Foreign policy is wacked out.

This is important.

One of the things often glazed over in the haste of politicians hacking away at foreign aid in their speeches and debates is how much of that aid is actually little more than military funding. We give a ton of such funding to Afghanistan and Iraq, for the obvious reason that we are occupying those countries and presumably "training" and arming their armed forces. But beyond that, we also give large sums to Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, and lesser amounts to other nations. Over half of our total foreign aid budget is consumed by these sorts of programmes. I doubt very much this is the sort of thing the average voter, when they are telling anyone in sight that foreign aid should be cut (to an amount more than we currently spend no less, because they don't actually know how much we spend on it and have no idea how big the federal budget is), has in mind as "foreign aid" for one. And second it is precisely the sort of aid programmes that neoconservative hacks who say they want to cut the foreign aid budget want to keep because it advances their silly nation-building/Christian Zionist foreign policy agendas. And as noted, it is thus precisely these kinds of foreign aid that aren't being cut. Indeed, they're precisely the sort that has been greatly expanded over the last decade.

Since I'd say neither of those are laudable goals for our foreign policy and national interests (helping a first world nation fund its military, Israel, or building for unstable third world countries larger and more capable armed forces without sound civilian institutions for stability of control, meaning the armed forces have outsized levels of control over the society and economy as in Pakistan), I'd be perfectly fine if this was the sort of foreign aid that gets gutted. I find no problem if the US wants to commit itself to helping defend Israel or leases out forces and equipment to provide a stable environment for the sale and transport of oil reserves in the Middle East (along with other goods). I have a much bigger problem if we're wasting money investing in pointless schemes that don't help accomplish those goals. We do little to help "defend" Israel if by providing it with money and technical expertise and equipment they feel emboldened to mistreat and abuse large portions of their residents and kick around their neighbours. And we do little to advance regional stability by attempting to build a nation-state out of Afghanistan and attempting to bribe Pakistan's military into helping us to do that when they have very real national interests in not doing so. So stuff like this is probably precisely the sort of waste, fraud, and abuse that people claim occupies huge portions of the federal budget.

Stuff like vaccines and AIDs funding in Africa, not so much really.

Everything is everything

I realize I haven't been very sympathetic to the complaints of these Occupy protesters. I share some of the diagnosis (crony capitalism is a real problem), but I disagree much on the potential solutions they offer (regulatory capture and public choice theory suggest that simply passing more rules in order to do something is stupid and bound to produce more problems than it would solve). For example, a protest in DC seized an abandoned school in the misguided notion that selling the school property to a private developer who wants to build a luxury hotel on the grounds would be less beneficial than building a homeless shelter on the same grounds. This would be true only if the city could not benefit from additional tax revenues from tourists and hotel fees (plus the cost of buying or leasing the property from the city) and use them to park a homeless shelter somewhere else (somewhere a private developer doesn't wish to buy the valuable land for hotel use). Or from the potential jobs created when the hotel opens meaning that there could be fewer homeless people in the first place. And so on. It can be an effective use of citizens to register and complain about developments in their neighbourhoods and cities, though I'd say we have much bigger fish to fry than the state selling off unused property and land to private owners (for instance eminent domain cases where the state SEIZES private property and then provides it to new private owners, as in Kelo or Brooklyn most famously).

All that said, this business has repeatedly cropped back up over and over in my attention and indeed the general public's not necessarily because they have a catchy message applicable to the nation or society as a whole, but because the authorities keep sending in the dogs. Keep sending in force to clear away peaceful demonstrations. They have some justification for wishing to clear these occupations and protests out because of time, place, and manner restrictions on the first amendment, so that's fine. But how is important. And so they keep trying to keep out the cameras when they do it. Precisely because they know very well what is liable to be on those cameras doesn't look very good and justified (pepper spray and tear gas on people sitting down).

