Disclaimer: I am a man, and this article is written with respect to the development of my understanding of the issue While both men and women can and should have a say in such a philosophical debate, a woman will probably have given more thought to a matter that directly affects her.
I am neither “Pro-choice” nor “Pro-life”. A year ago, after changing my opinion on the matter for a fourth time, I realized that the issue was so complex such that I didn’t know enough to defend a particular opinion. From my experiences, I don’t think there are many people who do. Yet, reasoned discussion is stonewalled by the adamant insistence on the most basic and simple reasoning of each perspective.
Most libertarians can identify that the key arguments surrounding abortion are based in conflict between two human rights: the right of life and the right to one’s body. This conflict is not elucidated by objective science, but by subjective philosophy. If a fetus or embryo is a life, then ending it could be morally wrong, but if not, then restricting a woman’s control over its viability could be morally wrong.
However, abortion goes beyond these foundation arguments. Some assert that even if a fetus is alive, it is similar to someone on a life support system, only the support system requires another’s body. Many would agree that being obligated to lend your body to a sick person is wrong; however, the fact that a fetus is brought into existence in this situation presents a possible exception. If a child were born in such a way that it was connected to other being, and needed to be so to continue life, would severing the connection not be an act of killing?
On the other hand, a “Pro-life” objection to the traditional “Pro-choice” argument asserts that even if a fetus is not a life, terminating its development into a life is immoral. One argument for this, presented by philosopher Don Marquis, asserts that ultimately, killing a person is wrong because it deprives them of a future, and abortion is wrong on the same grounds. However, this has been countered by questioning if, by the same logic, a killing a sperm or egg would be wrong as well.
These arguments, presented simply in this flowchart, only scrape the surface of the complex issue of abortion. They all have their own rebuttals and counter-rebuttals, and they don’t even begin to address utilitarian arguments or exceptions for rape, incest, or the mother’s life. However, by presenting some of the complexities, I believe I have illustrated the complexity of issues to be considered before being able to justifiably claim oneself as “Pro-choice” or “Pro-life”
It’s incredible how simple and yet revolutionary the principles are behind effective altruism as well as the ideas behind GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy Project; if you want to help people, don’t just donate to a charity that is looking to cure a rare disease, donate in a way that can do the maximum amount of “good” per dollar. That often means donating to a problem that affects many people, that has known, measurable, positive solutions, and that has lots of room for additional resources to combat the problem. If you don’t know about those organizations, you should definitely check them out.
Of course, there is an obvious elephant in the room when it comes to effective altruism: politics is complex, unscientific, and unpopular. In fact, GiveWell largely sidesteps the political sphere, ignoring a big swath of human activity which has tremendous impacts on society. Of course, they have good reason to do this; it allows them to focus on doing good things without harming anyone’s tribal identities or alienating their donor base. Moreover, it’s hard to get good unbiased data on what political policies would actually provide benefits; if there was, politics wouldn’t be so divisive.
However, I don’t have a donor base, and I have slightly different feelings on which policies would be most effective than the average American or even the average effective altruist. I wanted to see what would happen if we could assume away some of the unknowns about political policy. Let’s assume that the postlibertarian philosophy this blog espouses is correct: markets are pretty good at allocating resources efficiently, government policy can help address some economic areas where markets might not work (inequality, externalities), giving the state power is generally a bad thing and must be justified, and individuals should have robust protections from their government. We aren’t assuming away the current political landscape of the US, we’re just assuming we’re right.
So what would a libertarian trying to maximize efficiency in advocacy do? Do you try and emulate the Koch brothers and create or fund political organizations that change policy outcomes? Do you focus on viable candidates? How much do you accept the political process as given? Do you focus on political reforms (proportional representation), education (IHS, Economics of Library and Liberty), or do you try to work on making your own rules (crypto, seasteading, space exploration)? Let’s leave those hard questions for another time, and focus on perhaps the most mainstream approach to politics: how should you prioritize the importance of various political issues? People usually have specific issues they care about that determine which candidate they’d like to back, and the Open Philanthropy Project even has a U.S. policies page. But which issues are actually the most important? Continue reading Efficient Advocacy
Gary Johnson selected former Republican Massachusetts Governor William Weld to be his running mate. This was pretty surprising for Libertarians considering Weld isn’t really a well-known libertarian guy. Obviously, the Johnson campaign hoped not to repeat the failings of Jim Gray who was essentially unknown to the national media. During the Libertarian Party convention this weekend, the delegates selected both Gary Johnson and Bill Weld opting for pragmatism rather than party purity. This is some election year when the libertarians are more reasonable than the Republicans and Democrats.
