Open Market

When Hacking Isn't Really Hacking

Apparently, California is taking steps to pass a law that would ban people from hopping onto unencrypted wi-fi anonymously.  This seems to me to be unnecessary.  For one thing, it would discourage generosity: Many kind people who have nothing to lose by letting others onto their networks leave their wireless networks unencrypted specifically to let others on. And on the flip side of things, it might also encourage those who need to be safe not to take precautions, as they'd see the law as a security measure in and of itself and not bother to encrypt their systems.   There are plenty of other reasons as well, many of which are detailed over at TechDirt:

It's unclear, though, why California politicians see the need for a law here -- if people want don't want others accessing their WiFi, they have plenty of options with which to lock down their network, they don't need special legal protection. Furthermore, if piggybacking is outlawed, where would it leave people who actually want to share their WiFi, whether it's just an individual, or a business? Things get awfully messy there. If I want to share a network connection over WiFi, how do I communicate to others that I approve of them using my network? Physical signs aren't a perfect solution by any means.

--Peter Suderman

Disease-Carrying Pests vs. Life-Saving Chemicals: A Legal Dead Heat

Last Friday federal judge John Coughenour ruled against current EPA pesticide approval guidelines, insisting that the agency consult with U.S. Fish & Wildlife officials prior to final approval (despite describing such a process as “a task of gargantuan proportions”).  Angela responded to this unfortunate decision quickly:

Delaying access to these life-saving products at a time when they are greatly needed to address problems such as the West Nile virus is bad public health policy. The Centers for Disease Prevention and Control report more than 20,000 serious illnesses and about 800 deaths from the virus since 1999. 

Faster approval of new pesticide products is desperately needed because only a handful of effective products remain on the market for fighting West Nile.  Current excessive pesticide regulations have reduced the number of products available and discourage new product development.

Ironically, the West Nile virus—which pesticides could help control—poses a much higher threat to species than do pesticides, as demonstrated by recent West Nile-related deaths of endangered California Condors.

Angela ended up being quoted in Chemical & Engineering News and the good people who put together the “Week in Review” column for Landscape Management.

Of course, it’s not all bad news for the EPA’s legal team. On Tuesday, the U.S. Appeals Court ruled that allowing the use of the pesticide methyl bromide did not violate the Clean Air Act, swatting down the objections of plaintiff NRDC. For more on why methyl bromide is a useful and valuable tool, see Henry Miller’s recent piece for TCS Daily:

The UN's regulation of various chemicals applied to agriculture and food production is among its most egregious failures. Consider, for example, the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, which took effect in 1989. In essence, this is an agreement to limit or phase out various chemicals, and although it stipulates that "measures taken to protect the ozone layer from depletion should be based on relevant scientific knowledge, taking into account technical and economic considerations," appropriate balancing of all these factors has been lacking.

One chemical on the Montreal Protocol hit-list is methyl bromide (MB), an important pesticide used to control harmful insects, rodents, pathogens and weeds. Used by a large cross-section of the world's agriculture producers, it is an essential tool for pest control. (If you have ever eaten a commercially-grown strawberry from California, chances are you have methyl bromide to thank.)

MB is being phased out, in spite of the absence of any proven alternative and its importance to farmers and food producers—and the fact that it is an effective new way to kill anthrax spores.

Read the whole thing here, with more background on the MB battle from CEI here.

--Richard Morrison

Which Way is Down?

Orson Scott Card, noted for his novel Ender’s Game and its many sequels, spells out the religion of global warming alarmists in the “Psalm of Al:”

 

1. Great storms ravage our cities, and the wise man saith: Global Warming hath done this.

2. Drought keepeth all storms at bay, and the wise man saith: This also hath Global Warming done.

3. Global Warming maketh the oceans rise; it maketh deep snow to fall;

It gets better.

--Peter Suderman

I Blame ManBearPig

Yes, until global warming came along the World Bank was getting really close to ending world poverty.

