So to the risk cast podcast the official podcast of the risk management blog and of risk management magazine. My name is Bill Coffin. I'm the editorial director and publisher of risk management. I'm here with my usual suspects.
We're gonna work. Hello Jared Wade and Emily Holbrook. Hey this is our last episode of the year so before we get going, everybody happy holiday and all that good stuff. And Warren, what are you going for Christmas everyone?
Christmas? He doesn't celebrate happiness. He doesn't celebrate happiness. He doesn't celebrate.
He doesn't celebrate happiness. See my house it looks like a Christmas wonderland. We got like 15 of those little villages. Well I find it hard to believe.
They're all lit up and everything. That's because it's not me. So we got everything. I got the tree that's not since December 5th.
First week of December. I can't remember stealing it from my name is yard. I think it's good. I watched it.
Opus the 5th. I saw it up until December. It was good to go. I got it back yard.
Fantastic. I mean, I'm gonna get into it. Did we probably come for that way? No.
Oh yeah. Go up the main. Where I was born and raised. What was the main?
What was Christmas like a name? You guys like cold. Yeah it's freezing. I grew up there for 18 years.
I feel like the first 16 of them were in the first grade and half way through high school when we could actually drive. I walked to school like a mile or two every day. Seriously. You know what I mean?
You know what I mean? You know what I mean? You actually walked to school. Yeah.
I mean it's a mile. Yeah. This is what it was. You know what I just did every day.
Now I go back there. I'm outside for five minutes and I'm just like are you kidding me? Like even New York winter's like I can't handle anymore. Yeah.
Even Sam. It's too cold. Walk in the streets of Manhattan right now is actually kind of interesting during the morning rush hour because it's so freaking cold. And you get out of the train station.
Like there's something about coming out of Penn stations. It's the way the buildings are arranged when not all the wind comes off the river. It's really cold right from the train station. And everybody normally is like there's like a guy and whatever.
You get out of the train station. It's like the 8500 people running. Yeah. Like running.
No one has any ability to turn their head anymore because there's got hoods and stuff on stuff. You like you turn and you close yourself every time. Yeah. And it's worse though.
Now everybody's got this extraordinarily annoying rolling suitcase bags. Like even if it's a big suitcase you're going on a trip. I can see maybe calling on this at the airport. People have like a briefcase now on wheels.
Like you slack bastard. Pick it up and walk with it. Yeah. Not here.
You can't have those. I hate those things. Somebody actually called somebody out of the other day in the crowd in a rush hour crowd. I was like, why don't you pick up your bag?
And she's like, if I could I would. And I'm just like, okay. Merry Christmas to all you. Exactly.
Seriously. I'm on the escalator the one way down. We bring a hand on the escalator again. Start talking about how annoying it is that you're rolling a bag.
I was waiting online for the escalator. The stairs were free. Nobody was taking up the stairs were free. They're charging at the escalator.
Someone was dragging a wheeled case while we waited online for stairs that move. Eventually we're just going to have conveyor belts instead of sidewalks like in airports. Yeah. They're going to take a whole sidewalk.
Yeah. The slide wire. Slugs with little like Tyrannosaurus arms and like we have a lot of legs. Like those toys.
That's like in four years. As always, you heard it here four years. Morgan's ranch. You always make sure to look for the future.
I can't wait. That's four years. Make sure to walk it down to the future of my children. Take stock in mobile sidewalks.
You heard it here first. I don't know if you guys have heard about the report issued by the New York Times about millions of Americans drinking dirty water. You have? Mm-hmm.
I have. Because it is a national wide problem. It's nationwide. It's nationwide.
They went through compiled and analyzed millions of records from water systems and regulators from the nation. It's been a long time since 2004. The water provided to more than 49 million people. It has contained a legal concentration of chemicals like arsenic or radioactive substances like uranium.
Uranium? Uranium? That's awesome. Yeah.
Well as well as bacteria that's often found in raw sewage. And the thing that's, you know, the EPA has found these things but it's failed to punish municipalities and these towns. So there's a big. Any towns in particular?
Well, they give an example here. Ramsey, New Jersey. I don't know if that's by the Jersey Shore. Is that pollution in New Jersey?
Is that on the Jersey Shore? I don't know. Is that building off that's by the Jersey Shore? I live on the Jersey Shore.
Yeah, it's a bad situation down there. But anyway, there's rain in the water. Yeah, it's Ramsey, New Jersey drinking water test since 2004. I have detected the legal concentrations of arsenic, the carcinogen and the dry cleaning solvent.
Wait, do they call it arsenic as a label of carcinogens? Yes. They're like poison protective metals and stuff. It'll kill you immediately, but it may cause cancer also.
That's the problem. Usually dead by the time the cancer comes up. Alright. So this is.
In dry cleaning chemicals, all the stuff that are also carcinogens. Most of that stuff is regulated by the EPA but for us, believe us, there is an allowable level that is supposed to be safe for us. Yeah. It doesn't allow a level just for anything.
Right, parts per million type of stuff. So aside from New Jersey, are there other parts of the country like certain regions or certain states that have an usually high concentration of a bad drink for it? Or is it generally speaking, kind of an even distributed problem across the country? So, the bigger problems are in the areas with smaller populations.