With 2 former Republican governors on the ticket, the Libertarian Party is now poised to be a real third party alternative. This could be a huge year for them, even if they don’t win. Remember, from our archives, if you reach 5% of the popular vote in a presidential election, you are entitled to real money in the next cycle (the irony of Libertarians accepting Federal handouts not withstanding).
Nicholas Kristof has a follow up to his column “A Confession of Liberal Intolerance” where he condemned the intolerance of progressives especially in the university. Apparently, the left universally scoffed at the thought of tolerating conservatives…which essentially confirmed his point.
The EFF is shutting down their canary watch program after a year. I have previously discussed the importance and usefulness of warrant canaries. It seems the EFF has decided it isn’t worth the effort to keep track of all the notices because they seem to change too much from post to post. These aren’t bad reasons, but it is a little concerning. It seems likely that you’ll just have to stick to the default that any website you visit has received national security letters asking for information.
Jason Brennan at Bleeding Heart Libertarians on the difference between Ignorance, Misinformation, and Irrationality in democracies. Essentially ignorance isn’t exactly the problem in democracies, since if everyone is equally ignorant, then the non-ignorant people will be able to make rational decisions; there is no bias for the ignorant people since they have no opinion. Misinformation can be a problem though, if most people are misinformed, they will make poor decisions. But even if people are misinformed, having a deliberative discussion will help as rational logic should triumph. But irrationality is a serious problem, since even discussions would just spread more misinformation. This relates to the thesis of Bryan Caplan’s book The Myth of the Rational Voter (Wikipedia, full text for free). I look forward to reading Brennan’s new book, iconoclastically titled Against Democracy.
Tangentially related: John Oliver has a segment on the flaws of the primary system. Unfortunately, he sort of glosses over the assumption that they need to be more democratic, but do they? He says this time we “got lucky” in that the candidates with the most votes were the ones actually chosen, but we need to change things in the future. I disagree; the candidates we did choose are awful. If the system is working now, making it work better won’t help anything. Check out my previous post for more on this, and forward it to John Oliver if you get a chance. Better than reforming the primary system, let’s try making more parties more viable with some proportional representation in the House of Representatives!
Why Bernie doesn’t quit: Polisci 101 analysis of Bernie Sanders’ intentions. Basically, he wants to stop Hillary from turning towards the center, since he wants the Democratic party to be very a progressive Social Democrat party. This is also the reason that anyone who’s not a Social Democrat wants Bernie out of the race.
Ilya Shapiro at the Cato Institute, who knows his stuff pretty well, called Donald Trump’s list for replacing Justice Scalia’s SCOTUS seat “exceptional”. This is good news in that a Trump presidency would at least have this going for it. I don’t know if all this would make him a better choice than Clinton, but it is a big deal, at least to me. Doubtful if this alone would be enough to unite all Republicans around him.
Nick Gillespie has two solid blog posts. One is a great overview of a recent Foreign Relations Committee Hearing and the constrasting views of Marco Rubio and Rand Paul. Paul, we should note, won his primary to stand for reelection for his Kentucky Senate seat. This should largely guarantee his victory (PredictIt doesn’t have a market yet but PredictWise has it at 90% Republican). The other post discusses how Obama’s new overtime regulations are going to harm workers by reducing hours, workers, or both.
Meta-blog post. Do you need more economics blogs? Here is a giant list of them. They’re vaguely ordered by popularity, and you shouldn’t just dismiss it because Paul Krugman is first; there’s a lot of good blogs I didn’t know about.
Dylan Matthews at Vox makes the case for getting rid of the TSA. Doesn’t even mention the financial cost savings (their budget is $8 billion, and cost of time is at least that).
All the Scott Alexander: Apparently good kindergarden teachers have massive effects on income decades later, but no lasting effect on test scores. There really bizarre studies and all I can tell is that education research is hard.
