Uber drivers are contractors, not employees, according to a memorandum from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), striking a blow to union organizing efforts among ride-hailing operators.
The memo, written by NLRB General Counsel Peter B. Robb, states that drivers are free to set their schedules and work for competing companies, which means they are not employees under federal labor law. While the ultimate decision falls under the purview of the NLRB’s regional director, they typically adopt the advice of the board’s general counsel.
Robb’s memo concurs with a letter the Labor Department released last month that classified gig economy workers similarly.
The NLRB’s final ruling will apply only to union rights. It will not affect the slew of lawsuits brought against ride-hailing companies in pursuit of higher wages and overtime protections, among other demands. And it likely won’t placate the Uber and Lyft drivers across the country who went on strike last week, demanding that companies provide the benefits they grant to employees.
“Drivers are at the heart of our service─we can’t succeed without them─and thousands of people come into work at Uber every day focused on how to make their experience better, on and off the road,” said a statement from Uber in response to last week’s driver strikes. The company added that it is committed to providing “more consistent earnings, stronger insurance protections, [and] fully-funded four-year degrees for drivers or their families.”
Experts estimate that labor costs would increase between 20 and 30 percent if ride-hailing companies were forced to reclassify all of its workers as employees and provide them with health care and adhere to minimum wage laws. Those costs would likely be passed on to riders, upending a business model centered around providing affordable alternative methods of transportation. It would also trigger driver layoffs, making ride-hailing work an exclusive profession.
The popular ride-hailing companies are facing increased pressure to cut costs as they court investors with their recent public offerings. Currently, Uber and Lyft are hemorrhaging money; the former lost nearly $2 billion in 2018, while the latter lost $1 billion. Those numbers won’t improve with mandatory employee benefits for millions of workers.
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The family of ReGina Thurman is suing her jailers and nurses following Thurman’s preventable death behind bars in Jackson County, Missouri.
According to the lawsuit, which was provided to Reason by one of the lawyers on the case, Thurman passed away on January 20, 2017, while being admitted to the Jackson County Department of Corrections. Thurman told authorities that she had chest pain and that one of her legs was numb. Unbeknownst to Thurman, her aorta was tearing. According to the suit, her jailers should have recognized her symptoms as signs of either a tear specifically, or some kind of heart attack.
Yet neither the prison guards nor jail medical staff, who were contracted through Correct Care Solutions, L.L.C., took Thurman’s complaints seriously.
Rather than contacting emergency services, a guard had Thurman wheeled into a dressing room so she could change into her jail clothes. When Thurman ended up on the floor, another guard assumed that she was intentionally holding her breath. That guard told her to breathe, relax, and put the clothes on. A third joked that Thurman was suffering from “jail-litus” during the intake process.
Thurman was screened by a nurse named Jennifer Grimshaw, who checked her vital signs. This was the only medical care she received before she died.
A second nurse by the name of Miranda VanStratten documented that she checked Thurman’s vital signs multiple times through the evening. She said that they appeared to be normal and offered Thurman Tums tablets as she believed Thurman had heartburn.
Video from the jail revealed that VanStratten had not actually taken the vital signs as she said. Videos also revealed that Thurman was left alone without attention from a guard or nurse for 18 minutes at one point.
Thurman was threatened by a nurse when she was commanded to stand, despite her crying on the floor that she was in pain and unable to move. The nurse said that if she did not stand, she would be sent to the medical housing where she would be unable to make calls to her family.
A fellow inmate had already called Thurman’s daughter while the incident unfolded. The inmate told Thurman’s daughter that Thurman was experiencing chest pains and was being ignored. The inmate later said that she believed Thurman would get care if her daughter called the facility. Other inmates helped Thurman by alerting the guards or assisting her in standing.
Emergency paramedics were not called until after Thurman went pulseless.
The lawsuit demands compensation from the guards, the nurses, the county, and the medical contractor. Thurman family lawyers argue that the corrections staff and the medical staff breached their duties “by failing to, among other things, exercise reasonable and ordinary care, skill, and diligence in devising an adequate health care delivery system, promulgating and implementing adequate medical policies and procedures, training and supervising medical and nursing personnel, and actually providing the medical care and treatment ReGina Thurman required.”
The lawsuit also criticized the “reckless or callous indifference toward ReGina Thurman’s health and safety.”
