Category: reason

In 1948, the noted sex researcher Alfred Kinsey reported that 69 percent of men had paid for sex at some point in their lives. The 2005 General Social Survey put the number at closer to 15 percent. The true answer is probably somewhere in between—not just because time has passed and norms have changed, but because getting people to answer such questions honestly is not always possible. Still, it’s clear even from the low-end estimates that hiring a sex worker is a pretty normal thing to do, writes Maggie McNiel in her guide to hiring an escort.

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The Burton C. Gray Memorial Internship program runs year-round in the Washington, D.C. office. Interns work for 12 weeks and receive a $7,200 stipend.

The job includes reporting and writing as well as helping with research, proofreading, and other tasks. Previous interns have gone on to work at such places as The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, ABC News, and Reason itself.

To apply, send your résumé, up to five writing samples (preferably published clips), and a cover letter by July 1 to intern@reason.com. Please include “Gray Internship Application” and the season for which you are applying in the subject line.

Paper applications can be sent to:

Gray Internship
Reason
1747 Connecticut Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20009

Fall internships begin in September. Exact start dates are flexible.

Skaneateles, a town of 7,000 that rests at the north end of Skaneateles Lake, one of New York State’s Finger Lakes, is considering a ban on new restaurants in the city’s historic district.

The Auburn Citizen reported last week that the measure would prohibit new sit-down restaurants from opening along Genesee Street, which runs along the lake. That’s despite the fact that the waterfront district that would be impacted is composed of approximately 60 buildings that are “predominantly of commercial” nature.

So, why the ban on restaurants? As Baylen Linnekin writes, the rationale appears to be a familiar mix of protectionism: protecting neighborhood character, protecting existing restaurants from competition, and protecting existing home prices.

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“The single most important thing you can do politically for gay rights is to come out,” declared Barney Frank, who in 1987 was the first member of Congress to exit the closet voluntarily. “Not to write a letter to your congressman, but to come out.”

How did public support for the legality of same-sex relations double from the 1980s to today? How did support for both gay marriage and gay adoption grow by more than 20 percent in just two decades? Jeremiah Garretson tackles these questions in The Path to Gay Rights, a scholarly analysis of the LGBT movement’s success. The book’s narrative is hopeful—it’s a story of how countless personal interactions and individual changes of heart, not elite opinion or legal mandates, drove one of the most remarkable attitudinal shifts in modern history, writes Tyler Koteskey.

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Who you gonna call when your business is being outcompeted and you’re going bust? The feds, of course. President Donald Trump obliged his cronies in the electric power and coal industries today by ordering the Department of Energy (DOE) to take “immediate steps” to save the companies from going bankrupt. Those immediate steps will result in consumers having to pay higher power bills.

Back in March, the bankrupt nuclear and coal-fired electric power generator FirstEnergy asked the DOE to invoke section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act and declare that an “emergency condition” exists in Midwestern electricity markets. The company claims that closing down its old and unprofitable coal-fired plants will significantly reduce the reliability to electricity supply in the region.

In fact, the only real “emergency” is that the company has been losing money. In the guise of maintaining electric power reliability, FirstEnergy wants the DOE to order all coal and nuclear generating units in the PJM Interconnection footprint—a region covering all or parts of 13 states, plus D.C.—that have at least 25 days of onsite fuel be given non-market, cost-of-service rates and also guaranteed profits for at least four years. The “onsite fuel” qualification is meant to exclude generators that burn natural gas to produce electricity. Basically, the company wants the federal government to force consumers to buy its expensive electricity, and it wants to be guaranteed a profit too. Subsidizing these coal-fired plants would also help keep Trump’s coal industry pal Robert Murray, CEO of the Murray Energy Corporation, in business.

In January, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission voted unanimously to reject an earlier DOE proposal requiring coal-fired and nuclear power plants to stockpile 90 days of fuel onsite. The requirement was artfully framed as a measure to increase power grid resilience, but it was really a stealth subsidy to the coal industry.

Coal and nuclear power plants are losing money largely because they are being outcompeted by new and cheaper generation fueled by natural gas.