- Myron Ebell

Converting Eyeballs into Dollars

According to today’s New York Times, it appears that Universal Music Group will lend its massive song catalog to support a brand new music downloading service to compete with Apple’s market-leader, iTunes. No big deal, right? New music download services seem to be pretty common, and Apple’s business model has so far looked like the best way to fight piracy with cheap, easy downloading. But this one is different for a big reason: the music downloads it offers will be free. The company’s revenue will be entirely ad-driven, meaning that it has a real chance of taking a bite out of the illegal P2P networks that still see massive traffic. What this reminds me of is tech analyst Tim Lee’s recent post over at the Tech Liberation Front, in which he explained that, on the net, markets don’t necessarily have to trade in dollars—sometimes, eyeballs work just as well.

Lee writes:

It seems to me that the right way to think about this is that there is still a market for content on the Internet, but the dominant medium of exchange for content is increasingly eyeballs rather than dollars. I get paid for my time, not with dollars, but with something I value more at the margin: people who are interested in what I have to say. Eyeballs have two key advantages over dollars as a medium of exchange for Internet content: first, the reader doesn’t consider his attention to be a cost, the way he would a micropayment. And second, unlike micropayments, the transaction has virtually no overhead.

Here, downloaders will pay with their eyeballs and then advertisers will pay for the rights to their eyeballs. Artists and labels get paid; advertisers get access to a media-savvy demographic, and we get to fill up our iPods for free. In other words, it’s a transaction that, if it proves financially viable, seems to work in the best interests of everyone. 

--Peter Suderman

Earth to Adbusters: How About Protest Nothing Day?

Yesterday I did something very unusual: I didn’t spend a dime. Yes, I consumed some things I’d already paid for, such as the food and drinks in my fridge (and stuff I’d bought and put in the office fridge) and my subway fare card, but pull out my wallet and pay money for something I did not do once. It didn’t hit me until late last night, at which point I was home for the night and the day over. So what? Well, according to some self-righteous radicals, yesterday I was the most virtuous person in the world. Stocking up as a sign of piety—go figure. I’ll take consumerist hell over the anti-commerce neo-puritans’ heaven any day.

- Ivan Osorio

Mac Attack

Greenpeace just released a scorecard knocking Apple for its continued use of Brominated Flame Retardants. See what CEI Adjunct Scholar Dana Joel Gattuso has to say about the problems with previous proposals to ban BFRs and other substances. 

--Peter Suderman

Katrina and the Government

With the one year anniversary of hurricane Katrina upon us, new research suggests how government policies increased the extent of Katrina’s damage—But first…

I watched a segment on the NBC Today Show this morning about Katrina. Host Matt Lauer was “interviewing” former FEMA director Michael Brown. If conducted by a true professional journalist, an interview with Michael Brown could shed light on the federal government’s initial response to Katrina. But Lauer harbors no such desire. Instead, Lauer asks a series of leading questions whose sole purpose is to get Brown to say it was all Bush’s fault.

Now for some substantive information.

Last year, in New Orleans After the Storm, the Brookings Institution describes how past urban development trends in New Orleans exacerbated the effects of hurricane Katrina and what the city should do to rebuild:

“Most notably, the federal influence on regional housing policy clearly  exacerbated racial and ethnic disparities in New Orleans. Likewise, the federal roles in building highways and providing flood protection promoted unsustainable growth patterns that accentuated divisions and placed more New Orleanians in  harm’s way.”

At the very least, the conclusion would seem to be that one should be extremely skeptical of the wisdom of federal urban planners.

But what does the Brookings report propose instead? 

“That the federal government should take the lead in convening a world-class deliberation of the region’s top federal and other experts to assess the situation, and consider where rebuilding may and may not make sense, based on the best environmental and engineering research.”

As if the earlier urban planners weren’t also “top” experts and didn’t also use “the best” research available. What a strange conclusion.

Thankfully there is some more creative thinking going on.

In a new working paper put out by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, economist Emily Chamlee-Wright does not assume “that a large-scale government response offers the only viable path towards the successful recovery” from Katrina. Instead, Chamlee-Wright explores “some of the strategies private citizens use to overcome the collective action problem” of how to coordinate the actions and expectations of displaced Katrina victims as they try to find a place to live, to work, to gain financial resources for rebuiliding, to locate schools, to obtain transportation, etc.

e.g. mutual assistance, charitable actions, commercial cooperation

And in “Weathering Corruption”, economists Peter Leeson & Russell Sobel make the case that bad weather indirectly causes corruption.