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Last evening, I attended a rain-soaked rally in New York City for long-shot Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, a 44-year-old entrepreneur who is running on a platform based on three main ideas: a universal-basic income (UBI), Medicare for All, and what he calls “human-centered capitalism.” He’s funny, smart, and forward-looking. Although he has effectively zero chance of becoming president (then again, who thought Donald Trump would ever win?) and his vision is built upon flawed premises (more on that in a moment), the conversation he’s trying to start is worth taking seriously, if only because his fear of a jobless future resonates with many people.
Although Yang’s campaign said that over 5,000 people RSVPed to the rally, held at Washington Square near New York University, there were maybe a few hundred people in attendance. The rain, heavy at times, doubtless depressed turnout, but the mood was ebullient, with followers holding up signs that said everything from “Math” (a nod to the idea that the candidate’s numbers on his policies check out) to “Foreskin for the Win” (the Taiwanese-American Yang told The Daily Beast that he’s skeptical of routine circumcision of male babies).
Over about 20 minutes of comments, the candidate hammered home his main themes. “How did Donald Trump become our president in 2016?” Yang asked at one point. “The explanations go something like Russia, Facebook, the FBI, maybe a dash of Hillary Clinton thrown in there. But I looked at the numbers…and Donald Trump is our president for one simple reason: We automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, all of the swing states that Donald Trump needed to win.”
Anxiety over an increasingly jobless future is the motivating concern of Yang’s campaign. He thinks his version of a UBI, which would give every American between the ages of 18 and 64 $1,000 a month in cash, will provide people enough of a cushion to alleviate the stress and anxiety of economic dislocation without undercutting the desire to work and be productive. Indeed, he says that having basic needs met through a UBI and tax-provided health insurance (Medicare for All) will actually spur people to be more creative and entrepreneurial without reducing their zeal for employment. The jury is out on all of this, especially since the one existing program he keeps pointing to is Alaska’s Permanent Fund, which gave residents there just $1,600 for the entire year of 2018. Alaska simultaneously boasts the second-highest labor force participation rate and the nation’s highest unemployment rate, so go figure. Given the lack of truly relevant, long-term experiments, it’s far from clear what the outcome of a UBI might be.
That said, it will be costly—around $3 trillion a year (the current federal budget is $4.4 trillion). Medicare for All is also expensive—around $32 trillion over 10 years—and it’s not immediately clear how Yang would pay for all this. His campaign website talks about eliminating some federal spending, instituting a value-added tax (VAT) of 10 percent that would squeeze big tech companies more. He also says that his UBI would “permanently grow the economy by 12.56 to 13.10 percent,” which seems precisely like the sort of exact-sounding rosy scenario that doesn’t pass the smell test. Whether Yang’s budget math adds up it’s at least slightly heartening that, unlike, say, Bernie Sanders, he at least makes a gesture toward paying for his governing vision (Sanders resolutely refuses to explain in any detail how he’s going to pay for his version of Medicare for All).
Let’s leave aside for the moment the question of paying for Yang’s plans. Is he right that the biggest problem facing America is a jobless future, one in which automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning consign more and more of us to the reserve army of the unemployed?
Yang talks a lot about the coming revolution in self-driving trucks, call-center bots, and the like to paint a future in which fewer and fewer people between 16 years old and 65 years old have meaningful work to do. What has already happened to manufacturing jobs is about to happen to the retail sector and the few remaining blue-collar professions, such as trucking. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the labor force participation rate since 1950 peaked in 2000-2001 at around 67 percent. In 1950, it was around 60 percent and so far in 2019, it’s about 63 percent:
A slightly different story appears when you break the rate down via gender. Male labor force participation rate peaked in the early 1950s at around 86 percent and has been steadily declining ever since, to around 70 percent (the decline has flattened somewhat in the past few years, though it’s hard to know if that’s a new normal or a temporary cessation).
Meanwhile, female labor force participation rate grew steadily from about 33 percent in the early 1950s to a current level of about 57 percent (down slightly from a peak a decade or so ago of 59 percent).
Encouragingly, job tenure—the length of time an employee stays with the same firm—has been constant over the past decade. The BLS found that between 2008 and 2018, the median tenure of workers with the current employer has stayed stable at a little over four years (that’s also about what median tenure was in 1983). Over the same period, the percentage of workers with 10 years or more with their current employer actually increased, from 31.5 percent to 33.2 percent. This shouldn’t be happening if the labor market is being emptied out or massively disrupted due to automation.
