Quotulatiousness

July 31, 2013

Even police chiefs can get racially profiled

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:17

An absolutely fascinating story in the New York Daily News. (It’s from several years back, but brought to my attention today by Radley Balko):

At least one cop has been disciplined for ordering the NYPD’s highest-ranking uniformed black officer out of his auto while the three-star chief was off-duty and parked in Queens, the Daily News has learned.

“How you can not know or recognize a chief in a department SUV with ID around his neck, I don’t know,” a police source said.

Chief Douglas Zeigler, 60, head of the Community Affairs Bureau, was in his NYPD-issued vehicle near a fire hydrant when two plainclothes cops approached on May 2, sources said.

One officer walked up on each side of the SUV at 57th Ave. and Xenia St. in Corona about 7 p.m. and told the driver to roll down the heavily tinted windows, sources said.

What happened next is in dispute.

The congressional defenders of privacy

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:12

Jacob Sullum in Reason:

“This is not a game,” Mike Rogers angrily warned last week, urging his colleagues in the House to vote against an amendment that would have banned the mass collection of telephone records by the National Security Agency (NSA). “This is real. It will have real consequences.”

I hope Rogers is right. Despite the Michigan Republican’s best efforts to portray the amendment as a terrifying threat to national security, it failed by a surprisingly narrow margin that could signal the emergence of a bipartisan coalition willing to defend civil liberties against the compromises supported by leaders of both parties.

Rogers was not surprised by the recent revelation that the NSA routinely collects information about every phone call Americans make, just in case it may prove useful in the future. As chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, he knew about the program for years, and he had no problem with it.

Not so two other Michigan congressmen: Justin Amash, a 33-year-old libertarian Republican serving his second term, and John Conyers, an 84-year-old progressive Democrat first elected in 1965. These two legislators, conventionally viewed as occupying opposite ends of the political spectrum, were outraged by the NSA’s data dragnet, especially since representatives of the Bush and Obama administrations had repeatedly denied that any such program existed.

The measure that Amash and Conyers proposed as an amendment to a military spending bill would have required that records demanded under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which authorizes secret court orders seeking “any tangible things” deemed “relevant” to a terrorism investigation, be connected to particular targets. Although it was a pretty mild reform, leaving in place the wide powers granted by Section 215 while repudiating the Obama administration’s even broader, heretofore secret interpretation of that provision, the amendment was viewed as a quixotic effort.

“What LEED designers deliver is what most LEED building owners want – namely, green publicity, not energy savings”

Filed under: Business, Environment, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:24

A bit of LEED debunking at The New Republic:

When the Bank of America Tower opened in 2010, the press praised it as one of the world’s “most environmentally responsible high-rise office building[s].” It wasn’t just the waterless urinals, daylight dimming controls, and rainwater harvesting. And it wasn’t only the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum certification — the first ever for a skyscraper — and the $947,583 in incentives from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. It also had as a tenant the environmental movement’s biggest celebrity. The Bank of America Tower had Al Gore.

The former vice president wanted an office for his company, Generation Investment Management, that “represents the kind of innovation the firm is trying to advance,” his real-estate agent said at the time. The Bank of America Tower, a billion-dollar, 55-story crystal skyscraper on the northwest corner of Manhattan’s Bryant Park, seemed to fit the bill. It would be “the most sustainable in the country,” according to its developer Douglas Durst. At the Tower’s ribbon-cutting ceremony, Gore powwowed with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and praised the building as a model for fighting climate change. “I applaud the leadership of the mayor and all of those who helped make this possible,” he said.

Gore’s applause, however, was premature. According to data released by New York City last fall, the Bank of America Tower produces more greenhouse gases and uses more energy per square foot than any comparably sized office building in Manhattan. It uses more than twice as much energy per square foot as the 80-year-old Empire State Building. It also performs worse than the Goldman Sachs headquarters, maybe the most similar building in New York — and one with a lower LEED rating. It’s not just an embarrassment; it symbolizes a flaw at the heart of the effort to combat climate change.

