Jack

The allegedly non-Mao-inspired jacket retails for $69.90.

Uniqlo’s new spring collection features basic T-shirts and tank tops in bright jewel tones, Mister Rogers-esque cardigans, and ... a military jacket and pants combo that kind of look like the uniform worn by Mao Zedong.

The jacket, which retails for $69.90, comes in khaki, navy, and black. It’s standard, as far as military-inspired coats go, except for one thing: When paired with matching trousers, it bears a striking resemblance to the Mao suit, a simple outfit popularized by the Chinese communist leader in the mid-20th century.

To some, the Mao suit is synonymous with China’s communist revolution, during which millions of people died of starvation or, in later years, persecution by the government. Historians estimate that several millions died of starvation during the Great Leap Forward, and an additional 1.5 million, many of whom were city dwellers and intellectuals, were killed during the country’s 10-year Cultural Revolution.

Uniqlo denied that the jacket was inspired by Mao’s famous outfit in a statement to the South China Morning Post. “Any resemblance that customers or people on the web have commented on is purely coincidental,” Aldo Liguori, Uniqlo’s director of global public relations, told the newspaper. “That was never in our minds when we designed the item.”

As Shainghaiist notes, the Mao suit has largely fallen out of favor in recent years, and is “really only worn by the diehards” — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un regularly wears the suits during public appearances, and Chinese President Xi Jinping has been known to wear Mao suits on formal occasions (though he’s also known for wearing windbreakers).

Uniqlo isn’t the only brand to recently stoke controversy, intentionally or not, with a new collection. Burberry was recently called out for its new hoodies that feature a rope, which some critics say looked a lot like a noose, around the neck. (The resemblance to a noose, Burberry CEO Marco Gobbetti said in a statement to CNN, was unintentional; the line had a “marine theme.”) Katy Perry pulled a pair of shoes from her new line after critics said they resembled blackface. Other brands, like Gucci and Prada, have also had blackface controversies lately.

As for Uniqlo, the company claims the outfit’s resemblance to a Mao suit is completely accidental, and it doesn’t appear that the items will be pulled anytime soon.

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Getty/manonallard

• An elementary school in Virginia is facing criticism from parents and the Loudoun NAACP chapter over a portion of its Black History Month curriculum.
• Madison's Trust Elementary School students in grades 3 through 5 were taught about the Underground Railroad in gym class, where the lesson was reimagined as a "game."
• Some parents felt that because the "game" was to avoid obstacles — as if escaping slavery through the Underground Railroad — students were assuming the role of runaway slaves.
• "The lesson was culturally insensitive to our students and families," Principal David Stewart said in a letter to parents. "I extend my sincerest apology to our students and school community."

An elementary school in Virginia apologized after facing criticism from parents and the Loudoun NAACP chapter over an aspect of its Black History Month curriculum.

Madison's Trust Elementary School students in grades 3 through 5 were taught about the Underground Railroad in gym class through a "game" where kids, including African-American students, had to go through an obstacle course, according to a local NBC News affiliate WRC-TV.See the rest of the story at Business Insider

NOW WATCH: How Apple went from a $1 trillion company to losing over 20% of its share price

See Also:

• Nike is facing backlash after Zion Williamson's shoe exploded
• Share your opinion — become a BI Insider!
• Zion Williamson was wearing a $110 pair of Nike sneakers when one shoe exploded and he injured his knee

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In Arizona this week, a state legislator named David Livingston stirred a controversy about DNA that may be a portent of privacy nightmares to come. A law he proposed would have forced many residents to give samples of their DNA to a state database, to be stored with their name and Social Security number.

If passed, “many people—from parent school volunteers and teachers to real estate agents and foster parents—will have no choice but to give up their DNA,” The Arizona Republic reported. “Any DNA in the database could be accessed and used by law enforcement in a criminal investigation. It could also be shared with other government agencies across the country for licensing, death registration, to identify a missing person or to determine someone’s real name.”

A public outcry followed. In response, the bill was amended to require DNA “only from professionals who care for patients with intellectual disabilities in an intermediate care facility.” That focus is most likely due to a recent, widely reported crime: Weeks ago in Phoenix, police collected DNA from employees at a medical facility where a woman in a coma unexpectedly gave birth, identifying her alleged rapist.

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All 50 states maintain the DNA of at least some convicted criminals. And members of the military must give DNA samples to ease identification in battlefield deaths.

Some go so far as to advocate forcing everyone to submit DNA samples to the government for storage. In 2002, for example, Nature published a commentary arguing that “the most logical and fair practice—and also the most controversial—would be to DNA-test all individuals at birth. This would not only act as a deterrent from crime for all members of the community, but would make the task of catching criminals easier for police. If the correct safeguards are in place to protect civil liberties, why should a proposal to test everyone at birth be a frightening one? On the other hand, if the correct safeguards are not in place and the fears are justified, why are we daring to test anyone at all?”

[Read: How a genealogy website led to the alleged Golden State Killer]

There are two primary dangers of a universal DNA database. First, as Christine Rosen once wrote, DNA “provides an inescapable means of identification, categorization, and profiling” that is uniquely revelatory:

DNA is a person’s “future diary.” It provides genetic information unique to each person; it has the potential to reveal to third parties a person’s predisposition to illnesses or behaviors without the person’s knowledge; and it is permanent information, deeply personal, with predictive powers. Taken together, the coming age of DNA technology will change the character of human life, both for better and for worse, in ways that we are only beginning to imagine — both because of what it will tell us for certain and what it will make us believe. To know one’s own future diary — or to know someone else’s — is to call into question the very meaning and possibility of human liberty.

Second, imagine a permanent database of information that powerful. How long do you anticipate that trove would exist before being breached by nefarious actors? My assumption is that all permanent databases of sufficient size and value will be hacked eventually—and sooner rather than later, when the security infrastructure is designed and maintained by IT bureaucrats in state governments.

What if adequate safeguards are in place? I do not grant the possibility—not that the risks have stopped millions of consumers from voluntarily submitting their DNA to databases maintained by private technology corporations, as is their right.

[Read: The dark side of DNA databases]

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Arizona should reject even the watered-down proposal. A person shouldn’t be compelled to give a DNA sample in order to work in an intermediate-care facility. And passing that requirement into law would raise valid slippery-slope concerns.

More intriguing is a provision in the original proposal, since amended, that would have authorized “the medical examiner’s office in each county to take DNA from any bodies that come into their possession.” The Arizona Republic wrote that “collecting DNA from the dead could solve some longstanding cold cases.” That’s a public good—one that could conceivably spring wrongfully convicted people from prison. And DNA from the dead could presumably have research value, too.

On the other side of the matter are the privacy rights of the dead. Do the dead have any privacy rights? Do their extended family members? Perhaps the best path is putting people in DNA databases at death rather than at birth. For now, however, public policy in the United States is gradually heading in the other direction.

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Perhaps 10 million undocumented immigrants live in the United States. Their fate is among the most polarizing, seemingly intractable issues in American politics.

Proponents of a substantial amnesty often make humanitarian arguments, highlighting the most affecting challenges faced by families “living in the shadows.” That makes it easy to conclude that the debate is best understood as pitting globalists who emphasize the needs of the least well-off against nationalists who insist that the nation must prioritize what’s best for its own citizens.

