The sky is blue! Only when it's not gray. Or purple. Or red. Or orange. The clouds are white! Only when they're not gray. Or even darker than that. Basically, the clouds and sky can be anything. But can the sky be a creamsicle orange bubbly thing that looks like we're on an alien planet? Apparently so.
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Now that a military judge has acquitted Pfc. Bradley Manning of aiding the enemy and convicted him of violating the Espionage Act, civil libertarians are breathing a small sigh of relief. But the Obama administration still has a big problem: how to control the flow of information between government agencies so you don't have a system that allows a private stationed in Iraq--or a contractor dating an acrobat in Hawaii--from downloading and distributing secret documents.
Top officials know they've got a problem. Earlier this month, Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter addressed the information-sharing problem at the Aspen Security Forum. "There was an enormous amount of information concentrated in one place," Carter said. "It creates too much information in one place. You had an individual who was given very substantial authority to access that information and move that information. That ought not to be the case, either."
How did we get in this mess? Before the 9/11 attacks, government policies were the worst of both worlds: On one hand, you had a vast overclassification of documents shielding many secrets from government accountability. (See the 1997 panel led by the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan.) And, of course, you had too little sharing between government agencies, which could possibly have prevented 9/11. When it came to the hijackers, we now sadly know the FBI didn't know what the CIA was doing--and vice versa. Even within the FBI, there wasn't enough information sharing.
A number of changes were made after that, thanks to the 9/11 report. There were things like the National Counter Terrorism Center, the Patriot Act's breaking down of walls between agencies, and a vast expansion of computer sharing. As the national security state swelled, there was an explosion in classification, but at least the upside was an ability for agencies to cooperate more easily, and this led to the bin Laden raid and the capture of the Times Square bomber. The vast archives of sensitive information grew, and so did those who had access to them, including Manning, who inserted blank CDs marked "Lady Gaga," slipped them into a drive in Baghdad, donned headphones like he was rocking out, and downloaded some 700,000 documents, shipping them off to WikiLeaks.
As a low-level military intelligence officer, Manning not surprisingly had access to Pentagon secrets. But one of the most perplexing things about the case was his access to State Department cables. When Manning's leak was first uncovered, then-Rep. Pete Hoekstra asked what everyone was wondering. "Why would a private first class, sitting in Baghdad, have access to data far beyond his area of responsibility?" Hoekstra asked. "How can it be that between 500,000 and potentially over a million government employees have access to a database of sensitive State Department cables?"
In the following months, we learned a lot more about the wide availability of State Department cables. "Thee idea was that there was a wealth of information that needed to be available on the ground, to the war-fighters," testified Charlie Wisecarver, the former deputy chief technology officer at State during the Manning trial who outlined the Horizontal Fusion program. Collecting the cables was a high priority at State,?which even asked department enlisted Foreign Service officers' spouses to scan in older cables. Cables were uploaded to the Defense Department's Secret Internet Protocol Router Network. The State Department didn't put much in the way of restrictions on their use by the military, although at Foggy Bottom there were more protocols. The consequence is, Manning's documents rocked the world, perhaps even helping to ignite the Arab Spring when it was revealed how corrupt U.S. officials considered the Tunisian regime.
Steps have been taken to come up with a more sensible information flow. State is scrubbing cables more carefully before sending them to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon is tightening access. As part of a discussion of the Snowden case at the Aspen Security Forum in July, National Security Agency Director General Keith Alexander said, "You limit the numbers of people who can write to removable media. Instead of allowing all systems administrators [to do it], you drop it down to a few and use a two-person rule.... We'll close and lock server rooms, so that it takes two people to get in there."
But Washington is still worried. In a recent interview with National Journal, Republican Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois, a former officer in the Navy Intelligence Reserve, said, "We have a classified Internet on the backside of the intelligence community, and if you're on that system, then a Bradley Manning can download the presidential book of secrets like in the movie [National Treasure]." He noted that he didn't have nearly the kind of access to government-wide data when he was in the Balkans and Afghanistan as part of the reserves.
The trouble for Obama and his successors is that there's no easy way to fix the problem. Yes, you can make it harder to download data or have more alerts when someone does. It's pretty clear that no system is safe, and as long as the government has lots of people with lots of access to goldmines of classified data this won't be the last Bradley Manning.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/real-bradley-manning-problem-060034393.html
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The growth was helped by a strong performance in North America, where net sales were up 5% and the operating profit grew by 9%. Emerging markets are also proving to be a key area for the drinks giant, with net sales from that sector accounting for 42% of Diageo?s business, following 11% net sales growth and ?acquisitions which added ?233 million.?
Commenting on his first set of results as CEO Ivan Menezes said: ?These results reflect Diageo?s strengths. We have delivered 5% net sales growth reflecting the strength of our US spirits business and continued double digit growth in the emerging markets, despite weakness in some markets.
?Price increases in each region, positive mix in North America and Latin America and the rigour we have in managing our cost of production and controlling our overheads drove significant expansion in operating margin.?
Menezes also acknowledged the growth of Johnnie Walker which grew by over one million cases, taking past the 20m case mark. He added: ?The effectiveness of our marketing campaigns remains a competitive advantage for us and this year we have seen these campaigns extend the leadership of our brands in many markets during the year. This has been a key driver of our performance in scotch, our biggest and most profitable category, especially for Johnnie Walker which is now a 20 million case brand.?
Western Europe remains a problem area for Diageo, with net sales down by 4% over the year and the company?s CFO Deirdre Mahlan explained: ?The strong positions of our strategic brands in Western Europe have of course left them exposed to market weaknesses here, primarily J?B in Spain, Guinness in?GB and Ireland and Baileys in Southern Europe.?
She added: ?In Western Europe, the underlying trends are unchanged. The stronger second half?performance was due to the comparison against a weak third quarter in France in the prior year and in the fourth quarter, we had good momentum in Western Europe from continued growth of Captain Morgan and from innovation with the introduction of Captain Morgan Spiced and the expansion of premixes.?
In further good news for investors the results mean that Diageo will be increasing its dividend by a further 9%.
In making his first results presentation as CEO Menezes also paid tribute to the work done by his predecessor Paul Walsh, saying: ?Paul Walsh provided Diageo with exceptional leadership and shaped our strength and global position, and I want to take this opportunity to thank him on behalf of the entire Diageo team. As these results again demonstrate, Paul did make a strong business even stronger.?
This article was published on Wednesday, July 31st, 2013 at 9:53 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response.
Source: http://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2013/07/diageo-profits-and-sales-grow-in-2013/
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Getting a patent in Europe is hard. Making sure it's protected in every European Union member state is even harder. That's why the European Commission announced today that it plans on simplifying this notoriously convoluted process by proposing the legal framework for a unified patent court. Currently, patents must be validated in each member state to gain EU-wide protection, but as you know, patent litigation is everyone's favorite past time. Companies can incur prohibitively high costs simultaneously defending their claims in multiple countries. By cutting the number of patent courts down from 28 to one, a unified system would streamline the process of handling infringement cases, and perhaps even promote growth and innovation. While the measure must be approved by the European Parliament and individual EU states in order to become law, the proposal appears to be a step forward in the right direction.
