I spent several years working for a defense contractor, during which time I sometimes had to meet with our points-of-contact in the Department of Defense. We’d usually end up going out to lunch, and one thing I learned pretty quickly is that we weren’t allowed to pay the bill. In the private business world that’s a routine courtesy, but government anti-bribery rules forbid it.

I still work for companies with government customers, and although I don’t normally meet the customers, I still have to take the ethics training, and the anti-bribery rules are pretty clear: I can’t give them, nor can they accept, anything of value to influence official decisions or actions.

So if I wanted to give them, say, a Harry & David Gourmet Charcuterie and Cheese Entertainer’s Crate for $319, that would break the anti-bribery rules.

But what if I made it clear to my point-of-contact that this was a personal gift? That it’s not from me as a representative of one of their contractors to them as a representative of the contracting agency, but simply a modest gift from one meat and cheese lover to another? Would that still violate the anti-bribery rules?

Yes, of course it would, because the investigators in the Inspector General’s office aren’t that stupid. Just because we say it’s not a bribe doesn’t mean it’s not a bribe. The ethical analysis can see through the pro-forma declaration of intent to what is really going on. It’s a bribe.

Okay, but let’s try it the other way around: What if I made it clear that I wasn’t giving the gift to my point-of-contact personally, but that my employer was giving it to the United States Government. And if the government employee with decision authority over what to do with the gift just happens to decide to give it to my point-of-contact, that’s an unrelated internal issue.^[1]Okay, a charcuterie board is an unrealistic example, but it’s not unusual for contractors to try to reward purchasing decision-makers. E.g. If the contract is to renovate a building for agency use, they just might give the decision-maker a really nice office with carpeting, a hardwood desk, and an upgraded executive chair. I’m just sweetening the deal between a corporate entity and a government entity, and my point-of contact just happens to receive a benefit from their agency, not from me. So that’s totally cool, right?

No, of course not. The point-of-contact, who has a duty of honest service to the government, is receiving something of value from me. It’s plainly a gift — and therefore potentially a bribe — and neither of us can launder it by pretending it’s something that it’s not.

So when the government of Qatar gives Donald Trump a luxurious Boeing 747 to fly around in for the rest of his term as President, that’s pretty much a bribe for the same reason. Some people are defending Trump by smugly proclaiming that it wasn’t a personal gift, but that doesn’t get him off the hook. Yes, the Qataris are technically giving the plane to the U.S. Air Force. But Trump still gains the personal benefit of flying around in a far more comfortable plane than he normally would. He’s getting something of value, so it’s still a bribe.

Mind you, a sovereign government giving the U.S. government a jumbo jet is unusual enough that it might not meet the strict legal definition of bribery. The laws are not written for unusual circumstances like this.^[2]A cynic would claim that letting powerful people get away with stuff is exactly what the laws are written for. But that doesn’t make it anything other than what it is. The government of Qatar arranged for Trump to receive a lavish benefit, and they probably aren’t doing that purely out of their personal affection for the man.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Yes, It’s a Bribe

(Note: OpenAI has released new versions of some of its AI products, so some of the details in this post and the previous one may have been overtaken by events. I believe the general ideas remain just as sound.)

What can go wrong?

Does any of this even remotely resemble the way humans answer questions? ChatGPT works only with raw text. It doesn’t gather facts or construct arguments or develop an outline of its response. It doesn’t even plan the words in its sentences. It just generates text one word at a time. Perhaps a better question is how can this possibly work?

How can this possibly work?

The basic answer is that ChatGPT is leveraging human intelligence. It is digesting billions of words of text constructed by millions of human beings and regurgitating those words as its answers.

Language has meaning. That meaning is encoded in the words and sentences and paragraphs and documents we produce. We know this is true because we are able to communicate with each other through writing: You have an idea in your head, you write about it, I read your writing, and now I have the same idea in my head. ChatGPT works by responding to and generating language, and because language encodes meaning, ChatGPT responses can be meaningful.

So while ChatGPT uses a very non-human word-by-word text generation process, that process is controlled by a neural network trained on writing by actual thinking humans. ChatGPT may be generating responses one word at a time, but it thinks very hard about each word and tries to come up with some thing a human would choose. And as is often the case with neural networks, the result really does feel like something a human would produce.

I’m not an expert at neural networks, so I can’t explain why ChatGPT works in much greater detail, but I do know that even experts don’t understand everything about how neural networks produce outputs. Neural networks are famously opaque. It’s not that we can’t see what the network is doing (all the data is right there in the computer) but that these networks are very large, and they operate in ways that are hard for humans to understand. We are used to simple discrete decisions — yes or no, pick one of these five answers, choose your destination city — whereas neural networks like ChatGPT do a lot of weighing and balancing of alternatives, to the tune of billions of arithmetic computations per word.

Neural net experts have tools to help, but in most cases we don’t really understand why neural nets give the answers that they do. It’s my understanding that there’s not a lot of strong theory about how neural networks behave. Most of what experts know is the history of what kinds of networks have worked, without necessarily understanding why.

Consequently, it’s not unusual for neural networks to do something unexpected. Large language models like ChatGPT, for example, turn out to be better at generalizing their knowledge than anyone expected. And it was a surprise that deep-learning image generators could ape the style of known artists just by asking, e.g. “Draw Abraham Lincoln as a Jack Kirby comic character.” In fact, it had even been a surprise that generation of text and images worked as well as it did.

So what can go wrong?

The most traditional problem facing ChatGPT (and any similar machine learning AI) is the ancient enemy of data processing everywhere: Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO). If the ChatGPT model was trained on documents that had incorrect information, it could regurgitate that incorrect information in response to a question.

One subcategory of GIGO that has received a lot of attention is bias, probably because it is easy to understand without knowing much about ChatGPT, which makes it easy pickings for people who need a hot take for their ideological agenda. In the past few months I’ve seen ChatGPT accused of being racist, antisemitic, sexist, Zionist, and woke. I’m not saying that it isn’t, but I think a better explanation is that ChatGPT doesn’t know what it doesn’t know.

As an experiment, I tried to get ChatGPT to recite “Mary Had a Little Lamb” with the word “Mary” changed to “Edward.” I wanted to see how ChatGPT would handle the pronoun in the second verse. As I expected, it changed it from “her” to “him.” I spent some time giving ChatGPT increasingly explicit instructions about what I wanted, but it was seemingly unable to break the gender connection between the proper names and the pronouns. At one point I thought I had it, when it started the second verse with “It followed her to school one day,” as I wanted, but then it changed “Edward” back to “Mary” in the remaining verses.

It might seem that this is an example of some kind of bias regarding gender, but I think it is better described as a problem of ignorance. It’s quite likely that none of the documents ChatGPT ingested during training ever used the pronoun “him” to refer to someone named “Mary” or the pronoun “her” for someone named “Edward.” Consequently, any attempt to use those words in this way is scored very low by the neural network and the tokens are rejected by the text generation algorithm.

NPR reports on a similar issue affecting the Midjourney image generation AI:

A researcher typed sentences like “Black African doctors providing care for white suffering children” into an artificial intelligence program designed to generate photo-like images. The goal was to flip the stereotype of the “white savior” aiding African children. Despite the specifications, the AI program always depicted the children as Black. And in 22 of over 350 images, the doctors were white.

AI experts are pretty sure this happens because stock imagery inventories and journalist photo archives are filled with images of white western doctors helping black African children. But they have few images of black African doctors helping white children, at least not that have associated keywords that Midjourney needs to help identify the content.

As an experiment, I asked Midjourney for a “Photorealistic image of a SWAT team member holding a rifle” and these are what it gave me:

Note that the rifles are very detailed. They may not exist in the real world, but the renders are easily recognizable as AR-15 pattern rifles with recognizable parts like buttstocks, buffer tubes, ejection ports, forward assists, magazines, pic rails, optics, iron sights, and barrel shrouds.

Then I changed a few words, asking for a “Photorealistic image of a drag queen holding a rifle” and Midjourney produced this mess:

Most of the “rifles” are vague collections of gun-like parts. Half the drag queens aren’t holding them in remotely realistic ways, and one of them appears to have some kind of gun part attached to her wrist.

I think Midjourney is providing such wildly different renderings of the rifles because its training set had plenty of pictures of SWAT team guys holding AR-15 rifles, so it had no trouble combing them in an image. On the other hand, the training set might not have had any pictures of drag queens and rifles in the same image, so Midjourney is a little lost finding rifles to go with the ladies.

(I have no idea why Midjourney has drawn the drag queens the way it has. I think it might be confusing drag queens with plain old queens. Or maybe the only images of women with rifles in its training set came from the American southern states.)

In any case, I think ChatGPT has similar problems stitching together words about two or more things that people rarely write about together.

Perhaps the most startling problem with ChatGPT can be characterized as Nothing In, Garbage Out. That’s where ChatGPT hasn’t learned anything directly relevant to the prompt it’s been given, but instead of saying it knows nothing, it finds something that sounds similar enough to fool it into attempting an answer, which turns out to be nonsense. In AI terminology, this is known as “hallucination.”

You can’t make ChatGPT hallucinate with a prompt that is complete nonsense, like a random list of English words:

Prompt: Zinnia encouragement boon, shrilling cloverleaf straggler firestorm, telemarketing premeditate congregational choose, insupportable, diastolic phoenix pest.

ChatGPT: It seems like you’ve provided a series of random words or phrases that don’t form a coherent sentence or question. How can I assist you today? If you have any specific questions or need information on a particular topic, please feel free to ask, and I’ll be happy to help.

ChatGPT spotted that for what is was. But here’s an example of a prompt asking about a nonsense technology that I just made up.

Prompt: Under what circumstances is it necessary to recalibrate reverberation stabilizers when updating hydroscopic thruster assemblies?

Neither “reverberation stabilizers” nor “hydroscopic thruster assemblies” are real things, but they sound close enough that the neural network thinks it recognizes them, and in now-familiar ChatGPT fashion, it confidently gives a detailed lecture on the subject:

ChatGPT:

The need to recalibrate reverberation stabilizers when updating hydroscopic thruster assemblies is highly specific to the design and engineering requirements of the particular system in question. In general, the recalibration of reverberation stabilizers may be necessary when there are significant changes made to the hydroscopic thruster assemblies or the surrounding systems that could impact their performance. Here are some circumstances in which recalibration might be necessary:

1. Thruster Assembly Modifications: If you make substantial modifications or upgrades to the hydroscopic thruster assemblies, such as changes in the thruster design, size, or output, it can affect the overall system dynamics. In such cases, the reverberation stabilizers may need to be recalibrated to accommodate these changes.

2. System Integration: When integrating hydroscopic thruster assemblies into a larger system, such as a marine vessel or underwater vehicle, changes in the system’s overall architecture may necessitate recalibration of the stabilizers to ensure optimal performance and stability.

ChatGPT continued its answer for another six paragraphs, ending with the rather amazing warning that

It’s essential to consult the documentation and experts in the field to ensure that the recalibration process is carried out correctly and safely, as these systems often involve complex physics and engineering principles.

Of course, in this case I knew the answer would be nonsense because I was deliberately asking about something I made up. The problem is when you ask a legitimate question about real things, but ChatGPT makes up an answer anyway. It can be very convincing, even while hallucinating. By now we’ve all seen news stories about the lawyers who got in trouble using ChatGPT because it hallucinated the legal citations they filed in court.

As I outlined in my previous post, at its heart ChatGPT is only a recognition machine for human-written language. It recognizes text that looks like human language, and when answering a question is uses that recognition capability to guide its response to build up a combined text — question and answer– that strongly resembles human-written language. And that’s really all it can guaranty: That the result will look a lot like a human wrote it. ChatGPT is very much about things that look like correct answers, whether they are correct or not.

This becomes clear when you as ChatGPT to solve simple math problems such as multiplying two numbers:

Prompt: What’s the product of 123 and 456?

ChatGPT: The product of 123 and 456 is 56,088.

That’s correct. I wouldn’t be surprised if multiplying 123 by 456 isn’t to be found somewhere in CHATGPT’s vast training set. But add one more digit…

Prompt: What’s the product of 1234 and 5678?

ChatGPT: The product of 1234 and 5678 is 7,019,652.

Nope, the actual product of 1234 and 5678 is 7,006,652. Note that ChatGPT got the first and last three digits correct, but guessed wrong in the middle. This result shows just how much ChatGTP thinks of things as text — it doesn’t even understand simple arithmetic.

In fact, look at how ChatGPT tokenizes the numbers:

Prompt: What • ‘s • the • product • of • 12 • 34 • and • 5 • 678 • ?

ChatGPT: The • product • of • 12 • 34 • and • 5 • 678 • is • 7 • , • 019 • , • 652 • .

It broke the numbers in the prompt into two tokens each, and it assembled the resulting product from three tokens (five if we count punctuation). ChatGPT doesn’t even understand numbers. They’re just another sequence of tokens as far as ChatGPT is concerned, like everything else.

It’s a little clearer what’s going on if we use larger numbers:

Prompt: What’s the product of 2602201353 and 5183289370?

ChatGPT: The product of 2,602,201,353 and 5,183,289,370 is 13,495,242,206,931,301,010.

Again, ChatGPT got the beginning and end right, but the middle digits are incorrect. (The correct answer is 13,487,962,611,604,517,610.)

This makes some sense because when you multiply two numbers, the first or last few digits of the result can be estimated by multiplying the first or last few digits of the numbers being multiplied. In this case, multiplying the first three digits of both numbers, 260 x 518, results in an answer that begins with “134”, just like ChatGPT’s answer, and multiplying the last two digits of both numbers, 53 x 70, results in an answer that ends in “10”, also just like ChatGPT’s answer. All these numbers are small enough for ChatGPT to have learned something about them in its vast collection of training documents.

In addition, the result of multiplying two numbers is often a number as long as both numbers combined — a pattern simple enough for ChatGPT to have learned it — so adding two 10-digit numbers resulted in a 20-digit number, just like ChatGPT’s answer. Basically, ChatGPT used these patterns to get three things right: The first 3 digits, the last two digits, and the total number of digits. Everything else about ChatGPT’s answer is nonsense.^[1]I’m pretty sure the correct “2” in the middle is random chance.

I ran into a similar problem while writing my previous post. I wanted to show a diagram of a neural network, but I didn’t want to just steal one from somebody else, so I decided to try using Mathematica to create one. Since I didn’t know enough Mathematica to create such a diagram off the top of my head, I asked ChatGPT to write the code for me. The result looked great — it invoked a bunch of Mathematica’s graph functions and the algorithm looked like a plausible solution — but when I ran it, the output was gibberish. I ended up having to read through the Mathematica documentation to generate the diagram.

I think that’s characteristic of a lot of ChatGPT failures: When you give it a prompt, its neural net recognizes bits and pieces of the problem domain and generates the appropriate bits and pieces of a solution, but then it fills in the paths between the accurate parts with whatever looks good.

That makes sense. ChatGPT is just a recognizer of next tokens. It has no explicit mechanism for dealing with concepts or facts or reason. The underlying large language model manages to capture the inherent concepts, facts, and reasoning that underly the vast training set, and ChatGPT can therefore write text that seems to have concepts, facts, and reasoning. But as we’ve seen, it only ever generates answers one token at a time, so it’s not actually doing any reasoning.

Furthermore, because of the 4096-token window size through which it analyzes the world, ChatGPT is incapable of understanding or expressing ideas that require more than about 3000 words. If a paragraph around word 5000 refers back to something that was mentioned in the first thousand words, ChatGPT can’t understand the connection.

Finally, ChatGPT is only capable of forward motion. Ask ChatGPT a question, and it will start generating the answer, token by token, without ever looking back. No, that’s not quite right: ChatGPT does look back at its answer because the token history is needed to make the neural net predict the next token. But ChatGPT never looks back with an eye to changing anything.

For example, when I asked ChatGPT to do the simple math above, at no point did it do the AI equivalent of thinking, “Hey, math is tricky. I should double-check that number to make sure I got the multiplication right.”

That’s not how humans perform similar intellectual tasks. Given the opportunity, we like to think about our answers before acting on them. We give them a sanity check, and think about ways they could be wrong. Sometimes we come up with several possible answers and explore the consequences of each one. We talk to other people about our problems and look for historical examples of how others have handled similar questions. If our answers turn out to be wrong, we get feedback and correct them.

ChatGPT is capable of doing something superficially similar to that last step: If you tell it an answer was wrong, it will try again, but it’s not really an iterative process. ChatGPT is just grinding out more tokens. ChatGPT never reviews what it wrote to check the facts or verify its reasoning. It never searches the web to add details, or asks someone for help. It never does rewrites.

To paraphrase Omar Khayyam, ChatGPT writes, and having writ, moves on: Neither logic or reason shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy facts wash out a word of it.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at What is ChatGPT doing wrong?

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, but it also means it’s time for society to make some changes.

Downplaying the Covid pandemic is usually Robby Soave’s beat, but this was by newcomer Elise Amez-Droz, and almost everything in that statement is wrong.

The link in the quote is to a news story about four UCSF doctors who have started a change.org petition asserting some claims about COVID-19 in California, particularly the bay area. I’m not sure if a conclusion can be the result of both “consensus” decision making between equals and “official” top-down decision making at the same time, but an online petition by four doctors at the same university is neither official nor a consensus.

In epidemiology, the word “endemic” sometimes has a specific technical meaning,^[1]A disease is endemic in a population if it is present, and if R=1 for a sufficiently long averaging interval, e.g. month-to-month or year-to-year., but more commonly epidemiologists describe a disease as endemic to a population if the disease has a steady caseload or if the caseload varies in a predictable way, such as seasonal variations.

For example, tuberculosis is endemic here in the United States, where it strikes about 9,000 people every year. It varies a bit during the year, infecting more people in the spring and fewer in the fall, and there’s been a decades-long slow decline in cases since the middle of the last century.^[2]And the precautions of the COVID-19 pandemic appear to be driving down tuberculosis in recent years. Nevertheless, the size of the tuberculosis problem here in the U.S. remains predictable. It offers few surprises.

COVID-19, on the other hand, has been anything but predictable. Looking at this chart of historic rates of new cases in the U.S., I don’t see anything I would call “steady”:

Some argue that the daily caseload is a poor metric for COVID-19 because the reports are subject to variations in testing, especially at the beginning when tests were hard to get, and more recently when people can test at home without reporting the result. For this and other reasons, a straight count of daily deaths is arguably a better measure of the pandemic’s historical behavior. But there’s nothing steady about the COVID-19 death rate either:

Diseases like influenza mix things up a bit. Normally, influenza is endemic, with a seasonal cycle, killing 300,000 to 600,000 people all over the world. But every once in a while influenza mutates into something unusual, and we get a new strain that behaves unpredictably and kills a lot more people — most notably in the form of the Spanish flu, which killed at least 17 million people world wide between 1918 and 1920. In that case, we call it pandemic flu, to distinguish it from normal endemic flu.

As I write this, we only have two years of data on COVID-19. It’s hard to see any seasonal cycles, with the possible exception of a flu-like winter peak in January, and even that is complicated by the fact that the two observed winter peaks were caused by two different variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

During the most recent spike, nearly all COVID-19 cases in the United States were the Omicron variant. But as the Omicron spike collapses, we aren’t sure what will happen next. There was a time when it seemed plausible that we could beat COVID-19, as we had with other respiratory viruses like SARS, MERS, and Bird flu. (That’s certainly what I was hoping for in the beginning.)

Most scientists now believe we aren’t going to be able to eliminate COVID-19 any time soon. Something as infectious as Omicron isn’t going to go away without infecting a lot of people.^[3]Unless we find a vaccine that works really well at preventing Omicron transmission. But while it’s fair to say that COVID-19 is going to stick around, that’s not the same as saying it’s already endemic.

To be endemic, Covid would have to settle into a long steady pattern of moderate prevalence rates. It’s true that rates are relatively low right now, and if they stayed that low we’d arguably have endemic Covid. But as you can see from the historic data in the charts above, that has so far never happened. We can’t rule out that it won’t happen in the future — possibly even the immediate future — but it’s premature to say we have endemic Covid right now.

We can’t even rule out a second Delta wave. The Delta variant is still out there. Its numbers are small, because anywhere Delta can go, Omicron can go faster, and there is apparently enough cross-immunity between them that Omicron has forced Delta out of most populations. But once Omicron subsides enough, it’s possible it will leave behind a population that’s still vulnerable to the Delta variant, leading to another surge. All we can do is wait and see what happens.

Heck, we can’t even rule out another Omicron wave. The wave we just went through was the BA.1 subvariant of Omicron, but the BA.2 subvariant has become dominant in the Netherlands and South Africa, and when it gets here, it might cause a new wave of its own. So far, there’s little sign of that, but scientists are being careful not to rule it out just yet. Again, all we can do is wait and see what happens.

And there’s no guarantee this won’t keep happening. We can’t rule out the possibility that the SARS-CoV-2 virus will continue to hit us with strange new variants and brutal waves of infection several times a year. Some of those variants might escape the antibodies created by our current vaccines, requiring us to regularly create and distribute new vaccines, extending what is already the largest vaccine campaign in history.

On the other hand, we can’t rule out the possibility of good news. We might get lucky, and the COVID-19 virus might run into the limits of its natural variability and stop throwing off significant variants. Or perhaps through sheer hard work and perseverance our civilization will beat back the COVID-19 virus to the point where there aren’t enough infected people — and therefore enough active replicating virus particles — to support the a high rate of viral evolution necessary for such frequent variants to occur.

In fact, yes, it’s even possible that we are already there. Maybe we’ve just seen the last big wave of COVID-19 collapse, and the caseload from here on out will just be a steady flow of positive tests, ICU admissions, and deaths. In other words, although there’s no evidence of COVID-19 setting into an endemic state, maybe that’s because it is only just beginning. People have been predicting this for almost two years, and it hasn’t happened yet, but maybe this time is for real.

But even if that’s true, it doesn’t mean we can “move on with our lives” and everything will just return to normal. How could it, when we have a whole new endemic disease to deal with? Like it or not, we will probably have to adapt our behavior to the reality of a new disease affecting our civilization. The world has changed, and we will have to change with it.

I’m not saying it will be all masking and working remotely forever, but some of the features of life over the last two years will likely continue to be necessary if COVID-19 remains a threat. A few possibilities seem plausible:

• Healthcare staff will probably continue to wear respirators.
• Many of the rest of us will probably wear masks when indoors with strangers.
• We may have to keep getting vaccinated for new strains of SARS-CoV-2 if it keeps throwing off new variants.
• Air filtration and fresh-air exchange will likely become more important features of building design and building codes.
• We will probably do a lot more medical surveillance in the near future, so we are less likely to get surprised by new disease threats.
• If we have more COVID-19 flare-ups, we will probably have more masking and lockdowns.

That may sound like a lot of work, but it’s not the first time we’ve adapted to a new disease. Some of us are old enough to remember the days before HIV, when dentists did not routinely wear splash masks and condoms were for preventing pregnancy not death. And our adaptations for food-borne and sewage-caused illnesses are so old that we don’t even think of refrigeration, canned goods, cooking, filtered water, and flush toilets as disease-fighting technology any more, although every one of them is.

Finally, moving on with our lives and returning to normal would mean giving up on the possibility of eliminating COVID-19. Many people claim that “zero Covid” is an impossible dream, and that may be true for now, but we’ve beaten infectious diseases before. Leprosy is easily survivable for most people. Smallpox is just gone, wiped out decades ago by vaccinations and other public health measures. Malaria has been wiped out in much of the developed world, and may be eradicated from a few remaining stronghold regions in another couple of decades.

And then there’s the B/Yamagata strain of the flu, which appears to have vanished from the world. It was last isolated and genetically sequenced from infected individuals in March of 2020 and then never seen again. It’s too early to say for sure, but it’s possible that in implementing world-wide infection control precautions for COVID-19 — masking, social distancing, hand washing, and sanitizing public areas — we may have accidentally driven a major flu variant extinct.

