Tuesday, July 2, 2013
Calculating Risks
“Have you ever had anybody break into your house, put tape around your head and hold a knife to your throat?” she said, sobbing. “I beg you: Don’t let another woman go through this.”
It was a Wednesday morning in May at the Asotin County Superior Courthouse, and the state was moving to release Hudon’s former captor. Monte Hoisington, 61, would soon leave the high-security compound where he’d lived for the previous 12 years among hundreds of the state’s most detested pariahs including sexual sadists and serial rapists like him and move to Spokane.
The presiding judge seemed reluctant (and said as much), but his job was to uphold the law and he couldn’t ignore the evidence: Three forensic psychologists had assessed Hoisington and concluded that by law, the thrice-convicted rapist no longer posed a threat to society.
For Hudon, hearing the judge read the expert testimony was troubling, and she wasn’t alone.
The process used to release civilly committed sex offenders is not without its critics. While the majority of committed sex offenders refuse to be treated, many decline on the advice of attorneys to even speak with clinicians, so as to avoid self-incrimination. As a result, when offenders petition for release, the evidence against them is often stale and outdated putting further pressure on prosecutors who must prove offenders suffer from mental abnormalities and can’t control their behavior.
“I think that’s essentially not a very scientific process, and one can’t confidently say that someone is cured or reformed as one does, for instance, if they were confined for tuberculosis or a communicable disease,” says Ronald Page, a clinical psychologist in Walla Walla who has diagnosed hundreds of sex predators throughout his career, including Hoisington. “There are laboratory tests to rule those [illnesses] out, and that simply doesn’t exist here.” (...)
The most widely used tool for measuring an adult male sex offender’s relative risk for recidivism in legal cases is a 10-item assessment known as a Static-99. It is based on statistical averages of sexual offender recidivism research. When assessing an offender, it considers, among other things, his age at release, any prior sexual offenses and whether or not his victims were strangers.
The Static-99 was revised and reissued as the Static-99R in 2009, after researchers pointed out that older sex offenders are at a lower risk to reoffend than younger offenders. In the updated assessment, age is weighted. Turning 60 trims three points from an offender’s score.
“One can talk about averages and about statistics with confidence as it applies to groups,” Page says. “But any individual can be an outlier within a population.”
Hoisington turned 60 three days after his 2010 annual review. These yearly reports are assembled by Department of Social and Health Services psychologists, tasked with evaluating a committed offender’s mental condition and ultimately determining whether or not he continues to qualify as a “sexually violent predator.” If an offender no longer meets the criteria of a so-called “SVP,” the court can can decide to release him into the community.
But residents at McNeil aren’t required to participate in interviews with forensic evaluators. “Therefore, any of the resulting diagnostic impressions are based solely on a review of records, which may be inaccurate, biased, or lacking sufficient detail or clarity to be helpful,” McNeil psychologist Dr. Daniel Yanisch explains in an email. “While it is generally helpful if a person interviews, it is not always required to be able to answer the forensic questions that the law is asking be reviewed.”
by Deanna Pan, PN Islander | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Adventures with “Free” Checking
[Warning: this post starts off with a long and self-indulgent complaint about my bank. Feel free to scroll down to the bit where I actually get to the point.]
On March 11 of this year, I borrowed $200 from Citibank. Four days later, on March 15, Thomson Reuters was kind enough to directly deposit a substantial paycheck into my account — one which was much, much larger than $200. And ever since then, I’ve been steadily paying back Citibank the money they so kindly lent me, at an interest rate of 13.25%. On April 25, I paid $11.52. On May 23, I paid $12.15. And on June 26, I paid $12.23. At this rate, I am informed on page 5 of my most recent statement, I will pay off the balance in about 18 months.
Citibank, I hasten to add, is doing me a favor here: the standard interest rate on this kind of loan is significantly higher than what I’m paying, at 18.25%. Still, my behavior doesn’t make a huge amount of sense. I have many thousands of dollars in the bank, earning an interest rate of basically zero. In fact, I had many thousands of dollars in the bank on March 11, when I borrowed that two hundred bucks. So, what was I thinking? Why did I borrow the money in the first place, and why have I been so miserly in terms of paying it back? Do I want to maximize the amount of money that Citibank extracts from me in interest payments? It certainly seems that way.