[…]

“What LEED designers deliver is what most LEED building owners want — namely, green publicity, not energy savings,” John Scofield, a professor of physics at Oberlin, testified before the House last year.

Governments, nevertheless, have been happy to rely on LEED rather than design better metrics. Which is why New York’s release of energy data last fall was significant. It provided more public-energy data for a U.S. city than has ever existed. It found the worst-performing buildings use three to five times more energy per square foot than the best ones. It also found that, if the most energy-intensive large buildings were brought up to the current seventy-fifth percentile, the city’s total greenhouse gases could be reduced by 9 percent.

Vikings training camp in full swing … and evil genius Rick Spielman is proven right again

Filed under: Football, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:58

The Vikings are at their off-site training camp in Mankato this week, and the various fan blogs are doing a great job of covering the event (especially The Daily Norseman which has bloggers accredited and attending all open sessions). 1500ESPN has filled the void left when the great Tom Pelissero moved on to USA Today‘s sports department with Andrew Krammer (to team up with Judd Zulgad), while the main ESPN coverage is by Kevin Seifert. I hit my “maximum number of articles viewed” limit at the Minneapolis Star Tribune earlier this week, so the coverage from the St. Paul Pioneer Press is filling that gap for me until rollover.

I know most of you don’t much care for sports chatter, so I’ll put the rest of this post behind the curtain…

(more…)

July 30, 2013

The economic inefficiency of “fair trade” goods

Filed under: Business, Economics, Food — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:26

Tim Worstall applauds you for wanting to use some of your economic surplus to help out the poor and less fortunate producers of various goods in the developing world, but points out that the “fair trade” method is incredibly inefficient at funnelling any of that extra money to the original producers of your coffee or other “fair trade” goods:

However, you might want to have a little think about this in the lights of these quite astonishing numbers:

    An interesting statistic is that in 2010, retail sales of fair-trade-labelled products totalled about $5.5 billion, with about $66 million premium — or about 1.2 percent of total retail sales — reaching the participating producers. There has to be a better way of helping poor farmers. Having only 1.2 cents out of every dollar spent on fair-trade products reach the target farmers is a hugely inefficient way of helping these people. If people wish to help these farmers there has to be charities out there that can transfer more than 1.2 cents per dollar to them.

It may well be that you are exercising your consumer choice as a way to make the world a better place. It’s just an incredibly inefficient method of doing so and thus you might want to reconsider that plan.

My own supposition is that the reason Fair Trade is so appallingly inefficient is the number of Interchangeable Emmas who have to be paid from that money supposedly going to producers. It takes very many poor coffee farmers’ incomes to pay for the PR bod advertising Fair Trade coffee from an office in central London. It might well be better to simply do as Madsen urges, and buy things made by poor people in poor countries. Then send the money saved by not paying the Emmas off to a charity of some minimal efficiency. Or even, if coffee farmers are really your thing, simply drink an extra cup or two a day and send the money by increasing demand for their production.

Update: In a marginally related item, Jonathan Katz explains why the policy of sending food to distant lands is less an attempt to ameliorate hunger than it is a corporate welfare policy to prop up US agribusiness:

The problem, says Christopher Barrett, an economist at Cornell University and one of the world’s leading experts on food aid, is that the U.S. has an entirely different goal when it comes to sponsoring humanitarian assistance. Feeding the hungry has never been its sole purpose.

Rather, the historical goal of food aid has been to stimulate U.S. businesses — the agriculture and shipping industries above all. Modern food aid was devised in the early days of the Cold War as a way to dispose of government-held surpluses, in order to regulate crop prices at home and create markets abroad. The main programs in the early days of food aid didn’t even give food away for free, rather selling it to foreign governments at a discount. “It just happened that this could get advertised as and provide humanitarian relief on occasion,” Barrett said.

Over time, things began to change. Surplus disposal became less important than other forms of domestic price control, and the cheaply sold food did not prove very effective in opening markets. When in the 1970s and 1980s, food donated during famine emergencies in Asia and Africa proved effective, free-food distributions took over as the dominant programs.