This force has highlighted something which is tangentially related to the occupation's general complaints. Namely, the lack of accountability for authorities, especially on the issues relating to the use of force, and especially on the use of "non-lethal" force (tasers, pepper spray, tear gas, flashbang grenades, sound cannons etc). To date, the use of these has largely come up in dispersing more riotous crowds (at the WTO riots in Seattle or Pittsburgh, there was at least some violent demonstrators to justify use of force to disperse and arrest such) and more commonly in small organised raids on private property, usually against suspected drug dealers, or against single individuals, such as for non-compliance at traffic stops. Sometimes these make news. Tasing a grandmother isn't exactly the intended likely best use of a taser. Most of the time these incidents are explained away much as the statement after the now infamous UC-Davis scenario was. Police explain that they "feared for their safety", code words for "violent force was thereby justified", whether or not it actually was. For most people, these sorts of statements are sufficient justification without any further investigation warranted. I'd say that whenever the state and its agents decide to apply force against citizens, it should be clearly warranted. And when it is not, someone should pay an actual consequence (loss of job, arrest and criminal penalties, civil lawsuits, etc). Sometimes these uses of force do have legitimate causes and sometimes the legitimate purposes are less clear and the use of force justifications more vague. Some amount of leeway is appropriate because it can be difficult to assess complex situations in seconds as police often must. But the petty examples of casual puppycides, or even shootings of people during drug raids suggest that we've allowed a great deal of both militarization and callousness to infect the way we are policing entire neighbourhoods or for specific purposes. That these events are generally happening in tech-savvy student areas like campuses is really the only difference from what has happened for years in many neglected urban areas. We should be more than willing to ask why that is tolerated. Why if we appoint agents to use force on our behalf, for public safety or order, that we don't check up on how they're doing with that force and whether the public safety or order is being improved or endangered by these agents.

Around the world in 10000 words

I've been busy lately.

But so has the world.

So... Occupy Wall Street has been invaded and closed down. I'd have to agree that the police crackdown that finally came was probably better for this movement than letting winter and boredom cull the herd so to speak. Indeed, one could make a case that it is the very actions of police that started the attention on it in the first place; the brutal pepper spray video and scenes of mass arrests at its outset. All that said, I still don't think I have a clear handle on what, if any, agenda was involved in cohering the protests. I think the closest is the "this is what democracy looks like" chant with the idea of a horizontal non-authoritarian power structure. And I'd have to second Mr. Sanchez's deconstruction of that as a woefully utopian view that can only exist if you are surrounded by a few hundred people who generally share the views and outlooks on politics that you do. It dies the moment you encounter irreconcilable differences in cultural outlook (eg, social conservativism vs social liberalism) and have to resort to more than chants to shout down your opponents. Or even, shudder, have to listen to them instead of pretending that they just don't understand you (which they almost certainly have a deformed opinion, but as do you of them).

I'd also agree the "we are the 99%" troupe was silly and useless. Yes it highlights wealth inequality but it offers, by itself, no discernible paths to resolving that inequality.

There's been a fuss over e-cigarettes finally. I'm not a smoker. I find the habit disgusting. That said, I've also opposed state-enforced bans on smoking in restaurants, bars, most public spaces, etc. I find it more or less concentrates smoking in a handful of places that carve out legal exceptions ("private clubs" for instance) and that the places that are actually effectively banned were probably on their way out for permitting smoking anyway and didn't need the architecture of the state to control for it (most restaurants for instance). Plus I think that lacking the social enforcement desirable in most restaurants, such a ban is legally unenforceable anyway. With this said, I also find that if people are going to smoke, or otherwise attempt to ingest nicotine, then we should aim for the safest, healthiest ways for them to do so with the least possible harms to others. Secondhand smoke looks to me like more of a nuisance than a public danger, but if we can eliminate it entirely, as e-cigarettes do, then I won't complain. I'm a little confused as to why it is that the usually harm reductive liberals are the ones campaigning most vigorously to oppose these things and (maintain the) ban e-cigarettes. Evidently there's some obsession concerning cigarettes and/or nicotine that doesn't arrive concerning cocaine... except that nicotine patches and gum are perfectly acceptable. Maybe it's just the social phenomenon of watching people light up and blow on something (as evidenced by the changes in movie ratings relating to smoking?). Again, I don't quite understand this. It would seem to me that a society should aim for allowing people to do marginally dangerous things to their own bodies by choice (tattoos, consuming alcohol/tobacco/narcotics), provided that these things aren't hazardous to others (eg, pollution). Why get worked up about some people puffing out water vapor from fake cigarettes? Especially when the alternative is these same people puffing out secondhand smoke from real cigarettes? It sounds like a "for the children!" problem relating to the old gateway drug theory. But again, these are purported harm reduction liberals. Gateway drugs isn't exactly a fashionable theory among such people. Or really anyone who understands drugs.

