Tag: Not So Crazy Libertarian Ideals

The Surveillance State Starts At Home

As a man in his early 30s I like I’m too young to start with the, “Back in my day,” business. But back in my day kids had some semblance of privacy.

Many of my friends are at a point in life where they’re running into undiscovered territory as parents. When this happens they often post on Facebook to crowd source ideas from parents who have already blazed the path. Reading the recommendations posted by these parents, frankly, scares the shit out of me.

One of my friends has decided to get iPhones for his children. Because he’s not terribly familiar with electronics he asked Facebook for advice on what to do. I told him to ensure his kids put a password on it to protect the device contents (serious) and explain to them that cell phones are voluntary tracking devices so leave them at home when they’re doing something illegal (tongue in cheek).

What some parents posted was frightening. One parent advised my friend to enable Find My iPhone but not tell his kids about it (then explained how this helped her catch her kid lying about sleeping over somewhere one night). Another parent told my friend to prohibit his kids from setting a password and to periodically read through their messages. In fact reading through messages was advice posted by several parents. Yet another parent advised that he require his kids to hand over their phone every night so he can “charge” it (I used quotation marks here because charge is merely an excuse to perform a thorough nightly snooping mission).

If these parents’ Big Brother tendency stopped at personal electronics that might be one thing. But I’ve also seen parents comment in other threads about how they took the door off of their kids’ bedrooms.

Admittedly I’m not a parent but I was a kid and had parents. My parents were and continue to be cool. One thing I greatly appreciate is that they’ve always trusted me. I not only had a door on my bedroom but the door had a lock. They never required me to give them the passwords to my computers or online accounts. The only time they became snoopy is when I did something that justifiably betrayed their trust.

But its seems a lot of parents don’t trust their children. They treat their children like suspects under an investigation. Why you snoop through your kids’ communications, prohibit them from securing devices in a manner you cannot access, or take the door off of their bedroom you’re saying you don’t trust them. That’s an environment that’s bound to breed unhealthy paranoia and distrust in the very people they’re supposed to trust. I believe the mantra of “Innocent until proven guilty,” applies in all aspects of life. If your child has done something to betray your trust then there are grounds to perform an investigation. But I can’t imagine how treating your child like a suspect even when you have no reason to be suspicious is helpful to them.

The Decentralized Internet

“Internet provision is a natural monopoly!” How many times have you heard some economic illiterati say that? I’m sure you’ve heard it a few times even though the entire concept of natural monopoly is a myth. To demonstrate this I’m going to provide a couple of examples of decentralized Internet architectures. First we’re going to look at the corporate world where one Internet Service Provider (ISP) has decided centralized infrastructure isn’t fulfilling all of its needs:

Well T-Mobile wants to fix all that… by putting an LTE tower in your house. Yes, the unconventional carrier has announced a 4G LTE CellSpot that it says will offer 3,000 square feet of LTE coverage for your home or business. Plug it into the wall outlet, connect it to the internet, and your LTE connection will get a boost anywhere T-Mobile has spectrum. The CellSpot supports up to 16 calls at a time, and will work with any 3G, 4G, and LTE device on T-Mobile’s network.

T-Mobile’s biggest limitation is coverage. Improving coverage isn’t easy for a cell carrier because building towers is expensive and the bureaucracy between them and their customers is significant (my hometown kept denying AT&T permission to build a new tower simply because the city council didn’t want travelers to see an “ugly” tower when they passed through town). Being able to install a lot of microcells is a lot easier than building a tower simply because the carrier doesn’t have to buy land and get permission from local bureaucracies.

Two mistakes T-Mobile is making, in my opinion, is only allowing its customers to install these CellSpots and not paying people who choose to install them:

And the price is right too — eligible Simple Choice customers can get the LTE CellSpot for free (with a refundable $25 deposit), and keep it as long as they are customers of T-Mobile.

I bet T-Mobile would quickly find itself enjoying spectacular coverage if it paid anybody willing to install one of these in their home or business a little kickback (these microcells, after all, are consuming electricity and using bandwidth). For the right price (which means enough for me to make a little bit of profit) I’d be willing to install one of these in my home and I’m not even a T-Mobile customer.