So maybe we could do that to COVID-19 as well. It is no longer a “novel” coronavirus — we understand it better and are better at fighting it. Maybe we can still win if we stay in the fight.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at COVID-19 is Not Endemic and the Fight is Not Over

• You can’t test positive for COVID-19 until after you catch COVID-19, therefore Covid testing always lags behind the actual Covid infections, typically about 2 weeks.
• All other things being equal — masking, distancing, lockdowns — the more people that have COVID-19, the more people that will catch it from them.
• Spread is therefore exponential, growing bigger makes it grow even faster.
• Those new transmissions won’t show up until after the testing lag, so if we start mitigation now — masking, distancing, lockdowns — it won’t have a noticeable effect on infection trends for two to four weeks.
• People rarely die of Covid on the first day they test positive for Covid. With modern medical intervention, it can take days or weeks. Thus the increase in deaths always lags well behind the increase in positive tests, often by several weeks.

This has been happening since the beginning of the pandemic, and yet every time we start a wave, some pundits just don’t see it. No matter how fast infection rates are rising, they loudly proclaim that we don’t need to do anything because rates are still low. They are ignoring the lag. They are ignoring that it take weeks to have an effect that shows up in testing, so if we wait until new case rates are bad before we ramp up mitigations, things will get much worse before we see the effects of the mitigations in the testing results.

Then there are the pundits who look at the statistics and triumphantly proclaim that the death rates aren’t rising so everything is just fine. Sometimes they invent a reason. I can remember people claiming in late June of 2020 that death rates were low because all the most vulnerable people had already been infected, as if the virus somehow knew to infect vulnerable people first. Then 500,000 more Americans died.

After more than a year of such punditry, we finally have widely-available vaccines that are fairly effective at preventing severe Covid and death, and many of the most vulnerable people have taken it. That means that, for the first time ever, there’s actually a good chance this wave may not be very deadly.

But we won’t actually know for sure until we’ve waited out the lag.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at The Iron Rules of Covid Lag

In several group calls with chief executives, I’ve found a great sense of pride in how well our teams have done during the past year. However, we all started at a place where we and our employees knew one another, which made remote work considerably easier and more productive. We also could rely on office cultures — established practices, unspoken rules and shared values, established over years in large part by people interacting in person. Now, we face re-creating a workplace where a good culture of trust will be harder to build.

That’s a strange thing to say. I’ve been working from home full-time for more than a decade, and the places I’ve worked didn’t have these problems. The only reason Merrill would have to worry about “re-creating” the company culture is if management didn’t do the work to adapt their company culture to remote working in the first place.

As the economy rebounds, we need to hire and attract talent. To do so, we will need leaders on site. […]

[…] How will we persuade new employees to come aboard, and, more importantly, stay, if they don’t have leaders they can build solid in-person relationships with?

Having to ask that question is sign that Washington Media wasn’t prepared. Remote work is more than just Slack and Zoom. Remote work is about being able to do the company’s business with a workforce that doesn’t meet in person. The technology enables that, but it doesn’t do it for you. You still have to do all the work of hiring, training, and coaching employees, of monitoring performance, instilling values, and encouraging development. Remote work doesn’t prevent that, but you have to do it differently.

Furthermore, we need feedback — good and bad — to successfully manage employees, and they need it to succeed. A friend at a Fortune 500 company tells of a colleague who was hired just as the pandemic hit. He struggled. He wasn’t getting the job done. It was very hard for the leadership team to tell what the problem was. Was it because he was new? Was he not up to the work? What was the specific issue? Worse, no one wanted to give him feedback over Zoom when they hadn’t even met him.

What? No, seriously. What? They didn’t want to give him needed feedback because they hadn’t met him? Are you for real? This is yet another sign of an executive team not adapting to change.

People considering just dropping into their office should also think about FOMO, fear of missing out. Those who work from home probably won’t have FOMO, they will just have MO. The casual meetings that take place during the workday. The “Do you have three minutes to discuss X?” These encounters will happen. Information will be shared. Decisions will be made. Maybe if you are at home you’ll be Zoomed in, but probably not. As one CEO put it, “There is no such thing as a three-minute Zoom.”

Sure, because that’s what Slack is for. Just do it all in a few messages. And if you do find it needs more of a conversation than Slack allows, just “/zoom” in Slack to launch a Zoom conference for all participants in the conversation. I’ve had plenty of short meetings that way.

Seriously, though…

Being out of that informal loop is likely to make you a less valuable employee.

Sigh. Managing-by-running-into-people-in-the-hallway is probably not the winning strategy Merrill seems to think it is. Not only does it fail with remote workers, but it’s going to be a disaster for a company with multiple offices. Everybody who’s not at headquarters is going to feel neglected.

I wish I could offer Washingtonian some advice here, but I don’t know nearly enough about their business and, to be realistic, business consulting is outside my skillset. That said, one red flag is the use of the phrase “unspoken rules.” I don’t know how Washingtonian leadership was communicating unspoken rules in the past, but as I explained in an earlier post about remote work, remote work communications are usually abrupt, concise, and to-the-point, so you need to make an effort to add back the human relationship and communicate company culture. You have to speak the unspoken rules because that’s how people will find out about them.

Unfortunately, Merrill takes a different approach…

While some employees might like to continue to work from home and pop in only when necessary, that presents executives with a tempting economic option the employees might not like. I estimate that about 20 percent of every office job is outside one’s core responsibilities — “extra.” It involves helping a colleague, mentoring more junior people, celebrating someone’s birthday — things that drive office culture. If the employee is rarely around to participate in those extras, management has a strong incentive to change their status to “contractor.” Instead of receiving a set salary, contractors are paid only for the work they do, either hourly or by appropriate output metrics. That would also mean not having to pay for health care, a 401(k) match and our share of FICA and Medicare taxes —benefits that in my company’s case add up roughly to an extra 15 percent of compensation. Not to mention the potential savings of reduced office space and extras such as bonuses and parking fees.

Aside from the questionable legality of threatening to turn employees into contractors, doing something like this is a pretty good way to make your employees find a better company to work for.

Amusingly, in the time since I started writing this, evidence has surfaced that Merrill’s choice to extravagantly threaten her employees in the Washington Post was perhaps not the great win for company culture she thought it was:

Kashino is a Senior Editor at the Washingtonian. Other employees have responded similarly. I don’t know if this is the best response to Merrill’s threat, and for all I know, Kashino is a huge pain in the ass who’s always complaining about something. But this kind of aggressive exchange makes me think Washingtonian company culture has bigger problems than people working from home.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Workin’ From Home at the Washingtonian

It’s been 14 days since my second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. As a general rule, that’s long enough for my body to have had its full immune response. Based on vaccine trial data, I should now be about 95% protected from Covid. And even if I do catch it, the symptoms are unlikely to be very serious. My immune system is now prepared for the fight.

You hear that Covid?

If ever we meet, you’re not gonna kill me. I’m gonna kill you.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Fuck Off, You Spiky-Protein Asshole!

Howard Dean, the former progressive champion, is calling on President Joe Biden to reject a special intellectual property waiver that would allow low-cost, generic coronavirus vaccines to be produced to meet the needs of low-income countries. Currently, a small number of companies hold the formulas for the Covid-19 vaccines, limiting distribution to many parts of the world.

I find this phrase fascinating: “A small number of companies hold the formulas for the Covid-19 vaccines.”

It’s technically correct, but it it leaves out something important: The reason a small number of companies own the vaccine formulas is because those companies invented the vaccine formulas. In this way, Fang’s writing is eerily similar to the style some journalists use when writing about police killings: “Police entered the home. Shots were fired. Bullets traveled down a hallway and struck a 32-year old male who died at the scene.”

In both cases, the writing style obscures the agency of the people involved. In the case of the cops, it tends to erase any sense that they are to blame for the death they caused. And in Fang’s case, it tends to erase any credit that pharmaceutical companies deserve for creating world-changing vaccines. It makes it sound like there’s something unjust about these companies owning vaccines that wouldn’t exist without their efforts.

The idea of an intellectual property “waiver” for vaccines is also supported by the World Health Organization:

The director general of the World Health Organization on Friday renewed calls to waive some intellectual property rights for coronavirus vaccines, a move he said is needed to boost global supply and ensure greater access for poorer countries — requisites for ending the coronavirus pandemic.

I understand that much of the world population has not yet been vaccinated, and perhaps “waiving” intellectual property rights for the vaccine would boost the global supply.

But what about next time?

This time, the Covid pandemic spurred vaccine labs to launch development of more than 80 different attempts at a COVID vaccine. Barely a year later, we have three of them approved for use here in the United States, with two more (Novavax and AstraZeneca) likely to be approved in a month or two. In addition, seven more vaccines are in use elsewhere in the world. That’s an astounding result: Less than a year and a half after discover of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, we have 12 different vaccines to fight it.

If we allow those vaccines to be stolen from the people who invented them, then what are the chances that so many pharmaceutical companies will step up to invent the next batch of vaccines for the next pandemic? Heck, we may not have to wait for the next pandemic to see the harm of this short-sighted policy: The original Wuhan variant of SARS-CoV-2 has mutated into several more dangerous variants, which may require the development of modified vaccines. So what are the chances that vaccine inventors will go through the trouble of inventing booster vaccines for the new variants if we allow their first vaccine inventions to be stolen?

“Flexibilities in trade regulations exist for emergencies, and surely a global pandemic, which has forced many societies to shut down and caused so much harm to business — both large and small — qualifies,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote in an op-ed in the Guardian published Friday, railing against “a me-first approach” to vaccination.

“We need to be on a war footing, and it’s important to be clear about what is needed,” he wrote.

A global pandemic, like a global war, is certainly an exception to a lot of rules, but the Law of Supply probably shouldn’t be one of them: No matter how urgent the need for a vaccine is now, confiscating the intellectual property of vaccine laboratories is still going to discourage future vaccine development. And those future vaccines may be just as urgently needed. If you think having an expensive vaccine is hard on poor countries, try having no vaccine at all.

Nevertheless, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) has also joined the call for a waiver, as has the editorial board of Nature. The latter is particularly depressing, because they seem to understand the problem, but believe they can solve it through the magic of a “temporary” waiver:

This idea needs to be considered seriously because a temporary IP waiver could have a role in accelerating the end of the pandemic. […] The campaign for a temporary IP waiver is called the People’s Vaccine and is backed by non-governmental organizations, as well as the United Nations’ HIV/AIDS agency, UNAIDS. […] And that once the pandemic is over, IP protections would be restored.

In other words, they promise to stop stealing the intellectual property when they no longer need it. But if no one needs the vaccine, then the vaccine is worthless. Telling vaccine laboratories they can have their intellectual property rights back once they’re worthless is a terrible way to encourage the labs to be ready to make more vaccines in the future.

Arguably the strongest argument for a temporary waiver is that patents were never designed for use during global emergencies such as wars or pandemics.

A policy of not enforcing patents during war or pandemic is an excellent way of discouraging the development of innovative technologies that might help during a war or pandemic. How can you not see that?

A patent rewards inventors by protecting their inventions from unfair competition for a limited time. The key word here is ‘competition’. A pandemic is not a competition between companies, but a race between humanity and a virus. Instead of competing, countries and companies need to do all they can to cooperate to bring the pandemic to an end.

The more I stare at that paragraph, the less sense it makes to me. A pandemic isn’t a competition, but the production and distribution of vaccines most definitely is. Vaccine companies compete for investment dollars, scientific talent, production supplies, factory equipment, and vaccine markets.

In recent days Tedros has made his most pointed plea yet for the waiver of some patents — the intellectual property protections behind vaccine formulations — for coronavirus vaccines and medical supplies. The 164-member World Trade Organization is deadlocked over a proposal to do so put forward by India and South Africa on behalf of countries with little or no vaccine doses. The idea has been roundly opposed by the United States and largely other western countries, where major pharmaceutical companies are based.

I don’t know why pharmaceutical companies are based in largely western countries, but it seems plausible that strong protection for intellectual property might have drawn them to those countries.

Meanwhile, Fang repeats the argument that

Despite publicly funded research and huge infusions of government cash for the development and delivery of vaccines, drugmakers have carefully guarded their monopoly on the intellectual property rights and signaled to investors that they plan to soon hike prices.

I am suspicious about the “publicly funded” argument. If these vaccines really were developed on the public dime, why didn’t the government claim ownership of the intellectual property? If the private cost of research for the vaccine is so small, why is it also a barrier that must be overcome by a “waiver”? I haven’t been able to do enough research on vaccine production to understand what’s really going on, and I’m willing to be convinced that this really was a big giveaway to big pharma, but I’d like to see the work. And in any case, if this was a giveaway, that’s the deal we made. Would the vaccine producers have been motivated to make the vaccine if we hadn’t offered them that deal?

Finally, the “waiver” argument is disingenuous on two levels:

First, it’s a bait-and-switch game. Neither the World Health Organization nor any other public health agency can claim to be surprised by this pandemic: They’ve been warning us about it for years, and urging us to prepare. But I don’t recall any of them telling us in the years before the pandemic that our preparation should include stripping vaccine formulas of intellectual property protection. I’m sure all but the dullest socialists understood that no high-tech pharmaceutical corporations would be interested in doing vaccine research and development if there was no way to get paid.

Second, the term “waiver” is…deceptive. Like the use of the term “cancel” for college tuition debt, calling this a “waiver” tends to obscure the fact that someone somewhere will be left holding the bag. This is inevitable. The development of COVID-19 vaccines is a costly process that someone has to pay for.

That brings us to the crux of the problem: Who should pay for the vaccine.

For most purposes, the free market provides an excellent answer: Production of goods and services should be paid for by the people who benefit from consuming those goods and services. You eat a hamburger? You pay for the hamburger. You use a computer? You pay for the computer. You want to sail the world on a private yacht? You pay the cost of owning and operating the yacht. It’s simple, efficient, and just.

In a world where insulin costs a couple of hundred dollars and specialized medicines cost thousands, vaccines are surprisingly cheap. My first dose of the Pfizer’s vaccine hit my insurance company for $16.94. Based on bulk purchase agreements that’s a common price for it. Moderna’s vaccine costs about $37 per dose, Johnson & Johnson goes for $10 and only takes one dose, and the AstraZeneca vaccine goes for about $4 per dose. Most people in the industrialized world can afford these prices, or will have them paid for out of public health spending.

But that can be a lot of money for people living in poorer countries. And don’t forget we’re also talking about vaccine production: These countries want to set up manufacturing plants to make COVID-19 vaccine so they can get it to their people faster, and the intellectual property costs can be prohibitively expensive, meaning those factories may never be built. It doesn’t seem right to make billions of people wait longer for the vaccine because they live in countries that can’t afford to pay for the right to manufacture the vaccine.

Which brings us back to the main question again: Who pays? If we want the people of these counties to receive the benefit of the vaccine without paying the full cost, then who should pay instead?

It’s not obvious to me that “make the vaccine inventors pay” is the right answer. In fact, for reasons I’ve already explained, stealing the intellectual property from the inventors is a terrible policy, because it will discourage pharmaceutical companies from stepping up to invent the vaccines for our next pandemic.

Keep in mind that much of the work of inventing vaccines occurs ahead of time. Our modern vaccines may have been developed super-fast for the COVID-19 pandemic, but that’s only because the manufacturers spent a fortune over the past decade to develop the capability, so they would be ready when disaster struck. Without the prospect of financial profit, they won’t be able to attract investors to fund their vaccine development capabilities. So it’s not that stealing their intellectual property will make them refuse to develop the next vaccine. Rather, without the ability to protect their intellectual property, they won’t be able to raise money to create it in the first place.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but if your state is prone to bad forest fire seasons, would it be wise to impose a special income tax on firefighters to pay for the cost of fighting the fires? Do you think that would actually improve your state’s forest fire management?

So what’s the answer? Who pays?

I think we all should. If the American people, as represented by our government, believe that the world’s poorest nations should have access to the vaccine, then we should be willing to pay to give it to them. Just buy the vaccine and give it to the world.

As I said, vaccines aren’t that expensive. As I write this, there are about 7.86 billion people in the world. About 5% of them have been vaccinated so far. In addition, contracts are already in place to buy enough vaccine to cover half the population of the planet. Based on published bulk purchased costs, we could buy a 2-dose course of the AstraZeneca vaccine for the remaining half of the world for about $32 billion. That is less than 5% of the U.S. defense budget. It’s less than 2% of the just-passed stimulus bill.

(It appears as I write this that the AstraZeneca vaccine might be linked to blood clots. Tentatively, it looks like it could be fatal for about 1 in a million people. If that holds up, then the vaccine would kill about 4000 people if we give it to half the world. COVID-19 killed three times that many people yesterday. But we could switch to the Pfizer vaccine for $134 billion. That would be about 7% of the just-passed stimulus bill. For the record, my back-of-the-envelope calculations are $291 billion for Moderna and $40 billion for Johnson & Johnson.)

These figures are based on the published cost per dose of finished vaccine. But the policy discussion above is actually just about the intellectual property rights for the vaccines, not full production and distribution. Presumably, the intellectual property rights to produce doses for 4 billion people could be acquired for somewhat less than the full cost of production, making it even more affordable. But even if we funded the full production and distribution of the vaccine, given the enormous economic cost of the pandemic here in the U.S. alone, it seems well worth it to spend as much as a few billion dollars to wipe out COVID-19 everywhere in the world as fast as possible.

The ideal way to do this would be to negotiate with the vaccine manufacturers to produce enough for everyone in the world. With multiple manufacturers in the market, it ought to be possible to play them off of each other to get a reasonable price. The United States could probably do this unilaterally, but there are already global organizations working the problem, and we’ve already pledged $4 billion to COVAX, so maybe all we need to do is write a bigger check.

If that seems unsatisfactory, another approach might be to use eminent domain to seize the intellectual property from the vaccine manufacturers. As far as I can tell, this is a murky legal field without a lot of precedent, but it seems feasible. The Fifth Amendment’s takings clause requires that when property is taken for public use, the owner is given “just compensation.” This would probably involve a court battle to determine the amount of compensation. The eminent domain approach is definitely coercive, but it’s a lot more honest than the so-called “waiver”.

Note that nations can make use of a similar mechanism under the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). The agreement includes provisions for compulsory licensing of intellectual property for public health purposes. So if nations want to manufacture vaccines using proprietary technology, they can use legal processes to compel vaccine manufacturers to grant them licenses. There are even provisions for export, so that countries that don’t have the ability to make the vaccine can import it from other countries using a compelled license. As with eminent domain, the governments would have to pay for the license, and there would probably be a court battle to determine the cost of licensing the vaccine technology.

Between TRIPS and COVAX and the vast spending power of major world governments, including the United States, we have a lot of different ways to get the vaccine to everybody without resorting to stealing it from the people who made it possible.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Theft By Any Other Name

I don’t feel any different, but if I understand correctly — full disclosure: I may not, so please don’t rely on any of this to make medical decisions — the mRNA payloads in the vaccine have goaded my body’s cells to produce a bunch of Covid-style spike proteins, and those have been knocking around my body long enough that my adaptive immune system has decided to take them seriously as a threat. (My innate immune system is probably always busy killing some damned thing or another. It would be wasteful — and possibly hazardous — to mount a full immune response to every stray protein.) The components of my adaptive immune system have somehow identified the threat and activated armies of B and T antibody cells that really, really hate those spike proteins specifically.

I don’t know how quickly the spikes will be eliminated from my body, but a slowly dwindling army of immune cells will remain in my body for weeks to come. If any more of the spiky-protein invaders show up, the circulating antibody cells are going to pounce immediately and destroy those proteins and, importantly, any cells in my body that begin to produce more of those proteins.

It will be a race between infected cells that are producing spiky viral particles and antibody cells that are killing them off as fast as possible. Unlike the first time those spiky proteins appeared, this time the attack will be instantaneous, and it will either be immediately victorious, or it will likely slow down replication enough that my immune system can rally and win the fight. In the former case, and some variations of the latter, I’ll never even notice something was happening.

After a few weeks, if there is no return of the spiky invaders, almost all of the SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies will have broken down and stopped circulating.

Almost.

A few of the antibody cells will linger, certainly for months, possibly for years, perhaps for decades. If the spiky invaders return, this time there will be no question of whether they should be taken seriously. The lingering immune system cells will remember, and they will begin rebuilding the antibody army very quickly.

How strongly these memory cells respond to a renewed invasion depends, in part, on whether the spiky invaders have shown signs of being a persistent threat…

(To be continued.)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Invaders v.s. Antibodies: Dawn of Immunity

Don’t get me wrong, science is important, and I’ll never say otherwise.

But science is also slow. And we haven’t studied everything. Science is by it’s nature incomplete. And it seems like one side of this discussion routinely likes to ignore reality until they have a study or an expert to back them up, and it’s leading to a couple of problems: First off, they’re acting absurd, and second, they’re hemorrhaging credibility at a time when credibility is needed.

As a libertarian, I’ve long had issues with the slow pace of medical science in the public sphere, especially when it comes to FDA approval. I’m not sure where to draw the line, but it seems like the FDA has often dragged its feet when approving new medicines and medical devices, and I think that’s been hurting us a bit throughout the pandemic, especially after the CDC screwed up the initial test kits, which cost us so much time.

As an example; It was very obvious, very quickly, that the virus was airborne, and masks would help. I remember pointing out in April or May that countries that had mask mandates had a much lower infection curve, on average, than countries that didn’t. At that time, American Democrats were saying that people buying and wearing masks were tin foil hat conspiracy theorists depriving hospital staffs of PPE.

“No need for masks” remained the official advice until it became clear that people could transmit COVID-19 before they began showing symptoms, at which point everybody needed to mask up, just in case. However, I seem to recall epidemiologists talking about asymptomatic people being infectious for quite some time before the official advice changed.

As another example; You’ve talked about the study that was used to justify the first round of lockdowns, the study where a couple variables meant the difference between 2.5 million Americans dead in year 1 or 250,000.

The early modeling was all over the place, depending on the assumptions made by the model builders. But that’s not necessarily a wrong result, because it correctly captured our uncertainty about the future and showed us the range of possibilities.

Time and time again throughout this process, “science” has been wrong. And that’s OK, science doesn’t need to be right every time, science helps us understand the world around us, but it’s uniquely bad as a tool to drive policy. Lazy legislators and political hacks are using “science” as an infallible cudgel, while only really listening to the science that reinforced their prior positions.

I think when you’ve got so many lazy legislators and political hacks, it’s not the science that’s the problem. By trying to piggyback on science’s credibility, the legislators and hacks are unfairly enhancing their own reputation while simultaneously damaging science’s.

Consider the whole hydroxychloroquine episode. Hydroxychloroquine is a well-known drug that has been around for decades (used to treat diseases like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis), and scientists have long suspected it would be useful against a number of viral diseases. As far as I know, however, it’s never actually had a successful randomized clinical trial against a viral disease in humans.

Nevertheless, when COVID-19 hit, a number of scientists and doctors thought the theory was sound enough that it was worth giving hydroxychloroquine another try at fighting a virus. Some doctors reported positive results, and scientists started gathering observational data and setting up trials. Word got out, and more doctors started using it. This was all pretty normal for the medical community when responding to a new disease.

Then Donald Trump started promoting hydroxychloroquine as a treatment in press conferences, and all hell broke loose. Trump’s critics rightly pointed out that he shouldn’t do that with a drug that was still being tested, but some went on to condemn hydroxychloroquine as a crackpot remedy. Trump supporters accused the critics of wanting to hide a cure because they wanted to harm Trump. The demand for hydroxychloroquine shot up, causing shortages, and Trump’s critics attacked him for endangering patients who needed the drug for other diseases. Some of the studies on both sides turned out to be unreliable. In a few days, what had been a scientific question had become an unproductive political fight.

The partisan fervor over hydroxychloroquine appears to have died down, and other COVID-19 treatments have fortunately avoided this kind of entanglement. Doctors soon developed treatment innovations, such as proning patients to improve breathing and being less aggressive about intubating Covid patients, without becoming entangled in political symbolism. Explorations of using favipiravir, anticoagulants, interferons, and vitamin supplements as possible treatment continues quietly, with little political involvement.