My best guess would be that there's a crazy alliance between tobacco farmers and companies, the FDA/DEA types who just want to ban everything, and some overzealous anti-smoking campaigners.

Concurrent to that. Apparently all the smart kids are druggies. Or something. Actually that's not quite right, but essentially, if you have a smart kid, expect them to be more experimental. So to speak. And don't expect them to listen to the usual bullshit lines concerning drugs, sex, etc. Speak to them like an adult and trust them to make sensible decisions based on reliable information. Speak to them like a child and they are going to ignore you. My own pet theory on why there's such a disparity between drug use among regular people and the smart ones is that smart people are much more likely to be part of any counter-cultural "radical" behavior. We make up the core of atheists. Of libertarians. Of anarchists. Of socialists. And so on. It's a lot easier for intelligent people to consume complex arguments and construct sensible ones of their own concerning such radical "anti-social" behavior. It's also a lot easier for smart kids to "get in trouble" and then get away with it. They'll think it through more. This encourages a little bit of playing with the boundaries.

This result has some immediate policy implications. For instance, to those idiotic notions of drug-testing welfare recipients. This flies in the face of the argument that only pathetic losers are using drugs (intelligence also correlates with relative success people in the workplace and academia as a means toward self-advancement also). There are related studies suggesting that it's largely white-middle class people out there buying and consuming narcotics, and then a much smaller collection of browner addicts who get busted for it. Combined with the actual results of such initiatives as Florida's (that is, that 98% of tests come back negative and the state must now pay for the drug testing as well as welfare benefits), it suggests that a) most drug users don't need welfare in the first place, b) most drug users who would aren't going to apply for welfare anyway (they have other problems). As a second problem, it helps explain why those stupid DARE programmes don't work. Showing intelligent children drugs isn't likely to garner their cooperation in turning in their parents (the real purpose of such programmes) and isn't likely to turn them aside from their use. Because now instead of scary words and chemical names, they just look like powder and leaves.

Go go science

This is the sort of experiment involved in showing how organic life, even complex organic life, comes from a bunch of inorganic chemicals interacting. It's not very complicated to run or understand. It's been around for decades in one form or another.

The most interesting element though is defining "what is alive" in that vague area between "life" and "non-life". I'm not sure I agree entirely with those definitions of what is alive. But there's still room in that for self-replicating AIs, nano-machines, etc. And because of the "evolve" characteristic, it does get around the "fire" issue. So they're not terrible.

Agree to disagree.

A quiz. Agree or disagree with the following:
1) Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable?

2) Mandatory licensing of professionals increases the prices of those services?

3) Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago?

4) Rent control leads to housing shortages?

5) A company with the largest market share is a monopoly? (I used to have a hard time wondering why this one in particular kept coming up... and there did not appear to be some ideological basis for it. Pretty much everybody is stuck on stupid with it and a monopoly isn't that technical an economic principle). 

6) Third World workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited?

7) Free trade leads to unemployment?

8) Minimum-wage laws raise unemployment?

(Pretty much all of those are no-brainers for me).

9) A dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person?

10) Making abortion illegal would increase the number of black-market abortions?

11) Legalizing drugs would give more wealth and power to street gangs and organized crime?

12) Drug prohibition fails to reduce people’s access to drugs?

13) Gun-control laws fail to reduce people’s access to guns?

14) By participating in the marketplace in the United States, immigrants reduce the economic well-being of American citizens?

15) When a country goes to war, its citizens experience an improvement in economic well-being?

16) When two people complete a voluntary transaction, they both necessarily come away better off?

17) When two people complete a voluntary transaction, it is necessarily the case that everyone else is unaffected by their transaction?

The last two without the qualifiers "necessarily" are the only tricky questions in this second portion. The "necessarily" is being used to justify a lot more than interference in necessarily public concerns.