Today, the major players in food aid are nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as World Vision. But, because of how American laws are structured, domestic corporations still reap the much of the profit. Major U.S. agribusinesses can count on hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales to the government.

Shipping companies do even better. Federal law mandates that at least half of all U.S. food aid must be shipped aboard U.S.-flagged vessels. With shipping costs taking up nearly 40 percent of any food assistance funding, the law guarantees hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts for shipping companies. The winner of the Mozambique shipment was no exception: Sealift Inc. has grossed $203 million in government contracts since 2011, mostly from the Pentagon, according to data at USASpending.gov. This benefit is not lost on the shipping industry: The sector’s leading coalition, USA Maritime, spent $250,000 lobbying Congress on food aid and cargo-preference laws in 2011 and 2012.

The real, long-term source of damage to American interests from the NSA revelations

Filed under: Business, Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:10

In The Atlantic, James Fallows explains why the NSA’s digital overreach has likely harmed US long-term interests in many different ways:

In short: because of what the U.S. government assumed it could do with information it had the technological ability to intercept, American companies and American interests are sure to suffer in their efforts to shape and benefit from the Internet’s continued growth.

    American companies, because no foreigners will believe these firms can guarantee security from U.S. government surveillance;

    American interests, because the United States has gravely compromised its plausibility as world-wide administrator of the Internet’s standards and advocate for its open, above-politics goals.

Why were U.S. authorities in a position to get at so much of the world’s digital data in the first place? Because so many of the world’s customers have trusted* U.S.-based firms like Google, Yahoo, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc with their data; and because so many of the world’s nations have tolerated an info-infrastructure in which an outsized share of data flows at some point through U.S. systems. Those are the conditions of trust and toleration that likely will change.

The problem for the companies, it’s worth emphasizing, is not that they were so unduly eager to cooperate with U.S. government surveillance. Many seem to have done what they could to resist. The problem is what the U.S. government — first under Bush and Cheney, now under Obama and Biden — asked them to do. As long as they operate in U.S. territory and under U.S. laws, companies like Google or Facebook had no choice but to comply. But people around the world who have a choice about where to store their data, may understandably choose to avoid leaving it with companies subject to the way America now defines its security interests.

Update: Also in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s revelations, you’d think that Senator Ron Wyden would get the credit he clearly has been deserving all this time:

For many, many years we’ve covered Senator Ron Wyden’s seemingly quixotic attempts to signal to the American public (and press) that the NSA was doing a hell of a lot more surveillance than most people believed, even those who were carefully reading the laws. Because secrecy rules meant that he couldn’t directly reveal what he’d learned while on the Senate Intelligence Committee, he had to issue vague statements, documents and speeches hinting at things that were going on that he couldn’t actually talk about. Of course, now that Ed Snowden leaked a bunch of documents, it’s shown that Wyden was absolutely correct in what was going on (and that the American public wouldn’t like it).

You’d think that would lead people to have a lot more respect for the incredible efforts he went through to alert people to these issues without breaking the secrecy laws. And, in fact, many more people are aware of those efforts. The Washington Post has a nice article about Wyden’s attempts to bring these issues out and to get a real debate going on them.

However, towards the end, the reporter talks to two different former top lawyers at the NSA, who both appear to be really, really angry about Wyden daring to suggest to the public that the NSA wasn’t playing straight with the American public. First up, we’ve got Stewart Baker, the former NSA General Counsel and top Homeland Security official, who is so anti-civil liberties and pro-surveillance that he’s almost a caricature of himself — including claiming that the Boston bombings prove that Americans need less privacy and that civil libertarians complaining about too much surveillance are the real cause for the September 11 attacks.

The return of “lawful access”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:56

Michael Geist on the Canadian implications of some information that was published in a Buzzfeed article about a Utah ISP and the NSA’s installation of a “little black box” in their network:

The article describes how a Foreign Intelligence Service Act (FISA) warrant allowed the NSA to monitor the activities of an ISP subscriber by inserting surveillance equipment directly within the ISP’s network. The experience in Utah appears to have been replicated in many other Internet and technology companies, who face secret court orders to install equipment on their systems.