Admittedly relying on a centralized ISP, even if they’re utilizing a decentralized architecture, isn’t exactly demonstrating that Internet provision isn’t a natural monopoly. Fear not! T-Mobile isn’t the only game in town:

When you live somewhere with slow and unreliable Internet access, it usually seems like there’s nothing to do but complain. And that’s exactly what residents of Orcas Island, one of the San Juan Islands in Washington state, were doing in late 2013. Faced with CenturyLink service that was slow and outage-prone, residents gathered at a community potluck and lamented their current connectivity.

“Everyone was asking, ‘what can we do?’” resident Chris Brems recalls. “Then [Chris] Sutton stands up and says, ‘Well, we can do it ourselves.’”

When somebody says, “Well, we can do it ourselves,” you know they’re on the right track:

Faced with a local ISP that couldn’t provide modern broadband, Orcas Island residents designed their own network and built it themselves. The nonprofit Doe Bay Internet Users Association (DBIUA), founded by Sutton, Brems, and a few friends, now provide Internet service to a portion of the island. It’s a wireless network with radios installed on trees and houses in the Doe Bay portion of Orcas Island. Those radios get signals from radios on top of a water tower, which in turn receive a signal from a microwave tower across the water in Mount Vernon, Washington.

[…]

Back in 2013, CenturyLink service was supposed to provide up to 1.5Mbps downloads speeds, but in reality we “had 700kbps sometimes, and nothing at others,” Brems told Ars. When everyone came home in the evening, “you would get 100kbps down and almost nothing up, and the whole thing would just collapse. It’s totally oversubscribed,” Sutton said.

That 10-day outage in November 2013 wasn’t a fluke. At various times, CenturyLink service would go out for a couple of days until the company sent someone out to fix it, Sutton said. But since equipping the island with DBIUA’s wireless Internet, outages have been less frequent and “there are times we’re doing 30Mbps down and 40Mbps up,” Brems said. “It’s never been below 20 or 25 unless we had a problem.”

A better, more reliable service for less. What more could one ask for? Anybody who lives in a rural area knows the struggle of getting fast, reliable Internet access. Unfortunately many people in rural areas turn their frustrations into political campaigns. By the time they’re done they have higher taxes and promises from the local, state, or federal government that go unfulfilled. Had they taken the money they invested in political shenanigans and instead built a network they would have fast, reliable Internet connectivity. This is why you should listen to the person who says, “Well, we can do it ourselves,” instead of the idiot who tries to start a political campaign.

Internet provision isn’t a natural monopoly. A community can come together and build their own network and attach it to the Internet. This is even easier now that wireless connectivity is no longer slow or outrageously expensive.

Volkswagen Gives Americans What They Want, Americans Buy Volkswagens, Statists Confused By Markets

A lot of electrons have been annoyed by people writing about the Volkswagen scandal. In an effort to give customers the performance they want while still passing the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) unrealistic tests Volkswagen wrote some clever software. It’s no surprisingly Volkswagen sales increased in the month of October. Well, it’s no surprise unless you’re a statist who doesn’t understand how markets work:

There is a world in which consumers swiftly punish Volkswagen where it counts — the coffers — for its massive, systematic deception of the Environmental Protection Agency in which it cheated its way around diesel emissions tests for half a decade.

This isn’t that world.

Volkswagen of America just reported its October sales, the first full month of reporting since the scandal broke, and guess what? Sales are up 0.24 percent year over year, likely thanks in part to enormous discounts being offered to prop up volume. Now, perhaps they would’ve been up more in the absence of the scandal. But if consumers haven’t outright rewarded VW for deceiving them, they certainly haven’t done much to punish the automaker, either.

