Pushing privatization too far

This is Joseph.

This article from the New York Times, illustrates the problems of not paying for services via taxation:

Corey Statham had $46 in his pockets when he was arrested in Ramsey County, Minn., and charged with disorderly conduct. He was released two days later, and the charges were dismissed.

But the county kept $25 of Mr. Statham’s money as a “booking fee.” It returned the remaining $21 on a debit card subject to an array of fees. In the end, it cost Mr. Statham $7.25 to withdraw what was left of his money.

The argument for the card were kind of weak:

In its appeals court brief, the county said the debit cards were provided “for the convenience of the inmates,” who might find it hard to cash a check. 

It seems unclear to me why one could not return the contents of the person's wallet unmolested.  That would avoid this problem.  Or perhaps they could look into this technology called the "cash register"/  It solves the need to cash checks very effectively.

The cards themselves were riddled with fees:

He did get a debit card for the remaining $21. But there was no practical way to extract his cash without paying some kind of fee. Among them: $1.50 a week for “maintenance” of the unwanted card, starting after 36 hours; $2.75 for using an A.T.M. to withdraw money; $3 for transferring the balance to a bank account; and $1.50 for checking the balance.

Is this the sort of card agreement you would sign?  Why would we accept the state agreeing to this on behalf of the person arrested, especially after a $25 fee?

But this shows the real paradox of trying to adopt a private sector model for law enforcement.  The person being arrested is not the customer.  The society enforcing laws like "disorderly conduct" are the customers.  We have taxes to prevent free-riding -- if we, as a society, decide that we should enforce these rules then we should all contribute to the costs of enforcement.

But charging an "arrest fee" walks a very narrow line towards extortion.  What if somebody could not pay these costs?

In the case of bad conduct there is at least a argument (a bad argument but an argument) for recovering costs.  But where is the presumption of innocence here?  Furthermore, even if there is a process to recover costs (the article was unclear on this point), why does it make sense to have a complex process to return seized property.

I think some serious thought about these decisions would be sensible.  

You can’t condemn the outcome and condone the process

There are lots of people in this country (arguably a plurality) who are deeply disturbed by the results of this election. We have had more than our share of dire predictions and frightening analogies, but what we have not had nearly enough of it is serious discussion of the process that brought us here. This is in no small part because the figures in the media who have the most influence over the conversation are generally the ones with the most culpability for what just happened.

While virtually everyone was caught off guard by just how badly things went wrong, a number of us tried our best to call out the bad practices and declining standards that brought us here. I won’t list the specifics now -- if you’d like a taste, just search this blog for the terms like “journalism,” “Trump,” and “the New York Times” -- but I will say that the list is long and damning.

Put bluntly, journalism has gotten so bad that it constitutes a clear and present danger to the republic. It misinforms the public, promotes bad science and technology, distorts markets, comforts the comfortable, afflicts the afflicted, and, as mentioned before, undermines the democratic process. Until we demand and get better from the profession, things are only going to get worse.

The coolest part is when it makes its own planes

Joseph had a serious and rather depressing post scheduled for today, but I'm going to push it back to 2017. For the rest of this year I'm going to step back, take a deep breath, and watch things like paper plane machine guns.

From our good friends at Gizmodo:

Stick 200 sheets of A5 paper into the back of this machine gun and instead of firing bullets when you pull the trigger, it will unleash a barrage of up to 120 paper airplanes every minute.

The war on data heats up

We've been writing about for a long time. What we're seeing now is, in many ways, the logical conclusion of what we were writing about, but I had always assumed we'd come to our senses before this.



Sophie Kleeman writing for Gizmodo:

Over the weekend, our President-elect fingered South Carolina congressman Mick Mulvaney to lead the Office of Management and Budget. If confirmed, Mulvaney will wield a significant amount of power over virtually every federal agency—and that should make anyone who values science very, very uneasy.

...

