Americans are flipping homes like they haven't done since before the housing crash →

Home flipping in the US has hit levels not seen since the peak of the housing bubble.
According to Attom Data Solutions, homeowners in the second quarter flipped 51,434 houses, meaning they resold them shortly after purchasing.
Attom based its analysis on sales within 12 months and derived from the data the highest number of homes flipped since Q2 2010.
The number of investors flipping homes set a record that extends further into the past, rising to its highest since Q2 2007, roughly one year after house prices peaked.

The NSA Is Hoarding Vulnerabilities →

The National Security Agency is lying to us. We know that because of data stolen from an NSA server was dumped on the Internet. The agency is hoarding information about security vulnerabilities in the products you use, because it wants to use it to hack others' computers. Those vulnerabilities aren't being reported, and aren't getting fixed, making your computers and networks unsafe.
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Over the past few years, different parts of the US government have repeatedly assured us that the NSA does not hoard "zero days" ­ the term used by security experts for vulnerabilities unknown to software vendors...
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There is a fundamental tension between attack and defense. The NSA can keep the vulnerability secret and use it to attack other networks. In such a case, we are all at risk of someone else finding and using the same vulnerability. Alternatively, the NSA can disclose the vulnerability to the product vendor and see it gets fixed. In this case, we are all secure against whoever might be using the vulnerability, but the NSA can't use it to attack other systems.

The decline of the middle class is causing even more economic damage than we realized →

Op-ed quoted nearly in full:

...The authors — Ali Alichi, Kory Kantenga and Juan Solé — use standard econometric techniques to estimate the impact of declines in middle class incomes on total consumer spending. They find that polarization has reduced consumer spending by more than 3 percent or about $400 billion annually. If these findings stand up to scrutiny, they deserve to have a policy impact.
This level of reduction in spending is huge. For example, it exceeds by a significant margin the impact in any year of the Obama stimulus program. Alone it would be enough to account for a significant reduction in neutral real interest rates. If consumers were spending 3 percent more, there would be scope to maintain full employment at interest rates much closer to normal. And there would be much less of a problem of monetary policy’s inability to respond to the next recession.
What is the policy implication? Principally, it is the macroeconomic importance of supporting middle class incomes. This can be done in a range of ways from promoting workers right to collectively bargain to raising spending on infrastructure to making the tax system more progressive. These are hardly new ideas. And I supported them before seeing this new research. But there is now another powerful argument in terms of mitigating secular stagnation in their favor.

Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet →

First, a little background. If you want to take a network off the Internet, the easiest way to do it is with a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS). Like the name says, this is an attack designed to prevent legitimate users from getting to the site. There are subtleties, but basically it means blasting so much data at the site that it's overwhelmed. These attacks are not new: hackers do this to sites they don't like, and criminals have done it as a method of extortion. There is an entire industry, with an arsenal of technologies, devoted to DDoS defense. But largely it's a matter of bandwidth. If the attacker has a bigger fire hose of data than the defender has, the attacker wins.
Recently, some of the major companies that provide the basic infrastructure that makes the Internet work have seen an increase in DDoS attacks against them. Moreover, they have seen a certain profile of attacks. These attacks are significantly larger than the ones they're used to seeing. They last longer. They're more sophisticated. And they look like probing. One week, the attack would start at a particular level of attack and slowly ramp up before stopping. The next week, it would start at that higher point and continue. And so on, along those lines, as if the attacker were looking for the exact point of failure.

Congress overrides Obama’s veto of 9/11 bill →

Quite curious how this happened...

Congress on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly to override President Obama’s veto of legislation that would allow 9/11 victims’ families to sue the Saudi Arabian government over its alleged support for the terrorists who carried out the attacks.
It is the first override of Obama’s presidency.

What O. J. Simpson Means to Me →

An amazing essay. Coates reflects on how someone's guilt or innocence--such a simple concept--quickly becomes layered and complex because of the world we live in. A great read for mulling over issues of race and the justice system. And a good reminder of how important careful thought and empathy are.

Whom Should We Blame for Our Deranged Democracy? →

The confusion and hollowness of both political parties has not been a secret. Citizens left, right, and center have been giving up on electoral politics and the two-party system for decades. The nation’s largest political party is the “don’t bother” party—roughly half of the adult population who see no reason to vote, and nothing in it for them. Instead of scolding them, an active political party might look into the cause-and-effect of dysfunctional democracy and try to change it.

Hear, hear.