I don’t really know what to do with this. Governments and law firms around the world are rearing to shake VW’s piggy bank, but it’s a little confusing to me that car buyers wouldn’t be looking elsewhere while this all plays out (and it is very much still playing out). Are these buyers just not following the news? Are they not concerned, because America is generally less excited about diesel engines than Europeans? (Note that Volkswagen has suspended sales of its 2016 diesels, pending approvals, so Americans have made up the sales difference versus October 2014 with additional gasoline and hybrid purchases.)

Consumers only punish manufacturers when they feel they’ve been wronged. Why should I, as a consumer, be angry if I know an automobile manufacturer can’t sell its product in the United States without passing random government tests that demonstrates nothing of value (more on this in a second) and find out the manufacturer cheated the test to give me a better product? On the other hand I, as a consumer, have ever right to be angry when the government attempts to interfere with my acquisition of a desired product. The EPA tests, as I mentioned above, aren’t even testing real-world conditions so there’s no reason for consumers, even those who are dyed in the wool environmentalists, to give two shits about them.

And don’t make the mistake of construing this increase in sales with consumers not caring about environmentalism. Most consumers care greatly about environmentalism, which is why fuel mileage is advertised to heavily these days. Generally consumers want a balance between performance and fuel efficiency (of course the EPA’s fuel efficiency tests, like its emissions tests, aren’t accurate but that’s a different can of worms). If a vehicle’s fuel efficiency is too low consumers face undesirable increases in their fuel bills. But market forces are something statists don’t understand so they become confused by situations like Volkswagen’s sales increase and come to the faulty conclusion that it means consumers don’t care about environmentalism (and use that conclusion to argue the necessity of the EPA).

What we’ve learned from this Volkswagen scandal is that producers, when faced with idiotic regulatory tests, will find creative ways to give consumers what they want and be rightly rewarded. If you want to be angry with somebody be angry with the EPA. It’s been feeding the public bad data for decades and using that data to restrict availability of goods, which has forced manufacturers to cheat in order to fulfill the wants of their customers.

Exposure Doesn’t Pay The Bills

The Oatmeal posted an excellent comic yesterday (at least I first saw it yesterday). It directly addresses the bullshit of people trying to sucker artists into doing work for exposure.

As I’ve said, if you’re good at something never do it for free. And guess what doing something for exposure is? Free. Because exposure doesn’t pay the bills.

I run into my fair share of people trying to sucker work out of me for free. My sister is an artist so she probably runs into it a hundred times more than me (good thing our dad raised us right and neither of us get suckered into such scams). Because art’s value is primarily derived from creativity it’s harder for people to understand it has value than to understand something physical like a car has value. But anything worth doing is worth getting paid for and art is no exception.

If you look at websites, book covers, magazines, comic books, or the packaging on almost any product you’ll notice they all have something in common: art. Art catches the eye and is often the thing that causes somebody to initially notice a product. It’s the reason novels tend to have art instead of just the title and author printed on the the cover. I shit you not, the reason I initially noticed and checked out Whitechapel Gods is because the cover art is fucking fantastic. It turns out to be a fun read but if it didn’t have that cover art I probably wouldn’t have noticed it. This is why almost every product, including food at the grocery store, is packaged in something covered in art.

Manufacturers know art is important, which is why they pay artists to create it. The fact manufacturers pay artists to create art demonstrates art has value. Unless the person offering exposure is a seriously big name that can actually get your work in front of well known buyers willing to pay (I can’t emphasize that part enough) you they’re swindlers offering you nothing of value and should be ignored. If somebody really wants your art they’ll pay you money and if they don’t you’re wasting your time talking to them.

Don’t fall for the exposure malarkey (unless, of course, the person offering has some big chops that you know will get you in front of paying customers). Fuck exposure. Get paid instead.

Fix Things, Make Money

Do you want to know a secret for making lots of money? Learn how to fix things! Seriously. Using this one weird trick you can actually save yourself a ton of cash in a short period of time.

As I noted yesterday, one of the hard drives in my server gave up the ghost. While I probably could have sent it into to Apple to have them charge me $300 to put a new drive in I opted to go the cheaper route and fix it myself. In fact that is always my strategy when something breaks and isn’t under warranty. This is why iFixit is one of my favorite companies.

