Category Archives: Business

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

NSA

6 Comments

…Doesn’t know the extent of the Snowden damage:

This is criminal. Every single thing he did should have left an audit trail, both as a guard against misuse, and for damage assessment in a case just like this.

I didn’t say “criminal incompetence,” because if the need for an audit trail is obvious to such as me, it surely must have been obvious to higher-ups at NSA. If the systems lack the capacity for this, it’s because somebody doesn’t want the records kept. That suggests abuse at a systemic level. (It also undercuts claims of extensive auditing here.)

Then there’s the incompetence of letting someone like Snowden have such free-ranging access to the system: “The NSA had poor data compartmentalization, said the sources, allowing Snowden, who was a system administrator, to roam freely across wide areas. By using a ‘thin client’ computer he remotely accessed the NSA data from his base in Hawaii.” Snowden and Bradley Manning. That’s who’s in charge of our secrets?

Hey, I’ve got an idea! Let’s put the federal government in charge of our health care!

Business, Economics

The Airline Business

4 Comments

I have a late-afternoon flight out of Tucson to LAX, but the business that I thought I had in Tucson today has fallen through. There’s a morning flight with seats available.

In days of yore, American would have let me go standby on an earlier flight same day with no change fee, which makes business sense, because if they can satisfy their commitment to me to get me where I want to go earlier at essentially no cost other than fuel to carry my weight (assuming that the flight isn’t full), they have an opportunity to sell my seat (at $252 according to a quick check) on the later flight.

Apparently, the suits have decided that they’d rather charge me $75 bucks for the change. Now, it would be nice to get home earlier, but it’s not worth $75 to me, because I can do work here and just catch the later flight. So they just lost the opportunity to sell that seat on the afternoon flight. I guess they think this makes business sense, and maybe they have revenue models that indicates it does, but I’m annoyed.