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Courtesanal Access Protocols

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A while back, I stumbled across a series of posts by New Orleans sex worker Annie Calhoun on the subject of screening clients who contact her through the internet. I was especially struck by the degree of sophistication she shows in her thinking about security.

I realize that sounds condescending, but I don’t mean it that way. Corporate IT security managers would be thrilled if company employees understood security as well as Annie does.

I’m not a security expert, but as a software developer, I am somewhat familiar with the basic ideas behind information security, such as establishing a subject’s identity and controlling access to resources. What was especially fascinating to me about Annie’s posts is that — in part because she does business over the internet — many of her practices bear a striking resemblance to network security protocols.

Start with her section for newbies that explains why screening is necessary.

Just in case you don’t get where I’m going with this: This man was asking me to meet with him alone, in private, when he was completely unwilling to provide ANY information about himself whatsoever.

[…]

I know literally NOTHING about this man.

The man she’s talking about had sent her an email expressing his wish to meet her but did not want to provide screening information such as his name, employer, and phone number. This is a problem for Annie, because there are certain things she wants to establish about a potential client before she is willing to meet him alone in a private place:

For most of us, the client must:

  • be someone we’re willing to spend time alone with,
  • agree to provide the requested honorarium in the amount we’ve specified beforehand (on our websites, listings, etc.)
  • be someone we feel is not a danger to our personal safety.  We each have our own standards regarding what makes us feel safe.

(“Honorarium” is Annie’s way of saying she wants to be paid. Due to the legal climate, sex workers in America tend toward euphemism.)

In the world of information security, we might call the items in that list claims. They are assertions of fact about the client that Annie needs to establish before she will let him meet her. In a sense, Annie is specifying her access control requirements.

Speaking of which, I’m pretty sure that Annie’s access controls imply an additional implicit claim that she wants to establish about a client before she will meet him: Don’t be a cop. She doesn’t say this explicitly anywhere that I can see, but it seems like an obvious concern. (I’m guessing Annie doesn’t mention her no cops requirement because expressing a desire to hide from the police could be taken as evidence she’s doing something illegal.)

When discussing security, we often talk about establishing one’s identity, but in practice the details of an identity are linked to what the identity is used for.

For example, you can leave comments on this blog by signing in with your Twitter account. That doesn’t really tell me who you are, it just tells me you have the password to a Twitter account. So if @JohnSmith signs in, it doesn’t really prove that John Smith has left the comment. It literally only proves that the comment was left by someone with the password to the @JohnSmith Twitter account. That’s good enough for Twitter, and since I only want to offer people the ability to establish a secure history of comments, that’s good enough for me.

Annie’s got more at stake than I do, so she has more stringent requirements. Before getting further into those, however, let’s look at a screening method that doesn’t satisfy her requirements. She offers this fictionalized example:

To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Appointment with you tonight

Hey Annie,

My name is Bob Ross. You may have heard of me. I’m a painter, and I used to have my own TV show. Remember “happy little trees?” Yeah, I started that whole thing. Anyway, I want to meet with you tonight. I know it’s short notice, but I’m sure you can accommodate a slick guy like me.

Talk to you soon,

Bob Ross the TV Painter

That’s not going to work. It’s the equivalent of letting people comment with their Twitter handle without having to login to Twitter. It doesn’t prove the claim that they are the owner of the Twitter account, it only proves they know the Twitter account exists. The only authority for the claim that they own the account is their own assertion that they do. In matters of security, such self-certifications are worth nothing as an authority for a claim. Similarly, Bob’s letter only proves he knows Bob Ross the TV Painter exists, and his self-certified assertion that he really is Bob Ross the TV Painter doesn’t actually prove that he is.

Going into a little more detail, when you sign in with Twitter, my server receives a message from the Twitter server telling me you correctly logged in to your Twitter account. I trust Twitter because their business model depends on them being a reliable authority for identity claims. I believe that the message came from Twitter because it is signed with a certificate that belongs to Twitter. I trust that the certificate belongs to Twitter because it is authenticated with a chain of certificates that ultimately ends with a top-level public certificate that came installed on my server. Once my blogging software has enough information to link all these things together, I know I can trust your comment to have come from your Twitter identity. I have established a chain of trust.

