Author: Christopher Burg

The Shit Show of Shit Shows

Yesterday it was announced that Officer Noor is pleading not guilty to the charges against him:

The former Minneapolis police officer charged in the fatal shooting of Justine Damond last July plans to plead not guilty, using self-defense and reasonable force as a defense during trial, according to court documents.

I’m very curious to see what evidence will be presented by Noor’s defense to support their claim that he was acting in self-defense and used reasonable force. However, the courts tend to side heavily with law enforcers so I wouldn’t be surprised if he beats the charges even with the flimsiest of evidence.

What I do know is that this case is going to be a shit show.

There Is No Winning with Community Rules

Facebook has had a rough year. As a service with over two billion active users, it has been receiving a constant stream of mutually exclusive demands. Unfortunately, there is no way to please everybody when they want mutually exclusive things. For example, a lot of Facebook’s users want the service to be a place that upholds the ideals of free speech while a lot of its other users want the service to regulate various forms of speech.

Facebook responded to these demands by enforcing “community standards.” However, its enforcement of these “community standards” have seemed arbitrary because they’ve never actually been published. But the age of being punished for violating a secret set of rules is over. Facebook has finally publishing its community standards:

Facebook has released a lengthy 22-point document that explains more fully what its “community standards” are—in short, what is and isn’t allowed on the platform.

Now that the age of being punished for violating a secret set of rules is over, the age of having to interpret the published rules can being!

There is no winning condition when it comes to community rules. If you enforce a secret set of rules, your users become upset because they feel arbitrarily punished. If you enforce a public set of rules, your users still become upset because they feel arbitrarily punished whenever their interpretation of the rules differs from an enforcer’s interpretation.

Anybody who has had the task of enforcing rules in a community knows that the devil is in the details. A rule that states, “racism is prohibited,” may seem straight forward but it’s not. Race isn’t a concrete idea. Americans generally tie race to external appearances. Judaism, for example, wouldn’t normally be considered a race by American standards. However, Judaism is considered a race by Nazism. If somebody posts something anti-Semitic, does the rule against racism apply? If you decide it does and ban the user, they will likely argue that the rule doesn’t apply because Judaism isn’t a race, it’s a religion. Simple enough, just create a rule against religious discrimination, right? Discrimination, like race, also lacks a concrete definition. For example, if I call Christianity barbaric because most sects of Christianity oppose same-sex marriage, am I being discriminatory? Some may interpret my statement as discriminatory, others may interpret my statement to be a valid criticism.

There is no way to satisfy 2.2 billion users. For most communities, being unable to satisfy everybody usually leads to a healthy split. For a service like Facebook that relies on having billions of users to make itself appealing to advertisement buyers, a community split is dangerous. However, it is also unavoidable because there is literally no way to win.

Safety First

Although I have nothing even as insignificant as statistics to support this, I don’t think that it’s outside the realm of possibility that a correlation exists between ease of life and risk. There appears to be a tendency for people with easier lives have less risk tolerance. By and large the average person in the United States is well off compared to the average person in many other regions of the world. The average person in the United States also seems to have become more risk adverse and that aversion seems to be spreading to the point of absurdity:

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. (AP) — A near-century-old outdoor recreation club will now refrain from going outside because it is too dangerous out in the wilderness, according to officials at Penn State University.

The Penn State Outing Club, originally founded in 1920, announced last week that the university will no longer allow the club to organize outdoor, student-led trips starting next semester. The hiking, camping and other outdoors-focused activities the student-led club has long engaged in are too risky, the university’s offices of Student Affairs and Risk Management determined.

When I first read the headline I assumed that the Penn State Outing Club was partaking in firearm-related activities and that this decision was really a move to punish gun enthusiast. After all, it struck me as absurd that a university would ban one of its organizations from partaking in mundane outdoor activities like hiking and camping. Then I read the article. Now I realize that the United States really has reached where things I think are too absurd to be reality and, in fact, reality.

