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Politics, open government, and safe streets. And the constant incursion of cycling.

Category: Policy Page 13 of 35

Getting Used to Competence

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On January 8, 2009

In Law, Policy

Having a really hard time adjusting out of the past eight years, I’ve discovered, especially when it comes to the appointment of qualified people:

Cass Sunstein, a longtime University of Chicago legal scholar and prominent author, is set to take up a key cause in the Barack Obama administration: regulation.

[ . . . ]

Obama has promised an overhaul to federal regulation, specifically of the U.S. financial markets, and Sunstein’s job description suggests a sweeping agenda.

“This office is in charge of coordinating and overseeing government regulations,” a transition official said Wednesday, “and a smarter approach to regulation is key to making government work better and getting better results in terms of protecting health, the environment, etc.”

Regulatory rulemaking and enforcement is probably one of the least-sexy and most misunderstood functions of our Federal government, yet it provides some of the most tangible benefits (and costs) to citizens.  Given that the rulemaking environments vary drastically from agency to agency, it’ll be interesting to see what Sunstein hopes to – and can – accomplish in this post.

If Sens. Feinstein and Rockefeller Don’t Like

By

On January 6, 2009

In Policy, Politics

Panetta at the CIA, it makes me think it must be a good idea.

The Euro at Ten

By

On January 6, 2009

In EU, Policy, Society

I’m a few days late, but it’s still worth noting that we’ve just passed the 10 year anniversary of the emergence of the Euro. It was the subject of an enormous amount of speculation and debate, with many predicting its failure as a currency. SuperFrenchie does some dancing on the graves of those predictions here.  Jerome a Paris, a banker with no shortage of opinions, provides a useful exploration of the place of the Euro – especially in comparison with the US Dollar – in a global economy:

The dollar is increasingly money backed by financiers-manipulated debt. The euro is fundamentally money backed by real economic activity. The distinction will matter. And the finance industry will follow.

Interested?  Read more.

(The kid in me misses the Deutsche Marks, the Pesetas, the Guilders.  My interest in currency fluxuation began when we moved to West Germany, and I discovered the wonderful thing that was aribtrage – I could get so much more when I turned my dollars into marks (and that’s not even touching the experience of turning dollars into East German marks on the black market).  Of course, with the current exchange rate being €1 = $1.40, I now have some appreciation for the other side of that.  )

Unintended Consequences of Sloppy Legislation

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On January 5, 2009

In Law, Policy, Politics

Here’s an interesting consequence of reactionary legislation.  Many of you will recall what I think of as last year’s Summer of Lead, where some 45 million toys were recalled over concerns about lead poisoning.  It didn’t seem that a day could pass without another breathless press report about Chinese-manufactured toys that just might/possibly/could make American kids sick.   Okay, I should probably be a little less breezy about it, as toy safety and lead poisoning are both serious matters.  That said, it doesn’t appear that the politicians who were happy to slap together a legislative response took it seriously enough:

The law (CPSIA) to protect American children from lead and pthalate tainted mass produced Chinese toys is being used as a bludgeon by the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) to force toy stores to take all untested toys off shelves by February 10. The CPSIA goes into effect in February but the CPSC has not exempted handcrafted American and European toys made from natural materials and safe coatings. Individual toymakers cannot afford to pay for thousands of dollars of product testing designed by Congress for mass produced Chinese toys. Small shop owners cannot afford to test their inventory. Owners are threaten with $100,000 fines.

No more hand-carved dolls from the roadside stands around Pigeon Forge, TN?  Probably not what everyone had in mind.  Or maybe it wasn’t quite unintended – I’m sure Mattel and Hasbro had lots of input on the bill.  I’m sure they’d be happy to supply any shop with certified toys.

Good Summary of the Employee Free Choice Act

By

On January 4, 2009

In Policy, Politics

here. Except for the part where no one explains to me how a card check preserves rights better than a secret ballot. I’m entirely sympathetic to the majority of the changes EFCA would effect, but I remain unconvinced about the central aim of the bill. That its proponents seem to skim over it every time it’s discussed makes me all the more sceptical.

Isn’t this How the Whole Mess Started?

By

On January 4, 2009

In Policy, Politics

I suppose we should be surprised:

According to multiple reports, the Treasury Department has allocated nearly $10 billion more in funds from the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) than Congress has officially released, “effectively making more promises than it can afford to keep.”

More, if you care to laugh/cry a bit.  Whenever I see things like this, I think back to my work with a Federal grants program in the mid-90s, where service programs focusing on unimportant little things like classroom assistants, community policing, and homeless shelters ground to an immediate halt because Congress was busy playing budget politics.  Sure, we knew that the money was coming one way or another, but not a single program received a commitment nor did a dollar flow until it was actually authorized by law.  Of course, it was only millions of dollars at issue, and didn’t benefit the right kind of people.

