Jts5665

News comes this morning that Beijing has been awarded the 2022 Winter Olympics, beating out Almaty, Kazakhstan. Which touches on a point I made in this morning’s Boston Herald: 

Columnist Anne Applebaum predicted a year ago that future Olympics would likely be held only in “authoritarian countries where the voters’ views will not be taken into account” — such as the two bidders for the 2022 Winter Olympics, Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Fortunately, Boston is not such a place. The voters’ views can be ignored and dismissed for only so long.

Indeed, Boston should be celebrating more than Beijing this week. A small band of opponents of Boston’s bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics beat the city’s elite – business leaders, construction companies, university presidents, the mayor and other establishment figures – because they knew what Olympic Games really mean for host cities and nations:

E.M. Swift, who covered the Olympics for Sports Illustrated for more than 30 years, wrote on the Cognoscenti blog a few years ago that Olympic budgets “always soar.”

“Montreal is the poster child for cost overruns, running a whopping 796 percent over budget in 1976, accumulating a deficit that took 30 years to repay. In 1996 the Atlanta Games came in 147 percent over budget. Sydney was 90 percent over its projected budget in 2000. And the 
Athens Games cost $12.8 billion, 60 percent over what the government projected.”

Bent Flyvbjerg of Oxford University, the world’s leading expert on megaprojects, and his co-author Allison Stewart found that Olympic Games differ from other such large projects in two ways: They always exceed their budgets, and the cost overruns are significantly larger than other megaprojects. Adjusted for inflation, the average cost overrun for an Olympics is 179 percent.

Bostonians, of course, had memories of the Big Dig, a huge and hugely disruptive highway and tunnel project that over the course of 15 years produced a cost overrun of 190 percent.

Read the whole thing.

The Spin Cycle is a reoccurring feature based upon just how much the latest weather or climate story, policy pronouncement, or simply poo-bah blather spins the truth. Statements are given a rating between 1-5 spin cycles, with less cycles meaning less spin. For a more in-depth description, visit the inaugural edition.

—

The first paragraph of EPA’s 1500+ page Clean Power Plan, released on August 3, says this:

These final emission guidelines…will lead to significant carbon dioxide (CO2) emission reductions from the utility power sector that will help protect human health and the environment from the impacts of climate change.

This isn’t simply an exaggeration, a misstatement or a sophomoric rhetorical flourish.  It is simply not true.

The operative claim is that EPA’s  plan “will help protect human health and the environment from the impacts of climate change.” 

It will do no such thing.  The EPA’s own policy analysis model, called MAGICC*, tells us how much global warming will be prevented by the new plan:  0.019°C by the year 2100 (based on procedures similar to those we detailed here).  That’s the amount of temperature change a person will experience in about every second of life. It is simply impossible to detect this change in any global temperature history.

Even that is an overestimate of the actual impact of the plan.  The EPA has also published a “base case” which includes emissions reductions expected from existing state and federal regulations.  The difference between the plan and the base—i.e., the future temperature savings directly attributable it drops to 0.009°C—let’s be generous and call that 0.01°C.  

It is global warming that causes the “climate change” that we will be “protected” from.  So, if the amount of saved warming can’t be detected (the cause), there will be no detectable alteration in the trajectory of related climate change (the effect).

For that, we award the Clean Power Plan a “Heavy Duty” spin cycle award.

  

Heavy Duty. Government regulations or treaties claiming to save the planet from certain destruction, but which actually accomplish nothing. Can also apply to important UN climate confabs, such as Copenhagen 2009 (or, quite likely, the upcoming 2015 Paris Summit), that are predicted to result in a massive, sweeping, and world-saving new treaty, followed by self-congratulatory back-patting. Four spin cycles.

 *Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse-Gas Induced Climate Change

 

Today is Milton Friedman’s birthday — he was born on July 31 in 1912 and would have been 103 years old today. Unfortunately, Milton died on November 16, 2006 when he was 94 years old. In an editorial in the Wall Street Journal following Professor Friedman’s death, they reported his loss with the same tribute Milton used when Ronald Reagan died, saying “few people in human history have contributed more to the achievement of human freedom.” In honor of his legacy and birthday, here are some of my favorite Milton Friedman quotes:

1. There is nothing as permanent as a temporary government program.

2. Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

3. Inflation is caused by too much money chasing after too few goods.

4. Sloppy writing reflects sloppy thinking.

5. All learning is ultimately self-learning.

6. I’m in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.

7. Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.

8. The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

9. The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.

10. The high rate of unemployment among teenagers, and especially black teenagers, is both a scandal and a serious source of social unrest. Yet it is largely a result of minimum wage laws. We regard the minimum wage law as one of the most, if not the most, anti-black laws on the statute books.

11. Industrial progress, mechanical improvement, all of the great wonders of the modern era have meant relatively little to the wealthy. The rich in Ancient Greece would have benefited hardly at all from modern plumbing: running servants replaced running water. Television and radio? The patricians of Rome could enjoy the leading musicians and actors in their home, could have the leading actors as domestic retainers. Ready-to-wear clothing, supermarkets — all these and many other modern developments would have added little to their life. The great achievements of Western capitalism have redounded primarily to the benefit of the ordinary person. These achievements have made available to the masses conveniences and amenities that were previously the exclusive prerogative of the rich and powerful.

12. President Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”… Neither half of that statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. “What your country can do for you” implies that the government is the patron, the citizen the ward. “What you can do for your country” assumes that the government is the master, the citizen the servant.

13. On the difference between public vs. private education: “Try talking French with someone who studied it in public school. Then with a Berlitz graduate.”

14. ‘Fair’ is in the eye of the beholder; ‘free’ is the verdict of the market. The word ‘free’ is used three times in the Declaration of Independence and once in the First Amendment to the Constitution, along with ‘freedom.’ The word ‘fair’ is not used in either of our founding documents.

15. What most people really object to when they object to a free market is that it is so hard for them to shape it to their own will. The market gives people what the people want instead of what other people think they ought to want. At the bottom of many criticisms of the market economy is really lack of belief in freedom itself.

16. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from grinding poverty, the only cases in recorded history are where they’ve had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worst off, it’s exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that, so that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear: that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.

17. The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm; capitalism is that kind of a system.

18. With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves.

19. The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating.

20. The government has no more right to tell me what goes into my mouth [including illegal drugs] than it has to tell me what comes out of my mouth.

Bonus: You’ll find a great collection here of more than 30 Milton Friedman videos (the “Milton Friedman Speaks” lectures) on a variety of topics including “What is America?”, “Is Capitalism Humane?”, free trade, energy policy, the role of government in a free society, education and vouchers, the rights of workers, consumer protection, equality and freedom, and the future of our free society.

The post Happy 103rd birthday, Milton Friedman appeared first on AEI.