That fault line certainly runs through the immigration debate. But it can be misleading. Imagine that the welfare of undocumented immigrants counts for nothing at all—that their fate should turn entirely on what makes U.S. citizens best off. Given that constraint, there’s still a strong case that an amnesty is the best policy.

Many on both sides of the debate intuit otherwise because they conceive of undocumented immigrants as laborers who crowd into segregated urban enclaves, follow harvests, or sleep in worker bunks at meatpacking plants. In this telling, they might interact with Americans when making up our motel rooms or bussing our tables, but were they deported, the worst consequences most of “us” might suffer would be higher prices for lettuce or lawn maintenance.

There are wealthy Americans who interact with undocumented immigrants almost entirely as consumers of cheap labor; there are working-class Americans who interact with undocumented immigrants mostly as competitors for jobs; and those incentives do, in fact, fuel self-interested positions on the issue.

But so many undocumented immigrants have been in the United States for so long that literally millions are deeply integrated into American communities. They have friends, classmates, neighbors, and co-workers who are U.S. citizens. Many of them have enjoyed significant economic success too. All of that helps explain polls such as the one Fox News did in 2017, which noted that setting up “a system to legalize undocumented immigrants working in the U.S. receives bipartisan support: most Democrats (95 percent legalize vs. 4 percent deport), Republicans (69–28 percent) and independents (82–13 percent) want legalization to happen.”

In 2015, Pew found that “a solid majority (72%) of Americans—including 80% of Democrats, 76% of independents and 56% of Republicans—say undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S. should be allowed to stay in this country legally if they meet certain requirements.” Most recently, a 2019 Gallup Poll found that 81 percent “favor allowing immigrants living illegally in the U.S. the chance to become citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time.”

Watching Lou Dobbs or listening to Rush Limbaugh, one could be forgiven for concluding that support for a substantial amnesty is a radical position that cosmopolitan elites want to foist on “regular Americans.” In fact, despite being a legislative improbability at the moment, amnesty is very popular in this country. It is opponents of amnesty who are out of step with “regular Americans.”

That majorities of Americans favor a qualified amnesty is strong evidence for the proposition that it is the policy that would make citizens best off. Even those motivated by selfless humanitarian concerns derive value from getting their way in politics. But it is not definitive evidence, in part because it doesn’t tell us much about salience. Maybe lots of people favor amnesty but don’t care about it that much, while a smaller number oppose it with a strong, passionate hatred.

Let’s assume that among the minority of American citizens who oppose granting legal status to most undocumented immigrants, a sizable faction counts the issue as among the most important, or close to it, and opposes any amnesty intensely. Are any of their fellow citizens similarly passionate in the other direction?

There are, in fact, millions of American citizens who very likely value amnesty much more highly than the vast majority of its most passionate opponents value stopping it. Pew Research found in 2008 that “the number of U.S.-born children in mixed-status families (unauthorized immigrant parents and citizen children) has expanded rapidly in recent years, to 4 million in 2008 from 2.7 million in 2003.” That number is almost certainly even higher than 4 million today.

If we’re trying to maximize the happiness of Americans, with no regard for morality, just utility, how should we compare the cost suffered by a restrictionist who doesn’t get his way on amnesty in relation to the benefit derived by another American citizen for whom amnesty means getting to live in the same country as their mother and father without worrying about their deportation?

We’re admittedly crossing into the realm of speculation.

Still, there is a hugely compelling case for the proposition that 4 million Americans who will no longer worry that armed agents of the state will force their moms and dads to move far away, often to an impoverished or dangerous country, will get more utility from an amnesty than millions of those most opposed will lose.

When one starts to treat all Americans with close personal connections to undocumented immigrants as fully equal citizens whose pursuit of happiness is as valuable as that of any others, rather than unconsciously discounting them as possessing less legitimate claims to the nation, the case for legalizing the status of their parents or romantic partners or best friends or employers or employees starts to add up to a whole lot of profound benefits for Americans. And that’s leaving aside public goods that would flow from amnesty, such as hastening assimilation and facilitating better cooperation with local authorities.

Unlike some proponents of amnesty, I do not discount the preferences of the people on the other side of the debate, who object to rewarding unlawful entry or feel deep psychological discomfort with difference and ethnocultural change. Those concerns are legitimate.

I just don’t think it’s fair for their fears and strong predisposition to prize sameness to trump a policy that has majority support and that would very likely enhance the overall happiness and well-being of Americans. That’s especially so because undocumented immigrants who’ve been here for many years likely play a lesser role in the activation of latent predispositions to authoritarianism than does the rapid introduction of refugee populations or the overall changes in ethnocultural makeup that flow from ongoing legal immigration. Legalizing undocumented immigrants doesn’t change who resides here; they’re already here.

A compromise bill that traded a substantial amnesty for a five-year pause in legal immigration; the aggressive, ongoing deportation of newcomers who are convicted of felonies; offering permanent legal status rather than eventual citizenship for older unlawful entrants; and a shift away from chain migration toward a skills-based system might even be a satisfactory bargain both for Americans who are appalled at the treatment of undocumented immigrants and for fearful authoritarians. Loath as I’d be to delay the legal migration of newcomers eager to come here for a better life, I’d likely support such a compromise as an elected official faced with the alternative of extending a decades-long nightmare for the undocumented and the tens of millions of Americans who love them. Or if Donald Trump wants to trade an amnesty for a wall, that’s worth it too.

At the same time, a substantial amnesty should no longer be conceived of as a radical, unpopular proposal that starry-eyed humanitarians must wrest as a concession from the majority. Amnesty is a sensible policy with majoritarian popular support that can be justified on the nationalistic basis of increasing the overall happiness of Americans. Its supporters should push for its stand-alone passage. And opponents of amnesty should be forced to recognize that the longer they delay in agreeing to a bargain that legalizes the status of undocumented immigrants, the weaker their ability to wrest any concessions will be.

Not long ago, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, was dismissed as a showboating opportunist who cared more about climbing the political ladder than he did about the finer details of public policy. But his decision to abandon the dream of a high-speed train that would ferry passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco, at least for now, suggests that he’s made of sterner stuff. Lamented by romantic environmentalists, for whom high-speed rail has long served as an emblem of ecological virtue, and cheered by critics on the right as a rare reversal for California’s ascendant left, the decision to pare back this misbegotten project is best understood as a wise strategic retreat from a governor with far larger ambitions for his tenure.

To the surprise of hardened cynics, myself included, Newsom has moved swiftly since his inauguration to address the state’s housing crisis, championing initiatives that have the potential to transform the face of urban California. Between now and 2025, he has called for the construction of 3.5 million new housing units, or an average of 500,000 a year. Considering that California has built an average of 80,000 new homes per year over the past decade, this is a pretty lofty goal. Newsom is envisioning a building boom that would surpass that of the postwar era, and that is exactly what the state would need to make up for lost time. This effort will require every ounce of his political capital, and it made the choice before him clear. Newsom could either fight tooth and nail for a bullet train for the classes, or devote his energies to building housing for the masses. So far, he seems to have made the right call.    

