Tag: policy

Unban supersonic travel

In 1973, shortly after Boeing abandoned the 2707, its Mach 3 government-funded competitor to the British- and French-made Concorde, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a rule banning supersonic transport over the US

2023-03-23: A new proposal

If we’re lucky, we’ll have a sonic boom standard implemented in the United States by the late 2030s.

There is a better way. Congress could repeal the supersonic ban this year in the FAA reauthorization act. I have proposed text along these lines:

Until such time as the FAA creates standards that allow supersonic aircraft to operate over the United States, civil supersonic flight shall be allowed as long as mean cruise sonic boom directly beneath the flight track is less than 90 PLdB for daytime operations or 80 PLdB for nighttime operations.

I think this proposal is very clever, if I do say so myself. It would change nothing overnight, because no aircraft that can do a cruise boom less than 90 PLdB exists.

What it would do is signal to the aviation industry that America is open for business. It’s time to build new low-boom aircraft. Manufacturers would start working on new designs, knowing that when they are ready to be certified there won’t be any further obstacles.

Against Historic Preservation

Repeal all historic preservation laws. It’s 1 thing to require safety permits but no construction project should require a historic preservation permit. Here are 3 reasons: First, it’s often the case that buildings of little historical worth are preserved by rules and regulations that are used as a pretext to slow competitors, maintain monopoly rents, and keep neighborhoods in a kind of aesthetic stasis that benefits a small number of people at the expense of many others. Second, a confident nation builds so that future people may look back and marvel at their ancestors ingenuity and aesthetic vision. A nation in decline looks to the past in a vain attempt to “preserve” what was once great. Preservation is what you do to dead butterflies. Ironically, if today’s rules for historical preservation had been in place in the past the buildings that some now want to preserve would never have been built at all. The opportunity cost of preservation is future greatness.

Telemedicine

Another form of anticompetitive state-level protectionism.

The biggest hurdle may be state medical boards. Idaho’s medical licensing board punished a doctor for prescribing an antibiotic over the phone, fining her $10K and forbidding her from providing telemedicine. State laws that restrict telemedicine — for instance, requiring that patients and doctors have established in-person relationships — have drawn lawsuits charging that they illegally restrict competition. Georgia’s state medical board requires a face-to-face encounter before telemedicine can be delivered, while Ohio’s does not.

2020-03-26: Robots could enable a form of telemedicine that would keep humans out of areas of contagion. A small example is Spot:

It’s using a custom mount and enclosure for an iPad or similar-sized screen to be used for video conferencing between doctors and other healthcare workers and their patients.

Another is the 4x speedup for hygiene theater:

It takes human cleaners 1 hour to carefully disinfect the CT scanning room, wiping down the equipment and surfaces. So when the pandemic hit, and the room had to be cleaned after each use, “a machine that used to be able to do 30 scans a day is down to 7.”

Violet can clean the room in just 15 minutes. It uses machine vision powered by Intel’s Movidius AI chips to map and navigate its surrounding environment. Though humans still have to wipe down the “nooks and crannies the robot can’t get to, like behind the door handles.” But by cutting cleaning times down from 1 hour to 15 minutes, the hospital’s capacity for CT scans increases 4x.

2020-04-15: Health care costs can be lowered by reimbursing at the same rates for telemedicine or treatments that are at home, and by paying fees per patient, rather than huge profit margins on elective procedures

Tax prep is cruel and unusual punishment

have the IRS, which will be evaluating these people’s returns anyway, simply do all the math for most of the simple tax returns. We’re not talking about returns that would legitimately make use of deductions; we’re talking about very simple tax returns, which is what most people have filled out by tax preparers or tax software anyway. Now, this is usually where someone will make the obvious point: the government doesn’t deserve to be entrusted with this math. And, hey, I take that point seriously. The government has certainly shown its capacity to lie and deceive. But so has the tax-prep industry. Intuit has been guilty of all kinds of underhanded attempts to keep people from being able to file for free. They are proven deceivers, too.

this how taxes work in civilized countries. i hope this passes.

Encryption Backdoors

They’ve been threatening this for months now, but Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein have finally released a “discussion draft” of their legislation to require backdoors in any encryption… and it’s even more ridiculous than originally expected. Yesterday, we noted that the White House had decided to neither endorse nor oppose the bill, raising at least some questions about whether or not it would actually be released. Previously, Feinstein was waiting for the White House’s approval — but apparently she and Burr decided that a lack of opposition was enough.

This is what happens when your government is run by elderly, luddite lawyers instead of engineers.

Too much evidence

more evidence can reduce confidence. The basic idea is simple. We expect that in most processes there will normally be some noise so absence of noise suggests a kind of systemic failure. The police are familiar with one type of example. When the eyewitnesses to a crime all report exactly the same story that reduces confidence that the story is true. Eyewitness stories that match too closely suggests not truth but a kind a systemic failure, namely the witnesses have collaborated on telling a lie.

Guns And States

In summary, with my personal confidence levels: 1. Scatterplots showing raw correlations between gun ownership and “gun deaths” are entirely driven by suicide, and therefore dishonest to use to prove that guns cause murder (~100% confidence) 2. But if you adjust for all relevant confounders, there is a positive correlation between gun ownership and homicide rates (~90% confidence). This relationship is likely causal (~66% confidence). 3. The majority of the difference between America’s murder rate and that of other First World countries is not because of easier access to guns in America (~90% confidence). 4. But some of it is due to easier access to guns. This is probably 0.5 murders/100K/year. 5. An Australian-style gun control program that worked and had no side effects would probably prevent 2000 murders in the US. It would also prevent a much larger number of suicides. I am otherwise ignoring suicides in this piece because discussing them would make me too angry. 6. Probably the amount of lost gun-related enjoyment an Australian-style gun control program would cause do not outweigh the benefits. 7. This analysis makes me tentatively in favor of Australian-style gun control for the US, but I can’t say anything for sure until I’ve also looked more into the experimental evidence from various smaller-scale gun control programs, which I’m not going to do.