Problem: Long waits at the DMV

Solution: Triple the size of the waiting room

God forbid anyone would rethink an incredibly dysfunctional process.

John Scalzi tries to explain privilege to non-SJW-types by saying that being a white male is like playing life on "easy" difficulty.

I'll grant I benefited from a lot of things growing up others may not have had.  I had parents that set high standards, taught me a work ethic, taught me the value of education, had money, and helped send me to Ivy League schools (though the performance there, I would argue, was all my own).

Well, for those of you concerned about living down a similar life of privilege, I have a solution for you: start a business.  Doing so instantly converted me into a hated abused underclass.  Every government agency I work with treats me with a presumption of guilt -- when I get called by the California Department of Labor, I am suddenly the young black man in St. Louis called out on the street by an angry and unaccountable cop**.  Every movie and TV show and media outlet portrays me as a villain.  Every failing in the economy is somehow my fault.   When politicians make a proposal, it almost always depends on extracting something by force from me -- more wages for certain employees, more health care premiums, more hours of paperwork to comply with arcane laws, and always more taxes.

Postscript:  I will add an alternative for younger readers -- there is also a way to play college on a higher difficulty:  Try to be a vocal male libertarian there.  Write editorials for the paper that never get published.  Sit through hours of mindless sensitivity training explaining all the speech limitations you must live with on campus.  Learn how you can be charged with rape if your sex partner regrets the sex months later.  Wonder every time you honestly answer a question in class from a libertarian point of view if you are killing any chance of getting a good grade in that course.  Live every moment in a stew of intellectual opinion meant mainly to strip you of your individual liberties, while the self-same authoritarians weep and cry that your observation that minimum wage laws hurt low-skilled workers somehow is an aggression against them.

 

** OK, this is an exaggeration.  I won't likely get shot.  I don't want to understate how badly abused a lot of blacks and Hispanics are by the justice system.   I would much rather be in front of the DOL than be a Mexican ziptied by Sheriff Joe.  But it does give one the same feeling of helplessness, of inherent unfairness, of the unreasoning presumption of guilt and built-in bias.

The post The pen appeared first on Fredo and Pidjin. The Webcomic..

It isn’t every day that a person can go to his or her job, work, not participate in any criminal activity, and still get a prison sentence. At least, that used to be the case: the overcriminalization of regulatory violations has unfortunately led to the circumstance that corporate managers now face criminal—not just civil—liability for their business operations’ administrative offenses.

Take Austin and Peter DeCoster, who own and run an Iowa egg-producing company called Quality Egg. The DeCosters plead guilty to violating certain provisions of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act because some of the eggs that left their facilities contained salmonella enteritidis, a bacterium harmful to humans. They were sentenced to 90 days in jail and fined $100,000 for the actions of subordinates, who apparently failed, also unknowingly, in their quality-control duties.

In other words, the “crime” that the DeCosters were convicted of didn’t require them to have put eggs with salmonella into interstate commerce, or even to have known (or reasonably been able to foresee) that Quality Egg was putting such eggs into interstate commerce. It didn’t even require the quality-control operator(s) most directly involved in putting the contaminated eggs into interstate commerce to have known that they were contaminated.

Nearly a century of jurisprudence has held that imprisoning corporate officers for the actions of subordinates is constitutionally suspect, given that there’s neither mens rea (a guilty mind) nor even a guilty act—the traditional benchmarks of criminality since the days of Blackstone. Yet there are about 300,000 regulations that can trigger criminal sanctions. These rules are too often ambiguous or arcane, and many lack any requirement of direct participation or knowledge, imposing strict liability on supervisors for the actions (or inactions) of their subordinates.

In United States v. Quality Egg, the district court ruled that courts have previously held that “short jail sentence[s]” for strict-liability crimes are the sort of “relatively small” penalties that don’t violate constitutional due process.  Such a sentence has only been imposed once in the history of American jurisprudence, however, and for a much shorter time on defendants with much more direct management of the underlying bad acts. Additionally, prison is not the sort of “relatively small” penalty—like a fine or probation—that the Supreme Court has allowed for offenses that lack a guilty mind requirement.

Joining the National Association of Manufacturers, Cato points out in an amicus brief supporting the DeCosters’ appeal that this case presents an opportunity for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit to join its sister court, the Eleventh Circuit, in holding that prison sentences constitute a due-process violation when applied to corporate officers being charged under a strict-liability regulatory regime.

Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

On January 31, 1940, the very first Social Security check ever delivered went to Ms. Ida May Fuller, a former legal secretary who had recently retired.

 

Ms. Fuller had spent just three years paying into the system, contributing a total of $24.75 to Social Security.

 

Yet her first check was for nearly that entire amount. Quite a return on investment.

 

She went on to live past 100, collecting a total of $22,888.92, over 900 times the amount she contributed to the program. Her story is quite the metaphor.

If you’re not familiar, Social Security is comprised of two primary trust funds: Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) and Disability Insurance (DI).

Essentially, all of the taxes paid in to Social Security end up in one of these two trust funds.

The trust funds then ‘manage’ the money to generate a rate of return, and then pay out distributions to program recipients.

Now, the funds are overseen by a Board of Trustees which is obliged to submit an annual report on the fiscal condition of the program. It ain’t pretty.

The Disability Insurance (DI) fund is particularly ugly. In fact, the trustees themselves wrote in the 2015 annual report that

“[T]he DI Trust Fund fails the Trustee’s short-range test of financial adequacy. . .”

 

and,

 

“The DI Trust Fund reserves are expected to deplete in the fourth quarter of 2016…”

In other words, one of the two Social Security trust funds is just months away from insolvency.

When people think about Social Security, they think that all the problems are decades away.

Wrong. This is next year.

The other trust fund, OAS, is projected to “become depleted and unable to pay scheduled benefits in full on a timely basis in 2034.”

Which means that if you’re 47 or younger, you can kiss Social Security goodbye.

Bear in mind, these aren’t my calculations. Nor are they any wild assertions. They’re direct quotes from the trustees themselves.

And, just who are these trustees? The Secretary of the Treasury of the United States of America. The Labor Secretary. The Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Some of the most senior officials in the US government sign their name to an official report stating that these funds are nearly insolvency– one of them even NEXT YEAR.

Not to worry, though. Congress is on the case.

Late last week, several dozen members of Congress introduced the “One Social Security Act”, HR 3150, to solve this problem.

And let me tell you, their solution is bold. Fearless. And brilliant.

HR 3150 attacks the looming insolvency of Disability Insurance by eliminating the fund altogether.

So instead of having two separate funds for two distinct purposes of Social Security, the legislation aims to combine them into one unified fund.

That way, with just one fund, there won’t be any separate reporting about DI’s insolvency.

It’s genius! They make the problem go away by eliminating the requirement to report it.

