Reason Magazine - Staff

Ready, Aim, Firewall!

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 08 May 2008 12:28:00 EDT

Remember how anyone protesting China in Nepal risked getting shot during the Olympic torch relay at Mt. Everest?

Well, that's not the only censorship that's going to surround the Olympics, though it's a rather more dramatic interpretation of the word firewall: Technology Minister Wan Gang told Reuters some sites would be shut down or screened during the Games. "To protect the youth there are controls on some unhealthy websites."

In light of statements like there, there seems to be a serious case of unfounded optimism at the IOC:

Wan's statement comes just over a month after the International Olympic Committee reminded China of its obligations as an Olympic host city to allow the press to report as freely as they have in the past—which usually includes full, unfettered access to the Internet. The IOC insisted to the government that the Internet be "open at all times during Games time," and commission vice chairman Kevan Gosper appeared optimistic that China would comply. "On all issues where that's been concerned they've lived up to the (host city) agreement so we don't see any reason why they'd step back from that now," he said at the time.

More on China here. More Beijing Olympics here.

Prof. Tattletale

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:11:00 EDT

Part two in the grown-ups who should know better whining about bullying series:

A professor is suing because her students were sort of mean to her when she offered them the golden gift of "problematizing" technology and life sciences with, for example, "ecofeminist" critiques.

Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of “French narrative theory” that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will “name names.”...
Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. “My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful,” she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review.

And the best quote from her:

“They’d argue with your ideas.” This caused “subversiveness."

Via Julian Sanchez, who is at least marginally more receptive to French narrative theory

Calorie Conscientious Objectors

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 06 May 2008 16:00:00 EDT

Yesterday, New York's new policy requiring some restaurants to post calorie counts on their menu boards went into effect. A health department inspector swung into action, armed with "his laptop computer and a printer he carries in his backpack," for issuing violation notices.

Despite finding five violations, no fines have been issued yet because of a court ruling delaying implementation, but inspectors will begin handing out citations with a price tag attached in July to restaurants with more than 15 locations nationwide which refuse to trumpet the number of calories in a slice or a container of fries.

In case you want to support these brave conscientious objectors to the culinary paternalism (or guys who forgot to install the new menu boards--whatever), here's the honor roll:

Dunkin’ Donuts at 445 Park Avenue South, at East 30th Street; McDonald’s at 1560 Broadway, at West 46th Street; Popeye’s, at 321 West 125th Street, between Frederick Douglass Boulevard and St. Nicholas Avenue; Sbarro at 22 West 34th Street, next to the Empire State Building; and TGI Friday’s at 677 Lexington Avenue, at East 56th Street.

More on New York's war on tastiness here and here.

Rep. Tattletale

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 06 May 2008 12:59:00 EDT

It's not just wimpy kids and their wimpier parents who complain about bullying (see: Matt Labash's masterpiece on the anti-bullying movement in schools). The anti-bullying movement is trickling down to wimpy legislators.

The Boston Herald editorialized today "House chamber no place for thugs." Apparently some some gruff old legislator came up to a relative newbie and talked tough. The Herald's account:

A colleague came up to [Rep. Jennifer Callahan (D-Sutton)], chatted about a health care amendment that had come up earlier in the week, then what had been a casual conversation turned ugly. According to Callahan, he said, “I’ve been in this building for a long time, Jen, and I wanted you to know that I could make things really difficult for you. I mean, Jen, I could really hurt you.”

While this is far from collegial, it's not much more than the kind of tough talk one learns to expect from Hollywood depictions of hard-boiled legislators (see: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington). It's hard to imagine that Rep. Callahan was really as shocked (shocked!) as she makes herself out to be at the discovery that some legislators are assholes.

Call Me, We'll Do A Free Lunch

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 05 May 2008 11:32:00 EDT

The Universal Service Fund is one of those annoying lines on your phone bill that turns your $39.99 plan into at least 50 bucks a month. Essentially it takes taxes on interstate telephone service to subsidize telecom service for poor and rural areas, as well as broadband for libraries, health care facilities, and schools.

Unsurprisingly, payouts to phone companies are raging out of control, yet many rural areas still have notably inferior service:

The cost of the program has skyrocketed because of a bizarre funding formula which the FCC uses: the so-called "identical support rule." The agency calculates subsidies to smaller wireless carriers that serve rural areas based on the support that incumbent carriers receive per line, rather than on the actual costs of the smaller telcos. This has resulted in a dramatic rise in USF payments from $2.6 billion in 2001 to $4.3 billion last year.

Not to rush into anything, but it looks like the FCC may be thinking about maybe considering at some point reforming the system. Most likely this will just mean switching to subsidizing broadband instead of telephones.