Scott also has a great post on his experience in the Irish health system, related to the UK junior doctors’ strike. There are serious barriers to entry to the US medical system because the benefits are so high if you become a doctor. In UK, this is not true, since the state regulates how much doctors can make, so of course many doctors are leaving the UK and Ireland for places where the pay is less regulated. Scott says he’s not sure how to solve labor disputes, but if you have a freer market in hiring and payment, you don’t end up having labor disputes. The American system has problems as well, and if the barriers to entry could be reduced
Apparently non-technical people don’t know this, but Craig Wright isn’t Satoshi Nakamoto. He had an “exclusive” interview with several media outlets discussing how he was really the inventor of Bitcoin. But if you read the story pretty quickly, you notice he doesn’t provide a signature with Satoshi’s private key (the reddit and Hacker News threads found he stole a signature from a transaction in one of the early blocks), and he doesn’t move any of Satoshi’s money to a publicly declared account. Those are very easy ways to prove he is Satoshi Nakamoto, and he didn’t do them, instead relying on some weird demonstration directly to a journalist. I would have guessed most people would have figured he was lying (he has a weird history as well), especially because Satoshi Nakamoto has gone to great lengths to protect his identity, and this guy is clearly trying to get attention. But several news outlets printed it as true. Gavin Andresen, the lead developer of Bitcoin, has declared that he has seen proof, but he hasn’t told us what the proof is. But you shouldn’t need a really famous person to vouch for someone’s identity, that’s the whole point of Bitcoin; decentralized proof is easy and clear.
The outcome is monumental, but only because the courts have previously erred significantly and ruled that APIs are copyrightable at all. The Supreme Court had refused certiori to examine that ruling of an Appellate court, which in turn was a reversal of a District court decision (EFF has all the details). Interestingly, this most recent case was heard under the original judge, so it’s quite possible the Appellate Court will reverse again. I think it’s crazy to suggest that API names are even copyrightable, but given that they’ve been ruled as such, I can’t see how use of APIs isn’t fair use.
Google didn’t copy Oracle’s code; they rewrote it themselves, but used the same name for the code functions, and then packaged it into a much better product than anything Oracle had created. And it’s not like this negatively impacted Java’s market viability (contrary to what Oracle claims); Android likely saved Java from becoming a defunct language used only in big enterprise environments. Younger aspiring developers want to program in languages for apps and new web technologies like Ruby, Node, Swift, and even Python. But the only new reason to know Java is because Android exists; if Android had picked Python, that’s what everyone would be learning to make Android apps. It’s ridiculous.
But more fundamentally, the use of API names can’t be restricted! That defeats the whole purpose of having them! Sure, Twitter has the right to restrict the calling of functions on their servers through their APIs, but the actual name of the REST calls isn’t theirs forever now. Steve and Leo on Security Now said it very well about APIs:
It’s driving a car. If we didn’t have a single uniform car/driver interface, meaning brake and accelerator, and this is how the steering wheel works, it would be a disaster. And as I thought about this more, I realized that this notion of standards is what this comes down to. And standards are such a part of our life that it’s even – it’s almost hard to appreciate the degree to which we depend upon them. I mean, think about even threads, you know, nuts and bolts with standard threading. If everyone just made up their own, so that screws were not interchangeable, it would just be a catastrophe.
I would go even further; a steering wheel is a patentable invention that other car companies would have to pay to use…but calling it a “steering wheel” isn’t something you can restrict. Doing so would be a blatant misuse of copyright and horrific reduction in free speech. Steven Gibson continued:
And, I mean, so I guess my real complaint is that Oracle has historically benefited from the spread and the use of Java. And so because they allowed that to happen, it’s done as well as it has. And suddenly now Google has capitalized on it, and they’re wanting to take their marbles back and to say – or basically, essentially, this is a $9.3 billion lawsuit. So they’re saying we want some of the revenue which Google is obtaining as a consequence of doing a far better job in commercializing and leveraging Java for profit than we ever could. Because all we’re doing is telling everyone to get Java out of their computers…
…The BIOS is another perfect example. The fact that IBM gave us an interface called the Basic I/O System allowed all kinds of programs to be written without regard for whether it was, for example, a color graphic display or a monochrome graphic display. They were completely different. They occupied different hardware regions. Yet the BIOS hid those differences so that a program didn’t have to worry about what type of hardware you had. And that was an API, a standard. But just in general this kind of standardization, you can sort of imagine sort of a Mad Max post-cataclysm world where you no longer have standards, and everyone’s thing is just made from scratch, and they’re not – nothing’s interoperable. And it would just be a bizarre place.
And I think one of the major things that the Industrial Revolution did was it taught us the power of interoperability. And here Oracle is trying to say, yeah, we’re going to get a toll for you using something that we purchased and never figured out how to use.
I’ve said it in the past, and I’ll keep saying it: the purpose of all intellectual property law is not to help the owners of intellectual property, but rather to promote creativity and new works. Ruling that API names are copyrightable does literally nothing to promote interoperability or improve technology; it only makes it harder to improve the world. Getting this fair use ruling is better than nothing, but it should never have come to this.
Photo credit: Android Lineup by Rob Bulmahn, licensed under CC-BY-2.0.
