Today the FBI announced that it had managed to unlock Syed Farook’s iPhone without Apple’s help. So that particular fight is over for now. But why was Apple so hellbent on refusing to help the FBI in the first place? Was it really because they’ve suddenly decided to become the white knight of consumer privacy and mass surveillance backlash? Maybe! Or maybe there’s more to it.

Hold that thought for a moment and consider something else: Apple is sitting on a cash hoard of $150 billion that it seemingly can’t find a use for. Stock buybacks, acquisitions, R&D—those are all fine, but there’s no way these things can make much of a dent in a bankroll that’s this big and still growing. You need to think different—way different—to find a good use for that much dough. So what’s the plan?

Charlie Stross has a suggestion. Although $150 billion might be a lot for an ordinary company, it’s a pretty modest sum if you’re thinking of capitalizing a bank. So maybe that’s what Apple plans to do with it:

I’m going to assume you know what Apple Pay is: you use your iPhone, iPad, or Watch as a trusted, authenticated identity token in a shop to pay for stuff. It ties into your bank account and basically your phone swallows your debit and credit card.

Ultimately the banks are going to discover—the hard way—that getting into bed with Apple was a bad idea….Apple is de facto an investment bank, right now: all it needs is a banking license and the right back end and regulatory oversight and risk management and it will be able to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Chase or Barclays or HSBC as a consumer bank, too.

….Here’s my theory: Apple see their long term future as including a global secure payments infrastructure that takes over the role of Visa and Mastercard’s networks—and ultimately of spawning a retail banking subsidiary to provide financial services directly, backed by some of their cash stockpile.

The FBI thought they were asking for a way to unlock a mobile phone….[They] did not understand that they were actually asking for a way to tracelessly unlock and mess with every ATM and credit card on the planet circa 2030….If the FBI get what they want, then the back door will be installed and the next-generation payments infrastructure will be just as prone to fraud as the last-generation card infrastructure, with its card skimmers and identity theft.

And this is why Tim Cook is willing to go to the mattresses with the US department of justice over iOS security: if nobody trusts their iPhone, nobody will be willing to trust the next-generation Apple Bank, and Apple is going to lose their best option for securing their cash pile as it climbs towards the stratosphere.

It’s as good a guess as any, I suppose. When you outgrow the biggest normal business sector in the world, what’s left except to become a bank?

As we all know, millennials don’t care much for Hillary Clinton. That’s okay. I’m on the other side of that particular fence, but there’s plenty of room for honest differences about her views and whether they’re right for the country—differences that I don’t think are fundamentally rooted in age.

But there’s one issue where I suspect that age really does trip up millennials: the widespread belief that Hillary isn’t trustworthy. It’s easy to understand why they might think this. After all, Hillary has been surrounded by a miasma of scandal for decades—and even if you vaguely know that a lot of the allegations against her weren’t fair, well, where there’s smoke there’s fire. So if you’re familiar with the buzzwords—Whitewater, Travelgate, Vince Foster, the Rose law firm, Troopergate, Ken Starr, Benghazi, Emailgate—but not much else, it’s only human to figure that maybe there really is something fishy in Hillary’s past.

But many of us who lived through this stuff have exactly the opposite view. Not only do we know there’s almost literally nothing to any of these “scandals,” we also know exactly how they were deliberately and cynically manufactured at every step along the way. We were there, watching it happen in real time. So not only do we believe Hillary is basically honest, but the buzzwords actively piss us off. Every time we hear a young progressive kinda sorta suggest that Hillary can’t be trusted, we want to strangle someone. It’s the ultimate proof of how the right wing’s big lie about the Clintons has successfully poisoned not just the electorate in general, but even the progressive movement itself.