Unfortunately, risk aversion is contrary to reality, which is extremely risky. You certainly can be injured while hiking or camping but you can also be injured walking around town. At any moment you could be hit by a car, you could trip over a broken piece of sidewalk, or you could be bitten by a stray dog. This isn’t even beginning to touch on the “background radiation” risks like the increased pollution of cities that leads to numerous health issues in the long run. Hell, you might just have the bad luck of being killed by a meteorite.

Different people are going to have different levels of risk tolerance. If you are entirely intolerance or risk, you are going to have a tough time living in this universe that is constantly trying to kill you.

Oftentimes It’s Impossible to Determine Who Is Right

When two parties have a disagreement and provide opposing explanations for the disagreement, how do you determine which is giving an accurate explanation and which is giving an inaccurate explanation? If you’re watching the situation from the outside, you often can’t. However, that doesn’t stop individuals from reacting. A good example of this is the recent spat between the National Rifle Association (NRA) and Yeti:

The stunt followed a letter to NRA members sent by the NRA Institute for Legislative Action announcing that Yeti had severed ties with the NRA Foundation, following the lead of other companies in the wake of the Feb. 14 Parkland, Fla., shooting massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

The letter, sent by former NRA president and current lobbyist Marion P. Hammer, said the company “declined to do business with The NRA Foundation” without prior notice and “refused to say why.”

“They will only say they will no longer sell products to The NRA Foundation,” Hammer wrote. “That certainly isn’t sportsmanlike. In fact, YETI should be ashamed.”

But on Monday, just as the backlash and calls for boycott picked up steam, Yeti said in a statement to The Washington Post, also posted on Yeti’s Facebook account, that the NRA letter was “inaccurate.” The Austin-based retailer said it notified various organizations, including the NRA Foundation, that it was eliminating a “group of outdated discounting programs” from which the organizations benefited.

The NRA was not specifically targeted, Yeti said.

“When we notified the NRA Foundation and the other organizations of this change, YETI explained that we were offering them an alternative customization program broadly available to consumers and organizations, including the NRA Foundation,” Yeti said. “These facts directly contradict the inaccurate statement the NRA-ILA distributed on April 20.”

According to the NRA, Yeti severed business times without prior notification. According to Yeti, it discontinued a group of discounts for multiple organizations and offered a more customization option to those organizations. The NRA then said that Yeti was lying and Yeti in turn said that the NRA was lying. Who should be believed and why?

This is one of the arguments currently being had on numerous online communities. One side claims that the NRA is telling the truth while the other side claims that Yeti is telling the truth. Some of those who believe that the NRA is telling the truth have reacted by destroying Yeti products that they previous purchased. Meanwhile, some of those who believe that Yeti is telling the truth have called those destroying their Yeti products dumbasses.

Realistically, there is no way for those of us outside of the decision making apparatuses of these parties to know the truth. We don’t have access to the agreements between the NRA and Yeti. We don’t have access to the reason why Yeti discontinued its discount program. We don’t have access to the list of other parties that were also supposedly impacted by the discontinuation of the discount program. What we do have are statements made by two disagreeing parties. Trying to determine which of the two is giving an accurate summary of events is like trying to determine which spouse in a messy divorce is giving an accurate summary of the events that lead to the divorce.

Unfortunately, in these situations people tend to side themselves with whichever party they like better. Diehard supporters of the NRA will likely side with the NRA whereas diehard supporters of Yeti will likely side with Yeti. Likewise, people who hate the NRA may side with Yeti whereas people who hate Yeti may side with the NRA. Both sides will justify their position as being made by something other than their personal feelings but those justifications will almost certainly be based on statements made by the party they’re siding with.

I would argue that a better default position would be to side with neither party in a disagreement. Instead of a knee jerk reaction, why not be patient and wait for more information to possibly come to light? After all, what benefit is there from picking a side in an disagreement that doesn’t directly involve you?