California’s high-speed rail project was, from the very start, a textbook example of getting your priorities wrong. Nothing about passenger rail is remotely objectionable per se, and the diversion of some travelers from California’s overburdened airports, and from carbon-intensive air travel itself, would be a welcome development. The question, as ever, was whether the benefits of high-speed rail were large enough to justify the mounting cost of construction, which was expected to surpass $77 billion.

[Read: California’s high-speed rail—the critics’ case]

This is a sum that could finance a dramatic expansion of mass transit throughout the state’s largest metropolises, or a network of “driverless roads” that could unlock enormous efficiencies in moving people and goods. Alternatively, $77 billion could underwrite the spread of innovative technologies such as mass-timber construction, modular permeable pavements, and, well, you name it. If California’s goal were to achieve the biggest bang for its environmental buck, building high-speed rail would be far from the top of the list. It would make far less sense than, say, using those same funds to lower housing costs in cities in California, where the average carbon footprint is considerably lower than in more humid U.S. cities that are further east.   

Even leaving environmental considerations aside, completing the high-speed rail project meant securing a right-of-way through the South Bay, home to some of the country’s most affluent, and most effective, opponents of development. That effort had met with limited success, to put it mildly, and the potential political dividends from kicking up that hornet’s nest were always slight: There you go; now you have a train you will use rarely, if at all. Watch as it rumbles by your hideously congested freeway. As of now, the plan is to complete the high-speed route currently under construction in the Central Valley, where it will serve as a monument to the armies of shortsighted elected officials, overpriced consultants, and delusional local boosters who inflicted it upon California, where a large and growing share of the population can’t afford decent housing.

Which leads us back to Newsom’s housing crusade. Given the political clout of California’s homeowners, many of whom can be expected to resist even the most modest densification of single-family-home neighborhoods, the governor’s housing effort is fraught with danger. Overcoming their objections will be exceedingly expensive, because it will require spending generously on measures designed to curb congestion, and cementing a pro-growth coalition of Silicon Valley employers, construction workers, public-sector employees, and renters desperate for relief. And Newsom’s off to a decent start.

[Read: The Bay Area’s housing crisis is even worse after the wildfires]

In recent weeks, the Newsom administration has, among other things, proposed spending $1.75 billion to incentivize housing production, boosting housing targets for local jurisdictions, and more controversially still, giving those housing targets new teeth by threatening to deny transportation funds to jurisdictions that fail to meet them. A small coterie of California lawmakers is devising proposals of its own to capitalize on Newsom’s enthusiasm, some of which are very ambitious indeed.

Yet much more needs to be done, as evidenced by the fact that cities and counties throughout the state have only set aside enough land for 2.8 million new homes to be built. There is simply not enough zoned land to reach Newsom’s target of 3.5 million new housing units, even if everything went swimmingly. To achieve his objectives, the governor will have to make the case not just for casitas, or accessory dwelling units that can be added to existing homes, or for the occasional smattering of duplexes and townhomes in postindustrial corners of the state where NIMBYs are few and far between. He will have to make an affirmative case for a new way of life, in which Californians embrace multi-family dwellings, walkable neighborhoods, and, sacrilegious though it may sound, trading their private automobiles, or at least their second private automobiles, for increased reliance on buses, bikes, and of course, electric scooters.

Is Newsom up to the challenge? I can’t really say. Because I don’t share his ideological proclivities, I’m inclined to be skeptical. What I do know is that the billions of dollars he might otherwise have wasted on a doomed high-speed rail project could be more productively spent bribing NIMBYs into becoming YIMBYs.

At least our future socialist overlords aren’t thinking small.

After Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos proposed a new rule on the obligations of colleges under Title IX, focusing on the due-process rights owed to students accused of sexual misconduct, members of the public submitted more than 96,000 comments. The ACLU’s contribution is of particular interest.

By way of background, Title IX  is a law that states, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Under President Barack Obama, the Department of Education published a letter setting forth a new interpretation of what colleges had to do to meet their obligations under the statute. Any failure to comply would risk their ability to receive federal funding.

“Universities reacted with panicked over-compliance,” argues the Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen. “In renewing their attention to the rights of alleged victims of sexual assault, many began to disregard the rights of accused students ... It has become commonplace to deny accused students access to the complaint, evidence, the identities of witnesses, or the investigative report, and to forbid them from questioning complainants or witnesses.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: The ACLU declines to defend civil rights]

Emily Yoffe reported on related injustices for The Atlantic. Later, when DeVos was drafting a new rule to supersede the Obama-era approach, Yoffe commented that the Donald Trump administration’s proposed guidelines “aren’t without their flaws—but they move the policy in a more just direction.”

At the time, the ACLU seemed to disagree, vehemently.

The civil-liberties organization published a tweet complaining that DeVos’s proposal would “tip the scales” against accusers. “The proposed rule would make schools less safe for survivors of sexual assault and harassment,” it said. “It promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused and letting schools ignore their responsibility under Title IX to respond promptly and fairly to complaints of sexual violence. We will continue to support survivors.”

At the time I published a critique, “The ACLU Declines to Defend Civil Rights,” that asked, “Since when does the ACLU believe a process that favors the accused is inappropriate or unfair?” Many other civil libertarians objected, too.

So I was pleasantly surprised last week to read the more formal, official comment that the ACLU submitted to the Department of Education. As the Brooklyn College professor K. C. Johnson observed, the ACLU’s lengthier, more considered statement is strikingly different from its earlier social-media reaction. It encompasses significant criticisms of the new rule, many of which warrant attention.

But on matters of due process, it aligns more closely with the Trump approach than the Obama approach, bolstering rather than weakening vital procedural protections.

“The ACLU supports many of the increased procedural protections required by the Proposed Rule for Title IX grievance proceedings, including the right to a live hearing and an opportunity for cross-examination in the university setting, the opportunity to stay Title IX proceedings in the face of an imminent or ongoing criminal investigation or trial, the right of access to evidence from the investigation, and the right to written decisions carefully addressing the evidence,” it states.

[Read: The uncomfortable truth about campus rape policy]

It urges a requirement that universities “provide counsel for both parties for the hearing if either party requests counsel.” And it questions the ascendant notion that protections for accused students and justice for victims are at odds:

Conventional wisdom all too often pits the interests in due process and equal rights against each other, as though all steps to remedy campus sexual violence will lead to deprivations of fair process for the respondent, and robust fair process protections will necessarily disadvantage or deter complainants. There are, however, important ways in which the goals of due process and equality are shared. Both principles seek to ensure that no student—complainant or respondent—is unjustifiably deprived of access to an education. Moreover, both parties (as well as the schools themselves) benefit from disciplinary procedures that are fair, prompt, equitable, and reliable.

At the same time, the ACLU still objects to the way that the proposed rule grants colleges the discretion to decide whether the burden of proof in sexual-misconduct disciplinary hearings should follow the “preponderance of the evidence” standard, requiring a 50.1 percent chance that the charges are accurate, or a “clear and convincing evidence” standard, a higher burden of proof.

I previously argued against the lower burden of proof.

