Carriers Are Hoarding America’s Bandwidth. Google Just Wants Them to Share

A Google-led plan to overhaul how valuable airwaves are used for calls and texts is gaining momentum across the wireless industry, giving the company the chance to play a central role in networks of the future.

Citizens Broadband Radio Service, or CBRS, is a fat slice of the U.S. airwaves being freed this year from the military’s exclusive control. Instead of just zipping messages between aircraft carriers and fighter jets, the spectrum will be shared by the Navy, wireless carriers like Verizon, cable companies including Comcast, and even hospitals, refineries and sports stadiums.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google, with help from some smaller tech companies, is leading the charge on ways to make the new service work seamlessly. They've built databases and sensor systems that switch users to different CBRS channels to avoid interference, especially when the Navy sails into town.

This could upend the wireless business. Carriers spent more than $50 billion in recent years buying exclusive spectrum rights then charging users for cell service. What if, instead of buying and hoarding, spectrum is shared in new ways? It could become an abundant resource, making mobile internet connectivity more available and potentially cheaper.

“This will be a huge psychological hurdle for U.S. wireless companies to overcome,” said industry consultant Chetan Sharma. “These operators want to own the spectrum clean and not worry about interference.”

What’s changed is that the U.S. wireless industry is so desperate for new spectrum it’s willing to try the idea — and even work with Google, which has been viewed skeptically by the industry. Unlimited wireless plans have caused data usage to soar. Throw in pressure to build new 5G networks and companies like Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc. can’t afford to ignore CBRS, even if it disrupts decades of spectrum orthodoxy.

CBRS has three tiers. At the top is the military, which has gets spectrum whenever it needs it. The second is a priority level that will be sold to the highest bidders in hundreds or thousands of mini auctions covering different parts of the country. At the bottom is a free tier that any company can use. That final tier won’t get protection from interference.

Imagine you’re on a call with your smartphone in Los Angeles and it’s using CBRS to connect you. An aircraft carrier churns past. Systems run by Google, startup Federated Wireless or a few other companies, will spot that, give the Navy a prime bit of the spectrum to use, then move you onto a slightly different channel without dropping the call. When the ship leaves the area, the Navy’s spectrum is sent back into the mix. There's enough spectrum to go round — 150 MHz is the largest chunk of contiguous airwaves to be released in years. And the Navy is unlikely to sail past Denver, Kansas City or most other U.S. locations.

The key is that if a company buys a priority slice and doesn’t put it to work, the spectrum is free for others to use. This prevents hoarding and changes the supply and demand equation, making spectrum more plentiful.

“Spectrum is like drinking water. There’s only so much of it and you better use it efficiently,” said Joel Lindholm, an executive at Ruckus Wireless, a unit of Arris International Plc that’s building CBRS gear.

For Google, the project is the most successful in a long series of efforts to increase internet availability — the digital oxygen that sustains its search engine, YouTube video service and the ads that generate almost 90 percent of the company’s revenue. When CBRS goes live, the company will be in a powerful and somewhat familiar position. As a Spectrum Access System provider, it will be paid to sit in the middle of information flows about valuable spectrum and decide what happens to the airwaves in real time. To avoid interference, Google has even installed special sensors along U.S. coastlines to spot when Navy ships are near (although the exact locations are digitally scrubbed).

That power doesn’t sit well with the wireless industry...

by Alistair Barr, Mark Bergen, and Scott Moritz, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Susana Gonzalez

One of the Biggest and Most Boring Cyberattacks Against an American City Yet

Want to hear a boring story?

I can’t submit an expense report for a recent out-of-town work trip. I’ve got all the receipts, except one from long-term parking at the Atlanta airport. A sensor lets me in and out of the parking lot there, and my account gets charged automatically. Later, I can download a receipt from a website, which I submit to accounting at my university, which creates an expense report, which eventually processes a reimbursement.

But the website has been inaccessible all week. I’m assuming it’s a consequence of the recent ransomware attack on the City of Atlanta’s computer systems. In what The New York Times has called “one of the most sustained and consequential cyberattacks ever mounted against a major American city,” a group of hackers has been holding the systems hostage for a ransom of about $51,000 (payable in Bitcoin) since late last week. To stop the spread of the attack, the city has shut down some of its online services, including some that provide consumer services. The airport’s Wi-Fi system has been disabled—and, apparently, the parking system I use there, too.

I emailed the manager of the airport-parking service, but chances are she won’t be able to respond; Atlanta has directed many workers to turn off or unplug their computers, another precaution that they hope will help control the damage. Until the city decides to pay the ransom or extract the virus, many city officials are processing paperwork by hand.

In a statement, Atlanta’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, assured citizens that utility and safety systems, like police and water, are unaffected. She also noted, “This is a massive inconvenience to the city.”

Tell me about it. This is the new, humdrum reality of information-security breaches. When they don’t leak reams of personal information for theft and resale on the black market, they make ordinary life annoying in small but important ways.

***

Here’s more boring corporate bureaucracy for you: My university uses software made by Oracle and PeopleSoft for accounting and expense management. The system assumes one expense report per trip, which means that now I have to wait until the parking-system website comes back online so I can extract a receipt (for $100 or less) and submit it. Until then, I can’t get reimbursed for the rest of my trip, which totals far more than $100, unless I want to absorb the parking expense in the interest of expediency.

I’ll be fine, but not everyone can wait days or weeks for their reimbursement. In fact, other Atlanta citizens might fare worse. The city courts, unable to process tickets or warrants automatically, have been forced to do so by hand. Surely someone will make an honest mistake, and a ticket could be advanced to warranting after registering unpaid, or a warrant could wind up assigned to the wrong person.

The City of Atlanta assures its residents that anyone who can’t pay a utility bill won’t be penalized if they cannot access an online system to do so. But those exceptions would also have to be entered into a computer. Someone’s account could be incorrectly marked in arrears, and their water service shut down. Perhaps turning it back on again will require visiting the City of Atlanta Department of Watershed Management in person with payment by cashier’s check or money order. I can’t tell you what they’d have to do, because as I write this, the Atlanta Watershed’s billing website is down. Taking time off from work to correct inadvertent consequences of the computer outage could easily cost someone a shift, or even a job.

These are the kinds of cascading failures that take place when internet-connected systems get taken down, whether by surprise on the part of hackers or intentionally by municipalities or corporations impacted by them. Nobody means for these things to happen. Not the City of Atlanta. Not even the hackers who initiated the ransomware attack. But they are the consequence of building and operating computer infrastructure interconnected via the internet.

When a breach at the credit agency Equifax exposed almost 150 million Americans’ most personal information last year, I remarked on how banal the matter seemed. Equifax didn’t even appear to be trying to treat the situation with the gravity that it deserved, and the public seemed resigned to the matter. “Breaches have settled into a kind of modern malaise, akin to traffic or errands,” I wrote. “They are so frequent and so massive that the whole process has become a routine.”

That routine is only accelerating. Last week, when news broke that tens of millions of Facebook users’ personal data had been extracted by a personality-quiz app and sold to the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, public reaction was strong mostly because that data appears to have been used in U.S. election targeting. The fact that the data was vacuumed out of the social network has also raised hackles, even if people don’t fully realize that Facebook was designed to allow that very extraction.

All of these incidents arise from a slow, steady drip of small changes to the way people store, access, and manage information and services. Contemporary civilization has rebuilt itself atop a lattice of fragile computer systems, all interconnected. The chaos that ensues when these systems fail or get breached is so constant, it feels expected. Almost natural.

by Ian Bogost, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Rick D. via

Bang For the Buck

“Welcome, Patriots! Gun Show Today,” says a big sign outside the Cow Palace in Daly City, California, just south of San Francisco, where the Republican National Convention nominated Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. Inside, past the National Rifle Association table at the door, a vast room, longer than a football field, is completely filled with rows of tables and display cases. They show every conceivable kind of rifle and pistol, gun barrels, triggers, stocks, bullet keychain charms, Japanese swords, telescopic sights, night-vision binoculars, bayonets, a handgun carrier designed to look like a briefcase, and enough ammunition of every caliber to equip the D-Day landing force. Antique guns on sale range from an ancient musket that uses black powder to a Japanese behemoth that fires a bullet 1.2 inches in diameter.

