Musk on Regulations

Two men are in critical condition after being stabbed in the chest near Pittsburgh’s Mellon Park playground, authorities said.
Police were called at about 12:45 a.m. to the park along Fifth Avenue, according to Pittsburgh Public Safety.
They found three men injured. The third man was stabbed in the wrist. He was taken to the hospital in stable condition, police said.

*** 

Saudi Arabia is preparing to begin construction work on its next giga-project: a cube-shaped skyscraper big enough to fit 20 Empire State Buildings.
The Mukaab will be 400-meters on each side when construction is finished, which would make it the largest built structure in the world. The building will be the centerpiece of New Murabba, a community the country hopes will be a new destination within the capital city of Riyadh.

***

if Kamala Harris is as stupid as her critics claim, why does she have the Democratic presidential nomination and a roughly 50–50 shot of being the first female president in U.S. history? Do you know how many ruthlessly ambitious Democratic men and women have desperately yearned to get where she is? How many smart, tough, shrewd, often underhanded and cold-blooded pols have tried to claw their way up the greasy pole and fallen short?
And somehow this supposed dunce managed to do it?-rhetorical question from Geraghty

***

Musk on Regulations

According to Musk, he was once asked by marine officials to conduct a survey on whether the rocket could hit a shark during splashdown in the ocean.

"I got a bunch of nutty stories. SpaceX had to do this study to see if Starship would hit a shark. And I'm like... it's a big ocean. There are a lot of sharks! It’s not impossible, but it’s very unlikely. 

So we said, 'Fine, we’ll do the analysis. Can you give us the shark data?' 

They were like, 'No, we can’t give you the shark data.' 

Well, then, okay, we’re in a bit of a quandary. How do we solve this shark probability issue? 

They said, 'Well, we could give it to our western division, but we don’t trust them.' 

I’m like, 'Am I in a comedy sketch here?!' 

Eventually, we got the data and could run the analysis to say, 'Yeah, the sharks are going to be fine.' But they wouldn’t let us proceed with the launch until we did this crazy shark analysis. 

Then we thought, 'Okay, now we’re done.' 

But then they said, 'What about whales?' 

When you look at a picture of the Pacific, what percent of the surface area do you see as whale? If Starship did hit a whale, honestly, it’s like the whale had it coming, cause the odds are... so low. It’s like Final Destination: Whale Edition. 

And then they said, 'What if the rocket goes underwater, then explodes, and the whales have hearing damage?' This is real!"

Raw Milk

Raw Milk

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says he only drinks raw milk.

In Iowa. Montana, North Dakota, Alaska, Georgia and Wyoming all have passed laws (or changed regulations) since 2020 legalizing the sale of raw milk on farms or in stores.

Drinking raw milk is “like playing Russian roulette with your health,” as the director of the FDA Division of Dairy and Egg Safety once said. To be clear, the CDC’s own study says raw milk is estimated to have caused three deaths from 1998-2018 while oysters cause 100 deaths every year. Weiss writes “for new consumers, raw milk is a symbol. … To drink (and especially to produce) raw milk is a way of breaking with convention and raging against the machine — the United States Department of Agriculture, the Centers for Disease Control, the FDA, doctors, PhDs, state regulators, and Big Dairy.”

Big Dairy.

The final and biggest blow to raw milk came when a federal judge ruled in favor of the Ralph Nader-founded advocacy group, Public Citizen, and banned all interstate sales of raw milk.

According to an FDA study relying on 2016 and 2019 data, 4.4 percent of Americans report consuming raw milk in the past year, although the number has almost certainly grown since then.

Sally Fallon Morell, the president of the pro-raw milk Weston A. Price Foundation, which lists 3,000 locations in America where one can purchase raw milk, said “I think Covid had a lot to do with [people’s newfound interest in raw milk]. A lot of people don’t believe everything the government says anymore.”

Regulations

Astonishing economic numbers. The U.S. economy grew 3.1 percent over the past year while adding another 2.7 million jobs, and with core inflation moving back down toward the pre-pandemic benchmark. This is beyond any estimate. Even Kudlow was impressed. Kudlow said on Fox Business Network that "nobody got 2023 right," adding that the mismatch between predictions and what actually happened is a question forecasters and economists will have to look into. Bidenomics!

***

A rocket designed to carry a nuclear warhead was found in the garage of a home in Bellevue, a city across Lake Washington from Seattle

***

Assisting migrant families and unaccompanied children refugees has cost the federal government over $20 billion during the past two fiscal years, according to a new report. Off-the-books costs are, of course, not known

***

Regulations

Expanding government activity is a Constitutional question, an economic question, a business question. It is also a practical question: how can the average government official manage the complexity and how can the average citizen keep up?