There’s just one small issue. Legally, they have a word for this. It’s called fraud.

You and I would go to prison if we commingled funds like this. But in the hallowed halls of Congress, this is what passes as a solution.

This is so typical– solving problems by pretending that they don’t exist and destroying any element of transparency and accountability.

This pretty much tells you everything you need to know about government.

Look, it’s a hard reality to swallow. But the government’s own data show that these programs are not going to be there for you.

And the story smacking us in the face right now demonstrates precisely how politicians intend on ‘solving’ the problems.

These people aren’t the solution. They’re the problem.

And don’t think that ‘voting the bums out’ will affect anything. Elections merely change the players, not the game.

The only way forward is to invest in yourself, particularly in your business and financial education. Make plans based on the assumption that Social Security doesn’t exist.

And if, by some miracle, it’s still there by the time you retire, you won’t be worse off for having built a larger nest egg thanks to the financial acumen you developed.

(photo illustration; original by Balansboy)

Elio Motors announced earlier this week that it has received “non-binding indications of interest” valued over $25MM through its initial crowdfunding campaign on StartEngine. To date, the company has received $25,436,650 from 6,773 people, averaging $3,755 per person, and will continue to take additional expressions of interest while working with the SEC on next steps. It will eventually proceed with filing an offering statement and will begin to make a formal stock offer to interested investors after approval. 

The Arizona-based company will partner with Fiat subsidiary, Comau, to build its three wheeled vehicles that are expected to retail for $6,800 and achieve up to 84 MPG at a former General Motors factory located in Shreveport, LA. Elio plans to employ around 1,500 people and will start building the cars for the public in 2016. Over 43,000 reservations for the vehicle have been made so far.

Elio’s crowdfunding campaign was made possible on June 19, when Reg A+ of the JOBS Act Title IV went into effect, enabling private companies to raise capital of up to $50 million from both accredited and non-accredited investors. The company, however, ran into issues during its campaign when it started noticing several potential investors it deemed suspect based on newly created email addresses and dollar amounts.  

The unconventional design of the vehicle places it under the US government’s motorcycle classification, and even though the company has successfully lobbied in most states to alter regulations that would otherwise require drivers to wear a helmet, you’d still need to wear one in Nebraska, Missouri, Mississippi, West Virginia, and North Carolina – mainly because those states want you to look even more ridiculous while straining the car’s three-cylinder, 55 HP engine down the highway. 

[original]

EquityNet | Business Angel Investor Portal

The "shoot first, ask for immunity later" mentality of today's law enforcement officers is perfectly highlighted in this story about a US military veteran finding himself on the receiving end of a military-style raid… all because a "helpful" neighbor reported him for being in the "wrong" apartment. (via Amy Alkon)

Alex Horton, an Iraq war veteran, was having some work done on his apartment. During the repairs, his landlord put him up in a "model unit." He fell asleep in an apartment otherwise known to be unoccupied. A passing neighbor apparently saw him in the apartment through the cracked door and reported this to the police. What happened next was standard operating procedure -- both for the US military and US law enforcement.

I got home from the bar and fell into bed soon after Saturday night bled into Sunday morning. I didn’t wake up until three police officers barged into my apartment, barking their presence at my door. They sped down the hallway to my bedroom, their service pistols drawn and leveled at me.

It was just past 9 a.m., and I was still under the covers. The only visible target was my head.

In the shouting and commotion, I felt an instant familiarity. I’d been here before. This was a raid.

I had done this a few dozen times myself, 6,000 miles away from my Alexandria, Va., apartment. As an Army infantryman in Iraq, I’d always been on the trigger side of the weapon. Now that I was on the barrel side, I recalled basic training’s most important firearm rule: Aim only at something you intend to kill.

The militarization of police goes far beyond simply arming them with the military's leftover vehicles and weapons. It also informs their tactics. But law enforcement only cherry-picks what it likes about the military. Horton's article for the Washington Post points out that law enforcement officers don't handle their weapons like military members do. Soldiers are taught that guns are deadly and should only be pointed at targets the soldier intends to kill. Police officers are taught to use their guns for intimidation, without nearly as much attention paid to drilling home the point that guns are deadly and should be respected -- especially by the ones wielding them.

[Erik] Rhoads, the Fairfax County police lieutenant, was upfront about this mind-set. He explained that it was standard procedure to point guns at suspects in many cases to protect the lives of police officers. Their firearm rules were different from mine; they aimed not to kill but to intimidate. According to reporting by The Washington Post, those rules are established in police training, which often emphasizes a violent response over deescalation. Recruits spend an average of eight hours learning how to neutralize tense situations; they spend more than seven times as many hours at the weapons range.

This is what turns a report of a squatter in an apartment into a fully-armed raid. It didn't have to be this way. This "situation" could have been defused at any point before the officers rushed into the apartment with weapons drawn. The security guard at the complex could have been asked about the person in the model apartment. The apartment's owner and management could have provided helpful information as well. But no one -- not even Shift Commander Erik Rhoads -- even considered arming police officers with additional information. They had guns and the authority to use them. That was enough.

When I later visited the Fairfax County police station to gather details about what went wrong, I met the shift commander, Lt. Erik Rhoads. I asked why his officers hadn’t contacted management before they raided the apartment. Why did they classify the incident as a forced entry, when the information they had suggested something innocuous? Why not evaluate the situation before escalating it?

Rhoads defended the procedure, calling the officers’ actions “on point.” It’s not standard to conduct investigations beforehand because that delays the apprehension of suspects, he told me.

It also delays the apprehension -- the violent apprehension, I might add -- of non-suspects, as was the case with Horton. It instead expedites the sort of stupidity that would be comical if it weren't so dangerous for everyone involved. The willful ignorance of situations, explained away by the "need" to swiftly apprehend criminals, leads to more death and violence. And not just for "suspects." It makes the situation more dangerous for cops as well. It's as if modern law enforcement agencies view the "fog of war" as a tactical advantage, even though nothing about the history of that terms suggests it has ever been viewed that way by actual combatants.

This is an astounding admission. Rhoads, a commanding officer, is willing to purposefully endanger his own officers in the pursuit of a few more busts. His officers, apparently, are more than willing to be abused in this fashion, as long as it means they can dress up in tactical gear and yell a lot while pointing guns at people. Beyond that, though, he's willing to willfully endanger the public by purposefully avoiding any information-gathering that might make these interactions safer for both his officers and those they seek.

Rhoads' statement explains why flashbang grenades get tossed into toddlers' cribs. In the haste to bust someone responsible for $50 worth of drug sales, facts were withheld and investigative reconnaissance of the residence kept to a minimum. It allowed the raiding officers to operate with a minimum of concern for the occupants. All they had to know was "no-knock" and "drug dealer." Everything else was irrelevant.