Now that we basically have our two major candidates, let’s do a retrospective look at some of the political candidates our system was able to produce, reject, or approve over this election cycle. Let’s start with Republicans.
In early 2015, the prevailing wisdom was that Hillary Clinton was going to be the Democratic nominee. She looked like a strong candidate but one with a low ceiling; she had great name recognition and experience, but also was (and is) tied to the Obama administration, especially its foreign policy. I’d argue she’s appeared even weaker over the course of the primaries than she did in 2015 as big swaths of Democrats have shown hesitation to embrace her candidacy. Given this situation, Republicans should have been able to come up with candidates that played well against Hillary; what they got is someone who (as of May 2016), isn’t very competitive. If only there had been someone else to pick from!
It’s rare when an idea, or piece of evidence, comes along that is so impressive, it forces you to rethink your entire model of the world. The recently released Feinstein-Burr encryption bill has done just that.
It has been described as “technically illiterate”, “chilling”, “ridiculous”, “scary”, and “dangerous“. Not only are the issues with the bill fairly obvious to anyone with a cursory understanding of encryption, the problems are of such magnitude that it thwarts any attempt to understand the Senators’ actions. Let’s look at the effects of the hypothetical law.
The biggest issue is that this bill will significantly damage the United States’ national security. We live in a highly insecure world where cyberattacks, both foreign and domestic, are omnipresent. The Feinstein-Burr bill would fundamentally reduce the security of all technology infrastructure in the country. Jonathan Zdziarski in a blog linked above, gives some details:
Due to the backdooring of encryption that this legislation implies, American electronics will be dangerously unsafe compared to foreign versions of the same product. Diplomats, CEOs, scientists, researchers, politicians, and government employees are just a few of the people whose data will be targeted by foreign governments and hackers both while traveling, but also whenever they’re connected to a network.
That’s awful, and even if you have the most America-first, protect-American-lives mentality, weakening American encryption is the worst thing you could do; it literally endangers American lives.
I think there’s also a strong case to be made that this will do very little to combat terrorism. Unbreakable, strong encryption is widely available on the internet for free, forever; if bad people want to use it, they will. Moreover, terrorism, as awful as it is, is relatively rare; Americans are about a 1000x more likely to die non-terrorism related homicide. And many more “common” homicides occur due to heat-of-the-moment arguments, which means there would be no encrypted messages detailing conspiracies. All this bill does is remove the ability of average, non-technically inclined Americans to secure their data.
And the people whose data will be most at risk will be those consumers who are less educated or less technically adept. Better informed consumers might have the ability to install foreign encryption software on their phone to keep their data safe, but most uninformed consumers just use default settings. Thus, criminals who try and commit identity theft will greatly benefit from this legislation; they wouldn’t usually bother targeting knowledgeable users anyway, and with security stripped away from phones, it will be much easier to steal data from susceptible users. The people most in need of help to protect their data will be disproportionately harmed by this legislation.
On the other hand, most companies are not uniformed users. They have IT departments who understand the value of encrypting their data, and they will continue to purchase strong security software, even if it is no longer sold in the United States. Foreign produced software works just as well. Banning strong encryption will debilitate the American technology sector, one of the biggest and most important parts of the economy. This will cost Americans jobs and diminish America’s influence on the future of the world, as technological innovation moves overseas. But this isn’t just bad for Americans; it’s not easy to simply move an entire company or product overseas. There are huge capital investments these companies have made that will not be available in other countries immediately, if ever, and this will set back the global technology industry billions if not trillions of dollars.
So this really begs the question of why Senators Dianne Feinstein and Richard Burr introduced this bill; given their stated obsession with national security, and given the horrific effect this bill would have on American national security, there’s no good way to resolve their stated beliefs with their actions. Here are a couple theories to explain their behavior, and some discussion as to why each respective theory is unsatisfying.
