Jack

A judge has ruled that Broward County election officials violated Florida law by failing to report how many outstanding ballots they have in their possession. From the Miami Herald:

A Broward County judge ordered the county’s elections chief to turn over to Gov. Rick Scott’s campaign for the U.S. Senate an accounting of how many ballots were cast in the county, broken down by category, by 7 p.m. Friday.

Circuit Judge Carol-Lisa Phillips also held that Brenda Snipes, Broward’s supervisor of elections, was in violation of Florida public records laws for not turning the records requested by Scott’s campaign. She ordered Snipes to turn over the number of all ballots cast in the midterm election, including absentee, early voting and those cast on Election Day.

This is the result of a lawsuit filed Thursday by Rick Scott and the NRSC against Broward County Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes which said in part:

Voting in the 2018 General Election concluded November 6, 2018. Two days after voting has concluded, the Supervisor Of Elections is unwilling to disclose records revealing how many electors voted, how many ballots have been canvassed, and how many ballots remain to be canvassed. The lack of transparency raises substantial concerns about the validity of the election process.

This is an issue that Sen. Marco Rubio has been raising the alarm about on Twitter since Thursday morning.

#Broward election supervisors ongoing violation of #Florida law requiring timely reporting isn’t just annoying incompetence. It has opened the door for lawyers to come here & try to steal a seat in the U.S. Senate & Florida Cabinet
#Sayfie

6/6

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) November 8, 2018

#Florida law requires counties report early voting & vote-by-mail within 30 minutes after polls close. 43 hours after polls closed 2 Democrat strongholds #BrowardCounty & #PalmBeachCounty are still counting & refusing to disclose how many ballots they have left to count. #Sayfie pic.twitter.com/ReXCaOzkZP

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) November 8, 2018

For demanding that Broward adhere to state law, Rubio was accused of to trying to stop some votes from being counted.

When did I ask anyone to stop counting? And how is criticizing repeated election failures by same election official a fight to stop vote counting?

Why can’t #BrowardCounty elections do what 65 of 67 counties did, count all votes in timely way & in compliance with #Florida law? https://t.co/dtujSqotYG

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) November 9, 2018

Every vote legally cast should be counted. That’s the law

Have no problem with recounts. That’s the law.

But last early votes were cast Sunday & had to be submitted by Tue evening. That the law too.

Yet 48 hours after deadline #BrowardCounty is only county still counting them

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) November 9, 2018

This morning he kept going:

Early Voting in #BrowardCounty ended 108 hours ago. Every other county,including neighboring Miami-Dade (which had 100k more votes cast) was able to canvass,tabulate & report to state by deadline. But #Broward still hasn’t finished & won’t disclose how many ballots are left.

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) November 9, 2018

Finally, this afternoon, a short time before the judge’s ruling, Rubio posted another update thread:

Conduct of #BrowardElections office is in blatant violation of state law.

1. No early votes have been cast since Sunday. They had 2 days to tabulate them & submit to state by 7:30pm Tuesday as required by law. Yet as of latest update these are still only partially completed 2/4 pic.twitter.com/mmzJVZ6H5H

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) November 9, 2018

If #BrowardElections has some legitimate reason for why they have been unable to tabulate & report ballots they have had since Sunday night,like every other county did,they should disclose it. Instead they continue to operate under an indefensible shroud of secrecy. 4/4

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) November 9, 2018

Now a judge has agreed that Broward has violated the law and given them a few hours to rectify this, exactly as Rubio, Rick Scott, and the NRSC claimed. Maybe the media will take more interest in this dubious behavior by Broward County than they have so far?