Also arrayed on tables are signs, bumper stickers, and cloth patches you can sew onto your jacket: 9-11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB; THE WALL: IF YOU BUILD IT THEY CANT COME; HUNTING PERMIT UNLIMITED FOR ISIS. Perhaps 90 percent of those strolling the aisles are men, and at least 98 percent are white. They wear enough beards and bushy mustaches to stuff a good-sized mattress. At one table a man is selling black T-shirts that show a map of California in red, with a gold star and hammer and sickle. Which means? “This state’s gone Communist. And I hate to say it, but it was Reagan that gave it to them. The 1986 amnesty program [which granted legal status to some 2.7 million undocumented immigrants].”

If reason played any part in the American love affair with guns, things would have been different a long time ago and we would not have so many mass shootings like the one that took the lives of seventeen high school students in Parkland, Florida on February 14. Almost everywhere else in the world, if you proposed that virtually any adult not convicted of a felony should be allowed to carry a loaded pistol—openly or concealed—into a bar, a restaurant, or classroom, people would send you off for a psychiatric examination. Yet many states allow this, and in Iowa, a loaded firearm can be carried in public by someone who’s completely blind. Suggest, in response to the latest mass shooting, that still more of us should be armed, and people in most other countries would ask you what you’re smoking. Yet this is the NRA’s answer to the massacres in Orlando, Las Vegas, Newtown, and elsewhere, and after the Parkland killing spree, President Trump suggested arming teachers. One bumper sticker on sale here shows the hammer and sickle again with GUN FREE ZONES KILL PEOPLE.

Nor, when it comes to national legislation, do abundantly clear statistics have any effect. In Massachusetts, which has some of America’s most restrictive firearms laws, three people per 100,000 are killed by guns annually, while in Alaska, which has some of the weakest, the rate is more than seven times as high. Maybe Alaskans need extra guns to fend off bears, but that’s certainly not so in Louisiana, another weak-law state, where the rate is more than six times as high as in Massachusetts. All developed nations regulate firearms more stringently than we do; compared with the citizens of twenty-two other high-income countries, Americans are ten times more likely to be killed by guns. In the last fifty years alone, more civilians have lost their lives to firearms within the United States than have been killed in uniform in all the wars in American history.

Congress, terrified of the NRA, not only ignores such data but has shielded manufacturers and dealers from any liability for firearms deaths, and has prevented the Centers for Disease Control from doing any studies of gun violence. As of last October—the figure has doubtless risen since then—the top ten recipients of direct or indirect NRA campaign funds in the US Senate had received more than $42 million from the organization over the past thirty years. Funneling a river of money to hundreds of other members of Congress as well, the NRA has certainly gotten what it pays for.

In Armed in America, Patrick J. Charles points out that after each horrendous mass shooting, like the one we’ve just seen at Parkland, not only does the NRA once again talk about good guys with guns stopping bad guys with guns, but gun purchases soar and stock prices of their makers rise. However, only a tiny fraction of the more than 30,000 Americans killed by guns each year die in these mass shootings. Roughly two thirds are suicides; the rest are more mundane homicides, and about five hundred are accidents. Some 80,000 additional people are injured by firearms each year. All these numbers would be far less if we did not have more guns than people in the United States, and if they were not so freely available to almost anyone.

Although not the definitive study of the NRA that David Cole called for in these pages recently, Armed in America does cast a shrewd eye on what is probably the most powerful lobbying organization in Washington. For almost a century the NRA has pursued a two-faced strategy. It “would tout itself to lawmakers as the foremost supporter of reasonable firearms restrictions. At the same time, the NRA informed the gun-rights community that virtually all firearms restrictions would either make gun ownership a crime or somehow lead to disarmament.” The NRA presents itself to the public as “a voice of compromise” and boasts of its courses in gun safety, but skillfully mobilizes its five million members and annual budget of more than $300 million to make sure Congress never passes any meaningful gun control. The poignant, outspoken campaigning by the Florida high schoolers who survived the Parkland shooting may spur somewhat tightened gun control in a few states, but, at least at the national level, don’t expect new laws to be sweeping and significant.

The Koch brothers have been major financial supporters of the NRA because it so reliably turns out right-wing voters on election day. A vocal and militant NRA also helps protect people like the Kochs by encouraging the illusion that the real source of political power in America is gun ownership—rather than, say, great wealth. (...)

Men like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, Dunbar-Ortiz points out, have been sanitized in a different way, remembered not as conquerors of Native American or Mexican land, but as frontiersmen roaming the wilderness in their fringed deerskin clothing—and as skilled hunters. This has powerful resonance with many gun owners today, who hunt, or once did, or at least would like to feel in themselves an echo of the hunter: fearless, proud, self-sufficient, treading in the footsteps of pioneers. One of those fringed leather jackets (although not deerskin, the salesman acknowledges) is on sale at the gun show, as is a huge variety of survival-in-the-wilderness gear: canteens, beef jerky, buffalo jerky, bear repellent, and hundreds of knives, many of them lovingly laid out on fur pelts: coyote, beaver, muskrat, possum, and the softest, badger.

The early militias are one strand of ancestry Dunbar-Ortiz identifies for gun enthusiast groups like the NRA. Another is the legacy of America’s wars—not those with defined front lines, like the two world wars and Korea, but the conflicts in Vietnam, Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan. In those wars it was often unclear who was friend and who was enemy, mass killings of civilians were common, and many a military man evoked the days of the Wild West. General Maxwell Taylor, Lyndon B. Johnson’s ambassador to South Vietnam, for instance, called for more troops so that the “Indians can be driven from the fort and the settlers can plant corn.”

One of the greatest predictors of American gun ownership today is whether someone has been in the military: a veteran is more than twice as likely as a nonveteran to own one or more guns. Among the bumper stickers and signs at the gun show are JIHAD FREE ZONE and I’LL SEE YOUR JIHAD AND RAISE YOU A CRUSADE; the latter shows a bloody sword. Many a vet is strolling the aisles, happy to talk about fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan. The first of the chain of mass shootings that have bedeviled the United States over the last half-century or so, from atop a tower at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966, was by Charles Whitman, an ex-Marine.

The passion for guns felt by tens of millions of Americans also has deep social and economic roots. The fervor with which they believe liberals are trying to take all their guns away is so intense because so much else has been taken away. In much of the South, in the Rust Belt along the Great Lakes, in rural districts throughout the country, young people are leaving or sinking into addiction and jobs are disappearing. These hard-hit areas have not shared the profits of Silicon Valley and its offshoots or the prosperity of coastal cities from Seattle to New York. Even many of his supporters know in their hearts that Trump can never deliver on his promises to bring back coal mining and restore abundant manufacturing jobs. But the one promise he, and other politicians, can deliver on is to protect and enlarge every imaginable kind of right to carry arms.

People passionate about guns often display a sense of being under siege, left behind, pushed down, at risk. One of the large paper targets on sale at the gun show shows a scowling man aiming a pistol at you. On bumper stickers, window signs, flags, is the Revolutionary era DON’T TREAD ON ME, with its image of a coiled rattlesnake. At one table, two men are selling bulletproof vests. For $500 you can get an eight-pound one whose plates—front, back, side—are made of lightweight compressed polyethylene. “They used to use it to line the bottom of combat helicopters,” said one of the men. For only $300, you can get one with steel plates, but it weighs twenty-three pounds. Also on sale is a concealable vest that goes under your clothing: medium, large, and X-large for $285; XX-large and XXX-large for $315.

Who buys these? I ask.