In addition to creating excellent repair guides and selling a wide selection of tools, iFixit has been promoting the repair culture. Part of this promotion involves getting people over the mindset that they cannot fix things by posting articles about seemingly impossible or very difficult success stories.

But I promised a secret for making money, not saving it, and I should deliver. My fellow agorists are also looking for a way to make a few bucks under the table and knowing how to repair things is an easy way to do it. Compared to producing new products money gotten from repairing is easy to hide. Purchases of tools, spare parts, instruction manuals, schematics, and testing equipment can all be plausibly explained away as things you use to keeping your own equipment in running shape. In the case of personal electronics you don’t even need a place of business, you can either repair them in your home or your customer’s home. And when the job is finished there’s nothing left behind besides broken components that can be easily explained away.

Another benefit for an agorist repair business is it’s easy for an individual to beat their larger competitors. Consider the price Apple, Samsung, Dell, or any other electronics manufacturer charges to do a repair out of warranty. Can you honestly tell me you couldn’t beat their prices? Especially for repairs that involve little more than swapping a common component like a hard drive or RAM module. You can make a tidy profit and still beat their prices by a wide margin. This is why you see so many mobile phone screen repair businesses. The margins are still good when you’re undercutting the manufacturer and enough people drop phones to ensure a constant income flow.

Learn how to repair things. You’ll save yourself a lot of money and you can make a lot of hard to trace money with your knowledge.

Competition Is The Solution To Expensive Medication

Government regulation of the medical industry, particularly making buying health insurance mandatory and granting monopolies on ideas, have made medication unaffordable. People in need of medication are justifiably pissed about this, especially since many pharmaceutical companies feel the market is regulated enough to make it safe for them to continuously jack prices up. Unfortunately their anger is only resulting in more price increases because they believe more government regulatory power is the solution.

But more government regulatory power only exacerbates the problem because it further pushes competition out of the market and competition is the solution to high medication prices:

Turing Pharmaceuticals, the company that last month raised the price of the decades-old drug Daraprim from $13.50 a pill to $750, now has a competitor.

Imprimis Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a specialty pharmaceutical company based in San Diego, announced today that it has made an alternative to Daraprim that costs about a buck a pill—or $99 for a 100-pill supply.

“While we respect Turing’s right to charge patients and insurance companies whatever it believes is appropriate, there may be more cost-effective compounded options for medications, such as Daraprim,” Mark L. Baum, CEO of Imprimis, said in a news release.

What government enabled to run up to $750 per pill a single competitor brought down to $1.00 per pill. In a free market this is the norm. Absent of monopolies on ideas, mandatory purchasing of services, absurdly high testing costs designed to favor politically connected established manufacturers, and other forms of regulation on medical products there is actually a very large pie. And if anything can be said about markets if there is pie everybody wants a piece. Different providers attempt to grab a piece in different ways.

Some sell a premium good or service, some will provide the most inexpensive option possible, and many others will fall somewhere in between. Rolex continues to thrive by providing a premium wristwatch to its target market just as Timex continues to thrive providing very affordable wristwatches.

The medical market is no different. Some medication providers will charge a premium while others will provide an inexpensive option because the two portions of the market ensure enough pie is available for both and enough pie being available for both ensures both portions of the market are served.

If you become outraged when medical companies jack their prices up don’t beg the government to do more of the same. Instead do whatever you can to help expand a free market.

Apple Doing More For China’s Environment Than China’s Government

I continue to be amazed by people who believe governments are an effective way to protect the environment. It’s such a stupid belief because governments are the biggest polluters whose only interest in regulating pollution is getting a piece of the action through permit issuances. The only way to reduce pollution, which is the only way to change anything, is direct action. Oftentimes direct action to reduce pollution involves individuals whose property has been damaged by a polluter filing a lawsuit (of course such action has been illegal in the United States ever since the federal government started involving itself in pollution licensing). But that’s not the only way.