The U.S. experience should raise some alarm bells in Canada, since the now defeated lawful access bill envisioned similar legal powers. Section 14(4) of the bill provided:

    The Minister may provide the telecommunications service provider with any equipment or other thing that the Minister considers the service provider needs to comply with an order made under this section.

That provision would have given the government the power to decide what specific surveillance equipment must be installed on private ISP and telecom networks by allowing it to simply take over the ISP or telecom network and install its own equipment. This is no small thing: it literally means that law enforcement (including CSIS) would have had the power to ultimately determine not only surveillance capabilities but the surveillance equipment itself.

While Bill C-30 is now dead, the government may be ready resurrect elements of it. Earlier this month, a cyber-bullying report included recommendations that are lifted straight from the lawful access package.

Was Caligula the victim of a historical smear campaign?

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

I confess, my views on Emperor Caligula (formally Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus) were almost completely informed by the character in the novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God by Robert Graves. BBC News Magazine‘s Mary Beard thinks Caligula got a fearful load of bad press:

Of course, there had been some very nasty monarchs and despots before Caligula. But, so far as we know, none of his predecessors had ever ticked all the boxes of a fully fledged tyrant, in the modern sense.

There was his (Imelda Marcos-style) passion for shoes, his megalomania, sadism and sexual perversion (including incest, it was said, with all three of his sisters), to a decidedly odd relationship with his pets. One of his bright ideas was supposed to have been to make his favourite horse a consul — the chief magistrate of Rome.

Roman writers went on and on about his appalling behaviour, and he became so much the touchstone of tyranny for them that one unpopular emperor, half a century later, was nicknamed “the bald Caligula”.

But how many of their lurid stories are true is very hard to know. Did he really force men to watch the execution of their sons, then invite them to a jolly dinner, where they were expected to laugh and joke? Did he actually go into the Temple of the gods Castor and Pollux in the Roman Forum and wait for people to turn up and worship him?

It is probably too sceptical to mistrust everything that we are told. Against all expectations, one Cambridge archaeologist thinks he may have found traces of the vast bridge that Caligula was supposed to have built between his own palace and the Temple of Jupiter — so it was easier for him to go and have a chat with the god, when he wanted.

So the idea that Caligula was a nice young man who has simply had a very bad press doesn’t sound very plausible.

All the same, the evidence for Caligula’s monstrosity isn’t quite as clear-cut as it looks at first sight. There are a few eyewitness accounts of parts of his reign, and none of them mention any of the worst stories.

No revisionist slant on Caligula is complete without a few nasty cracks directed towards kindly old Uncle Claudius:

More topical though is the question of what, or who, came next. Caligula was assassinated in the name of freedom. And for a few hours the ancient Romans do seem to have flirted with overthrowing one-man rule entirely, and reinstating democracy.

But then the palace guard found Caligula’s uncle Claudius hiding behind a curtain and hailed him emperor instead. Thanks to Robert Graves, Claudius has had a good press, as a rather sympathetic, slightly bumbling, bookish ruler.

But the ancient writers tell a different story — of an autocrat who was just as bad as the man he had replaced. The Romans thought they were getting freedom, but got more of the same.

Considering what happened then, it’s hard not to think of the excitements and disappointments of the Arab Spring.

July 29, 2013

“Junk food costs as little as $1.76 per 1,000 calories, whereas fresh veggies … cost more than 10 times as much”

Filed under: Economics, Food, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:35

Making a case for the McDonald’s McDouble as the greatest food in human history:

What is “the cheapest, most nutritious and bountiful food that has ever existed in human history” Hint: It has 390 calories. It contains 23g, or half a daily serving, of protein, plus 7% of daily fiber, 20% of daily calcium and so on.

Also, you can get it in 14,000 locations in the US and it usually costs $1. Presenting one of the unsung wonders of modern life, the McDonald’s McDouble cheeseburger.