Fashion Victim

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 02 May 2008 11:44:00 EDT

One of the central works in the exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (until 12 May), Victimless Leather, a small jacket made up of embryonic stem cells taken from mice, has died. The artists, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, say the work which was fed nutrients by tube, expanded too quickly and clogged its own incubation system just five weeks after the show opened.

I guess I'll have to wait another year for my living mouse stem cell jacket. Darn it. I heard they were all the rage at Fashion Week.

Via Instapundit

"Please Put Laptops and Fuel Cells in a Separate Bin"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:48:00 EDT

On Tuesday, my laptop battery died mid-sentence, mid-flight and I was screwed. I'm looking forward to the day when I will be able to just pop in a new methanol canister and keep going. I was thrilled to read today that (when the fuel cell technology becomes available sometime in 2009) the TSA won't stop me from doing just that.

The ruling helps clear the way for the industry and consumer acceptance. Fuel cells extract electrons from a reaction between methanol, ambient oxygen, and a catalytic membrane. Fuel cell makers hope to replace lithium-ion batteries as a power source in portable electronics. One advantage: no recharging time. Refueling a fuel cell only requires popping in a new fuel canister. A universal charger made from a fuel cell can charge notebooks, phones, MP3 players, and other devices, cutting down the number of chargers travelers have to carry.

So I should be good to go. As long as I don't try to carry one through a metal detector inside my shoes, that is.

Mostly, the TSA appears in our pages when it does something dumb, so let's have one cheer for something done right.

Free Ride

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:55:00 EDT

If all goes well, thrifty Vermonters will soon have a new way to save a few bucks. All they have to do is hand over their hearts, kidneys, and corneas.

State Reps. James Fitzgerald (D–St. Albans) and Francis McFaun (R–Barre Town) have introduced a bill offering to wave the driver’s license renewal fees of Vermont residents who become organ donors, a system similar to one that has already been tested in Georgia. Nearly 100,000 people are on the national transplant waiting list, but Vermont currently provides a measly four or five dozen organs a year from a pool of about half a million licensed drivers.

Despite the staggering statistics about the miles of maple syrup–soaked intestines going to waste in the Green Mountain State, even this small incentive has proved controversial. Financial compensation for organ donation is prohibited by federal law, with opponents of organ markets arguing, in the words of the Harvard surgeon Francis Delmonico, that “payments eventually result in the exploitation of the individual.” Some Vermont bloggers have extended this argument to Fitzgerald and McFaun’s proposal, arguing that a driver’s license is a “necessary document” and that waving the $40 fee in exchange for an organ donation pledge puts “inappropriate pressure” on low-income drivers.

The University of Chicago economist Gary Becker, who has found that even small organ donation incentives can be powerful, writes that “monetary incentives would increase the supply of organs for transplant sufficiently to eliminate the very large queues in organ markets.” Nearly all economists agree. In recent years, major arbiters of medical ethics have softened their stance on compensation, with the American Medical Association, the American Society of Transplant Surgeons, and the United Network for Organ Sharing supporting some compensation experiments.

Pirate Capitalism

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism, by Matt Mason, New York: Free Press, 279 pages, $25

In a well-publicized speech two years ago, Disney co-chair Anne Sweeney said, “We understand now that piracy is a business model.… Pirates compete the same way we do —through quality, price, and availability.”

Sweeney wasn’t thinking about Jack Sparrow, the fictional hero of Disney’s cash cow Pirates of the Caribbean. She meant the consumers and capitalists who pull music, words, and video out of the culture and remix, recast, and resell them.

It used to be easy to tell the pirates from the creators. Record labels sold CDs; Napster distributed music for free. Studios made movies; bootleggers taped opening nights in theaters and sold DVDs on the street the next morning. But postmodern piracy is more than mere bootlegging. In its best manifestation, it is the creation of brand new products cobbled together from the sights and sounds of contemporary life—including those sights and sounds disseminated by billion-dollar entertainment corporations.

In order to keep up with the pirates, more and more media companies have started to copy and co-opt their tactics. They’ve done this so well and so thoroughly that it’s getting hard to tell where piracy ends and good marketing begins. These increasingly blurry lines are making the entertainment industry nervous and conflicted. In The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism, Matt Mason of Vice magazine tells the stories of early mix-tape mavens, turf-protecting graffiti artists, and retro sneaker designers while analyzing the ways that big companies compete with, fight off, and (increasingly) embrace culture pirates.

Mason concentrates on edgier industries, but we need look no further than Disney’s multi-billion-dollar Pirates of the Caribbean franchise for a prime example of a decades-long saga of a major corporation first plagiarizing itself and then encouraging others to do the same.