I bring this up because I had to blink twice to make sure my eyes weren’t fooling me this morning. Jill Abramson has followed Bill and Hillary Clinton for more than two decades, first in the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal, then at the New York Times, where she eventually became Washington bureau chief (and even later executive editor). Her perch gave her an unrivaled view into Hillary’s actions. Here’s what she had to say today in the Guardian:

I would be “dead rich”, to adapt an infamous Clinton phrase, if I could bill for all the hours I’ve spent covering just about every “scandal” that has enveloped the Clintons. As an editor I’ve launched investigations into her business dealings, her fundraising, her foundation and her marriage. As a reporter my stories stretch back to Whitewater. I’m not a favorite in Hillaryland. That makes what I want to say next surprising.

Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy.

…Many investigative articles about Clinton end up “raising serious questions” about “potential” conflicts of interest or lapses in her judgment. Of course, she should be held accountable. It was bad judgment, as she has said, to use a private email server. It was colossally stupid to take those hefty speaking fees, but not corrupt. There are no instances I know of where Clinton was doing the bidding of a donor or benefactor.

…I can see why so many voters believe Clinton is hiding something because her instinct is to withhold…Clinton distrusts the press more than any politician I have covered. In her view, journalists breach the perimeter and echo scurrilous claims about her circulated by unreliable rightwing foes.

As Abramson suggests, there are times when Hillary is her own worst enemy. The decades of attacks have made her insular and distrustful, and this often produces a lawyerly demeanor that makes her sound guilty even when she isn’t. As a result, the belief in Hillary’s slipperiness is now such conventional wisdom that it’s almost impossible to dislodge. I just checked Memeorandum to see if anyone was discussing Abramson’s piece, and I was unsurprised to find that it’s gone almost entirely unnoticed.

But the truth is that regardless of how she sometimes sounds, her record is pretty clear: Hillary Clinton really is fundamentally honest and trustworthy. Don’t let the conservative noise machine persuade you otherwise.

Here is this week’s Flint water report. Apparently Michigan’s DEQ took Good Friday off, so testing results go through March 24 instead of March 25. As usual, I’ve eliminated outlier readings above 2,000 parts per billion, since there are very few of them and they can affect the averages in misleading ways. During the week, DEQ took 688 samples. The average for the past week was 5.72.

San Francisco and Los Angeles have already passed laws raising their minimum wages to $15 per hour. Now, in a victory for labor activists who were getting ready to put a $15 minimum wage on the ballot, the state is getting ready to  follow suit:

According to a document obtained by The Times, the negotiated deal would boost California’s statewide minimum wage from $10 an hour to $10.50 on Jan. 1, 2017, with a 50-cent increase in 2018 and then $1-per-year increases through 2022. Businesses with fewer than 25 employees would have an extra year to comply, delaying their workers receiving a $15 hourly wage until 2023.

Future statewide minimum wage increases would be linked to inflation, but a governor would have the power to temporarily block some of the initial increases in the event of an economic downturn.

This would genuinely be terra incognita. The chart on the right shows the California minimum wage over the past 40 years, adjusted for inflation. An increase to $11 per hour in 2018 would return the state to slightly above its historical high point. Beyond that, however, the minimum wage goes far higher than it’s ever been.

What effect will that have, especially in lower-wage areas outside the big cities? There’s no telling. It won’t be Armageddon, but it might not be entirely benign either. Small increases in the minimum wage seem to have little or no effect on employment, but this increase isn’t small, and it unquestionably gets us beyond merely catching up with past erosion in the minimum wage. A statewide minimum of $15 would be a brand new thing.

Kansas recently tried out full-bore right-wing economics, and it’s pretty much been a disaster. Now liberals are getting their chance in California. Come back in a decade and we’ll find out if left-wing economics does any better.

On Friday, Donald Trump talked foreign policy for nearly two hours with David Sanger and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times. There’s not much point in reading it. It’s just Trump’s usual incoherent babble in expanded form. The only thing it demonstrates is that he can pretty much talk forever no matter how little he knows about something.

But here’s an interesting little factlet. Trump addressed the reporters individually by name 26 times during the interview. Here’s the scorecard: Sanger 23, Haberman 3. And one of Haberman’s three was this:

And — I’d love to ask David, Maggie, if he’s a little surprised at how well I’ve done. You know, we’ve knocked out a lot. We’re down to the leftovers now, from the way I look at it. I call them the leftovers.