The argument above was made by a commenter on the Freakonomics blog run by economics writer Stephen Dubner and professor Steven Leavitt, who co-wrote the million-selling books on the hidden side of everything.

Dubner mischievously built an episode of his highly amusing weekly podcast around the debate. Many huffy back-to-the-earth types wrote in to suggest the alternative meal of boiled lentils. Great idea. Now go open a restaurant called McBoiled Lentils and see how many customers line up.

But we all know fast food makes us fat, right? Not necessarily. People who eat out tend to eat less at home that day in partial compensation; the net gain, according to a 2008 study out of Berkeley and Northwestern, is only about 24 calories a day.

The outraged replies to the notion of McDouble supremacy — if it’s not the cheapest, most nutritious and most bountiful food in human history, it has to be pretty close — comes from the usual coalition of class snobs, locavore foodies and militant anti-corporate types. I say usual because these people are forever proclaiming their support for the poor and for higher minimum wages that would supposedly benefit McDonald’s workers. But they’re completely heartless when it comes to the other side of the equation: cost.

Update, 30 July: Stephen Dubner notes that the Kyle Smith story has triggered “about one zillion” media requests for more comment on the original post, but that he’s too busy writing to take time out to respond.

Spanish border guards stage virtual blockade of Gibraltar

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:18

The Spanish claim to Gibraltar is being pursued by other means, it would seem:

Spanish police stopped every one of 10,000 vehicles leaving Gibraltar for the mainland yesterday, causing six-hour traffic jams in the latest escalation in the standoff over the Rock.

Officers from the Royal Gibraltar Police were forced to impose diversions and create beachside holding areas as Spanish authorities ‘choked’ the border, causing massive tailbacks in 30C heat.

It was the second day that border guards had blocked links to the mainland, in a move that seemed calculated to bring Gibraltar to a standstill.

[…]

Most recently Spanish fishermen sparked a stand-off with the Royal Navy as they attempted to disrupt the creation of an artificial reef in the Bay of Gibraltar last week.

The fishermen used fast boats to weave in between British vessels involved in the reef-laying operation in a bid to create large waves to disrupt the work, the Sunday Express reported.

Intervention by a Royal Navy patrol boat brought an end to the protests. A Gibraltar government spokesman has accused Spain of launching the ‘draconian’ border checks which continued yesterday in ‘retaliation’.

He said the decision to lay the reef, which consists of large concrete blocks sunk to the bottom of the bay, had been taken on environmental grounds.

However, he added, it had infuriated Spanish fishermen since it would also foil any attempts by their vessels to carry out illegal trawling of the bottom of the Bay of Gibraltar.

Criticising the Spanish government’s response, the spokesman added to the Sunday Express: ‘Not only are these measures affecting thousands of innocent Spanish workers who make their living on Gibraltar, but we are extremely concerned about pensioners and families with young children being forced to suffer in this way just because they want to visit the mainland.’

Ten questions with Evernote CEO Phil Libin

Filed under: Business, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

Wired‘s Ryan Tate sat down to talk to Phil Libin of Evernote:

Evernote is known for its eponymous note-taking app, a seemingly modest piece of software that has brought in a heap of money. Evernote has topped 10 million downloads in the iOS and Android app stores and accumulated more than 65 million users across its mobile, web, and desktop versions.

CEO and serial tech entrepreneur Phil Libin used to bristle when people would refer to Evernote as a digital notebook. He sees the product as an extension of the mind, albeit one that’s only about 5 percent complete. These days, though, he’s learned to embrace the pigeonholing. After all, it was humble note-takers who brought Redwood City, California-based Evernote to profitability in 2011 by upgrading en masse to a premium version that includes optical character recognition (handy for pictures of business cards and receipts) and collaborative note editing (great for workgroups).

This year, Evernote is in the red again as the company scales up to reach Libin’s bigger ambition — becoming something like Microsoft Office for mobile devices. Or, as Libin put it in an hourlong interview with WIRED, “like Nike for your mind.”