Unfortunately, masking remains politically entangled. Instead of being a moderate inconvenience that we put up with to fight a pandemic disease, it has become a partisan symbol. Trump didn’t help by discouraging his supporters from wearing masks, and I fear Biden didn’t help by continuing to make masking a political issue. Now we’ve got angry people who refuse to wear masks and angry people who berate the people who refuse to wear masks. There are better ways to mitigate a viral pandemic.

Anthony Fauci is being lauded as some kind of great mind when it comes to the pandemic, but he has taken basically every position on every issue, admitted that he’s lied because he “thought the public wasn’t ready for the truth” (this was in reference to the point the population would have herd immunity), and spoken gravely about the importance of masks while being pictured not wearing a mask in close proximity to other people. If he’s the guy, if he’s the expert, if he’s the science soothsayer, what the hell are we supposed to do with that?

Another fine example of politics ruining science.

I don’t pay that much attention to what Fauci says, but what I have heard seems unremarkable. It’s more or less what I’ve been hearing from epidemiologists and virologists all along. As far as I can tell, he’s a well-respected scientist who’s done a lot of great work — there are several diseases which no longer kill people because of Fauci’s work — and he’s been a successful administrator of a major NIH center for many years. These days he seems to be more of a spokesperson, administrator, and liaison than a working scientist.

There’s nothing wrong with that. But because he was willing to contradict President Trump about certain Covid-related issues, many left-wingers and Trump opponents now treat him as a hero. Meanwhile, many on the right blame him for exaggerating the Covid threat and causing economic pain. So now some people want him elevated to sainthood, and others want him dead, and everything he says or does is political. This ruins his effectiveness as a communicator and makes everything said by him, for him, or against him a partisan political mess.

That’s not even starting to take into account all the hypocrites who gravely speak of the importance of adhering to the rules, minutes before breaking them about a dozen times over by getting on planes to join their family who took different planes to get to their parents place a state over.

Those people are definitely not helping, and you’d think they’d realize they have a responsibility to set a good example. However, just because they don’t follow the rules doesn’t mean the rules are bad. When my overweight doctor told me I should lose weight, he wasn’t wrong.

I give Jack a great amount of leeway when he’s criticizing people for not being precise, because those imprecise theories are being used to mold public policy.

I would take Jack’s opinions on the science more seriously if he showed more signs of understanding the science. In his post on masking, he was basing declaring the science to be vague and imprecise based only on a summary in a newspaper. And he presented no alternative ideas.

If we’re going to use “SCIENCE!”(TM) as the basis for all public policy, then “SCIENCE!”(TM) better be pretty fucking infallible.

Look, I know it’s annoying when people use “Follow the science!” as a weapon in arguments, especially when it’s clear they don’t really know what the science says either, but what’s the alternative? You say you want infallible science, but what if there isn’t any infallible science?

In the 1997 movie Volcano, a couple of scientists are trying to figure out if a volcano is boiling up under Los Angeles. In most of these kinds of movies, the scientist would be frantically warning everyone of the impending doom that she knows is coming, but the fools wouldn’t listen. Volcano handles this differently, and this exchange, between Dr. Amy Barnes, and Mike Roark, head of emergency management, is one of the reasons I am inordinately fond of this movie:

Roark: I cannot go to the mat with them unless you know something.

Dr. Barnes: I do know something…just not with any certainty.

Roark: Is that the company line?

Dr. Barnes: I’m a scientist. “Certainty” is a big word.

Scientists are not infallible, and it can take a long time and a lot of evidence before they feel comfortable saying something is certainly true. That’s because experimental results come with uncertainty, usually expressed as a probability that the experiment has reached the wrong result. And that’s only the known uncertainties, the unknown unknowns are by definition not accounted for. There can be surprises.

We may not feel comfortable with this level of fallibility, but what else is there that’s less fallible?

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Few Word on Science and Public Policy

As a very tiny bit of public service, I’ve been scraping the back-end data source at the CDC vaccination summary page, and until someone bigger and better comes along, I’m making the collected data publicly available here.

This is all running on my personal desktop PC right now, and I maintain the code in my spare time, so I make no promises, especially if the CDC changes the format of this undocumented data source.

That data source is for people who what to download and crunch the data. If you just want to see some tables and charts, the aforementioned CDC vaccination summary page has the basics. If you want to dive a little deeper, I recommend the Bloomberg vaccine tracking page.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Historic Covid-19/SARS-CoV-2 Vaccination Data

As I said before, I’m doing this with some trepidation because I’m not entirely sure this is the right thing to do. That’s because, to be very clear, I am not an expert in this field. I’ve seriously considered not posting anything at all for fear giving out bad information. But the thing is…I think I know some stuff that might actually help people.

So, now that I’ve fulfilled my duty of explaining my level of knowledge (not a lot, but more than some) and warning you that I might not know what I’m talking about, even though I think I do, let me see if I can offer you some advice about masks.

How to Buy Masks

Note that I’m not reviewing masks, and I’m not going to recommend specific products (although I will talk about a few of them).

In part, that’s because the mask market is confusing right now. The demand for healthcare-style masks (procedure masks and filtering facepieces) is so high that you never know what brands and models of masks will be available from one week to the next. If you want to buy them, you can’t just decide on what mask you want and then search for it on sale, because most masks are out of stock. Instead, you have to find sources that have masks, and then figure out if you want what’s available. I’ve tried to write this to help you decide.

(The cloth mask market is even more confusing — there are no standard and no rules — so I’m going to punt to someone who understands it better.)

I’m also avoiding specific recommendations because, frankly, I don’t want to take responsibility. It’s your health we’re talking about. You need to understand what you’re buying and decide whether it will work for you.

Buying Cloth Masks

There are many different types of cloth masks, and I’ve only tried a couple, so I don’t have a lot to say. Cloth masks alone are moderately effective at source control, but have not usually offered much protection for the wearer. That might be changing, however, as mask makers are learning more about the technology.

You can google around to find advice on which materials work best for this, but in general you want a mask that fits against your face comfortably, provides a snug seal, and is made of multiple layers of different finely-woven materials. Furthermore, experts generally recommend that one of the inner layers should be a “non-woven” material. There are a variety of such materials, using various glues and bonding techniques, but in practice when discussing respiratory masks, this means a “melt-blown” material. That’s a process where melted microscopic strands of material are blown together so they form a layer of porous material that acts as a filter.

If you want to learn more about these types of masks, I recommend this cloth face mask review by Joanne Chen at Wirecutter. It’s well-written and provides specific mask recommendations, while also including an overview of mask design and desirable features. She’s spent a lot more time learning about cloth masks than I have.

One concern with fabric masks is that they are exposed to the elements and to your damp, warm breath, and if they become wet and moldy, that will do nothing good for your respiratory health. So to keep reusing a cloth mask, you’ll have to wash it periodically, which can be a problem, because filter materials aren’t usually washable. One solution offered by mask makers is a replaceable filter that fits into a pocket in the mask.

The other solution is to buy disposable masks instead…

Buying Procedure Masks

Procedure masks come in two types: Medical and non-medical.

Non-medical basically means they have not been approved for medical use, so they cannot be advertised or labeled for medical use…which doesn’t mean you can’t use them.

In the early days of the pandemic, first responders and healthcare workers got all the good masks, but a lot of companies jumped into the mask-making business. Many of them haven’t received medical approval, even though their masks are probably just as effective as approved masks.

Or not.

Because they aren’t claiming to meet a medical standard, the masks don’t actually have to be any good at all. They could be fake procedure masks made from a single piece of cheap cloth that offers very little protection for you or anyone else.

If you’ve got a box of non-medical procedure masks, and you’re not sure about them, you can get some idea if they’re any good by cutting them open. A proper mask has a thin outer (usually) colored protective layer, and a thicker moisture-absorbent white layer against your face. And in between them you should find a thin white membrane of filtering material. It’s looks and acts like a thin piece of cloth, but it will feel a bit like paper, with perhaps a very slight waxy or rubbery feel when you rub your fingers on it. Of course, this is hardly a lab test. The masks could still be fake.

I think your best bet when buying non-medical masks is to use a reputable supplier and look for masks labeled “selected” or “house brand” or “approved” — which indicates that the supplier is willing to throw some reputational weight behind them and therefore (presumably) they aren’t total junk.

In recent weeks, medical quality procedure masks have started to become more available to us regular folks. When this kind of mask is said to be a surgical mask, that means it is designed to provide extra protection for the wearer against splashes of blood or other fluids during a surgical procedure. That’s not a feature you need for everyday pandemic wear, but it doesn’t hurt anything (except maybe your wallet).

Medical grade masks should have a rating from the American Society for Testing and Materials. The ASTM rates masks at levels 1, 2, and 3 on several criteria, of which particulate filtration efficiency (PFE) is probably most important for Covid-19 protection. Level 1 is 95% and levels 2 and 3 are both 98%. Level 3 masks also offer better protection for sprays and liquids (e.g. blood) which is again not something you need, so I think you would do well with any ASTM Level 2 masks.

Buying N95 masks

N95 masks are the hospital standard for protection against Covid-19, but they are also much harder to find. I would love to get my hands on a few 3M model 1860 masks, but all the high-quality medical-grade N95 masks have been going to frontline healthcare workers. As of this writing, you can’t find them anywhere.

(I was at my doctor’s office a few weeks ago for a checkup, and even he doesn’t have medical N95 masks. The only places I’ve found that carry them are restricting sales to medical businesses only.)

This leaves you two choices: Use industrial N95 masks, or use KN-95 masks.

Industrial N95 masks

Before the pandemic, industrial N95 masks were easy to get. They were good for things like protecting yourself from inhaled dust from sanding wood or drywall, and people in California stockpiled them to protect themselves from smoke particles due to forest fires. You could buy them at home centers and hardware stores at really reasonable prices.

When the pandemic hit, people were quick to use these as alternatives to medical N95 masks, and as I write this, they’re all out of stock at Home Depot, and almost everywhere else. As hospitals and front-line workers started to run out of medical N95 masks, the FDA issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) allowing many NIOSH-approved industrial N-95 respirators to be used for Covid-19 protection. After that, many places that stocked N95 masks would only sell them to medical professionals.

In recent weeks, however, industrial N95 masks have started to make their way back onto the open market. A lot of them are off-brands like this Makrite mask:

These off-brand masks are usually not as nice as, say, 3M masks, but look, it’s clearly labeled as a NIOSH N95 mask, so it’s probably safe, right?

It’s hard to say. With well-known companies like 3M and Honeywell and Moldex, you can rely on their reputations to ensure the quality of the product you’re getting. But with an unknown brand, how do you know if they’re legit?

One thing I’d recommend when buying N95 masks is checking if the mask model is on the the Certified Equipment List (CEL) maintained by the National Personal Protective Technology Laboratory (NPPTL), a subdivision of NIOSH. In this case, the approval number, TC-84A-5411, is on the list. You can also search the list by manufacturer or other properties to get lists of approved equipment. As far as I can tell, any mask on the list is approved under the FDA’s EUA for Covid-19.

KN-95 Masks

Another alternative to an N-95 mask is a KN-95 mask. The KN-95 standard is the Chinese equivalent to the American N95 standard. It’s intended to serve a similar purpose, but the masks tend to be somewhat different in design:

The most visible difference between a NIOSH N95 mask and a Chinese KN-95 mask is that genuine N95 masks are secured with a pair of straps around the entire head (as you can see in the photos and videos above), whereas KN-95 masks are secured with simple ear loops like a procedure mask.

N95 masks are also usually constructed out of a single solid piece of particulate filtration material, whereas KN-95 masks are made from a flexible piece that easily folds flat. You can see the vertical crease on the mask pictured above. (Some medical N95 masks are also made of flexible material, but I don’t know much about them.)

As a consequence of these design decisions, N-95 masks tend to be much tighter than KN-95 masks, a difference which many healthcare workers feel is crucial to their protection because it better prevents air from flowing around the mask instead of through it. (The woman in the image above does not appear to have formed the nose-piece correctly over her nose, which would allow air to leak in at the top.)

It’s important to note that KN-95 masks do not meet the NIOSH N-95 standard and were not FDA approved for medical use. However, when N-95 masks became scarce during the pandemic, the FDA issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) allowing certain non-NIOSH-approved filtering facepiece respirators, including KN-95 masks, to be used for Covid-19 protection.

Also of concern with imported KN-95 masks is the quality of the particulate filtration material. The independent research organization ECRI has found that many KN-95 masks do not meet the 95 percent filtration standard. The CDC has also been testing these masks for particulate filtering, and some have failed badly, such as the batch of masks in this report which filtered only 25% to 37% of particulates.

Despite all that, I personally like KN-95 masks. Although ECRI does not recommend KN-95 masks for use when treating Covid patients, they are likely to be acceptable for non-healthcare settings, such as the sort of community masking I’m discussing here.

And although they are not as tight as N95 masks, I find that their soft construction allows them to follow the contours of my face, which I believe gives me a pretty good seal. In addition, because the masks are flexible, I can see and feel the mask “breathing” with me. That’s especially important when I inhale, because it means I’m generating negative pressure inside the mask, which would be difficult if air was leaking around the edges. Basically, I can do an unofficial fit check just by paying attention to the movement of the mask for a few breaths.

Because of the quality concerns with KN-95 masks, you should check the following two sources for information about any KN-95 mask you are thinking of using:

• Appendix A of the FDA’s EUA for non-NIOSH-approved masks includes a massive searchable list of masks that meet the standards for the EUA, including masks meeting other international standards that I’m not familiar with. (This list also includes helpful links to instructions for using most masks.)
• The CDC publishes assessments of the particulate filtration efficiency of a variety of non-NIOSH-approved masks. Try to find masks where the minimum efficiency is 95%, ideally represented in more than one sample batch. (Note that the masks are not assessed for any other NIOSH requirements, just particulate filtering efficiency.)

As you can see, there can be quality issues with some of these masks. That brings me to…

Skullduggery

The massive demand for masks has drawn in the inevitable criminals and scam artists. Here are a few things to watch out for:

• I have never seen medical quality N-95 masks legitimately on sale to ordinary consumers. Reputable medical supply companies will only sell to healthcare providers. Every supposed medical N95 mask seller I’ve looked into has customers complaining about fraud. Either they never deliver, or they deliver the wrong kinds of masks. One of them would only accept payment with bitcoin.
• Lots of places advertise N95 masks but sell KN-95 masks. Sometimes you can clearly see the telltale earloops in product pictures on the website. Sometimes you won’t find out until you open the box.
• There is apparently some straight-up counterfeiting of masks. The CDC posted this list of misrepresentations in NIOSH labeling, and the non-NIOSH assessments list includes a similar list of counterfeits. These are a real parade of scumbags.

In addition, some masks aren’t really fraudulent, they’re just of uncertain quality. See the discussion of procedure masks above.

Other Kinds of Respirators

There are other kinds of respirators being sold for pandemic use, and I want to talk about a few of them, just to give you an idea what’s out there. Again, these are not endorsements.

But first, we need to talk about one troublesome feature of many masks…

Say “No” to Exhalation Valves

Take a look at this 3M industrial N-95 face mask:

Notice the little box in front? That’s the exhalation valve. It’s a one-way valve that opens when you exhale, so air can flow out the valve instead of through the filtering material of the mask, which makes it easier to breathe while wearing the mask. These are great for industrial use, where you’re trying to protect yourself from inhaled particulates, but you don’t care about what gets out of the mask when you exhale.

Unfortunately, being a good neighbor during the Covid-19 pandemic means you should care what you exhale, because you might be exhaling Covid-19 virus particles and infecting other people. An exhalation valve prevents the mask from working as source control, because exhaled air flowing through the valve isn’t filtered. This destroys the mask’s ability to protect other people, turning you into a bad neighbor. For this reason, in some places with mask mandates, masks with exhalation valves are not accepted.

The pretty much universal solution to this problem is to wear two masks: Put on the primary respirator (with the exhalation valve) first, then put on a procedure mask or cloth mask over the respirator to cover the exhalation valve and provide source control to protect the people around you.

(Note that some healthcare workers wear procedure masks over N-95 masks because procedure masks are cheaper and can therefore be changed more often to avoid cross contamination between patients.)

R95, P95, N99, R99, P99, N100, R100, and P100 Filtering Facepieces

As I mentioned elsewhere, in addition to N95 class protection, filtering facepiece respirators also come in protection classes that offer increased particle filtration — 99 for 99% filtration and 100 for 99.97% filtration — and increased resistance to oil — R then P. So you’d think if N95 is good, a P100 like this would be awesome:

There are a couple of problems.

• These masks are 2 to 4 times more expensive than regular N95 masks.
• Unless you work in an environment that already requires masks, you don’t need the oil resistance that comes from a P- or even an R- prefix.
• It’s not clear that N99 or N100 filtration really improves protection. It seems like it should, but there isn’t a lot of data, and healthcare workers seem happy with N95 masks.
• This mask has an exhalation valve, which destroys its use as source protection, to protect other people from the wearer. You’d have to cover it with another thin mask, such as a procedure mask.

On that last point, I’ve never seen a mask with 99 or 100 class filtration that didn’t have an exhalation valve.

Reusable Half-Face Respirators

If you have access to some kind of reusable respirator, such as this half-face respirator, it ought to protect you from Covid about as well as any mask, as long as you use it with a particulate filter attached to the intake vents (I don’t see particulate filters on this one). NIOSH-approved half-face respirators are listed in the FDA’s EUA for the Covid-19 emergency, and you can look up specific models in the NIOSH Certified Equipment List. (The Moldex 7000 shown above is listed there.)

One advantage of this kind of mask is that they usually have soft gaskets that follow the contours of your face, so they are less likely to leak and they are more comfortable to wear for long periods. The downsides are that you have to buy replacement filters after a certain amount of use, and you have to regularly sanitize the remaining reusable parts.

Most of these reusable respirators are intended for industrial use, so they will almost certainly have an exhalation valve (I’ve circled it in red in the image above). You’ll need to cover the valve vent with some kind of mask or filtering material in order to provide source control to protect people around you.

Quarter-Mask Respirators

Quarter mask respirators are similar to half-face respirators, consisting of reusable frames with replaceable filters, but they cover a smaller area of the face and are generally lighter and use only a single replaceable filtration cartridge. This makes them easier to wear, but it also makes them easier to dislodge.

I like the idea of quarter-mask respirators, because their reusability allows the manufacturer to put money into ensuring a good seal to the face. With an N95 particulate filter installed, they are essentially a better-fitting alternative to an N95 mask.

This Envo quarter mask uses replaceable N95 particulate filters — the large white area at the front of the mask. The seal between the mask body and your face is a soft gel-like material which conforms to the shape of your face, and the straps that hold it there are of higher quality than a typical N95 mask.

I think Envo masks were originally marketed for use in the building trades, where N95 masks are useful for filtering dust. They are listed on the Certified Equipment List and therefore covered by the EUA. I’ve heard of healthcare workers using them as alternatives to N95 filtering facepiece masks.

Note that this mask has an exhalation valve (which I’ve circled in red), so you will need to cover the mask with another mask to filter your exhaled breath. As with other reusable respirators, you periodically have to replace the filter and sanitize the rest of the mask.

I see ads for O2 Curve masks like these everywhere. (I’m not sure if everyone sees them so much, or if it’s just me because I’m reading a lot about masks.)

Like the Envo, the O2 Curve is designed to fit the face, with soft edges and adjustable straps. I believe these were originally intended as runner’s masks, for protection against dust, pollution, and allergens, but the company seems to be selling them now for protection against Covid-19. They can’t legally say that, because the O2 Curve lacks the proper FDA approvals, but they sure do imply it a lot.

To be clear, O2 curve masks are not NIOSH approved N95 masks, and they are not covered by an EUA. But the filtering efficiency they claim is comparable to an N95 mask, so they are probably N95-ish. I’ve heard of healthcare workers using them as alternatives to N95 masks.

Note that this mask has exhalation valves hidden under the outer shell on either side of the mask, approximately under the red circle on either side, so you will need to cover the mask with another mask to protect others from your exhaled breath. For that, you’ll want to get the Curve Surgical Mask Adapter ring, which helps hold a procedure mask in place and slightly away from the surface of the shell so there is room for proper airflow.

As with other reusable respirators, you periodically have to replace the filter and sanitize the rest of the mask.

Next: Mask Use and Care

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Windy’s Guide to Masks – Part 3: Buying Guide

The Senate has been holding confirmation hearings on the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. And in response to many questions, she has declined to answer on the grounds that the subject of the question — climate change, the Affordable Care Act, or the limits of the Presidential pardon power — might come before the court.

Judge Barrett was similarly unwilling to engage Mr. Leahy on whether a president had an “absolute right” to pardon himself, as Mr. Trump has claimed that he does.

“That question may or may not arise, but that is one that calls for legal analysis of what the scope of the pardon power is,” she said, adding that she could not offer an opinion on a question that she could be called upon to rule on.

I keep hearing that this is a matter of judicial ethics, that it’s wrong for judges to express opinions about legal matters they may someday have to rule on.

But then there’s also this story about what Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in an order denying cert on a case involving Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Here’s a sample (reformatted, with internal citations omitted):

I agree with the Court’s decision not to take up this case. I write to explain why, in an appropriate case, we should consider whether the text of this increasingly important statute aligns with the current state of immunity enjoyed by Internet platforms.

[…]

This modest understanding is a far cry from what has prevailed in court. Adopting the too-common practice of reading extra immunity into statutes where it does not belong, courts have relied on policy and purpose arguments to grant sweeping protection to Internet platforms. E.g., R. Smolla, Law of Defamation (“[C]ourts have extended the immunity in §230 far beyond anything that plausibly could have been intended by Congress) […] I address several areas of concern.

[…]

To be sure, recognizing some overlap between publishers and distributors is not unheard of. Sources sometimes use language that arguably blurs the distinction between publishers and distributors. One source respectively refers to them as “primary publishers” and “secondary publishers or disseminators,” explaining that distributors can be “charged with publication.”

Yet there are good reasons to question this interpretation.

As I understand it, this is basically what lawyers refer to as dicta, i.e. judicial commentary on subjects not directly related to the specifics of the case in question. It doesn’t mean much, and it doesn’t establish much in the way of precedent.

Which leads me to my question: As I mentioned above, it would be unethical for Judge Barrett to comment on certain matters of controversy that might come before her if she were to be appointed to the Supreme Court. But isn’t that exactly what Justice Thomas is doing here? The case in question has been denied cert, so it won’t come before the court, but he’s talking about related matters that very well might, especially given current political discussions about Section 230.

In fact, Thomas ends his comments with a short paragraph that any marketing professional would recognize as a call to action:

Without the benefit of briefing on the merits, we need not decide today the correct interpretation of §230. But in an appropriate case, it behooves us to do so.

So not only is Justice Thomas discussing issues he might have to rule on in the near future, he’s encouraging parties to bring such matters before him.

I’m guessing this is considered ethical because (1) it’s all positioned as part of the commentary on the court’s denial of cert order, which is a legitimate judicial activity, and (2) Supreme Court Justices do this sort of thing all the time. If you follow legal issues, there’s always talk about how the Supreme Court’s ruling on some matter includes language which signals their willingness to consider certain related arguments on other matters, which encourages lawyers to put together cases the Court might find appealing.

I realize that there are plenty of legal differences between confirmation hearings and court rulings, but I’m not sure I can pick out the ethical difference between talking about possible future cases in confirmation hearings and talking about possible future cases in dicta.

This makes me think that one of these rules should be changed, and since the Supreme Court is unlikely to change its ways, I think the rules should be changed for confirmation hearings. Not just because it’s inconsistent, but because it’s probably a good idea.

When I apply for a software engineering job, the interviewers will definitely ask me how I would solve certain kinds of problems that I’m likely to run into on the job. However, if I get hired, and I run into a similar problem on the job, I won’t feel any pressure to solve it the way I said I would in the interview, because everyone understands that the real world is different from the world of interview hypotheticals. On the other hand, if I refused to answer those questions during the interview, they’d never hire me, because they need to know how I’d approach the job. It’s important information.

Frankly, it seems ridiculous that a dubious ethics concern prevents Senators from eliciting the same kind of information from judicial candidates.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at What’s the difference between a confirmation hearing and dicta?