Previously, she has made dairy products from the perspiration of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

Here is the full article.  And:

In one exhibition, [Sissel] Tolaas captured the armpit sweat of severely anxious men from Greenland to China, recreated their individual smells and painted them onto the walls of the installation. (“There was a composite odor of anxiety that just infused the whole room, and it was really unhinging,” said Howes, who saw it in Basel, Switzerland). After the smell of fear, Tolaas recreated the smell of violence from cage fighters in East London. She has recreated the scents of Berlin’s famed Berghain nightclub, New York’s Central Park in October, World War I, communism and the ocean. Her shows are immersive and emotional in a distracted world. They aim to grip audiences right by the lizard brain.

And:

Tolaas also invented 1,500 “smell memory kits” — abstract odors that have never been smelled before. When you want to remember an event, you open the amulet and inhale, sealing the moment in your emotional core. For the London Olympics, she made a Limburger cheese sourced from David Beckham’s sweaty socks, which was served to VIPs.

File under “Department of Why Not?”

Enlarge / Detective Wayne Hays (Mahershala Ali) investigates a missing persons case while haunted by his past. (credit: YouTube/HBO)

We'd almost forgotten about HBO's uneven crime anthology series True Detective. It had a fantastic first season, only to hemorrhage viewers with the abysmally dreary, disappointing second season. But now the series is coming back for season 3, and if the new trailer is any indication, it's a welcome return to form.

The brainchild of former lit professor and novelist Nic Pizzolatto, True Detective has always fostered a very literary, philosophical tone, and, shall we say, unhurried pacing. When it works, it's brilliant. Season 1 was set in the Louisiana Bayou, as Detective Rustin "Rust" Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and his partner Detective Martin "Marty" Hart (Woody Harrelson) tracked down a twisted serial killer with a fondness for leaving weird twig sculptures in the woods.

The spooky setting and strong chemistry between the lead actors pretty much ensured its success with viewers and critics alike. It was well-plotted to reel the viewer in, and the dialogue between McConaughey and Harrelson yielded some much-needed comic relief. (Only McConaughey could pull off those long, drawling abstract ruminations without everyone wanting to strangle him, his partner included.)

Some of the most heated races in the November election are for offices that most Californians know little about. Ask an average voter about the Orwellian-sounding Bureau of Equalization (BOE), and they'll look at you with an eyes-glazed-over stare reminiscent of a cat's gaze after you ask whether it prefers tuna or turkey giblets. Likewise, how many voters can tell you why the race for insurance commissioner is so important?

The BOE races don't really matter. The tax board used to be fairly important, but the Legislature recently stripped it of most of its powers. Those elections mainly are about who gets a sinecure while they contemplate other offices. But the election of insurance "czar," as some rightly call it given the vast powers held by the head honcho at the Department of Insurance, holds real significance given its impact on insurance markets and the cost of your premiums.

The choice of commissioner is fascinating. Both candidates are highly accomplished, which offers a clue that this is not a placeholder job. They have different philosophies and personalities. Democrat Ricardo Lara of Bell Gardens is one of the Senate's most liberal members—an advocate for single-payer health insurance and one of the more entertaining personalities in the Capitol. Steve Poizner has a low-key demeanor. He was a Bay Area tech entrepreneur and was a moderate Republican insurance commissioner from 2007-2011. He is running this year with "No Party Preference."

The horse-race aspect is getting the most attention. Most polls show Poizner with a decent lead, although there's a sizable chunk of undecideds given the lack of overall attention paid to this office. If Poizner wins, he will be the first non-party-affiliated candidate elected to statewide office in California's history. "I really, really want to stay out of partisanship," he told CALmatters. "If I can win, that will open the door to lots of other people who will run for office."

Supporters of the top-two primary system see his possible success as a vindication of their reform, which elevates the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, to the general election. Their goal is to break the party stranglehold. That makes for a headline-grabbing political-reform story, but my interest centers on the importance of the office itself. Bottom line: California regulates insurance in such a ham-fisted way that it makes it tough for insurers to offer creative new products that meet market needs and to offer the most-competitive pricing to consumers.