The folks who run the power grid at PJM Interconection don’t think there’s a looming supply reliability problem. “There is no need for drastic action,” says a statement PJM released today. It adds:

Markets have helped to establish a reliable grid with historically low prices. Any federal intervention in the market to order customers to buy electricity from specific power plants would be damaging to the markets and therefore costly to consumers….

The PJM electrical grid is more reliable than ever, with 23 percent reserve margins and billions of dollars of new investment. All of this is occurring while emissions are decreasing and wholesale prices are at historic lows for the 65 million consumers we serve. From 2008 to 2017, wholesale prices in PJM fell by more than 40 percent. Competition has required generators to operate more efficiently while also attracting new, more efficient technology, resulting in more than $1.4 billion in annual savings.

Just another depressing example of Trump invoking war emergency powers to reward corporate cronies and stick it to consumers.

A new study says the American automobile industry will lose 195,000 jobs over the next three years if President Donald Trump presses forward with a plan to impose 25 percent tariffs on imported cars and auto parts. That’s on top of the existing tariffs on steel and aluminum, which are already forecast to whack automakers and other manufacturing jobs.

According to the study, which was released by the D.C.-based Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), a 25 percent tariff on automobiles and auto parts would cause production in those industries to fall by about 1.5 percent and would force the industry to shed around 1.9 percent of its American workforce. The resulting slowdown would affect more than $200 billion in U.S. exports, PIIE projects.

Last week, Trump ordered Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to investigate whether the U.S. should slap new tariffs on imported vehicles and auto parts under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which allows the president to impose tariffs unilaterally for “national security” reasons. It’s the same process the White House used to craft the tariffs on steel and aluminum imports that Trump announced in early March.

It’s absurd, of course, to argue that imported cars are a threat to national security.

The auto tariffs “would deal a staggering blow to the very industry it purports to protect and would threaten to ignite a global trade war,” Thomas J. Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement.

The American automobile industry employs 50 percent more people than it did in 2011, Donohue noted, and domestic production has doubled in the last decade. According to PIIE, the United States imported $183.8 billion of passenger cars, SUVs, and minivans in 2017, mostly from the European Union ($46.6 billion), Canada ($43.3 billion), and Japan ($43 billion). The U.S. currently imposes a 2.5 percent tariff on cars and a 25 percent tariff on trucks—a hangover from a 1960s trade war with France and Germany.

If other countries respond to American tariffs on automobiles and auto parts with similar tariffs, PIIE projects, the consequences could be even more disasterous. In that scenario, American production would fall 4 percent and 624,000 American jobs would be lost.

“Both scenarios demonstrate how reliant the domestic industries are on imported parts, or intermediate inputs, that are not produced in the United States or that have no easy US-made substitute,” PIIE’s analysts write. “Consumers could expect to see prices rise for both imported and domestically produced vehicles.”

Las Vegas’ hotel industry is teetering on the edge of a strike by hotel workers worried their jobs will be automated away.

Today is the deadline for the operators of 34 Las Vegas casinos and resorts to agree on a new contract with the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, which represents some 57,000 hotel workers, including cleaners, porters, and servers.

The Caesars Entertainment Corporation, which owns the famous Caesars Palace and seven other hotels in the city, was able to reach an early morning agreement with the union. But the rest have yet come terms.

One major sticking point is the union’s demand that they get a say in any new technology implemented by hotels, and that workers who lose their jobs to automation receive both financial compensation and the offer of alternative jobs.

“We support innovations that improve jobs, but we oppose automation when it only destroys jobs. Our industry must innovate without losing the human touch,” said Geoconda Argüello-Kline of the Culinary Union in a press release from last week, when 25,000 culinary union members voted to authorize a strike.

“I voted yes to go on strike to ensure my job isn’t outsourced to a robot. We know technology is coming, but workers shouldn’t be pushed out or left behind,” added Chad Neanover, a prep cook at the Margaritaville, in the same release.

Johannes Moenius, an economist at the Redlands University, says he understands the tech fears.

“Las Vegas is pretty much of the epicenter of a potential wave of automation,” Moenius explains. According to Moenius’ research, about 65 percent of the current jobs in Vegas may be automated within the next 20 years, the most of any large city in the United States. Up to 73 percent of today’s hotel workers could see their jobs automated, he tells Reason.