Red line is percentage of manufacturing jobs as a percentage of U.S. labor force. Click through for more details.
Yang’s animating concern is ultimately misguided in two profound ways. One concerns the pace of change. At least since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, critics have always worried that technological revolutions will wipe out whole industries overnight, causing a huge amount of human suffering and social dislocation. But that is essentially never the case. Consider manufacturing jobs. The share of factory workers as a percentage of the labor force peaked in 1943, at around 40 percent. Since then, it’s been a steady decline for decades. When it comes to contemporary fears about things such as autonomous vehicles and trucks, self-interested hucksters such as Elon Musk can easily gull reporters and others with predictions that we’re just a couple of years away from never having to touch a steering wheel again. But as Reason Foundation’s transportation guru, Robert W. Poole will tell you, we are in fact multiple decades away from such technological marvels becoming commonplace. Even disruptive economic change unfolds at a pace to which we can generally adapt.
The second issue with Yang’s grim vision of the future is more conceptual. Predictions of jobless futures have a long history and a perfectly failed record at being correct. At least since Queen Elizabeth I of England refused in 1589 to issue a patent for a type of knitting machine, people have always worried that technology will destroy the need for human workers. However, as Reason‘s Ronald Bailey documented in a 2017 article, MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and Boston University economist Pascual Restrepo
report that the number of jobs lost due to robots since 1990 is somewhere between 360,000 and 670,000. By contrast, last year some 62.5 million Americans were hired in new jobs, while 60.1 million either quit or were laid off from old ones, according the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The impact of robots, in other words, is quite small, relatively speaking. Moreover, when the researchers include a measure of the change in computer usage at work, they found a positive effect, suggesting that computers tend to increase the demand for labor.
Another Boston University economist cited by Bailey, James Bessen, notes that even jobs heavily impacted by the spread of computers and automation—think supermarket checkouts, paralegal work, and bank tellers—are employing more people than they did before the rise of labor-saving machines. The number of bank tellers increased along with the number of ATMs because ATMs “allowed banks to operate branch offices at lower cost; this prompted them to open many more branches, offsetting the erstwhile loss in teller jobs.”
As economic historian and Reason columnist Deirdre McCloskey has written:
Consider the historical record: If the nightmare of technological unemployment were true, it would already have happened, repeatedly and massively. In 1800, four out of five Americans worked on farms. Now one in 50 do, but the advent of mechanical harvesting and hybrid corn did not disemploy the other 78 percent.
In 1910, one out of 20 of the American workforce was on the railways. In the late 1940s, 350,000 manual telephone operators worked for AT&T alone. In the 1950s, elevator operators by the hundreds of thousands lost their jobs to passengers pushing buttons. Typists have vanished from offices. But if blacksmiths unemployed by cars or TV repairmen unemployed by printed circuits never got another job, unemployment would not be 5 percent, or 10 percent in a bad year. It would be 50 percent and climbing.
It’s conceivable that the future will be different than the past when it comes to automation and its effect on work. But it’s also highly unlikely and suggests that Andrew Yang’s policy platform is built on a foundation of fear that is thankfully mistaken.
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On May 17, the federal government may decide that it can dictate to cancer patients where they are allowed to receive life-saving treatment, and where they are not. That type of control is seriously dangerous; restricting access to treatmentin this manner gives the government far too much sway over people’s lives for no clear benefit.
On February 15 the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released a good proposal intended to help victims suffering from certain types of cancer, specifically those relating to the blood, like leukemia, by expanding access to CAR-T cell therapy. CAR-T is widely considered to be a medical breakthrough; the treatment is at least partially—if not wholly—successful in 80 percent of cases. But despite the treatment’s fabulous success rate, some cancer sufferers may be unable to take advantage of it due to one restrictive mandate within its National Coverage Determination (NCD).
The NCD outlines the cases in which treatments are covered and those in which they are not. In the case of CAR-T, within CMS’ otherwise commendable policy proposal, the agency will permit CAR-T treatment only when it is administered in hospitals. This stipulation is counterproductive red tape and can restrict people’s access to this life-saving cancer treatment. It is yet another example of the unintended, destructive consequences of government-controlled health care.
At first glance that restriction might seem entirely reasonable. After all, aren’t sick people treated in hospitals? Yes, but when it comes to treating cancer, hospitals are by no means the only viable option for care.