Mulvaney’s track record blends in quite nicely: He thinks climate change is a myth, and he has consistently voted against pro-environmental bills. He also voted for a bill that prevented the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases, and questioned the nthe logical ee,  d for federal funding for Zika research.

There is one key difference between Mulvaney and the rest of Trump’s team of appointments, however. Rather than limiting his damage to one individual agency, Mulvaney gets to defecate on all of them.  

The Office of Management and Budget is the largest arm of the executive office of the president, and possesses a correspondingly huge amount of power. It helps develop and execute the federal budget, oversees agency performance and management, and reviews “all significant federal regulations by executive agencies.”
For someone who will soon lord over government funding and the agencies that depend on it, Mulvaney is almost religiously opposed to federal spending. The New York Times notes that he’s totally cool with being part of the “Shutdown Caucus,” because of his “willingness to shut the government down” rather than raise the debt limit. He’s also continuously advocated for cuts to federal spending, and has repeatedly butted heads with his own party on spending issues.

All of this spells bad news for federal agencies and programs in general, but particularly those in the science, health, and environmental realms. Trump and his lackeys have already made clear their opposition to funding entire fields of scientific research—Bob Walker, a senior adviser, even suggested scrapping NASA’s Earth science division. Combine this staggering level of disregard with Mulvaney’s belt-tightening approach to federal spending, and the prospects for government-funded science research appear dimmer by the day.
...

“The White House Office of Management and Budget is central to good government—including its role overseeing science-based public health, safety and environmental protections,” Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at UCS, said in a statement. “[Mulvaney] has backed legislation to change the regulatory process in ways that would give an even stronger influence to industry, increase political interference and undermine science-based decision-making.”

Chief among Rosenberg’s concerns is Mulvaney’s support for bills like the Regulatory Improvement Act of 2015, which would “[create] a commission tasked with eliminating and revising outdated and redundant federal regulations.” Notably, the bill was intent on protecting business interests, and was championed by the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Federation of Independent Businesses, among others.

While slashing “outdated and redundant federal regulations” may sound prudent on the surface, Rosenberg, a former regulator, says it’s often a smokescreen that can be used to block policy measures protecting public health and the environment.

“You can’t overturn the Clean Air Act, so you just mess up the process [by which it’s implemented],” Rosenberg told Gizmodo. He likened it to the battle over reproductive rights: There may not be enough support to overturn Roe v. Wade (yet), but that hasn’t stopped state legislators from inserting procedural roadblocks at every other step of the way.

If Soylent actually were people, it would probably be easier on the digestion

Both in blogging and conversation, I can't think of a topic with which I've managed to offend more people than Soylent. I can't help but wonder if some of the fans who sprang to the product's defense later regretted their purchase. 

Eve Peyser writing for Gizmodo:

As you may recall, Soylent ended up recalling its Food Bar a month after releasing it when Gizmodo reported that it was causing customers to have “uncontrollable diarrhea” and vomiting, sending some to the emergency room. Soon after, Soylent halted sales of the 1.6 version of its powdered formula after people reported similar symptoms. The company eventually concluded it was the high-tech algal flour in the bars and powder that caused the illness, and vowed to remove it from future products.

Now that I think of it, maybe all tech reporters should be satirists

[I really need to get around to watching that show]

If you follow the tech industry or the discussions about employment and the treatment of workers, you definitely need to be following Dan Lyons, best known these days as a writer for the satirical show  Silicon Valley. Lyons is sharp and insightful and funny as hell and he does a great job cutting through the bullshit of the Augean Stables of today's tech journalism:

Making hiring and firing decisions based on age is illegal, but age discrimination is rampant in the tech industry, and everyone knows it, and everyone seems to accept it. What other industry operates like this? What would the world be like if doctors, lawyers, or airline pilots — or anyone, really, other than professional athletes — had to accept the idea that their career would end at age 40, or 50?

The standard defenses of this practice make no sense in terms of business

One excuse for pushing out older workers is that technology changes so fast that older people simply can’t keep up. Veteran coders don’t know the latest programming languages, but young ones do. This is bunk. There’s no reason why a 50-year-old engineer can’t learn a new programming language. And frankly, most coding work isn’t rocket science.