The Devil Is in the Details

I, probably like most people who travel in libertarian circles likely, have friends on both sides of the abortion aisle. The last few days my friends who are against abortion have been celebrating this piece of news:

Michael Bowman, a 53-year-old self-employed computer software developer from Columbia City, Oregon, hasn’t paid his federal income taxes since 1999.

He says it’s because his Christian ideals don’t allow him to pay into a system that funds abortions. In a YouTube video explainer of his defense, he likened paying taxes that then go toward funding abortions to German citizens under Nazi rule who outed Jewish citizens, sending them to their deaths.

And according to The Associated Press, he beat the feds in court this week.

Unfortunately, many of my friends celebrating this piece of news apparently stopped reading at this point. If they had read further, they would have learned that Bowman didn’t win an argument saying that being forced to pay for something that are at odds with his religious beliefs is wrong. He won an argument saying that he didn’t commit felony tax evasion:

To be clear, Bowman won the battle, not the war he’s fighting with the IRS and the Oregon U.S. District Court, when federal Judge Michael W. Mosman dismissed a felony tax evasion charge against Bowman.

Mosman ruled that the government’s indictment failed to provide any evidence that Bowman tried to conceal money from or misled the IRS by cashing his paychecks instead of depositing them and keeping a low bank balance so tax collectors couldn’t garnish wages from it to pay what it says are back taxes owed.

From what I’ve been able to ascertain, Bowman hasn’t made any effort to conceal the fact that he’s not paying taxes. He’s not evading taxes, he’s outright refusing to pay them. However, this decision doesn’t mean that his battle is over and that people can now avoid paying taxes by declaring that they’re Christian and therefore unwilling to pay taxes due to their opposition to abortion. The charge was dismissed without prejudice, which means prosecutors can seek a new indictment. Moreover, Bowman is still facing misdemeanor charges for willfully refusing to pay taxes.

I believe that people shouldn’t be forced to pay for something they don’t want. If Bowman doesn’t want his money going towards supporting abortion, he shouldn’t be forced to pay money that goes towards supporting abortion. Unfortunately, the legal system in the United States doesn’t believe as I do, which means Bowman will likely be found guilty and be forced to pay the taxes he owes along with the penalty.

Government Granted Monopolies are Good for Business

Few markets in the United States are as ripe with corruption as the medical market:

A drug that treats a variety of white blood cell cancers typically costs about $148,000 a year, and doctors can customize and quickly adjust doses by adjusting how many small-dose pills of it patients should take each day—generally up to four pills. At least, that was the case until now.

Last year, doctors presented results from a small pilot trial hinting that smaller doses could work just as well as the larger dose—dropping patients down from three pills a day to just one. Taking just one pill a day could dramatically reduce costs to around $50,000 a year. And it could lessen unpleasant side-effects, such as diarrhea, muscle and bone pain, and tiredness. But just as doctors were gearing up for more trials on the lower dosages, the makers of the drug revealed plans that torpedoed the doctors’ efforts: they were tripling the price of the drug and changing pill dosages.

Before some socialist reads this and thinks that they’re going to be oh so clever by posting, “See? This is what happens under capitalism,” let me explain how this kind of behavior is enabled by government.

In a market unrestrained by government interference, news stories like this would result in competitors making cheaper alternatives to the drug in question. However, in this case the manufacturer has a patent, a government sanctioned monopoly, on the chemical makeup of the drug, which makes it illegal for other manufacturers, at least in countries that recognize the patent, to make a product using that same chemical makeup. If a drug manufacturer wants to triple the price of their patented products, there’s nothing to stop them because no competition exists.

If you look at drugs that are no longer patented, there are usually several generic alternatives to the name brand drug. These generics have the same chemical makeup and therefore do the same thing but they usually cost a fraction of the cost of the name brand version. Once a generic is on the market the original manufacturer can either keep their prices absurdly high and lose a bunch of business or bring their prices down to a more reasonable level in an attempt to compete.

