February 10, 2011
February 7, 2011
Licensing as a tool for restricting competition
Stephanie Simon addresses the pro and con positions on licensing for various jobs:
[E]conomists — and workers shut out of fields by educational requirements or difficult exams — say licensing mostly serves as a form of protectionism, allowing veterans of the trade to box out competitors who might undercut them on price or offer new services.
“Occupations prefer to be licensed because they can restrict competition and obtain higher wages,” said Morris Kleiner, a labor professor at the University of Minnesota. “If you go to any statehouse, you’ll see a line of occupations out the door wanting to be licensed.”
[. . .]
At a time of widespread anxiety about the growth of government, the licensing push is meeting pockets of resistance, including a move by some legislators to require a more rigorous cost-benefit analysis before any new licensing laws are approved. Critics say such regulation spawns huge bureaucracies including rosters of inspectors. They also say licensing requirements — which often include pricey educations — can prohibit low-income workers from breaking in to entry-level trades.
Texas, for instance, requires hair-salon “shampoo specialists” to take 150 hours of classes, 100 of them on the “theory and practice” of shampooing, before they can sit for a licensing exam. That consists of a written test and a 45-minute demonstration of skills such as draping the client with a clean cape and evenly distributing conditioner. Glass installers, or glaziers, in Connecticut — the only state that requires such workers to be licensed — take two exams, at $52 apiece, pay $300 in initial fees and $150 annually thereafter.
California requires barbers to study full-time for nearly a year, a curriculum that costs $12,000 at Arthur Borner’s Barber College in Los Angeles. Mr. Borner says his graduates earn more than enough to recoup their tuition, though he questions the need for such a lengthy program. “Barbering is not rocket science,” he said. “I don’t think it takes 1,500 hours to learn. But that’s what the state says.”
In harder economic climates, expect to see a push towards trying to get some form of certification or licensing imposed in new fields. For example, I’ve seen several attempts to introduce mandatory certification for technical writers, usually with the intent of limiting access to the (reduced) pool of writing jobs in the field. Usually the biggest fans of certification are those who think they’re in a good position to dictate the requirements for certification (and often run courses/seminars which, I assume, would automatically appear in the final list of requirements).
February 3, 2011
Tools for protest marchers: anti-kettling app
Patrick Kingsley talks to the developers of “Sukey”, a new mobile phone app intended to help protesters avoid being kettled by police:
Cairo, it wasn’t. But at about a quarter to four last Saturday afternoon, on a crowded backstreet in central London, something happened outside the Egyptian embassy that deserves at least a footnote in the annals of protest history. A crowd of students weren’t kettled.
In the context of recent British protests, this was a near-miracle. At each of the previous four major student protests in London since the Millbank riot on 10 November, police have kettled — or, in their terminology, “contained” — thousands of protesters, preventing them from leaving an area for several hours, and often from accessing basic amenities such as food, water and toilets.
Police kettle protesters supposedly to quell violence, but protesters arguably only turn to violence out of frustration at being kettled. Most notoriously, police trapped hundreds of teenage schoolchildren inside a tight grid on Whitehall on 24 November — and only subsequently did a few of them smash up a police van abandoned in their midst.
Saturday’s non-kettle, then, was a victory in itself. But the real excitement wasn’t that it didn’t happen — but how it didn’t happen. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly why police and protesters behave in a certain way at a certain time, but one explanation for the kettle’s failure to form lies with a new communications network, which launched that afternoon: Sukey.
February 1, 2011
Football players behaving badly (again)
A report on another NFL player’s run-in with the law:
Los Angeles police used a Taser to subdue former USC football standout Everson Griffen after he allegedly assaulted an officer during a traffic stop near campus, department officials said Monday night.
Griffen, now a member of the Minnesota Vikings, was booked on suspicion of felony battery after the incident, which was reported about 4 p.m. Monday at 30th and Hoover streets, said LAPD spokeswoman Karen Rayner.
The incident took place during a routine traffic stop, Rayner said. Officers asked Griffen for his license, which turned out not to be valid, according to sources familiar with the investigation. Griffen then told them “he did not want to go back to jail” and sprinted away from the officers, who caught up with him after a short distance.
