Category: reason

Uber says it is laying off 100 of its self-driving car monitors—the people who ride along with self-driving cars and can take control of the vehicle, if necessary—in San Francisco and Pittsburgh. The decision, announced on Wednesday, follows the decision in March to suspend all self-driving testing. Uber says it will lift this self-imposed suspension sometime this summer.

A car accident in March catalyzed the overhaul. Elaine Herzberg, 49, was struck and killed by an autonomous Uber while she was crossing a road in Arizona. The death raised concerns about how self-driving cars should be regulated, and led Arizona, once friendly to the idea of autonomous vehicles, to outright suspend all self-driving automobile testing on public roads.

Despite the uproar over the possible dangers posed by autonomous vehicles, Uber plans to get its self-driving cars back on the streets of Pittsburgh this summer, and is hiring 55 “mission specialists” to replace the car monitors. These mission specialists will provide more technical feedback to the company, allowing Uber’s engineers to identify problems more easily.

Self-driving cars aren’t perfect, but neither are human-driven cars. Indeed, the fatal accident in Arizona was the fault of two human beings, not the computerized car. The driver, Rafaela Vasquez, was streaming The Voice on her phone instead of keeping an eye out for pedestrians. The technology recognized the pedestrian, but didn’t act because the system deduced that emergency braking was necessary, a function only the driver could execute. Why was emergency braking necessary? The victim was crossing outside of the crosswalk after dark, and the system did not have enough time to both identify the individual and activate the standard brakes.

If anything, this incident should show that self-driving cars shouldn’t be tested by regular people, with their tendencies to be distracted easily by every Twitter mention or text update. Monitoring self-driving cars is a job for people who fully understand the limitations of the technology and do their jobs with the appropriate amount of concern.

That said, we should keep testing autonomous vehicles so that one day they can carry the Hulu- and phone-addicted. Human error is behind 90 percent of car crashes and motor vehicle accidents cost Americans $871 billion in 2010. Self-driving cars have tremendous potential to make transportation both safer and cheaper.

To get there, companies need the regulatory freedom to continue testing and innovating. As Meghan McArdle pointed out in The Washington Post, driver-driven cars gave us 24 fatalities for every 100 million miles driven in 1921, but advances in technology and education have reduced that number by almost 95 percent. Autonomous cars could bring about a similar milestone reduction in automotive fatalities as the technology develops and the market becomes increasingly competitive. But for that to happen, policymakers can’t overreact to tragic accidents. We didn’t let them stop us from having cars, and we shouldn’t let them stop us from taking the next step in transportation.

Earlier this week, Stormy Daniels, the adult film star who says she took hush money to stay quiet about an alleged 2006 affair with Donald Trump, was arrested for violating an Ohio statute that prohibits a stripper from allowing patrons to touch her if she is nude or semi-nude. The statute used against her is an example of how free expression can fall victim to zealous moralizers—and how almost any law aimed at free expression can be used to punish a political opponent, writes Marc Randazza.

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New York’s Department of Health (DOH) has recommended that the state legalize marijuana for recreational use.

In a 74-page report commissioned by Gov. Andrew Cuomo and published Friday, health officials insisted that the “positive effects of a regulated marijuana market” would “outweigh the potential negative impacts.” Though the study cited many reasons, the two biggest ones had to do with the potential economic benefits and the effect legalization would have on the criminal justice system.

The report noted that New York could collect up to $677.7 million a year in state and local tax revenue if the state legislature legalized weed for recreational use by adults over the age of 21. Moreover, legalization would create jobs in the marijuana industry and reduce a variety of “costs associated with illegal marijuana, including police time, court costs, prison costs and administrative fees,” the study said.

Legalization would also benefit a lot of people—particularly ethic and racial minorities—who’ve been penalized by the criminal justice system for a minor marijuana infraction. In 2017, 86 percent of people busted for “marijuana possession in the fifth degree” in New York were “people of color,” while just 9 percent were white, the report said. Thus, legalization would reduce the “disproportionate criminalization and incarceration” of those groups. Health officials also recommended that the state “expunge the criminal records of individuals with marijuana-related offenses.”