“Everybody—who sees the way the world is going.”

by Adam Hochschild, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Sunnyland Slim, Homesick James and Elmore James at Charlie’s Lounge, Chicago, 1959
via:

Everything is Terrible: An Explanation

Facebook is a breeding ground for fake news and polarized outrage, accused of corrupting democracy and spurring genocide. Twitter knows it has become a seething battleground of widespread, targeted abuse — but has no solution. YouTube videos are messing with the minds of children and adults alike — so YouTube decided to pass the buck to Wikipedia, without telling them.

All three of those sentences would have seemed nearly unimaginable five years ago. What the hell is going on? Ev Williams says, of the growth of social media: “We laid down fundamental architectures that had assumptions that didn’t account for bad behavior.” What changed? And perhaps the most important question is: have people always been this awful, or have social networks actually made us collectively worse?

I have two somewhat related theories. Let me explain.

The Uncanny Social Valley Theory

“Social media is poison,” a close friend of mine said to me a couple of years ago, and since then more and more of my acquaintances seem to have come around to her point of view, and are abandoning or greatly reducing their time spent on Facebook and/or Twitter.

Why is it poison? Because this technology meant to provoke human connection actually dehumanizes. Not always, of course; not consistently. It remains a wonderful way to keep in contact with distant friends, and to enhance your relationship and understanding of those you regularly see in the flesh. What’s more, there are some people with whom you just ‘click’ online, and real friendships grow. There are people I’ve never met who I’d unhesitatingly trust with the keys to my car and home, because of our interactions on various social networks.

And yet — having stipulated all the good things — a lot of online interactions can and do reduce other people to awful caricatures of themselves. In person we tend to manage a kind of mammalian empathy, a baseline understanding that we’re all just a bunch of overgrown apes with hyperactive amygdalas trying to figure things out as best we can, and that relatively few of us are evil stereotypes. (Though see below.) Online, though, all we see are a few projections of those mammal brains, generally in the form of hastily constructed, low-context text and images … as mediated and amplified by the outrage machines, those timeline algorithms which think that “engagement” is the highest goal to which one can possibly aspire online.

I am reminded of the concept of the Uncanny Valley: “humanoid objects which appear almost, but not exactly, like real human beings elicit uncanny, or strangely familiar, feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers.” Sometimes you ‘click’ with people online such that they’re fully human to you, even if you’ve never met. Sometimes you see them fairly often in real life, so their online projections are just a new dimension to their existing humanity. But a lot of the time, all you get of them is that projection … which falls squarely into an empathy-free, not-quite-human, uncanny social valley.

And so many of us spend so much time online, checking Twitter, chatting on Facebook, that we’ve all practically built little cottages in the uncanny social valley. Hell, sometimes we spend so much time there that we begin to believe that even people we know in real life are best described as neighbors in that valley … which is how friendships fracture and communities sunder online. A lot of online outrage and fury — the majority, I’d estimate, though not all — is caused not by its targets’ inherent awfulness but by an absence, on both sides, of context, nuance, and above all, empathy and compassion.

The majority. But not all. Because this isn’t just a story of lack of compassion. This is also a story of truly, genuinely awful people doing truly, genuinely awful things. That aspect is explained by…

The Intransigent Asshole Theory

Of course the Internet was always full of awful. Assholes have been trolling since at least 1993. “Don’t read the comments” is way older than five years old. But it’s different now; the assholes are more organized, their victims are often knowingly and strategically targeted, and many seem to have calcified from assholedom into actual evil. What’s changed?

The Intransigent Asshole Theory holds that the only thing that’s changed is that more assholes are online and they’ve had more time to find each other and agglomerate into a kind of noxious movement. They aren’t that large in number. Say that a mere three percent of the online population are, actually, the evil stereotypes that we perceive so many to be.

If three of 100 people are known to be terrible human beings, the other 97 can identify them and organize to defend themselves with relative ease. 97 is well within Dunbar’s number after all. But what about 30 of a 1,000? That gets more challenging, if those thirty band together; the non-awful people have to form fairly large groups. How about 300 of 10,000? Or 3,000 of 100,000? 3 million of 100 million? Suddenly three percent doesn’t seem like such a small number after all.

I chose three percent because it’s the example used by Nassim Taleb in his essay/chapter “The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority.” Adopting his argument slightly, if only 3% of the online population really wants the online world to be horrible, ultimately they can force it to be, because the other 97% can — as empirical evidence shows — live with a world in which the Internet is often basically a cesspool, whereas those 3% apparently cannot live with a world in which it is not.

Only a very small number of people comment on articles. But they are devoted to it; and, as a result, “don’t read the comments,” became a cliché. Is it really so surprising that “don’t read the comments” spread to “Facebook is for fake outrage and Twitter is for abuse,” given that Facebook and Twitter are explicitly designed to spread high-engagement items, i.e. the most outrageous ones? Really the only thing that’s surprising is that it took this long to become so widespread.

Worst of all — when you combine the Uncanny Social Valley Theory with the Intransigent Asshole Theory and the high-engagement outrage-machine algorithms, you get the situation where, even if only 3% of people actually are irredeemable assholes, a full 30% or more of them seem that way to us. And the situation spirals ever downwards.

“Wait,” you may think, “but what if they didn’t design their social networks that way?” Well, that takes us to the third argument, which isn’t a theory so much as an inarguable fact:

by Jon Evans, TechCrunch |  Read more:

Image: via
[ed. See also: The Trouble With Quitting Facebook Is That We Like Facebook]

How Companies are Responding to the New Tax Bill

This is going to be a long post on my experience with the recent tax reform.

I work in finance for a small global company and needed to understand how the tax reform legislation would affect us. I read the all high status financial press, but the information provided was very low quality for my needs. I found that one big 4 firm and two law firms had good quality material online that gave me the information I needed to have productive discussions with our accounting firm and make informed decisions for our company.

Between my research online and the need to explain things to the boss, owners and other stakeholders, I began to see one of the biggest impacts of the tax reform was the destruction of tax shelters used by many US tech companies. Now, here is a claim I am less certain about: some firms have been and will be net losers by their use of creative tax strategies in the past. I expected to see this idea expressed more widely or at least investigated. (...)

This is not about whether the tax reform was good or bad. It’s about what it means to a good chunk of the corporate world, mainly, but not entirely tech companies.

Imagine a thousand tall towers all collapsing simultaneously. Imagine the noise, the pain, the horror of incomprehension, seeing dimly through the dust, ears ringing. That’s what was felt by a subset of tax lawyers, CFOs, CEOs and accounting firms all around the world. The US tax reform did have an impact on individuals, sure, but It was also about blowing up an enormous edifice of tax avoidance. There may not be many of us, but I feel this has been largely overlooked in the media.

For many years, companies have been placing their IP, booking their sales and paying themselves transfer prices to low tax jurisdictions to avoid US taxes. And yet all this was and is illegal unless:

1) There was a real underlying business purpose to it.
2) The business purpose was not merely to reduce taxes.
Sometimes only the thinnest veneer of business purpose was invoked. Then you would get a law firm to write an Opinion Letter which said what you were doing was legal because reasons and you could rely on this Opinion Letter to stay out of jail. Nevertheless, setting up the correct legal framework to avoid taxes was expensive. (A few years ago someone quoted me a price of about $2million to set up something like that for where I worked. I never did it though.)

And now none of this tax strategy works. It’s all over.

US corporate tax at 35% was among the highest in the world, even though effective rates were lower due to tax strategies. The high rate encouraged tax avoidance strategies, that for many companies was borderline (ref. the trouble Caterpillar is in now), and also had significant costs. This incentivized spending that had no real productive purpose. And it encouraged inversions, i.e. moving corporate headquarters out of the US into another tax jurisdiction.

The US also had a weird worldwide system where all a company’s income was taxed together. However, if a foreign subsidiary of a US company kept their profits, those profits were not taxed. The rules here were complex. To highly simplify, if a company kept their foreign profits overseas they would not pay US tax on those profits. The dominant tax avoidance strategy used by US companies involved creating profits in foreign subsidiaries, creatively.