The ACLU’s latest articulation of its position states, “By authorizing recipients to impose a clear and convincing evidence standard instead of a preponderance standard, the Proposed Rule frustrates the purpose of Title IX. Under that standard, even where it is more likely than not that the respondent sexually harassed or assaulted a complainant, the school would have no obligation to provide a remedy.” Notice the way in which “to provide a remedy” and to punish the accused student get conflated in that formulation of the matter.

“The preponderance standard is the appropriate standard of proof to apply for complaints involving peer-on-peer harassment or disputes, including Title IX grievance proceedings, for two reasons,” the ACLU continues. “First, it ‘is the burden of proof in most civil trials’ and requires the factfinder to determine that the complaint is more likely true than false … Second, the preponderance standard makes sense because it treats the complainant and the respondent equitably. That is why it is used in civil litigation, where there is no ex ante reason to favor one side over the other.” Notice that technically, even the preponderance standard favors the accused, insofar as they prevail in cases where the evidence for and against guilt are exactly 50 percent in both directions. (Elsewhere, the presumption of innocence itself is now being attacked.)

[Caitlin Flanagan: Mutually nonconsensual sex]

The ACLU goes on to argue that a “clear and convincing” standard “tips the scales against the complainant,” adding that “in Title IX grievance or disciplinary proceedings, both the complainant and the respondent have a significant interest in access to education. Serious disciplinary sanctions will undoubtedly affect a respondent’s access to education. And, as the Department acknowledges, a school’s failure to address sexual harassment or assault will affect the complainant’s access to education.” Thus, it concludes,   “A preponderance standard provides the most equitable approach for resolving the complainant’s and respondent’s equal interests in access to education.”

I still think the ACLU has this wrong. That intuition flows in part from my understanding of 50.1 percent. Imagine that a roulette table appears in your garage. You’re obligated to cover the bet of the first passerby. Yikes! For numbers one through 36, half are red and half are black. And then there’s zero, which is green.

A neighbor walks in, puts $1,000 on black, and demands that you spin the wheel. The odds are slightly in your favor. You’d be correct to conclude that you’re more likely than not to win. Now think of your confidence level that you will win as that wheel is spinning, but before the ball settles into its ultimate slot.

Based on that same degree of confidence, would you be willing to expel a student from college while permanently branding that person a rapist? I’d need something more than 50.1 percent confidence to impose that consequence on someone.  

What’s more, many of the most serious campus disciplinary hearings strike me as very unlike most civil trials in important respects. At public institutions, agents of the state are bringing charges against a student and perhaps imposing discipline, compared with one party suing another to try to recover damages. As Scott Greenfield, a criminal-defense attorney, writes on his blog Simple Justice, “this is no ‘grievance procedure’ but a subconstitutional criminal prosecution that has consequences more severe than the vast majority of crimes.”

The ACLU’s argument also posits a false symmetry. While the educational access of both accusers and respondents are indeed implicated in Title IX hearings, there are relevant differences, too. A wrongly accused student who is expelled utterly loses access to an education, whereas a victim doesn’t necessarily lose access to an education if a respondent is wrongly acquitted, in part because punishing a given perpetrator is not the only tool at a college’s disposal for safeguarding the educational access of victims.  

[Read: The bad science behind campus response to sexual assault]

Finally, an acquittal under a “preponderance of the evidence” standard may be harder on some accusers than an acquittal under a “clear and convincing evidence” standard, because only the former will strike many as implying an unreliable accuser. The latter better enables adjudicators to find someone not responsible without seeming to say that the accuser is more than likely a liar. That difference could conceivably spare some innocents a wrongful conviction, too, because some adjudicators are averse to implying that any accuser did something wrong or deceitful by coming forward with a claim of sexual misconduct.

These are the thorniest of questions, and neither approach to determining the burden of proof will yield the optimal outcome in all cases. People of goodwill who are genuinely concerned with the rights of accusers and respondents are on both sides of this debate.

And that strikes me as a final argument against the ACLU’s position. That is to say, because this is a tough question about which reasonable people can and do disagree, it makes sense to give different educational institutions leeway to adopt different burdens of proof. Perhaps the relevant tradeoffs vary with local circumstances in a way that makes different standards right for different institutions. Or perhaps a diversity of approaches is the best way to evaluate which burden is best and ought to be adopted universally at some point in the future.

Regardless, I suspect that the legislators who passed Title IX would agree that in doing so, they had no intention of prohibiting a “clear and convincing evidence” standard in campus disciplinary matters involving sexual misconduct. The thorny tradeoffs, with implications for access to education on both sides, are such that private institutions should be free to do what’s best as they see it rather than being coerced by the changing whims of a politicized central authority.

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This may seem like another "dead shark" story... but it isn't because of what fishermen did to this shark after it was caught. The body of this shark was used for a make-shift bong and people are pissed.

The TV cameras were waiting for Amara Enyia to walk into Emporium, a nightclub/pinball arcade where the long-shot candidate for mayor of Chicago was holding a $20-a-head fundraiser earlier this month. Enyia, a 35-year-old community organizer and neighborhood activist whose name most Chicagoans still can’t pronounce (it’s uh-MAR-uh EN-ya), has never registered above 6 percent in a poll. But her entrance was illuminated like a red-carpet walk, and hundreds of young people surrounding a stage strained to see who was coming into the room.

While Enyia, a triathlete, made a striking entrance, the cameras were fixed on the shorter man striding just behind her: her campaign’s biggest supporter, and one of the city’s most famous residents, Chance the Rapper, who was dressed in a purple sweater, jeans and his trademark “3” baseball cap, with “CHANCE” stitched on the adjustable strap.

“Chicago, what’s up!” Chance shouted to the hooting crowd when he took the microphone from Enyia onstage. “We need help to make a drastic change in this city. In every area I can think of, Chicago needs to change, and I really, truly believe in my heart that Amara is the change that we need. I believe that she cares. I believe that she loves the neighborhoods and the people downtown. I believe that she wants to do everything in her power to make the city better for us, and so, with that being said, we absolutely need y’all's help.”

Then he asked the hundreds of young people in front of him to phone bank and knock on doors—the most basic tasks of retail politics—on behalf of Enyia, who is one of 14 mayoral candidates set to appear on the ballot in February.

“I focused a lot of time, and I’m about to focus even more to make myself available to this awesome campaign, but you guys have your own voices, your own platforms, and I think that this is like some Harold Washington shit, honestly,” Chance said, referring to Chicago’s first black mayor, who died before Chance was born but whose legacy still inspires the city’s activists. “There’s gonna be movies about this shit, and we absolutely need you guys help to make that happen.”

He ended the evening playing “Time Crisis 3,” a rail shooter video game, while dozens of Enyia’s supporters watched.

Chance the Rapper is an international hip-hop superstar. He’s won three Grammys. His album Coloring Book debuted at No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 200 in 2016, with 57 million streams in its first week. He’s performed on “Saturday Night Live” twice. He’s headlined festivals in Europe. Other celebrities with millions of fans support presidential candidates (Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama) or causes with worldwide import (Mark Ruffalo and environmentalism).