Deployed troops are put into extremely dangerous situations every day and yet they are expected to maintain relationships with the people in the areas they patrol and not assume every tense situation can only be defused by gunfire. Back in the US where the streets are infinitely safer, the opposite is true. Force and aggression are the favored tactics and an officer's life is valued above all others. This isn't how policing is supposed to work and it betrays the public these officers are supposed to serve.

I understood the risks of war when I enlisted as an infantryman. Police officers should understand the risks in their jobs when they enroll in the academy, as well. That means knowing that personal safety can’t always come first. That is why it’s service. That’s why it’s sacrifice.

Here in the US, it's the public that's expected to make these sacrifices. A "civilian" is expected to die before an officer does and collateral damage is not only to be expected, it's wholly encouraged by those with the same mentality as Lt. Erik Rhoads.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

This KLM pilot nails it at Schipol airport in Amsterdam—and any passengers who refused to stash their stuff were likely nailed by their iPads during rapid corrections in 60MPH cross-winds. Read the rest

Still no time to blog, but I drew a monster truck driving manatee ramming a rocket sled pulled by a chainsaw wielding velociraptor.

And then Jack makes it look good.

I tend to agree. As state and local money gets tighter, something is going to give. And one of those things is going to be the public schools, because kids don't vote and elderly Boomers are much more concerned about keeping the public money flowing in their direction than they are about the future:

Public education is losing ground. It is being undermined at every turn. This is due to more than the Christian contingent. People everywhere are taking control of their children’s education. The Internet is making this possible. As time marches on, tools and information will be even more accessible. This trend will not be reversed.

Why not? Funding. The system takes gobs of money. Gobs. It inhales taxpayer money and then wastes it like any other bureaucratic welfare-state system does.

Resources flee over time from those individuals and institutions that misallocate capital. Competition eats them alive. Resources also flee over time from individuals and institutions that break God’s law. By giving the state jurisdiction over the education of our children, this is exactly what we have done over the last 300 years. We have already paid for that choice. We have more to pay. In the meantime, the institution is coming to an end.

Sometimes, good things happen for bad reasons. The end of the 18th century indoctrination system imported from Germany is an idea whose time has long past. Technology and economics are in the process of killing it.

Automattic, the company behind blogging platform Wordpress, continues to prove that just because the issuing of DMCA takedown notices has largely been handed over to automated processes, the response doesn't need to be similarly robotic.

Its latest transparency report shows it has rejected 43% of the DMCA notices it has received as either incomplete or abusive. Contrast this to almost any other platform where the initial response is to take down content/links first and work backwards from there. (Contrast this further to services like YouTube and Soundcloud, where content is subjected to automated pre-screening that seems to result in just as many illegitimate "removals.")

Automattic's DMCA process is anything but.

We carefully review each notice to ensure it’s formally complete, and includes all information required by the DMCA, before taking action. Notices that don’t meet the requirements of the statute are included in ‘notices rejected as incomplete.’

We also may decline to remove content if a notice is abusive. “Abusive” notices may be formally complete, but are directed at fair use of content, material that isn’t copyrightable, or content the complaining party misrepresents ownership of a copyright.

In an effort to keep the worst abusers "honest" (or at least warn others performing the same intermediary functions), Automattic continues to maintain a "Hall of Shame" highlighting issuers of bogus takedown notices.

So, there's at least one major platform that has its users' backs -- something it has taken as far as the filing of lawsuits against serial abusers. And it's one of the few that will actually try to determine whether or not the usage of the disputed content falls under fair use. Automattic seems to have learned from its past mistakes, and now it's attempting to hold rightsholders and their representatives to the same standard it applies to itself. If content is going to be removed, the person(s) making these demands need to hold up their end of the bargain.

DMCA abuse isn't likely to stop anytime soon. The process to issue notices continues to become more streamlined, which puts even more non-infringing content at risk. On top of that, the automated processes used to compile lists of "infringing" URLs continues to be error-prone. This wouldn't be an issue if the companies providing these services to rightsholders spent a little (or any) time giving the notices a once-over before sending them out. The failure to do so not only has the potential to remove non-infringing content, but also to screw the same people they're supposed to be protecting -- not just in terms of reputation, but also financially.

A brief perusal of DMCA notices issued to Google finds multiple examples of non-infringing content being targeted by flaky automated processes. It also shows rightsholders are being billed for largely useless takedown requests filled with URLs covered in previous requests by the same company.

This recent request by IFPI Latin America contains 237 URLs --- 236 of which were already delisted in response to earlier requests.


This is far from uncommon and pretty much amounts to double billing. Even in cases where rightsholders pay a monthly or yearly fee rather than per DMCA takedown, it's still wasted money. While it's obviously easier to let machines do the work and humans to collect the paychecks, nothing about an automated copyright takedown notice process contributes anything towards healthier respect for the idea itself, or the creations protected by it.

Automattic, on the other hand, will continue to gather respect from its users and potential customers around the world simply by refusing to lay out a WELCOME mat for our new DMCA robot overlords.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

morganovich e-mailed me after reading my most-recent note in response to Aaron the Aaron.  Here’s the bulk of morganovich’s e-mail, shared here with his kind permission (original emphasis):

If I may, I’d like to propose another line of reasoning:

It is precisely the fact that (as all seem to agree) that these academics “have no skills to run a business” that renders them unqualified to render judgements about the monopsony power of such businesses.

It seems we have 2 possible states of the world:

1.      Academics understand business, its decisions, its challenges, and what the world looks like from a CEO or a HR chair.  in such a case, they would seem qualified to speak to the power such a business has around hiring.  however, also in such a case, they can (justly) be taken to task for failing to put their money where their mouth is.  if this great opportunity exists and they understand the space well enough to see it, then failing to do something about it (even if it’s just consulting or joining a board) does seem to render the sincerity of their claims highly suspect.

2.      Academics do not understand business, its challenges etc and have NO IDEA what the world looks like from the operating side.  in such a case, they are speaking of something they have just admitted they do not understand.  their beliefs about monopsony may well be utterly sincere, but there is no reason why we ought to give them much credence.  they have already told us these are the beliefs of someone who does not understand the subject matter.  I may have some very sincere beliefs about how to remove a tumor.  but, before taking my advice, any sane individual might ask “have you ever performed surgery?”  and upon receiving my response in the negative, quite reasonably choose to heavily discount my advice and instead rely upon someone with actual experience.

From the Slope of Hope: Only a government employee could point to a 99.5% failure rate and declare it a success.

Look no farther than my local newspaper this morning: the city of Menlo Park (which is an affluent superb like Palo Alto, but even whiter and more sheltered) spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on equipment to read the license plates of all the cars passing by certain intersections. (We'll set aside the creepiness of the surveillance and just focus on the economics here.)