It began in the late 1950s, when someone at Disneyland dreamed up a wax museum of history’s great pirates, sort of a seafaring Madame Tussaud’s. After the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the herky-jerky robot motions and pre-recorded audio of “animatronics” became all the rage. Disneyland’s wax-pirate exhibit slowly evolved into a creepy, scary, kitschy wonder: a shadowy boat ride through larger-than-life animated pirates going about their dirty business.

After a few decades of mooring itself into the subconscious minds of American children—who among us didn’t duck when the fake cannonballs whistled by?—the Pirates of the Caribbean resurfaced in the early 1990s as a screenplay pitch from Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, whose previous projects included Aladdin and Shrek, paradigmatic specimens of the self-aware, self-referential, pop-literate era of animated features.

In 2003, Disney finally turned the adaptation of the theme-park ride into celluloid. The rest is history: Swaggery drunk Johnny Depp (in a character openly lifted from Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards) spawned a trilogy of films, the second of which made an astonishing $1,066,179,725 in worldwide box office. Halloween costumes abounded, some Disney-issued and some not. Some were simply labeled “pirate” but looked a lot like Sparrow/Richards.

At least eight video games inspired by the film have appeared, with varying degrees of official sanction. A mobile phone game released by Disney’s Internet unit received lackluster reviews while a popular, unauthorized Xbox game borrowed the title, The Black Pearl, and little else. But instead of suing the peglegs off their unauthorized competitors, Disney simply pulled alongside and joined the melee with its own (free) Pirates of the Caribbean online role-playing game, fighting it out on the pirates’ own terms. Disney has stopped seeing at least some of the world’s pirates and remixers as thieves, and started seeing them as opportunities for a vast, multi-faceted marketing campaign.

Using the customizable characters from the role-playing game, fans were soon creating original YouTube videos—digital clips of pirates skewering British officers on their cutlasses, for example—from within the world of Pirates of the Caribbean Online. Some of the best were made by the 10,000 fans given passwords for the beta test of the online game at a pre-screening of the third movie, making them officially sanctioned pirate remixers (many of whom take their role literally, showing up to the screening in eye patches and tricorns).

Lots of these fan-fiction films have developed narratives of their own. They are part of a growing movement of machinima, where fans use video game environments to create their own animated movies, many of them borrowing characters or settings from Hollywood blockbusters. Meanwhile, the unauthorized Xbox game has in turn become the basis for 14 (and counting) user-modified versions at the PiratesAhoy.com online community.

In 2006, completing the great circle of recycling, Disneyland altered the original Pirates of the Caribbean ride to include an animatronic Johnny Depp.

In an effort to explain this mash-up landscape, Mason turns, with mixed success, to the last days of disco, to the early days of tagging New York subway cars, and to economic game theory. The most apt parallel, though, is to an industry known for its fickleness. Video and music companies are slowly realizing something that the world of fashion—with its markedly more relaxed attitude toward intellectual property—has always known. In the words of Coco Chanel, who long ruled the fashion world with an iron fist and a quilted handbag, “a fashion that does not reach the streets is not a fashion.”

In a 2006 Virginia Law Review article, “The Piracy Paradox,” Kal Raustiala and Chris Springman made the case that “induced obsolescence” is the fashion industry’s healthy way of shrugging off the impact of copying while still remaining relevant. Logos can be protected —via trademark law, not copyright—but there’s nothing illegal about selling a purple head-scarf that looks a lot like the purple headscarf in Ralph Lauren’s last collection. Ralph simply announces that eyepatches are all the rage now and purple headscarves are so last season. This keeps fashion fresh and the industry strong, all with very weak intellectual property protection. As Coco said, “Fashion is made to become unfashionable.”

This isn’t to say that all designers sit idly by while $30 versions of $5,000 purses show up on the street. The Paris-based Hermès in particular has been aggressive about protecting its logos and certain additional trademarkable design elements. Still, the relationship between Chinese knock-offs and couture may be mutually beneficial in the end.

“We don’t like the model but we realize it’s competitive enough to make it a major competitor going forward,” Disney’s Sweeney said in her speech. Mason puts it another way, using awfully similar language: “Pirates have taken over the good ship capitalism, but they’re not here to sink it. Instead, they will plug the holes, keep it afloat, and propel it forward.”

Katherine Mangu-Ward is an associate editor of Reason.