The truth, of course, is more mundane: I had no idea that I borrowed $200 on March 11, and Citibank certainly never saw fit to inform me of the fact directly. Instead, they buried the details of the loan on page 5 of my (unopened) bank statement. Meanwhile, they quietly and automatically deducted those small minimum payments out of my checking account — payments which were small enough that I failed to notice them until this morning.
As for the $200 loan, well, it turns out that March 11 was a very busy day for my checking account. I deposited a small check for $17.75, I made two different ATM withdrawals, I automatically transferred $1,000 to an investment account, I paid my Amex bill, I made another automatic payment which goes out every week — and, on top of all that, a $250 check which I wrote on February 12 was finally cashed that day as well. All of which was enough to push me $112.56 into the red. Citibank then immediately took the opportunity to round that number up to the nearest $100 — because hey, why lend me $112.56 when you can lend me $200 instead — and automatically deposited that sum into my account, leaving me with an account balance, at the end of the day, of $87.44.
This is a yuppie overdraft: rather than charge me $35 a pop for overdrawing my account, Citibank just rounds any negative balance up to the nearest $100, and transfers that sum over from something wonderfully called a “Checking Plus” account. Which is what they call an overdraft line of credit. Naturally, when my paycheck arrived four days later, it went into my checking account, which is separate from my Checking Plus account . As a result, ever since then, I’ve had a steadily positive balance in my checking account which has been larger than the amount I owe on its overdraft facility. And ever since then, Citi has been quietly paying off the loan at a rate of $12 or so a month, in the hope that I would never notice it. After all, any sentient being, upon seeing this situation, would of course pay the entire loan off immediately.
When I discovered what had been going on, my first reaction was of course to just pay the loan off in full. But my second reaction was that I wanted to ensure that I didn’t end up in this situation again. So I phoned up Citibank. “I see that you’re automatically deducting the minimum payment from my checking account every month,” I said; “do you think I could switch that to the maximum payment, instead?” If I ever have a balance on my Checking Plus account, I would very much like that balance to be paid off in full.
You know the answer, of course: no, Citi couldn’t possibly do that. Automatic payments can only be for the minimum amount due, not for the full balance.
Citibank, I hasten to add, is doing me a favor here: the standard interest rate on this kind of loan is significantly higher than what I’m paying, at 18.25%. Still, my behavior doesn’t make a huge amount of sense. I have many thousands of dollars in the bank, earning an interest rate of basically zero. In fact, I had many thousands of dollars in the bank on March 11, when I borrowed that two hundred bucks. So, what was I thinking? Why did I borrow the money in the first place, and why have I been so miserly in terms of paying it back? Do I want to maximize the amount of money that Citibank extracts from me in interest payments? It certainly seems that way.
The truth, of course, is more mundane: I had no idea that I borrowed $200 on March 11, and Citibank certainly never saw fit to inform me of the fact directly. Instead, they buried the details of the loan on page 5 of my (unopened) bank statement. Meanwhile, they quietly and automatically deducted those small minimum payments out of my checking account — payments which were small enough that I failed to notice them until this morning.
As for the $200 loan, well, it turns out that March 11 was a very busy day for my checking account. I deposited a small check for $17.75, I made two different ATM withdrawals, I automatically transferred $1,000 to an investment account, I paid my Amex bill, I made another automatic payment which goes out every week — and, on top of all that, a $250 check which I wrote on February 12 was finally cashed that day as well. All of which was enough to push me $112.56 into the red. Citibank then immediately took the opportunity to round that number up to the nearest $100 — because hey, why lend me $112.56 when you can lend me $200 instead — and automatically deposited that sum into my account, leaving me with an account balance, at the end of the day, of $87.44.
This is a yuppie overdraft: rather than charge me $35 a pop for overdrawing my account, Citibank just rounds any negative balance up to the nearest $100, and transfers that sum over from something wonderfully called a “Checking Plus” account. Which is what they call an overdraft line of credit. Naturally, when my paycheck arrived four days later, it went into my checking account, which is separate from my Checking Plus account . As a result, ever since then, I’ve had a steadily positive balance in my checking account which has been larger than the amount I owe on its overdraft facility. And ever since then, Citi has been quietly paying off the loan at a rate of $12 or so a month, in the hope that I would never notice it. After all, any sentient being, upon seeing this situation, would of course pay the entire loan off immediately.