The thing is, these shelters often don’t last forever. Major tax reforms don’t happen often, but they do clear out many abusive shelters.

As a historical example, do you recall seeing video of buildings in Grand Cayman where there are literally thousands of companies registered there? That was the great tax evasion effort of a couple generations ago. Then the application of the rules 1) & 2) destroyed that tax strategy. Corporations could not point to an underlying business reason to have their investment portfolios domiciled in Grand Cayman as opposed to anywhere else. There have been many other geographically based tax avoidance strategies that were eventually blown up by European or US regulators, e.g. Jersey Islands, Malta, Cyprus. And others.

Caterpillar put a formal sales office in Geneva. Many others created profits in Ireland where they had a 12% tax to domicile their IP. Other countries were used as well. These countries had a lower tax rate than the US 35% and as long as they didn’t repatriate profits technically, they had no US tax, even though the US was, in theory taxing all profits worldwide at 35%. These companies’ foreign subsidiaries creatively created foreign profits could then be deposited in a US bank, which could be used as collateral for the parent company. Eventually, this tax avoidance strategy started to become embarrassing to US authorities. (...)

Back to US corporate tax. A lot of companies were able to get their effective tax rates down into the low teens. Using the embarrassing strategy I described. The CBO estimated the average marginal rate was 18.6%, others have estimated more like 27%, the truth is nobody really knows.

With the recent tax reform the corporate rate was reduced to 21% from 35%. Kinda average for the developed world, but fabulous for domestic companies that didn’t have good tax strategies available to them.

With the recent tax reform companies have to pay tax, 15.5% on all the profits they previously sheltered from US tax (8% if you invested in real property). That’s why you see stories of companies like Apple paying $38 billion dollars in tax from prior profits of foreign subsidiaries.

And the expensive tax shelters they set up have to keep running. They can’t just shut them down because of 1) and 2) above. If they did just shut them down, it would be close to an admission of guilt for tax fraud. I find this both weird and sort of beautiful.

There has been some bad journalism about this, even in the high status financial press.

Several stories about corporate quarterly earnings calls have featured CEOs explaining that their effective tax rates are going UP, even though the tax rate was lowered, because specific shelters don’t work anymore. Then a journalist asks something like, “so will you shut down the operation in Ireland?” The CEO responds, “No, Ireland is an important part of our business.” The stories never note that the CEO has to say that or the CEO would be almost admitting to fraud.

Eventually, the tax strategies that are now an expensive waste, can be unwound. You have to let enough time go by to let them get “old and cold.” After a couple/three years a company can simply be assumed to be changing business strategy.

by mrjeremyfade, Commenter, Slate Star Codex | Read more:

Without Belief in a God, but Never Without Belief in a Devil.

Eric Hoffer wrote The True Believer in 1951. One prefers to think of the hippie 60’s, or the raging 70’s, or the majorly moral 80’s, when they discuss mass movements. But all of those preyed on the same kinds of people, and followed similar patterns to, the Beatniks and the Birchers. It also immediately shifts us away from the more popular model of “economic dissatisfaction”. I don’t mean to imply that poverty is unimportant for mass movements – economic discontent is one of the primary drivers – but that it’s not alone capable of explaining their rise. The ’50s were horrifically unequal in other ways, but they aren’t a by-word for mass poverty. Perhaps more telling: neither the Beats nor the Birchers arose from the impoverished classes. (...)

Hoffer is most famous for (what’s now called) “Horseshoe Theory”, which postulates that extremes are always closer to one another than to moderates on either side. He thinks something similar, although I’m not sure he would agree with our common use. I’ve heard basically two arguments for horseshoe theory, one better and one worse: 1) the bad one, that “extremism is extremism” which is tautologically true but explains approximately nothing and, 2) that effective tactics will be adopted by extremist parties, making their actions the same if not their intentions. This is not exactly true, but with some qualifications it’s a lot closer.

What Hoffer thinks extremes share is neither ideology nor praxis. He thinks they share a hatred of the present, a desire for some vague future, and that their behavior is predicated on this. Here’s the passage that gets the most play:

In reality the boundary line between radical and reactionary is not always distinct. The reactionary manifests radicalism when he comes to recreate his ideal past. His image of the past is based less on what it actually was than on what he wants the future to be. He innovates more than he reconstructs. A somewhat similar shift occurs in the case of the radical when he goes about building his new world. He feels the need for practical guidance, and since he has rejected and destroyed the present he is compelled to link the new world with some point in the past. If he has to employ violence in shaping the new, his view of man’s nature darkens and approaches closer to that of the reactionary.

The reason for this commonality, for this shared deprecation of the present, has to do with the “state” of a person that joins (active) mass movements, and the way that mass movements exacerbate this quality. There’s not necessarily a connection between the current cause of frustration and whatever heaven will “resolve” it. Indeed: to find the “cause” would be to dwell on the present, which is precisely what it seeks to avoid.

This state is what Hoffer calls frustration. (...)

Hoffer doesn’t mean to explain precisely why humans get frustrated psychologically or politically. He’s more interested in what happens after it exists. Frustration is useful because it’s the only common factor among the disparate groups that make up an early mass movement. This is apparent from his taxonomy of the frustrated (Part II), and I’ll give you the chapter titles without going into detail: The Poor (subdivided into The New Poor; the Abjectly Poor; the Free Poor; the Creative Poor; the Unified Poor); Misfits; The Inordinately Selfish; The Ambitious Facing Unlimited Opportunities; Minorities; The Bored; The Sinners, i.e. quite a wide array of people.

The impetus to join a movement appears among the poor and the wealthy, so it can’t be strictly economic (the abjectly poor aren’t actually frustrated: the chapter is instead about why they aren’t). It appears among the unemployed and the ambitious, so it can’t just be “a job”. It appears among the smart and the stupid, so it’s not simple intelligence. What these groups instead share is dissatisfaction with the self and an attempt to substitute their self for a larger group identity. Or, this:

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race, or his holy cause.

Frustration in Hoffer’s lexicon, is never only frustration with “the system” or the status quo. It is always, always frustration with yourself. Even that frustration with the system is your own relation to it. This doesn’t mean it’s unjustified. It might be, like if the system stole your wife, but it might not be (examples abound). Its objective justification is fundamentally irrelevant. The individual always feels that it is.

Hoffer often talks about “substituting”, and the above passage is an example of it. One of the drives of the frustrated is to substitute an unsatisfactory self for some other thing. The dissatisfaction is not merely self-image, but fundamentally about action. You can tell yourself that you’re “good and perfect and beautiful” all day every day, but that’s not going to make you hate yourself less. At least the larger group you choose does something, or can do something.

Again, this might be justified or not: Perhaps you really do have the best start-up idea ever and Those Bastards are keeping the capital from you and destroying your life. Or maybe you have a notion that you’re “meant for something”, couldn’t figure out what and didn’t bother to try, and now you work a soul-crushing job clearly meant for [losers] that are definitely worse than you. Or The Onion. Or you’re incompetent but can’t admit it. Or you’re incompetent but only in this context and genuinely are meant for better things (if you read any link, make it that one; Ben Grierson is not the object of opprobrium here). All of this will result in the same: the sense that life has no meaning.

The frustrated cannot derive satisfaction from acting, which means that they can’t derive it from the present. Something else has to fill the void, and that something cannot be practical acts in the present. There are two reasons, mutually exclusive: For some, successfully finding that would reduce frustration and make them focus on the present rather than the future. For others, it would just be one more failure, another more empty nothing, another piece of evidence that the world is against you.

Hoffer:

There is a fundamental difference between the appeal of a mass movement and the appeal of a practical organization. The practical organization offers opportunities for self-advancement, and its appeal is mainly to self-interest. On the other hand, a mass movement, particularly in its active, revivalist phase, appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self. A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation. (...)

One framework for understanding mass movements looks quite similar up until the end. It goes something like this, subbing in terms: populism is the result of [resentment]. The populist movement advances the desires of its adherents over and against an outgroup. “We are the 99%!” means: we’ll take what we want from the rich. Bad for the rich, but certainly good for the 99%. In this view, the ills of a mass movement are their violence, or their illberalism, or their [other].