Trans Fat, Back and Cheaper than Ever

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:59:00 EDT

One reason that restaurants started using now-vilified trans fats in the first place (other than the fact that they were once considered a healthier alternative to animal fats) is that they're cheap. And, predictably, as food prices rise, those Canadian trans fat backsliders are responding to economic pressure:

An increasing number of restaurants are finding it tough to use healthier alternatives, including canola and other vegetable oils, which have been steadily rising in cost in recent months. Some restaurants and industry associations say prices for various types of vegetable oils have risen from 10 to 50 per cent in the past few months, and expect they will continue to go up as demand increases. ...
The situation reflects a larger problem that is taking shape across Canada as restaurants and other food providers struggle to cope with sharp increases in the price of cooking oil, a base ingredient in many menu items.

On the other hand, what do you expect from a country that invented poutine--fries covered in gravy and sprinkled with cheese curds? Keep fighting the good fight, my brothers and sisters in the Frozen North!

More on the grand trans fat battle here, here, and here.

Food Prices Up. Farm Bill... Also Up?

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:42:00 EDT

Congress to self: "Hmmm... food prices are way up. People are freaking out about it. What's the best approach here? Think, Congress. Think!"

"Ah ha! $300 billion in price support and other farm subsidies!"

***

Oh well, I guess we should be grateful for the little things:

The proposed bill would ratchet down payments to wealthy individuals not directly involved in farming, perhaps setting a cap that would cut off benefits for those earning above $500,000 in nonfarm income.

More farm fun here.

Mike's Hard Lemonade Yields Hard Time

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 17:11:00 EDT

Absent-minded professor dad buys lemonade for his kid at a baseball game. Turns out it's a Mike's Hard Lemonade.

After a guard spots the bottle, the kid is whisked away to the hospital in an ambulance (!) where they found no trace of alcohol in his blood about 90 minutes later. The doctors said he was OK to go, but instead he wound up in foster care. It was "two days before the state of Michigan allowed Ratte's wife, U-M architecture professor Claire Zimmerman, to take their son home, and nearly a week before [dad Christopher] Ratte was permitted to move back into his own house."

Everyone involved seems to have come down with a serious case of "just following orders":

The sympathetic cop who interviewed Ratte and his son at the hospital said she was convinced what happened had been an accident, but that her supervisor was insisting the matter be referred to Child Protective Services.
And Ratte thought the two child protection workers who came to take Leo away seemed more annoyed with the police than with him. "This is so unnecessary," one told Ratte before driving away with his son.
But there was really nothing any of them could do, they all said.

Jacob Sullum wrote about the hard treatment of girly beer substitutes at the hands of the law here.

Homesteading on the High Seas

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:58:00 EDT

If Peter Thiel funds something, it's bound to be cutting-edge awesome.

He is a supporter of the Methuselah Mouse Prize, which seeks to slow, stop, and eventually reverse aging. He was a producer of the film Thank You for Smoking, based on Christopher Buckley's charmingly ambiguous novel about a pro-tobacco lobbyist. An early investor in social networking, he was involved with Linked In and was the first investor in Facebook. He's big at the Singularity Institute (reason's Ronald Bailey caught up with him at the Singularity Summit earlier this year, check out the interview in the May print edition), which ponders and pushes artificial intelligence in preparation for a Vernor Vingeian "intelligence explosion." His first success was PayPal, which he originally hoped "would grow to become an extra-governmental system of currency, something reminiscent of the world described in Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon, in which programmers use encryption to create an offshore data haven free from government control."

And last week, Thiel announced a $500,000 investment—the same amount he put into Facebook in June 2004—in the Seasteading Institute. Seasteading, or "homesteading on the high seas," is an idea that has long attracted libertarians and others who would like to see a little more competition between forms of government. The idea is to get out into international waters and set up a floating outpost (or 12, or 1,200) from which people can come and go, experimenting with different types of legal, social, and contractual arrangements.

Thiel's co-conspirator and resident big thinker is none other than the impeccably credentialed Patri Friedman, son of David "Machinery of Freedom" Friedman, grandson of Milton "Capitalism and Freedom" Friedman. Patri, 31, has been beating the drums for various floating autonomous entities for several years, whenever he can steal time from his work as a software engineer at Google and from his now 2-year-old son, Tovar.

Despite the seemingly radical idea he's championing, Patri sees himself as a practical guy: "Starting a new country is actually a much less hard problem than, say, a libertarian winning a U.S. election," he says. He says that most of his competitors in the libertarian/anarchist autonomous entity business have been too ambitious, citing efforts from Sealand (the abandoned offshore fort-turned-free-state "which sort of worked" until it was devastated by fire in 2006) to more dramatic failures like Freedom Ship (current estimated cost >$11 billion, construction not yet begun) and the Aquarius phase of the Millennial Project ("colonizing the galaxy in eight easy steps!") to Minerva Reef (an uninhabited dredged island "invaded" by neighboring Tonga and eventually more or less reclaimed by the sea).