Over the course of the last decade, there has been a surge in outpatient facilities that treat cancer patients as well. These facilities have become especially important for those who live in rural areas and do not have an inpatient facility within reach. Demonstrating the value of the free market in health care, the growing marketplace for treatment locations provides patients with greater opportunity to choose the facilities that are right for them. Leave it to the federal government to inadvertently strip that freedom away.
To the credit of America’s governing officials, many members of Congress have recognized the CAR-T hospital treatment requirement for what it is: a disaster which could undo the utility of the rest of the proposal. On May 1, a group of legislators from across the country came together to express those concerns to Seema Verma, the administrator for CMS. In a rare demonstration of political unity, Democrats and Republicans wrote to Verma and outlined the problems the CAR-T hospital mandate would cause. Namely, hospitals alone won’t cut it.
A staggering 106 rural hospitals have closed since 2010. The problem may soon get even worse, with nearly 700 at risk of shutting down. While CMS deserves praise for crafting an otherwise commendable proposal, limiting CAR-T treatment to hospitals can have serious real-life consequences, harming cancer patients by limiting affordability and access to care.
For many cancer sufferers, travel is not a viable option. Over half of patients eligible for the CAR-T treatment don’t live close enough to hospitals where the therapy is administered. Even for those that do, other factors can be equally prohibitive.
Due to the substantial risk of dangerous side-effects, patients receiving CAR-T are required to remain within a half-hour away from a treatment facility. This poses a severe problem for some individuals of limited income, who can’t afford the financial burden of relocating for treatment. About one in two patients eligible for CAR-T live at least an hour away from a qualifying treatment facility. To receive treatment, they would have to secure temporary housing within the prescribed 30-minute radius. For many, that’s just not an option. That is precisely why individuals must have the autonomy to choose the treatment centers that work best for them, absent the useless, counterproductive edicts from government bureaucrats.
It was undoubtedly not CMS’s goal to restrict access to life-saving cancer treatment, but that is what will occur should they not remove this one anti-competitive mandate in the NDC from their otherwise sound proposal. For some, limiting CAR-T treatment to hospitals would mean a far greater financial burden on their shoulders. For others, it means they won’t be able to receive treatment at all.
Ultimately, the government has no business telling cancer victims where they can and cannot go to receive life-saving treatment. The NDC must be amended to extend greater access to treatment and allow the free market to thrive once again. Otherwise, cancer patients will suffer the consequences.
Dr. Ron Paul, a former U.S. congressman from Texas, is chairman of Campaign for Liberty
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After the death of conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016, President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to replace him. A moderate liberal, Garland likely would have shifted the balance of the high court to the left.But Senate Republicans refused to hold a hearing on Garland’s nomination until after the presidential elections—which saw Donald Trump elected to the White House, effectively ending any hopes for Garland’s appointment to the highest court in the land.
Once in office, Trump nominated the conservative judge Neil Gorsuch to replace Scalia. When Justice Kennedy—the high court’s most frequent swing vote—retired, Trump chose the solidly conservative Brett Kavanagh to take his spot. Liberals, concerned that a conservative majority may dominate the Court for a generation and overturn key precedents like Roe v. Wade, have responded by calling for expanding the Supreme Court to include as many as 15 justices. Several presidential candidates, including Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Kirsten Gillibrand have all endorsed court packing proposals, with former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder saying the idea should be “seriously” considered.
The idea of expanding Supreme Court membership hearkens back to the 1930s when FDR aggressively pushed the idea of court-packing because his New Deal policies were being declared unconstitutional.
“If court-packing does happen and you get this cycle of retaliation, this quite valuable institution would be undermined,” says Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University and contributor to The Volokh Conspiracy blog. “Protections for our civil liberties, for separation of power, for limits on the power of federal government—all of that would be significantly weakened over time.”
Somin sat down with Reason to discuss the revival of court-packing proposals on the left and how they could undermine the institution of judicial review.
Produced by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Meredith Bragg and Todd Krainin.
Photo credits: Pete Souza/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Cheriss May/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Ron Sachs/picture-alliance/Consolidated/Newscom, Doug Mills/picture-alliance/Consolidated/Newscom, Between the wars/UPPA/Photoshot/Newscom, Kevin Dietsch-Pool via CNP/MEGA/Newscom, akg-images/Newscom, Mark Hertzberg/ZUMA Press/Newscom.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) recently decided that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has no authority to regulate “articles intended for use in capital punishment,” including the drugs used in lethal injections.