Filed under: Misc
Via: EurActiv
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The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction released the latest in a string of reports today on fraud, mismanagement, and wasted US spending in the troubled country.
A US Marine sweeps for land mines in the Helmand Province of southern Afghanistan, Sept. 7, 2011. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reports today on fraud, mismanagement, and wasted US spending in the troubled country.
Rafiq Maqbool/AP/File
EnlargeToday, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reports that a $47 million US government stability program failed to bring any stability.
Skip to next paragraph Dan MurphyStaff writer
Dan Murphy is a staff writer for the Monitor's international desk, focused on the Middle East.?Murphy, who has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, and more than a dozen other countries, writes and edits Backchannels. The focus? War and international relations, leaning toward things Middle East.
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Last week, SIGAR reported that millions of dollars given to Afghan contractors to place grates over culverts to prevent explosives being hidden inside of them were misspent, likely leading to the deaths of US and other forces when grates were either not installed or installed improperly. At the end of June, SIGAR reported that the Pentagon was moving forward with a $772 million purchase of aircraft for the Afghan military "even though the Afghans lack the capacity to operate and maintain them."
Last year, SIGAR found that despite a US government program to help Afghanistan end money laundering, billions in drug proceeds and stolen aid money continued to flow out of Kabul International Airport.
And those are just the recent findings from SIGAR that have caught my eye. The government's inspector general, created to monitor the billions of dollars flowing to the Afghan war effort, has been churning out high quality reports for years, and if you read enough of them, the picture that emerges is one of weak monitoring, duplicitous contractors, hundreds of millions spent on facilities the US military won't use, or the Afghans don't want, or can't feasibly use.
The long-term impact of all this?
So far, very little, as far as I can tell. SIGAR issues reports and press releases and make itself available to answer questions from the press. Journalists cover the latest release and then it seems like the story vanishes down the Afghan spending black hole. The amount of money being wasted or directed toward the Taliban and other enemies of the US project rarely comes up in the debates over whether the US should consider a full withdrawal from the country at the end of 2014.
What's the latest?
According to the [Stability in Key Areas Program] contracts, contractors would award grants to communities for projects that address sources of instability identified by the community. In September 2012, USAID and the Afghan government agreed that each of the SIKA programs would be a ?quick delivery program,? in which projects identified by the community were initiated quickly but would achieve long-term results. Such projects could include road gravelling, culvert construction, or canal lining. The contracts also state that grants are the ?essential? component to the program and shall be provided to communities. Although USAID had disbursed approximately $47 million for the four SIKA contracts as of March 31, 2013, none of the funds had gone to grants that fund community projects, such as those that are ?labor-intensive or productive infrastructure projects,? as called for in the SIKA contracts to address sources of instability?[emphasis added].
SIGAR places the blame for this on the nine-month delay in an agreement between the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Afghan government to work together.?And while money hasn't been set, SIGAR reports that potential Afghan grantees are experiencing "fatigue" from endless rounds of planning workshops that lead nowhere. The program is, in effect, undermining crediblity and support for the US and the Afghan government, so far. "Such disappointment may actually result in further destabilization and disaffection toward the Afghan government," according to the report.
What happened with the $47 million?
SIGAR says that it has been disbursed to two for-profit contractors working with USAID - DAI of Bethesda, Maryland and Los Angeles-based AECOM. SIGAR says that USAID commented on a draft of the report and updated their figures, showing that $285,000 in disbursements had been made to Afghan grantees as of July 1, "only 0.6 percent of the $46.5 million designated for grants," SIGAR writes.
Most of the money spent so far has been on operational expenses for the contractors, research, and about 150 community workshops and training sessions. All of this for what was meant to be a "quick delivery" program designed to get Afghans to work and improve local infrastructure.
Conducting programs in far-off lands with limited infrastructure and with language and cultural barriers at every turn are hard, particularly when there's a war on. There are plenty of understandable reasons for why these sorts of programs don't pan out as advertised. Yet the spending train continues to steam along.
Money is often pointed to as an important weapon for the US war effort in Afghanistan, much as it was in Iraq.
The Commanders Emergency Response Fund (CERP), cash that senior officers were allowed to dole out without prolonged contracting procedures, was used widely in Iraq, and still is in Afghanistan. In the case of CERP in Iraq, SIGAR's counterpart for Iraq spending said in its final report in July that $370 million was supposed to spent equipping and paying the so-called Sons of Iraq, Sunni militias ? many former insurgents ?who switched sides in 2007 and were a major reason that fighting there cooled.
Did the money go where it was intended? Impossible to say, the Special Inspector for Iraq Reconstruction found.
The chance that a large amount of that money was skimmed off the top by Iraqi and other intermediaries in an environment where "monitoring was weak" is probably close to 100 percent. And if money didn't get to its intended recipients ? former Sunni insurgents who switched sides at great personal risk ? there's a chance that disillusionment among these men partially explains the reinvigorated Sunni insurgency in Iraq.
One wonders if the same problems are plaguing CERP spending in Afghanistan now.
Today the earnings circus rolls around to Sprint, where it's their turn to announce some quarterly figures for the period of Q2 2013. Top of the line Sprint posted a pretty sizeable operating loss of $874 million. Of note in regards to the iPhone were mixed results; overall unit sales were down slightly on the previous quarter, but a good percentage of those sold were to new customers.
iPhone sales for Sprint hit 1.4 million for Q2, down around 100,000 units on the previous quarter, but the good news for the carrier is that of that 1.4 million, 41% of those were sold to new customers. Compared to competitors like Verizon, the numbers are pretty slim, but it remains good news for Apple that new customers continue to pick up the iPhone across the major U.S carriers.
Sprint has a conference call scheduled for 8am ET that will be broadcast online for anyone who's interested, just hit the link below. If you recently picked up a Sprint iPhone though, how are you finding it? Happy with the phone? Happy with the carrier? Shout out in the comments below.
Source: Sprint
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/wMExzdk9n0M/story01.htm
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Car hacking is not a new field, but its secrets have long been closely guarded. That is about to change, thanks to two well-known computer software hackers who got bored finding bugs in software from Microsoft and Apple.
Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek say they will publish detailed blueprints of techniques for attacking critical systems in the Toyota Prius and Ford Escape in a 100-page white paper, following several months of research they conducted with a grant from the U.S. government.
The two "white hats" ? hackers who try to uncover software vulnerabilities before criminals can exploit them ? will also release the software they built for hacking the cars at the Def Con hacking convention in Las Vegas this week.
They said they devised ways to force a Toyota Prius to brake suddenly at 80 miles an hour, jerk its steering wheel, or accelerate the engine. They also say they can disable the brakes of a Ford Escape traveling at very slow speeds, so that the car keeps moving no matter how hard the driver presses the pedal.