What’s more, most jobs in tech companies don’t actually involve technology. During my time at HubSpot fewer than 100 of the company’s 500 employees were software developers. The vast majority worked in marketing, sales, and customer support. Those jobs don’t require any special degree or extensive training. Anyone, at any age, could do them.

The actual reasons do make business sense, but they aren't what you'd call pretty [emphasis added].

People born after 1980 do not possess some special gene that the rest of us lack. But Silicon Valley venture capitalists and founders somehow seem to believe this is the case. I suspect the truth is that tech startups prefer young workers because they will work longer hours and can be paid less.

Age discrimination is just the beginning.

Twenty years ago, when venture capitalists invested in young founders, they usually insisted that founders team up with older, seasoned executives to provide “adult supervision.” Lately the conventional wisdom has been that it’s better to let young founders go it alone. The consequences have been predictably disastrous. Young male founders hire young male employees, and spend huge money building kooky office frat houses.

In the tech industry the practice of bros hiring bros is known as “culture fit,” and it’s presented as a good thing. The problem with “culture fit” is that unless you’re a twenty-something white person, you don’t fit. People of a certain age, people of color, and women — most of us, in other words — are often unwelcome. This huge, dynamic industry, which is generating so much wealth, has walled itself off from most of the workforce, telling millions of people that they cannot participate. This situation obviously shortchanges a lot of workers, but it also hurts tech companies by depriving them of talent.

Age bias goes hand-in-hand with other forms of bias. HubSpot had many female employees, but few in top management positions. The company was run (and still is) mostly by white men. As far as I could tell, there were no African-American employees. Once, after sitting through a company all-hands meeting and being stunned by the ocean of white faces, I wrote to a woman in HR asking if the company had any statistics on diversity. HubSpot prided itself on possessing numbers for everything, and being a “data-driven organization.” I received a terse reply: “No. Why?”

Hiring by “culture fit” has a way of crowding out hiring by competence. Partially as a result, it is disturbingly easy to find multi-billion dollar tech companies with high level executives who are dumb as a big ol' box of rocks.

I lasted 20 months at HubSpot. My time there was filled with incidents in which colleagues demonstrated they shared Halligan’s low regard for older workers. After I left the company, I announced I was writing a memoir about my experience as a 50-something guy trying to work in startup land. Apparently some of the company’s executives freaked out about what might be in the book, and they did something so crazy that I still almost can't believe it.

According to the FBI, which investigated, these executives tried to hack into computers to steal the manuscript, and also tried to prevent publication of the book by engaging in extortion. No criminal charges have been filed, but the hacking, extortion, and ensuing cover-up raised questions about HubSpot’s culture and the trustworthiness of its leadership. HubSpot's board fired the CMO, and sanctioned Halligan, the CEO. A vice president resigned before the board could decide whether to terminate him. The board still won't tell me what happened.

The wonderful thing about age discrimination is that eventually we all get a chance to share the experience

[Following up on our previous piece on Dan Lyons.]

Though ageism has started getting more coverage, It is still almost invariably presented as a problem for the old (keeping in mind that, in this context, “old” is very much a relative term). This is a deeply flawed framework for what should be fairly obvious reasons. When it comes to discrimination, all of the other protected classes are more or less permanent – – your race, religion, sexual orientation, gender will generally stay with you for life – – but, barring sudden death, all of us will go through all classifications of age.

We therefore need to approach this problem in terms of overall career paths. If we do, it becomes apparent that, not only are younger workers also victims of age discrimination, they very well may be baring the brunt of it in today's employment market. Those younger employees are the ones turning in 60 hour weeks for less money than they merit as part of an implicit contract that will almost certainly be broken.

We have undermined the concept of deferred compensation – – often suggesting that the employee who expects the employer to make good on agreements is greedy and possibly dishonest – – while clinging to models that implicitly and sometimes explicitly rely on the idea that hard work and loyalty now will translate into rewards in the future.