It's said that the majority of the violations since 2004 have occurred at water systems serving fewer than 20,000 residents. Basically because they lack the resources to institute. Yeah, there was a part of the thing that was in West Texas for something. Maybe that was one of the worst ones.
It was supposed to be a smart community like that. And then, for instance, the Boston metropolitan area was like, maybe not the entire thing. I'm sure there's slightly different water municipalities there. But one of them has served several hundred thousand people.
It was supposed to be one of the cleanest. And actually not only had metal standards, but also had extra minerals and stuff in it. And in New York, are you supposed to be a great boy? I think generally speaking, they're pretty much all homely.
Well, they have the support areas as New York State. I think they're referring not to New York State. It's a 205 water system. They've broken a law by delivering tap water that contained a legal amount of bacteria since 2004.
That's a lot. So EPA is not in force regulation. Like where is the failure of force coming from as a matter of? The EPA just lacks the manpower of the ability to actually make me feel.
So there was a quote from someone in there who was saying that the EPA wouldn't like to maybe enforce it more, but they're a little lenient just because they know no one has the money to actually fix it in any way. Yeah, but you can find a small Texas town that has like a thousand. They don't have any money to pay the fund, especially during the money. It's not really a great excuse.
So if you're in these towns and you've got bad water, you're just going to have to buy a bottle of water. I mean, I don't know what you can do otherwise. I'm going to filter out every bit of... A British filter surprisingly helps a lot.
Yes. I've read reports about the Brittafilter. I mean, it doesn't remove everything, but it helps with tap water. Everybody I know who ever had like one of those home-bought water filter pictures never changes the filter after like you have to buy it.
So they're all inspired. That is actually has the opposite effect on it. It's much more harmful than just drinking all the tap. There's another study that I wish I'd have brought and had the more specifics on here, but that says that like bottled water is actually somewhat dangerous in this regard too.
Because a lot of this stuff, I mean, honestly, is just tap water. Like it's not drinking. Well, Aquafina is actually, that's what Coca-Cola did was. It was just...
It was just... Oh, I'll add a metro lane to municipal tap water, right? They just took top water and filtered it, I guess. It's pretty much just put it in the refill.
And most aquafina particularly is just tap water and I... Or designing one of the two lactose two main off-shoot like the Pepsi and Coke. It's not like the Poland Spring and all that stuff. That actually is a little more pure.
And I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure it's those two that are just tap water. But no, but some of them are even worse than tap water. Like I mean, especially when you're comparing to the good tap water systems like Boston and stuff. They'll have like maybe not quite so much like the arsenic and stuff like that, but like some of the petrochemical type of stuff that's in there.
And because they're not regulated by the FDA for the most part, these water systems. So it's kind of depending on where you live, there's really no good option to drink. And then you run to the whole, everybody hates bottled water trend at this point. Everybody walk around metal containers because the plastic makes your water taste bad or it just kind of goes into the bottle water.
It's just a amount too long or what have you. And then it's just not environmentally friendly with the plastic bottles. I had 8,000 million bottles every day. It was pretty amazing seeing just how fast the public opinion turned against bottled water in general for the last two years.
Like it didn't take that much. Also, everybody just kind of flipped this switch ahead. You know what, this is ridiculous. And bottled water was something that everybody was really quite used to drink all the time.
And they're trying to design a waste and a sign of environmental unfriendliness and you fill yourself the extra chemicals. I mean, it never seemed to be that bad. I just didn't like taste of water. I think it's the whole environmental.
It's because the environmental stuff kind of picked up a lot more in the last few years in general. So then you look at something that's obvious. We've got water for free and we're paying for it. In some cases, obviously not as many as we hope.
The water is just as good as you get in the tap unless you live in the trash. And still, I feel like that's almost like a rhetorical thing because most people even that are against bottled water, strongly still drink it. And I feel like being in New York like we hear about it more and stuff like that. I don't know if there's just a cry against bottled water that even there's an SUV or something.
And both those things are obviously very still prevalent. Well, the interesting thing is what actual harm comes out of these levels of literature? Well, that's what I was going to get at Bill. A lot of people think there's such small amounts of these toxins that it's not really going to do anything.
But the report said that... The report said that certain types of cancer, like breast and prostate cancer, have risen over the past 30 years and the research indicates it's because of these contaminants in the water. Really? There's a town in New Jersey, correct?
There's been a lot of anecdotal talk on the fact that there's a... I mean, the research on it, I guess, is pretty... The point is that around breath, there's a high number of people who have autism in their own. Is there something in the water?
You usually say that in Joe, you know, adjusting in the way of ingesting. But there really is a question because there's some sort of environmental thing going on there that has had some sort of long-term effect, perhaps, on the genetic code of the residents, and it's not hurting them, it's hurting them, but it's hurting them, but it's been a pass on with their kids or some of it's something that if you're a kid in the area, there's something in the environment that you're particularly susceptible to. And there's no proof whatsoever. I mean, undoubtedly, there's been lawsuits filed here and everywhere against various industrial concerns in the area.