Unfortunately, so long as manufacturers can patent chemistry, they can set their prices as high as they want.

Facebook Demonstrates the Irrelevancy of Laws

Laws are irrelevant so I became curious about how companies would get around the European Union’s new privacy laws. Facebook announced its plan and it will likely be the blueprint other companies will follow:

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – If a new European law restricting what companies can do with people’s online data went into effect tomorrow, almost 1.9 billion Facebook Inc users around the world would be protected by it. The online social network is making changes that ensure the number will be much smaller.

[…]

Facebook members outside the United States and Canada, whether they know it or not, are currently governed by terms of service agreed with the company’s international headquarters in Ireland.

Next month, Facebook is planning to make that the case for only European users, meaning 1.5 billion members in Africa, Asia, Australia and Latin America will not fall under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which takes effect on May 25.

This move will make the new European Union regulations only apply to users living in the European Union. And fear not! After a few court cases have been fought over this law, Facebook’s lawyers will have judges’ interpretations of the law to work with, which will give them the wiggle room they need to make the law irrelevant to people living in the European Union as well.

Once again, if you want to defend your privacy against Facebook, you have to take matters into your own hands. No amount of legislation is going to protect you.

Set a Strong Password on Your Phone

My girlfriend and I had to take our cat to the emergency vet last night so I didn’t have an opportunity to prepare much material for today. However, I will leave you with a security tip. You should set a strong password on your phone:

How long is your iPhone PIN? If you still use one that’s only made by six numbers (or worse, four!), you may want to change that.

Cops all over the United States are racing to buy a new and relatively cheap technology called GrayKey to unlock iPhones. GrayShift, the company that develops it, promises to crack any iPhone, regardless of the passcode that’s on it. GrayKey is able to unlock some iPhones in two hours, or three days for phones with six digit passcodes, according to an anonymous source who provided security firm Malwarebytes with pictures of the cracking device and some information about how it works.

The article goes on to explain that you should use a password with lowercase and upper case letters, numbers, and symbols. Frankly, I think such advice is antiquated and prefer the advice given in this XKCD comic. You can create more bits of entropy if you have a longer password that is easier to remember. Instead of having something like “Sup3r53cretP@5sw0rd” you could have “garish-bethel-perry-best-finale.” The second is easier to remember and is actually longer. Moreover, you can increase your security by tacking on additional words. If you want a randomly generated password, you can use a Diceware program such as this one (which I used to generate the latter of the two passwords.

Justice in the United States

When I discuss the justice system in the United States, I use the word justice with a heavy dose of sarcasm. Justice, at least in my book, implies that a wronged party has been compensated for the damages they suffered by the party that wronged them. Here in the United States justice tends to imply that a governmental body has been compensated for the damages suffered by another party:

T-Mobile USA has agreed to pay a $40 million fine after admitting that it failed to complete phone calls in rural areas and used “false ring tones” that created the appearance that the calls were going through and no one was picking up.

“To settle this matter, T-Mobile admits that it violated the Commission’s prohibition against the insertion of false ring tones and that it did not correct problems with delivery of calls to certain rural areas,” states an order issued by the Federal Communications Commission today.

T-Mobile will pay the $40 million fine into the US Treasury. FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn criticized the commission for not getting refunds for customers.

According to the Fascist Communications Club (FCC), T-Mobile wronged rural customers by inserting false ring tones on their lines and failing to correct issues that resulted in calls not being delivered. To punish T-Mobile the FCC fined it $40 million. However, that entire post is going to the FCC. The wrong parties, the rural individuals who had to deal with false ring tones and calls not being delivered, won’t receive a penny. T-Mobile isn’t even required to issue refunds.

This isn’t uncommon. Government regulators often accuse companies of harming individuals. The result of such accusations tends to be fines that are payable to the accusing agency while the parties that the accuser claimed were the actual wronged parties go without compensation. That doesn’t qualify as justice in my book. It’s just a scam for government busybodies to line their pockets while pretending to represent “the people.”