August 30, 2019 – Really Right

SEIU’s New Contract

The State of California and the SEIU have agreed to a new contract. I thought you should know just how generous your elected representatives have been with your tax money. Some details have not been made public yet but here’s what we know.

Wages

During negotiations, SEIU claimed they wanted a 21 percent increase over three years. As usual, they settled for a fraction of that amount. On the face of it, they claim they got 7 percent over three years. Each increment of this raise takes effect July first (the first day of the new fiscal year.) Actually, it’s less than that.

Two reasons why.

First, a few years back, the State created a new deduction taken from the paychecks of current state workers. This money is to go into a fund earmarked for future retiree medical benefits (sounds vaguely like the Social Security Trust Fund to me.) This fund is incremented over a period of four year and will rise to 3.5 percent of gross pay. The last increment will take effect July 1, 2020. It will go up another 1.2 percent. (see chart below)

Thus the 2.5 percent pay increase July 1, 2020 will actually be a 1.3 percent increase in take home pay (less all the payroll taxes on 2.5 percent “increase”).

Second, the pay increase for the third year, also scheduled to be 2.5 percent may not happen. During negotiations, the State was asking that they be given the right to forego this increase in the event of an economic downturn. Based on the information released thus far, it is unclear if the union agreed to this provision and if so, what the trigger to stop the pay raise will be.

Thus, the actual pay raise over three years may very well be only 3.3 percent; a far cry from the 21 percent the union claimed they were asking for.

Medical Tweak

The union claims that they got $260 a month for anyone on a State sponsored healthcare plan. This is to cover the employee contribution to healthcare. Thus, if only the employee is on the health plan, they would have no employee contribution any more. Once this is implemented, the state would pay 100 percent for individuals.

My question is this, currently my contribution to Kaiser is about $125 a month. Will the state really give me the whole $260 or just pay the $125 and call it good. Oh, for those of you in the private sector, sorry; I know you’re paying lots more than that out of pocket for your share of health insurance.

Geographic Pay

If a state employee lives in any of the following counties: Orange, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Cruz, they will also get a geographic differential of $250 each month.

As we know as conservatives, when a government creates a new benefit, over time it will grow to cover more folks. Geographic Differential pay is such a thing. I was surprised not to see a single San Francisco Bay Area county on this list. This is even more reason to suspect that this new benefit will expand over time.

Concluding Remarks

My observation of this contract is this; it appears that all these extra pay things added to the wages of State employees help the State by not boosting employee retirement (assuming retirement is based solely on salary) while easing the pain of living in such a costly State as California. This seems to be the gentleman’s agreement with the State.

iPhone Security Epic Failure Again

Apple users always swear that their gear is more secure than other operating systems; once again, this is proven to be a lie. The difference between Apple and Microsoft (or Google) is that the other guys are actively looking for security flaws and Apple does not. As we have repeatedly documented on this blog, Apple will only reluctantly admit to a security issue once the issue has been made public, and then only half-heartedly will they acknowledge it. Apple will refuse to fix known issues for years until outed by third parties.

Today another story is out and this one is as bad as it gets. Just by visiting a compromised website, hackers could get the following:

You location in real time, updated every minute
All your passwords
Chat histories on WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage
Address book
Gmail database

In total, 14 bugs were exploited for the iOS attack across five different “exploit chains” – strings of flaws linked together in such a way that a hacker can hop from bug to bug, increasing the severity of their attack each time.

Please note that it was Google that informed Apple of the security flaws which had been exploited in the wild for a mere two and a half years.

An unprecedented iPhone hacking operation, which attacked “thousands of users a week” until it was disrupted in January, has been revealed by researchers at Google’s external security team.

The operation, which lasted two and a half years, used a small collection of hacked websites to deliver malware on to the iPhones of visitors. Users were compromised simply by visiting the sites: no interaction was necessary, and some of the methods used by the hackers affected even fully up-to-date phones.