The Senators are actually foreign spies purposefully trying to weaken American national security. Obviously, if this theory is true, it’s self-evidently very bad that our elected officials not only don’t represent us, but actually represent foreign governments likely trying to harm Americans. Sure it’s quite unlikely since it’s very difficult to become a U.S. Senator at all, and no spy agency would send agents in with a plan to become a U.S. Senator. Whether they were turned into foreign agents after being elected, I really can only speculate. But it strikes me as improbable. Nonetheless, it is true that this legislation is exactly what foreign security agencies would want to introduce to make the United States more vulnerable. I was curious, so I checked the constitutional definition of treason as well as the Espionage Act, but it seems that you need to literally give secrets to other people, not just make it easier for them to obtain. But there is that one case where a high ranking official is in trouble for storing documents insecurely…
They’re power hungry politicians. The idea of the Senators being foreign spies is bit far-fetched. But what know for sure is that they are politicians, which means they chose a career path that would give them more power to change things. Maybe Burr and Feinstein are sick of technology companies telling the FBI that they can’t assist their investigations, and they wanted to put them in their place. If this theory is true, it’s pretty self-evidently evil; people in power using their power indiscriminately to harm citizens is the exact problem Thomas Jefferson identified in the Declaration of Independence. Of course, it’s not usually a big problem, because James Madison helped construct a whole host of ways to check the power of government. Of course, the most important check for our situation is that senators are voted in by the people. So as long as people know about this dumb bill, they’ll kick these guys out…right?
Hanlon’s Razor (origin disputed) states that one should “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” This theory would mean that two sitting, highly experienced U.S. Senators are too stupid to realize the ill effects this will have on national and economic security. Obviously, congress has to make laws in areas that its members are not always familiar with…but Burr and Feinstein are the chair and vice chair, respectively, of the Intelligence Committee. If anyone knows about intelligence, they do. And Feinstein is even on the Judiciary Subcomittee on Technology, Privacy, and the Law! If even these people are too stupid to understand what the effects of their own policies are, we might as well stop sending representatives to a legislature at all and just have run-of-the-mill uneducated voters pass everything directly through referendum. Sure, they’d have no idea what they’re doing, but apparently neither do Senators!
What I think is most likely, and most terrifying, is that American Democracy incentivizes members of Congress to make bad policy if it’s politically beneficial. With all the aides and staff Senators have, plus the amount of pressure they receive from outside groups, it seems unlikely they never heard about the bad effects of the bill. Yet, they did it anyway. Given they don’t work for law enforcement, there is no Frank Underwood endgame for passing this bill; banning encryption doesn’t directly allow Burr and Feinstein to look at their political enemies’ phones (…probably), just criminals and the police. So then maybe their incentive was to appear tough on crime and terrorism, consequences be damned. Richard Burr is in a reelection year in North Carolina, so let’s look at the effect this horrible bill has had on his chances to win according to Predictit.org:
Primary was in mid-March, bill introduced in early April
As you can see, the bill had very little effect on his perceived chances. Now, it could be that voters have already factored in Senator Burr’s position on destroying defending American national security, and he needed to introduce this legislation to maintain his position. But it looks identical to a situation where North Carolina voters couldn’t care less about Senator Burr’s position on encryption, and his introduction of legislation consequently had no effect on his reelection chances. If it’s the former, then we are in serious trouble because our legislative representatives are incentivized to make horrible policies because voters aren’t well informed. If it’s the latter, then we have to dismiss this explanation and go back to one of the other three.
Whatever the explanation is, it reflects poorly on how the government constructs policy, and it reflects poorly on American Democracy. Moreover, assuming any of those discussed theories are true, they imply massive issues that will be difficult or impossible to solve. Reforming democracy as many progressives would like, through campaign finance, wouldn’t even address any of these issues; it is the technology corporations and privacy NGOs which have been advocating for more privacy and making unbreakable encryption more accessible, while law enforcement and other government agencies have been advocating for less security. But as far as I can tell, even they haven’t demanded anything like this bill. Thus, more campaign spending by private groups would help, not hinder good policy.
No matter how you look at it, this bill indicates a big failure for democratic government and illustrates the dangers discretionary state power.
Tesla Motors announced their newest car, the Model 3, is now available for pre-order. It’s always been Tesla’s stated purpose to bring down the cost of electric vehicle dramatically, by first charging people for high end cars, and using those profits to innovate the cost of cars down to affordable levels for the general public. It’s an admirable goal that combines the best intentions with good incentives, using idealism to drive profits.
Tesla has, confusingly, sold 3 models of cars prior to the Model 3: the early Tesla Roadster (all over $109k price), the ultra-luxury sedan Model S (starting price at $76k, but most sell at over $100k), and the newer Model X SUV (about $5000 more than the Model S). Few Model X’s have been shipped, and only about 2500 Tesla Roadsters were ever built. The vast majority of Tesla’s automobiles have been Model S’s between 2012-2016. In that 4 year span, roughly 107,000 cars have been sold worldwide, with about 63,000 in the United States.
Making matters worse, Tesla has said they expect to start shipping at the end of 2017. Some analysts say that Tesla will ship about 12,000 cars in 2017 and another 60,000 in 2018. But this might be optimistic, since Tesla was supposed to start building the Model X last year, but only got a couple hundred out the factory before January.