Annie’s problem with Bob’s insistence that she just Google him is that so far there’s no chain of trust. There’s actually only one trustworthy claim she has about him: That he controls the [email protected] email account. The chain of trust for that claim runs through her email provider, which allows her to exchange email with Bob at that address.

Google does tell her a lot of things about Bob Ross the TV Painter, with all the authority of whatever public news stories and websites it finds for her, but it does not close the chain of trust: It doesn’t prove that Bob Ross the TV Painter is the same person as the owner of the [email protected] mailbox.

This problem can be hard to understand when you;re on the other side of it. After all, you know who you are, right? It’s hard to figure out where the gaps are from the other person’s point of view. I’ve run into this a few times when I missed paying a bill and somebody called to ask for their money. I have to explain to them that while I apologize for my error, and I promise to pay as quickly as possible, there is absolutely no way I’m giving my credit card number to a stranger who called me. If I had called them at their public customer service number, that would establish a chain of trust I could believe in, but when they call me, I have no proof that they are who they say they are.

Annie understands these things, and she goes through some trouble to explain several possible chains of trust to Bob:

What I need is an email address that is associated with you publicly and professionally. For instance, if you work for PBS, and the PBS website lists Bob Ross’s email address as [email protected], that will work perfectly. You can either shoot me a quick email from that account, or I can contact you through that address and you can reply that you’ve received that message. Then, I’ll know that you are really Bob Ross, the TV Painter.

The chain of trust is pretty clear. Annie trusts her email provider, so she trusts the claim that email from [email protected] is from whoever controls the [email protected] email address. As for the claim that the owner of [email protected] is Bob Ross the TV Painter, Annie trusts that Bob’s employer wouldn’t put fake contact information its public website, so if they say that Bob Ross the TV Painter has the email address [email protected], that’s enough to authenticate the claim for her. She now trusts that she’s talking with Bob Ross the TV Painter.

But perhaps Bob Ross is afraid to use his work email address for his dalliances with harlots. That’s why Annie offers a second option: She’ll send him something through his public address, and then he can respond to it through the [email protected] address, thus extending the chain of trust  to that address. In other words, Annie has reinvented the computer science concept of a bearer token.

When you login to your bank’s website, you provide your credentials — your username and password — in order to access the first page of the site. In return, the server generates a cryptographically secure token — basically some random data that would be hard for someone else to guess — and sends it back to your browser. After that, as you navigate around the website, whenever you click to bring up a new page, the browser sends the token along with the page request. (In browser terminology, the token is a cookie.) Since the server knows it gave out that token to a user who provided valid credentials for your account, possession of the token proves you are the owner of the account without your having to send along the username and password with every request.

Annie’s plan works the same way. She can send a message like this to Bob’s public account, referring to a randomly made-up order amount and using a made-up name (this is my example, not hers):

To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Thank you for your order!

Robert,

Thank you for your order. Your credit card will be billed $21.57.

Margaret P. Granholm
Sales Associate

Bob can then respond from the private account that he used to contact Annie earlier:

To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Got your message.

Hey Annie,

Got your message. Here’s the information you asked for: The amount is $21.57 and the sales associate’s name was Margaret P. Granholm.

Talk to you soon,

Bob Ross the TV Painter

The public websites establish the chain of trust to assure her that [email protected] is controlled by Bob Ross the TV Painter. And since she sent that address a token composed of the made-up name and amount, she knows that anyone who has that information must be Bob Ross the TV Painter, so when she gets that token back via the [email protected] address, she can close the loop and verify that [email protected] really is Bob Ross the TV Painter.

She further explains a similar technique over the phone:

Alternatively, you can supply a phone number that is traceable to you. Let’s use the PBS example. PBS lists Bob Ross’s office contact number as (504) 555-5555. I can call that number and ask to speak to Bob Ross, and all you have to say is “Yes Annie, it’s me,” and I’ll know I’ve been emailing back and forth with the right guy.

She also explains how the chain of trust can be broken:

However, if you only supply me with a phone number for a prepaid phone, or a number that, when Googled, is not attached to your name or business, that doesn’t really help me.

Backing away from the details a bit, the purpose of all this is to establish that [email protected] is a client that Annie can do business with rather than somebody who will hurt or arrest her. It’s possible to do this more directly:

And if neither of those methods works for you, you can also provide references (names and contact info or websites) from two established professional companions/providers/escorts you’ve met with in the past. I’ll contact them to make sure you’re safe and a gentleman. When they respond positively, I’ll get back to you and we can set up an appointment.