Learning a valuable lesson from his predecessors, Friedman is an incrementalist. "I want to talk about what to do this year, not how to colonize the galaxy." One way to start small, he says, is to hold a kind of floating Burning Man, called Ephemerisle, an idea inspired by childhood pilgrimages with his father to Pennsic, a Society for Creative Anachronism medieval reenactment held outside Pittsburgh, and college stints at Burning Man.

"There aren't that many people who are wiling to drop their lives and move to the ocean." Instead, he says, "it could start as a one week vacation, but then unlike Burning Man it could grow and eventually become permanent." Friedman hopes to hold the first Ephemerisle next summer, inviting many types of floating vessels to join him in international waters. Even an ordinary cruise ship might be enough to get started, since the cruise industry has proven that "providing power, water, food, and internet on the ocean is not only possible but can be profitable." But some of Thiel's grant is going toward figuring out the best way to throw up some small, cheap seasteads to provide a little non-state infrastructure and get things rolling (or floating, as the case may be).

From the official website: "Think about all the hot air and argumentation about a whole host of different political issues—freedom vs. security, absolute wealth vs. inequality, strong family vs. tolerance, open vs. closed borders, whatever the topic du jour is. Instead of deciding them through rhetoric, or voting on a few representatives to decide them for tens or hundreds of millions of people at once, imagine if we could try them each on a small scale and see what happens."

Thiel and Friedman met at a dinner set up by a couple of guys who work for Thiel's investment firm, Clarium Capital, and happened to be fans of Friedman's blog. Ajay Royan, a principal at Clarion and now a board member at the Seasteading Institute, described how the meeting of minds between Friedman and Thiel came about a few months back: "Peter knows Patri's grandfather, so we were just tickled that somebody of that lineage was so close to us physically and was thinking about macro issues from that perspective," says Royan. "We'd been having a lot internal debate [at Clarium] about how we get a freer space for people to function in. What was intriguing to us was that here was somebody proposing to shift the canvas to a relatively neutral space by recreating a frontier."

Not content with revolutionizing technology and society, Thiel says he's looking to bring "innovation to the public sector, where it's vitally needed." As with PayPal, his aspirations for the project are far from modest: "We're at a fascinating juncture: the nature of government is about to change at a very fundamental level."

Having a low-cost, gradually ramping up cluster of choices to live on would lower the cost of "jurisdictional arbitrage," which is very high right now, says Friedman. If you don't like your government right now, the only way to get a new one is to sell your house, pack up, move to another country, deal with immigration, get a new job and a new house, make new friends, and learn a new culture. This is expensive. But hopping from boat to boat, platform to platform, or island to island is cheap.

In fact, Friedman sees seasteading as a real, viable version of a metaphor his dad once used to sell anarcho-capitalism, and demonstrate why Nozickian utopias with lots of free entry and exit will tend toward libertarianism rather than authoritarianism:

Consider our world as it would be if the cost of moving from one country to another were zero. Everyone lives in a housetrailer and speaks the same language. One day, the president of France announces that because of troubles with neighboring countries, new military taxes are being levied and conscription will begin shortly. The next morning the president of France finds himself ruling a peaceful but empty landscape, the population having been reduced to himself, three generals, and twenty-seven war correspondents.

The question is (to paraphrase Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes): Will three generations of Friedmans be enough? Patri Friedman is optimistic. "I hope I can create a world where [my son] doesn't need to worry about how to increase freedom because we've already got it." he says. "But I suspect that I'll still be working on it by the time he's old enough to help."

Katherine Mangu-Ward is a reason associate editor

More DNA Day Fun: To Test, Or Not to Test?

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 12:19:00 EDT

In honor of DNA day:

Congress reached an agreement clearing the way for a bill to prohibit discrimination by employers and health insurers on the basis of genetic tests...
[The bill] would make it illegal for health insurers to raise premiums or deny coverage based on genetic information, and would prohibit employers from using such information for decisions on hiring, firing, promotions or job assignments.

Everybody's favorite fillibusterin' Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma has been delaying the bill, but it looks like it's about to shake loose. Coburn says he was worried about a new lawsuit boom as people with genetic conditions sued employers, insurers, or any body who looked at them cross-eyed. Some additional legal protections for employers have been added to the bill in the form of a "firewall" between insurer and employer sections of the bill, so it will mostly affect people looking to get individual health insurance plans.

