LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Car Hackers Could Harness Dealerships to Spread Vehicle Malware.
Archive for 2015
October 7, 2015
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: 5 Ways Self-Driving Cars Will Upend the Economy. The parasite sector based on traffic fines will be no loss.
HIGHER EDUCATION’S IDIOCY SPREADS TO THE AMERICAN LAW INSTITUTE: Better Sex Through Criminal Law: Proxy Crimes, Covert Negligence, and Other Difficulties of “Affirmative Consent” in the ALI’s Draft Sexual Assault Provisions.
IN THE MAIL: Edited by Mark L. Van Name, Onward, Drake!
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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 881.
MEGAN MCARDLE: The Gig Economy Is Piecework. But This Isn’t Dickens.
I confess, I’m not clear on what the problem is. Manual labor in the Victorian era was not primarily awful because it involved short-term contracts; it was awful because the jobs were grim, the pay was low, and injured workers frequently ended up destitute. Getting paid $25 an hour for doing something much more pleasant than scrubbing floors with caustic chemicals does not tug at my heartstrings in the same way.
I also find it hard to worry that Uber, or Amazon Flex, is going to develop dangerous dominance in the market for people driving stuff around in their cars. “People driving stuff around in their cars (including passengers)” is a market with very low barriers to entry, which is why taxi firms have invested so much in lobbying for laws, and powerful regulators, to protect them from competition. Network effects can, of course, create barriers to entry — but in a business where the only requirement is a personal vehicle and a skill that almost every American adult possesses, those effects are unlikely to be enough to allow any company to abuse either customers or workers for very long.
Network effects are most powerful where switching costs are very high. If I’ve paid $300 for a VCR, and a bunch more for VHS tapes, I’m unlikely to be interested in converting to your Betamax format. If I’ve paid several thousand for a PC and assorted software, and stored a lot of work in formats specialized to those programs, it’s going to be tough to convince me to go over to an entirely new system. By contrast, what’s the switching cost for an Uber user? I might sprain my thumb trying to open a new app? Even the switching costs for drivers are relatively minimal. Which means that no firm in this business is going to be able to enjoy substantial monopoly rents, because if they do, some bright entrepreneur with a modicum of capital at their disposal is going to dive in and compete them away.
The real concern, I think, is that these jobs will become substitutes for better jobs: more stable, better paid. This is obviously going to concern left-wing commentators, many of whom have already expressed worry that the “gig economy” is bad for American workers.
That may be. But that rests on the hidden, and so far unproven, assumption that the gig economy is in fact displacing workers by driving down the value of the work they do, rather than creating new economic activity that simply wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for these apps — and possibly in the process providing work for workers displaced from other industries, for reasons that have nothing to do with Uber or Instacart.
Read the whole thing.
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AND NOW, A FEW WORDS ON “INCOME INEQUALITY” FROM NOTED ECONOMIST GWYNETH PALTROW:
“Your salary is a way to quantify what you’re worth. If men are being paid a lot more for doing the same thing, it feels shitty.”
She also brought up the difference in wages between her and “Iron Man” co-star Robert Downey Jr.
“Look, nobody is worth the money that Robert Downey Jr. is worth,” she says. “But if I told you the disparity, you would probably be surprised.”
Wow, who knew that the Obama-voting Democrats who control Hollywood boardrooms were so sexist? (Of course, perhaps they’re simply taking their cue on this issue from Obama himself.)
Of course, as the proprietor of the Celebslam gossip blog snarks:
Gwyneth, contrast these two sentences:
“I saw Iron Man because of Robert Downey Jr.”
“I saw Iron Man despite Gwyenth Paltrow.”
Who should be paid more? If you want the same amount of money as Robert Downey Jr., you should have threatened to pull out of the fil–annnnnnnnd you’re replaced. See how easy that was? Robert Downey Jr. makes a shitload more than you because he puts asses in the seats, while you’re just a tiny interchangeable part. STFU.
No — let her scream as much as possible. Gwyenth’s rant is a reminder that the reason why so many Hollywood lefties have a particularly skewed view of capitalism is largely a result of the economic distortions and rapaciousness inherent in their own highly idiosyncratic profession.
NOW THEY TELL US: OBAMA’S VICE PRESIDENT IS “GRIM NEWS FOR FEMINISM,” SAYS SLATE.
Wait’ll Slate discovers his boss’s mixed record on this topic; which they’ll likely get to sometime in late January of 2017.
(As Ron Fournier tweets, “These David Brock oppo dumps just might bait @VP into the race.” By the way, will Biden surrending his @VP address in January of 2017?)
SO ANOTHER OBAMA PRONOUNCEMENT TURNS OUT TO BE CRAP: Zero correlation between state homicide rate and state gun laws. Correlation isn’t causation — but here there’s not even correlation.
TED CRUZ QUESTIONS SIERRA CLUB PRESIDENT AARON MAIR ON CLIMATE CHANGE:
If the earth is warming, it’s largely due to the steam emerging from Mair’s ears. After he exhausts his boilerplate talking points, Mair is reduced to acting like he’s ready to scream, “Goracle Coordinate! Goracle Coordinate! Goracle Coordinate!”, by the end of the clip.
DRIP, DRIP: FBI probe of Clinton e-mail expands to second data company. “The additional data, provided by Connecticut-based Datto Inc., could open a new avenue for investigators interested in recovering e-mails deleted by the former secretary of state — now the Democratic presidential front-runner.” Read the whole story to see how the WaPo’s Tom Hamburger and Rosalind S. Helderman spin this as Republicans vs. Hillary rather than Hillary vs. Justice.