From an article by Wenzel on Federal rules and regulations:

"The sheer numbers are staggering, as the regulatory factory on the Potomac spews negative externalities, polluting the economy. 2023 closed with 90,402 pages of rules and regulations published in the Federal Register — you read that right… more than ninety thousand pages of rules. The Biden administration finished the year with the second-longest collection of all time. President Obama holds the record at 95,894, and President Biden just displaced President Trump’s record of 86,356 pages in 2020. To achieve this feat, the Biden administration beat its own record of 79,856 pages in 2022.

But the numbers are not the only challenge. Indeed, regulatory watchers find themselves playing whack-a-mole with the variety of rules and regulatory agencies. It is now a sadly quaint notion that Congress, and only Congress, makes the laws. The language of the Constitution is unambiguous, and it’s right there at the beginning, just after the Preamble, in Article 1, Section 1: “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States” (emphasis added). Alas, this crystal-clear language, and the non-delegation doctrine which flows from it, are routinely ignored. Instead, we see an alphabet soup of rule-making agencies."

Behind all this is the unasked question: how much fortitude is required in public economic life and when do citizens just despair and surrender?

AI Containment

“The official number [of Covid-19 deaths] is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had [the] virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death,” a Times article read, explaining that both CDC data and a study in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases support the claim that “almost one third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category.”

***

The only times over which we have any degree of influence at all are the present and the future – both of which can be made worse by attempts at symbolic restitution among the living for what happened among the dead, who are far beyond our power to help or punish or avenge. Galling as these restrictive facts may be, that does not stop them from being beyond our control. Pretending to have powers that we do not, in fact, have risks creating needless evils in the present while claiming to deal with evils of the past.--Sowell

***

Central planning fails because its success would require the mind of God, yet planners are human. Even if they somehow weren’t corruptible, they can never be sufficiently informed to outperform the market, which is composed of the untold bits of detailed consumer and seller knowledge that are signaled through prices. Interference in the market process, whether it be through direct or indirect price controls, inevitably produces harmful unintended consequences.--deRugy

AI Containment

The Biden administration is stirring over developing controls for AI. They are talking about creating confines on developed commercial AI  products before they are released. Some questions come to mind.

--Does the government have in-house experts or will they rely on experts in the private sector, experts who are probably developing the products being analyzed?

--Does the government have a good history of quality regulations? After all, this sounds a lot more significant than regulating farmers to protect a field rodent.

--Is the regulatory process free of outside influence? Are those outside influences always domestic companies or are they sometimes foreign nations?

--What is the greater threat, those who accept the notion that AI should have oversight or those who repurpose existing, approved AI applications or develop their own outside of regulations? What are the plans for that second group?

Unintended Consequences

While the Western world was just as guilty as other civilizations when it came to enslaving people for thousands of years, it was unique only in finally deciding that the whole institution was immoral and should be ended.--Sowell

***

The online sci-fi magazine Clarkesworld has seen a steep increase in submissions, driven by stories created using ChatGPT and similar systems. A graph makes it look like they had fewer than 20 submissions per month for every month October 2022 and prior and then:
December: 50
January: ~115
February so far: nearly 350

***

In Utah, it is legal to forcibly sterilize a person with a disability.

***

Unintended Consequences

A significant contribution to understanding the unintended effects of regulation was Peltzman’s 1975 study of the effects on traffic safety of a slew of US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulations on the design of cars. In the mid to late 1960s, the federal government made a number of safety features mandatory. These included seat belts for all occupants, an energy-absorbing steering column, a penetration-resistant windshield, a dual braking system, and a padded instrument panel. In his study, Peltzman stated that the mandates aimed to reduce traffic fatalities and serious injuries sustained as a consequence of vehicle accidents. But he found something different. Fatalities were not reduced at all. Instead, deaths of vehicle occupants fell but those of pedestrians and motorcycle drivers rose. Peltzman’s tentative explanation was that by reducing the probability of being killed in a given accident, the mandates caused drivers to drive more “intensely.” His finding became so well known that economists started referring to the “Peltzman effect.” 

Later studies found that drivers with anti-lock brakes tended to follow the cars in front of them more closely. A 2010 study of NASCAR accidents found that the “mandated use of a head-and-neck- restraint system has almost completely eliminated serious driver injury, while simultaneously increasing the number of accidents per race” 

(from Pope and Robert D. Tollison, 2010).