When I discovered what had been going on, my first reaction was of course to just pay the loan off in full. But my second reaction was that I wanted to ensure that I didn’t end up in this situation again. So I phoned up Citibank. “I see that you’re automatically deducting the minimum payment from my checking account every month,” I said; “do you think I could switch that to the maximum payment, instead?” If I ever have a balance on my Checking Plus account, I would very much like that balance to be paid off in full.
You know the answer, of course: no, Citi couldn’t possibly do that. Automatic payments can only be for the minimum amount due, not for the full balance.
by Felix Salmon, Reuters | Read more:
Image: Wikimedia
My Mother, Gardening
I wonder what my mother would wish to take with her on such a journey, a journey beyond time. Surely she would hope to leave behind the damaged lungs that are slowing her down in her eighties, though she has already lived so much longer than the Boy King, dead at nineteen. Without a doubt she would have her Scrabble board folded up and set beside her, the soft old cotton sock still filled with worn tiles, the little wooden racks on which she’d sorted and re-sorted so many letters, made so many words. Her tennis racquet, just in case strength and flexibility should be granted to her once again. Perhaps she would keep the autumn leaves that I ironed in grade school between sheets of waxed paper and cut into bookmarks; and the clove-studded oranges that I made with my Girl Scout troop, shrunken and fragrant as the aged, perfumed offerings surrounding Tut in his tomb.
And she’d want to take the flowers she had gloriously preserved all her life: the light blue salvia that she’d grown and hung to dry in pipe-cleanered bunches over the kitchen sink, the Queen Anne’s Lace that she’d collected on weekend walks in the country. She always saved the loveliest of the roses from gift bouquets, at Mother’s Day and birthdays, and sank them one by one into finely sifted sand. When she gently drew them out, the fragile blossoms would be perfectly fixed, hovering forever at the grayish edge of pink. Wonderful things. (...)
In Eden, it was God’s voice—“Where are you?” (Genesis 3:8)—that called Adam and Eve back to their bodies. They were not just deep in the garden, they suddenly realized with alarm, but intimate with it, their own delicate, fresh skin close to the plants and trees growing there, brushing directly against rough stems and leaves. “I heard the sound of you in the garden,” Adam tried, lamely, to explain, “and I was afraid, because I was naked.” In that place, no longer untouched by time, their human flesh was revealed among the blossoming trees as what it really was: a fragile servant of appetite; mortal, likely to be wounded. The garden, as well, was revealed as vulnerable to violation, unequal to its own promise. And yet, many generations later, Eden would still color the prophets’ imagining of release from exile: “my people Israel . . . shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them . . . they shall make gardens and eat their fruit” (Amos 9:14). What lonely men those prophets must have remained! Wandering ministers of abandoned gardens, their fantasy of remaking the wounded world forever threaded with anger and doubt; layered over an unyielding assurance of abandonment.
by Joanne Jacobson, NER | Read more:
Image: Alleged location of the Garden of Eden, Wikimedia
Monday, July 1, 2013
In the Line of Wildfire
I roll out of my sleeping bag at 5 A.M., waking to the smell of dry grass and woodsmoke. I spent last night in the open, camped on rodeo grounds in the tiny Northern California town of Stonyford. Flames are visible on a ridge half a mile away. Time to go to work.
It’s July 12, 2012, and I’m about to be sent to my first forest fire of the season. I arrived yesterday to meet up with the Tahoe Hotshots, an elite group of wilderness fire-fighters based about 120 miles east of here, in a Sierra foothills town called Camptonville. The Tahoe team is part of a sprawling, multifaceted army: 177 federal, state, and county crews who must try and stop a fast-moving, 17,000-acre blaze before it spreads into Stonyford. Known as the Mill Fire, it was started on July 7 by lost hikers and raced east through the Coast Range and the Mendocino National Forest. Drought conditions and 60-mile-per-hour Pacific winds have fueled its advance; already, five buildings have burned on the edge of town.