We're bound to see more debate in this area as the science improves and the price of genetic testing comes down--this particular legislation took 13 years to make it through Congress. On one hand, people are afraid to do (potentially lifesaving) genetic tests right now because they're worried about future insurabiity--surely a suboptimal state of affairs. On the other hand, employers will discriminate on certain conditions, no matter what the law says, and in many cases, they ought to be able to. Why should we demand, for example, that a company invest in training an employee that it knows will likely to be out of commission due to illness in the near future?

And then there's this slippery slope:

[The bill] does not prohibit discrimination once someone already has a disease, and some experts said such protection would have to be the next step.
“You don’t want to be denied health insurance when you are at risk for breast cancer,” said Sonia M. Suter, an associate professor at George Washington University Law School. “But it seems to me you really don’t want to be denied health insurance when you have breast cancer.”

Our insurance system is pretty broken at this point, but layering on legislation requiring insurers and employers to ignore the information made available by quickly evolving science and medicine doesn't seem likely to help much.

Boston Bans Bottle Service

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 16:04:00 EDT

It's Thursday at 4:00 pm, which means the weekend has officially begun in college towns across the country. But bad news is coming down the pike for hearty partiers in Boston: A ban on bottle service in bars.

Letters are going out to unsuspecting bar and club owners at this very moment, informing them that bottle service violates Boston's existing ban on serving more than 2 drinks at a time to a customer.

The hilariously dismissive money quote from Boston Licensing Board Chairman Daniel Pokaski:

“We’re not New York and we’re not South Beach,” he said. “The city of Boston has a lot more to offer than just getting people inebriated. If all they can offer their clientele is just swilling down alcohol, then perhaps they shouldn’t be in the business.”

Not so long ago, Boston's esteemed politicians professed themselves shocked (shocked!) that people go to baseball games to booze it up.

Via Crispy on the Outside

The Green Fairy's Lollipops

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:29:00 EDT

To get you through the rest of the godforsaken primary season:

For when politics isn't quite surreal enough on its own: Take two absinthe lollypops, watch CNN, and call me in the morning.

More on green fairy's (victorious) fight for a green card here and here.

Bionic Woman Tanks, Bionic Eye Succeeds!

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:43:00 EDT

The Bionic Woman television series failed fairly spectacularly, but the prospects for the bionic eye look good:

Bionic eyes that return sight to the blind might not be as far off as previously thought, with researchers in London carrying out the first treatment on a pair of patients in a study of a new technology.
The new bionic eyes are connected to a camera on a pair of glasses, so they aren't the all-in-one models you're envisioning. And if successful, they'll really only allow patients to see light and dark outlines rather than full sight. But still, to someone who has no vision at all, this is still pretty great news. And if they're working on it in this state now, you know that they'll have the camera in the eye itself and the vision improved as the years go on.

Via Gizmodo

Arnold Among the Lilliputians

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 07:00:00 EDT

It was the perfect day for a conference on climate change at Yale University last Friday. In New Haven, Connecticut, the crocuses were peeking out from the soil. A group of state governors emerged from their winter stupor and milled around on unsteady feet, climbing in and out of zero-emission busses. A couple of Canadian legislators were present, perhaps stopping over on their return migration to the north. Ah, spring.

"I would not recommend that you have a public relations campaign on global warming in January and February in Manitoba," said Manitoba Premier Gary Doer. Ne'er have truer words been spoken.

The governors were in town to sign the Governors' Declaration on Climate Change—a soft and fuzzy document "recognizing new threats" and "recommitting to the effort to stop global warming"—but pretty much everyone else was just there to see Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, delegate from the land of perpetual sun, California.

In the morning sessions, the participants uttered the usual soundbites. The governors cheerfully rejected any suggestion that government-mandated reductions in carbon output might have economic costs. Gov. Jon Corzine (D-N.J) got a round of applause for saying that higher prices on energy and restrictions on use would be "an economic opportunity, not an economic burden." Gov. Jodi Rell (R-Conn.) crowed about "green collar jobs."

But a surprising new message was on display as well: States' right are back in fashion, and this time it's liberals singing the praises of federalism.

"States' rights, particularly in the last century, were regarded as the most regressive kind of policies," said Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D-Kansas). "The federal government would set a high bar on civil rights, or safety net issues. And states' rights was going to drag that back, to claim the opportunity to have a lower bar at the states. I want to suggest that in the 21st century this has been flipped." She expanded on that theme in an interview: "When I was young, states' rights was a pejorative term. But the federal government has been very laissez-faire in all sort of areas, so states are stepping up to fill the void." Gov. Corzine noted "a vacuum in Washington with regard to leadership on the issue of climate change," and apparently New Jersey, like nature, abhors a vacuum, since Corzine has been on the forefront of state-based carbon regulation.