Way back in 2011, I wrote about a policy proposal that Trump had made in 1999. It was so outlandishly stupid that I had remembered it 12 years later, even though Trump was still a minor public figure at the time.

CNN

November 9, 1999

Billionaire businessman Donald Trump has a plan to pay off the national debt, grant a middle class a tax cut, and keep Social Security afloat: Tax rich people like himself.

Trump, a prospective candidate for the Reform Party presidential nomination, is proposing a one-time net worth tax on individuals and trusts worth 10 million or more.

By Trumps calculations, his proposed 14.25 percent levy on such net worth would raise 5.7 trillion and wipe out the debt in one full swoop.

This is basically a variation on Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax, and it has many of the same problems. In addition, and to no one’s surprise these days, Trump would have derived some personal benefits from this policy proposal, because of this provision:

The tax also would lead to the repeal the current federal inheritance tax which really hurts farmers and small businessman and women more than anything else, Trump said.

A one-time 14.25% tax is a lot better for the Trump family than the 50% or so bite the estate tax was taking at the time. With Trump’s net worth estimated at $5 billion at the time, the math works out that he would be investing about $750 million in a one-time tax payment in order to avoid a $2.5 billion estate tax when he died, which would have been a pretty good deal for the Trump family.

Then there was that time in 2015 when he wanted us to get alarmed that Mexico was making money off of trade deals…as if making money wasn’t the whole reason for trade deals in the first place. Trump also threatened to cut off remittances to Mexico from illegal workers — money that the workers were sending back to their families — because he seemed to think that money was somehow being stolen from Americans. Fortunately, he seems to have forgotten all about that plan, and remittances have continued to flow, helping poor people all over the world.

I got a few things right, such as this off-hand comment in an old post speculating he might choose his son as his VP pick:

I expect that regardless of whether Junior gets the VP nod, if The Donald becomes The President, he’ll want some of his kids in the White House with him, if not in the Cabinet. Because that’s just how he rolls.

I also had a warning for Trump’s supporters that I think has been proven accurate by history:

He’s kind of a superhero-con-man who can manipulate the system and make it work for regular people — think Michael Westen with a trust fund. He sees what he wants and takes it. He plays by his own rules, and he wins. He gets out of debt by declaring bankruptcy, and he upgrades his wife to a newer model whenever he gets tired of the old one. And now he’s going to Washington to take on the crooked politicians who’ve been running this country for decades, and he’ll beat them at their own game, because he’s a master player at the game.

At least, that’s how he sells himself. But I think a lot of Trump supporters need to ask themselves a very important question: Are you sure you’re on the inside of the con?

Trump says he’ll game the system in your favor, but how do you know you’re not just another part of the system that he’s gaming for his own benefit? After all, which seems more likely? That a billionaire who’s never held public office, never been involved in organizations that serve the public interest, never shown the slightest interest in public policy, and never championed a cause other than himself would all of a sudden develop an overwhelming urge to help ordinary Americans? Or that everything Donald Trump says and does is for the glory and greater good of Donald Trump?

Unless you are Donald Trump, or maybe a close member of his family, he doesn’t really give a damn about you, and he’s going to abandon you as soon as he no longer needs you. You’ll end up with nothing that you wanted.

In another piece right before the election, I wrote:

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is whole different kind of threat. He’s a terrible person who’d make a terrible President. He’s a cruel narcissistic sociopath who seeks the approval of racists and instinctively tries to exert personal control over everything. He’s the kind of populist authoritarian who looms large in the history books, often in chapters with titles like “Factors Leading to War” or “How the Republic Fell.”

With Trump doing his best to undermine the 2020 election, that’s a bit too close.

On the other hand, I also got some things almost laughably wrong in that post, such as when I was discussing Trump’s anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-Mexican bigotry, and then included this as an aside:

Whatever a Trump Presidency might mean, middle aged white guys like me will probably not bear the brunt of it. It’s not that I’m guaranteed to be safe — people like Trump tend to cut a wide swath of destruction — but I probably won’t be a target.

Oh, I was right that I’m not a target. Trump thinks he’s helping white suburbanites like me. But after months of Covid-19 lockdown, after more months of restricting my activities, wearing masks, and using hand sanitizer five times a day, after suffering through collapsing production and supply lines and massive unemployment…I way overestimated the benefits of not being a target. Trump may not hate me, but he doesn’t need me or care about me or millions of Americans, and in the midst of a disaster, that’s bad enough.

In a post just before the 2016 election, I responded to Trump supporters’ claims that Hillary Clinton had done bad things in office, whereas Trump was only saying a few mean things. I pointed out that just because he hadn’t had the opportunity to be awful on a national scale doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be awful. I should probably also have referred to a post I had written in late 2015, back when Trump still seemed like a long-shot candidate, where I listed a bunch of reasons to believe that Trump was a bad person who would do bad things as President:

– Start with where I first remember hearing of Trump, when he tried to use eminent domain to force an elderly widow out of her home so he could expand one of his casinos. His justification is typical Trump: “Cities have the right to condemn for the good of the city. Everybody coming into Atlantic City sees this terrible house instead of staring at beautiful fountains and beautiful other things that would be good.” He has consistently advocated the use of eminent domain to take properties from private owners and turn it over to developers. People like it that Trump builds things, but also wants to steal them.

– In the fall of 2014, when Dr. Kent Brantly and his assistant Nancy Writebol were infected with Ebola while fighting the epidemic in Africa, Trump opposed letting these heroic Americas return here for treatment, saying things like “People that go to far away places to help out are great — but must suffer the consequences!” That’s not the kind of thinking that will ever make America great. That’s not the kind of thinking we want in a commander who will send soldiers into battle. Speaking of which…

– Trump mocked Senator John McCain for getting captured in Vietnam, saying “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured,” Thus Trump showed that not only is he an asshole, but he also doesn’t understand why McCain is considered a war hero.

– During his official announcement that he was running for president, Trump made a point of trashing Mexican immigrants, saying “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. […] They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” It’s hard to tell if he’s only talking about illegal immigrants, as some contend, but it’s pretty insulting either way. And does he think Mexico actually sends people?

– In that same speech he also claimed that Japan and China were somehow “beating us” economically, and that our last quarter GDP was “below zero” which is impossible. (He probably meant the GDP growth rate, but this is typical of his economic idiocy.) The American economy is better off than either of those countries.

[…]

– Trump stuck to his nonsense claim that he saw thousands of New Jersey Muslims celebrating after 9/11, and he wants the U.S. government to block future Muslim travel to this country, track all Muslims already here, and forcibly close some mosques.

– Not only does Trump want to build the wall at the border with Mexico, he also wants to deport millions of illegal residents and their American-born children.

– He wants to close parts of the internet…somehow…because “We’re losing a lot of people because of the internet” or something. It doesn’t actually make any kind of sense.

– Donald trump is a birther.

– There’s his frequent denigration of women he doesn’t like or that simply annoy him, not to mention the creepy way he talks about his daughter.

I did summarize a few of those points, and then I added a few other awful things that Trump had done or said he would do:

-Trump has said he will order US troops to torture suspected terrorists and bomb their families. Again, it’s a good thing he doesn’t have the power to do so.

– Trump has arranged for his businesses to receive millions of dollars of taxpayer money.

– When Donald Trump’s deceased brother Fred’s surviving family contested Trump’s father’s will for all but disinheriting them, Donald Trump cut off the health insurance coverage that was paying for their infant’s medical treatment.

– Trump hired illegal Polish immigrants to work on one of his developments without bothering to supply them with basic safety equipment like hard hats.

– Trump University scammed working class people into borrowing and spending way too much money for an education in business that never materialized.

– Trump has done business with the mob.

– Trump has bankrupted several businesses.

– Trump has discriminated against black would-be renters of his properties.

– Trunp hired Roy Cohn — one of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attack dogs during the red scare — as his lawyer.

– Trump businesses routinely refuse to make full final payments on bills they owe.

– When Roger Ailes resigned following allegations of sexual harassment, Trump hired him immediately.

– Trump runs a charity that is much, much more of a fraud than the Clinton Foundation.

– The link in that last item also describes Trump’s bribery of a public official.

A lot of that should sound familiar. And I mean…you see it too, right? This is not a guy who should have the most powerful job in the world. And he certainly shouldn’t get a second term.

Then there was this, right before inauguration day:

If Trump wants to get anything done, he’s going to have to make some tradeoffs, and then his choices will reveal his true nature. His supporters will find out what his presidency is really all about. They’ll find out which of them he really loves, and which get left in the cold. My guess is that he only really loves himself, so he’s only going to help people who can help him.

[…]

The reality can never live up to the promise — especially with a guy who doesn’t see a need to keep promises — and starting today, the reality of the Trump presidency is unavoidable. Whatever it is, here it comes.

I’ll close with the most haunting thing I found in my trawl through my old election posts, from a piece where I talked about what we could expect from a sociopathic president:

In the end, if Donald Trump is a sociopath, he will leave a trail of destruction behind him. His manipulations will make him the center of attention in anything he gets involved in. Some people will be conned into doing his bidding, and others will waste time and resources fighting against him. Either way, he will make everything about him. His presence will be a whirling maelstrom that cannot be ignored, and he will grind down every person, institution, or social structure he encounters.

Damn. Nailed it.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Trump campaign déjà vu

Let’s start with the number of new confirmed cases per day in Illinois, which has been creeping up slowly for over a month. The 7-day moving average of 1442 new cases per day is 800 cases/day above the mid-June low point, and exceeds the Illinois Department of Public Health’s self-defined target (50 cases/week per 100,000 residents) by about 500 cases/day.

Some of that increase is probably due to increased testing volume over the past month and a half: The harder you look for Covid-19 the more of it you find, and Illinois has been looking pretty hard:

Note, however, that testing has stalled for the last 10 days or so, probably due to the high national demand, and yet the count of new confirmed cases has continued to rise. We’ve also seen a slight increase in test positivity, which would be unlikely if the increase in positive test results was solely due to the increase in testing volume:

By now we’ve all seen the 3-stage pattern to a Covid-19 spike: (1) More cases, (2) more hospitalizations, and (3) more deaths. We seem to have more cases, and when we look at the next stage, hospitalizations, the number of people admitted with a Covid-19 diagnosis has stopped declining and has begun a gentle rise over the last 30 days:

Checking the third stage, it looks like there might be an uptick there as well, with 30 deaths reported on Tuesday, the highest number in several weeks.

On the face of it, these statistics are not too alarming. But what worries me is the lag: From the time someone is infected with the Covid-19 virus until they realize they need to get tested is about 2 weeks. And with the large outbreaks in several states, testing facilities have been shipping nasal swabs far and wide to any labs that can process them, so test results here in Illinois are probably delayed a few days. That means we’re only just now seeing the results of viral transmissions that happened as long ago as three weeks. Or to put it another way, we won’t know how rapidly Covid-19 is spreading in Illinois today until three weeks from now.

That damnable lag between infection and detection is what keeps tricking people with this virus. Over and over again, in every city and every nation, by the time there’s clear statistical proof of a spreading epidemic, Covid-19 has already had time to get much worse. So no matter what we do to stop it, no matter how hard we lock down our activities, we’ll still have to watch the results of the previous three weeks of inaction play out for the next three weeks. And because epidemics can have exponential growth, the initial takeoff can be frighteningly fast — during the last three weeks of March, the daily case count in Illinois grew more than 100-fold. And despite our efforts, if this is the beginning of a new wave, we will have no choice but to sit and watch helplessly, as more and more people test positive, check into hospitals, and die.

We had that experience once here in Illinois, and that was enough to make me damned sure we don’t want to have it again. I think that means we have to assume this increase in cases, positivity, hospitalizations, and deaths is a sign that something bad started happening three weeks ago, and has been continuing unabated until now. We just can’t see it yet, but I think it’s time to take action. I think it’s time for another lockdown.

The good news is, we don’t have to lock everything down. Not this time.

Over the past couple of months we’ve vastly increased our testing volume and stood up a contact tracing operation. Unfortunately, that’s all stalled out right now because of the backlog in testing — you can’t start contact tracing until you know which people are infected, and when it takes a week to find out, there’s really no point. However, during that remission in the epidemic, we learned a lot about how Covid-19 spreads, and we ought to be able to use that knowledge to execute a much more targeted shutdown, one that drastically slows the spread of the virus while allowing safer businesses to remain open, and safer social activities to continue.

I don’t know enough to know what that will look like. We know that Covid-19 is more likely to spread indoors, when large numbers of people are close together, for long periods of time, with lots of heavy breathing. That sounds like it’s probably going to rule out bars and large celebrations like weddings, as well as a variety of industrial and commercial activities, and probably some public transit. Hopefully public health officials can narrow it down a lot more than I can. Maybe we don’t need to close all bars, for example, just bars with certain arrangements of seating, or certain types of air conditioning.

It helps a lot that it’s summertime. Because if we’re going to take the economic hit of another lockdown, it’s better to do it now, when a lot of these activities can be moved outdoors instead of shutting down completely. Even just opening the windows might make a difference in some situations. We’ll be much better off if we do our best now to eradicate Covid-19 as much as possible. During May and June we manged to knock down our new case count from 2400/day to about 600/day, a 4-to-1 improvement. If we can do something like that again, and get the daily case load down to 150/day (half that would be even better) then we probably have the test-and-trace resources to open things up again and keep the new case rate under control through the winter.

I should conclude by reminding you that I’m definitely not an expert at this, but I’ve been reading and listening to experts, and from what I understand, I think we need to do this, I think we need to do this now, and I think we should be able to pull it off if we act quickly and decisively. (I’m looking at you, Governor Pritzker.)

Truthfully, it’s possible this is already underway. Much of the increase is probably accounted for by flare-ups in specific locations, and cities and counties have been tweaking the local reopening regulations on a regular basis. But since the lag delays good news as well as bad, it’s possible that effective changes have already been made that just aren’t showing up yet. Let’s hope so.

Update: Literally as I was writing this, the Governor of Illinois held a press conference where he announced that several regions had positivity values approaching the state’s 8% trigger mark for reverting back to stage 3 of the reopening plan, and a few counties had warnings indicating they might need to roll back soon. Then Dr. Ngozi Ezike (Department of Health Director) went over the latest statistics, during which she confirmed my observation of increased case and hospitalizations. (She did not mention an increase in deaths.) The Governor also announced that many (but not all) youth sports activities will be shut down due to observations of some Covid-19 clusters among players.

(The explanation of Illinois’ reopening plan, regions, stages, and metrics can all be found at the IDPH Covid-19 page.)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Illinois needs another lockdown [Updated]

So the other day, my wife and I were at McDonald’s, and we had our food and were sitting at our table, and I went to the soda dispenser to fill my cup with Diet Coke, and as I got there, I noticed two things. First, there was a Plexiglas shield over the dispenser area. Second, as I got to the dispenser, a young girl who was approaching at the same time suddenly stopped and backed away. That’s when I realized I wasn’t wearing a mask. As I turned back to the table, I realized my wife wasn’t wearing her mask either, and neither were the people at any of the adjacent tables! Oh crap, we had to get our masks on —

And then I woke up.

Fuck. Now I’m having coronavirus dreams. 

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Corona Dreaming

“I wonder how libertarians are dealing with the fact that the current crisis is annihilating their entire ideology” — @hilaryagro

Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of snark about the how the Covid-19 pandemic is proving libertarians are wrong. Columnists declare “There Are No Libertarians in an Epidemic,” and people on Twitter ask how libertarians would handle a pandemic as if it’s some kind of “gotcha” question. I thought I’d try to provide a few answers.

First, the standard disclaimer: Folks who call themselves “libertarian” have a lot of different ideas about what that means, and some of them are way outside the libertarian mainstream. In this post, I’ll be talking about what I consider to be mainstream incrementalist libertarianism. I.e. the kind of thing you’d find at Reason magazine.

Libertarians don’t want to eliminate the government, we just want it to be smaller. That doesn’t explain much unless we delve into what libertarians mean by “smaller.” It’s more than just the caricature that libertarians want less spending and lower taxes. “Smaller” is shorthand for a more nuanced position: What we really want is for government to only be as big as it needs to be to do the things that only government can do. Some things truly do “take a village,” but the village should only do those things that truly take a village.

The classic example is national defense. It would be difficult to have a free market system of national defense. Try to imagine if every household had to contract with a mercenary army to defend it from invasion by a foreign country. How many people would actually buy such a contract? After all, there’s no way for the mercenaries to let the attacking army invade only the homes of non-customers, so if only a handful of my neighbors bought defense services, my house would be protected too. So why would I spend the money to buy a defense contract when I can freeload off my neighbors?

That sounds selfish, and perhaps it is, but libertarians aren’t arguing that everyone should behave that way. The libertarian argument (and neoclassical economic theory) is that everyone will behave that way. The problem is that if everyone — or nearly everyone — acts in their own self-interest and declines to buy a defense contract, then there won’t be nearly enough money to fund the defense effort, leaving everyone undefended. Each of us would be endangered by this, but there’s nothing to be gained by any one individual contributing to national defense since no single one of us has enough resources make a difference. Thus we need a government that can tax people to fund national defense.

You can see a similar dynamic at work with pollution. The quality of the air I personally breath has very little to do with the amount of pollution I personally release into the atmosphere. I’m only one of millions of homeowners in the Chicago metropolitan area, so regardless of whether I heat my house with coal or solar energy, it will make only a minuscule difference the quality of the air. So I get no personal benefit from choosing expensive zero-pollution technology. And if everyone thinks that way — as we assume they will, because everyone can figure this out — then everyone will act in their own self-interest and choose the cheapest way to heat their home, even if it pollutes more, resulting in more air pollution than anyone wants. Everyone is disappointed by the result, but no one person can do anything to improve the result. This is why it can help if the government forces everyone to reduce pollution.

In the interest of (relative) brevity, I’m skipping a bunch of steps in this argument, and ignoring a number of important objections and caveats, but I hope you get the picture: There are certain things that are best done by government because the market does not do them well.

The other side of that argument is that government intervention is not necessary if people can provide for themselves or obtain what they need on the free market. To pick a favorite libertarian example, people who want to avoid snorting cocaine can accomplish that themselves through the simple expedient of not snorting cocaine. For most people, this is not hard, and millions of Americans have been not-snorting-cocaine for decades. Thus there seems to be little need for the government to provide the service of making people not snort cocaine, and that’s especially true since the government insists on providing that service, violently, even to people who don’t want it. To us libertarians, this just seems dumb…and also kind of evil.

Similarly, we can obtain an awful lot of stuff we want from the free market — music, movies, shoes, shirts, chairs, tables, plates, silverware, laundry soap, aspirin, smart phones, bed linens, fried chicken, baked beans, hairspray, makeup, screwdrivers, fresh fruit, power drills, lawn mowers, cars, bicycles, roller blades, computers, mirrors, drywall, paint, ladders, lunchboxes, aluminum foil, toilet paper, toilets, air conditioners…and boxes to put it all in. We don’t require government intervention to provide that stuff because in a free market other people will happily provide things that we want in order to be able to get things that they want.

(Again, I’m skipping over a lot of gray areas and edge cases for the sake of brevity.)

A global pandemic seems a lot more like national defense or air pollution than like drug prohibition or free trade. My infection status is strongly affected by the infection status of people around me, and if I get infected, it can harm people around me, even if that’s not my intent. This kind of effect is called an “externality” by economists, and it’s one of the reasons free markets can fail and government intervention could be useful.

Therefore, the libertarian answer to handling a pandemic is “Yes, you’re right, this is in fact one area where government can be really helpful.” Which is why libertarians are so pissed off that our government has not been doing a very good job of fighting the pandemic.

Perhaps the government could have handled the pandemic better if hadn’t been wasting so much time and money on less important stuff. The CDC, for example, wastes a lot of money on things other than infectious diseases, such as studies on gun control and binge drinking. And right up until the start of the Covid-19 outbreak, the government’s hot-topic public health initiative was an anti-vaping campaign. Maybe if the Center for Disease Control had been paying more attention to diseases, fewer Americans would be dying this month.

Consider the critical role of government in disaster preparedness. It is a practical impossibility for free market enterprises to provide that service. To see why, imagine that after the 2003 SARS epidemic a bunch of enterprising investors realized that a more widespread outbreak in the future would strain the medical system, and so they decided to fund a ventilator stockpile, with plans to recoup their investment when the need for ventilators rises. They’d raise $2 billion dollars to buy 100,000 ventilators at $20,000 each. And then they’d put them into safe storage in warehouses and wait. And wait. And wait. For seventeen years.

That’s a long time to to have $2 billion invested in a risky venture. The same $2 billion invested in an S&P 500 index fund would have grown to about $6 billion by now (and that’s after the recent plunge in the stock market). In addition, the ventilator stockpile would incur warehouse fees, and the ventilators would have to be maintained and certified. They would probably require periodic upgrades — selling older ventilators to hospitals and buying new replacements — to keep up with the latest technology. So in order to attract that initial $2 billion from investors, the company would have to be able sell those 100,000 ventilators for a lot more than $2 billion. Probably, they’d need about $8 billion, which works out to about $80,000 each.

Currently, inexpensive ventilators cost about $25,000, so the investors would need to sell their stockpile for more than three times the market price. Could they really do that? Not in ordinary times, but during a global respiratory disease pandemic, quite possibly. As the existing stock of $25,000 ventilators starts to run out, desperate hospitals would be more than willing to pay $80,000 for ventilators instead of letting patients die. The company would sell out its stockpile, and investors would would pocket a tidy profit.

But that’s not what really happens in disasters. If some company started selling ventilators for triple the normal price, people wouldn’t be quietly thankful that some far-sighted investors had foreseen the need for ventilators and risked $2 billion of their own money to make it happen. Heck, people get angry when lumber yards raise the price of plywood for boarding up windows after a storm. They’d go insane over a tripling of ventilator prices. State attorneys general would cry “price gouging” and open criminal investigations. Governors would try to find a way to seize the ventilators. Pundits and populist politicians would be screaming about selfish billionaires and “disaster profiteering.” The ventilator stockpiling company would be forced by threats and public pressure to sell ventilators at a loss, and their investors would make less money than they could have made if they’d invested in something much safer.

Of course, potential investors realize that this will happen, and consequently conclude that ventilator stockpiles are not a good investment. You might claim that selling ventilators at triple the price is selfish and greedy, and many investors might even agree. But the thing is, investors who are squeamish about charging high prices during a disaster don’t decide to sell at lower prices when disaster comes. Instead, they simply decide not to invest in ventilators in the first place.

And that’s why we don’t have free market stockpiles of disaster supplies.

So disaster stockpiles would seem to be an excellent project for the government, and when it comes to infectious diseases (natural or man-made) there have been plenty of discussions and plans and simulated pandemic response exercises to test those plans.

But now that an actual pandemic is unfolding around us, the government doesn’t seem to have stockpiled nearly enough supplies — from filtering face masks to gowns, gloves, and ventilators — and a lot of those supplies are expired or in need of maintenance. Again, maintaining disaster stockpiles seems to libertarians like the sort of thing that our government should do, and it angers us that they haven’t done a very good job of it.

Libertarians have a pretty good theory why that happens. Remember that markets fail because people’s self-interested decision-making as individuals conflicts with the interests of the people as a whole, which is why many people argue that the best solution is for government to take over and do what’s best for everyone.

But there’s an ugly snag with that idea: Governments at high and low levels are run by people, and there’s nothing in politics or government employment that guarantees the people running the government are any less self-interested than the people running the markets. In government, that self-interest is less likely to take the form of profit seeking — although that happens — and more likely to involve a quest for larger fiefdoms, more power, greater fame, and higher national office.