But Chance has chosen to focus all his philanthropic and political energy on his hometown, where he is as well-known for his activism as for his music. In addition to stumping for Enyia, the 25-year-old Chance has recently testified before the City Council in opposition to plans for a new police academy (he thought the money would be better spent elsewhere); promoted young aldermanic candidates in a video posted on Chicagoist, a local news site he acquired last year and intends to relaunch; written a Chicago Tribune op-ed urging the Chicago school board not to close a majority-black elementary school on his native South Side; and raised or donated millions of dollars for Chicago’s public schools. Chance has also been publicly critical of Mayor Rahm Emanuel over his cover-up of a video of a police officer shooting unarmed black teenager Laquan McDonald and the resulting breach of trust between the citizenry and the police in Chicago, where the homicide clearance rate is an abysmal 17 percent.

Why is a musical star throwing himself into these local debates?

Chance’s involvement isn’t a total surprise: He is a native of the South Side. His father, Ken, is a longtime Chicago political operator—and, in fact, is chairing the campaign of the front-runner in the mayoral race, Toni Preckwinkle, who has held office for nearly three decades. Chance, by contrast, has thrown his support behind Enyia, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants and a political newcomer who calls herself an “independent Democrat“ and is focused on uplifting marginalized neighborhoods whose populations and businesses have declined under Emanuel’s downtown-focused leadership.

Even with Chance’s support, Enyia is still a long shot. But his presence at her rallies is attracting young people who have never paid attention to politics, let alone local politics, in a city with a long history of entrenched machine power, where all but two mayors have been white and all but one male.

“I always care about things that are happening to people I know,” Chance said in an interview. “This might sound selfish, but who the mayor is determines how my family and my neighborhood, the jobs that are available, the tickets they receive, are they going to be able to pay them? Just, like, how the city functions is very important to my loved ones and to the people that are growing up after I’m gone.”

“Also,” he said, “the presidential shit is, like, too much.”

***

Chancelor Bennett grew up in West Chatham, on Chicago’s South Side, in a middle-class family heavily involved in local politics. His father was as an aide to Harold Washington and Barack Obama before serving as Rahm Emanuel’s deputy chief of staff and director of the city’s Office of Public Engagement from 2014 to 2016. Despite this upbringing, Chance has said his father’s career did not influence his own political outlook: “I was a kid. I didn’t really understand.”

In the early part of this decade, when Chance was still a local act playing $20 nightclub gigs, the Chicago hip-hop scene was dominated by “drill” rappers such as Chief Keef and Lil Durk , who spun tales of gang life over hard, dark beats. One of them, King Louie, nicknamed the city “Chiraq,” which became the title of a 2015 Spike Lee movie. Chance was seen as the next generation of the city’s tradition of socially conscious rap, pioneered in the 2000s by Kanye West, Common, Rhymefest and Lupe Fiasco.

On his hit mixtapes, 2013’s Acid Rap and 2016’s Coloring Book, Chance developed a style that combined hip-hop, R&B, rock and gospel, making him an artist whose appeal transcended not only musical genres but races and generations. Neither of those albums was explicitly political, but over time Chance has begun channeling his opinions about local politics into his music. In the single “I Might Need Security,” which dropped last summer—before Emanuel had announced that he wouldn’t seek a third term—Chance rapped, “Rahm you done / I’m expectin’ resignation / An open investigation on all of these paid vacations / For murderers.” That’s an apparent reference to Jason Van Dyke, the Chicago police officer who was recently convicted of killing Laquan McDonald. Van Dyke had been placed on desk duty while Emanuel concealed a video of the incident from the public.

“He just doesn’t need to be mayor anymore,” Chance told the music website Genius last fall in a video explaining the song’s lyrics. “He’s closed, I think, over a hundred schools in Chicago, tried to hide and settle the Laquan McDonald tapes when he was murdered by the police. I just really hope that he’s not gonna run again, because it’s over for his ass.” Early in his term, Emanuel closed 50 schools, mostly in black neighborhoods with declining populations. Asked to comment on Chance’s criticism, Emanuel spokesman Matt McGrath wrote: “I have terrible news!! Someone has gained access to your email account and is using it to inquire about six-month old news … because I can’t imagine this is a serious request from someone who pays regular attention to Chicago politics.”

In addition to his disapproval of Emanuel, Chance has made public education a pet issue. A graduate of Jones College Prep, a selective-enrollment public high school in the South Loop, Chance has donated or raised millions of dollars for Chicago Public Schools over the past two years, and in 2017, his nonprofit, SocialWorks, gave away 30,000 backpacks to students on the South Side. Chance was also involved in a campaign to prevent the Chicago Public Schools from closing a South Side elementary school, National Teachers Academy. In a Chicago Tribune op-ed published in December, he called the plan another example of “the never-ending cycle of the displacement of our black and brown children.” The school’s closing was ultimately halted by a judge.

Enyia had been involved in the National Teachers Academy campaign as well, organizing community meetings and helping to drawing up plans to keep the school open. In November 2017, she appeared before the Chicago City Council to protest the school's closing. Chance, by coincidence, appeared at the same hearing to speak about a different issue. But the two didn’t meet until months later, after the rapper started looking into mayoral candidates who might replace Emanuel. He was impressed to see that Enyia had worked on the project to keep the academy open. In September, Enyia was gobsmacked to receive a text message from Chance “out of the blue,” she said. The rapper followed up with a phone call inviting her to his downtown studio to talk politics.

Enyia has a law degree and a doctorate in education from the University of Illinois. As an aide to Richard M. Daley when he was mayor, she became disillusioned with the city’s philosophy of building up the Loop downtown and hoping its prosperity would trickle out to other neighborhoods. Enyia is now a public policy consultant and executive director of the Austin Chamber of Commerce, on the city’s impoverished West Side, and is running for mayor on a platform of directing more city resources to the unglamorous, neglected neighborhoods far from the tony Loop and the lakefront, with the expectation that businesses will follow. Hearing that idea in their meeting, Chance liked it, too, calling it “equity.”

“We just really vibed,” Enyia recalled of her two-hour meeting with Chance. “He had done his research on my campaign, so he was pretty well informed, so it wasn’t a whole lot of introducing ourselves. We were really on the same page—these issues of equity and investment in the neighborhoods. We talked a lot about what disinvestment looks like across policy areas.” In particular, she mentioned mental health—Emanuel had controversially closed half of the city’s 12 mental health clinics—and education. “And he talked a lot about his daughter. He has a [3-year-old] child now, and when he talks about education, he thinks about what kind of education she’s going to get. It changed his worldview.”

The rapper had a more succinct recollection of the meeting: “She was organizing around [National Teachers Academy,] and just a lot of stuff that I was working on. And then, basically, when I found out she was running, I read a bio of her, and I contacted her to try to meet up. And then when I met her, I was like, ‘Yeah!’”

Chance offered Enyia not only his endorsement, but himself as a surrogate. Their first appearance together was an October press conference on the second floor of City Hall, right outside the Council Chambers, and was attended by two dozen reporters—more press than Enyia had ever seen. Chance had teased the event on Twitter, which led to speculation that he was running for mayor himself.

“Obviously, I love this city, and I love it enough to call it out for its shortcomings,” Chance said, introducing Enyia. “I believe that me and Amara share a vision of what Chicago should be. We believe in supporting the people that are at the bottom economically, the people that have been written off. And she has the experience, the policy work and being a teacher and being an advocate for people without a voice, and I want to put my voice where she is.”