The opinion was published earlier in May and signed by Trump-appointed Assistant Attorney General Steven Engel:
Electric chairs and gas chambers are “articles” that were created for the sole purpose of capital punishment. Because of this, it is clear that the FDA does not have authority over them. Other articles, such as the drugs used in lethal injections or the guns used in firing squads, were created for functions beyond execution. While the FDA has technically never claimed jurisdiction over the former, its authority over the drugs used for lethal injections is questionable.
For example, the FDA has jurisdiction over hot tubs, saunas, and treadmills, ONLY when they are “intended for medical purposes.” The FDA has no authority when they are used for recreational purposes as that is beyond its jurisdiction.
In a similar way, the FDA regulates drugs based on whether or not they “are safe and effective for their intended uses.” An article approved for one use is currently not allowed to be imported for a separate use. Sodium thiopental, one of the three drugs used in the standard lethal injection cocktail since the 1970s, is one of the articles in question. Sodium thiopental is an anaesthetic used in surgical procedures. Corrections facilities multiply the normal 300-milligram dosage anywhere from six to 17 times for the purpose of execution.
The DOJ acknowledges that the FDA has jurisdiction over drugs used in animal euthanasia because it is a standard practice accepted in veterinary care. Capital punishment, on the other hand, is not accepted as medical care.
The DOJ also observes that lethal injection drugs would be unable to meet FDA compliance since the agency requires labels to include warnings about “unsafe dosages.” It is understood that warning against fatal use would be irrelevant for any drug used for the purpose of death.
Because of these observations, the DOJ concludes that the FDA cannot regulate any article of capital punishment because the intended use, capital punishment, is not medical and therefore falls beyond the FDA’s scope. The FDA is only free to regulate the same drugs when used in medical care.
The opinion stems from a years-long fight between the FDA and the state of Texas over an injunction blocking the importation of sodium thiopental. The injunction remains in place for now.
Though states are eager to possess sodium thiopental for executions, U.S. manufacturer Hospira ceased production of the drug altogether in 2011. After the company moved production to Italy, the Italian government demanded that the company ensure that the drugs would not be used to administer the death penalty. Hospira determined that while they did not condone the use of their drug for capital punishment, they did not have the ability to ensure that it would remain out of the hands of U.S. corrections facilities. In a statement following the decision to shut down entirely, the company said it regretted that hospitals “who use the drug for its well-established medical benefits” will no longer have access to the product.
A sodium thiopental shortage caused states to look for other manufacturers and drugs. Oklahoma, for example, began to use pentobarbital, a drug intended to euthanize animals. Opponents renewed their criticism of the drug following two botched executions in Oklahoma in 2014. When the Danish manufacturer announced that it would no longer supply the drug for lethal injections, states turned to synthetic versions.
The FDA has largely lost its claim as any sort of moral gatekeeper. Stories like the one portrayed in the 2013 movie Dallas Buyers Clubshow how the FDA’s heavy-handed regulations punish those seeking life-saving medicine. Rather, the DOJ opinion, as well as Texas’ and other states’ aggressive fight to access drugs for lethal injection show just how far the government is willing to go to kill.
Public opinion currently supports the death penalty. Pew Research Center found that the decades-long decline in support for the death penalty was thwarted by a rise in 2018. Pew also found in 2015 that the majority of people recognize that there is a risk of putting an innocent person to death and that the death penalty is unlikely to deter serious crime.
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With more than 1,700 entries, the Greater Los Angeles Press Club’s annual Southern California Journalism Awards broke its own record for submissions this year. While we did not break our own record, Reason did alright. We received a very healthy 19 nominations for work published across our print, web, and TV platforms in the 2018 calendar year.
Here are the pieces that tickled, enraged, and impressed the judges.
Best Humor/Satire Writing: Austin Bragg, Meredith Bragg, and Andrew Heaton, “Groundhog Day: 2018”
Best Obituary/In Appreciation: Todd Krainin, “Travel Shows Were Boring as F*ck. Then Came Anthony Bourdain”
Best Medical/Health Reporting: Zach Weissmueller and Mark McDaniel, “Government-Approved Workouts? The Fight Against Fitness Licensing”
Best Investigative Reporting (TV): Jim Epstein, “The $15 Minimum Wage Is Turning Hard Workers Into Black Market Lawbreakers”
Best News Feature (over 5 minutes): Zach Weissmueller, “Trump, Ryan, and Walker Want to Seize Wisconsin Homes to Build a Foxconn Plant”
Best Entertainment Personality Profile/Interview (TV): Nick Gillespie, Austin Bragg, and Ian Keyser, “CNN’s Jake Tapper on The Hellfire Club, Donald Trump’s Big Lies, and D.C.’s ‘Bullshit Waterfall'”
Best Non-Entertainment Personality Profile/Interview (TV): Nick Gillespie, Justin Monticello, and Todd Krainin, “Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, and the Cult of Silicon Valley”
Folks, you can’t ask for a better snapshot of what we do well.