Apprentices 2

                                    Apprentices 2

Men have been working on our house for the last 3 months, off and on. But there has been a change. When the esteemed Gov. Wolfe took "decisive action" and closed economic activity in Pennsylvania and the esteemed Mayor Peduto did the same in the city, they created gigantic no-work zones. No new work can be done and no new permits issued.
So....half the guys on the work crew on our roof have moved to Ohio, where there are less work restrictions.
All this to battle a problem we have only heard of.

From Pencils to Lighthouses

The world of economics and politics are fascinating, from pencils to...lighthouses.

There is constant debate over the proper venue of government. One often offered is market failure. Sometimes market failures occur because certain goods are plagued by free rider problems (i.e., people do not pay for the benefits they extract from the goods) and thus will be underproduced. This is a market failure associated with public goods where, they believe, the goods cannot be provided by markets in sufficient quantities. The best example is the lighthouse. As the light it produces is seen by all, the lightkeepers can never know who uses the light. This makes it hard to exclude free riders. Thus, if markets are left to produce lighthouses, there will be too few of them provided, increasing the occurrence of shipwrecks. State action is thus warranted to correct a market failure.

Munger wrote an article objecting. First, though markets can fail, governments can fail too. It may be that markets are unable to produce enough lighthouses, but states may do a worse job. This means that we need to accept the lesser imperfection.
Second, market failures are costly, which means that they generate strong profit opportunities for those who find solutions. For example, not having enough lighthouses may incentivize the development of different safety mechanisms such as repositioning software. Thus, market failures sow the seeds of their own solutions.

Geloso writes "two British entrepreneurs in the 18th century discovered a way to build “floating lighthouses” (i.e., lightships) that were quite cheap and charged significantly lower prices than other, stationary lighthouses. They opened a first lightship at the opening of the Thames River, which leads to London, to the delight of coal merchants and other shipowners. Their success was wild enough that they announced the launch of two other floating lighthouses in other places in England.

To mitigate the free rider problem, they used a variety of different mechanisms. They charged different prices to different people so that the price reflected each individual’s personal valuation of the service. They used subscriptions to incite people to finance production before they built the lighthouse. They also relied on certain informal organizations (such as the coffeehouses where coal merchants congregated) to ostracize non-payers. This rich combination of solutions was only brought to an end because the state-mandated monopoly sued the two inventors, prohibiting them from operating their lightship. The crown acquiesced, and that was the end of it."

 

He concludes, "There was nothing inherent to the lighthouse that made it a public good. It was a public good because government regulation made it so.

This is an important example. It speaks to how the lore of economics errs. The example used to justify state action was created by state action. Thus, justifications of state intervention on the grounds that there is a public good market failure actually may be getting the whole relation backward."

 

But there does seem to be that pesky shipwreck learning curve.

Protectionists

[ a protectionist]… believes that a voluntary exchange between Katarina in Bratislava and Lukas in Prague on December 31, 1992, was perfectly acceptable and harmful in no meaningful way to anyone, but that the same exchange between Katarina and Lukas on January 1, 1993, inflicted unwarranted damage on some innocent victims who deserve from the state protection from Katarina’s and Lukas’s peaceful, voluntary trade.
(Note: On December 31, 1992, Katarina and Lukas were citizens of the same country: Czechoslovakia.  A day later, they were citizens of different countries.)

From Manuel Ayau

Keeping A Peculiar Promise

The Sunnis are advancing in Iraq, a large oil producer. Iran, a large oil producer, may become involved. The conflict might interfere with production and transportation of oil in other producing countries.
The emerging markets are making more of a demand on world energy stores. According to The Global Warming Policy Foundation, Global demand for coal is expected to grow to 8.9 billion tons by 2016 from 7.9 billion tons this year. China is expected to add about 160 new coal-fired plants to the 620 operating now, within four years. 160! That's almost one a week. During that period, India will add more than 46 plants.
On the other hand, America's contribution to CO2 production is declining. CO2 production in the U.S. has fallen 12% from 2005 to 2012 and is at its lowest level since 1994. Coincidentally, employment rates have followed a similar path.
How could any reasonable person think of limiting energy sources in this country at a time like this?  Even if carbon were as toxic as arsenic, we would work around it. At any other time in history anyone campaigning to limit energy production would be suspected of  treason, bribery or blackmail.