Elsewhere she clarifies the information she needs about the other escorts:

Generally, when we ask for references, we’re looking for a name, email address, and a link to a website. For example:

This way, the provider can look at my website and see that I’m legit (or even search for my name on various ad, screening, and networking sites) before contacting me).

Notice again, the careful chain of trust: From the public website to the email address to the escort’s emailed verification that the client is safe.

One thing we might wonder is why does Annie put so much trust in public websites. How much does a website really prove? Couldn’t a cop or a serial killer set up fake escort sites? The short answer is that although public websites aren’t hard to set up, they do require an order of magnitude more work than getting a gmail address. That additional work will tend to screen out some bad actors.

Again, this is a common technique in information security. For example, it’s used in encrypted password systems to prevent password guessing. Passwords are stored in a hashed format that is computationally expensive to test, so even if a hacker obtains an encrypted password, it will be time-consuming to test password guesses.

Annie’s basic goal here is to pick verification techniques that are difficult for someone to spoof. A malicious person would have to plan ahead by setting up two fake escort websites with email addresses. And while setting up a website isn’t very hard, it’s considerably harder to setup a convincing website, especially for someone like Annie, who’s actually in the business. She could easily research the other escorts to determine their legitimacy.

To show how this works, let’s use Annie’s own website as an example, and look for signs that she’s legitimate. We can see that her WHOIS entry shows that her domain was registered in March of 2012 and the Wayback Machine starts picking up content from it in May of that year. Furthermore, Annie has purchase an advertising page on the Eros guide for New Orleans and at Preferred 411, and before they shut down U.S. access, she had reviews on The Erotic Review from 2012. Annie is also active on Twitter, and her website and Twitter bio link to each other to close the trust loop.

All of this is evidence of an internet presence going back for years, which is a strong indicator of legitimacy. If the Annie Calhoun identity was only created so that someone could give out fake escort references, the perpetrator must have gone through a lot of trouble to set all this up, and they’ve somehow maintained the fiction for six years without anyone blowing the whistle on them. It seems far more likely that Annie Calhoun is a legitimate escort who began working six years ago, which means that a reference from her is most likely legitimate.

It’s worth noting that Annie doesn’t have to do all the work herself. The online escort industry is large enough that it has spawned a services industry to support it, and escorts like Annie have been able to use screening services to do some of the work. The feds have been shutting things down lately (in their effort to stop sex work by making it more dangerous), but in the past, Date-Check performed screening, The Erotic Review had some kind of whitelist for clients that allowed escorts to vouch for them, and Preferred 411 did both screenings and escort endorsements. 

In computer security terms, these sites act as trusted third parties that verify claims. Some of the sites issue ID codes that escorts can check and others use email addresses, but all of them eventually provide a chain of trust between the potential client and some information that can be used to judge whether he’ll make a good client.

It turns out that a lot of potential clients don’t want to cooperate with the screening process because they don’t like revealing their identity to a stranger. That makes things difficult, but note that Annie’s screening goals — “someone we’re willing to spend time alone with…agree to provide the [correct payment]…be someone we feel is not a danger to our personal safety” — do not include knowing the client’s true name.

Getting the person’s true name is usually a practical requirement for screening, but we could imagine other ways of establishing trust. For example, if several other legitimate sex workers say that the person at the [email protected] email address, and he was a great client, that might be good enough. His control over the email address proves he’s the person the other sex workers met, and their references establish his safety. Annie might consider that sufficiently strong evidence that he meets her standards even if she does not know his name. (Or not. I can’t speak for Annie) The referring sex workers might not establish that the owner of the [email protected] address is Bob Ross the TV Painter, but they do help establish the other claims Annie is interested in, such as agreeable personality, ability to pay, and safety.

Again, Annie doesn’t have to do all of this for herself. If she works for an agency or a brothel, they may provide the screening services. The computer security equivalent would be a trusted third party that enforces compliance to certain standards, such as workflow orchestration services like IFTTT and Zapier, or business coordination services like athenahealth medical billing or Quickbooks payment processing.

I find it fascinating that American sex workers face some of the same security problems as software engineers, and that they solve them in analogous ways. Annie’s thoughts on issues of identity are particularly clear, and they parallel a lot of modern thinking about identity on the internet. If more people learned to think about these issues the way Annie does, a lot fewer people would fall for phishing schemes and other con games.