The moral of the story appears to be that no political group ideology is free from bias and no group assesses all political realities based on the actual real world impacts of their preferred policies, but rather based upon the signal that their preferred policy sends. Rent controls therefore "help" poor people and immigrants and/or the Chinese are "stealing our jobs". To my own tribe, libertarians, I'm disappointed that it's not understood that making something illegal constrains its availability (though in the case of drugs, it appears that it does so in a fairly small way). It is of course equally poorly understood on our opposite that making something illegal that people actually want will spawn black markets for it (as in the case of narcotics, alcohol, abortion, prostitution, etc) and won't just abolish the intended "vice", therefore creating costs for enforcement of laws, opportunities for corruption, and so on, all costs that must be associated with any perceived or actual benefits resulting from such constraints.

As a similar problem, because of the importance libertarians place on individual freedoms, we run into difficulties with those last two statements and the availability of voluntary transactions vis a vis the state's laws where the transaction occurs. It is true there are often externalities when a transaction occurs. Visiting a prostitute might carry venereal diseases back to a spouse or sexual partner. An addict purchasing narcotics (or alcohol) might be committing other crimes, or more commonly being abusive and damaging to their family (stealing items to pay for it, physically abusive, etc). Pollution from a factory or power plant can spoil the air and water around it, as a classic public goods problem with many "voluntary" parties involved. Traffic congestion is a similar problem. Gambling is pretty obviously a case where a voluntary transaction can leave one person worse off (assuming that the gamble was not merely recreational amusement for instance). There are plenty of opportunities for fraud even in voluntary transactions, or for informational asymmetries that cause further distortions and problems. The question for libertarians is something like "at what price freedom?". The most pragmatic response I can think of is to not restrict the action merely because the action is sometimes harmful but to come up with clearer and better incentives to avoid the negative consequences that we don't want (ie, by penalizing bad consequences or irresponsible actions, like fraud, theft, pollution, traffic, lack of condom use, domestic violence, etc). Here we have the satisfaction of leaving individuals enough freedom to do things, but still legally preventing them from actively harming others.

A strong corollary to this problem can be made with the global warming debate. In order to avoid what appears to be a very poor state level response (say, cap and trade on carbon), it becomes "necessary" to deny there is even a problem that the state/public must respond to with collective or even individual action. Libertarians on both fronts are essentially claiming that there is no problem with two people doing anything they want to each other in order to avoid the ham-fisted state level response of preventing everyone from doing similar but non-egregious things to each other. That's a serious overreach of ideology. There are obviously problems. The questions for us is something like the following a) are these problems solvable only through the architecture of the state? (often the answer is no, but sometimes it has a use) b) are the state's interventions likely to cause more problems than it solves? (very often this the reason the state is a poor choice for intervention) c) if this is the problem with the current state interventions, can a more sensible programme be designed and implemented to more strongly target the actual problem? (sometimes a more efficient government is possible, and sometimes not). I would argue that a carbon tax or gasoline tax is much more efficient than cap and trade. On carbon emissions at least. And I would argue that (effective) prevention/education programmes (which we do not have) and emphasis on treatment for addiction are much less costly (and effective) means of resolving the large scale social problems caused by addiction to substances than our current insistence on enforcement regimes and incarceration. But I would not argue that neither of these problems does not exist or does not matter in the first place. There are cases where some people will claim a harm, let's say gay marriage rights, and it really does not matter because we're talking about private contracts and the desired manner of family construction by private individuals that really do not have much public consequence and effect (empirically speaking). But quite obviously drug or alcohol addiction has public costs associated with it in the same way that smokestacks or a traffic jam does.

Notes from the front

It found that in 1979, households in the bottom quintilereceived more than 50 percent of all transfer payments. In 2007,similar households received about 35 percent of transfers. “Theshift reflects the growth in spending for programs focused on theelderly population (such as Social Security and Medicare), in whichbenefits are not limited to low-income households,” the studyexplains. “As a result, government transfers reduced the dispersionof household income by less in 2007 than in 1979.”

1) In case anyone is wondering why I'm not happy with social security and medicare and want to see them seriously reformed and curtailed to their stated purpose of social safety net, this is one reason. There is no reason a country, even a very wealthy country like the United States, should undertake to redistribute significant wealth to people who are already wealthy. Keep in mind also that this study was measuring household income quartiles, not net worth quartiles, where the retiree population would make it look even worse. Indeed, net worth gaps between the elderly and the younger working generation, which are always substantial, have grown even faster than income gaps.