The U.S. Forest Service, which usually runs the show when a big fire breaks out on federal land, has declared the Mill to be a national priority, and there are 1,500 wildland firefighters from around the West assembled to battle it. Some work on engine crews, manning the trucks that deliver water to the front lines. Others are smoke jumpers, who parachute straight into burning forests from cargo planes to stop small fires from growing. Some, like my group, are hotshots, backcountry firefighters who use chainsaws, Pulaskis, and rakes to cut firebreaks of bare earth around a blaze.
At the moment, though, all of us seem to be standing in the same line waiting for coffee and breakfast, which is being served at a mess tent staffed by high school students from inner-city Oakland. I work my way to the front, fill a Styrofoam cup, and head toward a set of rodeo bleachers to meet my boss, Rick Cowell, the 55-year-old superintendent of the Tahoe Hotshots.
“Dickman, you should have been here yesterday!” he says when he sees me. “We had a hell of a shift!”
Back before I had a desk job, I was a full-time hotshot. In 2006, I worked with the Tahoe crew, and this year Cowell agreed to let me rejoin. I arrived here too late for yesterday’s action, when the crew cut a line around a spot fire that started after an ember flew over a firebreak.
A six-foot, 170-pound man of Karuk Indian descent, Cowell has a broad chest, a beaked nose, and hands that feel like elephant hide. He’s fought nearly 800 blazes in his 36-year career, and his experience and leadership are a big part of why Tahoe is one of the best hotshot crews in the country.
Our job today is to cut and dig a line while engine crews hose down the fire, air tankers dump chemical retardant, and helicopters drop water from above. Once the Mill is surrounded by firebreaks and established logging roads, hotshots will intentionally burn brush and trees inside the perimeter, starving the fire of fuel. The stakes are high. If we succeed the flames stop. If we don’t, Stonyford, a town of about 150, and a forest the size of Boston will burn.
It’s July 12, 2012, and I’m about to be sent to my first forest fire of the season. I arrived yesterday to meet up with the Tahoe Hotshots, an elite group of wilderness fire-fighters based about 120 miles east of here, in a Sierra foothills town called Camptonville. The Tahoe team is part of a sprawling, multifaceted army: 177 federal, state, and county crews who must try and stop a fast-moving, 17,000-acre blaze before it spreads into Stonyford. Known as the Mill Fire, it was started on July 7 by lost hikers and raced east through the Coast Range and the Mendocino National Forest. Drought conditions and 60-mile-per-hour Pacific winds have fueled its advance; already, five buildings have burned on the edge of town.The U.S. Forest Service, which usually runs the show when a big fire breaks out on federal land, has declared the Mill to be a national priority, and there are 1,500 wildland firefighters from around the West assembled to battle it. Some work on engine crews, manning the trucks that deliver water to the front lines. Others are smoke jumpers, who parachute straight into burning forests from cargo planes to stop small fires from growing. Some, like my group, are hotshots, backcountry firefighters who use chainsaws, Pulaskis, and rakes to cut firebreaks of bare earth around a blaze.
At the moment, though, all of us seem to be standing in the same line waiting for coffee and breakfast, which is being served at a mess tent staffed by high school students from inner-city Oakland. I work my way to the front, fill a Styrofoam cup, and head toward a set of rodeo bleachers to meet my boss, Rick Cowell, the 55-year-old superintendent of the Tahoe Hotshots.
“Dickman, you should have been here yesterday!” he says when he sees me. “We had a hell of a shift!”
Back before I had a desk job, I was a full-time hotshot. In 2006, I worked with the Tahoe crew, and this year Cowell agreed to let me rejoin. I arrived here too late for yesterday’s action, when the crew cut a line around a spot fire that started after an ember flew over a firebreak.
A six-foot, 170-pound man of Karuk Indian descent, Cowell has a broad chest, a beaked nose, and hands that feel like elephant hide. He’s fought nearly 800 blazes in his 36-year career, and his experience and leadership are a big part of why Tahoe is one of the best hotshot crews in the country.
