The Morning Roar: AUS Gov. Takes $360m From Idle Bank Accounts, Obama Admin Tells Local Cops To Keep Surveillance Quiet, and Tesla Frees Its Patents
Your Friday the 13th edition of the Morning Roar, piping hot and good for what ails ya! Only two of the three stories are scary, so don't worry.Australian Government Claims $360 Million from "Idle" Bank Accounts Classify this under "things I didn't know, but find disturbing."I'm not sure how many people out there are aware of the laws in place that govern what happens to dormant personal bank accounts, but every country and each individual state in the U.S. has it's own rules for the procedures involved in the government taking back "its" money from you.The most headline grabbing example of this happened just days ago in Australia, where the government took a haul of over $360 million from personal household accounts after a period of just three years of dormancy. Naturally, people who had accounts holding pensions, random checking accounts, etc., were none too pleased. From the Herald Sun (AU):
Australian Bankers' Association chief executive Steven Munchenberg said the legislation was a “rushed” budget-boosting exercise which had transferred money set aside by people for their grandchildren's future to the government's coffers.“We have grandparents who put money aside for their grandkids' future and farmers who have set aside money for a rainy day, but it was transferred to the government,” Mr Munchenberg told Fairfax Media.Connie Franze, 68, and her son Vince, 45, told Fairfax Media they were trying to reclaim life savings of more than $12,000 that was taken by the government last June.Ninety per cent of the accounts seized by the government had balances of less than $5000, although some were worth millions.
The period that an account has to be inactive for before the government can vulture it varies, but is typically between 3-5 years, which is still far too short in my opinion. Oh, and watch out Georgia (the state, NOT the country), because your accounts can be seized by the treasury after just ONE YEAR. Good thing Georgia has so many peaches, because you'll need something to eat after the government takes your money.The money will be returned if a claim is put in on it, but as we all know, the wheels of the State turn slowly and money that is urgently needed (perhaps a health savings account?) could be months in coming after being taken.Obama Admin Urging Local Cops Not To Disclose Surveillance Capability "Keep them in the dark!" seems to be the modus operandi of President Obama's "most transparent administration ever." They even have a page on Whitehouse.gov about it. Yes, still! After everything that's happened! Adorable. The administration is extending that policy to local law enforcement, urging the cops to keep citizens in the dark about the capabilities they have for surveillance, specifically in collecting mass cell phone data.
The Obama administration has been quietly advising local police not to disclose details about surveillance technology they are using to sweep up basic cellphone data from entire neighborhoods, The Associated Press has learned.
Citing security reasons, the U.S. has intervened in routine state public records cases and criminal trials regarding use of the technology. This has resulted in police departments withholding materials or heavily censoring documents in rare instances when they disclose any about the purchase and use of such powerful surveillance equipment.
Aw, the Feds and the local cops...it's like a mama bear teaching her cubs (to lie and obfuscate information that is supposed to be available to the public)! Let's see what the ACLU has to say about this.
"These extreme secrecy efforts are in relation to very controversial, local government surveillance practices using highly invasive technology," said Nathan Freed Wessler, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which has fought for the release of these types of records. "If public participation means anything, people should have the facts about what the government is doing to them."
Right on. (Fist bump)Tesla Releases All PatentsTesla is an innovative company that is on the rise, which you would think would spur them to hoard their patents and maybe swim through them, Scrooge McDuck style. However, you would be wrong! The CEO and Founder of the company has embraced the market and competition for the betterment of his own and others' products now and in the future, renouncing his claims to any and all patents for their technology.I've posted the entirety of CEO Elon Musk's essay below (it's not too long). Give it a read. And...if you want to go deeper down the rabbit hole of the Intellectual Property debate, you can listen to Marc Clair and libertarian IP lawyer Stephen Kinsella go at it in the (first ever!) Lions of Liberty podcast down at the bottom. Enjoy your weekend.
Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible.At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales.At best, the large automakers are producing electric cars with limited range in limited volume. Some produce no zero emission cars at all.Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day.We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform.Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.
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