2) After that debacle last night, I seriously hope Rick Perry goes away for good. Seriously "oops?". Also, I could name off at least 8 or 10 cabinet positions or significant federal agencies that I'd want to see rolled down to nothing or their actually useful programmes rolled into other budget posts.
a) the Vice Presidency and associated bureaucracy. Obsolete requirements that we select strange people to be on a Presidential ticket with very minimal vetting in the event they end up ascending to the post of President is not a good idea to begin with. That there's a huge infrastructure around it is even less so.
b) Homeland Security.
c) DEA. Enough said on these two.
d) Department of Energy (most of the funding and programmes in it are actually related to the DoD or to foreign treaty compliance with the IAEA, the rest is largely useless subsidies to oil, coal and ethanol. Also I'd prefer to see CAFE standards go away and be replaced by a significant gasoline and carbon tax).
e) I'd like to see the Department of Agriculture and FDA combined and most of the USDA's functions eliminated.
f) Department of Education can be seriously curtailed or devolved to the states. The one qualifier I have there is that the states (or the fed) should make a serious effort to provide for school choice of the sort where money follows students. Even those "socialist" Europeans have a more capitalistic venture than we do when it comes to education, hence we're doing something wrong in the parlance of conservatives. SWEDEN "for pete's sake" has school choice systems and a superior educational model for what amounts to K-12. To say nothing of places like Finland which totally kick our ass at it. No child left behind would end also.
g) Commerce can go, its survey functions can be rolled into Treasury since most of them are economic data anyway (the census also could go in there). Labor is in a similar boat.
h) FCC
i) Cut the number of distinct financial regulatory boards to two or three, for starters.
j) Significant reforms to Medicare/aid and Social Security would presumably have some impact on HHS's budget. Eliminating Medicare Part D would be among these.
k) After removing the mortgage deduction and possibly introducing a negative income tax we could do away with HUD.
l) Cuts to defence would be in the 40-50% range if it were up to me. When including the two to four active wars that we don't need to be in, more like 60%
m) NASA would be privatized

And so on. It would not be hard for me to stand up and announce which ones were going away. I'd also be able to explain why rather than just have applause lines.


3) I haven't written about Cain's heinous off the field exploits. There are two reasons. First, I think it's a waste of time. The guy doesn't take running for President seriously to begin with as evidenced by his idiotic political positions on just about everything. He ought to be buried already without some sort of salacious sex scandal and isn't yet mostly because total ignorance is celebrated in the politics of the right today. It's also celebrated in the politics of the left, but they don't have a primary to demonstrate it where there are other options who might look smarter or dumber by comparison to Obama the way there are with Cain. Everybody but Perry and Bachmann on the platform looks smarter than he does (even Gingrich, which is saying something)...and the fact that all three are/were at points popular in polls is telling. Second, the amount of information we have on what he is accused of doing, much less what he actually did, is too poor for me to make any assessments. But from his bungled reactions to all this media attention, I think I can create a strong assumption that he's at least a scumbag like DSK. Whether that makes him guilty of a crime or just yet another case of men in powerful and prominent positions making all other men look like assholes to women generally, I don't know. If the stories and accusations leveled at him are true however, at the very least this is not a man who should be running for President, or should become President in the 21st century. But we knew that already before this story broke because of his statements on.. well just about everything else. Since usually I find American style sex scandals to be enormously tedious (except when they are evidence of hypocrisy, then they are amusing for about 20 seconds), I'm going to mostly ignore it until he finally goes away from one source or another.

Advice for the day

Don't go vote today unless you have nothing better to do with your time. More than likely you won't know enough about what you'd be voting on to bother anyway.

There does seem to be more incentive to go vote on a local or statewide election than the national, because the policies can be more immediate. But since the average voter does not know or does not distinguish between the levels of the state and its various powers as arranged, I don't see what purpose is served having large numbers of people go and vote who will complain to the President if their property taxes go up when it was they themselves that either hiked it through various levies or who appointed local and state officials who then hiked it. People who do not know what their government does, or worse can do, are likely ill-favored choices for people to make selections on who should be in government. This is of course a very large percentage of the body politic on any given issue. Not merely the unwashed, uneducated mass of the poor (who already don't vote in large volumes), but most everybody else too considerably overestimates their civic knowledge and ability to gauge the common good resulting from their impressions and prejudices on these issues.