If anything, the notion of "paying your dues" is even more entrenched in today's attitudes toward work. New employees are often expected to put in what would have been considered impossible hours. Freelancers are routinely expected to deliver professional level products for little or no money. Everyone is expected to borrow money to finance their own job training. All of these things are based on an implicit investment model.

But these sacrifices have come to look less and less like an investment over the past three or so decades, particularly compared to the 50s and 60s, when getting an education and/or putting in your time almost guaranteed a comfortable and stable middle-class lifestyle. Partly as a reaction to the upheavals of the 30s and 40s, the Postwar Era saw a wide array of institutional, regulatory, and cultural guarantees that these investments would be made good in the long term.

Now, nearly all of these guarantees have broken down. In terms of individual employers, there is no longer any pressure, official or unofficial, to show loyalty towards workers. Journalists now routinely portray calls for job security as protections for the "lazy" and treat as unreasonable and selfish the notion that employees have a right to collect agreed-upon pensions. In terms of overall industries, age discrimination violates the implicit contract of "paying dues." Rather than your hard work and sacrifices translating to a better job in the future, they translate to no job at all.

The 50-year-old engineer who can't get a position in the tech sector is a victim of age discrimination. So is the 29-year-old with huge college loans to repay who is about to discover he or she will be much less employable in six years. The only difference is, one of them doesn't know it yet.

Happy XKCDmas

"Albert and Pogo's Christmas" by Walt Kelly

Bad reporting continues

This is Joseph

This is . . . remarkable:

Indeed Carolina does so poorly on the measures of legal framework and voter registration, that on those indicators we rank alongside Iran and Venezuela. When it comes to the integrity of the voting district boundaries no country has ever received as low a score as the 7/100 North Carolina received. North Carolina is not only the worst state in the USA for unfair districting but the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project.

Of course matters are not helped by this reporting from the Los Angeles Times:

After North Carolina lawmakers refused to repeal House Bill 2, the law that curbs legal protections for LGBT people and has cost the state millions of dollars in boycotts and lost jobs, Democrats and Republicans took to a predictable pattern: blaming each other for the unraveling of the deal. 

This is the lead sentence.  Just how does the opposition party factor into this in any sensible way?  Do the Republicans not currently have the Governor and a super-majority of seats in the legislature?  Have they not been willing to pass other laws on short notice? 

The Los Angeles Times then has this quote:

“It may have been doomed from the beginning,” said Michael Bitzer, a politics professor at Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C., who noted that many rural Republicans, who face re-election next year, would face outrage from their constituents if they repealed HB2. “It started off with both sides wanting a pound of flesh from the other side, and it just went downhill from there.”

Look, there is a lot of blame to give to Democrats, over a great many bad decisions that have been made in the past few decades.  But I am not sure how this works as the lead for the story -- the most important element of the story is that both sides blame each other?  Even the New York Times did better.  Clearly, if repealing HB2 had been a priority for the current administration then they could have done so, with no Democrat interference.  How does a "blame both sides" narrative work here?  One side could have done this repeal, all by themselves.  Sure, it is possible that the opposition was not helpful, but I find this sort of reporting very misleading.  Even when one side is shut out from power, it is blamed for not somehow not  . . . inspiring? . . . the governing party? 

Christmas Greetings from Slumberland

From the great Winsor McCay.

Our annual Toys-for-Tots post

[Slightly modified from previous years.]

A good Christmas can do a lot to take the edge off of a bad year both for children and their parents (and a lot of families are having a bad year). It's the season to pick up a few toys, drop them by the fire station and make some people feel good about themselves during what can be one of the toughest times of the year.