This is not what Hoffer’s saying. Were that the case, his final sentence would read: “…automatically advances when it seconds the interests of the frustrated.” Mass movements do the opposite: they pretend to give you power, while stealing what little you had; they pretend to solve your problems, while entrenching them. Movements make the frustrated more frustrated and they self-perpetuate with no regard for those who perpetuate them. The seed that they sow is frustration.

This is for one obvious reason: competition. Groups that maintain frustration, or are better at sowing it, will outcompete the others. The strength of a movement is directly proportional to its size and the fanatacism of its adherents, and the fanatacism of its adherents is directly proportional to the frustration they’re trying to escape. Mass movements that are good at what they do: a) make previously content outsiders frustrated; b) further frustrate their adherents while pretending to advance the movement. This means that the strongest mass movements are inevitably going to be the ones that are the best at not delivering the goods. Any movement that actually succeeds for (advances the interests of) its frustrated adherents will make them less frustrated. Hence, they’ll stop being members. Or it will succeed at its purpose, they’ll still be frustrated, and they’ll just join another.

Modern mass movements are actually pretty inexplicable without this. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say [group] never does anything of value, and they’d be much better off if they [achieved this material goal]. I think Hoffer explains this perfectly. To achieve that goal would enervate the movement, and another would fill the void.

(That doesn’t mean it never takes power, just that in taking power it either devolves into an organization or manages to accomplish zero of its utopic plans.)

This sort of sounds good, depending on what the end goal of a mass movement is. But the problem is that it doesn’t mean movements do “nothing”, it means they frantically commit to useless, meaningless tasks that appear to solve something (Hoffer calls this “united action” – it dulls the mind and weakens the person). So instead of fighting the system, they suddenly start fighting random people taken to “represent it” but that specifically have no such power. Or they spend all their time writing manifestos and critiques, screaming and marching for no cause, making everyone else frustrated but fixing absolutely nothing. Or they turn on each other, trying to virtuously succeed at tasks they hate which have no real end. I really need to stress this: it kind of sounds like I’m attacking the left, but this is bipartisan, omnipartisan. All movements have this behavior: think of your own. It’s easy.

by Lou Keep, sam[]zdat |  Read more:

Image: The Silence, Ingmar Bergman

[ed. I've been a fan of Eric Hoffer (the "longshoreman philosopher") all my life, and The True Believer always on my bookshelf.]

The 100 Million City

The 1960 street map of Lagos, Nigeria, shows a small western-style coastal city surrounded by a few semi-rural African villages. Paved roads quickly turn to dirt, and fields to forest. There are few buildings over six floors high and not many cars.

No one foresaw what happened next. In just two generations Lagos grew 100-fold, from under 200,000 people to nearly 20 million. Today one of the world’s 10 largest cities, it sprawls across nearly 1,000 sq km. Vastly wealthy in parts, it is largely chaotic and impoverished. Most residents live in informal settlements, or slums. The great majority are not connected to piped water or a sanitation system. The city’s streets are choked with traffic, its air is full of fumes, and its main dump covers 40 hectares and receives 10,000 metric tons of waste a day.

But new research suggests that the changes Lagos has seen in the last 60 years may be nothing to what might take place in the next 60. If Nigeria’s population continues to grow and people move to cities at the same rate as now, Lagos could become the world’s largest metropolis, home to 85 or 100 million people. By 2100, it is projected to be home to more people than California or Britain today, and to stretch hundreds of miles – with enormous environmental effects. 

Hundreds of far smaller cities across Asia and Africa could also grow exponentially, say the Canadian demographers Daniel Hoornweg and Kevin Pope at the Ontario Institute of Technology. They suggest that Niamey, the barely known capital of Niger – a west African country with the highest birth rate in the world – could explode from a city of fewer than one million people today to be the world’s eighth-largest city, with 46 million people, in 2100. Sleepy Blantyre in southern Malawi could mushroom to the size of New York City today.

Under the researchers’ extreme scenario – where countries are unable to control fertility rates and urbanisation continues apace – within 35 years more than 100 cities will have populations larger than 5.5 million people. By 2100, say the authors, the world’s population centers will have shifted to Asia and Africa, with only 14 of the 101 largest cities in Europe or the Americas.

What happens to those cities over the next 30 years will determine the global environment and the quality of life of the world’s projected 11 billion people. It’s impossible to know how exactly how cities will grow, of course. But the stark fact, according to the United Nations, is that much of humanity is young, fertile and increasingly urban. The median age of Nigeria is just 18, and under 20 across all Africa’s 54 countries; the fertility rate of the continent’s 500 million women is 4.4 births. Elsewhere, half of India’s population is under age 25, and Latin America’s average age is as high as 29.

Latest UN projections expect the world’s population to grow by 2.9 billion – equal to another China and India – in the next 33 years, and possibly by a further three billion by the end of the century. By then, says the UN, humanity is expected to have developed into an almost exclusively urban species with 80-90% of people living in cities.

Whether those cities develop into sprawling, chaotic slums – with unbreathable air, uncontrolled emissions and impoverished populations starved of food and water – or become truly sustainable depends on how they respond. Many economists argue that population growth is needed to create wealth, and that urbanisation significantly reduces humanity’s environmental impact. Other observers fear cities are becoming ungovernable – too unwieldy to adapt to rising temperatures and sea levels, and prone to pollution, water shortages and ill health.

by John Vidal, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Virtuosos of Idleness

Most Americans today find work drudgery and leisure anxiously vacant. In our hours off work, we rarely achieve thrilling adventure, deliberate self-education, or engage in Whitmanian loafing. At the same time, faith is eroding in the idea that paid work can offer pleasure, self-discovery, a means for improving the world, or anything more than material subsistence. Some doubt that paid labor will continue to exist at all. Technological automation threatens to expel workers in droves and press wages downward. In the decades to come, if current trends continue, more people will be handmaidens to robots (think of the harried “pickers” in sweltering Amazon warehouses), or working at the beck and call of efficiency algorithms, than will be supervisors of these technologies. In some industries, subservience to information technology is already the status quo. Truck drivers, once a work force vaunted for its manly independence, are now subject to electronic surveillance, bound to devices that override their own judgment about whether they are too fatigued to drive.

The jobs lost to automation, however, may not be worth mourning. Work these days is not just sterile ground for self-cultivation. It is a site of coercion. Most companies, the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson argues in her remarkable Private Government, operate like communist dictatorships. Communist, because the firm (by definition) owns all the assets and organizes production through central planning rather than internal markets. Dictatorships, because at-will employment—the contractual norm in the United States—allows employers to fire workers for any or no reason, including their speech on social media, their haircut, their choice of sexual partner, or the inconvenient fact that their daughter was raped by a friend of the boss (the last a real-life example Anderson mentions). The infringements and invasions that are daily parts of modern work would be seen as impermissible violations if demanded by a government instead of an employer. Hence some people, such as the British work-refusers recently profiled by the sociologist David Frayne, have tried to subsist outside the workplace in part or altogether.

Accompanying this crisis of work is a crisis of leisure. Americans spend their time off work in unfocused restlessness. Passive amusements dominate nonwork hours, with television consuming the lion’s share of leisure. (American adults watch, on average, 2.7 hours of TV a day, according to US Labor Department surveys; a recent study by Nielsen pegged that figure at more than five hours daily.) And distraction, especially the states of minimal absorption encouraged by browsing on the Internet, is an enemy of both work and high-quality leisure. The slothful withdrawal that characterizes our off hours, coupled with the well-documented weakening of local and community ties, has dispiriting civic implications. The number of Americans who spent 2016 reclining on their beds or sofas, laptops perched on their stomachs as they watched a vulgar demagogue seize power, almost certainly stands in the tens of millions.