Our job today is to cut and dig a line while engine crews hose down the fire, air tankers dump chemical retardant, and helicopters drop water from above. Once the Mill is surrounded by firebreaks and established logging roads, hotshots will intentionally burn brush and trees inside the perimeter, starving the fire of fuel. The stakes are high. If we succeed the flames stop. If we don’t, Stonyford, a town of about 150, and a forest the size of Boston will burn.
by Kyle Dickman, Outside | Read more:
Photo: Kyle Dickman
Technical Difficulties
[ed. We're experiencing technical difficulties so please be patient; posts may be erratic for a while. Every time Blogger changes something you have to figure out what they're changing then find a workaround that will make things work again. In this case, it seems posts without a title can't be posted anymore (which I've done for some time with photos and art). So, I'll add titles (although you can't use the same title twice, apparently). Or try to figure some other workaround. I have no idea what this means for all the un-named posts that have been archived.]
The Watchers
Forty years after humans first saw pictures of a blue and white marble taken from space, it’s remarkable how few new images of Earth we get to lay eyes on. Of the 1,000 or more satellites orbiting the planet at any given time, there are perhaps 100 that send back visual data. Only 12 of those send back high-resolution pictures (defined as an image in which each pixel represents a square meter or less of ground), and only nine of the 12 sell into the commercial space-based imaging market, currently estimated at $2.3 billion a year. Worse still, some 80 percent of that market is controlled by the US government, which maintains priority over all other buyers: If certain government agencies decide they want satellite time for themselves, they can simply demand it. Earlier this year, after the government cut its imaging budget, the market’s two biggest companies—DigitalGlobe and GeoEye, which between them operate five of the nine commercial geoimaging satellites—were forced to merge. Due to the paucity of satellites and to the government’s claim on their operations, ordering an image of a specific place on Earth can take days, weeks, even months.
Because so few images make their way down from space every day, and even fewer reach the eyes of the public—remember how dazzled we were when Google Earth first let us explore one high-definition image of the planet?—we can fool ourselves into thinking that the view from space barely changes. But even with the resolutions allowed by the government for commercial purposes, an orbiting satellite can clearly show individual cars and other objects that are just a few feet across. It can spot a FedEx truck crossing America or a white van driving through Beirut or Shanghai. Many of the most economically and environmentally significant actions that individuals and businesses carry out every day, from shipping goods to shopping at big-box retail outlets to cutting down trees to turning out our lights at night, register in one way or another on images taken from space. So, while Big Data companies scour the Internet and transaction records and other online sources to glean insight into consumer behavior and economic production around the world, an almost entirely untapped source of data—information that companies and governments sometimes try to keep secret—is hanging in the air right above us.
Here is the soaring vision that Skybox’s founders have sold the Valley: that kids from Stanford, using inexpensive consumer hardware, can ring Earth with constellations of imaging satellites that are dramatically cheaper to build and maintain than the models currently aloft. By blanketing the exosphere with its cameras, Skybox will quickly shake up the stodgy business (estimated to grow to $4 billion a year by 2018) of commercial space imaging. Even with six small satellites orbiting Earth, Skybox could provide practically real-time images of the same spot twice a day at a fraction of the current cost.
But over the long term, the company’s real payoff won’t be in the images Skybox sells. Instead, it will derive from the massive trove of unsold images that flow through its system every day—images that, when analyzed by computer vision or by low-paid humans, can be transmogrified into extremely useful, desirable, and valuable data. What kinds of data? One sunny afternoon on the company’s roof, I drank beers with the Skybox employees as they kicked around the following hypotheticals:
- The number of cars in the parking lot of every Walmart in America.
- The number of fuel tankers on the roads of the three fastest-growing economic zones in China.
- The size of the slag heaps outside the largest gold mines in southern Africa
- The rate at which the wattage along key stretches of the Ganges River is growing brighter.
Such bits of information are hardly trivial. They are digital gold dust, containing clues about the economic health of countries, industries, and individual businesses. (One company insider confided to me that they have already brainstormed entirely practical ways to estimate major economic indicators for any country, entirely based on satellite data.) The same process will yield even more direct insight into the revenues of a retail chain or a mining company or an electronics company, once you determine which of the trucks leaving their factories are shipping out goods or key components.