The regulatory heavy approach, whereby the commissioner has to approve all proposed rate changes, sometimes leads insurance commissioners into highly political forays. For instance, outgoing commissioner Dave Jones used his power to try to prod insurance companies to divest from investments in coal-based energy, which was a vast stretch of the department's power to meddle in private investments. Jones also was viewed by critics as being too close to trial attorneys, who receive fees from the rate-approval ("intervenor") system.

This convoluted system goes back to 1988, when voters approved Proposition 103. As the Department of Insurance explains, the initiative capped rates and "requires the 'prior approval' of California's Department of Insurance before insurance companies can implement property and casualty insurance rates. Prior to Proposition 103, automobile, property and casualty insurance rates were set by insurance companies without approval by the insurance commissioner."

In our market economy, companies offer products at different prices and the buyer chooses. Prices are kept in line thanks to competition. There's a legitimate role for regulation, mainly to make sure the businesses live up to their promises. That traditionally is the main role of state insurance commissions. They need to assure that insurance companies have the financial resources to pay out the coverages in the event of disaster. But voters instead implemented a government-controlled rate system.

Suffice it to say, there are myriad and vital insurance issues hobbled by the voter-imposed model. For instance, the commission needs to modernize its regulatory approach so that companies can offer new lines of insurance that help businesses thrive. They need to allow a more competitive market, which is what ultimately keeps prices low and coverages high. They need to deal with our earthquake-insurance mess and wrestle with issues related to wildfires.

The candidates' ballot statements offer insight into their approaches. Poizner points to the "urgent issues" in the state's insurance markets. He strikes an activist pose, by discussing efforts he took in his past term to protect the public from being "shortchanged" by insurers. Lara's statement explains his approach with simplicity: The job "is really about two things—making sure that insurance is priced fairly and that if we ever need to use it, our claim will be handled fairly."

I have no voting advice to offer here, but would urge Californians to spend some time thinking about this rarely-thought-about race and department. Surprisingly, it's one of the more important races that you'll decide in November.

This column was first published by the Orange County Register.

Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. He was a Register editorial writer from 1998-2009. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.

Washington is at the top of “the terrible 10” states with the most regressive state and local tax systems, according to a report released this month by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

“These states ask far more of their lower- and middle-income residents than of their wealthiest taxpayers,” according to the institute.

This isn’t new news. My colleague Gene Balk wrote about the subject in April, highlighting a report from the Seattle-based Economic Opportunity Institute. That report found Washington taxation hardest on the poor, with Seattle the worst offender.

That is from Jon Talton, via Mike Rosenberg.

Interesting and substantive throughout, here is one bit:

Syverson: In general, we think companies that do a better job of meeting the needs of their consumers at a low price are going to gain market share, and those that don’t, shrink and eventually go out of business. The null hypothesis seems to be that health care is so hopelessly messed up that there is virtually no responsiveness of demand to quality, however you would like to measure it. The claim is that people don’t observe quality very well — and even if they do, they might not trade off quality and price like we think people do with consumer products, because there is often a third-party payer, so people don’t care about price. Also, there is a lot of government intervention in the health care market, and governments can have priorities that aren’t necessarily about moving market activity in an efficient direction.

Amitabh Chandra, Amy Finkelstein, Adam Sacarny, and I looked at whether demand responds to performance differences using Medicare data. We looked at a number of different ailments, including heart attacks, congestive heart failure, pneumonia, and hip and knee replacements. In every case, you see two patterns. One is that hospitals that are better at treating those ailments treat more patients with those ailments. Now, the causation can go either way with that. However, we also see that being good at treating an ailment today makes the hospital big tomorrow.

Second, responsiveness to quality is larger in instances where patients have more scope for choice. When you’re admitted through the emergency department, there’s still a positive correlation between performance and demand, but it’s even stronger when you’re not admitted through the emergency department — in other words, when you had a greater ability to choose. Half of the people on Medicare in our data do not go to the hospital nearest to where they live when they are having a heart attack. They go to one farther away, and systematically the one they go to is better at treating heart attacks than the one nearer to their house.