Tesla will get better at manufacturing, but they are not ready to switch from the high end market to the mass market (or as mass market as a $35,000 base model). The Tesla “master plan” is not ready to attack this level of the market yet, but that’s not to say it isn’t successful in other ways; as Ben Thompson wrote: “The real payoff of Musk’s ‘Master Plan’ is the fact that Tesla means something.” In fact it means so much that the demand for a $35k Tesla in 2017 is something like 10x predicted supply! Tesla should take advantage of this.
The obvious economic answer to quantity demanded outstripping quantity supplied is to raise the price. Scaling Tesla’s manufacturing output to new heights is not going to be easy, but it will be easier with additional resources. And Tesla could use some additional resources (they lost about $300 million in 2014). Right now, people will be waiting around for their cars for years. Why not take some more from people who want a car sooner, so that more innovation can be done to help the people on the back-end? That’s Tesla’s whole plan anyway. Creating an affordable family car that you can only make 50,000 of every year doesn’t help many families!
Now, of course, it’s true that some of the appeal of Tesla is that they are trying to transform the auto industry, and if they charge more for the Model 3, one could argue they aren’t as transformational as they claim. But I’d counter with Thompson’s comparison to Apple, in that the Tesla brand itself is drenched in cool. Tesla’s brand is quite valuable, and the best way to help humanity with that brand is to push harder for innovation.
An awesome, widely available $35,000 electric car will come, but for now, Tesla has the opportunity to marshal more resources to build a better future; it would be silly to not take advantage of that.
Photo Credit: “Candy Red Tesla Model 3”, is a derivative of this photo by Steve Jurvetson, used under CC BY 2.0. “Candy” is licensed under CC BY 2.0 by Mariordo.
I’ve settled on the right way to show the date in these links posts: the international standard ISO-8601. It’s about time since that has been the standard since 1988.
Niskanen center names social justice aware libertarianism as “neoclassical libertarianism“. I like this idea, as it’s strictly superior to progressivism, and I’ve been trying to come up with a good name for it. Scott Alexander called it left-libertarianism-ist, which just isn’t as catchy. Of course, maybe pure libertarianism is better, but neoclassical liberalism is far more politically palatable. It is also more “conservative”, meaning that it is closer to the status quo.
Merrick Garland would not be a good SCOTUS justice. Randy Barnett discusses with Reason why he opposes Garland’s nomination: he’s completely deferential to executive and legislative authority and does not protect individual rights from the state. Does it make sense for the Senate to not give him a hearing? Maybe, maybe not. Did it make sense to declare prior to his announcement that any candidate wouldn’t get a hearing? Hard to say; if that hard line approach made Obama nominate an old white guy who endorses state power in the name of national security, that’s certainly a win for neoconservatives. I don’t think anyone should take an outrage stance on the Supreme Court opening because this really is a complicated game theory situation with nested layers of strategy. Even though I’m sure he is one of the most un-libertarian nominees ever, it’s impossible to say if he would be worse than a Hillary appointee or even a Trump appointee.
Heard through Slate Star Codex, anti-censorship blog Status 451 (linked in the sidebar) held a fund-raiser for LambdaConf, a functional programming conference I had no idea existed until a week ago. Apparently, after an anonymous analysis of submitted papers, the Lambdaconf organizers selected a paper to be presented at the conference by Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug, perhaps the most well known neo-reactionary. Certainly I think neo-reactionaries are a bit nuts, but Mr. Yarvin has also invented the intriguing functional programming language Urbit. We don’t agree with him politically, we can learn and grow our knowledge by understanding what he has to say, especially in technological areas he is an expert in! Alas, as Eric S. Raymond recounts, the social justice movement did not see it that way and pressured LambdaConf to remove Yarvin from the event. Lambdaconf refused and the activists moved to forcing sponsors to drop out. Incredibly, Status 451 started an indiegogo campaign to save LambdaConf, which was funded within the day. This is a big victory for anyone who wants to live in a tolerant, knowledgeable, and free society, but if you want to know their motivations firsthand, please read what they have to say. Status 451 are also true believers, calling out some on the right for their similarly censoring response.
Bryan Caplan on liberalizing expertise and the link with defending free speech from the attacks of economic licensing.
A great write up on derivatives, what they are, how they work, and why it’s misleading to suggest that the derivatives market has a quadrillion dollars in risk.