State of the US Military

By

On January 4, 2009

In Policy, Politics

In (probably less than) two years, it will be commonplace to hear Republicans accuse the Obama Administration of “breaking” the US military.  There will be howling and whining about Democrats not supporting the military Nine times out of ten, it will come loudest from the Congressman representing the district where the Admin has cancelled yet another ridiculous weapons system.  But this meme of Democratic neglect of the military will be constantly repeated, with little challenge from a press that doesn’t understand or care too much about the truth of it.  My advance response?  Is in this story:

A veteran who has been out of the military for 15 years and recently received his AARP card was stunned when he received notice he will be deployed to Iraq.  The last time Paul Bandel, 50, saw combat was in the early 1990s during the Gulf War.

Must have some super specialized skills for them to need to do this, right?  I mean, they wouldn’t just call up a 50 year old just for his warm body?

The last missile system the veteran was trained to operate is no longer used by the military.

That’s where we are, with the US military, at the end of eight years of Republican rule.  Dragging 50 year old men – who have already honorably served – out of their lives and sending them into a war that should never have been started.   And no, the war isn’t over:

Two US soldiers died on Wednesday from injuries sustained in attacks in Baghdad and executed president Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, the US military said.

[ . . . ]

The deaths take to 4,220 the number of US military personnel who have died in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, according to an AFP tally based on the independent website www.icasualties.org.

And that is the state of the US military, courtesy of Republican policies and politics.

Czechs Take On the EU Presidency

By

On January 1, 2009

In EU, Policy, Politics

Today marks the official start of the Czech Republic’s six month turn in the EU Presidency.  For those unfamiliar with the EU structure, it’s probably easiest to think of the EU Presidency as something of a chairmanship on a committee of equals.  Having the Presidency will allow you some ability to set the agenda, host major meetings, and be treated as an important voice on matters of concern to the EU.  At the same time, the short term of office and generally consensus-focused tradition limit any raw exercises of power.  (In true EU fashion, it’s much more complicated than that – if you’re interested in the details, start here.)

The transition of the EU Presidency from France (the incumbent, until yesterday) to the Czech Republic has been the subject of much apprehension.  First, it’s only been five years since the Czech Republic officially joined the European Union, and the Czech Republic’s own government isn’t exactly an example of the sort of solid and steady hand many would prefer at the helm.  Second, the current Czech President – Vaclav Klaus – is a solid “Eurosceptic” (something of a catch-all term for those who oppose further accrual of power to the EU, away from the member states).  That pictured car with the No EU sticker?  That’s his.  That sort of naked rejection of the EU leads to scenes like this recent meeting of ambassadors from EU countries in Prague:

[A] recent such lunch proved very awkward, thanks to its guest of honour: the country’s Eurosceptic president, Vaclav Klaus. He was politely asked about EU policies and how they might be handled when the Czechs take over the rotating EU presidency on January 1st. Each time the president growled that he was against the EU, so had no reason to answer such questions. The Czech presidency was an insignificant event, he added, because the EU is dominated by its big founding nations. Mr Klaus turned to the envoy from Slovenia, a former Yugoslav republic that was the first ex-communist newcomer to hold the rotating presidency, earlier this year. Everybody knows the Slovene presidency was a charade, he ventured. It was scripted by big countries like France or Germany.

Awkward, indeed.  Klaus’ distrust of the big EU members is somewhat mutual:

A mood of impatience with the enlarged Europe helps to explain a mysterious plan, briefly floated by senior French officials, for France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, to continue hosting European summits after his country’s shot at the EU presidency finishes on December 31st. Such summits, it was briefed in Paris, would be reserved for heads of government from the inner core of countries that are in the single currency, the euro (possibly with Britain added). The Czechs, of course, are not: a detail that would allow Mr Sarkozy to continue running things in 2009, in case Czech leaders “sabotage” the EU during their presidency, as an official from the Elysée Palace tactfully put it to French reporters.

While I’ve long thought that the EU’s rapid expansion was a bad idea, ignoring the system after it’s been put in place is an even worse one.  Undermining the Czech Presidency will only serve to reinforce the suspicion that EU governance is largely a Franco-German affair, with the occasional assist from Britain.   With that perception out there, there will be little chance that the EU can move beyond being mired in struggles over organizational matters.  It would be far preferable to be able to focus on the merits of the Czechs’ stated goals for their term – financial deregulation, energy diversification/security, and reapproachment with Russia – than internal squabbles over who’s backyard will host the next EU summit on carbon emissions.