The Government-Citizen Partnership

While there a many problems in this political/economic landscape, the bank risks are significant ones and the most obviously recent. Here is Lawrence Lessig on Saturday's "Up w/Chris Hayes" (via Jim's Slog) talking about Jamie Dimon and BoA. What is interesting is that there is an element in what he says that sounds urgent and specific, as if this political influence and distortion of our system is somehow unique. Instead it is less specific and more metaphorical. For example, is this "crisis" worse than the ideological sub-prime mortgage crisis? And is it more politically manipulated?:

"The real story here is the fact that these guys are gambling because there's a government that's going to back them up. There's a bail-out that's going to come. And the most striking thing...for me was: here's a guy who's already demonstrated they can blow up the economy. And now another explosion goes off.

The fundamental reason why we should be afraid of them is the regulatory structure that makes it so that when they blow up we all go down with them. And the Senate is filled with a bunch of people who only want to make this guy happy. Now why is that?

It's because they know that this guy has the power to blackmail both the Democratic and Republican Party parties because if you don't have some kind of support from Wall Street, you lose the election! So it is the power he has in the political system that makes this so terrifying. This is the first financial crisis in the history of United States where the people who caused the crisis have enough power to block any effective reform that led to that crisis. And that's what we should be terrified about."

Regulators: Friends and Foes

Thomas Fanning, the CEO of the Southern Company, in his Saturday interview with the Wall Street Journal, was dismissive of gas energy and renewables. He has a strong position. He and his company benefit from state mandated contracts for their nuclear power plant currently under construction using taxpayers dollars. If it comes in on budget it will cost the taxpayers of Georgia $14 billion dollars. To build an equivalent amount of capacity using natural gas would cost $2 billion. So the Georgia taxpayer is on the hook for 7 times the cost.

Of course, the taxpayer had no choice. This deal was made between government and Fanning and the Georgia taxpayer has no opportunity to switch. Nor will the regulators allow a competitor.

This is what government thinks is capitalism.

No wonder Mr. Fanning is so smug.

Dogs, Parking Meters and the Rule of Law

There is a neighborhood area where the locals take their dogs to run with each other. It is a sizable park, not fenced but well away from pedestrian traffic, sometimes frequented by sunbathers in the early day. The dog people always come at dusk when they are off work, the dogs have been indoors all day and there are no people around. It has become an interesting little social subset, people of all ages, stripes and backgrounds joined by their care and love for dogs. The group is self selecting; the aggressive dogs, the less disciplined dogs, the dogs that run away are not brought to the park. The owners sit, some bring light folding chairs you see at high school ball games, and socialize while the dogs play. On Fridays people bring hor d'oeuvres and share some wine.

The city, like most, has a leash law. Any dog without a leash draws a 30 dollar ticket for its owner. It is a reasonable law. Dogs loose in the street can be a problem. Here in the dog park the dogs run in a controlled area without risk to themselves or others. But they are off their leashes.

Recently, drawn by the smell of potential fines, the police have moved in. They have actually begun to stake out the dog park and have started ticketing any owners there. Taking a law aimed at safety and quality of life in the city they have enforced the letter of the law to the detriment of both. Like parking meters which used to encourage the availability of parking spaces for businesses and now discourage parking at all, the leash law has become predatory. Initially the owners reacted by assigning lookouts, like pickets at a military camp, but gradually the group wore down. Now no one goes to the dog park.

Cucumbers and Ice Rinks

EU and Cucumbers
I was writing yesterday about the EU and the regulations on cucumbers.http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/eu-regulations-to-keep-cucumbers-straight-are-declared-null-and-void-606625.html Sometimes it hard to keep a straight face with these people. There must be a gene for meddling and it would have to be linked with arrogance.
There is a wonderful story--I believe an urban legend--about the town council that is asked to solve the beetle infestation in the local lake. After a long investigation and debate, they decide to import frogs to eat the beetles. A year later the locals complain about the frogs being everywhere and, after the appropriate investigations, the council brings in snakes to eat the frogs. The next year the town is overrun with snakes and the council starts to discuss alligators.These people tinker with everything without any concern over the fallout because they are so certain, so confident. They remind you of a church council from the middle ages; ordained, superior and self-righteous. And beyond simple mortal criticism.
The wonderful analogy with a skating rink should never be forgotten. Imagine going to a government bureaucrat and telling him you want to open a skating rink where people of all ages and skills will maneuver about an ice surface on razor-sharp blades. The government would go nuts. You would have a host of crippling rules, regulations and, likely, a supervisor barking crazy orders to the participants. It would never work. These regulators are silly; the problem is that when we need them, they don't do their job at all. Particularly if the problem is dynamic. They are great at regulating vegetables and toilet sizes; it's more difficult when it comes to active people, the economy and criminals. We don't need their help with toilets and cucumbers; we've got their help in spades. We do need their help in monitoring leverage, private and public debt and deficit spending; nothing.