Year: 2022
Twenty Years At the Keyboard
It was twenty years ago today that I wrote my first-ever blog post, and I figured I’d take a brief look back at my history here. That first post was on the on the subject of…wait for it…a young lady selling her used panties online. That post was just a quick one-off to get something… Read more
No Ground Truth: Sex Trafficking and Machine Learning
A tweet last week by Carol Fenton led me to an article in the Vancouver Province by Nathan Griffiths which begins with a seemingly shocking statistic: Roughly 40 per cent of online ads offering escort and sex work services in B.C. included language indicating child sex trafficking, according to a new pre-print study from SFU.… Read more
Michael Moore Tries to Rescue Us From Guns
The gun control debate has been raging lately, and now filmmaker Michael Moore has arrived to save the day with his proposal to repeal and replace the 2nd Amendment. I read it over, and of course it would be very bad for gun owners. That’s tempered by the fact that it is also very stupid.… Read more
A Libertarian Watches “Narcos”
My wife and I had been pretty much ignoring Netflix’s Narcos series because it didn’t quite interest us enough to justify expending our valuable TV-watching time. And as a long-time opponent of the war on drugs, I wasn’t sure I was ready for a series where DEA agents were the heroes. A few weeks ago,… Read more
COVID-19 is Not Endemic and the Fight is Not Over
I just saw an article at Reason arguing that the government should stop making COVID-19 tests free. It begins with this dubious statement: The consensus among scientists and lawmakers after two years of pandemic mayhem is that COVID-19 is officially endemic. That’s good news for those of us looking to move on with our lives,… Read more