Recreational pursuits more demanding than fleeting digital absorption are, increasingly, acts of consumption. Leisure is not something you “do” but something you “buy,” whether in the form of hotels and cruises or Arianna Huffington–vetted mindfulness materials. The leisure industry provides work for some while promising relaxation to others, for a fee.

The sorry state of leisure is partly a consequence of an economy in which we are never fully detached from the demands of work. The category of “free” time is not only defined by its opposite (time “free” of work); it is subordinated to it. Free time, Theodor Adorno warns, “is nothing more than a shadowy continuation of labor.” Free time is mere recovery time. Spells of lethargy between periods of labor do little but prepare us for the resumption of work. Workers depleted by their jobs and in need of recuperation turn to escapist entertainment and vacuous hobbies. And the problem of figuring out when work is “over,” in an economy in which knowledge workers spend their job hours tweeting and their evening hours doing unpaid housework and child care, has never seemed more perplexing.

The prospect of a “postwork” future has spurred renewed support in some quarters for a universal basic income provided by the state. Such proposals have made modest inroads in Europe: Last year, Switzerland put an unconditional monthly income plan to a national vote (finding 23 percent of the electorate in favor), and Finland is testing basic income schemes with a 2,000-person pilot study. The case for basic income has more recently been taken up in the United States, and not just by proponents on the left. Some libertarians and technology-sector leaders have come to see basic income as a way to quell the discontent that structural unemployment and growing wealth inequality might otherwise unleash.

The outcome of today’s push for basic income is far from clear. (The agenda will likely make no strides during the Trump administration.) And blithe predictions about the “end of work” and the consequent need to rethink leisure are often misleadingly simplistic: Analysts such as James Livingston and Yuval Noah Harari routinely understate the obstacles standing in the way of schemes like basic income in large, ethnically diverse countries, and ignore the likelihood that widespread automation will make people feel more precarious and harried (because of the need to cobble together an income from whatever short-term freelance work they can get) rather than less.

The truth is that we need to rethink leisure (however little of it we may possess) regardless of whether paid labor remains the center of our economic structure. (...)

The Idle Future

“The idea that the poor should have leisure,” wrote Bertrand Russell in his 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness,” “has always been shocking to the rich.” Along with John Maynard Keynes’s “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” published two years earlier, Russell’s essay, in which he argues for a four-hour workday, represents a serious attempt to understand what the future could hold for work. If the Victorians’ fanatical devotion to work was passing away, what would replace it?

Russell suspected that for British society in the 1930s, a radically diminished workday was already within reach. That the British populace did not already enjoy a deliciously idle society struck the philosopher as the result of deliberate political choices that overworked half the population and left the rest “to starve as unemployed.” He points to the apparent flexibility of the British labor market during World War I. All the men and women connected with the war effort—serving in the armed forces, working in weapons production, engaging in spying and propaganda—were for the war’s duration withdrawn from productive work. Yet general living standards were higher than ever.

The Therapeutic Three-Hour Workday

Keynes, for his part, saw the leisurely future of England and the United States as an inevitable byproduct of already-visible economic trends. “Mankind is solving its economic problem,” he declares; “the economic problem may be solved, or at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years” (emphasis in the original). Where Russell predicted a four-hour weekday, Keynes suspected that just three hours would suffice. The “age of leisure and of abundance”—an age, he implies, that all of humankind will enter together—is on the cusp of emergence. Meeting material needs was a collective problem shared by the human race. That the economic gains brought about by technology might accrue more to the capital holdings of a small number of elites than to the population at large does not seem to have occurred to him.

Keynes and Russell foresaw just one problem: A lapse into leisure might make us miserable.

“To those who sweat for their daily bread,” Keynes observes, “leisure is a longed-for sweet—until they get it.” Inactivity runs against our nature. By acquiring wealth, we lose the economic need that spurs us to work and create. Prosperity, Keynes warns, could precipitate a widespread nervous breakdown. His suggestion of a three-hour workday is not an economic proposal but a therapeutic one: because of our deep habituation to work, for “many ages to come…everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented.”

Who is the happy idler, according to Keynes? “No country and no people,” he warns, “can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread.… It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents to occupy himself.” People with talents will find their leisure time easily accounted for. But ah, he sighs, “how few of us can sing!” Most of us, cut loose from work and its accompanying rituals and social ties, will be left vacantly unoccupied.

To fix this, Keynes proposes nothing short of a moral revolution:

We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things.

Once freed from the pressure of economic need, society could transform its values and look upon the love of money as a “disgusting morbidity.”

by Charlie Tyson, Hedgehog Review |  Read more:

Image: Summer Idleness: Day Dreams, J. W. Godward via Wikipedia

The Amazing Metabolism of Hummingbirds

Hummingbirds have long intrigued scientists. Their wings can beat 80 times a second. Their hearts can beat more than 1,000 times a minute. They live on nectar and can pack on 40 percent of their body weight in fat for migration.

But sometimes they are so lean that they live close to caloric bankruptcy. At such times, some hummingbirds could starve to death while they sleep because they’re not getting to eat every half-hour or so. Instead they enter a state of torpor, with heartbeat and body temperature turned way down to diminish the need for food.

Kenneth C. Welch Jr. at the University of Toronto, Scarborough has studied the metabolisms of hummingbirds for more than a decade. His most recent research with Derrick J. E. Groom, in his lab, and other colleagues is on the size and energy efficiency in hummingbirds. By using data on oxygen consumption and wing beats to get an idea of how much energy hummingbirds take in and how much work they put out, the scientists found that during strenuous hovering flight, bigger hummingbirds are more efficient energy users than smaller ones. The research was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Excerpts from a telephone conversation with Dr. Welch have been edited for clarity and length.

Q. You manage to get hummingbirds to voluntarily put their heads in masks while they hover and feed. How in the world do you do that?

A. I learned to become a bit of the hummingbird whisperer. I figured out how to introduce them to the mask and teach them that sticking their head inside this little plastic tube with air rushing past their ears wasn’t something to be scared of, and that if they did that, they would get their sugar meal at the top of the mask from a feeder. And they said, “Very well. O.K. I’ll do this in order to get my food. And you can watch me while I do it.”

Q. And what are you watching for?

A. We’re measuring oxygen consumption rates. If I were to stick an elite Olympic athlete, a cross-country skier, onto a cycle ergometer and ask them to wear a mask and say, ‘O.K., go as hard as you can go, and I want to measure your peak metabolic rate,’ one of the ways we can quantify that is in oxygen consumption. So I can say, ‘This human athlete is consuming four milliliters of oxygen per gram of body weight per hour.’

A hummingbird can easily hit 40 milliliters of oxygen per gram per hour. And if I ask the hummingbird to do extra, if I give it a little bit of extra weight to wear, that can go up to well above 60. So, their tissues are using oxygen at rates that are many, many times what we can possibly achieve.

Q. And they need the oxygen to help them metabolize the relatively enormous amounts of sugar they are taking in to get the energy to power their muscles?

A. I did a calculation back in graduate school. It turns out that when they’re hovering around and foraging during the day, they’re pretty much exclusively burning the sugar that they’ve been eating in the last 30 minutes to an hour. And so, they have this incredible ability to move sugar through their system. And I did the calculation and said, ‘O.K., if I scale one of my hummingbirds up to adult male human size, my size, how much sugar would I need to drink per minute if I were theoretically a hovering hummingbird as big as I am?’ It turned out to be right around the amount of sugar that’s in a can of Coca-Cola per minute. I haven’t actually tried to do this. My doctor advised against it.

Q. So they move sugar through their system an awful lot faster than we do?

A. Unlike us, hummingbirds can use the glucose that they’re ingesting in nectar and can move it through their guts, through their circulatory system, and to their muscle cells so fast that they can essentially keep that pipeline going in real time.

You and I can’t do that. We can support some small portion of exercise with newly ingested glucose, about 30 percent. But what’s just as remarkable is that the diet of hummingbirds is nectar and that’s half glucose and half fructose.