Well, it’s not the “Love Boat” all over again, but it’s still sad to watch yet another NFL player endangering his career through brushes with law enforcement.
January 31, 2011
Showing their true colours?
To mark the Egyptian government’s shutdown of cellphone and internet access to their angry citizenry, the US government wants to have the power to do the same. Subtle, eh?
Legislation granting the president internet-killing powers is to be re-introduced soon to a Senate committee, the proposal’s chief sponsor told Wired.com on Friday.
The resurgence of the so-called “kill switch” legislation came the same day Egyptians faced an internet blackout designed to counter massive demonstrations in that country.
The bill, which has bipartisan support, is being floated by Sen. Susan Collins, the Republican ranking member on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The proposed legislation, which Collins said would not give the president the same power Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak is exercising to quell dissent, sailed through the Homeland Security Committee in December but expired with the new Congress weeks later.
The bill is designed to protect against “significant” cyber threats before they cause damage, Collins said.
Got to admire the balls of brass required to introduce legislation to do something in America at exactly the same time the US government is demanding that Egypt restore their citizens’ internet access. Breathtaking hypocrisy.
Update: By way of American Digest, a most appropriate image:
January 29, 2011
Bad news for US small businesses
A very small item in the recent US Obamacare legislation will mean a huge increase in tax compliance paperwork:
Section 9006 of the health care bill — just a few lines buried in the 2,409-page document — mandates that beginning in 2012 all companies will have to issue 1099 tax forms not just to contract workers but to any individual or corporation from which they buy more than $600 in goods or services in a tax year.
[. . .]
But under the new rules, if a freelance designer buys a new iMac from the Apple Store, they’ll have to send Apple a 1099. A laundromat that buys soap each week from a local distributor will have to send the supplier a 1099 at the end of the year tallying up their purchases.
The bill makes two key changes to how 1099s are used. First, it expands their scope by using them to track payments not only for services but also for tangible goods. Plus, it requires that 1099s be issued not just to individuals, but also to corporations.
Taken together, the two seemingly small changes will require millions of additional forms to be sent out.
“It’s a pretty heavy administrative burden,” particularly for small businesses without large in-house accounting staffs, says Bill Rys, tax counsel for the National Federation of Independent Businesses.
Eliminating the goods exemption could launch an avalanche of paperwork, he says: “If you cater a lunch for other businesses every Wednesday, say, that’s a lot of information to keep track of throughout the year.”
For a one-person business, this change could double or triple the tax-related paperwork right there. Given that a lot of people have started new businesses in the last couple of years — partly because big businesses downsized and haven’t been hiring again — this will be a significant discouragement to self-employment.
H/T to Virginia Postrel for the link.
Update: It may not stand: there’s a bi-partisan coalition in the Senate to repeal that provision.
January 28, 2011
Finns unhappy with icy iPhones
Bill Ray reports on the source of Finnish unhappiness with Apple iPhone performance:
Finnish iPhone users unhappy at the inability of the handset to operate below zero are entitled to their money back, even if the limitation appears in the small print.
The clarification comes from the Finland’s Consumer Agency, as reported by Finnish news agency YLE.fi, in response to numerous questions from concerned Finns who are unhappy that their shiny Apple toys won’t promise to work again until the spring, at best. So unless the shop specifically stated the zero-degree operational limit, then the regulator reckons iPhone-purchasing Finns are entitled to their money back.
Finland, like the UK, requires all items sold new to operate in the way they might reasonably be expected to do. Small print can’t negate those rights, and it’s reasonable for Finns to expect to be able to make phone calls outside, so refunds would seem to be in order. Meanwhile the regulator is preparing a list of questions for Apple about how it trains its staff, and how badly the iPhone breaks down when it gets cold.
January 27, 2011
UK government officials implicated in ADE-651 bomb detector scam
Remember the ADE-651? The bomb detector that could “detect elephants, humans and 100 dollar bills”? It now appears that British army personnel and civil servants were involved in the effort to sell the bogus device:
The government has admitted that the Army and UK civil servants helped market so-called “bomb detectors”, which did not work, around the world.