Up to that point in the campaign, Enyia had not collected a single donation greater than $1,000 and had only 2,944 Twitter followers. “I had never even heard of her,” admitted a South Side activist who happened to be in City Hall that day. Chance’s endorsement brought Enyia attention and money. The Chicago Sun-Times profiled her. Fellow South Side rapper Kanye West donated $200,000—more than enough to pay off fines incurred for neglecting to close campaign accounts from Enyia’s aborted 2015 run for mayor.

In late October, Chance appeared with Enyia at the corner of 63rd Street and Cottage Grove in Woodlawn, near the site of the soon-to-be-built Obama Center. Hundreds of people filled the area—West even showed up for a few minutes—listening to Chance and Enyia talk through a megaphone about the need for a “community benefits agreement” with the Obama Center to prevent gentrification from displacing longtime residents. “It’s an issue of who gets to stay in Chicago and having a say in how our communities change,” Enyia said at the event. That same month, Chance and Enyia appeared together in a campaign video offering Halloween safety tips.

In addition to helping Enyia, Chance has weighed in on politics using Chicagoist, the local news website he bought last year. In one of his songs, he suggests he made the purchase to counter bad press from the Sun-Times, which had reported on a child support dispute with his daughter’s mother. The site has not yet added any news content, but last fall, Chance used it to promote a 15-minute video that employed puppets, animation and costumes to educate young voters on the duties of an alderman, an office most Chicagoans consider the lowest form of political life. Over a recent 40-year period, one-third of the aldermen who served on the City Council were convicted of corruption. Wearing a wig and a fake mustache, Chance played a news hawk named “Champ Bennett” who hit the streets to ask random pedestrians, “How many wards are in Chicago?” and “What does your alderman do for you?” Nobody answered correctly. Then he interviewed a fictional alderman, portrayed by comedian Hannibal Buress, who told him, “If you want to start a bar, you want to get a liquor license, you gotta pay me off.”

“What’s crazy is that when I was making [the video], 90 percent of the information I divulged I didn’t know before I started working on it. I didn’t know that the longest-serving alderman had been alderman for 50 years. Also, just like, how they collect money for their war chests, how much they spend on their campaign. … They’re putting hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars into just reelection after reelection,” Chance told me. “There’s so much shit that’s just like, I don’t know—it’s Chicago, man.”

At the end of the video, Chance interviewed young candidates for City Council, including 29-year-old Maggie O’Keefe, whose opponent took office before she was born. O’Keefe couldn’t figure out why Chance was wearing a wide-lapel suit that looked like it came from the Good Times wardrobe department, but she appreciated his efforts to make Chicago politics more accessible to young people.

“He wants young people to be inspired by people who look like them, trying to make change,” O’Keefe said.

***

Chance’s decision to endorse Enyia doesn’t just represent a generational change in Chicago politics, it represents a generational change in his own family. It was around the same time the rapper and the activist were meeting in his studio, that Chance’s father signed on as the campaign chairman for Toni Preckwinkle, the 71-year-old president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners and chair of the county Democratic Party. In fact, Ken Bennett was the emcee for Preckwinkle’s September campaign announcement, at the Lake Shore Hotel in Hyde Park—the same hotel that hosted Harold Washington’s mayoral announcement in 1983 and Barack Obama’s 1995 kickoff event for state senate. As his son would later do, Bennett invoked Washington at the event, making it clear that Preckwinkle hopes to achieve a goal that still motivates aging Chicago progressives and fills them with nostalgia: reassembling Washington’s coalition of African-Americans, Latinos and white liberals.

“Mayor Harold Washington once said, ‘Chicago is one city. We should work as one people, for our common good and for all of our common goals,’” Bennett told the crowd, which was mostly made up of middle-aged African-Americans. “Chicago deserves a mayor that will fight for an equitable school system, economic development and jobs in all of the 77 neighborhoods in the city.”

That message might sound similar to Enyia’s, but she does tout a strategy that is different from Preckwinkle and other longertime politicians’. Enyia has sought to attract young people who have never voted in a local election; the campaign has registered “hundreds of voters,” a spokesman said, and expects to make it thousands once the polar vortex moves on from Chicago. Politico’s Illinois Playbook newsletter recently observed, “Enyia has been registering first-time voters—even young people in high school. They’re not the kind of voters who pop up in polls. And that has some politicos wondering if we’ll have an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez moment on our hands.”

In that effort, she has no better ally than Chance. At the Emporium event, some attendees said they had first heard of Enyia when the rapper endorsed her.

“It’s drawing a younger crowd,” said Josh Miller, 23, who works at Northwestern University. “I know it’s strange that a celebrity’s endorsement brings it on. It does bring a lot of credibility to the campaign. Northwestern students who live in Chicago have heard of her platform through him. I could name drop Amara to them, but I can’t name drop Paul Vallas”—a better-polling candidate.

“That’s a huge part of it,” Chance said. “Harold Washington, the same kind of formula. Talking to people that are usually not voters and just getting a lot of first-time voters, a lot of people that felt like they were counted out, and young people, people of color, people in those disenfranchised wards.” Washington’s election as mayor was the result of a voter registration drive that added 50,000 African-Americans to the rolls.

A disagreement over which mayoral candidate represents Washington’s legacy—Enyia, who has never held office, or Preckwinkle, a veteran politician and a party insider—does not appear to have caused a rift in the Bennett family, though.

“It’s like a normal father-son relationship,” Chance told me. “I love Amara. I’m very excited about her new candidacy and stuff like that, but when it’s, like, me and my dad hanging out, we don’t really talk about that.”

In mid-January, father and son co-hosted a birthday event at the nightclub Metro for Chance’s brother Taylor, who is also a rapper. They were billed as “Chance the Rapper” and “Ken ‘Rapper’s Father’ Bennett.” For his part, Ken Bennett wrote on his Facebook page, “I’m immensely proud of my son Chance, not only for pursuing his success with a clear, individual point of view but for continuing to use his success to advocate for his City. We may have different views on this race, but we share an unshakable love for each other and this city.” Bennett did not respond to an interview request placed through the Preckwinkle campaign.

Of course, for all the complaints about machine politicians, they sure win a lot of elections in Chicago. Celebrity can only go so far. A recent Sun-Times poll showed Enyia at just 3.1 percent, compared to front-runner Preckwinkle’s 12.7 percent. Bill Daley, the son and brother of former mayors, was in second place, with 12.1 percent. “Generally speaking, endorsements don’t much matter,” said Paul Lisnek, a political analyst for the local TV station WGN. “Will Chance’s money be used in a way to get her message out? That’s the difference.”

The Tuesday after the Emporium event, Chance finally made a financial contribution to Enyia’s campaign—$400,000, the biggest individual donation of the mayoral race so far. The gift more than doubled her war chest, and allowed her to air her first television ad just like candidates with personal fortunes or political operations. In total, Enyia has now raised about $650,000, almost all of it from Chance and Kanye West. Her Twitter following, meanwhile, has tripled since Chance’s endorsement.

