KeNo's Housing and Economic Portal: Friday April 17 Housing and Economic stories

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California Water Authorities Using Smart Meter Data as Evidence to Impose Fines - (www.dailysheeple.com) The smart grid isn’t coming. It’s already here. Everywhere people’s houses are being fitted if they already haven’t with smart electric meters and smart water meters. These meters communicate real-time usage data via radio frequency (which comes with its own set of health problems). Essentially, consumption of utilities in your home is being big brother tracked and traced at all times on the smart grid. Sure, it was sold to everyone as a “smart” solution for keeping consumption in check, that it would decrease utility bills because people could use it to check out how much they use and find smart ways to cut down. (How many people are really even doing that, by the way?) Not only is this going to be used to serve up “peak pricing” models against the population — to price electricity and water higher during times of higher consumption by the population — it’s also going to be used to allow the people to tattle on themselves via their data, a set up that will come with heavy financial consequences. As we can see happening now in California during its historic drought, smart meters are also being used by authorities to seek people out and impose fines.

Japan Shocked To Find Abenomics Is Destroying Its Middle Class - (www.zerohedge.com) In central planner “mission accomplished” news, the wealth divide in Japan is growing under Abenomics and middle class citizens are at risk of falling into poverty, The Japan Times says. Despite nightly sound bites from Kuroda, Aso, and Abe himself designed to assuage fears that the country’s gargantuan monetary experiment may yet fail to pull Japan out the deflationary doldrums, some people are getting impatient as the number of households on welfare continues to rise as does the number of nonregular workers. This comes on the heels of the rather amusing news that the country's Labor Ministry had fabricated a year's worth of data on wage growth (it turns out there was none) and after countless warnings from us that the PM's policies would end in spectacularly bad fashion (see here, here, and here for instance). Here’s more: According to Akio Doteuchi, a senior researcher at the NLI Research Institute, what is threatening people here is that, under the current social structure, virtually anyone in the middle class is at risk of falling into poverty. “It’s like walking in a mine field. Many risks lie ahead of you,” Doteuchi said. “Even if you are in the middle class, if something unexpected happens, you could slip into poverty.”

Government Threatens Family With Fine For Kid's Cardboard Fort - (www.dailycaller.com) A mom and dad’s idea to give their kids the coolest yard in the neighborhood has backfired and could now lead to the city of Ogden, Utah being covered in cardboard forts. Jeremy Trentelman and his wife Dee built an epic cardboard castle–complete with a slide, tunnel and windows– for their 3-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter but now they say the government has given them an ultimatum. They must take down the castle within 15 days, or face a $125 penalty, The Salt Lake Tribune reports. Upon receiving the demand Jeremy posted on Facebook, ”ARE YOU FREAKIN KIDDIN ME!!!?!” His wife shared his incredulity. “If it had been out for months or something then yeah, that would make a lot of sense…but it was a day,” Dee told KUTV.

An Emotional Audit: IRS Workers Are Miserable and ... - (www.bloomberg.com) Inside the service center, Gaddy, an IRS taxpayer assistance specialist, sits stoically in a beige cubicle marked by an electric sign with a red numeral 5. She has long, dark hair and wears a white turtleneck, black vest, black jeans, and black boots. She’s neatly arranged stacks of tax forms on her table in front of her. The speakers of her Hewlett-Packard computer softly emit the Jay Z song 99 Problems. She’ll hear quite a few from taxpayers today. A 16-year IRS veteran, Gaddy wishes she could share some of her own IRS troubles with her visitors. Her salary has risen only 2 percent in the last four years. The center lost its secretary and hasn’t replaced her because of a four-year-old hiring freeze throughout the agency, which means Gaddy and the remaining employees handle clerical duties, too. One of her fellow specialists spends all his time now answering questions via webcam from taxpayers in Harrisburg, Pa., because that office is short-staffed. Last year, to reduce the lines, the IRS discontinued its practice of preparing simple tax returns as a courtesy for people, many of them elderly. But in Philadelphia the queues have stayed the same or grown longer, because so many people come in with questions about tax credits for Obamacare and what to do to prevent identity thieves from stealing their refunds. (Because the refunds come on ATM-ready debit cards, thieves like to file victims’ returns ahead of time, with a different address.) “I mean, we still had lines,” Gaddy says, “but not out the door and around the corner.”

Court mulls revealing secret government plan to cut cell phone service - (www.arstechnica.com) A federal appeals court is asking the Obama administration to explain why the government should be allowed to keep secret its plan to shutter mobile phone service during "critical emergencies." The Department of Homeland Security came up with the plan—known as Standing Operating Procedure 303—after cellular phones were used to detonate explosives targeting a London public transportation system. SOP 303 is a powerful tool in the digital age, and it spells out a "unified voluntary process for the orderly shut-down and restoration of wireless services during critical emergencies such as the threat of radio-activated improvised explosive devices." The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in February sided (PDF) with the government and ruled that the policy did not need to be disclosed under a Freedom of Information Act request from the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The court agreed with the government's citation of a FOIA exemption that precludes disclosure if doing so "could reasonably be expected to endanger the life or physical safety of any individual." EPIC asked the court to revisit its ruling, arguing that the decision, "if left in place, would create an untethered 'national security' exemption'" in FOIA law. On Friday, the court ordered (PDF) the government to respond—a move that suggests the appellate court might rehear the case.

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