Export of the “magic wand” detectors to Iraq and Afghanistan was banned on 27 January 2010 because of the threat they posed to British and allied troops.
The move followed a BBC Newsnight investigation showing they could not detect explosives — or anything else.
Now Newsnight has learned that they are still being sold around the globe.
You can understand the attraction to potential scammers, as the things cost £11 to make (at most) and can be sold for £15,000 to unsuspecting dupes (or willing accomplices, splitting the profits) representing foreign governments.
January 26, 2011
Is Julian Assange a modern Senator Joe McCarthy?
Jim Goad asks if the actions of WikiLeaks are the modern-day equivalent of Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade:
Upon superficial inspection, still-living superstar hacker Julian Assange and long-dead commie-stalker Joseph McCarthy seem like natural-born enemies and political polar opposites. Technically, the Arctic and Antarctica are polar opposites, too, but are they really that different?
Comparing anyone to infamous anti-communist zealot Joseph McCarthy, as he is popularly understood in pop culture, is to accuse them of being a torch-carrying megalomaniac with a sociopathic disregard for the damage wrought by their ruthless, Spanish Inquisition-style paranoid purges, persecutions, pogroms, and perennial pickin’ on people. “McCarthyism” is considered a smear because we all must admit it was a shameful moment in American history when some upstart cheesehead Senator dared to suggest the American government was being infiltrated with communist sympathizers. Blot from your minds forever the fact that certain Soviet “cables” decrypted after McCarthy’s death seem to have at least partially vindicated him, and let us never teach in our public schools that communist governments murdered at least a hundred million human beings.
H/T to Ilkka for the link.
January 24, 2011
Recognizing the right to self-defence
Lorne Gunter wants our government to recognize that Canadians have a right to self-defence:
Canadian officialdom is conducting an all-out assault against self-defence. Quite simply, few politicians, Crown prosecutors, judges, law professors and police commanders believe ordinary Canadians have any business using force to defend themselves, their loved ones, homes, farms or businesses.
The latest example of the campaign against self-defence comes from southern Ontario. In August, retired crane operator Ian Thomson, who lives near Port Colborne, awoke early in the morning to find masked men attempting to burn his house down with him in it. When he fired at them with a licensed handgun he had stored in a safe, he was charged.
How out-of-touch are police and prosecutors when you are not even allowed to defend yourself and your property from thugs attempting to incinerate you? Their attitude seems to be that it is better to die waiting for police to respond than to take matters into your own hands.
[. . .]
When Canada became independent at Confederation in 1867, Canadians retained the rights they had at the time as British subjects. These included three “absolute rights”: the right to personal liberty, the right to private property and the right to self-defence, up to and including the right to kill an attacker or burglar.
William Blackstone, Britain’s famous constitutional expert, argued the right to self-defence included the right to kill even an agent of the king found on one’s property after dark, uninvited. He also traced the right to armed self-defence back to the time of King Canute (995–1035) when subjects could be fined for failing to keep weapons for their own protection.
January 22, 2011
QotD: Sikhs, the kirpan, and the courts
The [Supreme] court didn’t find for the appellants on the grounds that “the kirpan is not a weapon”. Indeed, all parties to the suit accepted the premise “that the kirpan, considered objectively and without the protective measures imposed by the Superior Court, is an object that fits the definition of a weapon.” The court found for the appellant because the school board’s zero-tolerance policy towards weapons, based largely on fears that the presence of a knife would somehow allow spooky negative vibes to propagate throughout the school, did not constitute a minimal infringement upon the rights of a religion that happens to insist upon the carrying of a weapon. (Anyone who has studied the remarkable history of the Sikhs can only be surprised that they don’t carry about five of them.)