Apparently the music industry thinks the DMCA doesn’t do enough to stop copyright infringers (more on the RIAA at TorrentFreak). It seems they’d like to target the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA, the only parts of it that are useful. Techdirt has a great series of posts from the other side, detailing the many abuses of DMCA takedown notices. Right now, there is no legal check on whether a takedown request comes from someone who actually owns the copyright, or even if that copyrighted work is utilized fairly for criticism or commentary. This isn’t an easy problem to solve by any means, but we should remember that the point of copyright is to encourage production of new works, and if there’s anything that YouTube does right is making it easier to create new content. Moreover, it’s helpful to remember that YouTube is run at a loss of more than $150 million a year. Trying to force YouTube to pay for content policing is one of the dumber ideas they’ve ever had, which is saying something. So what should be done instead? A good start would be to make false copyright claims a criminal offense, and require you to prove you own the copyright in the claim. It would also be good if it turned out your copyright claim was wrong, the ad-money would not go to the claiming part, but would be held in escrow until the dispute is resolved. This would allow YouTube to better focus on actual infringers and stop the torrent of false claims. Of course, another big looming problem for the RIAA is Facebook video, which doesn’t even have the semi-transparent (though flawed) takedown-notice system of YouTube. Ultimately, given how little money YouTube makes after 10 years on the internet, if YouTube was allowed to be held liable for infringing uploads, YouTube would either go out of business, or cease becoming a free platform anyone could use. This would be a monumental failure of the copyright regime; yes, it might end up getting RIAA members more money, but that is not the purpose of copyright. Copyright exists to help make new content, not destroy content platforms.
California is raising its minimum wage, eventually to $15 an hour. FiveThirtyEight’s Ben Casselman is excited at least to get some data on large minimum wage hikes, although judging from the headlines, it seems like he thinks this is a good idea. I’m fairly confident it is not, and Matt Zwolinski makes one good point to support me: the minimum wage doesn’t fight poverty. There’s a lot of data surrounding the minimum wage. And it’s apparent that unemployment does not automatically rise when minimum wage increases occur. Nonetheless, longer term unemployment effects are essentially impossible to study, and it’s likely there are some effects on businesses. If businesses could absorb 20-40% increases in labor costs easily, then why aren’t businesses getting more out of their employees, or more firms entering the business due to excess profits? There is evidence of long term job growth being harmed, as well as higher prices (see last link). Ultimately, I predict there will be negative consequences for California, but it’s hard to find something that is worth predicting. I could predict that California’s employment and workforce participation rate will be lower than the country average by more than they are now (check this in the future). It’s also likely that low cost goods will see price increases, but I don’t have an easy way to check that over the next five years.
GiveWell tries a new tactic to persuade more people to fund their top researched causes: ” First of all. Just so you understand, this guy is a total loser. He begged me to be his peer reviewer, I said ‘NO THANKS.’ Pathetic!”
I recently came across a fascinating legal concept called warrant canaries. I’m going to cover the idea briefly, but if you want to know more about them in detail, I highly recommend this Warrant Canary FAQ at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The context is that many online services based in the United States can be compelled by the FBI to give whatever information they have to law enforcement through National Security Letters. Those documents often gag the companies from informing their customers they are being spied on, even if the service is being provided specifically so that users can get encrypted, private communication. It’s hard to pin down the exact constitutionality of NSLs. They were ruled unconstitutional in 2013, but it looks like the case was remanded in 2015 after the passage of the USA Freedom Act. Given the government’s continued efforts to obtain information regardless of constitutionality and limitations placed on them by Congress, it would be nice if we had some way to communicate if a service was under duress from the government.
The usefulness of warrant canaries (I’ll get to what they are in a moment) is based on two legal concepts: (1) it’s not illegal to inform anyone of a warrant you haven’t been served, and (2) the state cannot compel false speech.
The first statement is common sense, since you can’t be curtailed from simply stating something hasn’t happened yet. The second is a bit more subtle; a stronger statement is that the state cannot compel speech at all, but that’s not always true. The state can sometimes compel commercial speech to inform consumers of information so they can make accurate decisions. The EFF elaborates that “…the cases on compelled speech have tended to rely on truth as a minimum requirement”.
This is essential because it allows companies with encryption products to convey highly relevant information to their customers. Companies can publicly post a message indicating they have not received a warrant because of the first legal concept, and they can immediately take down their public message when they do receive a warrant because the state cannot compel false speech.
To ensure the authenticity of the message stating that the given company has not been subject to a NSL, many go an extra step and sign their messages with a PGP key (example here).