Currently, 18 states have signed the Governors' Climate Change Declaration, but 36 states have enacted some kind of greenhouse-gas plan.

Why hundreds of Yalies crowded into a poorly ventilated auditorium on the first really warm, beautiful day of spring became clear when Schwarzenegger swept in at the last moment for a signing ceremony and a speech. He looked sleek in a green tie and a flawlessly uniform tan.

Schwarzenegger, a Republican, was the only one of the governors to acknowledge that states will have to make tradeoffs, mostly economic, if they are serious about reducing carbon emissions.

The biggest applause line of the day came when the seven-time Mr. Olympia turned the tables on political conventional wisdom about who is hurting the environment and who is helping. "It's not always Republicans" or big corporations, he said, that slow environmental progress. Several companies want to build solar power plants in the Mojave Desert. However, the place where they want to build may be the kind of territory that a particular kind of endangered squirrel would prefer to frequent. Efforts by the California Department of Fish and Game ("my own agency, that I'm supposed to be the head of and the boss of!") to protect "this little creature" have thwarted plans to build planet-saving solar arrays. "If we can't put a solar power plant in the Mojave Desert," Schwarzenegger thundered, "I don't know where the hell we can put it!"

Schwarzenegger has also pushed back, with lawsuits and a P.R. campaign, against the strongly worded suggestion from the Environmental Protection Agency that states are forbidden to go beyond federal standards for carbon emissions and set stricter standards of their own.

Of course, with his global fame and private jet, Schwarzenegger has taken advantage of this new states' rights doctrine more than most. Article 10 of the Constitution states that "no State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation," and also looks down on states that "enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power." But between rallying governors for carbon limits and hobnobbing with Kyoto protocol signatories, Schwarzenegger has probably already breached that dam when it comes to environmental issues. Last October, for instance, California and a coalition of European Union countries, U.S. states, Canadian provinces, Norway, and New Zealand formed the world's first International Carbon Action Partnership.

One of Schwarzenegger's applause lines: "We don't wait for Washington, because I've always said Washington is asleep at the wheel." This newfound pride in federalism has its definite limits. For every states' rights rah rah, there was a wistful plea for more federal regulation on carbon production. Even states' rights revisionist Gov. Sebelius said she hoped that "the roles will be reversed in the next administration." A proposed cap and trade plan, Gov. Jon Corzine said, is something he'd "love to see globally, love to see nationally, but unfortunately narrowed to regional efforts."

All of the governors present, including Schwarzenegger, agreed that no matter who took office in January, he or she would be "better on the global warming" than the Bush administration—meaning that some sort of national cap and trade or carbon tax was almost inevitable, whether under President McCain, President Obama, or President Clinton, and stricter federal regulations would again become the gold standard of environmental controls.

Even in this moment of states' rights redemption, the newly empowered governors restated their longing to return to the old way, when their marching orders come from Washington. This is understandable, since a uniform national policy will be easier on companies that do business in more than one state, and will send a clearer message to other countries about the United States' position on the issue. Plus, governors won't have to take the blame when their constituents object to higher prices at the pump, at the register, and at the car dealership.

Still, it is a little sad to see that even the Governator would cede power to Washington so gladly. In the meantime, he's making his own dubiously constitutional way in the enviromental future, winning the hearts and minds of Yalies, and making the other governors seem like girlie men.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is a reason associate editor.

Free, Happy People, Holding Hands

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 10:12:00 EDT

Free people are happy people, sayeth Arthur C. Brooks.

For example:

Pundits and politicians on the left often tell us that a free economy makes for an unhappy population: the disruptions of capitalism make us insecure, and we would prefer the security of generous welfare programs and national health care. But for most people, it turns out, that isn’t true.
To begin with, those who favor less government intervention in our economic affairs are happier than those who favor more. When asked in 2004 whether it was the government’s responsibility to improve the living standards of Americans, 26 percent of those who agreed called themselves very happy, versus 37 percent who disagreed. When asked in 1996 whether it should be “the government’s responsibility to keep prices under control,” those who said it “definitely should be” were a quarter less likely to say that they were very happy than those who said it “definitely should not be.”

More interesting stuff from Brooks here.

Sneak Peek

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 13:53:00 EDT

From yesterday's governors' conference on climate change at Yale:

Stay tuned more more, including Arnold Schwarzenegger getting a massive auditorium of Yalie environmentalists to cheer at the prospect of killing endangered squirrels in the Mojave desert.

Is Googlezon Upon Us?

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 08:08:00 EDT

Two headlines from DrudgeReport this morning:

BOOM: GOOGLE 1Q profit climbs 30%; tops analyst views...

