You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM six forty.
If there is OKF I AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeart Radio app, It's the Bill Handle Show. Wayne Resnik in for Bill. Some of the stories we're following for you here at KFI. La County health officials say they have identified the first human case of bird flu in La County. The person who has it has mild symptoms. They are recovering at home. They're giving them some anti virals, so it's not it's not a super emergency situation for that person, thank goodness.
They also say this.
Person got the bird flu from livestock at his work site that had the bird flu. It is jumping from animals to people, folks. I don't know if it's panic time yet.
No, it's not.
It's not panic time yet. Also, high surf also not panic time. High surf warnings hiatt surf advisories in effect all along the coast Ventura down through Orange County. The National Weather Service says you're gonna see waves as high as twelve feet at the beaches in La and OC and up in Ventura. Oh boy, eighteen feet. Some waves may hit that height that is too high to be around in my opinion.
But no need to panic.
Just don't go to the beach or even just stay you know, stay away from where.
The water's crashing on the shore. That's all.
Now, everybody loves money, and when a business sees an opportunity to make a lot of money, they get very excited and they start making plans to make all of that wonderful money. And in this case, the business is
the private prison industry. And the reason that they believe that they're going to start to make a lot of money is because we have a new administration coming in in January and the President elect, Donald Trump has said he is going to undertake mass deportations, and mass deportations means big money for private prisons because the Feds have
to put him somewhere until they deport them. Now, it is true that this is something Donald Trump said before his first term that he was going to deport tons of people, and he did deport I mean, he didn't
do it, but you know what I'm saying. Under his administration, they deported about nine hundred and thirty nine hundred and forty thousand people less than under the Obama administration, Although, and I'm not going to lie to you, I can't figure out if these numbers reflect a four year term for Obama or all eight years, because it would not be fair to take eight years of one president and
compare it to four years of another president. But in any event, it is it is low more than the net number of Obama deportations, but way more than the current president.
And so.
Even if it doesn't reach the numbers that President elect Trump is thinking about right now, it will likely be an increase over what we've been seeing, and that means more business for the big private prison companies like Geo Group, which runs a bunch of private detention facilities all over the place, and they had an earnings call recently where the executive chairman of the Geo Group said that this was an unprecedented opportunity.
And that they are gearing up.
They are bringing beds online that currently are not, they are looking at hiring a lot more staff. I wouldn't be surprised if for the next couple three years, private prison work becomes an employment growth industry. And they're not the only one. There are other companies that do this. I think Geo is probably the big daddy. I mean they currently right now they're holding forty percent of all ICE detainees, so they don't have a majority market share,
but they may have a plurality market share. They say they already have enough empty beds that they could spin up services there and bump up the number of people that they hold in custody, and that this could lead to over four hundred million dollars in additional annual revenues. Also, GEO owns a company called BI Incorporated.
I worked with not four. I worked with BI.
Briefly for a time a long time ago when they were starting the first electronic monitoring unit here in Los Angeles under the federal courts, and I worked on that unit, and we contracted with BI for services. They they hold a contract for the electronic monitoring of people awaiting court dates. So GEO has their hands in keeping people in prisoned
pending deportation. They also have their hand in monitoring people who are waiting for court dates to find out if they're going to be deported or they're going to get to stay, or if they're going to get a green card or whatever's going to happen. So they really there's a lot of money for them to make. There's some other companies that are very excited, like core Civic is the other It's like Coke and Pepsi. I think Geo is Coke, core Civic is Pepsi. In the world of
private prisons, they're saying essentially the same thing. We have unused beds that we can bring online very quickly. We can hire more people pretty quickly. And I guess to show that he is serious about doing this, President elect Trump has said he will issue emergency orders that will allow these private prison operators to hire people more quickly, speed up the background check process because right now it can take up to six months, and also to streamline
the normal competitive bidding process for these contracts. So they're gonna do it, They're gonna do it quickly, and those people are gonna get rich, no doubt.
All Right, let's talk about it.
We've been living with the twenty dollars an hour fast food worker minimum wage in California. So let's see how many jobs were killed and lost since that went into effect.
Hi, will can you hear me typing? Actually there are.
There are more jobs in the fast food industry in California since the twenty dollars an hour minimum wage passed. I remember, and you probably remember, and if you were listening to KFI, it was talked about a lot. When that law was signed Abe twelve twenty eight. There were stories of gloom and doom for the industry. For example, you may remember a franchisee of Pizza Hut, a group that owned one hundred They still do own hundreds of
Pizza Hut locations. They said, we will lay off every single one of our in house delivery drivers because of this. There was a guy who owned like one hundred and twenty or something Burger Kings. He said, I'm gonna have to cut everybody's hours and I'm gonna have to start putting in more of those self service kiosks because of this. Rubios they said, we're gonna have to close like fifty stores because of the rising cost of doing business in California.