As for Chance using his celebrity to influence public policy, Lisnek sees that as less of a stretch for a rapper than for most entertainers. “Rappers have a message,” he said. “He’s not Frank Sinatra stepping out from ‘My Way.’ He’s a guy whose message is social issues. And he’s not a stranger to the issues. He’s not an interloper. This is a Chicago guy. He went to Chicago schools.”

As a musician, Chance the Rapper beat the industry machine by refusing to sign with major labels, distributing his music for free over SoundCloud instead—and still becoming the first artist to win a Grammy for a streaming album.

“That’s probably why we’re so aligned,” Enyia said. “He had to fight the musical machine. He’s an independent artist who did it against the odds and set a domino effect for others. When those things happen, they serve as beacons for everyone else that it’s possible. So, this campaign, being an independent candidate, not being beholden to anyone or anything except the people of Chicago—what we’re doing is a beacon to so many who felt there was nothing we could do to change the way Chicago operates.”

Might Chance one day make the jump from music to politics and run for office himself? “I probably won’t ever be running for mayor of Chicago,” he said during the press conference at which he endorsed Enyia. Instead, as the rapper put it, “I’m a voice right now.”

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

The post San Francisco fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The post Markets in everything those new service sector jobs appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Many environmentalists believe that denser cities are better for the environment, as they use up less land and also require less energy for activities such as commuting. There’s also a perception that sprawl results from a lack of “planning”. But is this necessarily the case?

Wendell Cox has some surprising data on this topic:

The smallest lot sizes are one-half smaller than the national median of 0.26 acres. The major California metropolitan areas have among the smallest median lot sizes for existing 1-unit houses. This is not surprising, since California has the densest urbanization in the nation, as well as the first, second and third most densely populated major urban areas (Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Jose, in that order and ahead of fourth place New York). . . .

Houston’s small lot size (0.18 acres) is particularly surprising, given the general contempt of many planners who characterize it as excessively sprawling (Figure 2). In fact, Houston has smaller lot sizes than urban planning favorite Portland and has an urban density only a little less dense (Note 2). . . .

In fact, the four largest Texas metropolitan areas, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin each have median lot sizes of from 0.18 acres to 0.25 acres, small or smaller than Philadelphia, Boston or Washington. The market orientation of Texas land and residential development have not resulted in less efficient use of land.

All of this is a yet another reminder that the data does not always support pre-conceived perceptions.

This is not to say there aren’t cases where cities are both denser than Houston and more highly regulated.  But keep in mind that the density you see in places like Manhattan was created during a period where land use was much less strictly regulated than today.  If San Francisco were to make its land use rules more laissez-faire, it would probably be a net plus for the environment.

There is an ongoing battle between what might be called “scientific environmentalism” and “romantic environmentalism”.  The latter favors closing down nuclear power plants, restricting construction in attractive San Francisco and West LA neighborhoods, and banning GMO foods that require less land, pesticides and herbicides.  Can you guess which side I favor?

PS.  Even Houston is not entirely laissez faire, but it does allow a lot of infill townhouses in the closer in neighborhoods:

 

 

(16 COMMENTS)

If there were mass protests against the government of Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. decided to recognize the opposition as the legitimate government of Saudi, I would expect disaster.  Why?  Because…

1. Supporters of the Saudi monarchy remain powerful and confident enough to aggressively fight back, plunging the country into hellish civil war.

2. If the monarchy loses, its most likely replacement will be a revolutionary Islamist dictatorship.

3. Even if the new Saudi government sticks to democracy, the median Saudi voter probably favors even worse policies than the Saudi monarchy now imposes.  In particular, government enforcement of Islamic fundamentalism would tighten, and economic policies would move even further toward socialism and populism.

And now you know why I am optimistic about the constitutional crisis in Venezuela.

1. Supporters of Maduro are too weak and demoralized to aggressively fight back, so I put the risk of hellish civil war below 10%.  (Indeed, since there’s a high base rate for civil wars in situations this dire, it’s quite possible that the risk of civil war has actually fallen due to the crisis).

2. If the Maduro regime loses, its most likely replacement will be a moderate pro-Western democracy.

3. If the new Venezuelan government sticks to democracy, the median Venezuelan almost certainly favors better policies than Maduro now imposes.  In particular, government enforcement of socialist ideology will crumble, and economic policies will move sharply away from socialism and populism.

If you’re too young to remember the collapse of Communism, this is a tiny taste of the sweetness of 1988-1991.  When’s the last time you had reasonable hope of dramatic peaceful pro-freedom change in the world?

(6 COMMENTS)

Later this year, we’ll get to see the fourth season of The Expanse, after Amazon swooped in and saved the show from cancellation at Syfy’s hands. But good news: you can while away the time you’ll spend waiting for it by being able to watch all three seasons so far on Amazon Prime Video, starting next month.

Read more...

Researchers at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) and Georgia Tech have developed a new system that absorbs carbon dioxide and produces electricity and useable hydrogen fuel. New Atlas reports: The new device, which the team calls a Hybrid Na-CO2 System, is basically a big liquid battery. A sodium metal anode is placed in an organic electrolyte, while the cathode is contained in an aqueous solution. The two liquids are separated by a sodium Super Ionic Conductor (NASICON) membrane. When CO2 is injected into the aqueous electrolyte, it reacts with the cathode, turning the solution more acidic, which in turn generates electricity and creates hydrogen. In tests, the team reported a CO2 conversion efficiency of 50 percent, and the system was stable enough to run for over 1,000 hours without causing any damage to the electrodes. Unlike other designs, it doesn't release any CO2 as a gas during normal operation -- instead, the remaining half of the CO2 was recovered from the electrolyte as plain old baking soda. The research was published in the journal iScience.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. Here are 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017.

And here are the predictions I made for 2018. Strikethrough’d are false. Intact are true. Italicized are getting thrown out because I can’t decide if they’re true or not. Please don’t complain that 50% predictions don’t mean anything; I know this is true but there are some things I’m genuinely 50-50 unsure of.

US:
1. Donald Trump remains president at end of year: 95%
2. Democrats take control of the House in midterms: 80%
3. Democrats take control of the Senate in midterms: 50%
4. Mueller’s investigation gets cancelled (eg Trump fires him): 50%
5. Mueller does not indict Trump: 70%
6. PredictIt shows Bernie Sanders having highest chance to be Dem nominee at end of year: 60%
7. PredictIt shows Donald Trump having highest chance to be GOP nominee at end of year: 95%
8. [This was missing in original]
9. Some sort of major immigration reform legislation gets passed: 70%
10. No major health-care reform legislation gets passed: 95%
11. No large-scale deportation of Dreamers: 90%
12. US government shuts down again sometime in 2018: 50%
13. Trump’s approval rating lower than 50% at end of year: 90%
14. …lower than 40%: 50%
15. GLAAD poll suggesting that LGBQ acceptance is down will mostly not be borne out by further research: 80%