If you're new to the Toys-for-Tots concept, here are the rules I normally use when shopping:

The gifts should be nice enough to sit alone under a tree. The child who gets nothing else should still feel that he or she had a special Christmas. A large stuffed animal, a big metal truck, a large can of Legos with enough pieces to keep up with an active imagination. You can get any of these for around twenty or thirty bucks at Target, Wal-Mart or Costco. Toys-R-Us had some good sales last year;

Shop smart. The better the deals the more toys can go in your cart;

No batteries. (I'm a strong believer in kid power);*

Speaking of kid power, it's impossible to be sedentary while playing with a basketball;

No toys that need lots of accessories;

For games, you're generally better off going with a classic;

No movie or TV show tie-ins. (This one's kind of a personal quirk and I will make some exceptions like Sesame Street);

Look for something durable. These will have to last;

For smaller children, you really can't beat Fisher Price and PlaySkool. Both companies have mastered the art of coming up with cleverly designed toys that children love and that will stand up to generations of energetic and creative play.

* I'd like to soften this position just bit. It's okay for a toy to use batteries, just not to need them. Fisher Price and PlaySkool have both gotten into the habit of adding lights and sounds to classic toys, but when the batteries die, the toys live on, still powered by the energy of children at play.

Among living Americans, there are only two "generations"

 "The ________ Generation” has long been one of those red-flag phrases, a strong indicator that you may be about to encounter serious bullshit. There are occasions when it makes sense to group together people born during a specified period of 10 to 20 years, but those occasions are fairly rare and make up a vanishingly small part of the usage of the concept.

First, there is the practice of making a sweeping statement about a "generation" when one is actually making a claim about a trend. This isn't just wrong; it is the opposite of right. The very concept of a generation implies a relatively stable state of affairs for a given group of people over an extended period of time. If people born in 1991 are more likely to do something that people born in 1992 and people born in 1992 are more likely to do it than people born in 1993 and so on, discussing the behavior in terms of a generation makes no sense whatsoever.

We see this constantly in articles about "the millennial generation" (and while we are on the subject, when you see "the millennial generation," you can replace "may be about to encounter serious bullshit" with "are almost certainly about to encounter serious bullshit"). Often these "What's wrong with millennial's?" think pieces manage multiple layers of crap, taking a trend that is not actually a trend and then mislabeling it as a trait of a generation that's not a generation.

How often does the very concept of a generation make sense? Think about what we're saying when we use the term. In order for it to be meaningful, people born in a given 10 to 20 year interval have to have more in common with each other than with people in the preceding and following generations, even in cases where the inter-generational age difference is less than the intra-generational age difference.

Consider the conditions where that would be a reasonable assumption. You would generally need society to be at one extreme for an extended period of time, then suddenly swing to another. You can certainly find big events that produce this kind of change. In Europe, for instance, the first world war marked a clear dividing line for the generations.

(It is important to note that the term "clear" is somewhat relative here. There is always going to be a certain fuzziness with cutoff points when talking about generations, even with the most abrupt shifts. Societies don't change overnight and individuals seldom fall into the groups. Nonetheless, there are cases where the idea of a dividing line is at least a useful fiction.)

In terms of living Americans, what periods can we meaningfully associate with distinct generations? I'd argue that there are only two: those who spent a significant portion of their formative years during the Depression and WWII; and those who came of age in the Post-War/Youth Movement/Vietnam era.

Obviously, there are all sorts of caveats that should be made here, but the idea that Americans born in the mid-20s and mid-30s would share some common framework is a justifiable assumption, as is the idea that those born in the mid-40s and mid-50s would as well. Perhaps more importantly, it is also reasonable to talk about the sharp differences between people born in the mid-30s and the mid-40s.

There are a lot of interesting insights you can derive from looking at these two generations, but, as far as I can see, attempts to arbitrarily group Americans born after, say, 1958 (which would have them turning 18 after the fall of Saigon) is largely a waste of time and is often profoundly misleading. The world continues to change rapidly, just not in a way that lends itself toward simple labels and categories.

Last minute gift ideas from Cracked

My favorite part is the remote control.