In this case, Haberman asks Trump a question, and Trump responds first by addressing Sanger, and then telling Haberman that he really wants to ask if Sanger is surprised at how brilliant his foreign policy knowledge is. The transcript notes that this was met by laughter, and I can only imagine just what kind of laughter it was.

Anyway, take this for what it’s worth. Trump spent the entire interview practically slobbering over Sanger. Haberman might as well have been nonexistent for all the attention she got and the number of times Trump interrupted her to turn his attention back to Sanger. You may draw your own conclusions.

Over at the Washington Post, Robert O’Harrow Jr. has a deep dive into the roots of Hillary Clinton’s email troubles. As near as I can tell, once you cut through the weeds it’s the story of a senior official who’s technically illiterate and didn’t want to change her email habits. Both Clinton and her inner circle of advisers were “dedicated [BlackBerry] addicts,” but apparently neither the NSA nor anyone else was willing to help them make their BlackBerries safe. So, like millions of us who have tried to stay under the radar of our IT departments, Hillary just kept on using hers, hoping that eventually everyone would forget the whole thing. In the meantime, she grudgingly obeyed rules that required her to leave her phone behind when she entered her 7th floor office, but used it everywhere else.

That remains inexplicably dumb, but hardly scandalous. Nonetheless, we have this:

The FBI is now trying to determine whether a crime was committed in the handling of that classified material. It is also examining whether the server was hacked. One hundred forty-seven FBI agents have been deployed to run down leads, according to a lawmaker briefed by FBI Director James B. Comey. The FBI has accelerated the investigation because officials want to avoid the possibility of announcing any action too close to the election.

147 agents! To track down leads on one email server whose location and purpose have been known for two years. That’s crazy. It’s gotta be time for the FBI to either bring some charges or shut this thing down. Enough’s enough.

A few days ago I read a piece about a proposed new oil tax in Russia, and it sounded vaguely important. But other stuff happened and I never wrote about it. Max Fisher says that was a mistake:

The most consequential development in international affairs this week may have come, believe it or not, in a proposed change to Russian tax policy….When oil was selling for $100 a barrel, about $74 of that went to the state in taxes…leaving oil companies with about $11 a barrel in profit….Now, oil is selling at $35 a barrel, and taxes only take $17 a barrel….Oil companies only take $3 a barrel in profit.

….While we think of oil companies as taking profits just to shower on themselves — and indeed, there is some of that — they also spend heavily on finding and developing new oil sources….[The new tax] would make it much harder for Russian oil firms to develop new oil sources. Over time, as current oil wells dry up, new ones would not come online to replace them….Even if oil prices go back up, Russian oil output will decline so drastically that its economy might never recover.

….The potential consequences here — of Russia so cannibalizing its own oil industry that its current economic decline becomes more or less permanent — are really difficult to overstate. Sooner or later, the Kremlin would have to do one of two things (or even both): cutting back the Russian military, which is wildly expensive but gives Moscow the geopolitical muscle it believes is so crucial, or cutting back already weak social services, which does risk political instability.

Read the whole thing for more details. This is still just a proposal, and even if it goes through it might well get modified before it does serious damage. Still, much of Russia’s foreign policy is driven by the brutal fact that it has an economy about the size of Italy’s and demographic problems even worse than Italy’s, but still wants to be thought of as a great world power. As this becomes ever harder to pull off, Russia’s leaders may feel the need to somehow prove that they still matter. This would be bad.

This tax may or may not go anywhere, but it’s something to keep an eye on.

Long post ahead. Sorry.