Plenty of people would want real-time access to that data—investors, environmentalists, activists, journalists—and no one currently has it, with the exception of certain nodes of the US government. Given that, the notion that Skybox could become a Google-scale business—or, as one guy on the roof that afternoon suggested to me, an insanely profitable hedge fund—is not at all far-fetched. All they need to do is put enough satellites into orbit, then get the image streams back to Earth and analyze them. Which is exactly what Skybox is planning to do.
The most important thing to understand about Skybox is that there is nothing wonderful or magical or even all that interesting about the technology—no shiny new solar-reflecting paint or radiation-proof self-regenerating microchip, not even a cool new way of beaming signals down from orbit. Dozens of very smart people work at Skybox, to be sure, but none of them are doing anything more than making incremental tweaks to existing devices and protocols, nearly all of which are in the public domain or can be purchased for reasonable amounts of money by anyone with a laptop and a credit card. There is nothing impressive about the satellites they are building until you step back to consider the way that they plan to link them, and how the resulting data can be used.
Such bits of information are hardly trivial. They are digital gold dust, containing clues about the economic health of countries, industries, and individual businesses. (One company insider confided to me that they have already brainstormed entirely practical ways to estimate major economic indicators for any country, entirely based on satellite data.) The same process will yield even more direct insight into the revenues of a retail chain or a mining company or an electronics company, once you determine which of the trucks leaving their factories are shipping out goods or key components.
Plenty of people would want real-time access to that data—investors, environmentalists, activists, journalists—and no one currently has it, with the exception of certain nodes of the US government. Given that, the notion that Skybox could become a Google-scale business—or, as one guy on the roof that afternoon suggested to me, an insanely profitable hedge fund—is not at all far-fetched. All they need to do is put enough satellites into orbit, then get the image streams back to Earth and analyze them. Which is exactly what Skybox is planning to do.
The most important thing to understand about Skybox is that there is nothing wonderful or magical or even all that interesting about the technology—no shiny new solar-reflecting paint or radiation-proof self-regenerating microchip, not even a cool new way of beaming signals down from orbit. Dozens of very smart people work at Skybox, to be sure, but none of them are doing anything more than making incremental tweaks to existing devices and protocols, nearly all of which are in the public domain or can be purchased for reasonable amounts of money by anyone with a laptop and a credit card. There is nothing impressive about the satellites they are building until you step back to consider the way that they plan to link them, and how the resulting data can be used.
by David Samuels, Wired | Read more:
Sunday, June 30, 2013
The Supreme Court Just Handed Real Estate Developers a Huge Win
The Supreme Court handed down a decision Tuesday morning that's gotten considerably less attention than this term's blockbuster battles over same-sex marriage and voting rights. But Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District will likely prove a historic property-rights ruling, with far-reaching implications for the leverage local land-use agencies may use to extract concessions from property owners and developers for the common and environmental good.
The question lurking behind the case – how much and what can the public ask for when a private property owner's actions cause wider harm or societal burdens? – has the potential for much broader impact than the technical details of one Florida man's property dispute would suggest. And the 5-4 ruling surprised court-watchers who felt the government made a convincing case at oral arguments in January. In a majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court sided with the property owner.
"It’s a very important decision that seriously undermines the authority of local communities across the country," says John Echeverria, a legal scholar at the University of Vermont Law School who has written extensively on "takings" law. The two factions of the Supreme Court, on the other hand, disagree over whether this ruling will "work a revolution in land-use law."
The case revolves around a 14.9-acre property – primarily wetlands – east of Orlando purchased by Coy Koontz, Sr., in 1972. In the 1990s, he sought a permit from the local water management district to develop 3.7 acres of the land, dredging and filling it in to construct a building, a parking lot, and a retention pond. Under Florida law designed to protect the state's dwindling wetlands, anyone who wants to dredge or fill wetlands must get a special permit. And the land-use agencies that issue those permits can require property owners to offset any environmental damage to get one.