Two Napoleons and a Potemkin village

I wish I remembered the exact context, but a few years ago I was listening to a radio interview on the subject of delusion. At one point, the reporter asked "what happens when two mental patients who both think they are Napoleon meet each other?" The expert replied, "After careful consideration, both patients come to the correct conclusion: the other guy is crazy."

That anecdote came to mind recently when reading this piece in New York magazine by Benjamin Wallace profiling the troubles at Hyperloop One. [Longtime readers will remember this is not the first time we've called out New York's Hyperloop coverage.]

There is, course, another "hyperloop" company in the news. Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, but as Shervin Pishevar (venture capitalist and co-founder of Hyperloop One) told the generally credulous reporter, the other company didn't really have a serious chance of building anything of consequence.

[a] crowdsourced, volunteer-staffed company with a confusingly similar name, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies. It was perhaps not a serious long-term threat — the company was run by a former Uber driver and a former Italian MTV VJ — but Hyperloop Transportation Technologies had a few months’ head start over Hyperloop Technologies, and the amateurish nature of his rivals didn’t help Pishevar in the credibility game, which he recognized was, at this point, the entire game.

The dismissive tone might have had a bit more resonance if it hadn't been followed almost immediately by this description of how Hyperloop One prepared for its big moment in the sun

[Emphasis added]

Pishevar knew the power of a well-placed media exclusive to lubricate the creation of something from nothing. In fact, he had been keeping Forbes technology editor Bruce Upbin up to date on every development of his new venture since its infancy. “Shervin mentioned the Forbes piece early, maybe even the first day I met him,” BamBrogan remembers. By early 2015, Pishevar’s company was a few steps further along, having hired a general counsel (Pishevar’s brother Afshin, who was bunking in BamBrogan’s spare bedroom) and raised $7.5 million, primarily from Pishevar’s Sherpa Capital and from Formation 8, a VC firm run by the investor Joe Lonsdale. But the company was still in BamBrogan’s garage, with no health insurance, no company insurance, no HR processes, no website, and no office space. The only thing holding it together, at this point, was Pishevar’s estimable sales skills. With a big Forbes story now slated for imminent publication, the company was in a race to acquire enough of a patina of substantiality to merit prominent coverage in America’s most famous business magazine. “It was crazy,” BamBrogan recalls. “We’re spending time finding the right industrial space that we want to grow into but also that we can do for this Forbes shoot.”

A recently hired director of operations knew the landlord of a large campus in downtown L.A., and at the end of the month, BamBrogan and his handful of colleagues moved into a sliver of the space, a 6,500-square-foot former ice factory, before they had secured a lease. With the magazine deadline looming, the skeleton crew were unrolling carpets, BamBrogan was making repeated trips to Ikea in his Audi sedan to buy 16 Vika Amon tables and 64 Vika Adil legs, and the company was buying 25 computers and 50 monitors. Some of the computers had only one graphics card and couldn’t actually run two monitors, but the super­fluous equipment beefed up the apparent size of the company. The day of the shoot, BamBrogan and his co-workers scheduled a flurry of job interviews in the office so that more people would be around.

As if this weren't bad enough, the article then goes on to quote engineers for the company admitting what many of us have been saying all along: that the incredibly over-hyped demonstration was entirely limited to the parts of the technology everyone already knew worked. Rather than being a test, it was, in reality, little more than a glorified science fair exhibit.

In case I was a bit obscure in the title...

In politics and economics, a Potemkin village (also Potyomkin village, derived from the Russian: Потёмкинские деревни, Russian pronunciation: [pɐˈtʲɵmkʲɪnskʲɪɪ dʲɪˈrʲɛvnʲɪ] Potyomkinskiye derevni) is any construction (literal or figurative) built solely to deceive others into thinking that a situation is better than it really is. The term comes from stories of a fake portable village, built only to impress Empress Catherine II during her journey to Crimea in 1787. While some modern historians claim accounts of this portable village are exaggerated, the original story was that Grigory Potemkin erected the fake portable settlement along the banks of the Dnieper River in order to fool the Russian Empress.