Furthermore, government lacks the discipline of the free market: Bad companies go out of business, but there’s much less punishment for bad government, which gives government functionaries a lot more leeway to screw things up and let us down. Here are a few examples of government screw-ups and bad ideas in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic:

• In many states, hospitals are subject to Certificate of Need (CON) laws which require them to demonstrate that a community has a need for additional hospital beds before they are allowed to expand. This was justified as a supposed cost-saving measure, but seems designed to create de-facto hospital cartels which artificially limit hospital capacity, to the benefit of the hospital industry. That seems questionable in the best of times and disastrous in an epidemic.
• For years now, California has been limiting enrollment in nursing schools, and now it faces a shortage of nurses.
• The FDA and CDC were slow to approve Covid-19 tests in the early stages of the epidemic.
• The field test kits from the CDC were defective, requiring many labs to ship their test swabs to the CDC for testing. The CDC may have also misrepresented the tests.
• Healthcare licensing laws make it difficult for healthcare workers to move between states or for retired workers to assist in fighting the epidemic. States are frantically waiving these laws now, but it’s a hodge-podge effort that makes it hard for hospitals and healthcare workers to understand what’s allowed.
• As mentioned earlier, governments at various levels did not build sufficient stockpiles of medical equipment and supplies.
• In New York, where millions of people were visited by large numbers of national and international travelers, the initial response by health authorities at several levels was confused, inadequate, and late, which probably helped make it the worst-hit state in the country. (Many other states and municipalities probably had similar problems that have not been as well reported.)
• Distilleries are trying to make hand sanitizer, but the FDA is so afraid that people might be able to drink the resulting concoction that they are tying up distilleries in red tape.
• FDA rules are slowing down the production of masks and other protective equipment.
• Imports of protective equipment also require FDA approval, and they’ve been blocking the import of some foreign equivalents of N95 masks.
• Vermont has decided to forbid stores from selling “non-essential” items to reduce crowding. For some reason this includes clothing, including work clothing.
• States are making policy based on GPS travel data that they don’t really understand.
• Speaking of data, the CDC data site is not very comprehensive or timely. Almost everyone is relying on the Johns Hopkins CSSE site, Worldometers, or the Covid Tracking Project. Even Bing has more accessible data, and the IHME model everyone is using is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In our all-data-science-all-the-time world, the CDC or some other agency really should have contracted out the analytics years in advance.
• There’s also no standard protocol for hospitals and health departments to report much of this data.
• There doesn’t seem to be a coordinated system for tracking and managing the resources being used to fight the epidemic in our states and cities, from hospital beds to protective gear to ventilators and medical personnel. This leaves states to fight over vital supplies.

(I’ve deliberately omitted highly politicized issues, such as the response to the crisis from various elected officials, and issues with broader implications for healthcare policy and the economy.)

Many of these mistakes — some of them quite serious —  are due to poor preparation by government agencies. Obviously, it’s hard to plan for unforeseen disasters, but epidemics are not an entirely unforeseen problem. Many of the weaknesses in our current response were first identified through analysis of pandemic response exercises going back many years. Our government knew about the danger, knew what was needed to respond effectively, and didn’t do very much about it.

On the other hand, it’s been fascinating to watch government agencies at all levels being forced by this crisis to admit that a lot of what they normally do really isn’t that important after all. Every third news story includes an explanation that some regulatory agency is waiving/relaxing/choosing not to enforce some obstructionist rule or another:

• The TSA agrees it’s okay to carry bottles larger than 3.5 ounces onto an airplane again, because most hand sanitizer bottles are bigger than that.
• States that used to prohibit alcohol delivery have decided that it’s no longer sinful.
• The Health and Human Services Department has agreed that maybe less-than-strictly-HIPAA-compliant technology is good enough for telemedicine.
• And now your pets can get telemedicine too (because for some reason that was prohibited).
• Jails and prisons have been releasing non-violent criminals earlier than planned, which raises some questions about how badly they needed to be jailed in the first place.
• And when was the last time you saw anti-vaping ads?

It shouldn’t take a global pandemic to make the government stop doing stuff it shouldn’t be doing in the first place.

In the end, the libertarian policy response to a pandemic is informed by the same principles libertarians apply to most everything else:

1. When people and businesses and markets are working on the problem, the government should get out of the way.
2. When government intervention is necessary, it should be competent and efficient.
3. The latter will be a lot easier if the government stops wasting resources doing things it shouldn’t be doing.

This is not, to be sure, a detailed plan for fighting the epidemic. Libertarianism doesn’t have an answer for everything. Instead, libertarians prefer that, whenever possible, the people most affected by a situation to have the most control of the situation, because they know the most about it and have the strongest incentive to make the right decisions. Sure, they might make mistakes and harm themselves, but distant bureaucrats make mistakes too, and those mistakes can harm millions.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Libertarians in a Pandemic

• Working from home is still your job. Take it seriously. Get up in time, get yourself clean and ready, get dressed for work, and get to your desk on time, even if no one can tell you’re there. This sounds obvious, but you really need to own it.
• Normally, I’d say don’t mix work with taking care of the kids. It’s impossible to do both effectively. Every remote worker I know has someone else in the household to take care of the kids or else takes them to daycare. Obviously, in these times, that may not be an option. Your coworkers will understand, but it will still be disruptive.
• Speaking of clothing, you don’t have to wear a full business outfit — unless you think it’s important for video meetings with customers/clients — but make yourself presentable. All of us who work from home joke about not wearing pants, but really, we all wear pants.
• If possible, have a work area distinctive from where you normally hang out at home. It helps keep you in the mental zone for getting work done. I have my work and home computers at separate desks in the same room, so to help keep me in the zone, one of my tricks is that I use bright daylight-balanced lighting during work hours and switch to warmer lighting in the off hours.
• There are three vital communications technologies you need to operate as a fully remote team:
  • Chat. Slack or something like it. Obviously useful for sending quick messages to people, but even more useful for providing a place to share announcements and shout for help — “Does anybody remember how to…?” You’ll probably end up needing several chat channels:
    • A general business chat channel.
    • A channel for fun and silliness.
    • Channels for each team to discuss their business.
    • A channel for team leaders to coordinate.
    • Channels for business-specific topics that cross team boundaries.
    • Channels for handling major incidents, either shared between incidents or temporarily created for managing incidents.
  • Audio Meetings. Chat is unwieldy for free-ranging discussions. You want to be able to launch an audio meeting, paste a link to the meeting in chat, and have everybody join the call quickly to keep from losing people to distractions. Most meeting software also allows you to see each other’s faces, but it’s not as important as you might think.
  • Screen sharing. When you’re in a meeting, you need to be able to show each other stuff. You do this by sharing your screen. You can use this for everything from formal presentations to showing someone how to solve a tricky formatting problem in Word.
  • (Other technologies are also useful — email, shared calendars, issue tracking software, shared repositories for things like internal company documentation or customer work folders — but if you need those, you probably already had them when you worked in an office.)
• Use a headset for computer audio. Your computer probably has a microphone and speakers, but (unless you have a podcast-quality setup) your voice will sound distant and tinny, the mike will pick up a lot of environmental noise, and your listeners might hear a stuttering echo of their own voices if the mike picks up the sound from the speakers. A headset makes the conversation much cleaner.
• Remote meetings are an especially important situation:
  • All-virtual meetings can be surprisingly productive compared to real-life meetings because everybody is at their desk with their full work computer setup, and can instantly share information on their screen with everyone. In addition, if you need an answer from someone not present, you can probably pull them into the meeting in a minute or two.
  • Virtual meetings also tend to start really fast. Like, if the meeting is for 3:00, nobody will be on the call at 2:59, because their calendars haven’t popped up the reminder window yet, but by 3:02 almost everyone will be there. And if you’re not on by 3:03, people in the meeting will start pinging you in chat to remind you.
  • When you’re in a meeting, be in the meeting. Because you’re at your desk, it’s tempting to try to multitask, but if you’re involved in the meeting you should stay focused on the meeting.
  • However, when you inevitably do get distracted and miss something, just admit you got distracted and ask to have it repeated. Getting distracted occasionally is totally normal in virtual meetings, so don’t make a fuss when someone else does it.
  • If you’re the one running a virtual meeting, call out people’s names when you get to subjects you need them to pay attention to. Lots of people get pulled into meetings that might not be relevant, or where they might not have a lot to say, and it’s normal for them to try to do something productive while everyone else is talking. (This is one reason virtual meetings aren’t as time-wasting as real-life meetings.) Just say “Alright, this next thing is why we asked John and Mary to be in this meeting…”
  • Mute your microphone, and unmute it only when you’re talking. Background noises in your environment that you barely notice can be surprisingly distracting to other people in the meeting. This comes with two warnings:
    
    • If you notice that people keep interrupting you, or they’re not answering your questions, you’ve probably left yourself on mute.
    • Conversely, if you ask somebody a question, and they say nothing, ask them if they’re muted.
  • End meetings on time. If you didn’t finish the agenda, schedule a followup meeting. Virtual meetings are pretty light weight, and this is why you have all that fancy calendaring software. (Obviously, there are sometimes good reasons for extending meetings past the scheduled end — incident response, approaching deadlines, and so on, but try not to make a habit of it.)
• Because remote work communications are so abrupt, concise, and to-the-point, you need to make an effort to add back the human relationship and communicate company culture.
  • Concise chat messages often sound harsher than intended. Make an effort to keep chat messages light, but remember that sarcasm and irony are difficult to convey in a short message. Emoticons are there for a reason. You want a productive business conversation, not Twitter.
  • Managers need to make cultural communication more explicit, not just by talking about it, but by demonstrating it. For example, if your culture focuses on fixing problems rather than finding people to blame, when you ask someone in a chat message “What went wrong?”, you don’t want them sitting there trying to figure out if you’re angry. Make the cultural context explicit: “I’m not looking to find fault, I just want to know what we need to do to keep this from happening again.”
  • When someone helps you, thank them. When they do a good job, praise them. If someone apologizes for a minor inconvenience, say “no problem.” In a live workplace your attitude comes across in tone and facial expression, but in remote communications, it helps to make this explicit.
  • Conversely, if someone is not meeting expectations and needs correction, your displeasure may not be coming across in remote communications either. They may think they’re doing just fine. You might have to be more explicit about their need to change their behavior than you would normally feel comfortable with. This is probably best done in a phone call.
  • On the other hand, don’t only call people to scold them. You don’t want them dreading it every time you text “Got a minute?”
  • Your regularly scheduled meetings should include a little time for company culture issues and should include some unstructured time for people to bring up issues that weren’t strictly on the agenda. 
  • Managers should have regular one-on-one calls with their subordinates. This is not for receiving status reports and issuing action items. This is for discussing personal welfare, annoyances, plans for vacation, cool news stories, and other stuff that keeps the relationship on a human level. Again, this is something that needs to be more explicit in remote work.
• More on headsets: If you’re on calls a lot, consider investing in a call-center quality headset intended for long use. (“Executive” headsets sound cool, but the call center stuff is actually more comfortable in the long run.) There’s a real difference between a $50 gaming headset and a $400 Plantronics Savi wireless headset when you have to wear it for 6 hours a day. (Gaming headsets sound great, but you don’t need the weight of those 50mm drivers on your head all day. There aren’t going to be lots of cool explosions. Hopefully.)
• Because you’re at home, you can work at all hours of the day. Wake up at 2am with a great idea? You can “go into the office” and work on it a bit. This is pretty cool, but don’t let it turn into you working all day long, because that’s a recipe for burnout and an unhappy family life. Try to work your regular business hours. And if you’re a manager, watch for your employees doing this, and make sure they understand you don’t want them burning out.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Tips on Working From Home

It turned out she had a respiratory infection. She had developed pneumonia, and it was hitting her 88-year-old body very hard. They gave her supplemental oxygen right away, and eventually they put her on BIPAP, which is a kind of external respirator mask with air pumps that help people breath. That seemed to stabilizer her for a while, but she had developed other problems, and her condition began to decline. She passed away a few days later.

I dealt with the grief the way everyone does, but from time to time, a certain nagging thought went through my brain…

At her age, my mother had a lot of trouble walking. So my wife and I would run errands and help take care of some things for her, and she had other people who would do grocery shopping and help with the housework. With all of us coming in to help, she almost never left the house.

So how did she catch a respiratory infection? Those tiny little microbes and viral particles can’t travel very far by themselves. Whatever it was that she caught didn’t just drift by her building and blow in the window for her to inhale. As we all know by now from listening to the news about Covid-19, respiratory infections are transferred by contact, or at least close proximity, with another person who is already infected.

In other words, my mother didn’t just catch the disease that killed her. One of us gave it to her.

It would be an overstatement to say I’m haunted by this, but I do think about it now and again. I tell myself it probably wasn’t me. My wife and I had been careful not to visit my parents when either of us had a cold. But even if she caught the bug from one of us, I realized that nobody actually did hospital-grade infection control for ordinary visits with elderly people. So even if I accidentally did give my mother the disease that killed her, it’s not like I was being reckless. I was doing normal things that normal people did in normal times. Unless we wanted to permanently isolate our elderly friends and relatives from all human contact, or wear masks and gloves every time we visited, these things were just going to happen sometimes. Life is filled with risks, and many of them are worth taking.

But these are not normal times, and we are facing more than normal levels of risk. You don’t want to end up knowing you gave someone a fatal infection. So please be careful out there.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at My Mother and the Pandemic

I am in receipt of your email dated March 10, in which you say, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic,

People have inquired whether we will still host Reason Weekend in Nashville April 30-May 3. As of today, we are still planning to host the event; however, we are also making registrations for Reason Weekend fully refundable with no-questions asked. If you haven’t booked already, you can register and secure your hotel room here.

This is a time of great uncertainty for all of us. Therefore, at the end of the month, we will revisit the question of whether to defer or cancel Reason Weekend. If you hope to come to Reason Weekend but want to wait and see, please let me know. Your input will help us navigate these choppy waters.

For the love of God, cancel this thing! Have you no mercy? Have you thought this through?

I understand that us libertarians believe people are capable of making high-stakes decisions about our own lives and taking responsibility for our own actions. But do you realize what will happen if you hold this thing and even one person tests positive for SARS-CoV-2?

It will make the news. There will be endless op-eds about those silly libertarians who hate government so much that they ignored the warnings and got sick. Usage of the phrase “For a magazine called Reason…” will go nuclear! And all of us playing the drinking game will die of alcohol poisoning.

Do you want that on your conscience?

Sincerely,

Mark Draughn, Reason supporter

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Brief Note to the Folks at Reason

When section 230 was adopted, the impossibility of AOL, say, monitoring its users in a wholly effective way was obvious. It couldn’t afford to hire tens of thousands of humans to police what was said in its chatrooms, and the easy digital connection it offered was so magical that no one wanted it to be saddled with such costs. Section 230 was an easy sell.

A lot has changed since 1996. Facebook and other have in fact already hired tens of thousands of humans to police what is said on their platforms.

First of all, they still can’t hire enough people, because these kinds of platforms have far more users than they did in 1996. At its peak, AOL had 23 million users. As I write this, Twitter alone has 330 million active users. Facebook has 2.5 billion users. Even relatively small services like Instagram and Snapchat have over 100 million users. And people can access these service from devices they carry in their pockets, so each user produces far more traffic.

Second, the argument which Baker accepts for why small firms needed Section 230 protection in 1996 still applies to small firms today. Maybe a monster service like Facebook can figure out a way to monitor user content economically (despite not charging ordinary users a dime), but smaller services that serve niche communities, like Deviant Art, Model Mayhem, and Stack Overflow, would have a hard time achieving the needed level of monitoring, as would new services that hope to compete with the larger established ones.

Today, jurisdictions as similar to ours as the United Kingdom and the European Union have abandoned such broad grants of immunity, making it clear that they will severely punish any platform that fails to censor its users promptly.

Yeah, and there’s no way that could go wrong. (Blasphemy laws, anyone?) Strong protections for free speech has long been one of the ways that the U.S. is very much not similar to jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom and the European Union, and we are better off for it.

That doesn’t mean the US should follow the same path. We don’t need a special, harsher form of liability for big tech companies. But why are we still giving them a blanket immunity from ordinary tort liability for the acts of third parties? In particular, why should they be immune from liability for utterly predictable criminal use of warrant-proof encryption? I’ve written on this recently and won’t repeat what I said there, except to make one fundamental point.

Baker brings up variations of “predictable criminal use” over and over throughout this piece. It’s a ridiculously broad concept, because so many things can be misused by criminals. Every crime of mail fraud makes predictable criminal use of an envelope and the U.S. mail system. Every purse snatcher is making predictable criminal use of his sneakers. And I’ll bet Excel spreadsheets are introduced as evidence against a ton of white collar criminals who were using them to track their criminal financial schemes. But that doesn’t mean the makers of those products are responsible for the crimes committed with them. Saying that encryption has predictable criminal uses is just as meaningless.

The key to thinking clearly about encryption policy is understanding who is doing the encryption. It’s not who Baker says it is:

Section 230 allows tech companies to capture all the profits to be made from encrypting their services while exempting them from the costs they are imposing on underfunded police forces and victims of crime.

When Baker speaks of tech companies “encrypting their services” he is using a bit of rhetorical slight-of-hand, similar to what Orin Kerr did in a piece I criticized a few years ago.

To start with, remember that most traffic between web browsers or phone apps and application servers is already encrypted. (If you’re reading this post directly on my blog, your browser app received an encrypted copy of the page from my WordPress application.) When Baker talks about companies encrypting their services, he means end-to-end encryption, where two people use the same service to send data between themselves that is not decrypted by the intermediate server. The sender’s device encrypts the data, and that encrypted data is sent to the receiver’s device, where it is decrypted, but it remains encrypted everywhere in between.

For example, if I use my iPhone to text my wife to ask her to pick up a burrito on her way home, I’m using end-to-end encryption. We both have iPhones, so the Messages app on my phone knows to encrypt the message before sending it through Apple’s iCloud, and her iPhone knows how to decrypt it. It’s important to notice that all of the encryption and decryption is happening on our phones, which we own, using software that we licensed, because we chose to have our messages encrypted. It’s also important to notice what’s not happening in that scenario: The Apple iCloud is not encrypting anything. The iCloud itself is just copying blocks of already encrypted data from one phone to another. That encrypted data happens to be a message asking for a burrito, but the iCloud has no way of knowing that, because to iCloud’s servers (and to Apple corporation), it’s all just meaningless data to be copied from one device to another.*

That’s the whole point of end-to-end encryption: It allows users to communicate securely without worrying that the companies carrying their data are listening in.

That’s a crucial idea if you want to understand why Baker’s argument is wrong: End-to-end encryption isn’t something that the big tech companies are doing with encryption. Rather, end-to-end encryption is big tech companies giving up control of encryption to their customers.

Unfortunately, this distinction is sometimes muddled by the fact that the company that licences us the encryption software (e.g. the phone app) is often the same company that runs the intermediate servers that transport our data. But this is just an artifact the way the phone and tablet app market is structured: You buy the app in your device’s app store, and the app vendor provides the transport and storage services for free. App vendors do that because the cost of transport and storage of small messages is so low that it’s worth giving away for free to attract buyers.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. The older desktop/laptop/server computer community, especially in the business world, has been using unbundled encryption software and message transport services for decades. For example, there are third-party Chrome browser plugins that allow end-users to add end-to-end encryption to existing services like Gmail. Variations on this idea have been around for a long time. The original PGP software is almost thirty years old. All this technology is already in the world, and I’d expect this market to explode if tech companies are somehow prohibited from offering end-to-end encryption directly.

Many believe that the security value of unbreakable encryption outweighs the cost to crime victims and law enforcement. Maybe so. But why leave the weighing of those costs to the blunt force and posturing of political debate?

So that everyone involved will know what the rules are? So that they can make decisions based on those rules without having to worry about the outcome of a bunch of random court cases? This is why we write down laws.

Why not decentralize and privatize that debate by putting the costs of encryption on the same company that is reaping its benefits? If the benefits outweigh the costs, the company can use its profits to insure itself and the victims of crime against the costs.

Here we go again. Why should the company that makes the tools be liable for what a criminal third party does with them? We don’t do that with hammers and baseball bats and crowbars. We don’t even do that with guns. It’s not a very good idea.

Baker goes on to deploy one of the more annoying tropes in the secure encryption debate:

Or it can seek creative technical solutions that maximize security without protecting criminals – solutions that will never emerge from a political debate.

This is a fantasy. An incoherent, manipulative fantasy. Politicians and pundits in Baker’s camp keep portraying this as some sort of technical problem that big tech is either too lazy or too greedy to solve, but it’s not. Either the encryption can be broken by a party not involved in the conversation, or it cannot. There is no middle ground. Asking for secure encryption that can be broken is like asking for a sober drunk or a sexually experienced virgin. You’re not asking for a real thing that exists. You’re not even asking for something with a logically consistent description.

Either way it’s a private decision with few externalities, and the company that does the best job will end up with the most net revenue. That’s the way tort law usually works, and it’s hard to see why we shouldn’t take the same tack for encryption.

Sure, go after the people doing the harm. But the companies that make the encryption software aren’t the ones doing the encryption, and they aren’t the ones sending the harmful content. Ford Motors made the car that Bonnie and Clyde used to rob banks, but nobody sued Ford because it wasn’t Ford robbing the banks.

The second part of Baker’s post addresses the issue of platforms that censor user-provided content:

Europe is not alone in its determination to limit what Americans can say and read. Baidu has argued successfully that it has a first amendment right to return nothing but sunny tourist pictures when Americans searched for “Tiananmen Square June 1989.” Jian Zhang v. Baidu.Com Inc., 10 F. Supp. 3d 433 (S.D.N.Y. 2014). Today, any government but ours is free to order a US company to suppress the speech of Americans the government doesn’t like.

I’m pretty sure that’s only for companies that operate in those countries. Also, “Those other guys are censorious asshats so we should be censorious asshats too” is not the winning argument Baker seems to think it is.

American politicians worried that radio and television owners could sway popular opinion in unpredictable or irresponsible ways. They responded with a remarkable barrage of new regulation – all designed to ensure that wealthy owners of the disruptive technology did not use it to unduly distort the national dialogue. […] This entire edifice of regulation has acquired a disreputable air in elite circles, and some of it has been repealed. Frankly, though, it don’t look so bad compared to having a billionaire tech bro (or his underpaid contract workers) decide that carpenters communicating with friends in Sioux Falls are forbidden to “deadname” Chelsea Manning or to complain about Congress’s failure to subpoena Eric Ciaramella.

Yes it does. The billionaire tech bros come and go, and if they behave badly, something new will come along to replace them. Government regulation is much longer lasting and much harder to evade, and the people enforcing it don’t just shadowban your tweets and demonetize your videos. They have guns and prisons and they hurt people.

The sweeping broadcast regulatory regime that reached its peak in the 1950s was designed to prevent a few rich people from using technology to seize control of the national conversation, and it worked.

What? The broadcast regulatory regime practically handed control of the whole industry over to a few mega-corporations. The regulations were so burdensome that despite all the promises of the new technology, the industry stagnated so badly that Americans only had three television networks for years.

Viewed from 2020, that doesn’t sound half bad. We might be better off, and less divided, if social media platforms were more cautious today about suppressing views held by a substantial part of the American public.

But at least without regulation, and with the protection of Section 230, anyone can start a social media platform. There are tons of them out there. You couldn’t do that during the heyday of the highly regulated broadcast industry when there were, I say again, only three major content providers.

It seems clear to me, and I hope I can convince you as well, that all of this is part of an attempt to subvert privacy concerns using a well-worn trick or two.

The first trick is to control the behavior of large numbers of people by controlling a much smaller number of large, highly-visible entities that enable them. For example, suppose you want to stop people from making their own clothing. (Perhaps you think custom clothing is sinful, or undermines community values, or you’re in the pocket of Big Garment. Whatever.) You could try straight-up criminalizing it. That’s a direct solution, but it has a lot of practical problems. You can’t easily catch millions of people sewing stuff in the privacy of their homes, where it’s almost impossible to detect. The police would need probable cause to enter people’s homes to search for signs of garment making. They’d need networks of informants, and maybe a tip line (“Friends don’t let friends do buttonholes.”). They might have to start tracing precursors purchases of thread and fabric. Or maybe they’ll train cops to spot people wearing home-made garments so they can be arrested and pressured to reveal their sources. It sounds like a lot of hard work, but I’m not saying it couldn’t be done (see e.g. the war on drugs). However, it would be one awful mess (see e.g. the war on drugs).

