There are plenty of good technical overviews of the Heartbleed vulnerability (including a great overview by XKCD). The security impacts of this issue have been covered well by people far smarter than me. But I feel the need to pile on to reports that the NSA has known about this vulnerability and exploited it for… Continue reading The cost of NSA exploitation
Author: Nathan Hunstad
Bitcoin
I’m fascinated by Bitcoin, but not as a currency. I enjoy it’s mathematical underpinnings, its algorithms, its self-enforcing decentralization (I like torrents for the same reason). It is pretty ingenious with its block chain record of transactions and its use of cryptography, which I love. As a currency, though? It’s absurd. Ignoring the fact that… Continue reading Bitcoin
Tax Brackets
I’m with Atrios here (warning: profanity). The easiest part of computing your taxes is the calculation of tax from Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) facilitated by the tax tables. You could have one bracket, ten brackets, a hundred brackets, or an elliptic curve; the lookup tables make that computation simple, and the fact that most people… Continue reading Tax Brackets
Healthcare Agonistes Redux
It’s been a few months since the launch of the health care exchange, one of the biggest remaining pieces of Obamacare. It’s been rocky, but the numbers are not too far off from projections. As the exchanges and the other pieces of the law become status quo, however, that has not stopped the doom and… Continue reading Healthcare Agonistes Redux
2013 Tax Incidence
Hey, it’s time for my now-annual blog post on tax incidence! Graphs below…
Dealing With Stolen Credit Cards
How funny: the day after I write about password breaches, I learn that one of my credit care numbers has been stolen. Thankfully, though, I was well prepared for this event, and should be back to normal operations very quickly.
Password Breaches: Don’t Panic, Be Prepared
Hey, look, there’s been another password breach! Is it time to panic? I decided not to. In fact, I decided to pretty much ignore the whole story. As a result of this breach, I only rotated one password, and frankly, it wasn’t because I was worried that this password had been compromised. Wait, shouldn’t you… Continue reading Password Breaches: Don’t Panic, Be Prepared
MVP
How good would you feel about an IRS website that promised you 90% of your income tax refund if you used it? Or a DMV website that allowed you to have a pretty good shot of renewing your license tabs, but if your birthday was in December you’d find that your purchase couldn’t be completed?… Continue reading MVP
Rollout
So it’s been a month since the rollout of the health insurance exchanges created by the ACA, and it hasn’t exactly been a fantastic rollout. It also isn’t that unexpected, nor is it the worst rollout of all time. It certainly doesn’t mean that Obamacare is doomed to failure. But there are a lot of… Continue reading Rollout
How to manufacture a controversy
There’s a whole lot of stupid involved with the government shutdown, but the story that just blows me away is the Vitter Amendment and the so-called “special treatment” that Congress is supposedly getting with regards to health insurance. If you want to hear a small part of why we are in the situation we are… Continue reading How to manufacture a controversy