"Imagine what would happen if you were near a crowd," said Valasek, director of security intelligence at consulting firm IOActive, known for finding bugs in Microsoft's Windows software.
But it is not as scary as it may sound at first blush.
They were sitting inside the cars using laptops connected directly to the vehicles' computer networks when they did their work. So they will not be providing information on how to hack remotely into a car network, which is what would typically be needed to launch a real-world attack.
The two say they hope the data they publish will encourage other white-hat hackers to uncover more security flaws in autos so they can be fixed.
"I trust the eyes of 100 security researchers more than the eyes that are in Ford and Toyota," said Miller, a Twitter security engineer known for his research on hacking Apple's App Store.
Toyota spokesman John Hanson said the company was reviewing the work. He said the carmaker had invested heavily in electronic security, but that bugs remained ? as they do in cars of other manufacturers.
"It's entirely possible to do," Hanson said, referring to the newly exposed hacks. "Absolutely we take it seriously."
Ford spokesman Craig Daitch said the company takes seriously the electronic security of its vehicles. He said the fact that Miller's and Valasek's hacking methods required them to be inside the vehicle they were trying to manipulate mitigated the risk.
"This particular attack was not performed remotely over the air, but as a highly aggressive direct physical manipulation of one vehicle over an elongated period of time, which would not be a risk to customers and any mass level," Daitch said.
'Time to shore up defenses'
Miller and Valasek said they did not research remote attacks because that had already been done.
A group of academics described ways to infect cars using Bluetooth systems and wireless networks in 2011. But unlike Miller and Valasek, the academics have kept the details of their work a closely guarded secret, refusing even to identify the make of the car they hacked.
Their work got the attention of the U.S. government. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has begun an auto cybersecurity research program.
"While increased use of electronic controls and connectivity is enhancing transportation safety and efficiency, it brings a new challenge of safeguarding against potential vulnerabilities," the agency said in a statement. It said it knew of no consumer incident where a vehicle was hacked.
Still, some experts believe malicious hackers may already have the ability to launch attacks.
"It's time to shore up the defenses," said Tiffany Strauchs Rad, a researcher with Kaspersky Lab, who previously worked for an auto security research center.
A group of European computer scientists had been scheduled to present research on hacking the locks of luxury vehicles, including Porsches, Audis, Bentleys and Lamborghinis, at a conference in Washington in mid-August.
But Volkswagen obtained a restraining order from a British high court prohibiting discussion of the research by Flavio D. Garcia of the University of Birmingham, and Roel Verdult and Baris Ege of Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
A spokeswoman for the three scientists said they would pull out of the prestigious Usenix conference because of the restraining order. Both universities said they would hold off on publishing the paper, pending the resolution of litigation.
Volkswagen declined to comment.
(Reporting by Jim Finkle in Boston; Additional reporting by Joseph Lichterman in Detroit and Christine Murray in London; Editing by Tiffany Wu and Peter Cooney)
Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters.
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One of the more positive sounding admonitions from health care reform opponents was that the United States had "the best health care in the world," so why would you mess with it? Well, it's true that if you want the experience the pinnacle of medical care, you come to the United States. And if you want the pinnacle of haute cuisine, you go to Per Se. If you want the pinnacle of commercial air travel, you get a first class seat on British Airways. Now, naturally, you wouldn't let just anyone mess with someone's tasting menu or state-of-the-art air-beds. But like anything that's "the best," the best health care in the world isn't for everybody. The costs are prohibitively high, the access is prohibitively exclusive, and the resources are prohibitively scarce. What do the people in America who "fly coach" in the health care system get? Well, at the time of the health care reform debate, they were participating in a system that was, by all objective measurements, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/24/us-health-care-expensive_n_624248.html">overpriced and underperforming</a> -- if you were lucky enough to be participating in it. As anyone who's fortunate enough to have employer based health care or unfortunate enough to have a pre-existing condition can tell you, health care for ordinary people already involved all of those things that we were told would be a feature of the Affordable Care Act -- long waits, limited choice, and rationing. When the <a href="http://www.commonwealthfund.org/Content/Publications/Fund-Reports/2010/Jun/Mirror-Mirror-Update.aspx">Commonwealth Fund rated health care systems by nation</a>, the top marks in the surveyed categories went to the United Kingdom, New Zealand and the Netherlands. Ezra Klein examined the study, and <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/06/us_health-care_system_still_ba.html">observed</a>: "The issue isn't just that we don't have universal health care. Our delivery system underperforms, too. 'Even when access and equity measures are not considered, the U.S. ranks behind most of the other countries on most measures. With the inclusion of primary care physician survey data in the analysis, it is apparent that the U.S. is lagging in adoption of national policies that promote primary care, quality improvement, and information technology.'"
The only thing that perhaps matched the vastness of the spread or the depth of the traction of the "death panel" lie was the predictability that such a lie would come to be told in the first place. After all, this was a Democratic president trying to sell a new health care reform plan with the intention of opening access and reducing cost to millions of Americans who had gone without for so long. What's the best way to counter it? Tell everyone that millions of Americans would have increased access ... <i>to Death!</i> The best account of how the "death panel" myth was born into this world and spread like garbage across the landscape has been penned by Brendan Nyhan, who in 2010 wrote "Why the "Death Panel" Myth Wouldn't Die: Misinformation in the Health Care Reform Debate." <a href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/health-care-misinformation.pdf">You should go read the whole thing</a>. But to summarize, the lie began where many lies about health care reform begin -- with serial liar Betsy McCaughey, who in 1994 <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/07/andrew-sullivans-mccaughe_n_313157.html">polluted the pages of the New Republic</a> with a staggering pile of deception in an effort to scuttle President Bill Clinton's health care reform. As Nyhan documents, she re-emerged in 2009 when "she invented the false claim that the health care legislation in Congress would result in seniors being directed to 'end their life sooner.'" Nyhan: "McCaughey's statement was a reference to a provision in the Democratic health care bill that would have provided funding for an advanced care planning for Medicare recipients once every five years or more frequently if they become seriously ill. As independent fact-checkers showed (PolitiFact.com 2009b; FactCheck.org 2009a), her statement that these consultations would be mandatory was simply false--they would be entirely voluntary. Similarly, there is no evidence that Medicare patients would be pressured during these consultations to "do what's in society's best interest...and cut your life short." But the match that lit the death panel flame was not McCaughey, it was Sarah Palin, who repeated McCaughey's claims in a Facebook posting and invented the term "death panel." As Nyhan reports, Palin's claims were met with condemnation from independent observers and factcheckers, but the virality of the term "death panel" far outstripped its own debunking. To this day, the shorthand for this outrageous falsehood remains more firmly planted in the discourse than the truth. One thing worth pointing out is that Palin, in creating the term "death panel," <i>intended</i> to deceive people with it. In an interview with the <em>National Review</em>, <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/228636/rogue-record/rich-lowry">Palin admitted</a>: "The term I used to describe the panel making these decisions should not be taken literally." Rather, it was "a lot like when President Reagan used to refer to the Soviet Union as the 'evil empire.' He got his point across." Of course, while Reagan was exaggerating for effect, he wasn't trying to prey on the goodwill of those who were listening to him.