Of course, a foolproof way to ensure no data is lost is to simply make all data encrypted, like Apple has with the iPhone, ProtonMail does for email, and everyone who has ever sent encrypted emails has been doing since the 90s. But I still like this idea, because individuals who run encryption services should not be forced to be government puppets, like the FBI hoped to do to Ledar Levison.
The weakness is that we don’t know what we don’t know, so it’s possible the government already has a new Secret National Security Letter which it uses to compel companies to lie under some made up interpretation of an arcane piece of legislation. The only real security is end-to-end encrypted communication or being Hillary Clinton.
Scott Alexander has a new post on happiness and economic growth. There must be a name for this paradox, because it’s blindingly obvious if you think about it: Right now, compare your life to the life of 100 years ago, given your current standing in society. Your life right now is way better, you have time to spend on internet learning and debating about ideas in ways you couldn’t dream of 100 years ago. You have better food choices, longer life expectancy, better pop culture, more stimulating interests, far easier communication with distant relatives, and so on. And yet, the exact same thing will be said about our lives compared to the lives of those who live 100 years in the future. Sure, those lives will be better, but I don’t know how much that bothers us today unless we really think about it. Most people are pretty excited to live today at the frontier of human knowledge, and we don’t see it as a loss that we don’t have cheap self-driving cars and instant delivery groceries for low cost.
But yet, when you do think about it, we hate sitting in traffic or having to go to the store to pick something up, and we wish we had technologies that could get rid of those inconveniences. Yet, I bet people in the future will just have other errands they hate doing just like we hate sitting in traffic. But they will be inconveniences for future people who are tolerating them so that they can do even more awesome things that we can’t imagine, just like people 100 years didn’t sit in traffic because they didn’t own cars at all.
It’s very confusing. On a personal scale, obviously it would be ridiculous to complain about your current standing, because future technologies haven’t been invented yet. So of course everyone is pretty satisfied with what technology level they live in. Yet, our lives are obviously better for having these technologies. How do we reconcile this?
In the last month, I’ve often thought that the closest president we’ve had to Donald Trump is Andrew Jackson; Trump is a loud-mouthed, populist who falls outside of the mainstream party system, yet has significant support from non-elites and were despised by the elites themselves. This is also the perfect description for Andrew Jackson, who was so successful in this movement, he founded the Democratic Party. David Friedman comes to the same conclusion via a different route.
That last link caused me to run into a real problem with Donald Trump and Andrew Jackson grammatically. One subject is dead and one is alive, so what is the proper verb tense to use? Stack Exchange suggested this, which is honestly kind of lame.
Scott Sumner discusses socialism and France. He makes a short argument that France sounds like a pretty good model country for modern socialism: high amount of skilled civil servants, broad support for socialist policies, a willing government to implement them, and a modern, developed economy. Yet, Bernie Sanders supporters often reach for the Nordic countries rather than France as the big-welfare state (“socialist”) ideal. Why is French socialist policy somewhat of a political flop, while Nordic countries are idealized? And would a Bernie-America look like Denmark or maybe better, or perhaps more like France, or even worse? Given the size and diversity of America’s population and economy, France seems closer than Denmark, although both are closer to each other than the US. The only socialistic countries of comparable size seem to be the China and the Soviet Union which have forms of socialism even Bernie Sanders would abhor. Mostly.
Bryan Caplan also has a good discussion of libertarian critiques of welfare. Matt Zwolinski has a good counter post. I like the idea of bleeding heart libertarianism, or market liberalism or whatever, so I think Caplan’s critiques are pointed at exactly what I believe, which is excellent! You always want to have your beliefs critiqued by smart people. I think Caplan is right on many of his points, but I feel like my views are more politically practical. Voters obviously want some form of welfare for the poor, and at least that part could be done more efficiently with my ideas.
This is a good write up on the decentralized crypto-currency-ish entity Ethereum; Reason also did a recent video on it. Very soon I’ll be able to explain to people what it actually does. Right after I’ve figured out how to install it. If you want to learn about it without me, here is Ethereum’s website.
Fact checking Trump on trade. Why do we talk about trade deficits? I have no idea why they matter. Is it a problem if I buy a phone from Apple and I live in New York instead of California? Is there now a trade deficit between New York and California since I sent money out of my local community? No, nobody cares. And for the US, it’s even less relevant, since those dollars that US citizens spent have to come back to the US to be redeemed for goods and services. It would be like if I paid for my iPhone in New York dollars that had to come back to New York. I’m a free trade proponent, but I’m not deaf to some concerns people might have about trade, but this is one of the worst anti-free trade arguments you could make.
You must be logged in to post a comment.