But I mean, that's one of those cases where, you know, that's not news, that's not a secret to anybody living in that part of Jersey. I mean, everybody knows about break. It's just one of these weird things. There's a lot of...
I mean, there's a lot of... I mean, in Long Island, where I live in Nassau County, there was a... People always thought there's hype, just I don't know if it's joining any numbers, but breast cancer seems to be pretty prevalent, and that's always been one of those concerns that I've heard through the years growing out of, you know, something must be in the environment that's keying this level. Whether or not it actually means anything, like I said, anecdotal from my perspective, I have no stats to back up or that it's true, but people have been talking about that for every family member, you know, friends who have to go through, you know, somebody having breast cancer and everybody knows somebody, you know, it's just one of those things, and that's what everybody said.
Yeah, I don't know if I can talk about anything, I don't sound conspiracy-not, but I'm like, and you know, it's tough because you can't. How cool would it be though, Jared, secretly was a doctor? Like, you just talked about... We can't really notice what I have a doctor.
I'm an autoconologist. I'm only 19. But like, obviously cancer has existed throughout society for probably as long as we've been around, you know, but it's not really good records going back long enough to really see if it's like, you know, increased prevalence, and I mean, there's studies that definitely show that, but like, with the life expectancy increasing, obviously cancer is something you get later in life generally, it will be interesting to see, like, if this becomes way more prevalent as we, you know, go through the next half century in humanity, and how much of the stuff is based upon, you know, the chemicals and all these other processed stuff that is within water and food and everything that we put into our bodies. I mean, I wouldn't be shocked if I'd find out in 30 years that, I mean, all of us have colon cancer or something, and I'm not sure that human bodies must be processing all this stuff.
What sort of speaks is something that we actually wrote in the magazine that appears by the word-exerculation press? In the bioaccumulation, yeah. Where it explodes to low-tech and body, or it hurts you, but it's just gradually... Well, really, the real problem is more so that stuff is how it goes up through the food chain.
So if you have, say, a fish that swims in polluted water and the fish eats that water and is pretty contaminated, you know, that fishes... What if that contaminated goes through the whole fish and then something else, the fish eventually comes to your dinner plate with ridiculously high levels. Some reason as it goes up to the food chain, the concentration gets more exponentially increases as opposed to, like, you think it's really early, but for some reason it doesn't. So, minute levels of pollution go up and become larger levels of potentially larger levels with certain things.
And how do you identify? So we don't know, whatever parts per million they decide to be, you know, is good by the time it actually gets to say you're, you know, something you're consuming, it's probably way past that point. Right, and how do you identify what is actually causing these levels of cancer if they do, you know, prove out to occur later in life, and then, you know, ultimately, in this society, somebody's liable for it. You know, somebody is selling these things that are making this stuff happen, or they're polluting the rivers that are making this happen, and you know, what kind of...
What kind of price tag do you put on a city that has, you know, incredible rates of autism or cancer or whatever this could be? Well, it's an awesome fit to the test. I mean, some municipalities, this is more for liability concerns or sector school systems or social services to have beneficial usage, but I think like school is really... Or some municipalities have something written themselves out of liability, they just said, look, I mean, not liable by right with law.
You can't sue us for liability issues or having certain things that were providing because it's a societal benefit. And that's too bad if, you know, don't be generous like that, that's the risk we take with you. I mean, so I would wonder, you know, what you're talking about, Jared, I mean, the potential values here could be so huge in bankbusting, especially for small towns, some of this mythical small town west axis we keep referring to. They're not going to have the money to adequately safeguard their water supply.
They're certainly not going to have the resources to handle a class action lawsuit brought on by every person of the county. So, I mean, clearly, there's some sort of relief, whether it's simply just writing off the liability entirely, or not only knows what else, but it would not require huge resources. You know, and it could become... and works for a small town.
And, you know, in certain parts of the country, the cost of litigation is a lot higher than other parts of the country. And that happens in some Tony part of Connecticut, or like $1.00 a value. So what's going to start happening that is what will happen if you wanted to clean this up, is if these towns can't do it, they'll end up raising your water bill. Start paying for extra services to, you know, for the system.
So in the end, you'll end up having to pay for it. I could just, you can see that just every liability gets passed on to the consumer at some point. So if the water authority has to pay X plus 100, well, you're, you can be sure that water bill is going up X plus 100, too. It's how they pay for it.
They just like, sock on it, you know, a bank account. Basically, you know, try to create a $89 in alternative risk fund to pay for this, or I mean, I can't imagine anybody in the right mind in the private insurance sector would step up and go, you know what, we'll cover this. I mean, there's no, it's like, there's no way you could possibly underwrite for this thing, you know, in any kind of accurate sense. I mean, it's one of those things where you obtain a water supply, you can obtain it from someone else, you have a direct evidence of somebody leaking into a water supply.
If you're like a private accumulation situation, you've got 100 different people who are putting stuff in. There's no way you can pay that on any one source. You know, the water system is all connected at some point. I mean, what do you do?
Oh, that Mississippi River, we should sue Mississippi because our water supply is a tributary off of that. Yeah, good luck with that. It's easy. You see the one up river, it's like, what do I do?
Well, then we start a private company that's job is to clean all the water somehow. Thank you. We pay for that, but we what? There's a business.