Naturally, the GOP greeted anything that the Obama White House did -- from regulating pollution to flossing after meals -- as something that would "kill jobs." The Affordable Care Act was no different. As you might recall, Republicans' first attempt at repeal came in the form of an inartfully named law called the "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act." But did the health reform plan threaten jobs? Not by any honest measure. <a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/01/17/106950/is-health-care-law-really-a-job.html">Per McClatchy Newspapers</a>: <blockquote>"The claim has no justification," said Micah Weinberg, a senior research fellow at the centrist New America Foundation's Health Policy Program. Since the law contains dual mandates that most individuals must obtain health insurance coverage and most employers must offer it by 2014, "the effect on employment is probably zero or close to it," said Amitabh Chandra, a professor of public policy at Harvard University.</blockquote> As McClatchy reported, the "job-killing" claim creatively used the "lie of omission" -- relying on "out of date" data or omitting "offsetting information that would weaken the argument." The Congressional Budget Office, playing it straight, deemed it essentially too premature to measure what the effect the bill would have on the labor market. At the time, Speaker John Boehner dismissed the CBO, saying, "CBO is entitled to their opinion." Perhaps, but lately, job growth in the health care industry has <a href="https://www.advisory.com/Daily-Briefing/2012/03/07/Jobs-report-preview" target="_hplink">bucked the economic downturn and health care has remained a robust sector of employment</a>. And it stands to reason that enrolling another 30 million Americans into health insurance will increase the demand for health care services and products, which in turn should trigger the creation of more jobs. Is there a downside? Sure. More demand, and greater labor costs, could push health care prices upward even as other effects of health reform push them down. But it's more likely that repealing the bill will have a negative impact on jobs than retaining it.
The only thing more important than painting the Affordable Care Act as a certain killer of jobs was to paint it as a certain murderer of America's fiscal future. Surely this big government program was going to push indebtedness to such a height that our servitude to our future Chinese overlords was a <i>fait accompli</i>. <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/18/cbo-score-on-health-care_n_502543.html">As Ryan Grim reported in May of 2010</a>, the CBO disagreed: <blockquote>Comprehensive health care reform will cost the federal government $940 billion over a ten-year period, but will increase revenue and cut other costs by a greater amount, leading to a reduction of $138 billion in the federal deficit over the same period, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, a Democratic source tells HuffPost. It will cut the deficit by $1.2 trillion over the second ten year period. The source said it also extends Medicare's solvency by at least nine years and reduces the rate of its growth by 1.4 percent, while closing the doughnut hole for seniors, meaning there will no longer be a gap in coverage of medication.</blockquote> Recently, the CBO updated its ten-year estimate by dropping off the first two years of the law (where there was little to no implementation) and adding two years at the back end (during which time there would be full implementation). As you might imagine, replacing two years of low numbers with two years of higher numbers increased the ten-year estimate. But opponents of the bill immediately freaked out and declared the costs to have skyrocketed. <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/03/obamacare-haters-angered-by-facts.html">As Jonathan Chait reported</a>: <blockquote>The outcry was so widespread that the CBO took the unusual step of releasing a second update to explain to outraged conservatives that they were completely misreading the whole thing: "Some of the commentary on those reports has suggested that CBO and JCT have changed their estimates of the effects of the ACA to a significant degree. That's not our perspective. ... Although the latest projections extend the original ones by three years (corresponding to the shift in the regular ten-year projection period since the ACA was first being developed), the projections for each given year have changed little, on net, since March 2010." That is CBO-speak for: "Go home. You people are all crazy."</blockquote> As Chait goes on to note, the CBO now projects that "the law would reduce the deficit by slightly more than it had originally forecast."
Normally, if you tell Republicans that you're going to cut $500 billion from Medicare, they will respond by saying, "Hooray, but could we make it <i>$700 billion</i>?" But the moment they got it into their heads that the Affordable Care Act would make that cut from Medicare, suddenly everyone from the party of ending Medicare As We Know It, Forever got all hot with concern about what would happen to these longstanding recipients of government health care. In fairness, <a href="http://www.factcheck.org/2010/03/a-final-weekend-of-whoppers/">as Factcheck pointed out</a>, the GOP opponents of Obama's plan were simply picking up a cudgel that had recently been wielded by the president himself: <blockquote>Whether these are "cuts" or much-needed "savings" depends on the political expedience of the moment, it seems. When Republican Sen. John McCain, then a presidential candidate, proposed similar reductions to pay for his health care plan, it was the Obama camp that attacked the Republican for cutting benefits.</blockquote> <a href="http://www.factcheck.org/2010/03/a-final-weekend-of-whoppers/">Nevertheless</a>! <blockquote>Whatever you want to call them, it's a $500 billion reduction in the growth of future spending over 10 years, not a slashing of the current Medicare budget or benefits. It's true that those who get their coverage through Medicare Advantage's private plans (about 22 percent of Medicare enrollees) would see fewer add-on benefits; the bill aims to reduce the heftier payments made by the government to Medicare Advantage plans, compared with regular fee-for-service Medicare.</blockquote> The <i>New England Journal of Medicine</i> <a href="http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMp1005588">concurred</a>: <blockquote>A phased elimination of the substantial overpayments to Medicare Advantage plans, which now enroll nearly 25% of Medicare beneficiaries, will produce an estimated $132 billion in savings over 10 years. [...] The ACA also produces nearly $200 billion in savings by assuming that providers can improve their productivity as firms in other industries have done. On the basis of this presumed improvement, the law reduces Medicare's annual "market basket" updates for most types of providers - a provision that has generated controversy.</blockquote> The law doesn't cut any customer benefits, just the amount that providers get paid. Hospitals and drug companies agreed to these cuts based on the calculation that more people with insurance meant more people consuming what they sell and, more importantly for the hospitals, fewer people getting treated and simply not paying for it.
This lie was launched to prominence with the help of a false accuser, South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson, who famously heckled President Barack Obama during an address to a Joint Session of Congress by yelling "You lie!" after the president had mentioned that undocumented immigrants would not be eligible for the credits for the bill's proposed health care exchanges. As Time's Michael Scherer pointed out, this was not much of a challenge for factcheckers: <blockquote>In the Senate Finance Committee's working framework for a health plan, which Obama's speech seemed most to mimic, there is the line, "No illegal immigrants will benefit from the health care tax credits." Similarly, the major health-care-reform bill to pass out of committee in the House, H.R. 3200, contains Section 246, which is called "NO FEDERAL PAYMENT FOR UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS."</blockquote> In fact, <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/04/why_immigrants_get_short_shrif.html">as Ezra Klein pointed out</a>, the Affordable Care Act "goes out of its way to exclude" undocumented immigrants: <blockquote>As the AP points out...there are about 7 million unauthorized immigrants who will be prohibited from buying insurance on the newly created exchanges, even if they pay out of their own pocket. And the exclusion of this group from health reform -- along with other restrictions that affect fully legal immigrants as well -- could create a massive coverage gap that puts a strain on the rest of the health system as well.</blockquote> Klein goes on to add that "immigrants-rights advocates tried to prevent this scenario from happening," but they ended up losing to the politics of the day. The concession they won was a promise from the president that he would shepherd a comprehensive immigration reform package through the legislature. They lost that round, too.
