Lawsuits have been largely successful in court, thanks in part to actions taken by President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice, which issued an amicus brief on the issue last year. In that brief, it argued that “a bail scheme that imposes financial conditions, without individualized consideration of ability to pay and whether such conditions are necessary to assure appearance at trial, violates the Fourteenth Amendment” and its equal protection clause and is thus unconstitutional. Although new US Attorney General Jeff Sessions has expressed skepticism about past efforts on jail and criminal justice reform, the shift to a new administration is unlikely to affect the changes that are taking place around bail reform, experts say.
Tag: policy
Elephant in the Brain
One of the most frustrating things about writing physical books is the long time delays. It has been 17 months since I mentioned my upcoming book here, and now, 8.5 months after we submitted the full book for review, & over 4 months after 7 out of 7 referees said “great book, as it is”, I can finally announce that The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, coauthored with Kevin Simler, will officially be published January 1, 2018. Sigh. A related sad fact is that the usual book publicity equilibrium adds to intellectual inequality. Since most readers want to read books about which they’ve heard much publicity lately from multiple sources, publishers try to concentrate publicity into a narrow time period around the official publication date. Which makes sense. But to create that burst of publicity, one must circulate the book well in advance privately among “thought leaders”, who might blurb or review it, invite the authors to talk on it, or recommend it to others who might do these things. So people who plausibly fit these descriptions get to read such books long before others. This lets early readers seem to be wise judges of future popular talk directions. Not because they actually have better judgement, but because they get inside info.
2018-03-01: Policy would benefit
policy analysts and social scientists who claim that they understand the social world well enough to make recommendations for changes—they should understand the elephant in the brain. They should have a better idea of hidden motives because they could think about which institutions that we might choose differently to have better outcomes.
Battery production scaling
3 massive battery storage plants—built by Tesla, AES Corp., and Altagas Ltd.—are all officially going live in southern California at about the same time. Any one of these projects would have been the largest battery storage facility ever built. Combined, they amount to 15% of the battery storage installed planet-wide last year.
2017-08-08: 120 GWh by 2021
Factories planned by Chinese companies could have the battery capacity to produce more than 120 GWh by 2021 – enough to supply 1.5M Tesla Model S vehicles. This will be over 3x initial the battery cell capacity of the Tesla Gigafactory at 35 GWh
2020-08-10: European battery factories are situated in the wrong countries
Out of the 14 projects scheduled in Europe, 10 rely on CO2-intensive electricity production with locations in Germany, Hungary, and Poland. France, which produces 88% CO2-free electricity thanks to its 58 nuclear reactors, has only 1 gigafactory in the pipeline.
Union corruption costs trillions
with all the discussion of conflicts of interest in the Trump cabinet, it strikes me that the most glaring conflict in the public sector is ignored: The CoI between state and local politicians elected with the support of public sector unions who then participate in compensation negotiations for the members of those unions. Here the temptation of the politicians to buy the support of the unions with public money is overwhelming. The impact of this is potentially trillions when public pension liabilities are included
NHTSA tries to play FDA
in short, the NHTSA tries to play FDA and is chasing philosophical nonsense like the “trolley problem”
NHTSA (DOT) releases 116 pages of regulations for robocars, and it’s not good.
Drug price regulation kills
RAND’s calculations plus my own Fermi estimate suggest that prescription drug price regulation would cost 1B life-years, which would very slightly edge out Communist China for the title of Worst Thing Ever.
what should happen instead is to automatically approve drugs that have gone through european regulators in the us and vice versa
Sabotaged Gun Tracing
There’s no telling how many guns we have in America—and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby, computers are illegal and detective work is absurdly antiquated. On purpose. Thing is, the geniuses who work there are quietly inventing ways to do the impossible. 65% of the time, workers at the tracing center are able to successfully trace a gun used in a crime back to the original purchaser. A routine trace takes ~1 week, but they can turn an “urgent” around in 24 hours. The San Bernardino case was an urgent. The Boston Marathon bomber case was an urgent. Gabby Giffords: urgent. Charleston. Aurora. Fort Hood. Columbine. Washington Navy Yard. Sikh temple. Just figure every crime you ever watched endless horrifying footage of on TV involved somebody here in Martinsburg searching through a rat’s nest of records and then experiencing a moment of jubilance upon seeing that, yes, this is it, here is the 4473 that belongs to that lunatic. (Or his mother. Or his uncle. Or the pawnshop dealer who sold it to someone else. Tracing the gun beyond the initial point of purchase is on the cops.) This is the maddening, inefficient way gun tracing works, and there is no effort afoot to make it work any better. For all the talking we do about imposing new limits on assault weapons, or stronger background checks, nobody talks about fixing the way we keep track—or don’t keep track—of where all the guns are.
Consume less health care
There are 2 unavoidable realities of making the American health-care system less costly: Americans must use less care, and our nation’s legion of well-paying, stable jobs in the health-care sector need to be both less numerous and less well paid.
$1t wasted
just imagine if that money had been spent on infrastructure instead of mall cops.
Since 9/11, the United States has spent $1 trillion to defend against al-Qaeda and ISIL, dirty bombs and lone wolves, bioterror and cyberterror. Has it worked?
Vetocracy in action
When a new restaurant starts to take patrons from an old restaurant we generally don’t think that the old restaurant–the long-term resident–has the right to prevent the new restaurant from opening. The same is true, by and large, for new technologies and ways of doing business. Yet when it comes to residential land we give the old residents a veto on the new.
The sad thing is that the people most yakking about their “property” are also the ones who want to impose their misguided rules on others.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 