Trump and the Art of the Vandal

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On Monday of last week, Harley-Davidson announced that it will be moving production of motorcycles destined for the European Union to somewhere outside the United States. The reason isn’t hard to understand:

In response to U.S. duties on European steel and aluminum, the EU enacted tariffs Friday on more than $3 billion worth of U.S. goods including bourbon, yachts and motorcycles.

U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum imports have increased the cost of Harley-Davidson’s raw materials at the same time the European tariffs on motorcycles made it less profitable to sell U.S.-made motorcycles in Europe, so the company is moving their manufacturing operation outside the U.S. to avoid both sets of border-crossing taxes. It’s a logical business decision, and the possibility that some U.S. manufacturers would do things like this in response to tariffs was entirely predictable to anyone with even a modicum of economic education or business experience.

Naturally, Harley-Davidson’s decision made Trump angry, because he’s a babyman who cries when he can’t get his way: 

God, what a bully Trump is. He’s the abusive boss who makes life hell for employees and then calls them “ungrateful losers” when they quit. He’s the father who beats his son and then calls him weak for crying. Trump is driving companies out of business and then blaming them for quitting.

That’s not true. Harley-Davidson was responding directly to new tariffs. They announced in May of 2017 that they were moving some production to Thailand to avoid that country’s just-announced 60% tax on imported motorcycles, In addition, by manufacturing in that region, they would also be able to avoid some taxes when selling into nearby countries. Of course, they wouldn’t need to do that if they were protected by some sort of free trade pact that limited tariffs against U.S. manufacturers, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement that Trump had pulled the U.S. out of just four months earlier.

Thanks to Trump foolishly tearing apart our hard-won international free trade policies, Harley-Davidson had a strong incentive to reduce production in the United States and open factories in not just one but two separate economic regions. This is not exactly shocking: When you create isolated islands of trade, the market will create isolated islands of production. That’s wasteful, and it will cost American jobs and ultimately reduce the income of Americans.

For example, Jack’s Ornamental Iron, a small ornamental metal working company, has been forced to cancel a planned expansion because of Trump’s taxes:

The two were caught off-guard when President Donald Trump announced tariffs on foreign steel. Jack’s watched the price of steel shoot up nearly 25 percent in just two weeks.

“We buy roughly a million dollars worth of steel a year,” Schow said, “so that’s going to be $150,000 to $200,000 in additional cost to our business.”

The tariffs have put a halt to the growth of the company — plans to buy a nearby building for possible expansion are no longer a reality, Schow said. Also, plans for employee raises and expanding their workforce of 25 have been put on hold for now.

This illustrates one of the worst aspects of Trump’s trade war: It’s unnatural and therefore unpredictable. Jack’s Ornamental Iron was following all the rules for success in in the market — hard work, high-quality production, good customer relations — and yet their plans for expansion were scuttled by changes in tariffs. Every business now faces additional uncertainty in its planning and investments because of Trump’s stupid trade war.

It gets worse. As Reason‘s Eric Boehm argues, Trump’s trade policy will put a lot of power over businesses into the hands of government bureaucrats:

At three manufacturing plants in Arkansas, some 1,500 workers are waiting to hear whether the Commerce Department will let them keep their jobs.

Those workers make a product that you’ve probably never thought much about: tire cords. They are the lattice-like structures, often made of steel fibers, that line the inside of rubber tires to help them maintain their shape. The owners of those three Arkansas-based tire cord manufacturing plants say they will have to close their doors and lay off their workers, Arkansas Today reports, because the type of steel wire needed to make tire cords is not available from domestic manufacturers and foreign suppliers are now subject to a 25 percent import tax. They have applied for a special exemption from President Donald Trump’s steel tariffs, and the Commerce Department is considering the request.

Because of Trump’s trade policies, it’s no longer enough to run an efficient business and produce a good product. You have to kowtow to bureaucrats.

Perhaps nothing else about the ongoing debate over tariffs so clearly demonstrates the quiet horror of the Trump administration’s attempt at central planning. Workers and factory owners who produce a necessary but unremarkable product, filling a hole in a supply chain that few Americans ever notice, now fear that they will be forced out of business if their application for relief does not find favor with federal bureaucrats.

