James M. Jackson's Blog, page 3

How Democratic Billionaires Could Save Democracy

Billionaires have, apparently, decided the way to save the United States is to become president. Trump (assuming he is a billionaire—who knows since he hasn’t released financial statements?) won the presidency in 2016. Billionaires Steyer and Bloomberg want to run against him in 2020.

Media reports suggest Steyer has spent over $100 million of his own money on a campaign that hasn’t yet earned him a single delegate. Bloomberg started later and has spent over $300 million. Are they the most...

Should you post your DNA to publicly accessible databases?

An article about how police in Wisconsin used publicly available DNA to find a killer spurred me to consider whether we have a duty to perform DNA testing on ourselves to provide police with data to track down killers and rapists in cold cases. Or does police use of our data without our permission invade our privacy?
My instincts in approaching questions like is are libertarian.
I’ve asked to be cremated. I’m thrifty, and it’s cheaper to cremate than to embalm and bury. But also, I abhor the...

Happy Last Year of the Decade

Happy New Year everyone.
There seems to be a controversy every ten years about when a new decade starts. Thankfully, I will not live to experience this debate on steroids when the next century comes around.
I’m a numbers guy and have admitted on an earlier blog to missing the old odometers that gradually rolled over to a new thousand, or ten thousand, or one hundred thousand, the nines slowly being pulled around the circle and replaced by zeros. I’ve damned near crashed a car trying too hard to...

Grandparents are hiding out until January 1.

Why, you ask, are grandparents hiding out until January 1, 2020?
Is it because they gave their three-year-old grandson that fire truck he loves with the VERY LOUD siren and his parents are steaming mad? While that generational payback may not have been appreciated, the answer is more sinister.
It’s because Congress and President Trump put a temporary target on some older Americans that only lasts until the first clock-tick of 2020.
Only those oldsters with significant IRAs they are leaving to...

One Important Takeaway from the CapitalOne Hack

As part of a far-ranging conversation I had with a recent high school graduate, we touched on the CapitalOne hack. That breach did not affect her, but I said that she needed to act as if all her financial information was already available to criminals. Is it, even for one so young?

Doesn’t matter. The point was we all should act as though someone knows our Social Security Number, our driver’s license, our address, has our bank account numbers, credit card numbers, Medicare number, and health i...

A Debit Card Scam

Each of us has our preferred method of paying for things like pizza delivery. Some prefer cash, some credit cards, others debit cards, and a growing number use their smart phones. I’m leery about using a debit card that allows anyone direct access to my bank and only use them to get cash from an ATM. I rarely use cash, don’t trust my phone, and use credit cards with rewards whenever I can, paying off the balance each month. Which makes me a bit of a dinosaur.

If you use debit cards, make sure...

Why a Lottery Scam Should Inform Our Use of Electronic Voting Machines

Eddie Tipton, the former information technology manager for the Multi-State Lottery Association, was convicted in 2017 of rigging lotteries. The organization he worked for provides number-picking computers for lotteries in 33 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

He concocted a simple scheme: he added code to the computer programs that run the lotteries so that on certain specific days instead of producing a random draw of winning numbers, the program pick...

Amazon, Authors, and Asymmetric Information

By James M. Jackson
Asymmetric information occurs any time two parties to a transaction have different levels of knowledge about a situation.
Sometimes that’s a very good thing: When I go to the doctor with bothersome symptoms, I expect her to know a lot more than I do about diagnosing the problem and how to treat the underlying issue.
Sometimes it is not a good thing: for example, when you buy a used car from a stranger, the seller knows much more about the car than the buyer does. The seller k...

Furthermore – When Readers Dictate Priorities

It started with my False Bottom (Seamus McCree #6) proofreaders. My ARC readers jumped in with two feet. When the local postmistress buttonholed my better half, Jan, I knew I had a strategic issue to address.
Each novel, novella, and short story in the Seamus McCree series has its own narrative arc, but the series itself has a larger arc. At the end of each tale, questions remain—not about the action in that one—about how something will affect Seamus and his family in the future. Some of the n...

Fishy Business

Earlier this spring, Fishy Business, the 6thGuppy Chapter anthology was released by Wildside Press. Linda Rodriquez edited the anthology, and my story “Power of Attorney” is the final of the twenty-two stories chosen by a panel of three independent judges.
I don’t write many short stories because they need to laser focus on one specific issue and my preference is to interweave multiple story lines into a satisfactory tale. I wrote this story because even after writing Cabin Fever (Seamus McCre...