Tech Notes: Desk Clearing Edition

By

On December 31, 2008

In Distribution, Personal, Policy, Society, Tech

This story on “passive” heating of homes just confirms my decision that if I’m ever building a place for myself, I’m hiring Germans to do it:

The concept of the passive house, pioneered in this city of 140,000 outside Frankfurt, approaches the challenge from a different angle. Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even from occupants’ bodies.

And in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7 percent more to build than conventional houses.

~

I wouldn’t even consider owning an iPhone (keyboard required), but I’ll have to admit that this nifty little application – which geocodes your photographs by syncing your iphone’s GPS position with the timestamp on your photos – makes me wish my Treo could do that.

~

I wonder if this search/bridge will make the Tor anonymizer service any more useful. I try to keep a Tor node running most of the time, but it doesn’t seem to see much use.  What’s Tor?

Tor is endorsed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil liberties groups as a method for whistle blowers and human-rights workers to communicate with journalists, among other uses. It works by randomly routing traffic, such as website requests and e-mail, through a network of nodes hosted by volunteers around the world before delivering it to its destination. The traffic is encrypted enroute through every node except the final one, and the end point cannot see where the traffic or message originated. Theoretically, nobody spying on the traffic can identify the source.

It’s often painfully slow and not terribly easy to use, however.  Perhaps the app I linked will help stimulate some interest in overcoming that.

~

Looks like NASA is contracting out resupply of the International Space Station to two private operators.  While part of me is pleased to see an operator like SpaceX get some stability through this, I can’t help but wonder if it’s a significant step down the path of placing the space program (and tech) entirely in private hands.  The problem I have with that is massive public spending on R&D that will only end up being locked up for private benefit.

~

Consider the possiblities of this published research:

Rapid and selective erasures of certain types of memories in the brain would be desirable under certain clinical circumstances. By employing an inducible and reversible chemical-genetic technique, we find that transient CaMKII overexpression at the time of recall impairs the retrieval of both newly formed one-hour object recognition memory and fear memories, as well as 1-month-old fear memories. Systematic analyses suggest that excessive CaMKII activity-induced recall deficits are not caused by disrupting the retrieval access to the stored information but are, rather, due to the active erasure of the stored memories. Further experiments show that the recall-induced erasure of fear memories is highly restricted to the memory being retrieved while leaving other memories intact. Therefore, our study reveals a molecular genetic paradigm through which a given memory, such as new or old fear memory, can be rapidly and specifically erased in a controlled and inducible manner in the brain.

Well.
~

Open source once against illustrates the dangers of putting our elections in the hands of Diebold and other black box voting technology companies:

“Ballot Browser, an open source Python program developed by Mitch Trachtenberg (yours truly) as part of the all-volunteer Humboldt County Election Transparency Project, was instrumental in revealing that Diebold counting software had dropped 197 ballots from Humboldt County, California’s official election results. Despite a top-to-bottom review by the California Secretary of State’s office, it appears that Diebold had not informed that office of the four-year-old bug.

Shocked!

~

Homebrew is better.

I spent no small amount of time this year revising and improving my shot-to-publication workflow for my photo coverage of pro cycling races.  It’s an enormously time consuming process, and I’m still looking to improve it.  Reading this (recent) history of pro photog filing systems makes me rather thankful for today’s tech.

~

Speaking of photo tech – Polaroid is done making instant film today.

Almost 60 years after Polaroid introduced its iconic instant camera, the company will stop manufacturing the film Dec. 31. Remaining film supplies are expected to dry up sometime next year.

“Shake it like a what?”, the kids ask.

The ACS Conspiracy

By

On December 30, 2008

In Law, Personal, Policy, Politics

Could have told you this was coming:

Sixteen appointees and advisers helping president-elect Barack Obama’s Justice Department transition efforts all recently sat on the board of an organization little known outside legal circles: The American Constitution Society for Law and Policy.

I suspect we’ll hear more about this Big Liberal Plot in the coming years. To put it kindly (and honestly), the American Constitution Society (ACS) was a very late response to the conservative Federalist Society. Like the Federalist Society, it’s not a nefarious secret conspiracy – it’s a simple organization of like-minded lawyers who believe that supporting the organization can help advance their ideas about the law and government. I’ve been a member since the outset (2001), but haven’t participated all that much. There are lots of campus-based events, and (in DC, at least) ACS sponsors the occasional forum or lecture.  I think the last one I attended was this forum on human rights (co-sponsored with with Center for American Progress – you can view video of it here, if you like).  ACS also maintain a blog (natch), which you might find interesting.  I write all that in the hope that the next time you hear about “that liberal ACS”, you’ll have some measure of reality to compare to what will almost certainly be a mythologized version of the organization.

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