They are hardly alone. More than 1,200 businesses have filed over 20,000 requests for exemptions from the Trump administration’s steel tariffs.

I started writing this last week, and since then the trade war has created a few more casualties:

On Friday, the Trump administration levied tariffs on some $50 billion of Chinese goods, including everything from x-ray tubes and aircraft tires to ultrasound machines and agricultural equipment. China retaliated with its own tariffs on imported Americans cars, meats, and produce.

[…]

“Every time there is a trade friction, the first thing that gets hit with retaliatory tariffs are the fresh products,” says Steve Reinholt, export sales director for the Washington-based agricultural export company Oneonta. “We pack and ship things within 48 hours. If you have a bit of a slowdown, it can effect things quickly.”

Hardest hit, says Reinholt, are the cherry growers his company buys from, who over the past decade had been doing steadily increasing business with China.

[…]

“We’re very much expecting to have less volume to China this year,” says Thurlby. “Historically we would ship two million boxes in July alone. There’s just no way we see that happening this year, not with the amount of tariffs we’re talking about.”

Exporting to China had always been a challenge for the 2,500 or so Pacific Northwest growers that Thurlby’s organization represents. In the past, these growers have had to contend with a flat 10 percent import tax as well as a 13 percent value added tax.

Trump’s trade policies have only made things worse.

In response to the U.S.’s protectionist drift, China has upped tariffs on U.S. produce twice in the last three months, once in April and again last week, getting us to the 50 percent tariffs growers now have to pay.

This sort of micro-management of the economy isn’t just some unfortunate side effect. Trump is bragging about it:

I suspect that Trump gets this attitude from his years as a New York real estate developer. For a lot of people in local government, the job is not about the civics textbook version of government — passing good laws, running departments efficiently, serving constituents. Rather, it’s about making deals: Factory deals, strip mall deals, housing deals, stadium deals, land deals, development deals.

If you’re a businessman who wants to buy some land and develop it into a shopping mall with a residential complex, you will have to involve city politicians and planning officials every step of the way. You definitely need them to get zoning variances and permits, maybe some rent-control exceptions, permission for curb cuts, connections to city water and sewer, and so on. In addition, if you have enough influence (as Trump certainly did), you can probably get them to throw in some tax breaks, or maybe even use eminent domain to grab some of the real estate you need. You’ll get your lucrative development deal, and the politicians will get campaign contributions and bragging rights for bringing in new development and jobs.

That was the world Trump lived in for decades in New York, and that that seems to be his vision of what he should be doing now: Putting together deals for businesses that will help help him look good. In international trade, this means adding and removing tariffs to choose winners and losers, instead of letting the free market decide. This is pretty much the definition of crony capitalism.

The system of free international trade benefits everyone who participates, and Trump is tearing it down, hurting people on all sides. When you forcibly take value from other people to keep for yourself, that’s stealing. But when you simply destroy things that are valuable to other people, to the benefit of no one, that’s vandalism.

Marc Randazza, Freedom Fighter

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The New York Times is reporting that conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has hired Marc Randazza to defend him against the lawsuit filed by the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims over Jones’s claims that the shooting was some kind of hoax.

Since days after the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., Mr. Jones has spread bogus theories that the families were “crisis actors” in a government plot to confiscate Americans’ firearms. The families have endured online abuse, physical confrontations and death threats from Mr. Jones’s devotees.

Unfortunately, the Times story finds an unhelpful angle, as telegraphed by its title, “Lawyers for Neo-Nazi to Defend Alex Jones in Sandy Hook Case.” Reporter Elizabeth Williamson probably did not write that headline, but she did write the rest of the story:

Alex Jones, an online conspiracy theorist who claims the Sandy Hook massacre that killed 20 children and six adults was a hoax, has hired lawyers representing a founder of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website to defend him against defamation claims brought in Connecticut by families of seven Sandy Hook victims.

[…]

Marc Randazza and Jay Wolman of the Las Vegas-based Randazza Legal Group are defending Mr. Jones in Connecticut. The lawyers also represent Andrew Anglin, the co-founder of the Daily Stormer, who is being sued for harassment by a Montana woman after Daily Stormer followers subjected her to a torrent of anti-Semitic slurs and threats. Mr. Anglin has cited Mr. Jones as an early influence.