We are grateful to the Los Angeles Press Club for allowing us to mingle with the rest of Southern California’s notable media publications, to our story subjects for their willingness to talk about the ways in which our incessantly cruel and dumb ruling class have affected their lives, and to our readers for their continuing support of free minds and free markets. We can’t do what we do without you.
We’ll let you know the final score after the awards ceremony on June 30 in Los Angeles.
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More than two years after Nevada legalized marijuana for recreational use, Las Vegas will soon become one of the few jurisdictions in the country to license cannabis consumption lounges. The lack of locations where visitors can legally consume the marijuana they can legally buy has been especially glaring in Las Vegas, which attracts 43 million tourists a year and is home to the world’s largest cannabis emporium.
This month the Las Vegas City Council approved an ordinance authorizing licenses for “social-use venues,” which must be physically separated from pot stores and may not sell alcohol. For the first year the licenses will be limited to businesses that are already authorized to sell marijuana. Councilman Bob Coffin, who sponsored the ordinance, said he expects those businesses to open lounges adjacent to their retail locations.
The ordinance does not apply to the Las Vegas Strip, which is under the jurisdiction of Clark County. But the city has dozens of marijuana dispensaries that can now apply for permission to create venues where their customers can consume their products. The licenses cost $5,000 a year, and the lounges must be at least 1,000 feet from schools and casinos. Entry will be limited to adults 21 or older (Nevada’s marijuana purchase age), and patrons will not be allowed to use cannabis products outdoors or in view of the general public.
“We’re the new Amsterdam,” exulted Clark County Commissioner Tick Segerblom, a former state legislator who introduced a 2017 bill that would have explicitly legalized locally licensed cannabis consumption spaces. While that bill did not pass, Nevada’s Legislative Counsel Bureau concluded that state law already allows such businesses.
Question 2, the legalization initiative that Nevada voters approved in 2016, makes it a misdemeanor, punishable by a $600 fine, to consume marijuana in a store that sells it or in any “public place,” defined as “an area to which the public is invited or in which the public is permitted regardless of age.” The Las Vegas ordinance is designed to meet those requirements.
The Reno Gazette Journalreports that Acres Cannabis, which operates a 19,000-square-foot store at 2320 Western Avenue, plans to open a consumption space that “will include a concert hall and full-service kitchen launched with the Morton family,” founders of the Morton’s steakhouse chain. Acres CEO John Mueller brags that “you’re going to see an elevated experience over something you’ve seen in Amsterdam or these little boutique places” in cities such as San Francisco.
The casino and resort industry remains leery of marijuana, which is still federally illegal. The Nevada Gaming Control Board has warned that pot-friendly casinos could lose their licenses. Now the prospect of a better-than-Amsterdam experience for visitors who want to use marijuana threatens to draw business away from resorts and nightclubs that are not allowed to welcome cannabis consumers.
“What they’re really trying to target are the tourists coming into Las Vegas,” Councilman Stavros Anthony, a gaming industry ally who cast the sole vote against allowing cannabis lounges, told the Gazette Journal. “That’s really where the money is. That’s always where it’s been. These consumption lounges are really the first attempt to gather in the tourists that want to smoke marijuana here in Nevada.”
Segerblom thinks the casinos are right to be worried. “They’re concerned about [cannabis lounges] making money outside the hotels,” he told the paper. “They’re worried [that] the longer this goes outside hotels, the more established they’ll get. As a business person, I would be concerned too.”
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The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) has taken a radical turn in a few of its recent social media postings, winking at the idea of airline workers executing their bosses and encouraging the proletariat to literally seize the means of production.
Yesterday, the AFL-CIO tweeted out an explainer video from self-described “anti-capitalist, worker-owned” streaming platform Means TV featuring Dan Whelan, identified as a “Marxist, roofer”, explaining that the middle class is actually an illusion spread by the owners of society to divide the working class.
