“Obamacare facts explained by Stefan Molyneux. A comprehensive look at the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and its implementation.”
“He insists his motives have always been pure: to repel Switzerland’s ‘attack’ on other countries’ tax laws and exchequers. HSBC says he is no whistleblower. He tried to sell the data at first, the bank contends, and only started to work with prosecutors when he was jailed in Spain. Many more tax-shy Europeans have reason to sleep fitfully. Other countries are said to want a look at the pilfered data, much of which is apparently yet to be decrypted. When Mr Falciani first made the rounds with his discs, governments showed little interest. The fiscal strains produced by the euro crisis have changed all that.”
http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2013/10/banks-and-tax-evasion
“Foreign Minister Carl Bildt acknowledged that internet governance is being challenged, as some States operate vast surveillance systems without any laws of oversight whatsoever, and others are preparing for offensive operations on the net. The Foreign Minister called for the application of the principles of Legality, Legitimate Aim, Necessity, Adequacy, Proportionality, Judicial Authority, Transparency and Public Oversight to the conduct of online surveillance by States. Each of these principles forms part of the 13 International Principles, an initiative instigated by Privacy International and EFF in October 2012, well before the revelations of widespread NSA and GCHQ surveillance.”
“The number of people leaving Mexico to work in the United States has dropped by roughly 65 percent during the last decade. Big agriculture has sought to counter this by lobbying in Washington for an easier path by which farm workers could gain citizenship. But they’ve also hedged the bet by investing in research that could turn the field jobs over to machines. A firm in Mountain View, Calif., has developed a Lettuce Bot that thins plants in the field 20 to 40 times faster than a human can do it — and the unit works day and night. Its inventor told the San Francisco Chronicle that the robot can thin a 15-acre field, normally a day’s work for 25 people, in less than two hours.”
http://onlineathens.com/opinion/2013-09-15/funt-technology-will-end-illegal-immigration-debate
“USDA, which oversees the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), has just issued an order to SNAP agency directors calling for their respective States to implement an emergency contingency program because of government funding issues. In a letter obtained by the Crossroads Urban Center food pantry, the USDA is directing state agencies to, ‘delay their November issuance files and delay transmission to State Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) vendors until further notice.’ Should Congress fail to increase the debt ceiling this week, come November there will literally be millions of people in the United States who will receive exactly zero dollars on their EBT cards.”
“Brazil may require Internet service companies such as Google Inc. (GOOG) and Facebook Inc. (FB) to set up local data storage centers. Internet service companies would have to follow Brazilian privacy laws and the government may also decide to store sensitive data such as tax information within the country, Internet Policy Secretary Virgilio Almeida told reporters in Brasilia after a meeting between industry representatives and President Dilma Rousseff. The measures designed to protect information privacy come in response to allegations that the U.S. National Security Agency used software to access communications between Rousseff and staff members.”
“Whether or not whistleblower Edward Snowden’s decision to reveal details of the U.S. National Security Agency‘s (NSA) spying on everyday Americans’ digital lives was justifiable, it’s undeniable that the leak has been a colossal source of embarassment and controversy for the NSA, the U.S. intelligence community, and the U.S. federal government as a whole. In that regard many at the NSA are asking themselves — ‘Could we have done to stop the leak?’ Well the answer, according to a new report in The New York Times, is that they apparently could have — and likely quite easily.”
“People in Ohio, Michigan and 15 other states found themselves unable to use their food stamp debit-style cards on Saturday, after a routine test of backup systems by vendor Xerox Corp. resulted in a system failure. At about 9 a.m. Saturday, reports from across the country began pouring in that customers’ EBT cards were not working in stores. At 2 p.m., an EBT customer service representative told CBS Boston that the system was currently down for a computer system upgrade. U.S. Department of Agriculture spokeswoman Courtney Rowe said the outage is not related to the government shutdown.”
“In Montevideo, Uruguay this week, the Directors of all the major Internet organizations – ICANN, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Architecture Board, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Internet Society, all five of the regional Internet address registries – turned their back on the US government. With striking unanimity, the organizations that actually develop and administer Internet standards and resources initiated a break with 3 decades of U.S. dominance of Internet governance. It is the latest, and one of the most significant manifestations of the fallout from the Snowden revelations about NSA spying on the global Internet.”
“‘It is a massive entitlement to end all entitlements. It is going to cause a fiscal hemorrhage that is not even yet anticipated. It will tie up one-sixth of GDP in the most monstrous, massive, bureaucratic snarl that you can’t imagine. So therefore this needs to be stopped before it becomes operational.’ Stockman expects more companies will follow the lead of GE (GE) and Walgreen (WAG) who have announced they will move employee or retiree healthcare benefits to private exchanges. Once millions of additional Americans are ‘dumped’ onto Obamacare exchanges, Stockman expects the cost to the government of subsidizing (with tax credits) these Americans’ insurance to swell.”