Apple has announced a plan to build solar power plans in China:

Six months after Apple said it wanted to stop climate change, rather than debate the issue, the company has announced two new programs that it says will reduce the carbon footprint of its manufacturing partners in China. The two schemes aim to avoid the production of more than 20 million metric tons of pollution between now and 2020 by building solar energy sources in the country’s northern, eastern, and southern grid regions, and by partnering with suppliers to install clean energy projects over the coming years.

At the same time, Apple also announced that it has completed 40 megawatts of solar projects in China’s Sichuan province, capable of producing the same amount of energy used by Apple’s retail stores and operations offices in the country. Apple says the completion of the projects makes the company carbon neutral in China, but that doesn’t factor in the energy used by its manufacturers and suppliers. The two new schemes are intended to offset that energy usage, producing more than 200 megawatts of electricity through the new solar sources — enough to power 265,000 homes in China for a year — and by helping suppliers build projects that will offer more than 2 gigawatts of clean energy.

This move by Apple will do more good than any amount of petitioning the Chinese government. In fact if companies did similar things in the United States it would do more good than any amount of Environment Protection Agency (EPA) regulations.

Hate Potholes? Blame The State.

Although I’m pleased as can be that most of the world has moved beyond blaming the Jews for everything I’m not happy about society’s continued need to create scapegoats to blame everything on. In this case millennials have become the new scapegoats. Millennials are blamed for the failures of everything from Social Security to roads:

Millennials, they even drive different.

This key group of Americans is inadvertently creating unsafe conditions on America’s roads, according to a new report from Standard & Poor’s. That’s because this younger cohort is driving less than older groups and driving in more fuel-efficient vehicles when they do.

As a result, their gas consumption is lower so they pay less in federal gas tax, which is pegged at 18.4 cents per gallon. This means they contribute less to the Federal Highway Trust Fund, which helps pay for infrastructure maintenance in states.

Here’s the thing, it’s not the fault of millennials that the roads suck. It’s the State’s fault. The State has decreed a monopoly on transportation infrastructure and, like all monopolies, has run it into the ground. Consider the way the State funds transportation maintenance: gas taxes. Now consider the decrees the State has issued mandating more fuel economical vehicles. It really tied its own noose but forcing automobile manufacturers to build vehicles that use less of the very substance that is used to pay for transportation infrastructure.

More importantly though is the State has done almost nothing to increase its own efficiency. Look at any technology that exists in a freer market (one that entirely monopolized by the State). Every year the products either become cheaper, better, or both. Consumers expect better products or a lower price. Producers want to increase profits, which requires improving its manufacturing efficiency and technology.

While personal electronics, automobiles, fabrics, kitchen knives, and basically everything else have gotten better, become cheaper, or both the same can’t be said for transportation infrastructure. Roads today are nearly identical to roads from decades back. Road construction technology has almost improved very little over the decades.

Judging by every non-monopolized technology we have access to roads today should be phenomenally better than the roads our parents drove on. Road construction technology should be at a point where building new roads or replacing old roads is cheap and fast. The fact less plunder from gas taxes is rolling in should be a nonissue because the entire process surrounding transportation infrastructure should be a lot cheaper.

If you hate potholes blame the State for failing to improve the efficiency of its declared monopolies.

Law Enforcement And Security Provision Are Separate Jobs

Whenever you make a critical statement about a police officer it’s only a matter of time before some neocon piece of shit wishes ill on you. “I hope a burglar breaks into your home and shoot your family!” “I hope a rapist rapes your wife and daughter in front of you!” “I hope you get into a car accident!” The implication is anybody critical of police deserves the consequences of not having police. It’s an implication that can only be made by people who have fell for an all too common trap: the assumption that law enforcement and security provision are the same.

To illustrate this fact let’s consider a scenario that frequently plays out on roadways: a car accident. I’m using this scenario, in part, because it’s one where all three common public safety personnel; fire fighters, ambulance crews, and police officers; respond. The primary task of fire fighters is the make the scene as safe as possible and to rescue any trapped occupants from vehicles. Ambulance crews are primarily concerned with the medical needs of the individuals involved in the accident. But the primary purpose of police is to determine who broke which laws so they can be cited.