How? When a natural disaster strikes, FEMA steps in and hands out a lot of money. This “disaster relief windfall” encourages corruption by (i)creating new opportunities for embezzling public funds, (ii)enhancing public officials ability to transfer government funds to private individuals for their own gain, and (iii)putting public officials in charge of new and valuable non-financial resources, thereby increasing their power to extort or solicit bribes.

Their empirical results suggest that “eliminating FEMA disaster relief would decrease corruption more than 20 percent in the average state”.

--Isaac Post

The Historical Significance of Cat and Mouse

Last week at the Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog, Cato’s David Boaz had an excellent post about the somewhat broader meaning of Turner’s decision to go back through old cartoons and remove the scenes depicting smoking. (Open Market reported on the matter here.) Tom of <em>Tom and Jerry</em> fame apparently enjoyed a cigarette every so often, no doubt seeking respite from his high-tension relationship with Jerry. (Apparently Turner is less concerned about children hacking away at one another with a pick axe and more concerned about children wanting to emulate a cartoon cat.) They also seem to want to convince us that Shaggy and Scooby smoked cigarettes, which I think we all know was not the case.

A brief excerpt from Boaz’s post:

But there's something deeper here: an attempt to sanitise history, to rewrite it the way we wish it had happened. Smoking is a part of reality, and especially a part of history. Just look at any old movie. Everyone smokes: doctors, pregnant women, lovers. Real people smoked, too - people like Murrow and Pollock and Sartre. And some of them died of lung and throat cancer, which parents and teachers can point out. It's Orwellian to airbrush historical photos in order to remove evidence of that of which you disapprove.

Let me highly recommend that you read the whole thing.

--Brooke Oberwetter

Research Shows that Customers Who Are Alive Are the Best Kind

The New York Times has a finger-wagging editorial today reminding us that “light” cigarettes aren’t necessarily safer than regular cigarettes due to the compensation effect. That is, smokers inhale more deeply and smoke more often when smoking “lighter” cigarettes to compensate for the lower doses of nicotine.  According to the recent decision in federal court, the tobacco industry perpetrated a fraud against consumers by failing to warn consumers about the compensation effect. The Times editorial concludes:

No wonder there has been no decline in the risk of lung cancer or other smoking-related diseases even though smokers have moved in droves to supposedly safer cigarettes. Smokers of light or low-tar cigarettes need to realize that the industry is not so much concerned about their health as it is worried, in the words of an internal document, that their penchant to quit smoking entirely could pose “a special problem for the cigarette industry.”

How silly. Of course the industry is concerned about the health of smokers, and it’s concerned about addressing their demand for less dangerous smoked tobacco products. It’s 100% in the tobacco companies’ best interests to create, market, and sell healthier products. Because while yes, it would be a “special problem” for the industry if smokers quit smoking entirely, it would also be a special problem if they all died. My understanding is that dead people aren’t such reliable customers.

As a quick aside, here’s an analogy to the court’s finding: I want to lose weight, but I also want to get blindingly drunk five nights a week off of cheap domestic beer. Bud Ice, my cheap domestic beer of choice, sells a “light” beer that I fancy. Bud Ice Light only has 110 calories compared to the 148 in regular Bud Ice. So the pounds are just going to melt off. But wait. The percentage of alcohol by volume in Bud Ice is 5.5, whereas Bud Ice Light’s is only 4.1. So to achieve my goal of filthy stinking drunkenness, I’ll have to drink more Bud Ice Light than I regularly drink of Bud Ice. Certainly you can see my dilemma. 

A single shot of 80-proof tequila gets you a tad drunker than a single Bud Ice, with fewer calories than a Bud Ice Light. Why not drink tequila instead? That’s a good question that involves a Cinco de Mayo debacle featuring a karaoke rendition of La Cucaracha that I’d rather not get into. Suffice it to say that my preference is for cheap domestic beer, just as many smokers prefer cigarettes to chewed tobacco even though the latter are healthier and deliver nicotine. So is Budweiser perpetrating a fraud by labeling Bud Ice Light a “light” beer, since I’ll have to drink more of it to get equivalently drunk? I don’t think so. But would U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler?

--Brooke Oberwetter