In this case, Koontz offered to permanently conserve the rest of his land from development in exchange for the permit to develop the 3.7 acres. The St. Johns River Water Management District argued that his offer was insufficient. The agency proposed instead that he develop only one acre and conserve the rest, or that he pay for contractors who would make improvements to other government-owned wetlands within the same watershed but several miles away. Koontz turned down both options and sued instead. In the 11 years this case has been winding through the legal system, Koontz died. The property owner is now his son, Coy Koontz, Jr.
The legal issue at play here comes from the Fifth Amendment – the Just Compensation Clause that states "...nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." There is a long and complicated legal history sketching out what constitutes a government "taking" of private property, and when public agencies must compensate property owners for that taking. In Koontz, the central question was whether or not the St. Johns River Water Management District violated Koontz' property rights by denying him a permit when he wouldn't agree to the District's conditions to develop his land.
The question lurking behind the case – how much and what can the public ask for when a private property owner's actions cause wider harm or societal burdens? – has the potential for much broader impact than the technical details of one Florida man's property dispute would suggest. And the 5-4 ruling surprised court-watchers who felt the government made a convincing case at oral arguments in January. In a majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court sided with the property owner."It’s a very important decision that seriously undermines the authority of local communities across the country," says John Echeverria, a legal scholar at the University of Vermont Law School who has written extensively on "takings" law. The two factions of the Supreme Court, on the other hand, disagree over whether this ruling will "work a revolution in land-use law."
The case revolves around a 14.9-acre property – primarily wetlands – east of Orlando purchased by Coy Koontz, Sr., in 1972. In the 1990s, he sought a permit from the local water management district to develop 3.7 acres of the land, dredging and filling it in to construct a building, a parking lot, and a retention pond. Under Florida law designed to protect the state's dwindling wetlands, anyone who wants to dredge or fill wetlands must get a special permit. And the land-use agencies that issue those permits can require property owners to offset any environmental damage to get one.
In this case, Koontz offered to permanently conserve the rest of his land from development in exchange for the permit to develop the 3.7 acres. The St. Johns River Water Management District argued that his offer was insufficient. The agency proposed instead that he develop only one acre and conserve the rest, or that he pay for contractors who would make improvements to other government-owned wetlands within the same watershed but several miles away. Koontz turned down both options and sued instead. In the 11 years this case has been winding through the legal system, Koontz died. The property owner is now his son, Coy Koontz, Jr.
The legal issue at play here comes from the Fifth Amendment – the Just Compensation Clause that states "...nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." There is a long and complicated legal history sketching out what constitutes a government "taking" of private property, and when public agencies must compensate property owners for that taking. In Koontz, the central question was whether or not the St. Johns River Water Management District violated Koontz' property rights by denying him a permit when he wouldn't agree to the District's conditions to develop his land.
by Emily Badger, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: EPA
Saturday, June 29, 2013
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Fukushima: One Man's Story
For generations, villagers came together twice a year to celebrate the bounty of the ocean. At New Year, dozens of fishing boats, festooned with flags, would join a parade out to sea, their horns blaring. In the lead was the vessel that had caught the most fish the year before. Two months later, when the sea was cold and rough and the fishermen needed an excuse to stay on shore drinking, the main matsuri, or Shinto festival, was held. It honoured the sea and the paddy fields of Ukedo, which together provided the two staple ingredients of every Japanese table: fish and rice. Children would dress up in gaudy costumes, with red and yellow flowers on their hats, speckled robes and red clogs, dancing to songs that celebrated life by the sea. Young fishermen would strip down to a pair of tight white shorts, and, fired up with slugs of the village’s sake, they would hurl themselves into the icy water, carrying heavy wooden shrines that sloshed about on the waves. The name of the festival spoke to the success of their entreaties to the Shinto spirits of the sea. It was called the Amba Matsuri, or Festival of the Safe Wave.
Morihisa Kanouya, then 71, had long reaped the benefits of the safety of those waves. A second-generation fisherman, he was often among the first five in the New Year’s parade because of the size of his catches. His working life was as regular as the movement of the tides. He would rise at 2am, six days a week, at his home close to the sea. Hisako, his cheery wife, would get up with him, handing him a small bento box that she had prepared before going to bed, with a snack that he would eat in the chilly darkness out at sea. He would set out with only his eldest son for company. In a few hours they would haul in anything from 50-200kg of fish, including flounder, octopus, sea bream and squid. By 7am, they would be back home in time for Hisako’s breakfast. Then from 9am, Kanouya-san (as everyone knows him) would unload his catch at the wholesale market, from where it would be trucked to Tsukiji, one of the world’s biggest fish markets, in Tokyo. By the early afternoon, he would have scrubbed his nets, and a bit later he would be tucking into his first glass of sake. A strapping, broad-chested man, he can still put away a few litres a day, he reckons. But by 8pm, he was usually home and in bed.
