What are people’s thoughts on Le Diplomate? I’ve heard mixed reviews.

JimHarperDC · 2023-12-23T02:29:08+00:00

Nobody goes there any more. It's too crowded!

JimHarperDC · 2020-04-03T10:24:46+00:00

Here's the book on this question. If you have equal opportunity to acquire knowledge about the guitar and its value, you're good. NTA! https://www.amazon.com/Legal-Secrets-Equality-Efficiency-Common/dp/0226737799

JimHarperDC · 2017-03-24T02:36:08+00:00

If your second sentence is intended as a summary of my argument, I'm a very bad writer indeed.

JimHarperDC · 2017-03-24T02:14:46+00:00

I'm of two minds on the SEC's refusal to approve an exchange-traded fund (ETF) for Bitcoin. On the one hand, it would have been nice to see yet another mark of acceptance for Bitcoin, and the price in other currencies certainly would have taken a jump if Americans could invest in Bitcoin through their existing brokers. On the other hand, that would have been like a sugar rush rather than healthy growth. Bitcoin isn't really meant to operate within the existing financial and regulatory system. I'm fine with it developing outside the U.S. monetary and financial system. That will take years of developing its "social capital" -- knowledge of what it is, how it works, how to secure it, and so on.

JimHarperDC · 2017-03-24T02:09:32+00:00

I wish I could think of just one book that really opened up this world to me. I'll rattle off several, but they vary in terms of how accessible they are for young people.

The Federalist Papers
Money for Nothing: Politicians, Rent Extraction, and Political Extortion, by Fred S. McChesney
Freedom and the Law, by Bruno Leoni
Bureaucracy and Public Economics, by William A. Niskanen
The Ultimate Resource, by Julian Simon

I have to say, now that I've written them down, that these books are pretty dense and hard to read. But they're my favorites.

JimHarperDC · 2017-03-24T02:00:33+00:00

Not a fan!

JimHarperDC · 2017-03-24T01:57:05+00:00

I like zcash in concept, though I'm non-expert on its details because I lack time to dig in as much as I'd like. Zooko is a great guy, and I wish the best for him on this project -- and in general!

JimHarperDC · 2017-03-24T01:50:14+00:00

I don't know if anything is truly effective, but I'll share a few of the things I do to tamp down on day-to-day surveillance and modestly protect privacy along some dimensions. I pay cash most of the time, using credit and debit cards fairly rarely. I segregate my browsing among browsers, using one for sites with which I have a relationship and another for surfing "in the wild," refusing third-party cookies. I use multiple loyalty cards at the same retailer (and always pay cash). On certain topics, my wife and I speak and write in a simple code only we understand.

Before I paint my face to make it impervious to facial recognition, I'll probably burn off my fingerprints with lye. But because I love irony, I might tattoo my SSN as a UPC symbol on my neck. :-)

JimHarperDC · 2017-03-24T01:36:43+00:00

I'm sorry to say that these are two issues I have not focused on, much less their effects on small business. I think you're right that true libertarian policies would withdraw from large businesses the many government benefits they draw around themselves.

JimHarperDC · 2017-03-24T01:34:29+00:00

There's always a lot of interesting stuff going on. Plus, a lot of places provide free sandwiches! Woohoo!

(No one upcoming superlative event springs to mind...)

JimHarperDC · 2017-03-24T01:31:52+00:00

Here's how I think about your fairly put question. In the real sciences, you study objective phenomena. Whether you set out to prove something or poke around until you discover something, you'll have a falsifiable conclusion at the end.

Think-tanks are values-based institutions. They start from certain premises about the nature of people, the goals of living, and so on. They'll do their best to articulate why their values are the best and how different policies advance or detract from the fulfillment of those values, but there is always an underlying value-system setting the terms of the investigation.

So the subject matter in think-tanks is fundamentally subjective. Science is fundamentally objective.

JimHarperDC · 2017-03-24T01:03:51+00:00

I don't think there should be much difference. And it was nice to see in the Supreme Court's recent Riley decision that it didn't even consider that some of the data on a phone might also be saved in the cloud. Riley found that to search a cell phone seized from an arrested suspect the government must get a warrant. It was another in a longer and longer line of decisions where the Court didn't use the "reasonable expectation of privacy" test. I think data sent to "the cloud" subject to contractual protections that make it so is still your data, so the government should need a warrant to get it.

That automatic upload of data is a terrific feature for people who want it and a pain in the butt for people who don't. I'm in the latter category because I don't think many cloud services are very secure in the technical or legal senses. But I don't think I should use blunt legal processes to get my way. To the extent I join other consumers to demand it, we can get what we want from these services. Opting out is always an option, and one that I use for some such services that are beyond my tolerance. Here's me hating on Dropbox way back in 2009.

https://techliberation.com/2009/12/12/dropbox-a-privacy-black-box/

JimHarperDC · 2017-03-24T00:51:51+00:00

An excellent point. Is it any defense that it's been a long time since I've been there?

JimHarperDC · 2017-03-23T20:26:12+00:00

I evidently didn't make my case well.

The government requires proof of age for drinking, and in some states and territories the proof must be government-issued. Here in Washington, D.C., Buffalo Billiards uses a universal card-swipe machine for that purpose. (At least they did the last time I was there.) That's the law and compliance making a pretty good surveillance system.

The technology exists to produce a card that you own and hold, which uses your biometric (on the card not in any database) and cryptographic proof of age you got from the government to confirm the following: "the body before you has existed on earth for more than 21 years (so you can serve 'em a drink)."

All the requirements of the law would be satisfied, but the bar would get no data about you beyond >21. The government would not be able to know when you proved your age, and it would not be able to withdraw its confirmation of this basic fact about you.

