Harriet Blogs

Public funds diversion

Vanity Fair recently featured an article about a new commemorative coin. It was issued by the U.S. Mint, part of the United States Treasury, for the benefit of The Lion's Club. The legislator who advocated approval of this coin represents the part of Ohio in which The Lion's Club is headquartered. In other words, The Lion's Club is among this Congressman's constituents.

Why is there any objection to issuing commemorative coins?

Congress has authorized issues of commemorative coins in the past.  In the past, the cost of making the coins was to be defrayed by sales of the coins. That's the proper way of doing things, the fair and legal way. Note that with each coin there is a $10 to $35 surcharge, depending on denomination. This is also fair and legal. Those surcharges go to the organization that is being commemorated.

In the past, organizations included

• The Smithsonian Institution, which was formed by charitable bequest, and has been fully owned by the U.S. government since the museum's founding in 1825 or so, with free admission to the public
• The Winter Olympics, whose associated commemorative coin surcharge went to Salt Lake City when the Winter Olympics was held there, if there were additional costs not covered otherwise

Surcharge as a form of entitlement

Historically, money generated by coin surcharges went to government entities i.e. entities run for the benefit of the people. Commemorative coins for the Smithsonian, or the Abraham Lincoln National Monument, clearly are appropriate. For the Winter Olympics, the funds went to city government, not a private organization.

The Lion's Club is not a public sector entity. It is inappropriate for The Lion's Club to receive surcharge funds as a result of government production and sales of commemorative coins. Representative Amash (R-MI) says exactly why this is wrong:

"It’s far beyond the proper scope of the federal government to act as a sales agent for a private group.”

Not politics as usual

The Ohio legislator who looked after the best interests of The Lion's Club is not a Democrat. It isn't an issue of partisanship. He is a Republican. Objections were voiced by his own fellow Republican party members.

This situation makes me feel a loss of confidence in our elected government, quite unlike anything I have experienced before.

The Erosion of Online Anonymity

One of the most important principles of individual privacy is the ability to act anonymously. When people are driving to a store or reading a book at home, they have a reasonable assumption that nobody is monitoring their behavior and attaching it to their name and address.

via blog.summation.net

We've been hearing plenty about how nothing is private anymore, how we're so exposed by on-line activity. Well, this post by Auren Hoffman actually gives some pointers on how to restore on-line privacy. What once was lost can occasionally be found, even for something as elusive as anonymity. However, it takes time and some effort. But anything that took awhile to do will usually take awhile to reverse.

The best part was about removing browser cookies. We've all heard about that over and over, at least I have, but if you don't accept ANY browser cookies, a lot of sites won't load right. That is more my concern than no longer receiving advertising targeted to what are supposed to be my interests. The bad cookies are the ones that contain so much identifying information that there are very few people that could be matched to that cookie other than you.

There is a section titled "What Anonymity Means" which explains what you can do to protect yourself. Go read that because I can't explain it as well as the article did.

There are also three suggestions for online marketing and advertising companies that could be changed, so that the consumer would have more privacy, yet the website would still be able to function and offer things for sale to the people that want those things. These could be part of a consumer advocacy for online privacy agenda if one were to try to take action oneself and bring about change in a sensible, plausible way that might actually succeed!

Block List

The TypePad Knowledge Base suggests effective ways to deal with all those people who leave comments and are being bothersome to your blog. The most effective remedy is to construct your own blog specific block list. Also consider the older, original Six Apart version block list.

Block them by keyword content, or block them by IP address. This shows you how to do it!

4th & Bryant water line break

via www.kokochi.com

Spectacular! The location is San Francisco, California, I believe.