Moenius stresses that his 65 percent figure is a technical one, describing jobs that could be farmed out to robots, not jobs that necessarily will.

“Think of your high-end restaurant in Vegas,” he says. “They are not going to have robot servers running around and bussing tables. But a lot of stuff that can be done in the kitchen and the back office is up for grabs.”

Already hints of the automation to come are popping up. The Renaissance Hotel has at least two full-time robot butlers that schlep towels and toiletries to hotel guests. The Tipsy Robot, a bar, has swapped out its human bartender for two large cocktail-mixing robotic arms. Less flashy but no less disruptive are the self-check-in kiosks being rolled out in several hotels, and the voice recognition technology that many guests can now use to order room service.

The spread of this new technology is a boon to guests—a majority of whom of whom expressed a preference for a more automated hotel experience in one survey—and to hotel owners themselves, who can save on labor and benefit costs.

This Culinary Workers Union in a less appealing position, given that they represent the lower-skilled support staff whose jobs are at risk. Unfortunately, its other demands may give hotel operators an incentive to embrace automation faster.

The union has been demanding a pay bump of 4 percent a year for the next five years, boosts to health and retirement benefits, and the extension of union membership to currently non-unionized restaurant and arena workers. Whatever the merits of those demands, they add expenses that hotel owners could largely avoid through automation: Robots don’t demand pay increases, nor do they require health benefits. Even an unobjectionable demand that hotels offer better protections against sexual harassment on the job has an automation angle. In these pre-Westworld days, robots are hard to sexually harass.

On the other hand, if the union is able to raise the costs of automation—through financial compensation for displaced workers, and by mandating that the union get a say before new technologies are adopted—their demands will look a lot more sustainable.

Law-abiding Californians’ right to buy and sell AR-15s and other popular semi-automatic rifles shrank this week after a judge upheld state rules targeting “assault weapons.”

The National Rifle Association’s state affiliate had challenged rules, set to take effect on July 1, that expand the existing definition of “assault weapon” to include centerfire rifles with “bullet buttons,” plus a slew of handguns and shotguns. Those rules, the group’s lawsuit argued, extend far beyond what a 2016 state law authorized, writes Declan McCullagh.

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When you look back at your childhood, you might have fond memories of throwing around little “Bang Snap” noisemakers with your friends. Or possibly at your friends, if you were that kind of kid. You might have even brought some to school to share and have fun with during recess. I know I did.

But now we live in a world of school panics. A 10-year-old fourth grader in the Henry County School District in Georgia bought a handful of these little noisemakers to his bus stop, then had three left over in his backpack when he entered Flippen Elementary School. Another student told the principal, who searched his backpack and found them.

They didn’t suspend him, which itself would be absurd. They expelled the boy, permanently. Indeed, they expelled him from the entire school district, pointing to a zero tolerance rule “that permanent expulsion is the punishment when a student brings an explosive compound to school,” according to Atlanta’s WSBTV.

Let’s be clear: These toys work by having tiny amounts of silver fulminate combined with gravel, which detonates when stepped on or thrown into a high surface. While it is true that silver fulminate is an explosive, the extremely small amounts of it within these toys are absolutely harmless.

Some of these bang snaps are marketed as being safe for children over the age of 8, so I understand that an elementary school with children as young as 5 or 6 might not want them on the premises. But to treat this boy as though he brought an actual “explosive compound” to school is embarrassingly stupid. His mother now has to try to convince the school board to show mercy and let her boy back in.

As an aside to all Atlanta-based media outlets: “Poppers” are a completely different thing that you should maybe know about. When I saw headlines saying a 10-year-old had been expelled for bringing “poppers” to school, my mind went to a very, very different place.

Once upon a time, the first of June was generally a time to turn off the three-channel tube, which was mostly a wasteland of reruns and summer replacements, and head outside to practice genocide against anthills with firecrackers or see the USA in your Chevrolet.

But those days have gone the way of hula-hoops and the Olsen twins. The broadcast networks are a deluge of high-concept (Halle Barre knocked up by a space alien!) summer popcorn shows. And cable increasingly sticks to business as usual, rolling out new series all summer long. Television critic Glenn Garvin takes a look at the first three to hit the airwaves in June.

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