Were health care policies dear to Republicans left out of the health care reform bill? Totally! <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/health/2009/10/29/171026/top-10-reasons-why-republicans-should-support-the-house-health-bill/">Unless we're counting the following</a>: --Deficit-neutral bill --Longterm cost reduction --Interstate competition that allows consumers to purchase insurance across state lines --Medical malpractice reform --High-risk pools --An extension of the time young people were allowed to remain on their parents' policies --No public money for abortion --Small business exemptions/tax credits --Job wellness programs --Delivery system reform In fact, the Democrats were eager to get GOP input and enthusiastic about including many of their desired components in the bill. Oh, and did we mention that the Affordable Care Act was modeled on a reform designed and implemented by a former Republican governor and presidential candidate, whose innovation was widely celebrated by the GOP while said former governor was running for president? And did we mention that the individual mandate that was used in Romneycare to ensure "no free riders" was originally dreamed up by the Heritage Foundation? And did we add that additional DNA of the Affordable Care Act was borrowed from the Senate GOP alternative to the Clinton plan in the 1990s and the <a href="http://www.bipartisanpolicy.org/news/press-releases/2009/08/bipartisan-policy-center-releases-report-improving-health-care-quality-a" target="_hplink">2009 Bipartisan Policy Committee plan</a>, which was endorsed by Tom Daschle, Howard Baker, and Bob Dole? As for the process, you might recall that the White House very patiently waited for the bipartisan Gang Of Six to weigh in with its own solution, and openly courted one Republican gang member, Sen. Chuck Grassley, long after it was clear to every reporter inside the Beltway that Grassley was intentionally acting in bad faith. And perhaps you don't recall the bipartisan health care summit that was held in March of 2009? if so, don't feel bad about it -- RNC Chairman Michael Steele couldn't remember it either, <a href="http://politicalcorrection.org/blog/201002250005">when he yelled at the president for not having one</a>.
So, here's a fun little story about obscure parliamentary procedures. In May of 2010, as the health care reform michegas was steaming toward its endgame, it looked like the measure might fall. The Senate had passed a bill, but the House was stuck in a bit of a jam. It had no other choice but to take a vote on the Senate's bill, because if the House bill ended up in a conference committee to be reconciled with the Senate's, the whole resulting she-bang was assured of a filibuster, as the Democrats had, in the intervening period, lost their Senate supermajority. But the House had a problem. <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/16/health-care-opponents-dem_n_501353.html">As I wrote at the time</a>: <blockquote>House members are averse to doing anything that looks like they approve of the various side-deals that were made in the Senate -- like the so-called "Cornhusker Kickback." The House intends to remove those unpopular features in budget reconciliation, but if they pursue budget reconciliation on a standard legislative timeline -- where they pass the Senate bill outright first and then go back to pass a reconciliation package of fixes -- they'd still appear to be endorsing the sketchy side deals, and then the GOP would jump up and down on their heads. Enter "deem and pass." Under this process, the House will simply skip to approving the reconciliation fixes, and "deem" the Senate bill to be passed. By doing it this way, the Democrats get the Senate bill passed while simultaneously coming out against the unpopular features of the same.</blockquote> "Deem and pass" is the aforementioned obscure parliamentary procedure. And here's the thing about obscure parliamentary procedures -- everyone <i>loves</i> them when their side is doing them, but when they're being <i>done to you</i>, then they are basically evil schemes from the blasted plains of Hell. So if you're guessing that the Republicans declared the Democrats' use of "deem and pass" -- which also carried the moniker "the Slaughter Rule," after Rep. Louise Slaughter, who proposed its use in this instance -- to be a monstrous and unprecedented abuse of power, then give yourself a prize! And give yourself a bonus if you guessed that in reality, the GOP had used "deem and pass" <i>lots of times</i>. <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/16/house-has-long-history-of_n_500623.html">As Ryan Grim reported</a>, "deeming resolutions" had been in use dating back to 1933, and in 2005 and 2006, Republicans employed them 36 times. Other Republicans complained that Slaughter was supporting a tactic that she once vigorously opposed. <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/the_arms_race_of_rules.html">That's true</a>! She fought the "deem and pass" during the Bush administration and lost. Which is precisely when she learned how effective it could be!
Lots of people wouldn't mind having better access to more affordable health care. But what if it came with thousands of IRS agents, picking through your stool sample? That sounds pretty bad. It also sounds pretty implausible! But that was no impediment to multiple health care reform opponents making claims that the tax man was COMMINAGETCHA! In this case, the individual mandate -- which requires people to purchase insurance or incur a tax penalty -- provided the fertile soil for this deception to spread. A March 2010 floor speech from a panicked Sen. John Ensign was typical of the genre: <blockquote>My amendment goes to the heart of one of the problems with this bill. There is an individual mandate that puts fines on people that can also attach civil penalties. And 16,500 new IRS agents are going to be required to be hired because of the health care reform bill.</blockquote> March of 2010 was a pretty great time for this particular lie. In one five day period, Ensign was joined by Reps. Paul Ryan ("There is an individual mandate. It mandates individuals purchase government-approved health insurance or face a fine to be collected by the IRS which will need $10 billion additional and 16,500 new IRS agents to police and enforce this mandate."), Pete Sessions ("16,000 new IRS agents will be hired simply to make sure that this health care bill is enforced.") and Cliff Stearns ("There is $10 billion to hire about 16,000 new IRS agents to enforce the individual mandate on every American"). All wrong! <a href="http://factcheck.org/2010/03/irs-expansion/">Per Factcheck</a>: <blockquote>This wildly inaccurate claim started as an inflated, partisan assertion that 16,500 new IRS employees might be required to administer the new law. That devolved quickly into a claim, made by some Republican lawmakers, that 16,500 IRS "agents" would be required. Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas even claimed in a televised interview that all 16,500 would be carrying guns. None of those claims is true. The IRS' main job under the new law isn't to enforce penalties. Its first task is to inform many small-business owners of a new tax credit that the new law grants them -- starting this year -- which will pay up to 35 percent of the employer's contribution toward their workers' health insurance. And in 2014 the IRS will also be administering additional subsidies -- in the form of refundable tax credits -- to help millions of low- and middle-income individuals buy health insurance. The law does make individuals subject to a tax, starting in 2014, if they fail to obtain health insurance coverage. But IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman testified before a hearing of the House Ways and Means Committee March 25 that the IRS won't be auditing individuals to certify that they have obtained health insurance.</blockquote> As Factcheck goes on to note, <a href="http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-111hr3590enr/pdf/BILLS-111hr3590enr.pdf">on page 131 of the bill that was passed</a>, the IRS is explicitly prohibited from "from using the liens and levies commonly used to collect money owed by delinquent taxpayers, and rules out any criminal penalties for individuals who refuse to pay the tax or those who don't obtain coverage."