Now in Rubio's is an.
Interesting case because at the time that they said that that we're gonna have to close forty five fifty stores because of the rising cost of doing business in California, their biggest expense was their debt payments. Because they were acquired by private equity firm. Private equity is almost always evil, so that's a little disingenuous, but nonetheless that was the tone of the news coverage in the wake of the passage of the twenty dollars an hour fast food minimum wage.
Then it went into effect and in April, I believe, and then after it went into effect, this group called the California Business and Industrial Alliance, they took out an ad in USA Today Full paid saying we've lost ten thousand jobs. Okay, I was actually they actually they put out that ad right after the beginning of a normal yearly cycle for fast food jobs. The fact of the matter is fast food jobs are seasonal, and jobs go
away starting around June. They go away again right around now, and then they come back and that has happened.
That happens over and over. It's a cycle.
So if you use raw numbers you can get a misleading result. If you use seasonally adjusted numbers. During this period, actually five thousand jobs were gained. Now, the Hoover Institution, which is a think tank, they're very free market, so.
They don't like minimum wages.
They say they looked at unemployment data starting from when the law was signed through the end of the year and that a bunch of jobs went away. But then it was pointed out that they were not using seasonally adjusted numbers, and they and this is why I bring this up, because it's one thing for me to say they said ten thousand jobs went away, but that wasn't true. But it's another thing when they retracted their post and
admitted that they blew it. So even they ended up saying, oh, yeah, we didn't do it the right way, the fair way. Then came another group called the Employment Policies Institute, which happens to be run by a guy who's a big lobbyist for the restaurant industry, who said, hey, let's look at January twenty twenty four and see what happens with employment because of this law. And oh, jobs went down. But remember I just told you there's a seasonal cycle
in place. If that person had picked September of twenty twenty three, when the law was signed, for example, to then look, or if they had picked April of this year when it took effect, guess what, then it would have shown that jobs had gone up. So you can pick and choose obviously, how to put out information to have it to have it put forth the conclusion that you want, but that doesn't mean that your conclusion is
really the fair or accurate one. So is there some way to know for sure what raising the minimum wage does to jobs? Not really, because it's actually very complicated.
You know a lot of economists go.
Who's just beth. If you raise the wage, you gotta pay people. You can't afford to have as many people who are But here's the thing. If you look at all of the studies that have been done in the aggregate, what you find is an increase in the minimum wage doesn't really have much of an effect. In some cases there is some job loss, but it's not catastrophic. In other cases, jobs go up. How can this even be if it's such simple math. Well, because there's a flip
side to paying people more. When you pay people more, those if we call them, lower level jobs, become more attractive to workers. They stay longer, which means although they're paying the workers more, they are spending less money on recruitment and training and turnover and so in fact, in many cases, a raise in the minimum wage pays for itself. So that's the situation anyway, with the twenty dollars an hour fast food. It did not lead to a job ageddin.
Okay, China. That's it. Let's get some news from Michael Monks. No.
For a long time, the FBI has been warning about Chinese infiltration in the United States.
Now we all know, everybody knows.
There's some level of Chinese spying, and we think about it a lot in terms of there is steal our military secrets or hack into our high level computer networks. But also and the specific thing the FBI has been warning about four years is infiltration of by people working on behalf of China into local politics cities and counties which we normally don't.
Think of China.
Why would China want to bother with, for example, the Arcadia City Council. Well, let's find out, because the endoment has delivered by prosecutors, and this indictment says that a guy was trying to work on behalf of electing a particular person to the Arcadia City Council and the crime would be, you know, being an illegal agent of a foreign power. You can't do that. Now I'm torn about saying who they think the council person is, but it
has been published in the La Times. So I guess I'm just telling you that the La Times is saying that the person who was being helped is Arcadia City council person Eileen Wang. I also want to make very very clear she's not been charged with any crime, and it's not even clear if she knew of this guy's ties to China. So it is entirely possible that Eileen Wang is a completely innocent person.
Targeted though because of.
Perhaps some connections to people who are supportive of China, or possibly some sincerely held beliefs that are pro China, but did not know that someone acting as a foreign agent of China was helping her get elected. So that that having been said, which I don't say is just a throwaway, it's really important that right now she not be villainized. However, the idea was that the guy who's been indicted, Mike Son, was putting together dossiers of who who.