It’s a general principle of legal ethics that everyone is entitled to a lawyer. Alex Jones and Andrew Anglin are no exception. They are entitled to a lawyer, so somebody in the legal profession has to represent them. In this case, they’ve picked Marc Randazza.

Scott Greenfield, who manages to write about all legal things before I do, has found some dumb reactions to Randazza’s representation of Jones, and one of them is a common but tiresome response from Above the Law‘s Elie Mystal, who should know better.

And I respect what he’s doing. No, I don’t agree. I don’t think he should be doing it. Just because Nazis deserve a legal defense doesn’t mean you’re a good person for defending them.

That’s a slight variation of something lawyers must hear a lot when they defend unlikable clients: “Just because somebody has to represent them, that doesn’t mean you have to do it. You could have said no.”

That’s a weak argument. Everyone, including guys like Alex Jones and Andrew Anglin, has a right to legal representation. As an ethical matter, the legal profession, considered broadly as an institution, owes them a duty of defense, no matter how unpleasant it may be. And when faced with a repellent duty that someone has to fulfill, there is no virtue in refusing the duty when you that know someone else will have to do it. If Randazza had refused to take this case, then some other poor lawyer would be stuck in his place, having to endure the same stupid crap.

Beyond that, guys like Alex Jones and Andrew Anglin deserve a defense simply because our legal system is built around the assumption that they will get one. Our adversarial system encourages both sides to present their strongest and most aggressive argument in court. So although Jones and Anglin may be bad people, they aren’t necessarily as bad as the opposing party accuses them of being. That doesn’t mean they did the specific things that the lawsuit alleges. That doesn’t mean the people suing them are entitled to everything they’re asking for. A one-sided proceeding does not produce justice. Which is why everyone deserves a defense.

I suppose you could ask, even if everyone deserves a defense, why it is that Randazza seems to represent so many figures from the alt-right.

…he’s taken on a number of far-right clients, including Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin, the alt-right site GotNews and its founder Chuck Johnson, right-wing internet personality Mike Cernovich, and the alt right-beloved forum 8chan. Last month, he also entered the case of alt-righters and neo-Nazis accused of conspiracy to riot in Charlottesville.

I think the reason is probably the obvious one: They pass his name around between them. You defend dentists against malpractice suits, you get calls from other dentists. You defend cops from brutality claims, you get calls from other cops. And you defend alt-right trolls, you get calls from other alt-right trolls. That’s just how word-of-mouth marketing works.

(If I had to guess — and guessing is much less work than investigating — I wouldn’t be surprised if Mike Cernovich was the key. Randazza is a long-time legal blogger at Legal Satryicon, and long before Cernovich was a leading figure on the alt-right, he had a perfectly normal legal blog called Crime and Federalism, which he shared with Connecticut lawyer Norm Pattis. In those early days, the legal blogosphere was a small community, and Cernovich almost certainly would have been aware of Randazza. I was part of that community, and I knew both of them.)

Marc Randazza is not some kind of “Nazi lawyer.” He’s a well-known First Amendment lawyer who has helped a lot of different kinds of people, sometimes for free. In a small way, I’m one of them. Randazza’s blog has one of the most hilariously pugilistic Terms and Conditions pages I’ve ever seen, and when I asked him something about it, he told me I could use it on my blog if I wanted to, and he let me list him as the legal contact for Windypundit.

At another time I was thinking of registering a “Windypundit” trademark, and Marc gave me some free advice. He even offered to do the registration for me. (I didn’t take him up on it because it felt funny to ask him to work for free, even though he’d offered.) It would be misleading to say Marc Randazza is my lawyer — he’s never represented me in anything — but I wouldn’t be surprised if our minor interactions meet the technical legal definition of a lawyer-client relationship.

What it comes down to is this: When planning the military defense of a country, you want the battle against the invaders to start at its borders, not in its heartland and cities. The same is true when defending free speech. We want the battles to occur at the fringes, with the weirdos and deplorables, because if we’re fighting for the freedom of speech of people who say ordinary things, we’ve already lost the war.

Marc Randazza is one of the people fighting for us at the fringe.

GDPR Compliance Notice

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I’m pretty sure the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) doesn’t apply to this website because (1) it is not hosted in the EU, (2) it doesn’t target people in the EU, (3) it’s not even a business website, and (4) fuck that Eurotrash bureaucratic bullshit.