Evernote’s staff of 330 is divided into teams of no more than eight members — small enough, as Libin sees it, to sit around a dinner table and have a single conversation. No team project can last more than nine months, and none of the teams share any code, which is something close to sacrilege among the software priests of Silicon Valley. One recent sunny Friday, while programmers behind him raced to rewrite the iPhone and iPad versions of Evernote from scratch, we pelted Libin with questions about the past, present, and future of his company.

Why Germany is the venue for the loudest denunciations of NSA surveillance

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

Alex Harrowell explains the deep suspicions among Germans which long predate the NSA surveillance revelations:

Obviously, privacy and data protection are especially sensitive in Germany. After the Stasi, the centrality of big databases to the West German state’s response to the left-wing terrorists of the 1970s, and the extensive Nazi use of telephone intercepts during the seizure of power, it couldn’t really be otherwise. Privacy and digital activism is older and better established in Germany than anywhere else — in the US, for example, I consider the founding text of the movement to be the FBI vs. Steve Jackson Games case from 1990 or thereabouts, while the key text in Germany is the court judgment on the national census from ten years earlier. But the UK has a (strong) data protection act and no-one seems anywhere near as exercised, although they probably should be.

So here’s an important German word, which we could well import into English: Deutungshoheit. This translates literally as “interpretative superiority” and is analogous to “air superiority”. Deutungshoheit is what politicians and their spin doctors attempt to win by putting forward their interpretations and framings of the semirandom events that constitute the “news”. In this case, the key event was Snowden’s disclosure of the BOUNDLESS INFORMANT slides, which show that the NSA’s Internet surveillance operations collect large amounts of information from sources in Germany.

The slides don’t say anything about how, whether this was information on German customers handed over by US cloud companies under PRISM orders, tapped from cables elsewhere, somehow collected inside Germany, or perhaps shared with the NSA by German intelligence. This last option is by far the most controversial and the most illegal in Germany. The battle for Deutungshoheit, therefore, consisted in denying any German involvement and projecting the German government, like the people in question, as passive victims of US intrusion.

On the other hand, Snowden’s support-network in the Berlin digital activist world, centred around Jacob “ioerror” Applebaum, strove to imply that in fact German agencies had been active participants, and Snowden’s own choice of further disclosures seems to have been guided by an intent to influence German politicians. Der Spiegel, rather than the Guardian, has been getting documents first and their content is mostly about Germany.

In this second phase, the German political elite has shifted its feet; rather than trying to deny any involvement whatsoever, they have instead tried to interpret the possibility of something really outrageous as being necessary for your security, and part of fundamental alliance commitments which cannot be questioned within the limits of respectable discourse. The ur-text here is Die Zeit‘s interview with Angela Merkel, in which Merkel argues that she knew nothing, further that there was a balance to strike between freedom and security, that although some kinds of spying were unacceptable, the alliance came first. The effectiveness of this, at least in the context of the interview, can be measured by astonishingly uncritical questions like the one in which she was asked “what additional efforts were necessary from the Germans to maintain their competitiveness”.

H/T to Tyler Cowen for the link.

It’s the same joke over and over again … but it’s funny because it’s true

Filed under: Government, Humour, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:54

H/T to Nick Gillespie for the link.

July 28, 2013

Procol Harum and the Danish National Concert Orchestra and choir

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:34

Procol Harum performing A Whiter Shade of Pale with the Danish National Concert Orchestra and choir at Ledreborg Castle, Denmark in August 2006

H/T to American Digest for the link.

It’s not surprising that they can be bought – it is surprising for how little

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:03

Cory Doctorow posted at BoingBoing:

A detailed analysis on Maplight of the voting in last week’s vote on de-funding NSA dragnet spying found that the Congresscritters who voted in favor of more NSA spying received more than double the defense industry campaign contributions of their anti-NSA-voting rivals. They were the winners in the industry’s $13M donation bonanza leading up to the 2012 elections.

The remarkable thing is how cheaply these empty suits sold out their vow to uphold the Constitution. On average, the pro-spying side got $41,635, while the anti- averaged $18,765 — a difference of $22,870.

Contributors and the NSA amendment

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