Did Eileen Wang know?
What connections did she have that might be useful. Maybe it's not Eileen Wang that's useful to China at all, but maybe it's somebody that she knows and that would make her a valuable person to get into a position of power, because she simply knows people who would be of assistance to China. Because that's the strategy here, get in at the grassroots. We can all, we can all understand going after a senate, going after a high placed
FBI agent, going after a huge, huge businessman. But the other approach is to go in at the local level, people who seemingly couldn't possibly be worth bothering with, except number one, they may know people, and number two, they may go on to be a big fish someday. Maybe you're a city council person today, but then maybe you're a state senator, and then maybe you're a governor, and
then maybe you're in the United States Senate. And what it shows is the long, the long con the long strategy of the Chinese government to infiltrate here in order to get influence in place for their purposes. They're thinking, they're not only trying now for now, they're trying now.
For much much later.
And the FBI knows it, and they they've been warning everybody, and it seems like we're playing catch up. All right, ladies and gentlemen, you are allowed to have a digital license plate in California, and a couple of other states, and you can display fun little messages around the edge of it. And somebody's already hacked it in a heinous way. Let's find out what he did in a segment we're calling hacked.
Every name, every sett all right. Joseph Rodriguez is his name.
He's a researcher with IOActive, which is a security firm.
And here's what he did.
So these digital license plates are sold by a company called Reviver. You put them on your car, and as I said, you know how you can put a frame around your license plate from your car dealership or something that says, you know, eat, pray, love, or my other car is a thing whatever. So with these you can do it electronically and change it at will. And that's I guess what people like about it, all right. So
here's what he did. So he got one of these things, and there's a sticker on the back of it, and you take the sticker off and it reveals some connectors, and he put a cable on the connectors and he was able to rewrite the firmware of this license plate in a few minutes. And now with this new basically operating system installed, he can control the license plate from an app over bluetooth and change the entire thing to
show anything he wants. So the idea is, hey, man, you want to go one hundred miles an hour through a speed trap, Well just change your license plate number to something else. And you could change your license plate number two. I mean, I guess you could have it say like, UH, can't get me. I don't know, it's probably too many letters, but you get my point. But
here's the thing. Here's why you should be concerned about this idea of somebody being able to change their digital license plate to another license plate number is if they change it to yours, guess who gets the tickets for blowing through the toll booths. Guess who gets the speeding tickets from the speed cameras you get them. Nobody wants that this also could be done maliciously on purpose. I mean you could, like, somebody could say I'm going to change my license plate number so I can speed in
evague tolls and they happen to pick yours unwittingly. Or maybe you got a neighbor who doesn't like you and they've got one of them and they're like, you know what, I'm going to change my license plate number that guy's license plate and go out and purposefully run through tollbooths and speed through cameras. I would not panic about this just yet. There are some caveats here. It obviously has
been done, however, couple of things. First of all, in order to get this firmware into this license plate, what he had to do is put some wires on a chip inside the plate and then monitor the voltage of the plate and then purposefully cause a glitch on the voltage at an exact moment to turn off the security features of the license plate so that he could rewrite the firmware. Now, once the firmware's in, then anybody can
use the app and do it. But the it's you know, have you ever I don't know how many of you have ever jail broken your iPhone, but it's kind of like that, except there's a first step that's even more complicated. Also, you have to have physical access to the car and the license plate, and you have to take the license
plate off the car. And these license plates have a feature that will alert the owner if they are removed from the car, So you also would have to roll up on your victim and jam the radio transmissions from the license plate in order to do the thing so that it doesn't tell the owner.
That you've taken the license plate off. So in practical.
In reality, this is unlikely to happen to anybody.
He did it in a lab where.
He didn't have to worry about the owner being alerted that the license plate was taken off the vehicle, for example. But just the fact that somebody thought to do it and figured out how to do it means someday it may become easier to do it. There. Already was another security researcher two years ago who he didn't hack the digital license plate, but he hacked the company's website, so he was able to make himself an administrator and change
license plates that way. Now Reviver was able to patch that, so nobody's going to be able to do that again. But the problem with this new hack is you can't fix it remotely or by updating the firmware because the vulnerability is in the chip itself. So unless you get an unless they patch the chip and then give everybody new license plates, theoretically the license plate is vulnerable, but it's not that vulnerable because look at all the rigamarole.
You got to go through to hack.
It KFI AM six forty Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
You've been listening to the Bill Handle Show.
Catch My Show Monday through Friday, six am to nine am, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.