Once hacked, the user’s deepest secrets were exposed to the attackers. Their location was uploaded every minute; their device’s keychain, containing all their passwords, was uploaded, as were their chat histories on popular apps including WhatsApp, Telegram and iMessage, their address book, and their Gmail database.
Google says hackers have put ‘monitoring implants’ in iPhones for years

Oh, as usual, it is a British news outlet breaking the story not the American media. As a rule, the UK has better coverage of national news in the United States than our own media. I guess they’re all too busy trying to make stuff up about Trump and Russia instead of doing their jobs. Back in the day, Woodward and Bernstein worked hard to break their story; they would not be contented just to be part of the echo chamber that passes for the mainstream media today.

Oh, there is other hacking news out there today as well.

Teenager hacked government file sharing website known as Army Aviation and Missile Research Development and Engineering Center Safe Access File Exchange (AMRDEC SAFE) Click here for story

Lastly, there is a fair chance your dentist had their data compromised by a ransomware attack. Click here for story.

Dems Go for Pagan Vote

In their never ending pursuit to identify another class of victims, the Democrat Party has decided to embrace those that reject God. While most of us had thought they did this decades ago, they formalized the arrangement earlier this week by passing a resolution to be welcoming and inclusive of those unwilling to bend their knee in worship of their Creator.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) passed a resolution Saturday praising the values of “religiously unaffiliated” Americans as the “largest religious group within the Democratic Party.”

The resolution, which was unanimously passed at the DNC’s summer meeting on Aug. 24 in San Francisco, Calif., was championed by the Secular Coalition of America, an organization that lobbies on behalf of atheists, agnostics, and humanists on public policy. The group celebrated the DNC’s move as the first time a major party “embraced American nonbelievers.”

“Religiously unaffiliated Americans overwhelmingly share the Democratic Party’s values,” said the resolution…

The move comes as Democratic presidential candidates have ramped up their religious rhetoric on the campaign trail, but the party announced it is targeting “nonreligious voters” to try to beat President Trump, who solidified the evangelical vote in 2016.

Political pundits have pointed out Democrats’ so-called God problem in the past and their efforts to solve it.

In 2012, the last election Democrats won, a headline from the convention read: “Democrats boo God.” In 2016, attendees heckled a preacher during the opening prayer. And on Saturday, Democrats took a shot at believers who use “religious liberty” to threaten the civil rights of LGBTQ Americans.
Democratic Party embraces nonreligious voters, criticizes ‘religious liberty’ in new resolution

Below is the resolution in its entirety.

After passage, the Secular Coalition of America issued the following press release.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) this past Saturday embraced American nonbelievers for the first time, adopting a resolution that recognizes their contributions to society and to the Democratic Party.

This move by the DNC, which was unanimous absent one abstention, demonstrates that they are living up to the big-tent inclusive values they regularly espouse, though it also shows they recognize the value of courting the largest, fastest growing religious demographic in the nation. It was first passed in the DNC’s Resolutions Committee on Thursday.

At nearly one quarter of the total U.S. population, nonreligious Americans—one third of which are Democrats and nearly half of which are independent—will represent a sizeable voting bloc in the upcoming election. This resolution marks the first time a major U.S. political party has specifically courted religiously unaffiliated people across the nation.
Democratic Party embraces nonreligious voters at annual summer meeting

Let’s breakdown the math in the last paragraph.

25 percent of the US population is classed as “Unaffiliated.”

6. Atheists and agnostics account for a minority of all religiously unaffiliated.

Most are secular. Atheists and agnostics account for only about one-quarter (27%) of all religiously unaffiliated Americans. Nearly six in ten (58%) religiously unaffiliated Americans identify as secular, someone who is not religious; 16% of religiously unaffiliated Americans nonetheless report that they identify as a “religious person.”
America’s Changing Religious Identity

So, a quarter of a quarter of the US population is atheist, agnostic, pagan, secular, or whatever you want to call it. In real math, that means about 6.25 percent of the nation falls into this bucket.

Given the bombardment of secularism and evolution in our culture, I’m surprised the number is that low.

As always, Democrats don’t care what you believe—or don’t—as long as your first allegiance is to the All Powerful State.