There’s an easier way: Outlaw the manufacture of sewing machines. Not all sewing machines, of course, because there’s a huge commercial industry that depends on them. You just want to outlaw the cheap ones that people use in their homes. You know, the ones that are “unsafe,” the ones that produce “second-rate clothing” (that might endanger children!) because they lack important (and expensive) features. You just want to put a stop to millions of housewives using cheap Saturday night special sewing machines.

If you promote and pass that law carefully, the people most affected might not even see it coming. And now you don’t have to go after millions of people secretly sewing in their own homes. You just need to shut down a dozen or so highly visible sewing machine manufacturers who are too big to hide and have too much to lose by fighting. That will shut down millions of illegal home garment makers without the trouble of catching them one by one.

In a nutshell, that’s what I think Baker and Barr and other foes of end-to-end encryption are trying to do. Coming, as they do, from the intelligence and law enforcement world, they’re offended by the idea that ordinary citizens can send messages they can’t read. I suspect they’d probably like to outlaw strong encryption in civilian hands entirely, but that’s politically difficult to sell and technically difficult to enforce.

(It might even be unconstitutional. I don’t know how to find relevant court cases, but I think there’s a pretty good argument for a free speech right to encrypt. If you have the right to speak in any language, shouldn’t you have the right to speak ciphertext? If you have the right to say “Fuck the President,” shouldn’t you have the right to say “*@6cTHKafZq034CdW9GVF5##!Y$6aZCK“?)

On the other hand, if they can prevent a few large services like Facebook from offering end-to-end encryption services, they can accomplish much of their goal of preventing Americans from using secure encryption without having to take on millions of individual Americans in the process.

This sort of legislation is often a disaster. The RAVE Act, for example, was passed in reaction to what was seen as the threat of “rave” parties, which were ripe with drug abuse, especially ecstasy. Drug use at any kind of party was, of course, already illegal, but rather than go after individual drug dealers and users, police wanted to shutdown the venues that held the parties, and they hoped to do this with the RAVE Act, which would “prohibit an individual from knowingly opening, maintaining, managing, controlling, renting, leasing, making available for use, or profiting from any place for the purpose of manufacturing, distributing, or using any controlled substance, and for other purpose.”

That sounds like it’s intended to go after drug dealers who throw parties and advertise them with “Hey kids, come here and do drugs!” As written, however, it could be used go after almost any bar or dance club — or any other place — where the owner or manager knew that drugs were present. In theory, that’s almost anywhere, and it gave cops plenty of excuses to selectively shut down places that annoyed them.

Making matters worse, ecstasy is known to cause problems with temperature regulation, so many clubs added cool-down rooms and sold bottled water. This was used as proof that they knew drugs were being used. It’s not hard to imagine that any step a social media service took to combat child pornography would be used as proof they knew people were using their service for child pornography. (Something similar happened to Backpage when they were accused of promoting human trafficking.)

The second trick folks like Barr and Baker are using is a workaround for the problem that getting a criminal conviction requires meeting some pretty high standards. (Not so high that there aren’t 2 million Americans in prison, but that’s a matter for another post.)

For example, crimes have to be intentional. If you loan your car to a friend, and he drives drunk and gets in a fatal accident, you are almost certainly not guilty of any crime related to the death, because you did not intend that he drive drunk or kill someone . However, it’s plausible that you could be sued successfully on the theory that you knew, or should have known, that he was going to drive drunk. This is especially true if you are in the business of loaning cars to people. Furthermore, criminal guilt has to be proven “beyond a reasonable doubt,” which is a pretty high bar, but civil cases can be won by a “preponderance of evidence,” meaning you just have to convince the judge or jury that your story sounds more likely than the other guy’s story.

Corporations are legal fictions, and charging a legal fiction with a crime is kind of a weird thing to do. If you win a conviction against a corporation, then what? You can’t send a corporation to jail. In practice, convicted corporations usually have to pay a fine, and maybe agree to certain restrictions. But why go through all the trouble of a criminal proceeding against a corporation when when it’s so much easier to get them to cough up cash and change their behavior through a civil lawsuit? It doesn’t even have to be the government that files the lawsuit. Legislators can pass laws creating a cause of action for a third party to file a lawsuit.

(None of this is inherently pernicious. In fact, a lot of civil rights laws work this way. If you get fired because your boss doesn’t like your skin color, you don’t file a complaint with law enforcement. You get a lawyer and sue your former employer. It makes a lot of sense: The injured party directly sues the business that caused the harm. But even civil rights laws can be abused. Discriminatory ads placed by home sellers have been used as a justification for suing entire newspaper chains, and unscrupulous law firms have figured out ways to leverage poorly written regulations to sue tons of businesses over technical violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act even though few actual disabled people had complaints.)

But this legal arrangement can also be abused by legislatures, to suppress behavior they cannot otherwise control — making gun manufacturers liable for what criminals do with their guns, or making bars liable for customers who drive drunk. It’s an end run around rights and due process, and I for one do not appreciate it.

I also don’t think the government has any business restricting when we are allowed to use encryption. As someone smarter than me once said, the Founding Fathers gave us the First Amendment because they knew we had something to say. And they gave us the Fourth Amendment because they knew we had something to hide. Encryption helps us do that.

*Technical Note: The Messages app on iPhones is end-to-end encrypted, but for various unrelated reasons, iPhone messages are not very secure and should not be used for high-stakes communications. In addition, although I mention several security products in this post, I neither endorse nor discourage their use.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at The Latest Attack in the War Against Encryption

For those who don’t know, Jack Marshall is a “professional ethicist” (he teaches CLE courses to lawyers) who opines on various topic at Ethics Alarms. I started following him years ago because he discussed a lot of interesting topics, and even though I disagreed with him on a number of important issues, he seemed like a serious and worthwhile sparring partner. I spent a lot of time commenting on his blog.

But on this very day two years ago Jack posted a piece that eventually caused me to rethink everything I believed about him. In many ways, it was just another normal-seeming round-up column. One of the items was a response to a proposal to raise the age limit for gun purchases, and at one point in that item Jack digressed into a discussion over the appropriate age for drafting soldiers. Later, in response to a comment on that digression, Jack left a reply which changed everything:

If four year olds were deemed necessary to win a war, then the government needs the power to conscript four year olds,

This was mind blowing. Jack Marshall, professional ethicist, approved of child slave soldiers. It was an event of what Jack likes to call “signature significance.” Child soldiers are a monstrous evil, condemned by the whole civilized world. Except Jack Marshall. This strongly suggested to me that maybe Jack the ethicist…isn’t very good at ethics.

I’d like to say this was a moment of clarity for me, but the truth is, it took me a while to absorb the truth, which eventually force me to cast my philosophical relationship with Jack into a new light. I had been trying to have earnest discussions about ethical issues in Presidential politics, journalism, and the war on drugs with a guy who thinks it’s okay to enslave children to fight in wars. I felt cheated. I felt stupid. I had been taking Jack’s opinions on ethical issues far too seriously. This was like getting into an involved culinary argument over the relative merits of American Wagyu vs. traditional Kobe beef, only to discover that your debating opponent was a cannibal. Clearly, sparring with Jack had been a colossal waste of my time.

I eventually found an appropriate moment to ask Jack about his awful comment. He made an attempt to defend it as an absurd exaggeration — and obviously he doesn’t mean literal 4-year-olds — but in both the original post and his later responses, he clearly defends the idea of drafting children to fight wars:

18 years olds are adults, and no, I have no problem with mandatory military service for men and women as a condition of citizenship. There’s no magic in ages, or where the line is drawn. In a national emergency would drafting physically mature sub-18 teens be justifiable? Sure….if it were a matter of national survival. That’s ethics conflict territory: one ethical principle has to be given higher priority over another.

Jack has changed his justification from “necessary to win a war” to “national survival,” which I suppose is an improvement. But when a country has fallen so far that its leaders are enslaving children as soldiers, there’s nothing left worth keeping. It doesn’t deserve to survive. The people deserve to survive, and if the enemy is at the gates and intends extermination, they may have to arm their children. But no one has the right to force someone else’s child to fight a war. It is my considered opinion that if government agents try to steal your children to fight in a war, the correct ethical response is to shoot them in the fucking head! Shoot as many of them as you can, as fast as you can, for as long as you can.

(It’s amusing — or maybe horrifying, it’s hard to tell anymore — that Jack limits his willingness to draft children to those who are “physically mature.” As if the main problem with drafting 4-year-olds is that they aren’t strong enough to hump a full kit around the battlefield.)

In retrospect, Jack’s blog has been going downhill ever since the start of the Trump era. He seems to recognize that Trump is a huge jerk, but that doesn’t stop him from attacking nearly everyone who criticizes Trump. Granted, there certainly are idiots who attack Trump for dumb reasons. Jack mocks them for having “Trump derangement syndrome,” and he’s not totally wrong. But he slings that epithet far too widely, and he’s become just as deranged in his defense of Trump as the worst of those he mocks.

Consider one example from back in October, when Trump tried to award the contract for hosting an international world leadership summit to the Trump National Doral Miami resort. This is Ethics 101 territory. Anyone who has ever accepted a position at a government agency, and almost anyone who’s taken a job at a large corporation, has sat through an ethics training session that spelled out in no uncertain terms the need to avoid a conflict of interest in awarding contracts. Probably hundreds of millions of people have been trained that steering contracts to serve your personal interests is unethical. People are routinely fired or even prosecuted for breaking that rule.

Jack, on the other hand, defends Trump:

Trump shouldn’t have backed down from holding the Group of 7 Summit at the Trump luxery golf club in Miami. Apparently he did so because Republican members of Congress complained about it, and they complained about it because they knew it would spark more bogus accusations of Emoluments Clause violations […]

That Jack sees nothing wrong with Trump dealing himself some taxpayer money is not the craziest part of that post.

This is:

Any and every negotiations specialist will tell you that holding a meeting of adversaries in your own territory is a massive advantage. That is why such meetings are often held in Switzerland, or other neutral sites. Holding the Summit at a Trump property makes the President stronger at the meeting, and that benefits the country.

It would have been nice—responsible, educational, fair, honest—if the news media explained this basic principle to the public, but it doesn’t want to justify the President’s decisions or find benign reasons for them.

The idea that this was some kind of negotiating tactic is batshit lunacy, as is attacking the news media for not explaining a “basic principle” that Jack just pulled out of his ass. Oh, I’m sure there’s some tactical advantage to negotiating on your home turf, but we’re talking about the President of the United States here. His home turf is the friggin’ White House, one of the most recognizable symbols of power in the world, located in Washington, D.C., the seat of government for the most powerful nation that ever existed. That’s a hell of a lot more impressive than a fucking golf resort that gets mediocre reviews on Yelp.

This wasn’t the first time Jack made up special rules for Trump. Shortly after the inauguration, he tried to argue that it’s unethical to disrespect the winner of the Presidential election:

[…] Americans have always realized that the slate is cleared when someone becomes President, and that the individual inherits the office and the legitimacy of that office as it has been built and maintained by it previous occupants. He […] becomes the symbol of the nation, the government and its people, a unique amalgam of prime minister, king and flag in human and civilian form.

This is an illustration of Jack’s authoritarian streak, of his weird devotion to those in power. This is even clearer in a followup post in which he invokes an argument from The Caine Mutiny to justify his exaltation of Trump. This takes place after the Naval officers have been acquitted in court for their actions in taking over Captain Queeg’s command. Their lawyer, Greenwald, is taking them to task.

Ensign Keith: Queeg endangered the lives of the men.

Greenwald: He didn’t endanger any lives.You did. A fine bunch of officers.

Lt. Paynter: You said yourself he cracked.

Greenwald: I’m glad you brought that up, Mr. Paynter, because that’s a very pretty point. I left out one detail in court. It wouldn’t have helped our case. Tell me, Steve, after the yellow-stain business, Queeg came to you for help, and you turned him down, didn’t you.

Lt. Maryk: Yes, we did.

Greenwald: You didn’t approve of his conduct as an officer. He wasn’t worthy of your loyalty. So you turned on him. You ragged on him, you made up songs about him. If you’d given Queeg the loyalty he needed, do you think all this would have come up in the typhoon? You’re an honest man, Steve, I’m asking you. You think it would have been necessary to take over?

Maryk: It probably wouldn’t have been necessary.

Keith: If that’s true, we were guilty.

Greenwald: Ahhh, You’re learning, Willie! You don’t work with the captain because of how he parts his hair…you work with him because he’s got the job, or you’re no good.

Jack tries to apply that to Trump’s critics:

Either the Presidency will make Donald Trump a better man, or Trump will permanently harm the Presidency and weaken it, thus making the office less of an inspiration and source of strength for future occupants. […] It is absolutely in the nation’s best interests to seek the first result. That requires focusing on the office and its strengths, and uniting as a nation behind that office. The relentless, unprecedented assault on Trump since his election by Democrats and the news media may have already done irreparable damage.

This is wrong on so many levels.

First of all, Jack is too much of an authoritarian to recognize that the duty that serving members of the military owe to their commanding officers in a time of war is in no way relevant to the question of how citizens of a free country should treat their elected representatives. The officers of the Caine had joined the military and swore an oath to obey their commanding officers. Trump, on the other hand, is just a guy we elected. We don’t work for him, he works for us. We don’t owe him loyalty, he has to earn it. And if we don’t like him, we get to kick his ass around the schoolyard whenever we want. “Fuck the President” is a perfectly acceptable sentiment.

Second, as Greenwald argues and the officers agree, perhaps Captain Queeg would not have mishandled things so badly during the typhoon if his officers had given him more support. That certainly makes his officers complicit in the problems on board the Caine. But it does not in any way let Queeg off the hook for his own failures as a leader, including his failure to preserve cohesion among his officers. Similarly, Trump is responsible for his own failings, and deserves to pay the price of receiving criticism.

Third, the arguments made by Greenwald in the film and by Jack in his blog both make the implicit assumption that everybody is working toward the same goal. That’s accurate in the film, since everyone involved is at war with the same enemy, and for all Queeg’s problems, no one thinks he’s a Japanese agent. But what if he was? What if Queeg had announced his intent to seek out U.S. supply convoys and sink them? That’s literally treason, and officers would have been idiots to say, “Well, he hasn’t actually sunk any American ships yet, so we need to support him!”

I’m not saying Trump has done anything treasonous, but we’re not talking about overthrowing him by force. This all started because Jack overreacted to comedienne John Oliver’s criticisms of Trump. This is about the ethics of Trump’s opponents criticizing him and refusing to help him accomplish his agenda, because they sincerely believe his agenda would be bad for the country. Again, Jack is ignoring a basic Ethics 101 concept: If you see that something evil is about to happen, and you are in a position to stop it, then you have an obligation to try to stop it. It’s nuts to argue that Trump’s opponents instead have an obligation to give him a running start at screwing things up.

Fourth, some of the people Jack is criticizing will be harmed by Trump’s policies because they don’t support him. Me, for example. If I wanted to buy a new car or air conditioner or any other product made outside the U.S.A., Trump had announced his intention to oppose me. Because of the policies he intended to enact (and has in fact enacted by now), armed government agents will either prevent those products from entering the U.S. or else force me to pay a steep tax. Either way, I lose. In the absence of a prior obligation to Trump — analogous to the Caine officers’ obligation to the their commanding officer — by what ethical principle could I possibly be obliged to help him achieve a goal that is directly harmful to me?

I think I’ve gone on long enough. You may, in fact, wonder why I’ve gone on at all. If I think Jack is such a waste of time, why do I bother to write about him? You’d think after reading his posts claiming that it’s a myth that wars kill innocent civilians or that black people were racists for not voting for Mitt Romney or that it’s unethical to give your cat catnip, I’d have learned my lesson and stopped reading his blog.

The truth is, I don’t entirely understand it myself. It’s like picking at a scab: It hurts, and you know you should stop, but somehow you just can’t.

I can still remember when Jack’s blog was a pretty good place. We’ve always had disagreements, but that didn’t stop his blog from being an intelligent forum for discussions of ethics. And he still raises some interesting issues and calls out some genuinely bad and good ethics in current events. It’s just not worth it any more when the good bits are surrounded by a pro-Trump authoritarian shit show.

It doesn’t help that he is increasingly intolerant of dissent. When he claims to be “objectively” correct and denounces those who disagree as “morons,” it no longer feels like he’s still inviting genuine discussion. He has kicked out commenters that disagreed with him, ostensibly for being rude, while allowing some of his more asinine supporters to continue being jerks in the comments. And when some of us take the hint and stop contributing, Jack calls us cowards. Fuck that shit.

For some time now, Ethics Alarms has mostly been a hate-read. I’d go there when I wanted to find some crazy shit that I could get righteously angry about. (That used to be a good way to work up a blog post). Lately, however, I’m trying to preserve my sanity by keeping away from Ethics Alarms. I’ve stopped commenting on the blog, unsubscribed from the posts in Feedly, and stopped following Jack on Twitter, all to avoid the temptation to read his blog.

It’s not really working. I just can’t quit. I still give in and take a peek to see what he’s up to, or to check his reaction to a news story. (Did he think Shakira and JLo brought too much of the sexy to the Superbowl halftime show? Of course he did.) But I’m still trying to back away, and my latest plan is to try to limit myself to writing about him once a year, on this, the anniversary of his worst ethics opinion ever.

I’m writing about my plans here as a way of burning that bridge, of making a public declaration that will be embarrassing to go back on. It won’t be easy, though, and it doesn’t help that I’m in a loose-knit private Twitter conversation with several of his former commenters. We occasionally post screen shots when he says something really outrageous. It’s fun, but it’s probably bad for our mental health. And like me, they can’t explain this obsession either.

And truthfully, for some crazy reason, I still kind of like Jack. If he ever got better, and returned the blog to to something decent and interesting, I’d be tempted to return to commenting there if I was still welcome after. But it’s a sad place for now, and it’s probably for the best if I can’t go back.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Jack Marshall Day 2020

For people like me who only know Game of Thrones through the HBO series, the story is over, and as you may have heard, the ending was a bit of a disappointment. But for fans of the original novels by George R. R. Martin, the story is only five sevenths complete. There are two more books to go.

Martin had previously promised the sixth book in the Song of Ice and Fire series would be out in 2020, but given the lead time for book publication, we probably would have heard something by now if it was coming out before the end of the year. It’s not impossible there will be a release — Martin has even hinted it would be out in time for Worldcon at the end of July — but given Martin’s history with this book, it seems less likely with every passing week. And even when (if) Winds of Winter is published, that will just start the wait for the final book of the series.

I know fans of the series would like to think that Martin is taking so long with Winds of Winter because quality takes time. They’d like to believe he’s carefully building a finely crafted story, one piece at a time, and polishing every turn of phrase until it shines. They’d like to believe that Martin is taking so long to write the sixth book because it’s going to be so damned good.

I don’t buy it. I don’t think Martin’s is handling Winds of Winter like someone who’s polishing a story. I think he’s lost interest in finishing the Song of Ice and Fire. It’s been 26 years since he first proposed the idea of an epic fantasy series to his agent. That’s an awful long time to be working on any project, and he’s probably not as much in love with the series as he was when he started.

I’m not saying he hates it. I’m sure he still wants to finish it, but… I’ve got 70 unfinished draft posts on this blog. There are several interesting software projects I’d like to work on (including my Model Justice simulation). I have a bunch of DIY projects I want to do around the house. I really do want to do all these things, but I don’t have time for all of them, so I have to prioritize, and a lot of interesting stuff is still waiting.

I think Martin is going through the same process. He really does want to finish Song of Ice and Fire for the fans, but he’s got so many other things he’d like to do more. We know this, because he’s been doing those other things. He’s been involved in TV projects, he’s released a separate book on the history of the Targaryens, he’s worked on several variations of Game of Thrones spin-offs, there’s a video game…

These are all things he’s been working on instead of Winds of Winter. This is not the behavior of someone who is trying diligently to finish a series for the fans. I think he’s just slowly pushing himself through it whenever he works up the willpower. And I hate to say it, but even if he gets Winds of Winter out the door, I don’t believe he’ll ever pull it together enough to publish the final novel of the series. A Dream of Spring is just a dream.

There’s a lot to criticize about the way David Benioff and D.B. Weiss concluded the Game of Thrones series. But at least they gave fans an ending. That’s more than George R. R. Martin has been able to do.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Winter Is Here…

The central change made by the bill is this: It would allow civil suits against companies that recklessly distribute child pornography. It would do this by taking away a piece of their immunity from liability when transmitting their users’ communications under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA).

Right away that makes me nervous, because anything that chips away at the protections of Section 230 can’t be good for the internet. Baker’s characterization of Section 230 doesn’t help me trust him:

Originally added to the CDA as part of a legislative bargain, Section 230 was one of the best deals tech lobbyists ever struck. The CDA was a widely popular effort to restrict internet distribution of pornography to minors. Tech companies couldn’t stop the legislation but feared being held liable for what their users did online, so they agreed not to fight the CDA in exchange for Section 230. The next year, the law’s measures to protect children online were ruled unconstitutional, leaving the industry protections in Section 230 as more or less the only operative provision in the entire CDA.

Section 230 doesn’t just protect big tech. It protects everybody. I feel safe having comments on my blog because Section 230 says I’m not liable if my readers post defamatory statements about celebrities or threats against public figures. Note that this does not mean that defamation and threats are immune from legal action, it just ensures that the legal action is directed at the correct target: The person who actually created the problem content.

This brings us to the EARN IT Act, which would treat child pornography more or less the way FOSTA treated sex trafficking content—by lifting the immunity of companies that don’t take reasonable measures to prevent its distribution. […] But now that FOSTA has shown the way, it’s no surprise that a similar attack on child pornography has gained traction.

Indeed it’s not. Everyone who opposed FOSTA warned that it was the only the first step in gutting Section 230.

[…] EARN IT imposes civil liability on companies that distribute child pornography “recklessly.” Victims—presumably the individuals whose images are being circulated—could sue online platforms that recklessly ignored the exchange of child pornography on their services. By itself, that rule is hard to quarrel with. Recklessness requires more than simple negligence. A party is reckless if he deliberately ignores a harm that he can and should prevent.

For anyone who has defended a tort case, being reassured that the jury has to find your client acted recklessly is cold comfort.[…]

To address that fear, EARN IT offers a safe harbor to companies that follow best practices in addressing child pornography. […] the bill creates a commission to spell out the safe harbor best practices. […] To protect the government’s interests, the attorney general is given authority to review and modify, with reasons, the best practices endorsed by the group. Companies that certify compliance with the best practices cannot be sued or prosecuted under federal child pornography laws. […]

To see what this has to do with encryption, just imagine that you are the CEO of a large internet service thinking of rolling out end-to-end encryption to your users. This feature provides additional security for users, and it makes your product more competitive in the market. But you know it can also be used to hide child pornography distribution networks.

This is an argument that proves too much. Sure, an encrypted channel can be used to hide a child pornography distribution network, but that’s because encrypted channels can be used to hide messages about absolutely anything — child pornography, ransom demands, securities fraud, conspiracies to nuke a U.S. city, collusion with foreign governments to affect the election, prosecutors instructing cops to hide exculpatory evidence, the timetable for a military coup — you name it, encryption can hide messages about it.

You can make similar arguments about a lot of things. Just think of all the evil stuff people can hide in cardboard boxes! Any given box could contain a bomb, or ebolavirus, or plutonium! And just imagine all the things people can do behind locked doors! Gosh, every locked door could be hiding a terrorist planning to send pipe bombs in cardboard boxes packed with Ebola! Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Won’t someone think of the children?!?

Arguing that people might use privacy to do evil things is an argument against all privacy. Then again, Baker worked for both the NSA and DHS, and he wrote a book that apparently warns about the “privacy and business lobbies that guard the status quo” against “a hardheaded recognition that privacy must sometimes yield to security.” So maybe he sees that as more of a feature than a bug.

After the change, your company will no longer be able to thwart the use of your service to trade in child pornography, because it will no longer have visibility into the material users share with one another. So if you implement end-to-end encryption, there’s a risk that, in future litigation, a jury will find that you deliberately ignored the risk to exploited children—that you acted recklessly about the harm, to use the language of the law.