Oh, Congresscritters, the poor dears! So many bills to read and so little time -- between raising campaign cash at lush fundraisers and receiving marching orders from powerful corporate interests -- to actually read them all. <a href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_08/019629.php">And this Affordable Care Act was a real humdinger of a long bill</a>. And long bills are bad because length implies complication and complication requires study and study implies some form of "work." So the proper thing to do is to mulch the entire print run of the bill and use it to power the boiler that heats the "sex dungeon" in the Longworth Office Building, the end! Actually, reading the bill is not that hard, despite the complaints. As the folks at <a href="http://computationallegalstudies.com/2009/11/08/facts-about-the-length-of-h-r-3962/">Computational Legal Studies were able to divine</a>: <blockquote>Those versed in the typesetting practices of the United States Congress know that the printed version of a bill contains a significant amount of whitespace including non-trivial space between lines, large headers and margins, an embedded table of contents, and large font. For example, consider page 12 of the printed version of H.R. 3962. This page contains fewer than 150 substantive words. We believe a simple page count vastly overstates the actual length of bill. Rather than use page counts, we counted the number of words contained in the bill and compared these counts to the number of words in the existing United States Code. In addition, we consider the number of text blocks in the bill -- where a text block is a unit of text under a section, subsection, clause, or sub-clause.</blockquote> <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/09/house-health-care-bill-ac_n_350810.html">As HuffPost noted in March of 2010</a>, "the total number of words in the House Health Reform Bill are 363,086," and when you throw out the words in the titles and tables of contents and whatnot, leaving only words that "impact substantive law," the word count drops to 234,812. "Harry Potter And the Order Of The Phoenix," a popular book read by small children, is 257,000 words long. (Although in fairness to Congress, the Affordable Care Act contains very few exciting accounts of Quidditch matches.)
We couldn't have a list of Affordable Care Act distortions without noting the ways some of your 2012ers have added to the canon. Herman Cain said that if the ACA had been implemented, <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/politics-elections/177511-video-cain-if-obamacare-had-been-implemented-already-id-be-dead-">he'd be dead</a>. Not likely! The new law expands coverage so that uninsured individuals who face what Cain faced (cancer) have a better chance of getting coverage, and it restricts insurers from tossing cancer patients off the rolls based on their "pre-existing condition." But more to the point, Cain would have always been the wealthy guy who could afford to choose his doctor and pick the care he wanted. The Affordable Care Act doesn't prohibit wealthy people from spending money. Rick Santorum says that his daughter, who is diagnosed with a genetic disorder called trisomy 18 and who required special needs care, <a href="http://blogs.desmoinesregister.com/dmr/index.php/2011/04/25/santorum-more-disabled-people-will-be-denied-care-under-obamacare/">would be "denied care" under the Affordable Care Act</a>. Nope! Again, the law restricts insurers from throwing people with pre-existing conditions off their rolls. And for individuals under 19, that went into effect in September of 2010. Michele Bachmann believes that the Affordable Care Act would open "sex clinics" in public schools. This is Michele Bachmann we're talking about. <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/01/bachmann-sex-clinics-will_n_306292.html">Do you even need to ask</a>? And finally, Mitt Romney has said, as recently as March 5, that he never intended his CommonwealthCare reform to serve as a "model for the nation." "Very early on," he insisted, "we were asked -- is what you've done in Massachusetts something you would have the entire government do, the federal government do? I said no, from the very beginning." Unless "very early on" and "from the very beginning" mean something different from the conventional definition of those phrases, <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/03/05/438044/romney-mandate-model-video/">Romney should augment his daily pharmaceutical intake with some memory-enhancing gingko biloba</a>.
Obviously, we did what we could to include as many of these lies and distortions as possible, but there's no way to include them all. If you're a completist, however, be sure to check out the <a href="http://www.thefrisky.com/2012-03-14/fact-or-fiction-obamacare%E2%80%99s-1-dollar-abortions/">Impossible Tale Of The One-Dollar Abortion</a>, the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/09/AR2011020905682.html">Story of the State-Based Inflexibility That Wasn't</a>, <a href="http://politicalcorrection.org/factcheck/201101210006">The Curious Case of the Politically Connected Waivers</a> and <a href="http://www.minnpost.com/dc-dispatches/2011/03/michele-bachmanns-health-care-cover-charges-hard-fathom">Nancy Drew And The Hidden $105 Billion Expenditure</a>.
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/30/health-care-law-delay_n_3678040.html
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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/WoUp_RspVX4/130729231601.htm
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A still from First Comes Love Courtesy of HBO Documentary Films
I was initially drawn to Nina Davenport?s documentary First Comes Love (premiering July 29 at 9 p.m. on HBO) because of a tersely disapproving, suspiciously snide notice in the New York Times. The review seemed to contain just the blend of tight-lipped moral disapprobrium, of simmering resentment toward the artist that usually signals something intriguing or alive. The reviewer said that the filmmaker, whom I had known very distantly in college, was on ?her favorite subject?herself.? The review implied that in this vivid documentary account of having a child on her own, with a sperm donor friend, Davenport came across as somehow shallow or vain.?
The documentary has attracted admiring notices, as well, but other reviewers were equally condemning or vehement. Slant writes, ?Davenport doesn?t seem interested in taming her unwieldy vanity, and thus her documentary reads as a match.com profile recontextualized as cinema narcissismo.? Time Out writes that Davenport ?approaches a hot button issue from the most suffocatingly narcissistic perspective imaginable.? And Variety calls First Comes Love ?irritatingly self indulgent.? Doesn?t this intrigue you, so far? Aren?t you curious about what this terrible, narcissistic, self-indulgent person has done?
Part of what Davenport has done is make a difficult, rich film about her own experience. (How dare she? What vanity! What narcissism!) And part of it, I am quite sure, is that she has gone ahead and had a child on her own. The logic here is revealing: There is something about single motherhood that people see as selfish, or self-indulgent, or narcissistic, in a way that they don?t see the urge for a child in a married woman. It is as if a single woman were somehow going against nature, daring to ask of the world some fulfillment not due to her because she does not have a man behind a newspaper at a kitchen table. This manifests in precisely the sort of slightly uncontrolled moralism on display in the reviews.