Well, it seems like the solution, all the stuff is, you know, some distant technology that we don't know about, you know, that cleans water somehow. How do you clean the uranium out of water? I mean, you best bet on that is what we use your superpowers. And you can lift the entire water supply and take it somewhere else.
The water tainted by the soil inside it may be invulnerable to the super stomach. I'm sorry, stomach. Anyway, anyway. Well, as you can guess, the EPA is getting grilled about this and they're supposed to come up with some sort of solution soon.
So I'm going to keep my eye on it and probably blog about it in the coming weeks. We'll keep our eyes closed. We'll keep our eyes closed. Stock up on bottle water.
Yes, exactly. I'm pretty filter, too. There you go. Save plastic.
Drink whiskey. I wasn't going to say it, but... The solution is alcohol. In tech news on Thursday night, Thursday evening, some point, I think around 10 p.m.
The social networking service Twitter was hijacked by a group called the Iranian cyber army. This is a little scary. Some people doubt whether or not it was actually an Iranian group that had anything to do with this or whether it was just some pranksters and whatever normal hackers that were having some fun at the expense of geopolitical humor. But what they did was they hijacked a home page and they put up this note.
It was just this image that had a green flag. The message was kind of scary but also kind of humorous in a way. It said, and I quote, USA think they're controlling and managing internet by their access, but they don't. We control and manage internet by our power.
So do not try to stimulate Iranian peoples to... ...now which country in a Margolis. Iran, USA. Take care.
I'm sorry, I graced my phone. I was like, take care. Eat your vegetables. Don't take any wood, nickels.
The whole thing for the most part is in all caps and then take care. It's just lower case. They invented their nerd rage enough at the end of the Twitter account. They went, hey, you know, a little soft take care, you know.
So I assume that it was obviously Twitter. The Twitter track was redirected to the site. Yeah, the site took over and I think it said essentially a message. This website has been hacked by Iranian cyber army and that came up on the...
So were there demands? Did they have demands or something? I don't know. We don't fix the problem within a few hours at most.
And Twitter isn't like Amazon.com and that got hacked or whatever. They don't make money by every second. They're all still wasn't like this. Incredible.
I'm sure Ashley could your head of heart attack though. Right. That's more what it was. Everyone can use their Twitter for a while.
I think it's kind of more what it speaks to is like, you know, anyone can be hacked even like this mega brand like Twitter, which is, you know, the query like Facebook at this point. So just kind of shows that, you know, everyone can be hit. Well, the Iranian cyber army thing is a little disturbing because also this week there's a story about how Iranian-based or Iranian backtackers had actually used like a $26 off the shelf program to hack into the video feeds of predator drones flying over Afghanistan. So basically, insertants on the ground could use this off the shelf technology that you just buy over the internet and it patched into the video feeds of surveillance drones that were kind of hunting them and trying to shoot them out.
And basically, it'll make the element of surprise. And what was interesting about that is that the Pentagon has been really concerned for a while about, you know, nation states, you know, really, you know, waiting with what they call cyber warfare. And we wrote about this, I guess, last year in the magazine about how some Russian hackers had basically shut down the whole nation of Estonia for a couple days. Yeah.
And allegedly that happened as well, like in the Georgia conflict. Yeah. I don't know if it was ever driven, but Georgia's, you know, cyber connection went down pretty much nationwide during that time. Right.
And you know, Russia and China have both been pegged as countries that have been putting a lot of resources into developing very robust cyber warfare, you know, capabilities, I suppose. It's really seemed like very surprising that Iran might do the same thing given, you know, Iran's, I mean, there's some pretty substantial claims that they do a lot of funding or backing of various, you know, nefarious elements in the region. And for them to actually, you know, and for them to hack, you know, certainly for them to hack, you know, predator video feeds seems certainly in their case. But I mean, also to hack some like Twitter, I mean, why not, you know, you know, especially since Twitter was used during that whole, the whole election this year, you know, and the leadership is still staying with that.
They're like angry at Twitter for fermenting for offering, you know, people that. Well, I mean, they call themselves the Iranian cyber army, but doesn't mean they're affiliated with the Iranian government. It sounds, you know, obviously the message was, you know, translated or something because it's obviously not, you know, which syntax or anything like that. And take care and it's just no real demand.
It sounds like, I mean, hackers are no stories for, you know, not just hacking something, but telling people to hack something. Or like the badge of honor, like, I was. I think it's amazing that we're almost in 2010 and large websites such as Amazon and Twitter are still being hacked. There's not, you know, tech security measures in place that work.
Well, it's no matter what you do with hackers, there's always going to be somebody smarter to be around it. So what's happening is not preventable. I'm saying to say, I say, no, I don't think you can prevent a lot of basic hacking, but I'm sure there's always going to be somebody who can break any program. I mean, it's out there.
It's just a matter of being smart enough to find a password. It's always you're trying to fix the holes and plug the leak and everything. You don't really know of a type of attack until it occurs. And then you figure out a way as the good guys to fix it and then the bad guys figure out a new way to get around it.