The latest quarterly report came out, and out of 198,286 license plates read, 204 of them were brought to the attention of authorities as "wanted" vehicles. OK, cool. Looks like we're getting some hits here and and go grab some criminals, right, boys?

The problem is that 203 of the 204 weren't "wanted" at all. The plates were all misread. There was one - count 'em, one - license plate out of the 198,286 which was indeed a plate from a stolen car, and the police captain (which, around here, is a quarter-million dollar year salary) assures the public that the license plate readers are "working properly" since, after all, they did button down one vehicle (which, if I may speculate, was probably worth, oh, about ten thousand bucks or so).

Suffice it to say that the hundreds of thousands spent on the equipment - - to say nothing of the time and effort involved from the police force (each member of which enjoys a six-figure salary) probably is a substantially greater sum than the value of the single vehicle retrieved. Here ya go:

This is from the New York Times editorial board: 

More than 50 countries agreed on Friday to eliminate tariffs on a wide range of technology goods like medical devices, navigation equipment and advanced semiconductors in a trade agreement that should benefit American manufacturers, consumers and the global economy.

Signatories to the Information Technology Agreement, which covers 201 product categories, include the United States, the European Union, China, South Korea and other members of the World Trade Organization. International trade in those goods totals about $1.3 trillion a year, or about 7 percent of all trade. 

I worry that I’m speaking to soon, but so far at least, I have not seen any of the usual trade critics complain about this deal.  With trade negotiations such as the Trans Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, there are lots of groups who are fired up about protesting every stage of the process.  But with this deal to eliminate tariffs on tech goods, these same folks have not had much to say.  Which perhaps suggests a way forward for negotiating future trade deals – focus on lowering tariffs and other forms of pure liberalization, and stay away from “governance” issues such as intellectual property, labor and the environment.  The benefits are greater with this approach, and the controversy appears to be lower.

Let’s compare and contrast two viewpoints on Uber and see what that tells us about one’s trust of market forces vs. trust of government force.

1. From Steve Horwitz’s article in The Freeman “Uber Solves the Fundamental Problem of the Marketplace (Or, Turning Strangers into ‘Honorary Kin’)“:

As an economic innovation, Uber exemplifies the way creative entrepreneurs discover new methods of providing better, less expensive consumer products and services. It also demonstrates how such creativity helps people navigate around barriers to entry created by government regulations that, though designed to protect consumers, end up protecting incumbent firms.

The fundamental problem of markets is the need to establish trust among strangers. In a wonderful book called In the Company of Strangers, Paul Seabright explores this formulation in great depth. He argues that for markets to work more fully, we need various institutions that allow strangers to be less suspicious of one another. We need to turn them into “honorary friends,” or in my own preferred version, “honorary kin.”

After all, what makes us willing to get into the backseat of a stranger’s car? With taxis, there are the obvious markers that are designed to generate trust: yellow or green paint, a corporate name, and the name and picture of the driver, among others. Many of those markers are possible because of the corporate structure that puts all of the drivers in similar-looking vehicles with the same company’s name.

That is not how Uber works. Not only are you getting into the backseat of a stranger’s car; you are getting into the backseat of their personal vehicle, which has no obvious marking that it is intended to provide rides to strangers. But Uber overcomes this apparent problem in several ways that make clever use of technology. When you request your ride, you are immediately given identifying information about the driver and car, including a thumbnail picture of the driver, the color and make of the car, and its license plate.

An additional way in which Uber establishes trust is by using GPS technology to show you exactly where your car is and how long (and what path) it will take to get to you. Watching the car drive up on the Uber app as you see it in front of you is a major signal of trust. Uber also gives you a cell number for your driver, which is useful if the pickup location is ambiguous. It also makes retrieving anything you left in the car much easier. Have you ever tried to get a lost item back from a cab company?

Uber also establishes trust through its rating system, which works much like those of eBay and other online, anonymous exchange-based sites. Riders rate drivers, and the driver’s rating appears alongside the identifying information about the car. Drivers rate riders, too, so if you misbehave in a car, you are less likely to get picked up the next time you need a ride. After all, sellers also have to trust buyers!

Finally, Uber has the profit incentive. If drivers are not trustworthy, people will not use the service, and Uber will suffer. Notice that taxi companies with various forms of government protection from competition (e.g., the taxi medallions in New York City) do not face the same strong incentive effects here. They don’t have to please their customers in quite the same way. And that might explain why my recent Uber driver had a bottle of water waiting for me in a very clean, very comfortable, and relatively new car. That does not describe most taxi rides in most cities.

Living out beautiful anarchy by finding ways around the state and crony-capitalist providers like cab companies requires that the alternatives, such as Uber, solve the problem of turning strangers into honorary kin. Thankfully, modern technology, such as the combination of GPS, electronic payment, and smartphones that Uber and other services in the sharing economy are using, provides effective ways of doing so and makes us willing to get in the backseats of strangers’ cars as if they were the backseat of our parents’ minivan.

2. Now compare that to this critical and unappreciative report on Uber from Detroit Free Press columnist Mitch Albom:

I am from the generation whose mothers preached “Don’t ever get in a car with a stranger!” So right from the start, Uber had me nervous. Let’s see. You download an app onto your phone. You type in where you are. A driver you never met before suddenly appears, knows your name and has a loose connection to your credit card. The vehicle may be a Lincoln, an SUV or a six-year-old Kia, the same car the driver just took to the grocery store, or, for all you know, the drug pickup. You get in.

Well. You get in. I am standing on the sidewalk, still trying to get the iPhone turned on. Uber, based in California, is a techie-first phenomenon, belonging to the generation that believes nothing bad could happen from sharing every piece of personal information with the entire universe. My generation is more afraid. Actually terrified. And perhaps, in the end, more practical. We are also dinosaurs.

So while young people gleefully hail Uber cars on their way out of bars, and cities everywhere argue over whether Uber unfairly competes, avoids taxes or influences legislation, Baby Boomers are still mumbling, “Wait, you just get IN the car? And the driver could be ANYONE?” Well. Sort of. To be an Uber driver, you do have to sign up. And, according to Uber, you undergo some sort of background check, although the depth of that check seems in question.

The drivers, who, as Uber advertises, work only when they want to (lest Uber have to pay them salaries, benefits and all that yucky old-fashioned stuff) and supposedly have to pass a driving test. But you don’t have to look far (like a Forbes magazine article) to read stories of applicants who were given an Uber cell phone with no driving training and told to get out there and start making money.

So, dinosaurs like me (you know, anyone over 26) wonder how this is much different than trusting your life to the car that just pulled up when you had a flat tire. After all, Uber bills itself as “the world’s safest, most reliable ride,” but that’s pretty hard to believe when someone like me could be driving for them in a matter of days. Just ask my family. They see me pull up, they turn the other way and stick out their thumbs.

