I CAN’T HACK IT
What is the use of passwords?
Dear John: A question: In the grand scheme of things, what is the point of having a password?
Equifax gets hacked, Yahoo gets hacked. I don’t put my mother’s maiden name or my Social Security number on any of my password-protected accounts because those who do provide such information seem to get hacked.
Passwords provide a false sense of security. Oh, and make sure your password includes letters, numbers and a certain number of digits, blah, blah, blah, so it is difficult to remember and difficult to compromise. Yeah, sure! M.K.
Dear M.K.:
I have a question for you. Why do they say you should wear clean underwear in case you get into an accident? If you get into an accident, your underwear isn’t going to stay clean.
It’s the same thing for passwords. THEY say you have to do it, so just do it.
Besides, all those different password combinations are improving your memory.
And speaking of which, don’t make your password anything like you’ve used before, or any logical series of letters or numbers, and make sure there’s a symbol and some caps.
In other words, make sure it’s nothing you will ever remember. Hackers could make a living selling us clues to our own passwords.
Dear John: Dr. Janet Yellen, head of the Federal Reserve, is in a bad spot for a Ph.D. econ- omist who has only worked in academia or government.
She has too much faith in low-confidence data without questioning their provenance. And she has an academic/political bias against data, contrary to her expectations. Worse, her theories are being tested in a real economy on real people in the real world who will bear the brunt of her (and her predecessor’s) failures.
Laurence J. Peter in “The Peter Principle” noted, “In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out” assigned duties and that “work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.”
It appears that the first part of Dr. Peter’s observation has been true for a couple of decades, but what is worrisome is that the number of competent government employees is rapidly decreasing and the limited number of survivors are being overwhelmed by the tsunami of incompetence washing over the country.
Someone actually made a movie (titled “Idiocracy”) about the inevitable result of fulfilling the entire Peter Principle. It’s a silly movie, but like all satires, it has a generous dose of truth buried in it. A.Z.
Dear A.Z.: I’ve been saying for a long time that the Fed and its governors were out of touch with reality. Yellen proved it when she recently said the Fed had been overestimating the strength of the job market. Well, no kidding!
Academics are buried in universities and don’t get much recognition — or pay. That’s why a lot of the economic positions in government are filled with people fleeing universities. It takes them out of the shadows.
And they come with plenty of theories, and not a lot of experience, say, as to what is affecting middle-class families.
Dear John: Why is it that the Clintons seem like Teflon?
I spend most of my week earning a paycheck to support my family, and my wife works as well. We are amazed at how much the Clintons get away with.
It seems they always get a free pass from the press and no one cares how they “earn” their money. What the hell is going on in this country?
I am not naive but it is true. R.F.
Dear R.F.: I can’t prove it, but I think the Clintons have a pact with the devil.
But even the devil will eventually get tired of all this nonsense.