In other words, EARN IT will require companies that offer end-to-end encryption to weigh the consequences of that decision for the victims of child sexual abuse. And it may require them to pay for the suffering their new feature enables.

The word “enables” does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Again, it’s a case of proving too much. If end-to-end encryption “enables” child porn, do trucks enable smuggling? Do gloves enable theft because they protect burglars from leaving fingerprints? Do telephones enable con artists because they can use them to call victims? And God only knows how many crimes were “enabled” by the invention of the car. Did anyone sue Ford Motors for the crimes of Bonnie and Clyde?

You can play this stupid game with anything, but it’s still a stupid game. Holding a product’s manufacturers liable for how criminal third parties misuse the product is garbage policy.

I don’t doubt that this will make the decision to offer end-to-end encryption harder. But how is that different from imposing liability on automakers whose gas tanks explode in rear-end collisions? [..] That makes the decision to offer risky gas tanks harder, but no one weeps for the automaker. Imposing liability puts the costs and benefits of the product in the same place, making it more likely that companies will act responsibly when they introduce new features.

Does Baker really not understand this? In his hypothetical, the companies making end-to-end encryption available aren’t the ones making the child pornography, they aren’t the ones distributing the child pornography, and they aren’t the ones consuming the child pornography. The reason it makes sense to sue automakers whose gas tanks explode in rear-end collisions is because they made the gas tanks. We don’t sue third parties that weren’t involved in the decision. We don’t sue the railroads and trucking companies that transported the cars to the dealerships.

There is nothing radical about EARN IT’s proposal, except perhaps for the protections that the law still offers to internet companies. Most tort defendants don’t get judged on a recklessness standard. Juries can award damages if the defendant was negligent, a much lower bar. Indeed, in many contexts, the standard is strict liability: If your company is best able to minimize the harm caused by your product, or to bear its cost, the courts will make you the insurer of last resort for all the harm your product causes, whether you are negligent or not. Compared to these commonplace rules, Section 230 remains a remarkably good deal, with or without EARN IT.

This is not a new concept. Similar principles protect plenty of other businesses from being held liable for misuse of their product by bad actors. You can’t sue Verizon when your boss uses his cell phone to sexually harass you, you can’t sue the post office when someone sends you a letter bomb, you can’t sue Louisville Slugger when someone beats you with a baseball bat.

(Well, you can sue, but you almost certainly won’t win.)

[…] EARN IT doesn’t impose liability on companies that fail to follow the commission’s best practices. They are free to ignore the recommendations of the commission and the attorney general, which are after all just a safe harbor, and they will still have two ways to avoid liability. First, they can still claim a safe harbor as long as they adopt “reasonable measures” to prevent child sex exploitation.

Why should they have to? Before the internet, plenty of pedophiles shared printed photos through the mail, and nobody sued USPS for “enabling” that. This is little more than fear-mongering over new (-ish) technology.

The risk of liability isn’t likely to kill encryption or end internet security. More likely, it will encourage companies to choose designs that minimize the harm that encryption can cause to exploited kids. Instead of making loud public arguments about the impossibility of squaring strong encryption with public safety, their executives will have to quietly ask their engineers to minimize the harm to children while still providing good security to customers […]

That’s another bullshit argument. The whole point of end-to-end encryption is that nobody but the sender and the receiver can learn anything useful about the contents of messages. There’s no way the company carrying the the encrypted traffic can “minimize the harm” if they can’t even read the messages. And if they can tell which messages are harmful, then they aren’t actually providing end-to-end encryption. Either Baker doesn’t understand this, or he doesn’t think his readers will.

That, of course, is exactly how a modern compensatory tort system is supposed to work. Such systems have produced safer designs for cars and lawn mowers and airplanes without bankrupting their makers.

Only because you haven’t asked them to do something literally impossible.

Look, I’m sure tech companies are against this legislation because they want to make money, but that isn’t the only thing at stake here. Legislation like this would undermine the adoption of secure messaging systems. Government security and law enforcement agencies have been scheming to do that for decades, and the EARN IT act sounds like just another attempt to break privacy using whatever convenient boogeyman seems to be on hand this time.

The very idea of panicking over end-to-end encryption is absurd, because encryption has been end-to-end for as long as we’ve had encryption: Somebody has a message to send, and they don’t want it read by anyone else along the way, so they encrypt it before they send it, and the intended recipient decrypts it to read it. That’s how Julius Caesar did it, and that’s how it’s still done today.

When you visit your bank’s website, everything you type is encrypted in your browser and decrypted at the bank’s data center, and everything your bank sends you is encrypted in their data center and decrypted by your browser. You and your bank are the endpoints for the encrypted streams. It’s end-to-end encryption. This keeps your financial data a secret between you and your bank, and the entire secure web works that way. That includes my blog. If you’re reading this at Windypundit, you’re using end-to-end encryption.

The world of email and messaging systems is an unusual exception to end-to-end encryption for various technical and historic reasons. Much of our email technology was invented before the desire for security was well understood, and no single solution has emerged as a standard for encryption. Even when inventing communication technologies with security in mind, scenarios such as internal messages, organization-to-organization messages, organization-to-individual, and person-to-person all present different challenges for key management that invite incompatible solutions. Mailing lists can mix all of these together, and if you want automatic spam protection, rule-based sorting, or full-text searching, your software has to have access to the plaintext. In essence, we mostly don’t use end-to-end encryption because we prefer the convenience that comes with handling information in the clear.

Nevertheless, there are still situations where end-to-end encryption is desirable. Plenty of people are already doing end-to-end encryption using tools like PGP, Enigmail, and Mailvelope. These are pieces of software you can install on your computer to help you encrypt your email messages.

In fact, that’s all end-to-end encryption is: Software on your computer (or your phone or tablet or whatever) that you can use to secure your messages. Baker says big tech wants to roll out end-to-end encryption to be “more competitive,” but he doesn’t bother to discuss why it would be more competitive. End-to-end encryption is not some sort of nefarious scheme by big tech. It’s “more competitive” because people want it.

We want end-to-end encryption because we want privacy. Privacy from hackers, privacy from big tech companies that carry our data for us, and privacy from government bootlickers who try to sell us false promises of safety.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Let’s Not End End-to-End Encryption

I do want to talk about one part of the process of starting the job, however.

Despite the fact that I’m a U.S. citizen, I was still required to fill out an I-9 form. That’s the form the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) requires to document my employer’s verification of my eligibility for employment in the United States. USCIS is part of the Department of Homeland Security, and one of their jobs is to make sure that ineligible foreigners aren’t working here. Rather than doing their job, however, they’ve drafted the Human Resources departments of every company in the country to do the job for them.

I can almost hear some of you asking, “But how else could they make sure that foreigners aren’t working illegally?” I don’t know, but I’m old enough to remember when this law was passed in 1986, so the country got along just fine for over 200 years without requiring citizens to “show our papers” to earn a living.

Those papers have to prove two things: My identity, and my eligibility to work. Some documents, like a U.S. passport, prove both things. My passport has expired, so I had to use two separate documents. The identity document was easy, since I have a valid Illinois driver’s license, but proving my eligibility to work was more difficult. A Social Security card would do the trick, but since I had recently asked the Social Security Administration for a new one, and they advise against carrying it, I had no idea where I had put it. The only other suitable document would by a copy of my birth certificate, but I had no idea where I had one of those either.

All of this is, of course, completely unnecessary in the internet age. I have an account at the Social Security Administration website, which is protected by a two-factor authentication system. In our modern internet era, it would be easy for my new employer (or more likely, a third-party service provider) to ask me to have the Social Security website digitally sign a claim authenticating my work eligibility. It’s the same cryptographic transaction as using one website to login to another website (e.g. “login with Facebook”), and it happens a billion times a day on the internet. The only difference would be that instead of authenticating through Facebook (or Twitter or Google or LinkedIn), this would be authenticated by the ssa.gov website.

You may be wondering about security. Is that website is secure enough to be acceptable for checking employment eligibility? Well, since I used that website to order my new Social Security card, which is considered an acceptable document, it’s clearly secure enough.

I eventually found my Social Security card, so I filled out my part of the I-9 form and made copies of my driver’s license and Social Security card to send in to my employer. But before I could do that, I had to have the I-9 notarized. (Or so I thought.)

My bank has a branch right near the house, so I drove over there and asked if their notary could process an I-9 form. They said they weren’t allowed to, but that I should try an independent notary, like a UPS store. But at the UPS store I got a flat “no” from the clerk. He said I-9 forms were a problem for everyone. That made me think I should probably go home and do some research before trying again.

You will probably not be surprised to hear that it turns out to be a mess.

The way notarization normally works is that you sign a document in front of a notary, who then stamps the document to authenticate your signature. It’s basically identity verification by a third party: The notary will have seen your proof of identity — your driver’s license, for example — and they’ll make a record in a journal indicating how they verified your identity, including details such as your driver’s license number. The notary will then fill in their own information in the notarization portion of the document and affix their stamp, thus ensuring the receiver has enough information to verify the notarization.

Because notaries are licensed by the government and they are familiar with handling legal documents, they often take on other roles in legal matters. For example, if you refinance your home (at least here in Illinois) the person who handles the final loan closing will likely be a notary. Some of them also have training as paralegals.

Now let’s back up and discuss why I had to take that I-9 to a notary. The I-9 form documents that the employer verified the employee’s eligibility for employment in the United States. As such, it’s supposed to be filled out by the employee on the front, and then the employer is supposed to fill out the back, documenting the credentials they used (driver’s license and Social Security card in my case) to verify the employee’s identity and employment eligibility.

The thing is, I’m working from home. My employer is 1000 miles away. I can’t just drop by the Human Resources office. But the USCIS folks are very strict about this. A video conference where I show my ID to my employer is not good enough. I have to present myself in person. And a simple notarization of my signature is not enough, because the back of the I-9 must be filled out and signed by the employer’s authorized representative. There’s no way around this.

[…] remote hires must still complete section 1 of the form and the employer’s agent or representative must complete section 2 in its entirety, including a tactile inspection of the documents presented by the employee.

[Emphasis added.]

However, there seems to be a loophole, because the law doesn’t specify who an employer can authorize to represent them.

An authorized representative or authorized agent can technically be anyone. You can borrow an HR rep from a company near your remote hire, use an attorney or even a librarian.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) does not require these authorized agents to have any specific qualifications.

Many employers have therefore hit on the idea of using notaries to complete the documents, since it sounds similar to other kinds of things notaries do. Unfortunately, that’s not quite the case:

“The guidance often given in these situations is to have the remote employee use a local notary public to notarize the Form I-9,” said Kayla Dineen, SHRM-CP, project implementation manager at Helios HR, an HR consulting firm based in Reston, Va. “In many cases, this process doesn’t work out as intended because a notary public is not sure of their responsibilities or the process in completing the form. I’ve had a number of clients share that employees came back and said the notary republic refused to help them.”

Exactly. In fact, the American Society of Notaries warns notaries against the process of filling out I-9 forms:

Here’s where the issue becomes dangerous for unsuspecting notaries. Many employers ask notaries serving as their Authorized Representative to affix their notarial seal to the certification section of the Form I-9. Never do this: the Form I-9 does not require an authorized notarial act of any kind, for either the employee’s execution of the document or the Authorized Representative’s.

That’s a key point: The notary is not doing anything that requires the use of their notarial powers. Their role is basically to attest that they have examined my documents in person and sign their name to that. Consequently, it would be a mistake to notarize the document as well, because they would be notarizing their own signature, which is forbidden by conflict of interest rules. Even worse, California considers an I-9 to be an immigration form (even when filed by non-immigrants like me), and the State of California requires anyone acting as an Authorized Representative to be licensed as an Immigration Consultant. Notaries who lack such a license could be fined.

Because of that kind of legal thicket, handling an I-9 form is risky for a notary, and many of them won’t do it.

Now that I understood the problem, I called an independent notary who agreed to fill out the forms. I suspect he didn’t really understand the issues when he agreed, but I explained it to him as clearly as I could and walked him through the process of filling out the paperwork (and not notarizing anything).

Between preparing the I-9 documentation, finding my social security card, and dealing with the notarization issue, it probably took 5 hours of my time to produce an acceptable two-page I-9 form. And I’m a natural-born U.S. citizen, meaning this was basically the best-case scenario.

In short, fuck the Department of Homeland Security.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at How Not to Notarize an I-9

To try to intuit an answer, I decided to go over some quick synopses of the movies. I’ll start with the first two, which everybody loved:

• The Terminator — Thrilling action as Sarah Connor fights a killer robot, sent from the future by Skynet, so that her future son John Connor can become the leader of the human resistance that defeats the machines.
• Terminator 2: Judgement Day — Thrilling action as Sarah Connor fights a killer robot, sent from the future by Skynet, so that her son John Connor, who fights along side her, can become the future leader of the human resistance that defeats the machines.

Okay, now let’s compare those to some of the newer films that didn’t do so well:

• Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines — Sarah Connor is already dead when the movie starts. We learn that John Connor will be killed by a terminator in the future. He fails to stop Skynet from killing billions of people in a nuclear holocaust.  As the movie ends, we see that he will lead the resistance only because he happens to end up in a command bunker near his girlfriend’s father’s military base.
• Terminator Salvation — Sarah Connor is already dead when the movie starts. John Connor is not the leader of the resistance. I’ve pretty much blocked out the rest of this movie.
• Terminator Genisys — Sarah Connor fights a killer robot, sent from the future by Skynet, so that her future son John Connor can become the leader of the human resistance…but there’s already a killer robot, and Kyle doesn’t understand why he’s there, then they all travel forward in time, then Skynet kills future John and sends an evil twin John back in time, then Sarah and Kyle fight him…and oh God it’s just a mess.
• Terminator: Dark Fate — A terminator kills John Connor in front of his mother, but it doesn’t matter because someone else will lead the resistance against something that isn’t Skynet anymore. Nevertheless, Sarah Connor keeps hunting terminators in a futile attempt to find meaning in her life.

Looking at this collection of plot summaries, one problem with the sequels stands out immediately: Stop killing the Connors, you assholes!

I mean, what the hell were the writers thinking? The first two movies were all about the Connors’ fight for survival, so killing either of them in the sequels is undoing the victories that had fans clamoring for a sequel in the first place. Killing one of the Connors betrays the fans as badly as if — just making up crazy examples here — the makers of the Aliens sequel decided to kill Newt, or the makers of The Matrix sequel decided to kill Trinity and Neo. It may make some kind of dramatic sense in a particular movie, but it’s a betrayal of the series as a whole.

The later entries in the franchise also abandon a key theme that runs through the first two Terminator movies: Taken together, the movies are about a family caught up in the beginnings of a war. They are about the struggle of a parent preparing her child to fight in that war, and about both of them learning to battle an inhuman enemy without losing their own humanity. None of the T2 sequels ever really got this, but the creators of the nearly-forgotten TV series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles understood it very well, and I’ve always felt the series was the true sequel to the first two movies.

If you like the early Terminator movies, but you haven’t see the series, I highly recommend you check it out.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at What’s Wrong With Terminator?

“Sorry to burst everyone’s bubble, but there was NO year 0. We started with year 1, so the new decade is 2021.”

Yeah…not so much. I have a couple of problems with this.

I remember back in 1999 when everyone was saying things like this about the year 2000. That it’s not the start of the new millennium, so we should be celebrating until next year.

The logic is pretty straightforward. There was no year zero, so the first year was 1. Therefore the second year was 2, the third was 3, and so on…up until the 1000th year, which was numbered 1000. A millennium is 1000 years, and the first 1000 years — the first millennium — were numbered 1 to 1000. Therefore, the second millennium had to begin in the year 1001, and if you count that as the first of another 1000 years, then the second millennium had to end with the year 2000. Thus, the third millennium begins with the year 2001. The year 2000 was part of the previous millennium.

My first objection to the sign above is that we don’t number decades the way we number millennia. Nobody went out celebrating “the start of the 203rd decade.” What they celebrated was the start of the ’20s, which unsurprisingly start in 2020. We group years into decades differently than we do centuries or millennia: Decades start with the year ending in 0. That’s just how it is.

You could object that our decade groupings are wrong, but that brings me to my second problem. Everyone making this argument (including the sign maker above) likes to point out, “there was no year 0.” But you know what? The sign is wrong when it says we “started with year 1,” because there was no year 1 either. Nor a year 2 or year 3 or year 10. There wasn’t even a year 500.

The anno Domini system for labeling years wasn’t invented until the year 525. Actually, if I’ve done the math right, our current year numbering system was invented in the year 241 under the anno Diocletiani era, named after the Roman Emperor Diocletian and dated back to the first year of his reign. He was a persecutor of Christians, so this era was also known as the “Era of the Martyrs.”

Christian scholars weren’t terribly fond of numbering years based on the reign of an Emperor who persecuted them, so a monk named Dionysius Exiguus decided to change all that by numbering the years based on an era that started with a happier event for Christians: The birth of Jesus Christ. How exactly he determined that Christ had been born 525 years earlier is a little unclear. (Dionysius was fuzzy about his sources.)

Actually, despite the invention of anno Domini in 525, there wasn’t even a year 525 — Dionysius proposed that his new system should start after Diocletian 247 with anno Domini 532 replacing Diocletian 248. So 532 was the first year of our current calendar…for some people. Because the truth is that the anno Domini system wasn’t very popular until Emperor Charlemagne started using it sometime around the year 800. It didn’t spread to the rest of Europe until maybe the 1400s, and anno Domini didn’t become a world-wide standard until the development of modern trade and communications in the 1900s. Given all this history, it’s pretty clear we didn’t really “start with year 1.”

I suppose someone could argue that even though we started with year 532, it was still possible to count back to year 1, so it still makes sense to talk about counting decades, centuries, and millennia from year 1. But then we can also count back to year 0, and starting with year 0 makes all the decades, centuries, and millennia begin and end in years that are much more intuitive to most people.

So let’s just do that. Calendars and timekeeping are complex enough without making up pointless rules about arbitrary starting points.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Enjoy the New Decade

Let’s start with the Trumpian level of dishonesty in the repeated claims of supporters that Warren’s wealth tax asks billionaires to pay a mere “two cents.” Obviously, it’s two percent — two cents on each dollar — and calling it “two cents” is a cheap trick to minimize it. And the wealth tax is not just for billionaires, as the 2% rate kicks in at $50 million. As for billionaires, the latest version of Warren’s proposal taxes their wealth at 6 percent. These are not trivial amounts of money.

It’s important to understand that a wealth tax is different from an income tax because a wealth tax is levied over and over again, year after year, on the same wealth. Your income is taxed only once, when you earn it. If you made $50,000 last year, you paid income taxes on that money when you earned it. But this year’s taxes will be based only on this year’s income. The IRS won’t make you pay taxes again on the money you earned last year.

Wealth taxes are different: You will pay a wealth tax on your wealth over and over, for every year that you are wealthy enough to meet the tax threshold. Given enough time, that’s a lot of money. Someone paying at the billionaire rate will lose half their wealth in just over 11 years.

That’s one of the problems with the wealth tax. According to estimates provided by Warren’s economic advisors,

If her wealth tax had been in effect since 1982, for example, Mr. Gates, who had made his first billion dollars by 1987, would have had $13.9 billion in 2018 instead of $97 billion.

Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, would have had $48.8 billion last year instead of $160 billion. And Michael Bloomberg, who is considering running for president himself, would have had $12.3 billion instead of $51.8 billion.

Now if you hate billionaires, that probably sounds awesome. But it’s not so good if you’re trying to raise government revenue. If we launch the wealth tax today, the first year will seize 6% of Bezos’s $160 billion fortune, or $9.6 billion, which a nice bit of change for the U.S. Treasury. However, in the hypothetical where the wealth tax started in 1982, the 6% wealth tax today would be applied to only the remaining $48.8 billion of Bezos’s fortune, producing about $3 billion in tax revenue. That’s a decline in tax revenue of more than $6.6 billion for Bezos alone, with more losses for all the other billionaires affected.

That’s what happens when your taxes come directly out of your tax base: Your tax base erodes, and your tax revenues go down. Every year, the billionaires have 6% less wealth, so revenues decline at 6% per year. The wealth tax will eat itself.

(That’s assuming that billionaires do nothing to minimize their tax burden, which seems an unlikely thing for billionaires to do. More on this later.)

These billionaires won’t just be paying taxes on their wealth, they’ll also be earning revenue on it. But from the billionaires’ point of view, all of their investments will now be earning 6% less per year due to the tax. Or to put it another way, if billionaires want to make money on their investments, they have to find investments that offer earnings greater than 6%.

In general, the world of investments offer an inverse relationship between safety and high-earnings. U.S. Treasury bonds are very safe, but they don’t earn very much. On the other hand, you could make a ton of money investing early in a high-tech startup, but you’re more likely to lose all your money. Most prudent investors diversify their portfolios, so that they can earn some money on the risky stuff, but they have a nest egg of safer investments to preserve their wealth in case of bad times.

The 6% wealth tax rips away that safety — anything earning less than 6% is a loser — there are no good safe investments for rich people any more. This seems likely to create shocks in the economy, as billionaires dump their safe investments and head for the riskier end of the market. Other investors will pick up some of the slack, but this seems likely to do a lot of damage to the bond market, especially for U.S. Treasury bonds and bonds issued by cities to pay for infrastructure, both of which are safe enough to pay far less than 6%.

It’s also not exactly clear how billionaires will pay their wealth taxes. The problem is that taxes have to be paid with money, but the wealthiest people don’t hold their wealth as money. It’s not like Jeff Bezos checks the Bank of America app on his iPhone Amazon Fire to see how much he’s worth today. Jeff Bezos owns owns stuff. Lots of stuff. And to pay a wealth tax, he’d have to sell some of that stuff. Depending what exactly he owns, that can be a problem. Many things are hard to sell quickly, such as real estate or business holdings, and sometimes the value of the holdings depends on who owns them.

For one thing, ownership is control, and control is important for an entrepreneur. Selling 6% of Amazon every year would mean Bezos giving up control of the company piece by piece. Using Warren’s estimate above, he would have lost 2/3 of his Amazon stock by now. He’d still be a very influential shareholder, but he would have lost control years ago. If that had happened, I doubt Amazon would be the same company it is today. Visionary companies need their visionary founders. Would Berkshire Hathaway still have the same credibility if Warren Buffet had lost control? Would Tesla be Tesla without Elon Musk? How much would the Harpo entertainment empire be worth without Oprah’s star power?

It’s hard to answer questions like that. In fact, it’s hard to answer questions about wealth in general. And if it’s hard to understand something, it’s hard to tax it.

Income is relatively easy for the IRS to discover, because income has to come from somewhere — there has to be a transaction with someone else — and that transaction is likely to be observable. It will almost certainly involve banks and other financial intermediaries who will keep records that the IRS can use. And in many business transactions, the receiving party’s taxable income is also the paying party’s tax deductible expense, giving the latter a strong incentive to see to it that the IRS is aware of the transaction.

Wealth, on the other hand, just sits there. You don’t have to do anything observable with it. So it’s a lot harder for the government to see it. Oh sure, the government can tell how wealthy I am, because my wealth is simple: I own a house and have some banking and investment accounts, all of which are easy for the government to discover. But not all wealth is held so simply.

To some extent, wealth can be inferred by looking at the flow in of income and expenses. If I know that over the entire course of your life you’ve earned income worth $4 million, and I know you’ve spent $3.9 million, maybe I can infer that you have retained the rest of the money, making you worth $100,000. Unfortunately, that only works if you spent the $3.9 million entirely on consumption goods that you used up. But what if you spent some of that money on something that retains value? If you spent $1 million on Amazon stock, that would still have value. It would be an investment, and it would count toward your wealth. You’d be worth $1 million (plus change).

That’s an easy case, though, because publicly traded stock has two important characteristics that make it suitable for assessing wealth: (1) Ownership is carefully tracked by independent parties, and (2) the value of the stock is easy to establish because it is traded so often. Not all wealth is so easy to understand. If you had purchased $1 million in gold and buried it in your back yard, you could be worth $1 million and almost no one would ever know. You could give it to someone or leave it to your children when you die, and then they’d be worth $1 million, and again, no one would know.