But then, we are a generation that likes its cabs yellow and its hands free. I guess it’s archaic to believe that uniform cars, a state or city licensed organization, regulation and full-time drivers make for a more reliable transportation system. Maybe we’re too nostalgic. But at least cabbies used to get their information through a radio dispatch. Uber drivers are like musical chairs — closest one wins. And their customers come through cell phones. When your business depends on how quickly you read an app while behind the wheel, I get nervous.

This is not to say Uber is a bad idea. It isn’t. But like most tech-based ideas, it turns muddy when human beings get involved. There have already been several alleged assaults between Uber drivers and passengers. And Uber drivers complain there are too many of them now to make the promised money.

Maybe you trust Uber, maybe you don’t. To me, this is about a larger notion, that everybody is a specialist as soon as they start doing something. You blog, you’re a journalist. You sell an eBay item, you’re a retailer. It’s an egalitarian approach to life, we can all do anything, have anything, share everything, someone else’s music, someone else’s movie, someone else’s car.

MP: It seems like those most skeptical and critical of Uber and the sharing economy are those of the progressive and liberal political persuasion – like Mitch Albom. Reason? Progressives seem to trust the heavy hand of government force more than they trust the invisible hand of market, they have more faith in regulated monopolies/cartels (e.g. Big Taxi, public schools) than market competition (Uber, charter schools), and in general favor government solutions and government force over market solutions and voluntary exchange. Or put differently, progressives don’t believe in the magic or miracle of the marketplace, they don’t trust the market and have instead learned to subjugate themselves to the power of the state, with its volumes of liberty-crushing regulations and armies of regulators.

One’s position on Uber tells us a lot about their economic and political views and their relative trust of the market to regulate itself through vigorous market competition versus their trust in the power of the state to regulate, but so often, stifle the market to the detriment of consumers. In the end, it’s another opportunity to invoke Bastiat’s words of wisdom from 1850: “Treat all economic questions from the viewpoint of the consumer, for the interests of the consumer are the interests of the human race.” When it comes to transportation, there’s no question that Uber is doing a much better job of serving the interests of the consumer and the human race than Big Taxi by offering lower prices and faster and better service. As the world progresses forward and consumers increasingly choose Uber and Lyft over Big Taxi when they have a choice, the “progressives” aren’t being very “progressive” in their thinking.

Steve Horwitz 1, Mitch Albom 0.

The post Contrasting views on Uber and what that tells us about trusting the market vs. trusting government appeared first on AEI.

Last minute evidence that completely turns a legal case on its head doesn't come about all that often -- despite what you see in Hollywood movies and TV shows. The discovery process in a lawsuit generally reveals most of the evidence revealed to everyone pretty early on. And yet... in the high profile lawsuit over the copyright status of the song "Happy Birthday," the plaintiffs "Good Morning to You Productions" (who are making a documentary about the song and are arguing that the song is in the public domain) have popped up with a last minute filing, saying they have just come across evidence that the song is absolutely in the public domain.

And, here's the real kicker: they discovered this bit of evidence after two questionable things happened. (1) Warner/Chappell Music (who claims to hold the copyright for the publishing, if it exists) suddenly "found" a bunch of relevant documents that it was supposed to hand over in discovery last year, but didn't until just a few weeks ago, and (2) a rather important bit of information in one of those new documents was somewhat bizarrely "blurred out." This led the plaintiffs go searching for the original, and discover that it undermines Warner Music's arguments, to the point of showing that the company was almost certainly misleading the court. Furthermore, it definitively shows that the work was and is in the public domain.

If you haven't been following the issue closely, there is actually a lot of evidence, much of it put together by Robert Brauneis, that the song really should be in the public domain. There are all sorts of questions raised about how it became covered by copyright in the first place. Everyone agrees the song was originally written as "Good Morning to All" in the late 1800s, but from there, there's lots of confusion and speculation as to how it eventually was given a copyright in 1935, granted to the Clayton F. Summy company. People have argued that the 1935 copyright was really just on a particular piano arrangement, but not the melody or lyrics to Happy Birthday To You -- which had both been around long before 1935.

Warner/Chappell has long argued that Summy Co never published or allowed anyone else to publish the lyrics to Happy Birthday, but that seems undone by this new evidence. And, again, it seems a bit odd that magically Warner/Chappell suddenly "found" a bunch of new evidence. As Good Morning to You Productions notes:

On July 13, 2015, Defendants gave Plaintiffs access to a database of approximately 500 pages of documents, including approximately 200 pages of documents they claim were “mistakenly” not produced during discovery, which ended on July 11, 2014, more than one year earlier.

So over a year later, and just weeks before the court was likely to rule on the matter, suddenly Warner finds stuff that was missing before? Okay. But it gets even stranger. Because one of the things in this very late data dump is a 1927 publication of the song Happy Birthday in "The Everyday Song Book." And, as the plaintiffs in the case note, there's a line right under the title song that "is blurred almost beyond legibility -- curiously it is the only line in the entire PDF that is blurred in that manner." Hmmm. Here's the image: Here's a closeup of the title and the "blurred line" right beneath the title: The plaintiffs found this odd and went on a search for the original copy of the Everyday Song Book, finding the edition that was shown in the documents (the 15th edition) as well as a few earlier editions, and a much clearer version: From there, you can see that the "blurred" line says that the song is published via:

Special permission through courtesy of The Clayton F Summy Co.

As the plaintiff notes, this is evidence that there is no copyright on the song. They also went back and found that this particular edition was not the first one in which the song appeared. Instead, it first appeared in the 4th edition, published in 1922, well before 1935. The key issue: the lack of a copyright notice. Today that wouldn't matter. But under the 1909 Copyright Act it matters quite a bit.

Under Section 9 of the 1909 Copyright Act, “any person entitled thereto by this Act may secure copyright for his work by publication thereof with the notice of copyright required by this Act” affixed to all copies of the work.... At a minimum, Section 18 of the 1909 Copyright Act required the notice to include the word “Copyright,” the abbreviation “Copr., ” or the “©” symbol as well as the year of first publication and the name of the author of the copyrighted work.... If the strict notice requirements of the 1909 Copyright Act were not met, the “published work was interjected irrevocably into the public domain.” Twin Books Corp. v. Walt Disney Co., 83 F.3d 1162, 1165 (9th Cir. 1996) (emphasis added). None of these notice requirements was met for the Good Morning and Birthday Song included in the fourth edition of The Everyday Song Book published in 1922.