His income had long been as steady as his hours. Off Japan’s north-eastern coast, the collision of the warm Kuroshio current with the cold Oyashio current coming down from the Arctic Ocean produces some of the world’s richest fishing. It is not for nothing that many fishermen view the sea as a liquid bank, providing a recurring flow of cash year in, year out. For the fishermen of Ukedo, there was a bonus. Since 1971, when Japan’s biggest utility, Tokyo Electric (Tepco), had opened its first nuclear-power plant on the Fukushima coastline a few miles south of their village, they had been offered generous financial support for agreeing to give up their fishing rights, so that Tepco could pour the warm overflow from its nuclear cooling systems into the ocean. Ukedo’s fishermen took the lion’s share of the first big subsidy. Every time Tepco built a new reactor in the vicinity—there were six in total—the fishermen received a generous top-up. It had enabled Kanouya-san and his colleagues to buy new engines and upgrade their trawlers, making them more reliable and extending their reach out to sea. Fishing became far more lucrative than farming, and even when Japan’s economy stalled in the 1990s, Ukedo continued to prosper. For years Kanouya-san was one of its top seadogs, as head of the local fishing co-operative.
But in 2011 he had finally decided it was time for a change. He resolved to hang up his white fisherman’s boots, leave his job at the co-operative, and take Hisako on a trip—around Japan, and even the world, if possible. The news delighted her, he recalls. So when, on the afternoon of March 11th, he felt the biggest earthquake to jolt Japan in at least 1,000 years, he rushed home, only to find her laughing with friends. They had been having tea together when the quake struck. Now she was giggling and gossiping nervously with them, using a broom to sweep up the bits of crockery that had fallen to the floor. She was oblivious to the risk of a tsunami. He wasn’t. Some 17 of his fellow fishermen had done the most sensible thing under the circumstances: they had jumped into their trawlers and headed out to sea, knowing they could ride over the swelling tide before it would crash onto the coastline. But Kanouya-san’s first concern was his wife. (...)
These days, you find Kanouya-san, now 73, living alone on the outskirts of Fukushima City, capital of the eponymously named prefecture. His new home is about 50 miles north-west of Ukedo, across a high mountain range, and he rarely goes back. He lives in a prefabricated, box-like temporary housing complex. During my last visit, in February, an icy wind blowing from Siberia was making the snow billow up against the door of his home. Inside, he sat huddled with his back to the wall, in a coat and scarf, opposite his large Panasonic television. As usual, there were several fisherman’s caps, fedoras and trilbies pegged to the wall above his head; they are his pride and joy and his only decorations. As usual, he greeted us gruffly. No small talk. Even as I struggled to unlace my boots at the door, he turned his back on me and went into his living room. To one side of him is a photograph showing him as a roguish-looking man in the 1970s, with a brown leather jacket and a cap worn at a tilt like Robert Redford in "The Sting". Next to him is Hisako, wearing jeans and with a round, smiling face. Sometimes I have remarked on what a playboy he looks in the photo. He smiles mischievously, as if to acknowledge that, back then, he did indeed have the pick of all the girls.
But now, it’s only the other photo of Hisako that counts. It shows her on her own, austerely dressed in a dark robe, with her hair swept back. Beside it are candles, sticks of incense and flowers, as well as oranges and biscuits that Kanouya-san offers every day as he prays to her. Among them is a small urn with her ashes inside. Hisako is now a spirit, and when he kneels at her shrine, he rings a small bell, lights a stick of incense, and bows his head solemnly.
by Henry Tricks, Intelligent Life | Read more:
Photo: Jeremie Souteyrat
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by Dhiya Kuriakose, Mashable | Read more:
Image: Mashable
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