When in doubt, abstain. Don't vote. In fact, don't waste your time trying to study up enough to vote each year. Go forth and live your lives. Leave this sort of thing to people who have nothing better to do than learn and analyze various public policy choices.

I have some "faith" in the methods of democratic choices to produce consistent improvement in some types of social and economic outcomes (though it can just easily regress, and there are many economic outcomes for which it is much inferior to markets because of systemic bias and ignorance). I certainly don't believe that we should force people not to vote if they wish to do so or restrict the right of franchise in some measure of civic knowledge. But I don't think we should go around exhorting people as though it is some grand civic duty either. Even if it were such a duty, we would be better served expending large amounts of time and treasure attempting to educate the voting public on the various complex issues of the day than on encouraging their minimal civic engagements to the community to come in the form of a ballot with no systematic means of assessing the likely availability of knowledgeable voting behind it.


"I find, in other words, that this whole issue keeps directing my attention back towards a fundamental problem: I have to share my polity with large numbers of silly people who are not equipped to make reasonable decisions about political issues".  More or less sums it up. 

Let's assume that the problem is presented thusly "If you don't vote, you have no right to complain". This makes no sense. First off, we have Constitutional protections for free speech. Both voters and non-voters alike are protected in their "right to complain". Secondly, people who vote tacitly accept a system that produces results. Sometimes they will not like those results, sometimes not very much at all. But by participating in that structure, they've already acceded that they will abide by those results (even if they will then complain loudly about them or even agitate to overturn them at the earliest convenience). Third, the assumption seems to be that voting is a minor time suck. After all, all it takes is to walk into the ballot box and cast away. But in order to vote in a manner consistent with some ethical guidelines (ie, casting an informed ballot, even one that conforms to only your own preferences and not what might promote a better common good for the entire community), it's an incredible time suck. Considerable amounts of research are required on complex topics to understand them enough to form opinions around which even basic political positions can be founded, and then to apply those positions to existing candidates and issues up for decisions in any modestly accurate way. As an example of this problem: incredible numbers of voters do not know which major political party is generally "pro-life" and which is "pro-choice", and this with abortion being one of the simpler issues to comprehend and follow with fairly stark political distinctions between the two major parties. Anything more complicated and forget about it; almost nobody knows anything. Simply throwing your vote away on whatever flights of fancy strike you in the ballot box isn't likely promote your own limited version of desired social goods, much less anything more complex and noble as the "public good" as it applies to large diverse populations with competing interests and demands on society in general (much less the much smaller but expansive political society in which voters are participating). I'd much rather people were aware of that and it give them pause than give further comfort to this notion that non-voters have no right to complain. 

The problem for me isn't the results of voting. It's the demand that people vote without any forethought as to the consequences of their vote being cast poorly. Sit it out. Don't do it, do not give into the peer pressures. And get on with the business of being a human being. Ideally we would have a structure that allows such minimal engagement and celebrates it. We instead of a system of self-promotion that serves no purpose.

On the death of the NBA season

Rational choices, yeah right. Good luck getting people to make them.

This lockout reminds me of the problem of the ultimatum game. Put two people in a room. Give one of them 100 dollars. Tell them that the two people there have to make a deal in order to get anything of that money. If either side rejects the proposed deal as made by the money holder, then nobody gets anything. Usually the deal arrived at is somewhere in between 33-40% at the low end (on average). Even though if you aren't the possessor of the money, any deal actually benefits you and so you should accept anything other than "I'll just keep it all for myself". (note, recent psychology studies in smaller societies like hunter-gatherer tribes in Brazil for example suggest that they are more willing to accept "unfair" deals than Americans/Westerners. But there aren't many former or current hunter-gatherer tribesmen in the NBA player's union).