In this scenario the fire fighters and ambulance crews are providing security services. Police are providing law enforcement services. The first two are primarily concerned with the wellbeing of the individuals involved in the accident whereas the last one is primarily concerned with the profits of the State.

Did one driver run a red light? Neither the fire fighters or ambulance crews concern themselves with such matters (and if they do they’re powerless to do anything about it). Police officers, on the other hand, care very much because running a red light is against the law and therefore a citation can be issued to the driver who did it. As a quick aside a byproduct of raising revenue is the generation of a report that insurance agencies will use to determine who was at fault and therefore liable (except in states like Minnesota that have no-fault insurance) but that’s not the primary task of the police and culpability an easily be determined by a party that isn’t a law enforcer.

When somebody speaks out against law enforcement they’re not usually speaking out against security provision. Unfortunately the two have been merged into a single job and this merger has existed long enough where a lot of people mistakenly believe they cannot exist separately. But we see the fact these two jobs are not dependent on one another everyday. In fact a lot of businesses hire security providers that aren’t law enforcers.

Consider a loss prevention specialist. Their job is to prevent the theft of goods. One way they often go about doing this is placing a guard at the front of a store. The guard serves two purposes: to be a psychological deterrent to thieves and to prevent thieves from leaving the building with stolen merchandise. Loss prevention specialists aren’t concerned with whether you pay your taxes, smoke cannabis, or otherwise break any laws.

Some businesses even hire armed security providers. These providers are generally tasked with protecting people and high value property. Armed security can often be found at high risk businesses such as banks or driving and guarding armored trucks filled with cash. A lot of hospitals also hire armed security personnel to, in part, escort doctors and nurses to their vehicles because their shifts often end at oh dark thirty, which is when the risk of being attacked is notably high. But again, the armed security providers aren’t concerned with whether you pirated music, violated the sugar tariff, or did some other unlawful activity.

If you’re unsure if a particular task falls under law enforcement or security let me give you a general rule of thumb. Tasks involving protecting people or property from harm generally fall under security whereas tasks involving the threat or use of force against people whose only crime is violating a government decree falls under law enforcement. The former can be done without the latter as demonstrated by the existence of fire fighters, medical personnel, and private security guards. That being the case it is possible to criticize law enforcement without criticizing security.

Only In A Socialist Paradise

A lot of soft socialists (my name for your typical socialist who is too timid to just go full socialist) cite Nordic countries as being a veritable paradise. Free healthcare! Free education! Free everything! All of this comes at a cost though. The most notable is positively brutal personal income tax rates. A lesser considered but more insidious cost is ridiculous economic controls. Where else but a socialist paradise could you find police being tasked with wielding State violence against people who sell pizza too cheaply?

The new campaign, which is being publicised on police social media accounts, asks people to inform officers if they spot a pizza on sale for under six euros (£4.50), national broadcaster Yle reports. “Unless a pizza is on temporary sale there is no way a legitimate establishment can offer pizza for less than six euros,” Det Insp Minna Immonen of the Uusimaa police department is quoted as saying. Police are trying to crack down on the “grey economy”, which costs the country millions of euros in lost tax revenue each year. They also want people to make sure they get a receipt for their pizzas, regardless of value.

There is no legitimate way an establishment can make a profit by selling pizza for less than six euros? Odd. I can think of many. Pizza can, for example, be used as a loss leader at an establishment that makes its real profit from alcohol or cannabis sales (I’m not sure if cannabis is even legal in most Nordic counties but their status as a veritable paradise leads me to believe it must be).

Even more interesting than the idiocy of tasking the police with enforcing this ridiculous restriction is the reason. According to the broadcast the State is merely protecting businesses from themselves (because, apparently, they’re too stupid to know how much they can sell a pizza for and still profit). But the real reason is the loss of plunder from taxes that aren’t stolen.

The cost of free shit is so high that a person can’t even sell a pizza for less than six euros because the State won’t get a big enough cut.