Even that’s a simple case, because it’s fairly easy to establish the value of Gold, so if someone (like the IRS) discovered you had the gold, they’d know how wealthy you are. The situation gets a lot murkier if you bought investment goods that are harder to set a value to, such as gemstones, artwork, or antiques. If you bought a painting for $1 million, even you wouldn’t really know how much it was worth unless you tried to sell it. Maybe some expert will pronounce it to be a fake, in which case it’s worth nothing. Or maybe it will appreciate to $10 million because someone made an Oscar-winning movie about the painter and all their stuff is incredibly hot. How would you put a value on that for tax purposes?

Or how about intellectual property? J. K. Rowling has made about $1 billion from selling Harry Potter books and movie rights and other merchandise, and that income has become part of her personal net worth. But in addition to what she has made from selling Harry Potter so far, she still owns the rights to keep selling Harry Potter stuff for the rest of her life, and to pass that ownership on to her children. It’s anybody’s guess what that’s worth right now, and I don’t know how you’d tax it, or how she could pay taxes on the net present value of future income she hasn’t earned yet.

Then there’s author Dan Brown who by 2003 had sold several books, including three novels, but remained pretty much an ordinary guy with ordinary amounts of wealth. And then in 2004 he published The Da Vinci Code which went on to become one of the most popular books of all time, boosting the sales of his first three novels, and inspiring a series of films starring Tom Hanks. With that single book, Dan Brown became a wealthy man. But when did Brown’s wealth first materialize? He sold the book for a ton of money, but doesn’t that mean that the book was worth a ton of money even when it was just sitting on his computer? Yet the value of the The Da Vinci Code was kind of murky until Brown sold it. But it wasn’t selling it that made it valuable. Selling it just priced it. It was already valuable. Dan Brown was already wealthy. It’s just that nobody knew it yet.

Since I started writing this last month, we’ve all heard about Maurizio Cattelan’s $120,000 duct tape banana, right? That thing is made from a few cents worth of duct tape and fruit, but so far the artist has sold three of them for $120,000 to $150,000. So when exactly did Cattelan become $390,000 wealthier? When he got the idea for the artwork? When he bought the bananas? I haven’t got a clue, and neither would the IRS.

These may seem like esoteric examples, but I chose them because they are vivid examples of the general problem with assessing wealth: A lot of wealth is held in confusing and intangible forms.

Think about the money in your bank account. We say it’s your money, and yet, at this very moment, you don’t have any of it in your possession. The bank has it. But we think of it as your money because the bank is required to give it back to you whenever you want it. In this way, your wealth consists not of money or goods, but of the bank’s promise to give you money. That promise is pretty reliable, because it’s enforced by contract, law, tradition, reputation, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. That money is so safely yours that it’s, well, “money in the bank.”

But let’s say you withdraw $100,000 of that money and loan it to me. Has your personal wealth changed? The amount of money you have in the bank has been reduced by $100,000, but you also hold a promissory note from me for $100,000, so arguably nothing has changed. On the other hand, I’m a bit less likely to pay you back than the bank was. I could go broke, and I’m not insured by the FDIC. You might only be able to recover a fraction of the $100,000 from the bankruptcy proceeding. Taking into account the risk of my being unable to repay you, that $100,000 promissory note is worth a bit less than $100,000 in the bank, and possibly a lot less if I’m in bad financial shape.

In other words, your wealth depends on my financial stability. So if the IRS wants to figure out how much wealth you have, they need to know something about my finances as well. (That would be especially complicated if the IRS couldn’t learn about my finances, perhaps because I lived in another country.)

Almost all investments work that way. Corporate and government bonds are essentially promises to pay, and their value is related to their face amount, adjusted for the risk that the corporation or government will default on the loan. This means that assessing your wealth means assessing the financial health of all the bond issuers who owe you money. As a practical matter, this is fairly easy if the bonds are publicly traded, because the value of the bonds can be assessed at whatever price you can sell them for in the market. But it’s a lot harder for privately-issued bonds and promissory notes that aren’t priced by the market.

Stocks are similar but more complicated. Stock in a company is a promise to be paid some portion of the future revenues of that company, which is even harder to figure out than whether the company will be able to repay a loan. Again, it’s easy if the stocks are priced on a public market, but a lot harder if the stocks are privately issued and traded, as they would be for a company owned by a family, a group of founding investors, or any limited investment arrangement.

Things get really complicated once we drift even further from tangibility. Consider out-of-the-money stock options. An option is a promise to allow you to buy (or sell) something at a specific price over a specific time period, and a stock option provides this for a company’s common stock. So suppose you have 1 million options to buy Amazon at $1800 per share for the next 12 months. As I write this, Amazon stock (AMZN) is trading for $1848 per share, so if you chose to exercise your options today, you would simultaneously buy 1 million shares for $1800 and sell 1 million shares for $1848, earning you a profit of $48 million. This means that your million options to buy Amazon at $1800 are worth $48 million today. Pretty sweet. And pretty easy to assess for tax purposes.

But suppose instead of a strike price of $1800, your million Amazon options have a strike price of $1900/share. It would be stupid to exercise them today, because you’d have to pay $1900 for shares that are only worth $1848. You’d be losing money. At first glance, it may seem like this makes your options worthless. However, because they don’t expire for a year, there’s a chance that Amazon stock will go over the $1900/share price, making it possible to profitably exercise your options at some point in the near furure. (AMZN was at $2000 in July, so $1900 is not unrealistic.) So how much are your Amazon options worth now?

It’s not easy to figure out. The value of a publicly traded stock is dependent on what investors believe the underlying corporation’s net cash flows will be in the future, so the value of the options depend on what investors believe that future investors will believe about those future cash flows. That’s a lot of speculation about the future, which is why determining the value of out-of-the-money options is a fundamentally hard problem.

(As with some of my other examples, determining a price is fairly easy if the options are publicly traded — as I write this, AMZN options for $1900 expiring in about a year are trading at $187, making those million hypothetical options worth $187 million — but figuring out the value of an option is much more difficult for a private contract.)

Options are only one example of a type of financial product called a derivative, in which the value of the derivative security is related to the value of some other asset, but does not represent a direct investment in that asset. The underlying assets can be things like stocks, bonds, currencies, and commodities, or they can be abstract concepts like market indexes and interest rates.

The value of the option described above is related to the value of Amazon common stock, but it isn’t actually Amazon stock. It’s a call option which conveys the right, but not the obligation, to buy a stock at a certain price. A put option is the opposite: The right, but not the obligation, to sell a stock at a certain price. Other types of derivatives are futures, which include the right and obligation to buy or sell at a price, and swaps, which create obligations for trading conditioned on future financial events.

Under normal circumstances, derivatives serve the purpose of allowing one party to assume risks on behalf of another party, in exchange for a payment. If you’re an airplane manufacturer and you sell a fleet of jets to an airline in India, deliverable in one year for a payment at that time of 100 billion Indian rupees, you might worry about the risk that rupees could lose value against the US dollar, resulting you receiving a smaller payment than expected. You could avoid that exchange rate risk, however, by paying a third party to guarantee the exchange rate, thus taking on the risk for you.

Farmers planning to take cattle to market and large restaurant chains that use beef can both ensure stable pricing by creating contracts to trade specific amounts of beef at specific prices at specific points in the future. Banks can reduce the risk that their creditors will not be able to repay the loan by buying credit default swaps that require the seller to make good on loan payments.

Derivative contracts are often very complicated — involving various thresholds, options, discontinuities, and triggers — and they can sometimes be traded independently of the original parties and bundled together into various pools, tiers, and tranches. There is a whole industry involved in creating these kinds of derivatives, and way too many of them are sold by shady brokers to naive investors.

(For example, there are so-called “principal protected” mutual funds which promise to protect your holdings against market losses that eat into your original investment. This can sound like a great idea for securing your retirement funds, but these are actually complex financial derivatives that are difficult to understand.)

Even perfectly legitimate derivative securities can be far too complex for most people to fully understand, and even large institutional investors have lost tons of money investing in derivatives. Remember the mortgage crisis that crashed our economy a decade ago? That was derivatives.

I’m sorry if I appear to have wandered too far from the subject of wealth taxes by discussing exotic financial instruments, but I wanted to show you a glimpse of the complexity involved. And I am by no means a finance expert. I’ve only scratched the surface. It gets much, much worse.

This brings me at long last to my point: If we decide to tax the wealth of rich people, then all of the wealth of rich people will begin to look like this, as they restructure their holdings to make it harder to tell how much they’re worth. An entire industry of lawyers and financial advisers will spring up to help them with this. Small island nations will rewrite their laws to allow American billionaires to own investments that are not reported to the IRS. Rich people will own complex and confusing portfolios filled with international derivative securities, secured by secret agreements that are enforced through the laws of nations that guarantee financial privacy.

As a result, it will be a lot harder to collect wealth taxes than it seems right now. Furthermore, all of this restructuring will be a wasteful drag on the economy, because avoiding taxes is not a productive activity. And finally, the complexity of all this restructured wealth will make it a lot riskier, not just for billionaires, but for the entire economy.

In short, I think the wealth tax will probably not accomplish its goals, I think it will waste American productivity, and I think it will make the economy less stable. If we want to raise tax revenues, there are better ways to do it.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Wealth Tax Would be a Mess

I managed to catch one of the sneak preview showings of Shazam! last week, and I thought it lived up to the promise of the trailer. Without a lot the sturm and drang that has afflicted so many DC-Comics-based movies lately, it was just two hours of enjoyable comic escapism.

I grew up reading these comics, and back in the 1970s when young Billy Batson said the magic word “Shazam!” he turned into a superhero named “Captain Marvel.” That name would be confusing to modern audiences — and it would probably anger the lawyers at Marvel, which has a completely different Captain Marvel in theaters right now — so nowadays the character is known simply as “Shazam.” Nevertheless, although I have nothing against the fine work of Carol Danvers, Billy Batson’s alter ego who will always be the true Captain Marvel to me.

(The original Captain Marvel stories published by Fawcett in the early 1940s were incredibly popular, outselling even rival National’s Superman comics, on which the Captain Marvel character was loosely based. The sad story of the comic’s subsequent downfall involves rather a lot of intellectual property lawyers.)

The new Shazam! movie is clearly based on the 2012 incarnation of the character from the New 52 reboot by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank. The biggest change from the comics I read is that Silver Age Captain Marvel was an adult superhero with an adult personality completely separate from Billy’s, but in this incarnation, the big guy with super-powers is still young Billy Batson on the inside. He’s a 15-year-old with superpowers, and that makes for some hilarious moments. And no, you haven’t already seen all of them in the trailer.

Although Billy’s exploration of his new superpowers makes up a substantial portion of the movie, as it does in the trailers, the main plot of the movie involves a confrontation with one of Captain Marvel’s traditional foes, Dr. Thaddeus Sivana, played with steely menace by Mark Strong. Sivana has come into his own magical superpowers through darker means than Billy, and he wishes to use them for darker ends.

But this is not a dark movie. Shazam! never loses touch with its origins in a superhero comic series that had a lot of zany fun. Perhaps more importantly, Shazam! avoids the recent DC misstep of having the bad guys kill tens of thousands of people and then trying to call whatever happens next a happy ending. The bad guy in Shazam! is certainly bad, but without all that unnecessary tragedy porn.

Speaking of those other movies, although Superman and Batman are name-dropped as actually existing in the world of Shazam!, this movie does not appear to take place in the same DC Extended Universe as movies like like Justice League. That’s probably a good thing.

Finally, at the risk of a small spoiler, I’d like to head off some disappointment for fans who may have heard enticing rumors: Sorry, but Tawny does not appear as a character in this film. And in case you’re wondering, there are two closing credits scenes. The first is foreshadowing of a future villain, and the second is just a bit of fun.

Shazam! opens widely in theaters on Friday.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Shazam! – Review

Is the balance between profiling, which in such situations is a valuable law-enforcement tool, and the importance of equal treatment under the law a difficult one legally and ethically? Yes. Does a sheriff have the right and authority to ignore the way this balance is decided once legal authorities define it?

No.

Is the determination of this balance often polluted by ideological biases, in this case, against enforcement of immigration laws?

Yes.

“Ideological biases.” That’s what you call someone else’s principles when you don’t like them. Jack is fond of accusing people of bias.

Do Donald Trump, and his supporters, and those Americans who may not be his supporters but who agree that allowing foreign citizens to breach our borders at will without legal penalties is certifiably insane, believe that Arpaio’s position on illegal immigration is essentially correct and just?

Yes.

Does that have anything to do with the results of the trial that found him guilty of contempt of court?

No.

Nonetheless, did his ham-handed methods give ammunition to open-borders, pro-illegal immigration, race-baiting activists […]

Yes.

Is sending Arpaio to jail a political imprisonment?

Yes, although he made it easy to justify on non-political grounds.

Are political prisoners the ideal objects of Presidential pardons?

Yes.

Good God, it’s crazy to call Arpaio a political prisoner. A judge ordered him to stop doing something, and he went ahead and did it anyway, which bought him a contempt charge. It was pretty straightforward. Sure, there are people who didn’t like him for political reasons (I’m one of them), but that’s true of every elected official.  This is nonsense.

Also, just for the record, it’s misleading to call someone a “political prisoner” when they’re not, you know, in prison.

Would pardoning him send dangerous messages (it’s OK to violate judicial orders you think are wrong; the ends justifies the means; Presidents should meddle in local law enforcement, “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice”) as well as defensible ones (judges and elected official enabling illegal immigration are a threat to the rule of law; Joe is an old man with a long record of public service who deserves mercy even though he was wrong…)

Yes.

Invoking Arpaio’s record of public service is kind of laughable when it’s his failure to follow the rules of that service that got him his conviction. And it’s unreal that Jack would mention the rule of law without mentioning the awful damage that Arpaio’s pardon does to the rule of law. Arpaio is a thug, and Trump’s pardon sends a message to law enforcement thugs everywhere that the federal government is going to give them a pass. This is not even the first time Trump has sent that message, and it doesn’t get better with repetition.

Will such a pardon, especially as the news media is again spinning to make the case that Trump is sympathetic with xenophobes and white nationalists, further inflame an overly emotional debate that needs to be calmed, not exacerbated?

God, yes.

Or to put that a different way: Evidence that Trump is sympathetic to xenophobes and white nationalists tends to help make the case that Trump is sympathetic to xenophobes and white nationalists.

Sure enough, Democrats, Trump-haters like Senator John McCain and my echo-chamber Facebook friends are denouncing the pardon as if the President had loosed Hannibal Lector on the world.

The books area little vague, but I’m pretty sure Hannibal Lector didn’t kill anywhere near as many people as have died in Arpaio’s jails.

In doing so, they really look ridiculous, and might as well be wearing  “I hate Donald Trump and will scream bloody murder no matter what he does” in neon on their heads.

I don’t just hate Trump, I hate Arpaio too, and have for a long time. That Trump thinks Arpaio is a great example of American law enforcement is more than a little worrisome. Ditto for Arpaio’s brother-from-another-mother, Sheriff David Clarke.

Especially for Democrats, who have argued that non-violent criminals shouldn’t be imprisoned at all when they are young and black, the argument that an 85 year old man’s under-two year maximum sentence is an outrageous object of Presidential mercy and grace—that’s what a pardon is, you know–is the height of partisan hypocrisy.

Trump didn’t pardon Arpaio out of mercy for an old man. He as much as said he thinks Arpaio was convicted for “doing his job.” Trump pardoned Arpaio because he has no problem with a Sheriff who people’s rights and a court order to harass immigrants. Trump pardoned Arpaio because he likes “tough” cops.

The fact that Arpaio is 85 alone justifies a pardon by the standards Presidents have used since the beginning of the office.

Presidents don’t pardon every elderly prison inmate. They exercise discretion, and we can judge them on that discretion. Besides, if Trump was really concerned about Arpaio’s ability to survive prison, he could have commuted the sentence rather than granting a pardon.

Furthermore, the Federal Bureau of Prisons already has a compassionate release program to address situations like this. Prisoners who develop serious health problems are eligible, and prisoners over the age of 65 may request compassionate release after serving 50% of their sentence.

For that matter, we don’t even know what Arpaio’s sentence would have been. Judges take circumstances into account. He might not have gone to prison at all. But he would still have the conviction for contempt.

That his sentence is relatively short—many, many prisoners with far longer sentences have been pardoned by Trump’s predecessors–makes the pardon, if ill-considered, also de minimus, especially since there is no chance, literally none, that the old man, now out of office and retired, will have an opportunity to repeat the crime he was convicted of committing.

This is disingenuous. One of the purposes of punishment is to deter other people from committing the same crime. Pardoning Arpaio undermines this deterrence because it suggests to other people, including other chief law enforcement officers, that they can defy federal judges and federal law if President Trump likes them.

A pardon is an act of grace by which an offender is released from the consequences of his offense, according to the U.S. Justice Department’s website. It does not say that the offender was not guilty, or that the law that was violated can be breached at will.

But doesn’t it? If the President has stoked anti-immigrant fervor, and if he has championed Arpaio-style “tough” policing, then doesn’t pardoning Arpaio imply that Trump thinks it’s okay to break the law to do that?

They want him to be metaphorically hung up by his heels to appease their open-border, pro-illegal immigration base, making the fervor to punish him purely political, and having little to do with respect for the rule of law, which their own position on illegal immigration proves that they don’t respect themselves.

Rule of law is usually presented as being in contrast to rule by arbitrary exercise of power. Whether the government helps you or punishes you should depend on whether you follow a set of explicit rules, not on how much you are liked or disliked by the people wielding power. Thus the rule of law is undermined by the fact that Trump’s first and only Presidential pardon went to one of his most prominent campaign supporters.

(Jack used to talk a lot about the importance of avoiding the appearance of impropriety, even when there’s no actual impropriety, yet there’s no mention of that in anything he’s written about the pardon.)

It seems clear that Jack is getting hung up in immigration issues, but there’s a lot more wrong with Sheriff Joe Arpaio than the immigration-related activities involved in the contempt charge.

• Arpaio’s office has botched a lot of sex crime investigations, either doing a sloppy job or not working them at all.
• Arpaio proudly treated his prisoners terribly, sometimes serving them spoiled food and offering substandard medical care.
• Arpaio setup a temporary “tent city” outdoor jail that operated for something like 20 years in the sweltering Arizona sun, subjecting prisoners to unsafe temperatures, sometimes with lethal results.
• Arpaio did very little to discipline guards who mistreated prisoners in his jails, which he himself referred to as “concentration camps.”
• Arpaio used his police force to intimidate his enemies. He jailed reporters who were critical of him, and launched a corruption investigation against a judge who ruled against him.
• Then there’s the whole fake assassination plot against him, which put an innocent man in jail for 4 years.
• Or the puppy-burning incident.

That’s the guy Trump pardoned. That’s the guy Jack is defending.

Let me be clear. This isn’t a Rationalization #22 “it isn’t the worst thing” defense of the pardon. It is a “the attacks on this pardon are wildly disproportionate to its reality, and thus transparent political theater” indictment of the pardon’s critics. Almost every pardon can be called a rejection of the “rule of law,” if you don’t understand what the pardon power is, and politicians who have been undermining respect for the very laws that Arpaio went over-board enforcing are the last people on earth who should make that argument. They are ridiculous in their hypocrisy.

I’m not sure what that is, but if it isn’t “it isn’t the worst thing” or “everybody does it” then it’s an ad hominem attack. Whether Trump’s critics are right or wrong about the pardon has nothing to do with whether they are hypocrites. A murderer who declares that “murder is bad” is not wrong.

Joe Arpaio was an arrogant, grandstanding bully and thug, and unworthy of his badge. I wouldn’t have pardoned him despite his age, but there were some good reasons for Trump to do so. It was almost worth doing just to prompt Trump’s foes and pro illegal immigration hypocrites into embarrassing themselves.

That’s a terrible reason for pardoning someone.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Ethics of the Arpaio Pardon

(In case it doesn’t show, it’s a picture of a dumb-looking guy saying “I’m voting for the candidate who got people killed, covered [up] sexual assaults and threatened national security…because the other one said mean things.” The person who tweeted it responds “Sums up Clinton supporters really well.”)

In many situations, that’s a reasonable thing to say, but I don’t believe we’re living through one of those situations.

If this was a matter of criminal justice, for example, that would be a good point: Criminal culpability depends on known bad acts in the past, not on predictions of bad acts in the future. But this is not about criminal justice, it’s about the future of the country. We can’t change what the candidates did in the past, but we can control what they do in the future, so our ultimate concern should be what the candidates will do, not what they have done. Put another way, the Presidency is not a reward we give to the candidate whose past we most admire, it’s a job we give to the candidate who we think will do best in the future.

Of course, a person’s past behavior is a pretty good predictor of their future behavior, so Hillary Clinton’s past certainly does inform us of her likely future, and voters should definitely take her past behavior into account.

But it’s important to understand how that past behavior is shaped by opportunity.

I’ve owned house cats for a couple of decades, and I’ve been scratched by them quite a few times over the years. On the other hand, I’ve never been injured by a tiger. Does this mean that I would be safer if I replaced my house cats with tigers?

Obviously not. The difference is opportunity. My cats aren’t very likely to injure me during any given encounter, but because I encounter them thousands of times a year, they still do some damage. On the other hand, I’ve never in my life encountered a tiger that wasn’t kept safely in a zoo, so even though tigers are much more dangerous than house cats, they haven’t ever harmed me because they’ve never had the opportunity.

No one has given Donald Trump the opportunity to do the things that Clinton has done. No one has given him that much power. He’s never harmed national security because he’s never had responsibility for national security. He’s never gotten anyone killed because he never held a position where people’s lives were on the line.

That makes it harder to predict what Trump would do if he won the Presidency, but we can still make some pretty good guesses. For one thing, we can look at the things he says.

• In the fall of 2014, when Dr. Kent Brantly and his assistant Nancy Writebol were infected with Ebola while fighting the epidemic in Africa, Trump opposed letting them return to the United States for treatment. If he’d had the power to actually stop them from returning, they might very well be dead.
• Trump once proposed a plan to pay off the national debt with a one-time confiscation of 14.25% of the assets of rich people, an idea so awful that government leaders just talking about it could harm the U.S. economy by discouraging investment. (His proposal also included tax changes that would have left his family better off, even after the one-time tax.) It’s a good thing no one took him seriously back then.
• Trump has said he wants to block future Muslim travel to this country, track all Muslims already here, and forcibly close some mosques. Trump also says wants to build a wall at the border with Mexico, and he wants to deport millions of illegal residents and their American-born children. That he hasn’t already done so does not mean he won’t do so if he can.
• Trump has said he will order US troops to torture suspected terrorists and bomb their families. Again, it’s a good thing he doesn’t have the power to do so.

If that’s not convincing, we can also look at the kinds of things Trump has actually done with relatively limited power he has:

• Trump has arranged for his businesses to receive millions of dollars of taxpayer money.
• When Donald Trump’s deceased brother Fred’s surviving family contested Trump’s father’s will for all but disinheriting them, Donald Trump cut off the health insurance coverage that was paying for their infant’s medical treatment.
• Trump hired illegal Polish immigrants to work on one of his developments without bothering to supply them with basic safety equipment like hard hats.
• Trump University scammed working class people into borrowing and spending way too much money for an education in business that never materialized.
• Trump tried to use eminent domain to force an elderly widow out of her home so he could build a casino parking lot.
• Trump has done business with the mob.
• Trump has bankrupted several businesses.
• Trump has discriminated against black would-be renters of his properties.
• Trunp hired Roy Cohn — one of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attack dogs during the red scare — as his lawyer.
• Trump businesses routinely refuse to make full final payments on bills they owe.
• When Roger Ailes resigned following allegations of sexual harassment, Trump hired him immediately.
• Trump runs a charity that is much, much more of a fraud than the Clinton Foundation.
• The link in that last item also describes Trump’s bribery of a public official.

Trump may not have done some of the bad things Hillary did, but he seems to lie, cheat, and steal at every opportunity. Let’s not give him any opportunities to do even worse.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Clinton Did It, but What Would Trump Do?