The study posited that smoking marijuana comes with mental and physical health risks, but suggested that legalization won’t lead to an onslaught of new users. That assertion fits with data from Colorado, where legal marijuana went on sale for adults in 2014. Since then, adolescent weed use has actually dropped to its lowest rate in almost a decade.

Now, it’s up to Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the state’s Democrat-led legislature to decide if they want to move forward with legalization. As the Associated Press reported, Cuomo has previously been wary of supporting legalization, but with far-left actress Cynthia Nixon challenging him in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, he’s “softened his stance.” In January, Cuomo asked the DOH to study the issue.

In the spring of 1989, Chinese students occupied Tiananmen Square, erected a replica of the Statue of Liberty, and called for democracy and individual rights. By the fall, people living in East Germany took hammers and chisels to the Berlin Wall, unleashing a wave of revolutions that ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was an auspicious year for human freedom.

Nineteen eighty-nine was also the year that Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto published The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in The Third World, which radically challenged conventional wisdom about the underlying cause of persistent poverty in the post-colonial landscape. Drawing on his extensive field work with the Peruvian-based think tank the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, de Soto argued that people were pushed into the black market and wider informal economy because governments refused to recognize, document, and promote legal ownership of land and other assets.

Without clear title and the right to transfer property, common farmers understandably refused to invest much in the land they tilled, and they couldn’t use it as collateral. This created what de Soto later called “citadels of dead capital” with value that could never be fully accessed.

No one, he argued, would plan for the future if everything they accumulated could just be taken away. As much an activist as an intellectual, De Soto has been called “the world’s most important living economist” by former President Bill Clinton. He is credited with changing policy in Peru and elsewhere by pushing governments to create property regimes that are public, transferable, and secure. His latest endeavor is a partnership with Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne and others to use blockchain technology and social media to create totally public and perfectly transparent records of ownership.

Reason’s Nick Gillespie caught up with de Soto in Washington, D.C. in June, where he received the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Julian L. Simon Memorial Award, named for the late free-market economist who believed that “mankind is the ultimate resource.”

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The United States may be in the “early stages” of a trade war, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) said Friday.

Speaking to reporters in Kentucky, McConnell bemoaned the fact that there are no winners in a trade war. “As you all know, I’ve said before, I’m concerned about getting into a trade war and it seems like…we may actually be in the early stages of it,” McConnell said, according to The Hill. “Nobody wins a trade war, and so it would be good if it ended soon.”

McConnel’s remarks follow a week of tit-for-tat tariffs between the U.S. and China. Last Friday, the Trump administration slapped tariffs on $34 billion of Chinese goods, prompting the Chinese to impose retaliatory tariffs on U.S. produce, meat, and cars. On Tuesday, the Trump administration upped the ante by announcing additional tariffs of 10 percent on $200 billion of Chinese imports.

The Kentucky Republican has repeatedly expressed concern that these tariffs will harm the U.S. economy. Yet, neither McConnell nor a Republican-controlled Congress have done much to rein in Trump’s ability to impose tariffs.

On Wednesday, 88 senators voted in favor of a measure limiting the president’s power to impose tariffs for national security reasons. However the nonbinding measure, co-sponsored by Sens. Bob Corker (R–Tenn.), Jeff Flake (R–Ariz.), and Pat Toomey (R–Pa.), was mostly seen as a symbolic gesture.

Neverthless, the Senate’s vote, and now McConnell’s comments, could be a sign of a growing Republican willingness to stand up to Trump, as Reason‘s Eric Boehm noted on Wednesday:

The nonbinding vote is, for now, mostly meaningless. Still, the bipartisan support for limiting the president’s ability to abuse the Section 232 tariff authority is the first sign that Republicans in Congress might be willing to stand up to Trump as he continues escalating an unnecessary trade war.