Fructose is getting a lot of bad press these days because of high fructose corn syrup in the Western diet and its association with metabolic disease and obesity. We’re not good at using fructose at all. Hummingbirds can use that fructose at very high rates.

Q. How do they do it?

A. Birds and nectar-feeding bats have evolved the ability to enhance the flux of nutrients like small sugars like fructose and glucose or amino acids to more effectively absorb their food. And getting them to their tissues is enhanced because hummingbird muscles and hummingbird hearts and hummingbird blood vessels are so good. The hummingbird heart rate is high and it’s pumping so much blood per unit of time. They have lots and lots of capillaries that allow the blood to get up close and personal to their muscle cells.

And hummingbirds can apparently take up fructose in their cells, and we’re trying to figure out what enables that. We do know that there is a different form of glucose transporter that is a specialist at taking up fructose. In our muscle cells that transporter is barely present. But hummingbird muscle fibers tend to have a lot of this transporter. So, we think we’re a little closer to understanding how they can take up fructose so fast. But the story’s not yet complete. We need to do some follow up work in order to really confirm that.

by James Gorman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

Land of the Lawless

In the late 1970s, I had lunch with the head of the Internal Revenue Service. I broached a subject long on my mind: “I have been told that the section on insurance in the tax code is so complex that fewer people understand it than understand Einstein’s theory of relativity.” He replied that he wouldn’t doubt if that were true. So I followed up and asked, “How can it be enforced?” His answer was that it largely wasn’t.

If this seems shocking, beware—lawlessness is an overwhelming fact of American life, though little attention is paid to this many-unsplendored phenomenon. How many times have we been told that our country is under the rule of law and that nobody is above it? Yet the country’s legal life is defined instead by major zones of lawlessness created, in one aspect, by noncompliance and lack of enforcement and, in another, by raw power, which can be political, economic, or armed. These multiplying zones have pushed the rule of law into little more than a torrent of dysfunctional myths.

You might think attending one of Amer­ica’s 205 accredited law schools would help a person see through all this. But with few exceptions, law schools teach the rule of law as if it were the norm—as if public condemnations of criminal acts and sometimes prosecuted violations mean our culture really is defined by its laws. Courses push students to hone their analytic skills to find conflicts, inconsistencies, distinctions, ambiguities, and textual improvements in the formal legal system. Rarely is the rule of law exposed for what it is, though from time to time schools of legal thought do examine this—as did the “legal realists” at Yale Law School from the 1920s to the 1950s or the “critical legal studies” professors from the 1970s through the 1990s. But the language of these schools was too abstruse. The scholars did not focus enough on reaching outside their academic groves and were mostly unable to foster any kind of social justice movement that could make the law mean what it should—that is, justice.

Over the past century, as laws have become more remote from public education and distant from popular access, they have also become more complex and more pervasive. In parallel, the various zones of lawlessness have expanded and the rule of power has increased. Occasional high-profile prosecutions or sanctions have helped promulgate the idea that laws are effective in their coverage, but such prosecutions have often been ineffective, with corporations demanding that Congress eliminate criminal penalties for willful and knowing violation of the law. To give just one example, corporate lobbyists succeeded in eliminating the criminal penalty from the 1966 automobile-safety laws, even when people were killed due to knowing violations of the government’s motor-vehicle safety regulations.

To see through a myth as pervasive as our rule of law requires a journey through these zones of lawlessness. Taking it may provoke the constructive outrage that can come from an informed sense of injustice.

***

Let’s start with systematic violations of the law that escape enforcement year after year. First, the health care industry, in which at least 10 percent of what our country spends goes down the drain from computerized billing fraud and abuse. According to Harvard professor Malcolm Sparrow, author of License to Steal, this 10 percent figure represents the minimum amount. Applying it to this year would produce a fraud amount of about $350 billion. The fraud is rarely prosecuted. In 1992 the Government Accountability Office estimated a comparable 10 percent drain, but Congress continued to starve the enforcement budgets of the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice. These agencies recover less than $3 billion of what’s defrauded from Medicaid, Medicare, and Tricare military insurance each year—appallingly low, given that commercial crooks defraud an estimated $60 billion from Medicare alone.

Even more alarming is what we learn from a May 2016 report from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine estimating that there are a minimum of 250,000 lives lost yearly due to preventable problems in our nation’s hospitals. That’s an average of 5,000 deaths a week. These deaths stem largely from continual negligence—which can include accidents, misdiagnoses, malpractice, and hospital-induced infections—but criminal negligence and outright profit-driven criminality are also prevalent. Though these mass violations are supposed to be actionable by public prosecution and by private civil action under our tort laws, far less than 5 percent of potential civil cases are brought to attorneys by next of kin. Prosecutions are much rarer. (...)

Corporations further assert their power over the rule of law through tax evasion and avoidance. As Congress cut the IRS budget over the past decade (with inflation adjusted, down more than 25 percent from 2009), the agency has been increasingly unable to enforce the law against what it says is $400 billion a year in “uncollected taxes”—a sum that does not even include huge “avoided taxes” that flow from corporate lobbyists driving their agendas through a greased Congress. The result of this, says Robert McIntyre, who was the director of Citizens for Tax Justice for many years, is that citizen taxpayers have to pay more taxes and receive fewer public services or else incur larger government deficits.

Ongoing myths about the law serve to camouflage or protect these truly dominant acts of power—that’s an important reason for the near nonexistence of regular compliance reports by regulatory agencies to Congress and the public. Such reports would not only show widespread noncompliance and minimal enforcement, they would also reveal just how little help the aggrieved classes receive from legal processes. And, of course, indentured enforcement agencies do not have much interest in publicizing widespread violations of such magnitude. Doing so might generate an appropriate level of outrage—which could spur a movement to change the system that powerful institutions are more interested in keeping the way it is.

Why would government want to help diminish these zones of lawlessness? It, too, operates in one. Our uncontrollable national-security government has given us secret wars, secret law, secret courts, secret evidence, secret prisons, unauthorized secret budgets, unlawful surveillance of attorney-client communications, blatant snooping on all Americans, unauditable secret expenditures for quagmires abroad, and even redacted published judicial decisions. Though due process of law is arguably the greatest legal achievement of Western civilization, unlawful imprisonment (now euphemistically called “detention,” regardless of duration) of domestic persons and aliens are the stuff of media exposés that mostly go nowhere. Our government has too often shunted aside probable cause and upended habeas corpus and other bulwarks of due process. And U.S. courts contribute to the impunity through knee-jerk procedures blocking lawsuit challenges due to presumed “lack of standing” or by saying that a dispute is “political” and can only be resolved between the executive and legislative branches.

Then, when legal bodies do attempt to speak out against this lawlessness, they are ignored. In 2005 and 2006, the normally reticent and conservative American Bar Association (under its president Michael Greco) sent three unprecedented white papers to President George W. Bush asserting that he was in violation of the Constitution. Neither Bush nor Vice President Dick Cheney ever bothered to acknowledge, much less respond to, these charges from the largest bar association in the world.

The government continued its extensive violations of our constitutional freedoms. In January 2012, an extraordinary article was published in the Washington Post by George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley outlining ten of them, which flowed from the official misuses of laws as well as from the instruments of oppression themselves, including all-too-routine prosecutorial abuses and law­lessness among police and in prisons. New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s 2018 State of the State address picked up on a similar theme, giving a shocking statistic: 75 percent of all inmates languishing in New York City jails have not been convicted of a crime but are simply awaiting trial. (Although not the subject of this essay, the lawlessness of the powerful—through their actions or inactions—have often worked to worsen the incidence of street and domestic violence.)

The view is no better on the international stage, where law cannot keep up with the violent insults of noncompliance with constitutions, treaties, or statutory restraints—from the general precepts of the laws of war to specific provisions of the Geneva Conventions. National sovereignties are routinely overridden by undeclared wars of choice, drone killings, illegal armed incursions, torture, and the widening license accorded military contractors. Greenhouse gases originate in one nation but traverse the globe, leading to devastating impacts. All are outside of any legal frameworks.