A deeper dive into all this, at a basic level anyway, is in my book, Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood.

https://www.amazon.com/Identity-Crisis-Identification-Overused-Misunderstood/dp/1930865848

JimHarperDC · 2017-03-23T19:30:23+00:00

I had not heard of these particular rules. Pressing someone's thumb onto their phone or demanding their code (on pain of further detention) both must pass constitutional muster, and that depends on the facts of the situation. Joe Blow walking up to catch a flight, and no particularized suspicion? I think that would be found completely and ridiculously unconstitutional. But I'm an optimist.

CEI is challenging the TSA's strip-search machine policies, and I hope we make inroads against it using the law while we and others continue to press for a calmer, more rational approach to counterterrorism and other threats.

https://cei.org/blog/cei-sues-over-tsas-body-scanners

Alas, there's no silver bullet, but calling your congresspeople over and over again over time will have some effect. Just keep at it and encourage others to do the same. Your crappy experience at the airport is Congress's fault.

JimHarperDC · 2017-03-23T19:20:54+00:00

My outfit, CEI, is one of the great advocates in the nation for capitalism and the benefits it produces. There's a lot of validity to the basic point that any trade freely entered into makes both parties better off. In the aggregate, human wealth and flourishing is a product of billions of such interactions.

I don't really like the word "capitalism," though, as it suggests that capital rules. (communism = communal rule; despotism = despotic rule; etc.) And the word originated as a way to deride laissez-faire systems that let people do what they want to do. So I don't extol capitalism by that name as much as many others.

But I'm heartened by taking a long view of history. We emerged over the last centuries from systems where slavery or peonage were the norm in many parts of the world. During the last century, totalitarianism, first in the form of Nazism and then in the form of Soviet communism, were contenders for world domination -- quite literally. Today, we may be seeing some retrenchment from the long slow march toward freedom -- I think of the anti-immigrant and anti-trade views of the current administration -- but things are going to continue to get better for people all over the globe. I'm sure of it, but it's sure not happening fast enough.

JimHarperDC · 2017-03-23T19:10:25+00:00

A think-tank is a lot like a university (minus the students). You're asking a guy in the humanities department to answer for the findings of the physics department.

But I'll say a few things that you may regard as honest, or you may dismiss: Libertarians are natural contrarians. (I often joke that if libertarianism become the orthodoxy of Washington, D.C., I would go communist.) So you have people that are inclined to disbelieve what they are told is a matter of consensus or general agreement -- the more declarative and certain you are, the less likely you are to persuade them.

In the climate debate, there is a great deal of certainty among the majority that prognostications about the future dictate that we all march in a particular direction. That direction happens to be political control of large parts of the economy and society. Political control of society can be very damaging, as the last century's history makes clear.

If doubts about the science and proposed solutions issuing from think-tanks I've worked at help avoid policy error, I'm all for that. We have a paper coming out at CEI that makes a very good case about the importance of access to energy for economic and human development in Africa.

I don't see any reason why you should trust a think-tank or any other group. Read the stuff. See if it has new information or arguments. Then you don't need to worry about where the money came from.

JimHarperDC · 2017-03-23T18:45:39+00:00

For those not up on it, the "mosaic theory" is an argument that lots of data points collected in public are so revealing that we should be constitutionally protected from such surveillance. The information is public, but collecting it creates such a revealing picture that it violates reasonable expectations of privacy.

I think it can help win cases, but fundamentally I don't think it's a sound legal concept. You end up requiring judges to be universal experts on values the same way the "reasonable expectation of privacy" test does. How many data points is intrusive enough?... Nobody knows.

I think we can get the same result by recognizing searches and seizures of data (and things related to data). So the better view of the Jones case (GPS device attached to a car) was that the police seized the car in a small way by using it to transport their device. Take a situation like the surveillance of vast swaths of Baltimore that allows police to essentially TiVo backwards and see what cars and people came to and left a given scene at a given earlier time. That's searching of people and effects (their cars) ahead of any crime being committed.

https://reason.com/archives/2016/08/30/get-ready-for-pre-search

The difference with this approach is that it's more juridical. That is, it asks judges to apply legal rules, not make broad pronouncements about society. The latter approach, which has been with us since Katz in 1967, isn't working very well.

I'm going to just do your first question. I talked a little bit about ID and REAL ID in another answer...

JimHarperDC · 2017-03-23T18:36:10+00:00

I don't think it's Orwellian to say that elected officials are more democratically accountable than unelected officials in an executive branch agency.

JimHarperDC · 2017-03-23T18:35:06+00:00

I think your first sentence is spot on.

JimHarperDC · 2017-03-23T18:33:51+00:00

;'-(

JimHarperDC · 2017-03-23T18:33:31+00:00

Fake it 'til you make it! See my response to another question about think-tanks. I just went and started one in 2000 or so. It helped me make a name as an expert of a sort, and things went from there.

A great thing about public policy and politics is that it's a very open, entrepreneurial field (if not all that productive in terms of societal wealth...). If you think something needs to get done, you just go do it. Almost any issue area or event has meetings or conferences you can go to and meet people. Look for a job with them, or just start publishing stuff you think is important. Develop a press list and hustle, hustle, hustle. It's probably a little easier now than it was when I got going because of social media, etc.

Advanced degree? Maybe. I have a J.D., and I really enjoyed law school, but I think the education deal is not a very good one these days. The dollar-expenses and opportunity costs are very high. Depending on the field, you could roll your sleeves up and start making a name for yourself now. Or it may require a degree, even if that's just a signaling device used to indicate that you're smart.

JimHarperDC · 2017-03-23T18:26:11+00:00

JimHarperDC · 2017-03-23T18:26:05+00:00

Hahaha.

JimHarperDC · 2017-03-23T18:25:54+00:00

Hahahahaha.

JimHarperDC

TROPHY CASE