If congressional Republicans really want to rein in Trump on tariffs, however, they’ll need meaningful legislation to pass with a two-thirds majority in order to override a presidential veto. Though 88 senators approved the nonbinding measure, it will be much harder to garner that kind of support for binding legislation.

Why is that? According to Axios‘ Caitlin Owens, many Republicans don’t want to “cross” Trump “until their voters feel the pain” from the tariffs. “There’s a lot of confidence in the president,” says Rep. Tom Cole (R–Okla.). “But in this situation, most Republicans are classic free traders and a lot of them represent areas where this is dangerous.”

Still, some GOP lawmakers want to act, regardless of the political repercussions. “We got 88 votes yesterday on the Corker amendment,” Sen. Lamar Aleander (R–Tenn.) told Axios on Thursday. “Several of us are thinking of other legislation actions we could take. And we hope the president will change his mind.”

A California mayor wants to pass legislation that would prevent employers in his city from requiring that male employees wear neck ties.

“I spend a lot of hours every week on an elliptical or a bike just to increase blood flow to my brain, and it turns out every morning when I put on a tie I’m diminishing it,” Lancaster Mayor R. Rex Parris reportedly said.

Parris, who is also a litigator, cited a study in Neuroradiology that appears to support the idea that neck ties are harmful. The study looked into the effects of “socially desirable strangulation” and concluded that wearing a necktie, particularly a tight necktie, runs the risk of lowering cerebral blood flow, or CBF. Low CBF, as Parris argued, can cause serious issues for people suffering from ailments like high blood pressure.

The mayor also attacked the insistence that professional men wear neckties through a gender discrimination lens, saying, “I don’t think it’s appropriate in America today to make anyone do something that is now known to be detrimental to your health. Especially if it’s based on gender.” In a separate interview, Parris said, “It would be tantamount to us saying that women had to wear high heels. We know it’s bad for them.” (A New York City Human Rights Commission argued similarly in 2015, saying the requirement that men wear neckties is every bit as gendered as requiring that female employees wear skirts.)

Reason contacted Parris’s office to learn whether the ban was intended for private employers in the city, or just the city government. Parris’s office confirmed that he was, in fact, referring to private employers, and sent a press release reiterating that research shows ties restrict blood flow to the brain.

City attorney and municipal law expert Michael Colantuono told the Los Angeles Times that a private company would have the grounds to sue against such a prohibition. It’s possible a court would strike down the law if private employers can prove it imposes an undue burden. In order to prevail in court, Parris would likely need to prove that neckties are a public health issue.

Let’s get one thing out of the way right up front: bartenders and restaurant workers in Washington, D.C., did not ask the city to raise their wages and eliminate their tips.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Many tipped workers from the restaurant and bar scene in D.C. opposed the minimum wage initiative approved by the city’s voters in a low-turnout primary election last month. That ballot question, Initiative 77, was pushed by a national labor organization with designs on unionizing service sector workers.

And while the idea of boosting the minimum wage for tipped workers in the city from the current level of $3.89 per hour to $15 per hour might sound progressive, the reality is that many servers and bartenders take home far more than $15 per hour when tips are included, so the passage of Initiative 77 could actually see their take-home pay cut.

Despite opposition from the very people who were supposed to be helped by the proposal, Initiative 77 passed on June 19.

Those servers and bartenders might win after all. Members of Congress and the District of Columbia City Council are taking steps to thrwart the will of the people and block Initiative 77 from taking effect.

Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.) is preparing to file an appropriations bill that would block the implementation of Initiative 77. The bill could be offered as an amendment on the House floor as early as next week.

“Congressman Palmer believes that the tipped wage increase is bad policy, and the Constitution empowers Congress to exercise exclusive jurisdiction over the District of Columbia,” Elizabeth Hance, Palmer’s press secretary, tells Reason. “In instances where D.C. attempts to implement really bad policies like the tipped wage increase, Congress should intervene to correct them.”

Palmer, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, is co-sponsoring the bill with Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), who serves as chairman of that libertarian-ish grouping within the House GOP.