I think I’ve made it clear that I think more highly of Hillary Clinton than Bernie Sanders. I don’t make a big deal out of this because I like Bernie too. My inclination toward Hillary is clear, but it’s also fairly modest. Without diving into a long and turgid essay about this, here are a few quick bullet points explaining why I like Hillary:

• Her entire career has demonstrated a truly admirable dedication to helping the least fortunate.
• Unlike her husband, she obviously doesn’t enjoy the cut and thrust of partisan campaigning. Yet she soldiers on after taking decades of sewage-level abuse that would overwhelm a lesser person. This demonstrates the kind of persistence that any Democrat will need governing with a Republican Congress.
• She takes policy seriously and she’s well briefed. She doesn’t pretend that one or two big ideas can suddenly create a revolution.
• She’s a woman, and yes, I’d like to see a woman as president.
• Special pleading to the contrary, a moderate candidate is almost certain to be more electable in November than a self-declared democratic socialist.
• In the Senate she demonstrated that she could work with Republicans. Yes, it was always on small things, the GOP being what it is these days. Still, she built a reputation for pragmatic dealmaking and for her word always being good.

Needless to say, Hillary also has weak points. She has decades in the public eye, and voters usually prefer candidates with more like 10-15 years of national exposure. What’s more, she obviously comes with a lot of baggage from those decades. On a policy level, I don’t get the sense that her foreign policy instincts have changed much based on events since 9/11, and that’s by far my biggest complaint about her. Finally, I’m not thrilled with political dynasties.

OK. That’s the throat clearing. The real point of this post is Matt Taibbi’s article explaining why he disagrees with Rolling Stone’s endorsement of Hillary. There are, obviously, arguments in Clinton’s favor, and there plenty against. But Taibbi’s is surprisingly thin. Here’s the nut of it:

The implication [of the endorsement] is that even when young people believe in the right things, they often don’t realize what it takes to get things done. But I think they do understand….The millions of young voters that are rejecting Hillary’s campaign this year are making a carefully reasoned, even reluctant calculation about the limits of the insider politics both she and her husband have represented.

For young voters, the foundational issues of our age have been the Iraq invasion, the financial crisis, free trade, mass incarceration, domestic surveillance, police brutality, debt and income inequality, among others. And to one degree or another, the modern Democratic Party, often including Hillary Clinton personally, has been on the wrong side of virtually all of these issues.

Let’s go through those one by one.

The Iraq invasion: This one is totally fair. Hillary did support the invasion, and it was the wrong call. What’s more, this is a good proxy for her general hawkishness, which is her weakest point among millennials and her weakest point among an awful lot of older voters too.

The financial crisis: Taibbi doesn’t even bother making an argument for this aside from some snark about the speeches Hillary gave to Goldman Sachs. But that’s just petty point scoring. Beyond that, it’s plainly unfair to blame her by association for legislation signed by Bill, which she had no hand in. And look: the only Clinton-era law that probably had a significant effect on the financial crisis was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which was supported by 83 percent of the House and 100 percent of the Senate. Even Bernie voted for it. The truth is that Hillary’s positions on Wall Street reform are reasonably solid.

Free trade: This is a “foundational issue” for millennials? Starting in the late 90s, there was a 3-4 year period of anti-globalization protests, and that was about it for high-profile attention. Most millennnials were barely in their teens at that point. A recent Gallup poll asked Americans if increased trade was good or bad, and 35 percent said it was bad. Among millennials, it was 32 percent, lower than most other age groups. Trade is getting a lot of attention lately thanks to TPP and Donald Trump, but it’s just never been a foundational issue for millennials.

Mass incarceration: This again? Taibbi says that Bill Clinton “authorized more than $16 billion for new prisons,” and slams Hillary because she “stumped for that crime bill, adding the Reaganesque observation that inner-city criminals were ‘super-predators’ who needed to be ‘brought to heel.'” The truth: Bill Clinton had barely any effect on incarceration; Hillary’s “super-predator” remark was reasonable in context; and both Clintons have long since said they regretted the carceral effects of the 1994 crime bill—which, by the way, Bernie Sanders voted for. Give it a rest.

Domestic surveillance: Taibbi doesn’t actually say anything further about this, but I’ll grant that I prefer Bernie’s instincts on this issue, just as I prefer his instincts on most national security issues. But anyone who thinks Bernie could make a dent in this is dreaming. In concrete terms, mass surveillance enjoys substantial public support and virtually unanimous support among elites and lawmakers—and that’s after the Snowden revelations, which were basically the Abu Ghraib of mass surveillance. It’s really not clear that in practice, Bernie would do much more about this than Hillary.