The maturation of the so-called corporate state has made all this even more entrenched. A major factor is military contracting. In September 2007 the government-contracted Blackwater Corporation used weaponized vehicles to slaughter fourteen unarmed Iraqis in one of Baghdad’s public squares. This briefly occasioned some attention from Congress, but by the end of October, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had officially informed the House Oversight Committee that—remarkably—there was no law covering the actions of Blackwater and their private police in Iraq. It seems that any crimes committed by corporations commissioned by the Defense and State Departments to perform guard duty and other classified tasks fell into a gap between Iraqi law—from which they were exempted by the U.S. military occupation—and the laws of the U.S. military itself. The rights of the individual guards were less clear; though some have been prosecuted, a single conviction for first-degree murder was overturned in circuit court in 2017.

Such lawless zones only become more complicated as technology advances. The daily evidence of international cyberwarfare and hacking—as well as corporate espionage—occurs without any framework of international law. There is presently no serious effort by the community of nations to negotiate international treaties regarding this volcanic, intrusive technology that, apart from stealing personal and official records, can destroy the critical infrastructure of societies.

***

Recourse does—or should—exist. America inherited from medieval England two great liberation movements for private action against wrongdoers: the law of contract and the law of torts. These two pillars of our private law are meant to empower wrongfully injured or defrauded people against wrongdoers by giving them their day in court with a trial by jury.

But here, too, powerful forces have fomented a culture of lawlessness. Corporate power has been able to erode the strength of these remedies by imposing one-sided fine-print contracts and by lobbying legislatures to seriously weaken the content and use of tort law. Though the latter is euphemistically called “tort reform,” it is a reform for corporations, not people. Corporate lobbyists have succeeded in having legislation enacted that arbitrarily ties the hands of judges and juries, who are the only ones who see, hear, and evaluate the evidence in each case in court. These lobbyists seek nothing less than impunity and immunity for their corporate entities.

Prominent lawyers, too, have been involved in weakening these remedies. Their unprofessional conduct flows from their status as so-called officers of the court, whose ethical responsibilities should be pointing them instead toward widening access to justice and its judicial institutions. But corporate law firms are the brains behind the political and economic dom­ination of corporatism and its corporate state, which runs roughshod over weakening labor unions and consumer-defense organizations. They systematically obstruct use of the law by the very people meant to be protected by it.

by Ralph Nader, Lapham's Quarterly |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Craigslist’s Legendary Personals Section Shuts Down

Back before matching algorithms and swiping left and right were the only ways to find love (or lust) online, there was a thing called Craigslist. The idea behind Craigslist is “what if the classified ads, but online?” Aside from selling things, one of the most popular parts of the site was for finding dates — or paid companionship.

This week, the House of Representatives approved a bill known as FOSTA (Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017), which places legal responsibility for sex-work interactions on platform holders, rather than individual users. It’s a dramatic shift, since platform holders have, for years, been immune to legal responsibility for what their users do on their platforms, provided that they responded to inappropriate behavior effectively.

Unlike companies like Facebook or Google, however, Craigslist is and has always been stubbornly simple. It doesn’t use advanced AI or whatever to root out bad posts. Because of that, the site announced last night that it was taking down the Personals section entirely.

A brief note reads:

US Congress just passed HR 1865, “FOSTA”, seeking to subject websites to criminal and civil liability when third parties (users) misuse online personals unlawfully.

Any tool or service can be misused. We can’t take such risk without jeopardizing all our other services, so we are regretfully taking craigslist personals offline. Hopefully we can bring them back some day.

To the millions of spouses, partners, and couples who met through craigslist, we wish you every happiness!

This sort of reaction is one that those who oppose the bill feared; that it would cause a chilling effect on legitimate platforms that would shut down functionality entirely rather than assume the legal risk. In the meantime, the one guy still in charge of personal ads at your local print paper is doing backflips.

by Brian Feldman, Select/All |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: How Congress Censored the Internet (EFF)]

The Math Behind Pennsylvania's Partisan Gerrymandering

The morning John Kennedy was set to testify last December, he woke up at 1:30 am, in an unfamiliar hotel room in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, adrenaline coursing through his veins. He'd never gone to court before for anything serious, much less taken the stand.

Some time after sunrise, he headed to the courthouse, dressed in a gray Brooks Brothers suit, and spent the next several hours reviewing his notes and frantically pacing the halls. “I think I made a groove in the floor,” Kennedy says.

By 3:30 pm, it was finally time. Kennedy’s answers started off slowly, as he worked to steady his nerves. Then, about an hour into his testimony, Exhibit 81 flashed on a screen inside the courtroom. It was a map of part of Pennsylvania’s seventh congressional district, but it might as well have been a chalk outline of a body.

“It was like a crime scene,” explains Daniel Jacobson, an attorney for Arnold & Porter, which represented the League of Women Voters in its bid to overturn Pennsylvania’s 2011 electoral map, drawn by the state’s majority Republican General Assembly. The edges of the district skitter in all manner of unnatural directions, drawing comparisons to a sketch of Goofy kicking Donald Duck.

As an expert witness for the League of Women Voters and a political scientist at West Chester University, Kennedy’s job was to show how the state’s map had evolved over time, and to prove that the General Assembly had drawn it specifically to ensure that Republicans would always win the most seats in Congress.

“Mr. Kennedy, what is this?” asked John Freedman, Jacobson’s colleague, referring to the tiny, single point that connects one sprawling side of the district to the other. Or, if you like, where Goofy’s toe meets Donald’s rear.

“A steakhouse,” Kennedy answered, according to the court transcript. “Creed's Seafood Steaks in King of Prussia.”

The only thing holding the district together, in other words, was a single ritzy seafood joint.

“If you were in the courtroom, it was just devastating,” Jacobson says.

Districts like Pennsylvania’s seventh don’t get drawn that way by accident. They’re designed by dint of the centuries-old practice of gerrymandering, in which the party in power carves up the electoral map to their favor. The playbook is simple: Concentrate as many of your opponents’ votes into a handful of districts as you can, a tactic known as "packing." Then spread the remainder of those votes thinly across a whole lot of districts, known as “cracking.” If it works as intended, the opposition will win a few districts by a landslide, but never have enough votes in the rest to win the majority of seats. The age of computer-generated data splicing has made this strategy easier than ever.

Until recently, courts have only moved to stop gerrymandering based on race. But now, the law is taking a closer look at partisan gerrymandering, too. On Monday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued a brand new congressional map to replace the one Kennedy testified about. The new map follows a landmark decision last month, in which the three Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices overruled a lower-court decision and found that Pennsylvania’s 2011 map did in fact violate the state constitution’s guarantee of “free and equal elections.” The court ordered the Pennsylvania General Assembly to submit a new map, with approval of Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Tom Wolf. Following unsuccessful appeals by the General Assembly, the court drafted and approved its own map, which will now be in effect for the midterm elections in November, opening up a new field of opportunity for Democrats in the state.

On Tuesday morning, President Trump urged Republicans in the state to "challenge the new 'pushed' Congressional Map, all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary. Your Original was correct!"

According to Jacobson, given the Supreme Court of the United States already declined to stay the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's decision, it's unlikely they'll take up the case. It's already agreed to hear four other gerrymandering cases this term, which may well re-write the rules on this twisted system nationwide.

The change that's already come to Pennsylvania may not have been possible without the research Kennedy and three other expert witnesses brought to light. They took the stand with a range of analyses, some based in complex quantitative theory, others, like Kennedy’s, based in pure cartography. But they all reached the same conclusion: Pennsylvania’s map had been so aggressively gerrymandered for partisan purposes that it silenced the voices of Democratic voters in the state. Here's how each came to that conclusion—and managed to convince the court.

by Issie Lapowsky, Wired |  Read more: 

Images: Pennsylvania electoral map (since 2013) and Remedial Plan

Takahashi Hiroaki dit Shotei 高橋弘明, Black cat and tomato
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