NAOMI KLEIN’S THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING PROVES CONSERVATIVE CRITICS OF ENVIRONMENTALISM ARE RIGHT:
This Changes Everything, the movie version of Naomi Klein’s bestselling book by that title, is a moment of astonishing candor on the environmentalist left. For decades, conservatives have argued that environmentalism is a cover for centrally managed economies, wealth redistribution, and intrusive government regulations. Klein comes out and says that indeed, environmentalism is exactly that. Conservative critics, she says in so many words, “are right.” Climate change is an opportunity to write “a new story.”
Jettisoning millennia of accumulated knowledge and “Starting From Zero,” to coin a phrase — hey, it’s sure to work this time.
Related: “It’s becoming springtime for dictators,” Joel Kotkin warns in the Orange County Register, referring to Jerry Brown, Barack Obama and other leftists who love radical environmentalism as a useful mechanism to end-run the checks and balances of democracy.
LIFE IN OBAMA’S AMERICA: “CEOs who cannot cap a leaky oil well or who sell noxious peanut products go to jail; EPA functionaries who turn white-water rivers into toxic yellow mush melt back into the coils of the bureaucracy.” Accountability is for the little people.
MILO YIANNOPOULOS: Feminists Call The Cops When I Show Up. Here’s Why.
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Bill Lifting Crude Oil Export Ban Contains $500 Million Earmark for Labor Unions.
DEFINING AMBIGUOUS SEX AS RAPE, as explored by Ashe Schow at the Washington Examiner:
And yet, colleges and universities across the country are being told to determine whether such a “dance of ambiguity” — as Tavris quotes from social psychologist Deborah Davis — is indeed rape. And they are being incentivized by the federal government to find that it is.
But Tavris also reminds readers that accusations born of such ambiguity may not represent malice on the part of the accuser. In these situations, both accuser and accused are providing “honest false testimony” and both believe they are telling the truth, even though their memories and interpretations may be wrong.
“When trying to reduce sexual assault, labeling all forms of sexual misconduct, including unwanted touches and sloppy kisses, as rape is alarmist and unhelpful,” Tavris concludes. “We need to draw distinctions between behavior that is criminal, behavior that is stupid and behavior that results from the dance of ambiguity.”
In response, Stacy McCain asks the most important question left unanswered by Schow: “So, what is this ‘ambiguous sex’ kids are having at college nowadays?”
To paraphrase Monty Python, I’ve heard of ambiguous sex, but I’ve never had it.
SPELUNKING IN THE MEMORY HOLE: Jesse Walker: Why Was There a 12-Year Gap in the Gun Debate? What happened to gun control from 2000 to 2012? Funny you should ask…
When Hillary Clinton unveiled her plans for new gun controls yesterday, she sounded a nostalgic note for her husband’s years in the White House. “There are a lot of ways for us to have constitutional, legal gun restrictions,” she said. “My husband did. He passed the Brady bill, and he eliminated assault weapons for 10 years. So we’re gonna take them on. We took them on in the ’90s. We’re gonna take them on again.”
Some voters, listening to this, might wonder whether anyone was taking “them” on after the ’90s ended. The short answer is: not really. Oh, the anti-gun lobby was still around, and they would occasionally send me lonely-sounding press releases. And some fights still flared up over local laws, with two of those battles making it to the Supreme Court. But as far as national politics were concerned, there was a great gap in the gun debate: a period of more than a decade when Washington did not see a significant push for new restrictions on the right to bear arms.
As with any historical period, we can argue about when exactly this started and stopped. But if precise dating is your thing, you can say it began on November 7, 2000, and ended on December 14, 2012. The first is the day Al Gore failed to carry his home state of Tennessee, a loss many observers blamed—along with his losses in several other swing states—on his support for stricter gun laws. The second is the day of the Sandy Hook massacre.
Well, 2012 is also the year the Democrats basically wrote off the possibility of recapturing the South, and decided instead to focus on minority voters. Plus:
Pleasing as this may sound to some parts of the Democratic coalition, other activists on the left have been wary. Bill Clinton’s gun controls were tightly linked to his tough-on-crime posturing; indeed, by driving Republicans to oppose what was presented as law’n’order legislation, they were a classic case of Clintonian triangulation. His assault weapons ban, a law generally regarded as having no notable impact on crime rates, was embedded in the crime bill of 1994, a law that did so much to amp up incarceration that the former president eventually apologized for its effects. His Gun-Free Schools Act, also passed in 1994, helped launch the era of zero tolerance and the school-to-prison pipeline. Basically, the Clinton-era anti-gun rhetoric that this year’s candidates have been reviving overlapped heavily with the Clinton-era carceral policies that the candidates have made a big deal of rejecting. And the more the party’s leaders flirt with ideas like an Australian-style confiscation of weapons, with all the intrusive policing that would require in a gun-loving culture like America’s, the more that tension will look like a full-fledged contradiction.
Indeed.
THE CHEWBACCA DEFENSE COMES TO POLITICS:John Kasich: Medicaid Expansion Is Type of Policy that Could Reduce Mass Shootings.
Related: “John Kasich renews push for strict ‘green energy’ mandates.”
Between Trump and Kasich, I’m happy that there are more Democrats in the race to offset the far left rantings of Bernie and Hillary. But when will they join the other party and make it official?
YEAH, PRETTY MUCH: The Authoritarian Left Is Getting Comically Desperate. “The answer is simple: identity politics is in crisis. At the popular level, it is being rejected by an increasingly overwhelming majority of the population. Meanwhile, at the academic level, the old 1960s theories that long sustained left-wing radicalism are on their last legs.”