In the NBA case, the players are the ones sitting out and owners the ones having the money. Deciding to sit out the season in order to "spite" the owners gains players nothing. Diehard basketball junkies like me will suffer through college basketball, a largely inferior product because of much lower skill level, until they return. Casual basketball fans will mostly do the same, but may hold a grudge for a period of some years, diminishing the size of the market pie to be divided further. So players have no leverage to demand more. What's more, holding out over 2.5% when that amount still guarantees to you HALF of the pie, seems a little insane, not just foolish. Certainly you can argue that players might deserve more than half based on their actual economic worth to the teams they play for by providing an entertaining service to fans. That's certainly possible, though you have to consider boring things like the licensing fees, marketing, and ownership/leasing of arenas to play in, plus a desire for profitability by management of any enterprise, even entertaining monopolies and not just the athletic achievements visible on the court. Certainly you can argue that it makes owners look greedy to fight on that line (though the same argument could easily be applied to players). But those are arguments that loom much smaller when one is dividing up and fighting over several hundreds of millions of dollars.

Sometimes when two parties fight, one party is completely in the wrong and has to compromise more to restore balance to the relationship. At other times, it isn't in the wrong, but if it wants to sustain a relationship with the other party it has to compromise anyway (and in this case, the players have no choice but to sustain the relationship, there is no competing league for most of them to go to). Paying a price to stand on principle does not net anything here. The rational choice is in fact to cave, at least on that issue.

But that's not going to happen. 

Wild worlds

SCOTUS is a weird world.

I'm reminded of the jury in 12 Angry Men. In it, a single juror manages to turn the jury from a pronouncement of guilt to innocence primarily by questioning shaky eyewitness testimony.

Trouble is that:
a) that was a movie, with a script. Not reality
b) the eyewitness was pretty shaky in that case. (an old woman looking at night for a mere flicker of an event)
c) that was 50 + years ago and despite that, people still believe the emotional power of eyewitness testimonies to be roughly infallible.

Which is, in the parlance of evidence, bullshit. Most of the time eyewitnesses are unreliable. Their stories don't match. Police behaviors and even common police techniques (lineups for instance) can manipulate their memories. Even after previous court rulings have aborted some of the most ridiculous manipulations by police. Most people don't have ironclad memory and details will shift over time (I have only recently discovered this as a problem by observing others. My memory seems to work differently, though not perfectly either). Details occurring in rapid succession for complex events like a robbery, rape or murder are often stashed as peripheral data anyway.

The court's position that other unreliable data points would be up for grabs is perhaps disconcerting for the amount of shift that would be required in our criminal justice system. But there's plenty of tactics and methods that are in fact, roughly useless. Drug dogs for instance give false positives at least 2/3s of the time. This isn't the dog's fault. It's the handler. This results in a lot of invasive searches being "justified" when all the justification amounts to is the officer handling the search simply thought the person was guilty, without any evidence to suggest it. As the court pointed out, there are plenty of "jailhouse snitches" testifying (Omar's appearance in the Wire is a classic). The reliability of such people can already be deemed questionable by many observers, though there are probably sensible reasons to regard it as more reliable than is commonly believed (snitching is  looked down upon enough in the criminal community that one has to have a pretty damned good reason to be willing to do it, this cuts both ways of course).

Now I would say that having people tell stories about what happened, from their point of view, is perfectly fine. I'm not sure that preventing witnesses from testifying makes sense. But clearly there needs to be much more rigor in how we allow it as admissible evidence. Do lots of people all ID the same person? Is there corroborating video or audio, or actual hard evidence (blood, DNA, fingerprints, ballistics, etc)? I'm inclined to agree with the Court that it's hard to keep it out. But we should also be more aware of just how bad, how very bad, such "evidence" is. It's effectively useless.

Ultimately, I'd say suspicion of guilt is justified on such things as "I saw that man, with these peculiar features, doing X to person/property X", certainly. I don't see how we should turn it into firm statements of conviction.

File under better late than never?

Nipplegate, legal.

It helped the anti-FCC side of the argument that the FCC had to ex post facto CBS in order to fine it because its rules had allowed fleeting nudity or obscenity, and were changed in response to the "event".

The whole range of laws and rules that are passed because a random "obviously" terrible thing happens, but which cannot be punished under these new rules and laws because they already happened, kind of depressing.