What we don’t know is the mechanism that drives that response. We don’t know whether the patients choose a hospital because they have previously heard something from their doctor, or the ambulance drivers are making the choice, or the patient’s family tells the ambulance driv­ers where to go. Probably all of those things are important.

It’s heartening that the market seems to be respon­sive to performance differences. But, in addition, these performance differences are coordinated with produc­tivity — not just outcomes but outcomes per unit input. The reallocation of demand across hospitals is making them more efficient overall. It turns out that’s kind of by chance. Patients don’t go to hospitals that get the same survival rate with fewer inputs. They’re not going for productivity per se; they’re going for performance. But performance is correlated with productivity.

All of this is not to say that the health care market is fine and we have nothing to worry about. It just says that the mechanisms here aren’t fundamentally different than they are in other markets that we think “work better.”

Here is the full interview, via Patrick Collison.

Icelanders bought 47% fewer books in 2017 than they did in 2010, a very sharp decrease in a matter of only six years. In a recent poll in Iceland, 13.5% of those who responded had not read a single book in 2017, compared to 7% in 2010.

Iceland has a wonderful tradition of giving books as Christmas presents, with people reading into the night on Christmas Eve. However, even this may be under threat: in 2005, an Icelander received an average of 1.4 books as gifts at Christmas; this number is now 1.1, with 42% of Icelanders not receiving a single book for Christmas according to the most recent poll…

Recent research shows an alarming rise in students under 15 struggling to read their own language. And they are picking up English at a much faster pace than before – it is not strange to hear them speaking it in the playground.

Here is the full story.

He is one of my favorite actors, so I was pleased to read this:

Chow Yun Fat plans to give his entire net worth of $714m to charity.

As reported by Jayne Stars, Hong Kong movie legend Chow Yun Fat will give his entire net worth of $5.6 billion HKD ($714m USD) to charity.

Despite his gargantuan wealth, Fat remains rather frugal. Only spending $800 HKD ($1o2 USD) per month, Fat is often seen taking public transport and doing charity work.

He used his first Nokia phone for over 17 years, only switching to a smartphone two years ago. Fat is known for shopping at discount stores. “I don’t wear clothes for other people. As long as I think it’s comfortable, then it’s good enough for me,” he said.

Fat often spends his free time hiking and jogging, instead of splashing out.

Here is the full story, via the excellent Benjamin Copan.  And if you don’t know his performances in The Killer, a John Woo film, now is the time to check it out.

Just 8 percent of Brazilians told the Pew Research Center in 2017 that representative democracy is a “very good” form of government – the lowest of all 38 countries surveyed.

Most of the article is about what we can expect from Jair Bolsonaro, sometimes called “the Brazilian Trump,” who is very likely to be Brazil’s next president, recommended and interesting throughout.

Here is the audio and transcript, here is part of the summary:

Tyler sat down with Krugman at his office in New York to discuss what’s grabbing him at the moment, including antitrust, Supreme Court term limits, the best ways to fight inequality, why he’s a YIMBY, inflation targets, congestion taxes, trade (both global and interstellar), his favorite living science fiction writer, immigration policy, how to write well for a smart audience, new directions for economic research, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: In your view, how well run is New York City as an entity?

KRUGMAN: Not very. Compared to what? Actually, I like de Blasio. I actually think he’s done some really good things. What he’s done on education, and even on affordable housing, is actually quite substantial. But the city is so big and the problems are so large that people may not get it.

I will say, it is crazy that you have a city that is so dependent on public transportation, and yet the public transportation is not actually under the city’s control and has clearly been massively neglected. I don’t suffer the full woes of the subway, but I suffer some of them, even myself.

The city could be run better than it is, but it’s certainly not among the worst-managed political entities in the United States, let alone in the world.