This suspicion of the single mother?s motives, the sense that she has some untoward reason for acting as she does, and is not thinking generously of the child in the way mothers are supposed to, takes very weird forms. The New York Times reviewer, for instance, said that she ?rather liked? Davenport?s father in the film. The reason she ?rather likes? him is that ?he?s the kind of parent who thinks caring for children means more than just cheerleading.? Of course, he also calls his daughter a ?dilettante? for pursuing an unlucrative career in the arts, without a husband to take care of her. He also comments, when she says she wants to have a child, ?You are a single mother having a fatherless child. Sounds like the ghetto.? Definitely not a ?cheerleading? parent, in other words. His own wife observes that he is enjoying hurting Davenport?s feelings. But what the New York Times reviewer is telling us is that this man seems more sensible, more likeable to her, than Davenport, who is romantically, bravely, unsensibly, pursuing what she wants. ?What we see, barely cloaked, is the distaste for the hubris, the ?narcissism? of thinking that you can raise a happy child on your own.
Many people in the film tell Davenport that she shouldn?t have a child because of her financial insecurity, and yet many reviews chastise her for apparent ?privilege,? for her ?casually affluent family.? (Though they don?t seem casually affluent to me. They seem very deliberately self-consciously affluent.) So, in fact, the single mother is, as usual, attacked for being poor and for being rich, for not supporting a child and for being able to support the child. Is there any position a single mother could make a movie from that would be acceptable to the critics, both in her life, and in the world? The answer is probably no.
The idea that Davenport is vain is particularly absurd, as this film, if anything, goes almost too far in showing her in an unflattering light, both physically and otherwise. Davenport is not afraid of showing herself, for instance, at the breast pump, one of the least attractive stances of a woman of all time, not to mention getting fertility shots, giving birth, being fat, bloated, and also in various states of emotional vulnerability or need or unappealingness. She is fearless in this respect, and rather than calling her ?vain? or ?narcissistic,? we could see this, alternatively, as a brave artistic choice. Further, like Lena Dunham, another filmmaker who critiques her own exhibitionism with humor, but is nonetheless attacked for it regularly, Davenport mocks her own need for attention. During labor, surrounded by an unusual number of family members and friends, she jokes, ?I?ll never get this much attention again.?
One of the many fascinating things about the film is that once the baby is born, the universe begins to reshuffle around him. The radiant child creates his own world, he summons people, brings them to him, humbles them. Even Davenport?s father, who had coolly suggested when Davenport announced her pregnancy that she ?have an abortion,? is seen awkwardly holding the child, admitting that his grandson is wonderful. (He actually gives the months-old infant a lecture on how even poor kids can succeed in life. The baby could go to ?night law school,? he tells him.) There is a great scene in the film where her single best friend, her very reluctant and cagey sperm donor gay friend, and her new boyfriend are all hanging around her crazy, chaotic, warm domestic scene drawn to the baby. In the end, it?s a film that both celebrates and challenges our ideas of family; it is romantic, critical, tender, confused. If this is narcissism, in other words, we need more of it.
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BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The Quartet of Middle East peace mediators urged Israelis and Palestinians on Tuesday to avoid actions that undermine new peace negotiations.
Senior aides to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas held their first talks this week since 2010.
"The Quartet ... calls on all parties to take every possible step to promote conditions conducive to the success of the negotiating process and to refrain from actions that undermine," the group, made up of the United States, Russia, the United Nations and the European Union said in a statement.
(Reporting by Adrian Croft; editing by Foo Yun Chee)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/quartet-urges-israelis-palestinians-avoid-undermining-talks-170528763.html
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21 hours ago
Joshua Lott for The New York Times
Panels in the Deer Valley section of Phoenix. Utilities say the subsidies given to solar-minded homeowners are too generous.
For years, power companies have watched warily as solar panels have sprouted across the nation?s rooftops. Now, in almost panicked tones, they are fighting hard to slow the spread.
Alarmed by what they say has become an existential threat to their business, utility companies are moving to roll back government incentives aimed at promoting solar energy and other renewable sources of power. At stake, the companies say, is nothing less than the future of the American electricity industry.
According to the Energy Information Administration, rooftop solar electricity ? the economics of which often depend on government incentives and mandates ? accounts for less than a quarter of 1 percent of the nation?s power generation.
And yet, to hear executives tell it, such power sources could ultimately threaten traditional utilities? ability to maintain the nation?s grid.
?We did not get in front of this disruption,? Clark Gellings, a fellow at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit arm of the industry, said during a panel discussion at the annual utility convention last month. ?It may be too late.?
Advocates of renewable energy ? not least solar industry executives who stand to get rich from the transformation ? say such statements are wildly overblown. For now, they say, the government needs to help make the economics of renewable power work for ordinary Americans. Without incentives, the young industry might wither ? and with it, their own potential profits.
The battle is playing out among energy executives, lawmakers and regulators across the country.
In Arizona, for example, the country?s second-largest solar market, the state?s largest utility is pressuring the Arizona Corporation Commission, which sets utility rates, to reconsider a generous residential credit and impose new fees on customers, months after the agency eliminated a commercial solar incentive. In North Carolina, Duke Energy is pushing to institute a new set of charges for solar customers as well.
Nowhere, though, is the battle more heated than in California, home to the nation?s largest solar market and some of the most aggressive subsidies. The outcome has the potential to set the course for solar and other renewable energies for decades to come.
At the heart of the fight is a credit system called net metering, which pays residential and commercial customers for excess renewable energy they sell back to utilities. Currently, 43 states, the District of Columbia and four territories offer a form of the incentive, according to the Energy Department.
Some keep the credit in line with the wholesale prices that utilities pay large power producers, which can be a few cents a kilowatt-hour. But in California, those payments are among the most generous because they are tied to the daytime retail rates customers pay for electricity, which include utility costs for maintaining the grid.
California?s three major utilities estimate that by the time the subsidy program fills up under its current limits, they could have to make up almost $1.4 billion a year in revenue lost to solar customers, and shift that burden to roughly 7.6 million nonsolar customers ? an extra $185 a year if evenly spread. Some studies cited by solar advocates have shown, though, that the credit system can result in a net savings for the utilities.
Utilities in California have appealed to lawmakers and regulators to reduce the credits and limit the number of people who can participate. It has been an uphill fight.
About a year ago, the utilities pushed regulators to keep the amount of rooftop solar that would qualify for the net metering program at a low level; instead, regulators effectively raised it. Still, the utilities won a concession from the Legislature, which ordered the California Public Utilities Commission to conduct a study to determine the costs and benefits of rooftop solar to both customers and the power grid with an eye toward retooling the policy.
Edward Randolph, director of the commission?s energy division, said that the study, due in the fall, was a step toward figuring out how to make the economics work for customers who want to install solar systems as well as for the nonsolar customers and the utilities. The commission wants to ensure, he said, that, ?we aren?t creating a system that 15 years from now has the utility going, ?We don?t have customers anymore but we still have an obligation to provide a distribution system ? how do we do that?? ?
The struggle over the California incentives is only the most recent and visible dust-up as many utilities cling to their established business, and its centralized distribution of energy, until they can figure out a new way to make money. It is a question the Obama administration is grappling with as well as it promotes the integration of more renewable energy into the grid.