And you know, they're always creating new holes and things. Well, and there's so much incentive because everything we do and increasingly, we also have more and more is based online. You know, I was just talking about before in England, Britain is actually starting to, they've just set a plan that they will do away entirely with checks, you know, right checks to pay money. Really?
Yeah, by like 20 to 18, they're going to pay for checks. Everything online. So it's so suggesting that even money kind of miles past the point of physical paper, I'm assuming, I don't really really read the article. I just had one, but I'm assuming that they'll get to the point where something is a lot more automated or rather online.
So there's so much incentive to continue to hack stuff when everything that we do is online. I personally haven't paid a bill in person in years. Can I just be? I can't imagine you're imagining out some money that's floating around everywhere else.
Yeah, no. Yeah, I mean, we also had time for it. Yeah, wasn't that a one of the heck of an entire fire sale? Yeah, fire sale.
Yeah, I ran things. Yeah, like exactly what you're saying, for Twitter, that was kind of like a big tipping point in Twitter's existence when the Iranian kind of elections were going on, all the outcry. And there was a point where the US government actually intervened because there was a scheduled maintenance of Twitter that was going to go on during that week. Yeah.
And the state department actually contacted the people who were like, can you not do this now? Like something kind of revolutionary globally is going on right now that we've never kind of seen before and these people have this voice that otherwise wouldn't have, without you guys. So I guess that would be maybe some of the motivation. If there was a real Iranian group, it would be, that was why they might take it on Twitter.
I was saying I weren't Iranian. I was just wondering. I can't think you could assume that their government backed the cyber army. It just seems a little kind of like, well, when Estonia got shut down, I mean, with a lot of cyber security experts thought it was just a bunch of Russian hackers or Russian script cities, whatever, you know, who figured it out.
But the idea was that Russia had been really, had been training people to do cyber warfare. And those people could be training other people. That sort of thing. Not really like a terrorist excel structure, but I mean, these people all kind of know each other as part of a community and these skills and ways of dispersing.
And these could be people who are not necessarily formally trained by any government, but they are certainly sympathetic to it and they get their hands on the skills and they figure, well, they're going to emulate the tactics that are being put forth by the government. If you're coming from countries, a lot of the Russian republics really fit this better, that don't have the resources, like military resources or economic resources. It's not that hard to have a laptop and computer skills. It doesn't take much money to actually make a real effect, particularly if you have an agenda.
You can't really, you don't have an army that can make a dent, but you certainly have a bunch of hackers. You can probably do more than an army code these days anyway. Cyber war is going to be the big front line in the asymmetrical war. It really levels the whole battlefield.
We've already seen in most of the conflicts of the past ten years that the traditional let's have two forces line up in a battlefield thing from the old days. At some point just fighting in general. It's not even a point. You can control who's where the money's going.
That's kind of the point. Well, Jerry did raise a really good point, which is exactly what Russia did though when they hit Georgia. The first and half of it is the countries electronic architecture started stumbling down and made it really hard for them to get internet and computer based messaging out of the country. And that was easy to do because a small country didn't have a whole lot of resources to knock down.
So it just took a short while and Russia was pretty good at what they do. They're able to do it. The computer network is an entire country. At this point, what is it running off a computer?
It's not really a matter of redundancy. With smaller countries like Georgia and Estonia, the thing is there's only so much redundancy they can have. It would be much, much, much harder to do the same thing to a large country. I say, any of the G20 because there's so much redundancy built in.
And it gets like the G7 or G6. To do something like that in the United States, for example, you probably couple of nuclear weapons really to knock out like entire electronic architectures because there's so much redundancy built into the system. And the same is true of Russia, of Great Britain, of France. Over the case of that, North East Blackout, you just need that.
Well, there, that wasn't very, didn't take a nuke to do. That's the grid that's on Ether Grid. That's the straight up power grid. Which was a whole different kind of vulnerability.
But you can't, I don't know, I have Art's own believe in the hacker, you know, figure out how to hang in the power grid. Where were they? That was one of the few things that was still manually operated. And the movies were always correct.
I couldn't back up to the new power grid that I'm writing about for the January February issue. The hackability of the power grid. The smart grid. They're making a whole new smart grid that's supposed to be a little better than the old complete electricity type software.
There's actually digital cables that can talk to one another. Anything that can talk to one another is ultimately vulnerable. Well, the truth is that no matter how sophisticated you make any kind of electronic information system to be proofing attackers, ultimately you have humans that are interfacing with it. And you can have a completely full proof, completely invincible system.
But as long as you have a human operator anywhere in the mix, that's where your biggest threat of failure is going to come from. I don't know, I've seen, I think, there's two documentaries that might counter that. One was called the Matrix. Two-way thing it was.
Skynet came, what, what was it? It took over. Those were documentaries, right? Those were documentaries, right?
Those were documentaries, right? They were no struck first, but they were humans or new guys. I appreciate that. I'm pretty sure those were documentaries, though.
They're not documentaries. Yes, they are. They're true. The Matrix is certainly a documentary.
That means you can watch a movie. No, I'm not gonna watch a movie. You're seeing cannery if he's around, he exists in the world. Those were documentaries.
I saw him in that old movie. What was that? Oh, Bill and Teds. That was also a documentary.