ECONOMICS AND TECHNOLOGY:
16. Dow does not fall more than 10% from max at any point in 2018: 50%
17. Bitcoin is higher than $5,000 at end of year: 95%
18. Bitcoin is higher than $10,000 at end of year: 80%
19. Bitcoin is lower than $20,000 at end of year: 70%
20. Ethereum is lower than Bitcoin at end of year: 95%
21. Luna has a functioning product by end of year: 90%
22. Falcon Heavy first launch not successful: 70%
23. Falcon Heavy eventually launched successfully in 2018: 80%
24. SpaceX does not attempt its lunar tourism mission by end of year: 95%
25. Sci-Hub is still relatively easily accessible from within US at end of year (even typing in IP directly is relatively easy): 95%
26. Nothing particularly bad (beyond the level of an funny/weird news story) happens because of ability to edit videos this year: 90%
27. A member of the general public can ride-share a self-driving car without a human backup driver in at least one US city by the end of the year: 80%

CULTURE WARS:
28. Reddit does not ban r/the_donald by the end of the year: 90%
29. None of his enemies manage to find a good way to shut up/discredit Jordan Peterson: 70%

COMMUNITIES:
30. SSC gets more hits in 2018 than in 2017: 80%
31. SSC gets mentioned in the New York Times (by someone other than Ross Douthat): 60%
32. At least one post this year gets at least 100,000 hits: 70%
33. A 2019 SSC Survey gets posted by the end of the year: 90%
34. No co-bloggers make 3 or more SSC posts this year: 80%
35. Patreon income less than double current amount at end of year: 90%
36. A scientific paper based on an SSC post is accepted for publication in real journal by end of year: 60%
37. I do an adversarial collaboration with somebody interesting by the end of the year: 50%
38. I successfully do some general project to encourage and post more adversarial collaborations by other people: 70%
39. New SSC meetups system/database thing gets launched successfully: 60%
40. LesserWrong remains active and successful (average at least one halfway-decent post per day) at the end of the year: 50%
41. LesserWrong is declared official and merged with LessWrong.com: 80%
42. I make fewer than five posts on LessWrong (posts copied over from SSC don’t count): 70%
43. CFAR buys a venue this year: 50%
44. AI Impacts has at least three employees working half-time or more sometime this year: 50%
45. Rationalists get at least one more group house on Ward Street: 50%
46. No improvement in the status of reciprocity.io (either transfer to a new team or at least one new feature added): 70%

PERSONAL:
47. I fail at my New Years’ resolution to waste less time on the Internet throughout most of 2018: 80%
48. I fail at my other New Years’ resolution to try one biohacking project per month throughout 2018: 80%
49. I don’t attend the APA National Meeting: 80%
50. I don’t attend the New York Solstice: 80%
51. I travel outside the US in 2018: 90%
52. I get some sort of financial planning sorted out by end of year: 95%
53. I get at least one article published on a major site like Vox or New Statesman or something: 50%
54. I get a tax refund: 50%
55. I weigh more than 195 lb at year end: 60%
56. I complete the currently visible Duolingo course in Spanish: 90%
57. I don’t get around to editing Unsong (complete at least half the editing by my own estimate) this year: 95%
58. No new housemate for at least one month this year: 90%
59. I won’t [meditate at least one-third of days this year]: 90%
60. I won’t [do my exercise routine at least one third of days this year]: 80%
61. I still live in the same house at the end of 2018: 60%
62. I will not have bought a house by the end of 2018: 90%
63. Katja’s paper gets published: 90%
64. Some other paper of Katja’s gets published: 50%

SECRET: (mostly speculating on the personal lives of friends who read this blog; I don’t necessarily want them to know how successful I expect their financial and romantic endeavors to be. I’ve declassified the ones that now seem harmless to admit.)

65. My partner and I come to a decision about whether to have children: 80%
66. My partner and I are engaged by the end of the year: 70%
67. My partner and I do not break up by the end of the year: 70%
68. [Secret prediction]: 60%
69. [Secret prediction]: 70%
70. [Secret prediction]: 60%
71. [Secret prediction]: 50%
72. [Secret prediction]: 50%
73. [Secret prediction]: 50%
74. [Secret prediction]: 90%
75. [Secret prediction]: 90%
76. [Secret prediction]: 60%
77. [Secret prediction]: 70%
78. [Secret prediction]: 60%
79. [Secret prediction]: 50%
80. [Secret prediction]: 60%
81. I lose my bet against Duncan about Dragon Army Barracks: 80%
82. Dragon Army Barracks is still together at the end of the year: 70%
83. I will visit Greece: 50%
84. I will visit Germany: 70%
85. [Secret prediction]: 70%
86. [Secret prediction]: 70%
87. [Secret prediction]: 60%
88. [Secret prediction]: 50%
89. [Secret prediction]: 50%
90. [Secret prediction]: 70%
91. [Secret prediction]: 90%
92. [Secret prediction]: 50%
93. Still working at my current job at the end of 2018: 90%
94. Working 30 hours/week or less at the end of 2018: 50%
95. Have switched to practicing entirely in the East Bay: 60%
96. [Secret prediction]: 60%
97. Will not finish first section of a difficult calligraphy project: 60%
98. Will not finish all sections of difficult calligraphy project: 95%
99. I will not do work for AI Impacts by the end of the year: 70%
100. I will not finish more than 25% of a new novel: 70%

Calibration chart. The blue line represents perfect calibration, the red line represents my predictions. The closer they are, the better I am doing.

Of 50% predictions, I got 6 right and 16 wrong, for a score of 27%
Of 60% predictions, I got 8 right and 7 wrong, for a score of 53%
Of 70% predictions, I got 14 right and 4 wrong, for a score of 78%
Of 80% predictions, I got 10 right and 3 wrong, for a score of 77%
Of 90% predictions, I got 17 right and 1 wrong, for a score of 94%
Of 95% predictions, I got 6 right and 2 wrong, for a score of 75%

50% predictions are technically meaningless since I could have written them either way – which makes it surprising I managed to get such an imbalance between right and wrong. I think I’m more wrong than should be statistically possible. I’m not sure what to think about that.

After that, things go okay until the 95% level, where I get a very poorly calibrated 75%. This is partly the fault of not having very many 95% predictions this year, but even so I should have done better than this.

Two things happened that screwed with a lot of my predictions. First, cryptocurrency crashed (remember, I made last year’s prediction during the height of the boom, when Bitcoin was around $15,000). I expected it would go down, but not this much. Since I made a lot of predictions about cryptocurrency and all of them were correlated, this went badly. I can hear the ghostly sound of Nassim Nicholas Taleb laughing at me.

The other thing that happened was that my partner unexpectedly broke up with me, changing all of my life plans and precipitating a move to a different house. Again, this was a black swan that affected a lot of correlated predictions. In this case, my move took a lot of money, which meant I didn’t have enough money to be worth investing, which means I didn’t bother doing any fancy financial planning like I had been dead set on doing in January 2018. I’m usually pretty good at following through on important things, so I was 95% sure I would get the financial planning done, but black swan = spend savings = no point in financial planning was something I hadn’t considered.

I’m not sure how to deal with those sorts of correlations here except to not make too many correlated predictions.

I’ll post my 2019 predictions later this week. If you’ve made some of your own, post a link in the comments and I’ll link them along with mine. And while you’re waiting, I also made some predictions last February for the next five years.

But Vanguard’s founder himself began to wonder if there wasn’t a problem, because just three companies now dominate index funds.

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