“All workers under capitalism are subject to the same conditions of constantly producing more for as little wage compensation as possible,” says Whelan.
Differences in income, type of work, or lifestyle that we use to draw distinctions between working- and middle-class wage earners are all a fiction, he goes on to say, created by “the rich and the media” to divide and distract workers from the inherent class conflicts in our society.
The country’s largest labor organization apparently found these textbook Marxist talking points convincing enough to tweet out the video, along with the caption “we all need to seize the means of the production.”
That tweet, taken on face value, seems to endorse some form of workers’ revolution aimed at taking ownership of capital currently held in private hands. This understandably raised a few eyebrows.
AFL-CIO last week: It costs $1,200 to build a guillotine. @AFLCIO this week: "Seize the means of production." pic.twitter.com/QNlEtuaOwr
This is not the first time the AFL-CIO has courted controversy in the past few days with some of its social media content.
Last week, in response to a widely circulated picture of a Delta Airlines poster suggesting its workers would have more money for video game consoles if they didn’t pay union dues, the AFL-CIO tweeted out a meme suggesting that deprived of a union, workers would be spending that money on a guillotine instead.
The post was eventually taken down, and an AFL-CIO spokesperson issued a statement to CNN saying “we strive to keep our Twitter account actively engaging and real to advocate for working people,” she said. “We came across and shared this Internet meme. We realize it was in poor taste, that [it] doesn’t reflect the values of the AFL-CIO and it has been taken down.”
Whether this latest invocation to seize the means of production is representative of the AFL-CIO’s views as a whole is unclear. In recent years the organization has stuck to more incrementalist goals like raising wages for its members, not abolishing wage labor altogether.
Reason‘s request for clarification on this latest tweet was not returned by the time of publication.
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The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted 8 to 1 to ban local law enforcement from using facial recognition technology. Not everyone is pleased.
“It is ridiculous to deny the value of this technology in securing airports and border installations,” said Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law expert at George Washington University to The New York Times. “It is hard to deny that there is a public safety value to this technology.”
Well, yes. And the public safety value of putting electronic ankle bracelets on everybody and keeping their location information in a giant database so that police can later find out if an individual was near the site where a crime happened is similarly undeniable. But that doesn’t seem like such a good idea.
The San Francisco ban was passed, as the Times reports, in response to civil libertarian concerns about the technology’s potential abuse by the government amid fears that it may shove the United States in the direction of an overly oppressive surveillance state.
Police, on the other hand, argue that facial recognition would now just be a handy investigative tool simply used to identify suspects committing crimes while caught on closed-circuit city and private security cameras. Sounds reasonable, yes?
Consider the recent Florida case in which officers used facial recognition technology to identify someone as an allegedly low-level drug dealer by comparing cell phone camera snaps with a mugshot database. The alleged dealer claims that the police got the wrong guy. As part of his defense, the accused man’s attorney challenged the accuracy of the technology and asked to see what other booking photos were returned as probable matches by the facial recognition algorithm. The police refused to turn them over. “Their refusal violated the Constitution, which requires prosecutors to disclose information favorable to a defendant,” asserts the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Sadly, such police and prosecutorial misfeasance is not all that rare.
As bad as this misconduct is, that is not the main concern with widespread government deployment of facial recognition technology. Civil libertarians worry that the technology could morph into pervasive automated authoritarianism in which individuals can be tracked everywhere, in real time, similar to the version being developed by the Chinese government. The Chinese government reportedly aims, as part of its Skynet surveillance system, to add an additional 400 million video cameras to its existing 170 million over the next three years. The cameras employ real time facial recognition technology.
As Matt Cagle, a lawyer with the ACLU of Northern California tells the Times, the technology “provides government with unprecedented power to track people going about their daily lives. That’s incompatible with a healthy democracy.”
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Anxiety over an increasingly jobless future is the motivating concern of Yang’s campaign. He thinks his version of a UBI, which would give every American between the ages of 18 and 64 $1,000 a month in cash, will provide people enough of a cushion to alleviate the stress and anxiety of economic dislocation without undercutting the desire to work and be productive. Indeed, he says that having basic needs met through a UBI and tax-provided health insurance (Medicare for All) will actually spur people to be more creative and entrepreneurial without reducing their zeal for employment. The jury is out on all of this, especially since the one existing program he keeps pointing to is Alaska’s Permanent Fund, which gave residents there just $1,600 for the entire year of 2018. 