Time travel. Every moment true. Why do you think there's no phone booths anymore? They have all their time machines, so they got rid of them.
They, the government, the man. Guys, to get a little serious, how's the government hired hackers to find holes in their system? Or they might just make them something? No, no, no.
It's not gonna fit companies, the larger ones to hire these hackers. To work on their payroll to find the holes before other hackers find them. Yeah, they call it white hat hacking. White hat and black hats.
There's actually a black hat hacking conference, I think. So like in Texas, just like that. Really? Yeah, it's really fascinating.
Where these guys get together. And there are a lot of people who, yeah, they're basically, they provide services and they figure out how to test the weaknesses of your system by doing a hack about under controlled circumstances. So they can then explain how they did it and where the hack came from. And all these guys are reformed, you know, ex- Yeah, a lot of guys.
When the jail for a few years came out and realized, hey, I can't do that anymore. Well, I can make money on that. Just saw the lights somehow and realized, hey, I can make money if I start my own consultancy. Of course, the guy, the original guy, the original hacker went to jail was a guy named Kevin Mitnick.
We got busted back in the late 80s, early 90s, and he got up to be a tough deal because when he was like the hacker of all hackers in the 80s, and they finally chased after for a long time, they got him, they put him in jail for a couple years. And then they sent him, one of the things they sent him too is basically a lifelong ban off the internet, which when he came out as a guy as a bomber, you know, but then the internet exploded and he's like, I don't know what to do. I mean, this poor guy has a skill set. He's like the only man in America who's forbidden from getting online.
And he's going back to his parole, you know, can you please lighten this up and that sort of thing. And I think they ultimately lighten the sense a little bit so he could become a security consultant because he had to be able to cut a living somehow, you know. But for a while, he was the guy like the only guy in America who was, you know, your grounded off the internet forever for life. And not even knowing what the internet was going to become.
Well, right, exactly. I heard that Warcraft is fun. Do you guys remember when Harlan Paimon's systems got that every... Yeah, well the mastermind behind that, his name is Albert Gonzalez and he's facing 15 to 25 years in prison and he is now claiming that he has a form of autism so he can seek a leaner sentence.
This is like every... No, it's just like every... 13 year old jerk online claims to have Asperger's syndrome. I was like, you don't have Asperger's, you're just a dick, okay?
The 13 years old, you don't have any manners and you get off like people off online and you... And we call on it and you're like, no, no, no, it's really Asperger's. Come on. I see him drinking water in brick.
Yeah, for us. By the Jersey Shore, right? Yes, by the Jersey Shore. Thanks for asking.
Well, no, what is this? Well, it's always a turn you hired a psychiatrist to determine that his behavior was consistent with the description of Asperger's disorder, which is the type of... There we go! He's not an Asperger's.
He's a fellow, isn't he? He's just a really smart flop. There are people out there with Asperger's, okay? It's a serious thing.
Yes. There are people who have no practice. Exactly. Of course, social skills.
Yeah, they're social skills. And they, you know, they... Then again, if enough people have poor social skills, eventually they'll just redefine the disease for it and they'll come up with some aim and it will be something. If enough people exhibit certain symptoms...
You had them working on work? That it is a disease. Yeah, it's working. I'll take it out.
I'll take the name. I'm all for it because it makes my low-level social skills seem a little much better than you. Everyone else has been downgraded. I can just coast on my poor skills.
I'm just looking to flatten the curve here a little bit. It's a comparatively speaking. I'm tired. Wait, it's just a way to be around.
I'm sorry. ID possibly a C in no time. The curve is just... That's it.
Yeah. I think that'll be the time when I start to loop on the ground or something. I'll just cut all ties. I'll just become a mole man or something.
Stay away from everybody. Here's what I want to talk about. LEDs. You know, they light emitting diodes.
Everybody loves to save... To replace incandescent light bulbs with LEDs. No matter where they are. Save all sorts of energy.
I know. Bill's very green. So I'm sure you replace every light in your house with something that's better. All the Christmas lights outside the house and on the tree.
They're all LEDs. Oh, the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree is all LED. It's got a cool glow, but it's not a glow. They do look like normal lights.
It's got a cool glow. They definitely look strange. They don't look like normal lights. You really see a lot of LEDs around Christmas time.
You see them in the stores because all the lights are like LEDs. But the other thing they do is in four-down. These traffic lights. A lot of communities have replaced their regular lights.
They save a substantial amount of money. Actually, there's one anecdote. When I get into this. One community in Wisconsin actually saves a million dollars a year on electric costs by replacing the LEDs.
I think it was a statewide deal. Let me read this for a second. I believe, yes. Actually $750,000 a year.
But here's the problem. Sounds great, right? Saving lights? Saving environment, saving electricity.
Fantastic. Here's the problem. It snows. It snows.
It snows into the LED lights. They don't have enough heat to actually melt the snow. The lights actually get blocked. It's, you know, obscured.
It's a tragic accident. There's actually cases of people who may or may not have been killed in a traffic accident because, you know, the blocked lights. Somebody was rammed by it. And then lost it too.
Well, certainly. Not only that, they also have to have crews that have to go and dust the lights off. So are they really saving money? Well, that's the question.