The congressional effort follows close on the heels of Tuesday’s vote in the city council, where a majority of the council’s 13 members supported a proposal to overturn Initiative 77.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Council Chairman Paul Mendelson said the wording of the ballot initiative was misleading—this is absolutely true, as I’ll explain in a moment—and that he believed the council should take action because “for a measure that is advertised as helping workers, to have so many workers opposed is striking.”

Initiative 77 was pushed by the Restaurant Opportunity Center (ROC), which has pushed successfully for similar laws in places like San Francisco and Minneapolis. Though it was founded after 9/11 to help displaced workers from the World Trade Center’s Windows on the World restaurant, the group has morphed into a union front, and previously made headlines during the summer of 2013 for staging Occupy Wall Street-style sit-ins at some restaurants in major cities. Since then, it has maintained a notably lower profile, but has continued to push policies like Initiative 77.

Diana Ramirez, co-director of ROC’s D.C. chapter, told the Post that the council’s repeal effort was “flat-out voter suppression.”

It’s anything but. Congress and the D.C. City Council are doing what elected officials in a representative democracy are supposed to do: act as a check on the will of the masses. And it should tell you something that a Republican Congress and the city council of a heavily Democratic city like D.C. are on the same side of this issue—the same side that both management and employees were on during the run-up to the election.

If anyone is engaged in chicanery here, it’s ROC and the other progressive groups that pushed Initiative 77 in the first place. While the ballot question made it sound like tipped workers earn less than $4 per hour currently, actual D.C. law requires that employers top-up tipped employees pay if they do not earn enough in tips to surpass the $12.50 minimum wage that applies to all non-tipped workers in the city.

In other words, all workers already earn at least $12.50 per hour, but tipped workers have the opportunity to earn more—sometimes significantly more. Servers and bartenders that I interviewed for a previous story about Initiative 77 told me they can make $300 to $400 during an eight-hour shift.

The most frustrating thing about Proposition 77, Julia Calomaris, a server at Bistrot Du Coin on Connecticut Avenue told me, is how often people seem to think voting for Prop 77 is helping restaurant workers.

“People have no idea how much money you can make working in a restaurant,” says Calomaris, who has worked in the industry for 17 years. Imposing a $15 minimum wage and eliminating tips is “giving help to people who aren’t asking for it,” she says.

It’s not just servers and bartenders who could lose if Initiative 77 is allowed to become law. The new rules could ripple through the restaurant industry, affecting business decisions ranging from how many support staff to hire to where to locate.

“When the cost of business gets too high, the first people to be laid off are going to be the prep cooks, support staff, bussers,” Ryan Aston, who bartends at the Hamilton, an upscale bar just a few blocks from the White House, told Reason last month. “When labor costs become too high, I mean, it’s not a charity. You’re in business to make money. I love what I do, but I do it because I get paid.”

Overturning the will of the people isn’t great optics, of course, and elected officials should endeavor to do so only when it is clear that the people have erred. This is probably one of those times.

Television Critic Glenn Garvin takes note of a Canadian comedy that is making its way to U.S. viewers via Hulu:

Letterkenny has been kicking around on the Canadian streaming service CraveTV—mostly a reservoir for U.S. premium cable shows like Game of Thrones—for a couple of years. A stapled-together series of talky sketches about some guys sitting their otherwise-deserted roadside produce stand somewhere in rural Ontario, it has no discernible plot, story, or production costs. Its sole purpose seems to be Canadian self-immolation

The characters chat about good Tinder come-on lines: “You just, you know, say something like, ‘On a scale of one to America, how free are you right now?'” Although there are cautionary notes about Tinder having a worrisomely similar name to Grindr, the gay dating site: “That’s a good way to get a finger in your bum.”

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Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein just announced that a grand jury has indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking into the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and arranging for the release of internal communications for the purpose of influencing the outcome of the 2016 election.