And:

COWEN: Will there ever be interstellar trade in intellectual property? You send your technology to a planet far away. It arrives much later, of course. Or you trade Beethoven to the aliens in return for a transporter beam? Can this work? You’ve written a paper that seems to indicate it can work.

KRUGMAN: I wrote a paper on the theory of interstellar trade when I was an unhappy assistant professor. Are there any happy assistant professors? [laughs] I was just blowing off steam. But it’s an interesting question.

COWEN: It could become your most important paper, right? [laughs]

KRUGMAN: We could imagine that there would be some way. We’d have to find somebody to trade with, although it’s the kind of thing — if you try to imagine interstellar trade for real in intellectual property — it’s probably the kind of thing that would be more like government-to-government exchanges.

It sounds like it would be really, really hard, although some science fiction writers are imagining that something like Bitcoin would make it possible to do these long-range . . . I don’t think something like Bitcoin is even going to work here.

Krugman also gives his opinions on Star Wars and Star Trek and Big Tech and many other matters.  Interesting throughout…

Hyperallergic: A Banksy artwork “self-destructed” at a Friday night Sotheby’s auction in London.

“Girl with a Balloon” (2006) was the final lot of the evening sale at Sotheby’s and ended things off with an impressive final price of £953,829…

Robert Casterline of Casterline Goodman gallery was in attendance and told Hyperallergic what happened next. He explained there was “complete confusion” and an “alarm inside the frame started going off as the gavel went down.”

“[It] sold for over a million dollars and as we sat there…the painting started moving,” he said, and added that the painting’s frame, also made by Banksy, acted as a shredder and started to cut the canvas into strips. “[It was] all out confusion then complete excitement,” he explained.

Anny Shaw of the Art Newspaper spoke to Alex Branczik, the auction house’s head of contemporary art for Europe,  who seemed as surprised as anyone.

Banksy is a genius.

Via Hetherington and Weiler, via Jonathan Haidt.

Video shot and edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

Back in February, I got very excited about the Cadillac CT6 sedan. It didn't handle better than its competitors. It wasn't faster or better put-together. But it did come with Super Cruise: a cutting-edge semi-autonomous driving assist that combines HD mapping and a proper driver monitoring system. Super Cruise is geofenced, so it only works on divided lane highways—and only when it knows you're looking at the road ahead, thanks to that driver monitoring system. That made it the best such system on the market—yes, even better than Tesla's Autopilot—and it seems Consumer Reports agrees. On Thursday it published its first-ever ranking of semi-automated driving systems, putting Super Cruise in at the top.

The proliferation of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) across the auto industry has been quite a thing to watch. Some features are there for driver convenience, like adaptive cruise control and lane keeping. Others—collision warning or emergency braking for example—are more consciously safety features. But the rollout can also be a bit bewildering, particularly when it comes to relative performance. The problem is that comparative testing is easier said than done, at least without the right resources.

Sascha Segan

Android smartwatches may be about as dead of a form factor as Android tablets, but that isn't stopping OEMs from continuing to pump out these little packages of wrist-mounted sadness. The latest is LG's "hybrid" smartwatch, the Watch W7, which one-ups the usual Wear OS hardware package by slapping physical, analog watch hands on top of the display.

The watch hands look great in LG's press renders, which only ever show the watch face, but if you try to use any of the "smart" capabilities of your smartwatch, you'll quickly realize how bad of an idea this is. The physical watch hands constantly obscure the display, making it difficult to see the text and buttons on your smartwatch. To make matters worse, the watch hands need to connect to the requisite gearing in the body of the watch, so there's also a sizable hole in the center of your tiny 1.2-inch display. To make matters even more worse, the layout has the display, then the watch hands, then the glass cover, so there's a large air gap between the display and the display cover. As we learned in early smartphone designs, not bonding the display to the cover negatively affects display brightness and contrast.

Bush: Whatever you want.