What you basically did is you save a bunch of money. You replaced all your lights and save your money. But now you're creating another hazard, another risk. Outside to potentially life and life, I guess.
Okay, but here's even my big question, though. If the snow is coming down and blowing so hard as to cover up the traffic lights, I would imagine that even in areas where the aren't traffic lights, people who are out driving are at substantial risk of sliding around and crashing anyhow. Yeah, I didn't think about that. There's a sideways snow.
Yeah, seriously. I mean, I wish you were in a school like Jay. Yeah, I was saying, like, I mean, I was in like, I mean, I was in like, like, places like Maine and Wisconsin, Green Bay and stuff and where this is talking about Michigan and Minnesota. If it's not that regular, I mean, it happens five, six times a month.
And don't think about it as if the only time this happens is when the snow is falling. If it's a wet snow that sticks onto every flat surface and then freezes or doesn't freeze, those lights are frozen until something knocks the snow off. And if you think about it, if you look at, if you think visualized most traffic lights, they have those little like hoods over them. So they come up so the sun is not clear from the sun.
That's also going to block the winds. It's also not going to blow off the snow anytime quickly, particularly if you get wet snow that freezes. Like in these northern states with constant Illinois or Illinois, Illinois. Illinois is like a plural and it sounded like a person who can't pronounce words.
No, it's always a risk. It's always a risk. You're with constant. You're with constant Illinois and it makes me sound dumb because it doesn't actually work that way.
So hey, welcome to the English language, we're going to work. Yeah, so that's a problem. It's not when it's snow falling. Well, there's little cows over the lights though.
I mean, my understanding is that one of the benefits of LEDs though is that they actually are not as susceptible to being washed off by sunlight, right? So if you had any of those cows anymore, could you possibly try to redesign the lights? I don't think it'll matter though if you think about it. Think about it good snow.
Think about it the last time you saw good snow and you had snow on like the tree limbs. It's not one of the fences. Yes, it's supposedly just where we're having snow tomorrow. It's the 18th of December and if it's snow tomorrow, that's because we told you it was going to.
I don't like this idea at all. What? It's the LED lights. You don't like saving the lights?
You don't like the many traffic lights? Well, I think they're maybe saving money, but they also have another expenditure with having a higher picture. Well, here's the trick. And then it kills people too.
Well, listen, it's not like there's this rampant epidemic of people dying of traffic lights. There's one documented case at least in this article that says they think it might have contributed. There's five or six accidents that are documented. But these LED lights are only in a few places, right?
Yeah, but I'm sure that is pretty widespread. I think Wisconsin is part of the state line. I'm sure there's PODontowns. Minnesota, Illinois.
The electrical causes are pretty compelling. I think a lot of small units of power are eager to make the cost, which over because they can seem to make a call back. What it's actually starting to, what a lot of these authorities are now having to consider because of this, you know, you've got to consider what's the solution. So the solution is to either find some sort of like weather shields, which they sort of make, or add like heating elements to lights, which sort of, the fact that they're considering is kind of like a lot of smaller places already said, now we can't do that because it's costly.
But now you're actually saying, well, what would it be, I mean, how is it feasible is it's to save the electricity on the lights and then spend it on a heating element in the winter time? Well, you know, there's a stretch of Route 78 between Pennsylvania and New Jersey that I travel and going back home. And it's this one, quickly and has to go down the mountain. There's an automatic deicing system there.
So whenever it's snow, however it works, that portion of road is always ice-free, always snow-free, you know, the plow, it's just kept being that way. I would wonder if maybe they'd, you know, adapt, maybe that's what technology for lights. I mean, it's like every part of the country's going to have this problem. I imagine it's going to be mainly a problem in areas that have lots of snow.
So parts of the Midwest, up into the Great Lakes, that's what I mean. I mean, I would guess there's a normal dust, or maybe just a moderate, you know, two to four inch, kind of snow falls. Not really going to cause a lot of this. I'm just saying, if you think about the snow, if it's a snowy that's going to stick and it's going to be windy, it doesn't have to be a lot of snow to cover anything.
It gets snowed all the time and it's like the wind is going to cover up. It's like if you have a snow, it's a no- It's not practical for them to change it. So anyone who's incorporating it later might be able to do that stuff. Yeah, it would seem like if you decide to switch your lights tomorrow in your community, that would be a good idea.
You'd have to cut down the cost of, say, over time police, you know, we didn't have a de-icing situation. We'll also get traffickers. And they actually, I was watching some video and they had the real high-tech ways to make it literally put a guy was literally taping ice scrapers, you know, like a car, hand scraper, and you'd have to like these long-ass broomstick type of things. They used to literally standing out there and scraping it.
But they got to do every single light, and depending on how much it is your crew's got to work a little extra time. Yeah, granted, it's not like this is some sort of thing that all of a sudden makes all the value that you're seeing throughout the year just, you know, wash away. But, you know, it's like everything else that we ever do, there's always another side to the benefits. Well, there's also like an educational campaign that could happen too that wouldn't, I mean, it staggers me how stupid people, even in New York are, but like driving the snow.