Utility executives have watched disruptive technologies cause businesses in other industries to founder ? just as cellphones upended the traditional land-based telephone business, producing many a management shake-up ? and they want to stay ahead of a fundamental shift in the way electricity is bought, sold and delivered.
?I see an opportunity for us to recreate ourselves, just like the telecommunications industry did,? Michael W. Yackira, chief executive of NV Energy, a Nevada utility, and chairman of the industry group the Edison Electric Institute, said at the group?s convention.
The fight in California has become increasingly public, with the two sides releasing reports and counter-reports. A group of fast-growing young companies that install rooftop systems, including SolarCity, Sungevity, Sunrun and Verengo, recently formed their own lobbying group, the Alliance for Solar Choice, to battle efforts to weaken the subsidies and credit systems.
They have good reason. In California, as intended, net metering has proved a strong draw for customers. From 2010 to 2012, the amount of solar installed each year has increased by 160 percent, almost doubling the amount of electricity that rooftop systems can make, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. With federal tax credits and a rebate program for installation costs under the California Solar Initiative phasing out, determining how much to pay customers has become even more critical.
?Net metering right now is the only way for customers to get value for their rooftop solar systems,? said Adam Browning, executive director of the advocacy group Vote Solar.
Mr. Browning and other proponents say that solar customers deserve fair payment not only for the electricity they transmit but for the value that smaller, more dispersed power generators give to utilities. Making more power closer to where it is used, advocates say, can reduce stress on the grid and make it more reliable, as well as save utilities from having to build and maintain more infrastructure and large, centralized generators.
But utility executives say that when solar customers no longer pay for electricity, they also stop paying for the grid, shifting those costs to other customers. Utilities generally make their profits by making investments in infrastructure and designing customer rates to earn that money back with a guaranteed return, set on average at about 10 percent.
?If the costs to maintain the grid are not being borne by some customers, then other customers have to bear a bigger and bigger portion,? said Steve Malnight, a vice president at Pacific Gas and Electric. ?As those costs get shifted, that leads to higher and higher rates for customers who don?t take advantage of solar.?
Utility executives call this a ?death spiral.? As utilities put a heavier burden on fewer customers, it increases the appeal for them to turn their roofs over to solar panels.
A handful of utilities have taken a different approach and are instead getting into the business of developing rooftop systems themselves. Dominion, for example, is running a pilot program in Virginia in which it leases roof space from commercial customers and installs its own panels to study the benefits of a decentralized generation.
Last month, Clean Power Finance, a San Francisco-based start-up that provides financial services and software to the rooftop solar industry, announced that it had backing from Duke Energy and other utilities, including Edison International. And in May, NextEra Energy Resources bought Smart Energy Capital, a commercial solar developer.
But those are exceptions.
?The next six to 12 months are the watershed moment for distributed energy in this country,? said Edward Fenster, a chief executive of Sunrun, adding that if their side prevailed in California and Arizona, it would dissuade utilities with net metering programs elsewhere from undoing them. ?If we don?t succeed, the opposite will be the case and in two years we?ll be fighting 41 of these battles.?
This story was originally published on July 29, 2013 in The New York Times under the headline, "On rooftops, a rival for utilities."
Copyright ? 2013 The New York Times
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If you're going to make music on your desktop, you can't make it look much better than this. Flickr user Caroline di Paola combined blacks, whites, and lots of lights and knobs to create a stylish and futuristic audio mixing workspace.
Audio equipment has a habit of looking pretty ugly, but quite a few devices can fix that problem. Caroline found quite a few exceptions in the Numark Mixtrack, Lexicon IONIX, and some simple black and white studio monitors. Not that you should pick your equipment based on aesthetics, but it certainly doesn't hurt your workspace if the equipment works great and looks nice.
If you have a workspace of your own to show off, share them with us by posting it to your personal Kinja blog using the tag featured workspace or adding it to our Lifehacker Workspace Show and Tell Flickr pool. Photos must be at least at least 640x360 and please include information about what you used, how you came up with the design, and any other relevant details. If your awesome workspace catches our eye, you might get featured!
Desktop Mixer | Carolina di Paola on Flickr
By Jethro Nededog
LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Balancing a romantic relationship and a professional dancing career isn't easy.
"I can't believe that I even allowed it to be on television," Allison DeBona, who will be live-tweeting Monday's episode at 9/8c, told TheWrap of her current romantic situation.
The star of The CW's "Breaking Pointe" had an on-again-off-again romance with fellow dancer Rex Lajos Tilton on Season 1. And in the year between seasons, the dancers broke up for good and Allison rekindled her romance and started a long distance relationship with her previous boyfriend.
On the show's second season premiere episode, we learned that Allison's boyfriend has given her an ultimatum. It's him or dance.
"It was probably like the hardest three months personally for me, because I knew it would change the rest of my life. It was so crazy," she said.
Currently a demi-soloist at Salt Lake City's Ballet West, DeBona has dedicated most of her life to dancing. She now holds one of the top positions in the Company.
It is for that reason and the fact that ballet careers can be very short-lived that the decision to leave for love is difficult for her. Those are also the reasons why fans and critics wonder why she would even consider her boyfriend's ultimatum.
"If ballet is the only thing in your life, knowing it will end is a very scary thing," she said. "If when your body doesn't allow you to dance, you may have excluded everyone out of your life. So, when this ends, I wondered what am I going to have?"
Because of the limited time dancers can perform, many of them put their relationships on hold.
"To have everything I have in my career and to have found love, I just thought this is both a curse and a blessing," she said. "And I really had to think about it.
DeBona said that the only people she could turn to were Tilton (they're still friends), principal soloist Christiana Bennett and demi-soloist and roommate Katie Critchlow. Notice that DeBona's three closest friends are at her level in the company or above. She told us that it's tough to speak to anyone else, because she's not sure whether they just want to date Tilton or just have an eye on her position in the company.
At any rate, viewers will watch DeBona struggle with choosing love over her ballet career over the course of the season. And, she seems confident viewers will be OK with where she landed.
"I will reassure everybody that it was one of the most well thought out decisions I've made in my life," she said. "I looked at every gray area between the two decisions and you will see that journey for me through the finale. I can't tell you how it turns out, but women will be proud, whether they agree or not, of my decision."
At the same time, the Company is casting "Cinderella" and it's the source of some angst and competition for the dancers. The woman who originated this version of the main role at The Royal Ballet in London, Wendy Ellis Somes, has a lot to say about which dancers will get which parts.
"We all fought for our parts," DeBona told us. "Wendy Ellis did not care what position you held in the company. All that angst you see with the dancers is real. All the girls at Ballet West are so strong and beautiful and any one of them could do the roles. Wendy Ellis owns that role and you can tell she was looking for dancers who reminded her of herself."
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/breaking-pointe-star-allison-debona-opens-her-impending-004010630.html
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