Eleven of the 12 Russian operatives are charged with either hacking into or “spearphishing” (sending emails to trick people into providing passwords) the computer networks of Democratic Party officials; spying on network activity and collecting information; and creating fictional personas to spread the information and conceal that the source was actually Russian officials with military intelligence agency GRU. The veiled proxies included an organization named DCLeaks (which claimed to be Americans) and Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to be a single Romanian person. The hacking campaign dated back to March 2016, according to the indictment.

The 12th Russian operative (as well as one of the previous group of operatives) is charged with hacking into election-management systems on the state level, where that person is alleged to have stolen information about roughly 500,000 voters. Eleven of the 12 operatives are also charged with money laundering, as they are alleged to have used cryptocurrencies to fund their activities while concealing their connections to the Russian government; and with aggravated identity theft, for using peoples’ names and passwords to commit fraud.

Rosenstein took great pains to explain that, thus far, there are no allegations that any Americans knew they were communicating with Russian intelligence officers as they went around arranging the release of the internal Democratic Party records. There’s also no allegation as yet that any attempts to meddle with the election systems affected the outcome of the presidential vote.

According to the indictment, Democratic Party organizations realized they had been hacked by May of 2016, and brought in a security company to purge the hackers. But the Russian operatives managed to remain in Democratic systems until October 2016.

To distribute the stolen emails, the Russian operative created a fictitious group named DCLeaks, claiming it was made up of U.S. “hacktivists.” They made up fictitious people and a Facebook page to promote the leaks online. The computer that operated the Twitter account for DCLeaks was the same computer used for some of the fake social media campaigns intended to stir up protests in the U.S.

In the summer and fall of 2016, the operatives invented Guccifer 2.0 and used “him” to release additional stolen documents through WordPress. The indictment notes that a candidate for Congress actually requested that Guccifer send him or her stolen documents related to his or her opponent, and that Guccifer complied. (The candidate is not named.) The Russians also sent stolen Democratic Party data to a “then-registered state lobbyist and online source of political news.” They also sent stolen documents about the Black Lives Matter movement to a journalist (both the state lobbyist and journalist are unnamed). Guccifer also passed along files to an unnamed “Organization 1,” which were then released just prior to the start of the 2016 Democratic National Convention. This seems like an obvious reference to WikiLeaks, but the organization is not named.

The entire indictment can be read here, and it is an outcome of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of election meddling. President Donald Trump is scheduled to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday. People are already anxious about what could happen there. This certainly isn’t going to calm anybody down.

Tom Alciere is a former Republican state legislator in New Hampshire who resigned under public pressure in 2001 after he made some public comments supporting the killing of police officers. He ran unsuccessfully for office two more times as a Republican (one time losing to a write-in). This year he appears on a primary ballot for the 2nd District‘s federal House seat, pursuing the Libertarian Party’s nomination.

The party did its best to prevent that. In 1993, the New Hampshire Libertarian Party (NHLP) booted Alciere. The party’s executive committee renewed its stance against the candidate last month, noting in a resolution that “Alciere has a history of advocating violence” and “refused to take a pledge against violence as a means of obtaining political objectives.” (Alciere was also arrested in 2009 for a misdemeanor assault on a 12-year-old female neighbor.)

For those reasons, state party chair Darryl Perry wrote in a petition to the state’s Ballot Law Commission (BLC), the party “disavows, impugns, forswears and repudiates Tom Alciere as a Libertarian candidate.” Perry requested the BLC “remove the name Tom Alciere from Libertarian Party’s primary ballot” in accordance with a regulation that the “name of any person shall not be printed upon the ballot of any party for a primary unless he or she is a registered member of that party.”

The State of New Hampshire, though, has a different definition of what it means to be a registered member of a Party. As far as it is concerned, it just means being registered to vote under that party’s banner. Despite the NHLP’s view of itself as a private organization that should be able to define its own membership, the state says Alciere can stay on the ballot for the September primary.