In other words, it appears that the song was put into the public domain by 1922 at the latest. The plaintiffs argue that the lack of a copyright notice on the work shows that Patty Hill (who wrote the song) likely put the work into the public domain years earlier:

Publication of the Good Morning and Birthday Song in The Everyday Song Book in 1922 and thereafter, with Summy’s authorization but without a copyright notice, is fully consistent with Plaintiffs’ position that the Happy Birthday lyrics had been dedicated to the public many years before then. Because the lyrics were in the public domain, there was no reason for a copyright notice to be set forth in the song book. Moreover, the authorized publication of the Good Morning and Birthday Song in 1922 without a copyright notice also is fully consistent with Plaintiffs’ position that the 1935 copyrights (E51988 and E51990) covered only the specific piano arrangements written by Summy’s employees Orem and Forman (as well as the second verse written by Forman). Since the lyrics were already in the public domain long before 1935, there was nothing else to be copyrighted other than the new work that Summy’s employees contributed when those copyrights were registered.

The filing also notes that while the copyright on the compilation for the 1922 and 1927 publications could only cover the overall compilation, rather than the individual works, even so both copyrights have long since expired, so Warner/Chappell can't even claim that the copyrights for either compilation now lead to the copyright today.

In other words, there's pretty damning conclusive evidence that "Happy Birthday" is in the public domain and the Clayton Summy company knew it. Even worse, this shows that Warner/Chappel has long had in its possession evidence that the song was at least published in 1927 contrary to the company's own claims in court and elsewhere that the song was first published in 1935. We'll even leave aside the odd "blurring" of the songbook, which could just be a weird visual artifact. This latest finding at least calls into question how honest Warner/Chappel has been for decades in arguing that everyone needs to pay the company to license "Happy Birthday" even as the song was almost certainly in the public domain.

It's been reported for years that the company brings in somewhere around $2 million per year off of the song -- and it's looking like none of that money should have been paid.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

You can now download Glen Cook's opening chapter in the Starfishers trilogy, Shadowline, for only 1.99$ here.

Here's the blurb:

The vendetta in space had started centuries before "Mouse" Storm was born with his grandfather's raid on the planet Prefactlas, the blood bath that freed the human slaves from their Sangaree masters. But one Sangaree survived—the young Norborn heir, the man who swore vengeance on the Storm family and their soldiers, in a carefully mapped plot that would take generations to fulfill. Now Mouse's father Gneaus must fight for an El Dorado of wealth on the burning half of the planet Blackworld. As the great private armies of all space clash on the narrow Shadowline that divides inferno from life-sheltering shade, Gneaus' half-brother Michael plays his traitorous games, and a man called Death pulls the deadly strings that threaten to entrap them all—as the Starfishers Trilogy begins.

"Ugly brown rings where waves used to lap at the shore. Dry docks lying on desiccated silt. Barren boat ramps. Trickles of water." Those are just some of the disturbing images California's Department of Water Resources team saw in an aerial tour of Northern California's Folsom Lake, Lake Oroville and Shasta reservoirs released this week...

 

The dramatic aerial views timelapsed from just a year ago show the level of devastation already... and it's not about to get any better...

 

Click image below for interactive gallery...

 

Source: SFGate.com

Two years ago, we wrote about the state of Georgia ridiculously threatening to sue Carl Malamud and his site Public.Resource.org for copyright infringement... for publishing an official annotated copy of the state's laws. This followed on a similar threat from the state of Oregon, which wisely backed down. Malamud has spent the last few years of his life doing wonderful and important work trying to make sure that the laws that we live by are actually available to the public. The specific issue here is that while the basic Georgia legal code is available to the public, the state charges a lot of money for the "Official Code of Georgia Annotated." The distinction here is fairly important -- but it's worth noting that the courts will regularly rely on the annotations in the official code, which more or less makes them a part of the law itself the state points directly to the annotated version as the official laws of the state. Furthermore, the annotations are very important in understanding and applying the relevant interpretations and case law (case law is a part of the law, after all). And then, the question is whether or not the law itself should be subject to copyright restrictions. Malamud has long argued no, while the state has obviously argued yes, probably blinded by the revenue from selling its official copy of the annotated code. Update: In the original post, I overstated the claim that the courts would directly rely on the annotations. While the annotations are often used to better understand the relevant case law, it does not appear that the courts directly refer to the annotations themselves.

It took two years, but the state has now done the absolutely ridiculous thing of suing Malamud. It is about as ridiculous as you would expect again focusing on the highly questionable claim that the Official Code of Georgia Annotated is covered by federal copyright law -- and that not only was Malamud (*gasp*) distributing it, but also... creating derivative works! Oh no! And, he's such an evil person that he was encouraging others to do so as well!

This action for injunctive relief arises from Defendant’s systematic, widespread and unauthorized copying and distribution of the copyrighted annotations in the Official Code of Georgia Annotated (“O.C.G.A.”) through the distribution of thumb drives containing copies of the O.C.G.A. and the posting of the O.C.G.A. on various websites. Defendant has facilitated, enabled, encouraged and induced others to view, download, print, copy, and distribute the O.C.G.A copyrighted annotations without limitation, authorization, or appropriate compensation. On information and belief, Defendant has also created unauthorized derivative works containing the O.C.G.A. annotations by re-keying the O.C.G.A. in order to make it possible for members of the public to copy and manipulate the O.C.G.A., thereby also encouraging the creation of further unauthorized derivative works.

Believe it or not, the State of Georgia is actually claiming that it needs the copyright protections here to incentivize it to create these annotated copies of the law. Apparently, without copyright, Georgia's law would remain sadly unannotated.

Each of these annotations is an original and creative work of authorship that is protected by copyrights owned by the State of Georgia. Without providing the publisher with the ability to recoup its costs for the development of these copyrighted annotations, the State of Georgia will be required to either stop publishing the annotations altogether or pay for development of the annotations using state tax dollars. Unless Defendant’s infringing activities are enjoined, Plaintiff and citizens of the State of Georgia, will face losing valuable analysis and guidance regarding their state laws.

This is ridiculous. In what world does making the law require copyright protection?

The State is particularly upset that Malamud ran some crowdfunding and donation campaigns seeking to raise money to keep his operations running, saying that he raised this money "to assist the Defendant in infringing the State of Georgia's copyrights." The State also complains that he uploaded the code to the Internet Archive under a CC 0 public domain dedication, saying (incorrectly) that this implies that he claimed that he was the owner of the annotations. That's not true at all. He's claiming that everyone owns them, because they're the law.

Later, the lawsuit makes Malamud out to be some sort of horrible person on a "crusade" to make the laws free, and to "control the accessibility of U.S. government documents."

On information and belief, Carl Malamud has engaged in an 18 yearlong crusade to control the accessibility of U.S. government documents by becoming the United States’ Public Printer – an individual nominated by the U.S. President and who is in control of the U.S. Government Printing Office. Carl Malamud has not been so nominated.

It takes a special kind of ridiculousness to argue that someone seeking to make the laws of the land more accessible to the public is somehow looking to "control the accessibility" of those laws. But, welcome to the State of Georgia, apparently home to just that kind of special ridiculousness.