I hate to break it to Nav Bains and to admirers of leading comparative-religion scholar Michael Ignatieff, but reciting “It’s not a weapon” won’t give us a magic wormhole we can all leap through to avoid debates over religious accommodation in public services. As I understand matters, and I am perfectly prepared to receive instruction on this point, the whole point of the kirpan is that it’s an avowedly defensive weapon. The reference books, including those written by Sikhs, tell us that it is worn precisely to signify and reinforce the Sikh’s wholly admirable preparedness to protect his faith, his community, and innocent human life. I suppose I could have added the words “just as a handgun might be”, but that would send altogether too many of my readers scrambling for the Preparation H.
Respectable efforts to establish a modus vivendi on the kirpan in secured public spaces can’t begin with evasion if they hope to be successful (and certainly it sets a terrible precedent for evasion to be designated courage). I’ll add that the problems are not really all that thorny for those of us who have never consented to fanaticism about security theatre or to cretinizing “zero tolerance” of blades in schools
Colby Cosh, “That non-weapon sure is pointy”, Maclean’s, 2011-01-21
January 20, 2011
This is not the powder you were hoping for
This is bound to show up in some “stupid criminal tricks” roundup:
Florida cops have cuffed a burglary gang who broke into a house and stole the ashes of the owner’s father, believing they were illicit narcotics.
The victim returned to her Silver Springs residence to discover she was short of a few items, including electronics and jewellery. Rather more disturbing was the absence of the ashes of her departed dad, and those of her two Great Danes.
[. . .]
“It was soon discovered that the suspects snorted some of the ashes believing they were snorting cocaine,” local Fox News reports.
Once the penny had dropped, the master criminals ditched their booty, which police are trying to locate.
January 17, 2011
Another sexting case, with a slightly misleading headline
A brief report at the National Post implies something a bit different than the article actually says: Woman jailed after nude photo posted on Facebook.
Eighteen-year-old Angelica Nicholson of Portage, Ind. sent a nude photo of herself to a “male acquaintance” — apparently to the displeasure of the acquaintance’s girlfriend.
The girlfriend in turn posted the photo on Facebook and after an exchange of heated text messaging, Ms. Nicholson contacted Facebook to remove the photo.
Dissatisfied with Facebook’s response time, Ms. Nicholson called 911 and claimed she was 17 to get the photo removed faster.
Police found out the woman was 18 from government records, and Ms. Nicholson was arrested for false reporting.
So, yes, she was arrested, but not for posting a nude photo on Facebook. Abusing 911 services, yes, but not for posting to Facebook.
January 16, 2011
Caledonia discussed on “The Agenda”
Publius has a post up with the interview of Christie Blatchford, author of Helpless on Steve Paikin’s TVO show The Agenda.
January 6, 2011
Drug-sniffing dogs nowhere near as accurate as billed
Everyone loves dogs, right? They’re “man’s best friend”. They’re also a significant part of the war on drugs. And they’re far from infallible:
Drug-sniffing dogs can give police probable cause to root through cars by the roadside, but state data show the dogs have been wrong more often than they have been right about whether vehicles contain drugs or paraphernalia.
The dogs are trained to dig or sit when they smell drugs, which triggers automobile searches. But a Tribune analysis of three years of data for suburban departments found that only 44 percent of those alerts by the dogs led to the discovery of drugs or paraphernalia.
For Hispanic drivers, the success rate was just 27 percent.
For something as important in the arsenal of drug warriors, drug-sniffing dogs and their handlers don’t appear to have training standards of any consistency:
But even advocates for the use of drug-sniffing dogs agree with experts who say many dog-and-officer teams are poorly trained and prone to false alerts that lead to unjustified searches. Leading a dog around a car too many times or spending too long examining a vehicle, for example, can cause a dog to give a signal for drugs where there are none, experts said.
“If you don’t train, you can’t be confident in your dog,” said Alex Rothacker, a trainer who works with dozens of local drug-sniffing dogs. “A lot of dogs don’t train. A lot of dogs aren’t good.”
The dog teams are not held to any statutory standard of performance in Illinois or most other states, experts and dog handlers said, though private groups offer certification for the canines.
No standards for training? Lucrative police department budgets? Nope, no possible way that unscrupulous folks would ever take advantage of that opening.