Under the law, the BLC wrote, “any legal voter” who tells the state “he intends to affiliate with and generally supports the candidates of the party with which he offers to register…shall be registered as a member of such party.” Since “Mr. Alciere did so register,” the commission concludes, he “therefore became a member of the Libertarian Party, as far as the statutory requirements of New Hampshire law are concerned.” The BLC’s decision is unappealable.

In its convention earlier this year, the NHLP endorsed Justin O’Donnell, also on the ballot against Alciere, for that House seat. Perry says they had no idea Alciere intended to take advantage of the party’s freshly re-won petition-free ballot access until he did it.

Alciere’s campaign website condemns the NHLP for aiming at his ballot access, insisting it has “chosen to imitate the model of the Democratic Party in how they treated Bernie Sanders; and the Republican Party, in how they treated Ron Paul for being too libertarian for them. Libertarians constantly cry foul when ballot access restrictions are used against Libertarian Party candidates, and now they use the same trick as a tool for their own political advantage.”

When it comes to the politics of advocating cop-killing, Alciere said in a phone interview this week that he is the true “orthodox libertarian extremist” and the party has “watered down their message. Let’s face it, [Gary] Johnson and [William] Weld [the party’s presidential ticket in 2016] weren’t exactly orthodox libertarian extremists,” since they avoided talk of things like “getting the border open, drugs legalized.”

“During a drug raid an innocent drug dealer is clearly justified in using deadly force against an intruder,” even if that intruder is a police officer, Alciere says. Hence, his stance on the propriety of cop-killing.

“They claim I’m going too far in talking about the age-old principle that not only the exact same enemy pilot that dropped bombs on Pearl Harbor during that attack but also all the armed forces of a hostile government are the enemy for the duration of the hostilities. And I apply the same principles to police forces.” People who choose to go to war against an oppressive government, he says, “are entitled to take out enemy officers, which is what the police force is.”

When he won his Republican state legislator seat, Alciere says, “I had this false sense of some glimmer of hope of working through the system and making a difference. I resigned in frustration because it became obvious it’s a complete waste of time trying to reason with all these crazy people” in politics. He adds that the abolitionists in their day were thought of as the crazy ones, because everyone around them “refused to be reasonable” in the face of the anti-slavery movement’s moral correctness.

Alciere says he doesn’t have the resources to campaign in any meaningful way for the L.P. nomination, but he hopes voters will seek out his website. Not just registered Libertarians, but voters unregistered with the other major parties, can vote in the Libertarian primary, according to Perry.

The question of the L.P.’s ability to distance itself from controversialists such as Alciere highlights the importance of things like the pledge the party insists all members sign on joining (part of which states “I do not believe in or advocate the initiation of force”) and the party’s statement of principles defining what a Libertarian believes, which says in part that a party member agrees to “prohibiting the initiation of physical force against others.”

As Alciere and other party members on the “extremist” spectrum, such as former vice-chair Arvin Vohra might insist, violence against government employees isn’t necessarily initiatory force, but retaliatory force.

That statement of principles, for what it is worth in policing the acceptable frontiers of Libertarian thought, was protected by a vote at the L.P.’s convention earlier this month. Seven eighths of registered delegates must vote for any changes to the statement of principles; that requirement is now itself protected with its own 7/8 requirement.

Caryn Ann Harlos, newly elected secretary for the Libertarian National Committee, was an activist working to ensure that the statement of principles remained intact. In a phone interview after the convention, Harlos emphasized it more as a way to ensure the party isn’t taken over by more centrist types who don’t actually embrace the L.P. for being as radical as it is.

But as Perry and the NHLP say, having party members on record about the use of physical force ought to be a way to distance the party from certain advocates of violence, though the state of New Hampshire did not agree.

Alciere, for his part, thinks that non-Libertarian politicians are responsible for real-life violence against police. “They have got cops’ blood on their hands, they are buying votes with the blood of cops” by sending them out to “get themselves killed trying to enforce blatantly unjust laws.” Politicians and voters may not literally pull the trigger on police officers, he says, but “they are pulling the lever” as politicians and voters that can lead to their deaths.