The complaint further submits as an exhibit this Columbia Journalism Review article about Malamud from 2009 in order to support Georgia's ridiculous claim that Malamud sees what he's doing as a form of "terrorism." The lawsuit says the following:

Carl Malamud, has indicated that this type of strategy has been a successful form of “terrorism” that he has employed in the past to force government entities to publish documents on Malamud’s terms

Of course, all that's likely to really do is further educate the court about what Malamud is really looking to do: make the laws of the land more publicly accessible.

Either way, this seems like a ridiculous move for Georgia. Going after Carl Malamud for copyright infringement for helping to make the public more aware of the law in the state of Georgia just seems ridiculous. And for all of the state's repeated claims in the lawsuit that it's doing this to protect taxpayers, one has to ask why it's spending taxpayer revenue on filing such a ridiculous lawsuit?

Back when the state of Georgia first threatened Malamud two years ago, he responded as such:

It is a long-held tenet of American law that there is no copyright in the law. This is because the law belongs to the people and in our system of democracy we have the right to read, know, and speak the laws by which we choose to govern ourselves. Requiring a license before allowing citizens to read or speak the law would be a violation of deeply-held principles in our system that the laws apply equally to all.

This principle was strongly set out by the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall when they stated “the Court is unanimously of opinion that no reporter has or can have any copyright in the written opinions delivered by this Court, and that the judges thereof cannot confer on any reporter any such right.” Wheaton v. Peters, 33 U.S. (8 Pet.) 591 (1834). The Supreme Court specifically extended that principle to state law, such as the Ofcial Code of Georgia Annotated, in Banks v. Manchester (128 U.S. 244, 1888) , where it stated that “the authentic exposition and interpretation of the law, which, binding every citizen, is free for publication to all, whether it is a declaration of unwritten law, or an interpretation of a constitution or a statute.”

This still applies, and it seems that the State of Georgia might want to re-evaluate its choice of targets here.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Via Jim Quinn's Burning Platform blog,

If itsy bitsy pie slice – Greece (.33%) – can create this much worldwide economic havoc because of their unpayble level of debt, imagine what will happen when the truth is revealed about France (3.81%), Italy (2.88%), and Spain (1.88%). China’s (13.9%) entire economic model has been built upon debt and the world consuming their output.

The world has run out of money to consume their shit. Japan (6.18%) is in the midst of a demographic and debt death spiral. The U.S. (23.32%) is living on borrowed time and the continued dominance of the USD. How long will it last? We are inhabiting in a world stacked with TNT run by monkeys with matches.

Today’s data visualization is the most simple breakdown of the world economy that we’ve seen. Not only is it split to show the GDP of dozens of countries in relation to one another based on size, but it also subtly divides each economy into its main sectors: agriculture, services, and industry.  

The lightest shade in each country corresponds to the most primitive economic activity, which is agriculture. The medium shade is industry, and the darkest shade corresponds to services, which tends to make up a large portion of GDP of developed economies in the world economy.

To take it one step further, the visualization also shades the countries by continental geography, to easily see the relative economic contributions of North America, Europe, South America, Asia, Oceania, and Africa.

Former Obama administration economist, Jared Bernstein, argues for higher taxes in a New York Times op-ed yesterday. His piece begins:

Like it or not, the campaign season is upon us, and that almost certainly means somebody is going to try to buy your vote with a tax cut — even though average federal tax rates are already low in historical terms, our tax code remains tilted in favor of the wealthy, and our children, neighborhoods and infrastructure desperately need public investment.

I tried to use my imagination and think of how a thoughtful and intelligent liberal like Bernstein might conceive of tax policy. But I could not come up with any scenario under which this statement might be considered true: “our tax code remains tilted in favor of the wealthy.”   

The plain fact of the matter is that the federal tax system is highly graduated, or what liberals call “progressive.” Lower-income households pay much smaller shares of their income in taxes than do higher-income households.

In his article, Bernstein uses data from the respected Tax Policy Center (TPC), as I do here. The first table shows TPC estimates of average federal tax rates (total taxes divided by income) for U.S. households (specifically, “tax units”) in five income groups.

Average Federal Tax Rates, 2015

   Source: Tax Policy Center estimates.

The average household in the highest group will pay 25.7 percent of its income toward taxes in 2015, which compares to 3.6 percent in the lowest group. The average household in the middle group will pay a rate about half that of the highest group. I don’t see how this data can be reconciled with Bernstein’s claim.

Data from other sources shows the same tilt in tax burdens toward high earners. Actually, “piling on” on high earners is more accurate than “tilt.” The following screenshot is from Table A-6 in this Joint Committee on Taxation report. I’ve circled the key column. Average tax rates rise rapidly as income rises. The highest earners in 2015 will pay an average federal tax rate of 33.1 percent, which is about twice the rate of those with middling incomes, and many times the rate of people at the bottom.

 

Perhaps Bernstein meant “tilted in favor of the wealthy” compared to other countries. But we have pretty solid data showing that is not correct either. Tax Foundation summarizes OECD data here showing that the U.S. has the most graduated, or progressive, tax system among the high-income nations.

Bernstein is right that the “campaign season is upon us.” But that doesn’t give him license to tilt tax data upside down to fit his policy narrative.

Government green energy programs are supposedly about subsidizing new energy technologies to reduce their cost and increase their adoption rate.  But it appears to me that they are in fact merely about subsidizing favored companies.

Why?  Well consider this:

Over the last couple of years, trade remedy actions on clean energy products have intensified. In the wind industry, the Wind Tower Trade Coalition, an association of U.S. producers of wind towers, brought an AD/CVD complaint against imported wind towers in 2011. The U.S. Commerce Department started an investigation, and announced a preliminary decision in December 2012.

This decision found both subsidization and dumping in relation to Chinese imports and imposed an antidumping tariff of between 44.99% and 70.63%, as well as countervailing duties of 21.86%–34.81%. The Commerce Department also established a separate antidumping duty of 51.40%–58.49% on Vietnamese wind tower manufacturers.

In the solar industry, in October 2011, the Coalition for American Solar Manufacturing, a group of seven U.S. solar panel manufacturers led by Solar World Industries America, accused Chinese solar panel companies of dumping products in the United States. The Commerce Department opened an investigation in 2011 and announced the final ruling in 2012. The decision was to impose antidumping tariffs ranging from 24% to 36% on Chinese producers.

All of those actions are not only not consistent with reducing the cost of new energy technologies, they actually raise the cost of wind and solar.  The only benefit of these actions is to improve the bottom line of crony-connected green energy companies.  There is no reason to believe that this cronyism is not the real rational behind the whole program.   If government subsidizes consumer solar purchases 30% and then raises solar panel costs by 30%, they are not making the technology cheaper for consumers, but just finding an excuse to pour tax money into the pockets of a few folks like Elon Musk.