Oh, yeah. You don't remain, you know, like, it's just a way to grab the snow and even if it's Texas or like that southern community's where the snow is, the world stops. Right. And then it's famous.
Like, they got like a little tiny dusting and people just freak out and always need to be able to do it with donuts on the highways and all that. Just this can't handle it. Like, where I grew up, you know, like there's times where the snow is just falling so hard and you're driving it because you've got to go somewhere that you just, because of the snow that's in front of your windshield, you can't see the lights very well. So there's a knowledge of driving the snow that you treat the light like a stop sign.
Right. And that's what some of the constant, you know, the new support workers were saying, you know, well, people just need to learn that if they can't see the light properly, just treat it as a stop sign. That could be probably the most simple and maybe even the most effective solution of the whole thing seriously, just a serious educational campaign, you know. Yeah, that's what they do during hurricanes when it knocks out the power of the lights.
They put up signs in certain places to that effect, you know, which, you know, treats it if it's out treated like, you know, if it's a power failure, that's technically what you were doing. You know, powerfully just go below through the intersection because all that lights are going boom. But yeah, I mean, there's not one guy in the snowstorm there decides this is the time he's going to get his F-150 up to 45 miles an hour. But I guess you're not familiar with Jerry and the road conditions are bad.
Maybe, you know, you're not, you know where the lights are. Maybe you will blow through it because you can't stop that well anyway. And you didn't see it far enough. And then you see a light, slam on your brakes, still go through.
Right. I mean, they're reporting it, so it's become a big epidemic, but I don't think it's that. I do think, though, I don't think it's a big deal, but I think it was a little fact that they were saying, talking about what it saves, they said, uh, LEDs in Wisconsin, LEDs installed seven years ago were still burning while incandescent bulbs were placed every 12 to 18 months. So you figure if they're doing that, they're saving money over and over again, I would imagine that it's going to take quite a bit before they all start going, you know, rethinking that.
Yeah, yeah, it's got to be a short fix. I'm unfortunately like I said, there was some accidents and unfortunately one death that might have been attributed, but I don't know if that would have, no one can say that's because of this light or because it was just an accident. More people die in the roadways in the United States, then all the combat doesn't be in the Vietnam War. So I mean, the truth is that no matter how many people, how many fatalities you can't show up to snow covered, LED traffic lights, it's such a small number statistically, I can't imagine it would be enough to disprove these technologies.
It would be more a case of it's an obvious risk that's been identified, but because of other costs considerations such as less replacement costs in the bulb or lower electrical costs, it clearly doesn't matter if the risk has to be managed rather than simply getting rid of the lights entirely, or the ice or something. It's a little cautious. I mean, that's, you know, what it is, but I always wonder though, when you get these things when they hit the media and it's interesting, but you always get that one or two comments from people that are like, there's never happened before. How could this possibly be safe?
And at what point does, you know, you could see a plausible scenario where that sort of ground swell up, this is terrible, we need to go back to where it was. What's it? It's a big box. I'm a little bit of an official, I love something, because there's just too many people in their community that demanded that this change is even though it has absolutely no relevance to the one thing or another.
I'm not saying that Green Bay is smaller for this. I've never been in the church, maybe, but you know, come on, the whole place where it's going. The situation being, I can't see a situation where it is, I just can't see that I could see a scenario where they also have to change things. Well, it's funny because one of the commenters, I think on the blog post that had a pretty good photo in the blog post over a green light just being almost completely blocked out.
And then right next to it, hang was like, you know, an overhead, like no right hand sign or something like that. And the comment was like, meanwhile, the sign is completely blocked out by snow too. Yeah, that's going on for your stop signs. Yeah, I mean, or whatever is always blocked out by snow.
So it's not like it's this new, complete thing. But I think it does speak to the idea that as we develop all these new technologies, whether they're green or whatever digital, there's going to be these unforeseen things that in practice turn out to be riskier or more difficult to deal with. Yeah, think about it. Who really knew before this point that incandescent lights, traffic lights melted the snow and this was never blocked?
I didn't. I didn't. I didn't. That even occurred to you until you changed something, obviously for the better.
And all of a sudden you find out really that didn't. I mean, that was a plan. That's just kind of lucky. I don't think when they made an incandescent light, they're like, you know what's good about this too.
One of the commenters, though, I've never noticed this either, but he was saying, oh, this is actually good because now there's not water in the middle of the street that turns into ice. And he was saying, like, underneath the, you know, the hot ones he said that he'd always noticed this. It's like the big thing about nobody ever knew about water drips down and it just becomes ice. That's why I'm not on the sidewalk.
It's always been dark. Oh, like ice. One of the street quarters is the light. I know.
And there's no, and there's no, it's too cold to cold to melt. So we shouldn't be ice there, but it's the dripping water. I'm off for LED traffic lights now. No, you're always waiting.
You're actually waiting for the water. What do you doing inside the sun? What was interesting? Well, sometimes you imagine those guys, too, like Sal, who's been working there for 55 years, just going out like, what the hell?
No. It's freezing cold, just scraping a light with no leverage whatsoever. One of the things, yes. I get it.
I get it. A lot of times, but still, I can't think of it if you're putting pressure on it. It's not just going to keep it from you. You know, the job they give to the rookie?