Home movie footage from a 1931 cruise aboard the ocean liner Mauretania.
This ship was built in 1906 and was sister ship to the ill-fated Lusitania.
Month: December 2014
Quote of the Day
Richard Epstein, The flawed 75% tax solution from Hollande and Piketty:
The basic question is why would anyone assume that major shifts in tax rates should have only relatively modest effects on the production of wealth. No one would say that about a cut in market wages of over 50 percent. So why assume otherwise in a tax context?
“The FAA, Drones, and Caltrops”
Some thoughts about drones and govt regulation, from the always interesting John Robb:
Here’s one of the reasons that the FAA has seized control of all drones (including toys) and is slowing the development of automated aviation to a crawl. It’s a dumb move, since it won’t work, but they are doing it anyway.
The reason is that drones make disruption easy.
[. . .]
The big question: Will the FAA effort to control drones protect against this type of disruption? No. It won’t.
It actually makes the situation worse. It prevents the development of the safeguards an economically viable drone delivery network would produce.
Read the whole (brief) post to get Robb’s full argument, which is a plausible one.
Perhaps the FAA is motivated more by inertia and typical bureaucratic risk-aversion than by any sophisticated consideration of the likely downstream societal effects of drone development.
The FAA’s proposed regulations would mainly affect commercial drone users who would probably be constrained by liability in any case. The pilot-license requirement makes little sense except to restrict entry into the market and as a means of tracking users. These regulations are not going to be easily enforceable. Maybe the FAA is being driven in part by lobbying from airlines and police agencies. Overregulation will incentivize the development of quiet drones, camouflaged drones, miniature drones, RF-shielded drones, autonomous drones that can fly programmed courses without radio control, etc.
Big companies that can game the political system will get drones. Governments will get drones. Hackers, criminals and terrorists will get drones. Small and mid-sized businesses will pay up for approved outsourced drone services or will go without. The availability of liability insurance to cover drone-caused damage may be a significant issue.
Someone wrote that operating a drone should be like owning a dog: minimal formal regulation, ad hoc restrictions based on local conditions, and liability for damages. That seems about right.
We shall see what happens. At this point I’m more concerned about the FAA than about caltrops.
State of the Disunion
Here we are, in the first week of the last month of 2014, and by way of good cheer, I can say that things haven’t descended quite so far into the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse territory – pestilence, war, famine and death – as I had feared some two or three months ago, when Ebola was all the rage in news. People are still falling sick to it, of course, but curious that such news is no longer in the News, capital-N News, run by the professional news-gatherers, whose motto and mission does seem to be comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted. Funny old world, that.
Still, certain elements of the current scene do give cause for alarm. Not new alarm, but just the same old abiding fears which spurred me to begin writing books to persuade readers of the virtue of the grand American experiment and to refit the kitchen pantry closet to allow storage of mass quantities of staple foods. At the age of 60-something, I appear to be turning into my grandmothers, one of whom conserved a box of Ben Hur brand cayenne pepper over several decades until it was nothing more than some rusty-red dust, and the other of whom had a two-year supply of on-sale-purchased canned food stashed in the garage. I am trying to advance on my grandmothers’ example, though – since I have a vacuum-sealer and freezer. I do wish that I had somehow managed to get ahold of the ancestral can of cayenne pepper; it’s probably valuable now as an antique for the container, if not the rust-red pepper dust therein. Enough for pestilence and famine – what about those oldie-but-goodie standbys, War and Death?
What will happen to privacy
The earliest use of privacy in the OED appears in the 17th century. According to Google books Ngram Viewer it constituted 0.000432% (which I will hereafter show as 4.32/10K) of words in books around 1600. By 1605 it no longer appears in Ngram until 1641 when it reappears at 0.14/10K rising to 7.37/10K in 1664. It then fell to 3.16/10K in 1700 and 2.33/10K in 1720 where it bumped around 2.5/10K for the next two centuries with a high of 3.28 in 1824.
In 1890 Brandeis and Warren published “The Right to Privacy” in the Harvard Law Review. In 1928 Brandeis wrote a dissent in the case of Olmstead v. U.S. in which he argued that the warrantless wiretapping of a bootlegger constituted a violation of his right to privacy:
Whenever a telephone line is tapped, the privacy of the persons at both ends of the line is invaded and all conversations between them upon any subject, and, although proper, confidential and privileged, may be overheard. Moreover, the tapping of one man’s telephone line involves the tapping of the telephone of every other person whom he may call or who may call him. As a means of espionage, writs of assistance and general warrants are but puny instruments of tyranny and oppression when compared with wire-tapping…
(The makers of our Constitution) conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment. And the use, as evidence in a criminal proceeding, of facts ascertained by such intrusion must be deemed a violation of the Fifth.
But it was not until Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 that the Supreme Court recognized “that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance” to overrule a Connecticut law prohibiting the prescription and sale of birth control devices violating the right of marital privacy. Soon after in 1967 Olmstead was overruled in Katz v. U. S.
What brought about that change of opinion? In 1920 the use of the word privacy began an exponential increase from 2.68/10K in 1920 to 4.14/10K in 1950 to 7.55/10K in 1970 to 14.19/10K in 1990 cresting at 21.01/10K in 2003 before declining to 18.9/10K in 2008 (the latest year available). This tracks to the number of automobiles per person which grew from 86/1,000 people in 1920 to 286/K in 1950 to 478/K in 1970 to 717/K in 1990 cresting at 823/K in 2007 and declining to 801/K in 2012. Not a coincidence as the automobile brought greater freedom of movement to almost every American than had ever existed for any person before. With that freedom of movement came the ability to quickly go to strange communities with greater anonymity. And the ability to commute from the suburbs, where people no longer lived cheek by jowl in multi-family dwellings with attached walls or as part of an integrated rural community.
So what is happening to our concept of privacy with word frequency 10% in five years from 2003 to 2008? Perhaps it has something to do with the decline in popularity of driving among the young. The percentage of 25-29 year olds holding drivers licenses declined from 94% in 1994 to 90% in 2002 to 86% in 2012. Or the growth of American Facebook users from 1 million at the end of 2004 to 169 million in 2013. And the willingness of those users to make public virtually anything about themselves for the world to see and even more about their friends.
Considering that it took only 39 years for wire tapping to go from being morally questionable but not illegal to being unconstitutional, it will be interesting to see how our concept of a right to privacy evolves.