SHOCK: NEW YORK TIMES POSTS LOSS; worst period 'company and newspaper industry have seen'...

Perhaps the long-predicted Googlezon media apocalypse will be here sooner than you think:

Don't Be Evil, Revisited

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:28:00 EDT

Google and AOL cheerfully encouraged people worried about their privacy in the age of targeted ads to turn to technological solutions at an event today, and talked about ways they are trying to make it easier for users to block their ads. They were, of course, fending off government regulation.

The Network Advertising Initiative already offers a cookie that lets users opt out of ads from the biggest players, but cookies aren't 100 percent protection, they can expire or be erased.

Google chief privacy officer Jane Horvath predicted that in the future, there may be a technological solution "that will have a cookie or something that will allow this (opt-out preference) to be a constant," adding, "that would be a very promising direction to go."

Other much worse, likely less effective ideas include a federal Do Not Track database, similar to the Do Not Call list. And this:

A broad coalition of consumer and privacy advocates last fall called on the Federal Trade Commission to establish such a registry. The concept is this: Any advertising entity that sets a "persistent" cookie on a user's machine would be required to give the FTC the domain names of servers used to place it. Consumers would then be able to import that list of domain names and block them from tracking their Internet surfing behavior.
Polonetsky said that while he supports the concept, "I think the way to do it isn't a government place where your browser goes and gets stuff."

This sounds like a little bit of the old "Don't Be Evil" to me: Working to make it easier for people opt out is pretty sportsman-like. Personally, even if I could permanently opt out, I'm not sure I would. At least for now, eerily well-targeted ads, like the "Barack and Roll t-shirts" the scroll bar at the top of my email is currently offering, still amuse me. For more ads like these, and fewer for penis pills, I'll happily accept Google's electronic nose sniffing in my email.

A Cup Holder in the Bathroom, and Other Brilliant Ideas

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:05:00 EDT

About a month ago, as part of it's ohmygodwe'relosingourchokeholdonthecoffeeindustry panic campaign, Starbucks launched MyStarbucksIdea.com. Customers log on and suggest improvements for Starbucks stores, like a shelf in the bathroom for your cup, coffee ice cubes for cold drinks, or this clever idea:

One idea that has gained traction is to embed a customer's regular order on her Starbucks card so when she enters the store she could swipe the card, her order would be put in and paid for, and she'd avoid (and shorten) the line. Other suggestions call for the ability to send in orders by phone or Web. These customers are telling Starbucks that long lines irritate them. But note well that they didn't come online to complain. Instead they offered solutions. This is the gift economy of online.

An excellent article on the project in BusinessWeek emphasized the positive, open-sourceishness of the whole endeavor. So quit yer bitchin' and go fix Starbucks.

Pay Quarterly Taxes, Become a Republican?

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:46:00 EDT

Interesting. Check out these charts showing trends in Republican voting, set against the national average:

Doctors and lawyers, plus clerks and other wearers of the white collar have fled screaming from the Republican party in the last several decades. Meanwhile, business owners, skilled workers, and unskilled workers have fled screaming to it. Business owners are obvious: Quarterly estimated taxes suck (I just wrote a check for my freelance income, and it hurts) and Republicans are the party of tax cuts. Has the changing economy given skilled and unskilled workers a more entrepreneurial sense of themselves and/or made them think more like business owners? Or is there something else going on?

Via Will Wilkinson

"We Don't Talk Green Talk in the Company"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 12:56:00 EDT

One of the best features ever to appear in reason, in my humble opinion, was a three-way debate about corporate social responsibility between Milton Friedman, Whole Foods founder John Mackey, and the guy you see above, Cypress Semiconductors' T.J. Rodgers. All three are libertarians, but they found plenty to disagree about. Rodgers was more Catholic than the pope, citing Friedman to Friedman, and accusing Mackey of letting Ralph Nader ghostwrite his contribution.

These days, Rodgers is also the chairman of SunPower Corp, a manufacturer of solar-power systems. But his stance on the touchy-feely side of corporate social responsibility doesn't seem to have changed:

"We don't talk green talk in the company. As a matter of fact, I get itchy when I hear that kind of stuff."

Then he tells a story about the time he caught the president of SunPower "blathering about ice caps or something like that" and went to great lengths to publicly mock him for being, essentially, a Birkenstocks-wearing dirty hippie.

Rodgers' position these days seems to be something like this: Give the people a product they want, make a profit doing it, and don't feel too high and mighty if you happen to do something "socially responsible." Green is good? Who cares? The important thing, as he puts it, is that "green is green." Like money, get it?

Watch the whole thing at reason.tv

Read more about Rodgers here. More from Rodgers here.