Personal data collected: This is a normal website, meaning that it collects every piece of data you send it, including everything you type in and everything your browser sends it. If you don’t want me to have your data, don’t send me your data.

Some of the content served from this site may request that your browser send data to other web sites — everything from font and image providers to WordPress.com to Google Analytics and more. If your browser honors those requests, then it will send data to them. If you don’t want your browser sending out your data, then you need to fix your browser.

My site, like all WordPress sites, includes code written by thousands of people. I have not in any way inspected or audited it. Some of it may share your data in the course of doing what it does for this website. If you don’t want to take that risk, don’t send me your data.

Your right to be forgotten: I reject your right to be forgotten. You don’t have the right to control the data I keep in my possession. If you don’t like something about you on this site, you can ask me to change it. I might or might not do so, at my sole discretion.

Bonus statement about cookies: Of course this website uses cookies. Websites have been using cookies since 1994. Get over it.

Dumb Green Energy

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The California Energy Commission wants to force new homes to use solar energy :

California moved a step closer Wednesday to requiring solar panels on new homes and low-rise apartment buildings starting in 2020, the first such mandate nationwide and the state’s latest step to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

This clean energy revolution comes at a price:

The commission estimates solar panels would boost construction costs for a single-family home by roughly $10,000.

To be fair, as the commissioners point out, with the median California detached single-family home already costing over $500,000, this is a relatively small cost that is unlikely to have much of an affect on market. But it will have some effect, especially if their estimate of the cost is low.

They also argue, less convincingly, that generating your own power from the sun will reduce your utility bills enough to pay for the cost of the panels:

The move’s supporters insist the solar homes would save their owners money by slashing monthly utility bills. That savings could be worth $16,251 over the 30-year life of the house, according to the commission.

The first thing we should ask ourselves when we hear claims like this is if the savings from solar power are so great, why would California have to force homeowners to make the investment? People spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on homes routinely make these kinds of decisions all the time. Reduced energy costs should be an easy selling point for new homes.

One likely reason is that it’s not clear how the commission arrived at the figure of $16,251. This description makes it sounds like they add up 30 years of utility savings, which is an awful long time to wait for a return on an investment, resulting in a pretty poor 1.6% rate of return. In the commission’s explanation, which doesn’t include this savings figure, they estimate related numbers using a net-present-value method, which would be a lot better, if that’s how they arrived at the number.

Of course, the validity of that number also depends on the details of how the calculations are done. US Berkeley economics professor Severin Borenstein thinks they used the wrong numbers for current electricity costs, and I wonder how they accounted for volatility in fossil fuel energy prices. Lower-than-expected oil prices in the next few decades could wipe out all the savings. As could the arrival of some other cheap energy source.

That cheap energy source could turn out to be somewhat ironic. Solar electricity generation used to be extremely costly, but as usage has grown, economies of scale have made it much less expensive. The long-term cost of solar photovoltaic electricity generation has been declining, and the trend is expected to continue. However, even though residential PV generation costs have declined 70% in the last 10 years, the greatest economies of scale are expected to come from utility-scale generation, which could be provided at between 1/2 and 1/3 the cost of residential generation. If power companies bring solar photovoltaic generation online any time soon, people who put solar panels on their roofs may end up paying a higher lifetime cost than their neighbors who get solar energy from the electric company.

Of course, the cost to homeowners should not be the sole deciding factor in an environmental policy. In the absence of a meaningful carbon tax, the metered cost of electricity does not reflect the environmental costs of generating power from fossil fuels. Each individual homeowners pays only part of the cost of using fossil fuels, with everyone else suffering the environmental costs. So while the savings may not make sense for individual homeowners, when you take the fossil fuel costs of pollution and anthropogenic global warming into account, the much greater savings might make sense for the planet as a whole.

But that still leaves the problem that the California Energy Commission is trying to pick winners in the market by forcing people to use residential solar power generation, even though utility-scale solar power would be much less expensive. If we’re going to spend billions of dollars to reduce carbon emissions, shouldn’t we pick the technological path that allows the greatest reduction per dollar? Instead, the commission has chosen an expensive feel-good path — which also probably funnels money to politically influential construction interests — that may reduce residents’ need for utility power, thus actually discouraging utility companies from investing in greener power generation.

Transforming our energy production is a huge undertaking. We need to be smart about how we go about it.

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