Police brutality: Bernie barely even mentioned this until he was the target of protests from Black Lives Matter a few months ago. It’s hardly one of his go-to subjects, and there’s no real reason to think Hillary’s position is any less progressive than his. In any case, this is almost purely a state and local issue. As president, neither Hillary nor Bernie would be able to do much about it.

Debt and income inequality: Once again, Taibbi doesn’t bother to say much about this. Here’s his only actual argument: “Hillary infamously voted for regressive bankruptcy reform just a few years after privately meeting with Elizabeth Warren and agreeing that such industry-driven efforts to choke off debt relief needed to be stopped.” But this is just plain false. And while there’s no question that Bernie is stronger than Hillary on Wall Street issues, both rhetorically and in practice, Hillary has generally been pretty strong on all these issues too. And her proposals are generally a lot more serious and a lot more practical than Bernie’s.

Put this all together and here’s what you get. Hillary’s instincts on national security are troublesome. If that’s a prime issue for you, then you should vote against her. It’s certainly the issue that gives me the most pause—though I have some doubts about Bernie too, which I mention below.

She also lags Bernie in her dedication to bringing Wall Street to heel. But this is a much trickier subject. Bernie has thunderous rhetoric, but not much in the way of plausible plans to accomplish anything he talks about. Frankly, my guess is that neither one will accomplish much, but that Hillary is actually likely to accomplish a little more.

In other words, there’s just not much here aside from dislike of Hillary’s foreign policy views. That’s a completely legit reason to vote against her, but it’s hard to say that Taibbi makes much of a case beyond that.

Bernie Sanders too often lets rhetoric take the place of any actual plausible policy proposal. He suggested that his health care plan would save more in prescription drug costs than the entire country spends in the first place. This is the sign of a white paper hastily drafted to demonstrate seriousness, not something that’s been carefully thought through. He bangs away on campaign finance reform, but there’s virtually no chance of making progress on this. The Supreme Court has seen to that, and even if Citizens United were overturned, previous jurisprudence has placed severe limits on regulating campaign speech. Besides, the public doesn’t support serious campaign finance reform and never has. And even on foreign policy, it’s only his instincts that are good. He’s shown no sign of thinking hard about national security issues, and that’s scarier than most of his supporters acknowledge. Tyros in the Oval Office are famously susceptible to pressure from the national security establishment, and Bernie would probably be no exception. There’s a chance—small but not trivial—that he’d get rolled into following a more hawkish national security policy than Hillary.

I’m old, and I’m a neoliberal sellout. Not as much of one as I used to be, but still. So it’s no surprise that I’m not always on the same page as Taibbi. That said, I continue to be surprised by the just plain falseness of many of the left-wing attacks on Hillary, along with the starry-eyed willingness to accept practically everything Bernie says without even a hint of healthy skepticism. Hell, if you’re disappointed by Obama, who’s accomplished more than any Democratic president in decades, just wait until Bernie wins. By the end of four years, you’ll be practically suicidal.

My oncologist is surprisingly pleased with my progress. His theory seems to be that if my counts are going down slowly, they’ll also go up slowly, and that means I have a slow-moving form of multiple myeloma—which is good news. In any case, if he’s happy, I’m happy.

The more concrete upshot of this is that he reduced my weekly dose of the evil dex from 20 mg to 12 mg. Sadly, this came a few hours too late for this week’s insomnia-fest, but in the long term it should reduce my dex-induced sleep disruption. I might even start getting some sleep on Friday nights. Hooray!

The evil dex will be keeping me up all night tonight, but that’s OK. I actually kind of enjoy it. Unfortunately, every silver lining has a cloud, and in this case the cloud is lots of afternoon crashes over the next few days to make up for the lost sleep.

But then again, every cloud has a silver lining, and in this case the silver lining belongs to Hopper, who gets a great place for her afternoon snooze. Hopper thinks dex is a wonder drug that makes humans more like cats, and who’s to say she’s wrong?