After enacting sweeping reforms in Argentina, President Javier Milei faced a major protest. Tens of thousands of people marched through the streets, hundreds of flights were grounded, and schools and businesses closed in protests to Milei’s attempt to fix the troubled South American country.  

Milei is the first self-described libertarian head of state in history. To avert economic disaster in a country facing huge deficits and a 160 percent inflation rate that has since spiked to over 211 percent, he told the country, things would likely get worse before they could get better. 

In his inauguration address on December 10, Milei acknowledged the daunting challenges ahead. “No government has received a worse inheritance than the one we are receiving. We neither seek nor desire the difficult decisions that must be made in the coming weeks. But unfortunately, we have no choice,” he explained. 

Ten days into his term, Milei issued a “mega-decree” of more than 300 executive measures. He abolished national rent control, which had caused a 75 percent drop in available apartments in Buenos Aires between 2022 and 2023. He repealed price controls, slashed subsidies, and fired more than 5,000 government employees. He allowed direct competition with Argentina’s government-owned airline, which he plans to privatize. And he defied the country’s powerful labor unions. 

Milei’s transformative agenda has encountered resistance, notably from Argentina’s largest labor union, the General Confederation of Labor, which represents about one out of every five Argentine workers. The union called for a nationwide strike on January 24, bringing portions of Buenos Aires to a standstill. 

Their main reason for protesting? Milei had issued an order ending the automatic withholding of union dues, leaving workers free to opt out of union membership. He also banned government workers in sectors like health and education from striking. While his measures were temporarily suspended by a court ruling, unions are making a show of force so that Milei’s agenda doesn’t make it through Congress.

Despite the economic challenges and opposition, Milei remains resolute in his pursuit for a freer, less regulated, and less debt-ridden Argentina. Addressing world leaders at the World Economic Forum this January, he said that the Argentina of the future will be based on libertarian principles.

“If measures are adopted that hinder the free functioning of markets, free competition, free price systems, if you hinder trade, if you attack private property the only possible fate is poverty,” Milei said. 

Yet Milei’s main political adversaries aren’t Argentina’s workers. In fact, Milei is calling for increased welfare in the short term to ease the pain for the working class during this transition to a new economic model.

As Argentine political economist Marcos Falcone told Reason, Milei’s actual adversaries are wealthy Argentines who have benefited from government largesse.

“Milei is going against crony capitalism because he is basically trying to kill the businessmen that have lived off of government support,” Falcone said. “We need to move forward. And the people need to be able to profit, you know, not just companies because of regulations and privileges.” 

In his speech at the Davos conference, Milei encouraged business owners to not be intimidated “by the political class or by the parasites who live off the state.” 

“You are heroes. You are the creators of the most extraordinary period of prosperity we’ve ever seen,” Milei continued. “Do not surrender to the advance of the state. The state is not the solution. The state is the problem itself.”

Milei faces a thicket of regulations and political resistance in Argentina. It won’t be easy to carry out Argentina’s economic transformation. We’ll have to wait and see if he picked the right chainsaw to cut through the challenges ahead. 

 

Music Credits: “The Art of Loneliness” by ANBR via Artlist; “Chapter Two” by Brianna Tam via Artlist; “The Racer” by Tristan Barton via Artlist

• Editor: Danielle Thompson
• Graphics: Adani Samat
• Sound Editing: Ian Keyser
• Translation: César Báez
• Camera: Juan Renau

The post Javier Milei vs. Big Labor appeared first on Reason.com.

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This was a big week for AI-generated deep fakes. Sultan Meghji, who’s got a new AI startup of his own, walked us through four stories that illustrate how AI will lead to more confusion about what’s real and what’s not. First, a fake Biden robocall urged people not to vote in the New Hampshire primary. Second, a bot purporting to offer Dean Phillips’s views on the issues was penalized by OpenAI because it didn’t have Phillips’s consent. Third, fake nudes of Taylor Swift led to a ban on Twitter searches for her image. And, finally, podcasters used AI to resurrect George Carlin and got sued by his family for violating copyrightish law. The moral panic over AI fakery meant that all of these stories were too long on “end of the world” and too short on “we’ll live through this.”

Regulators of AI are not doing a much better job of maintaining perspective. Mark MacCarthy reports that New York City’s AI hiring law, which has punitive disparate-impact disclosure requirements for automated hiring decision engines, seems to have persuaded NYC employers, conveniently, that none of them are using automated hiring decision enginess, so they don’t have to do any disclosures. Not to be outdone, the European Court of Justice has decided that pretty much any tool to aid in decisions is an automated decision making technology subject to special (and mostly nonsensical) data protection rules.

Is AI regulation beginning to suffer from backlash? Could be. Sultan and I report on a very plausible Republican plan to attack the Biden AI executive order on the ground that its main enforcement mechanism, the Defense Production Act, simply doesn’t authorize the measures the order calls for.

In other Big Tech regulation, Maury Shenk explains the EU’s application of the Digital Markets Act to tech companies like Apple and Google. Apple isn’t used to being treated like just another tech company, and its contemptuous response to the EU’s rules for its app market could easily spur regulatory sanctions. Looking at Apple’s proposed compliance with the California court ruling in the Epic case and the European Digital Market Act, Mark says it’s time to think about price regulating mobile app stores.

Even handing out big checks to technology companies turns out to be harder than it first sounds. Sultan and I talk about the slow pace of payments to chip makers, and the political imperative to get the deals done before November (and probably before March).

Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore. is still flogging NSA and the danger of government access to personal data. This time, he’s on about NSA’s purchases of commercial data. So far, so predictable. But he’s also misrepresenting the facts by claiming flatly that NSA buys domestic metadata, ignoring NSA’s clear statement that the metadata it buys is “domestic” only in the sense that it covers communications with one end inside the country. Communications with foreign countries that flow into and out of the U.S. have long been considered appropriate foreign intelligence targets, as witness the current debate over FISA section 702.

Maury and I review a Jim Dempsey’s effort to construct a liability regime for insecure software. His proposal looks reasonable, but Maury reminds me that he and I produced something similar twenty years ago, that is still not even close to adoption anywhere in the U.S.

I can’t help but rant about Amazon’s arrogant, virtue-signaling, and customer-hating decision to drop a feature that makes it easy for Ring doorbell users to share their videos with the police. Whose data is it, anyway, Amazon? Sadly, I’m afraid we know the answer.

It looks as though there’s only one place where hasty, ill-conceived tech regulation is being rolled back. China. Maury reports on China’s decision to  roll back video game regulations, to fire its video game regulator, and to start approving new games at a rapid clip—though only after a regulatory crackdown had knocked more than $60 billion off the value of its industry.

We close the news roundup with a few quick hits:

• Outside of AI, VCs are closing their wallets and letting startups run out of money
• Apple launched what looks like an expensive dud – the Vision Pro
• Quantum winter may be back as quantum computing turns out to be harder than hoped
• And, speaking of winter, consumers and regulators seem to be cooling fast on self-driving cars in the wake of serious missteps by Cruise

Finally, as a listener bonus, we hear from Rob Silvers, Under Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security and Chair of the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB). Under Rob’s leadership, DHS has proposed legislation to give the CSRB a legislative foundation. The Senate homeland security committee recently held a hearing about that idea. Rob wasn’t invited, so we asked him to come on the podcast to respond to issues that the hearing raised – conflicts of interest, subpoena power, choosing the incidents to investigate, and more.

Download 489th Episode (mp3)

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@gmail.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug! The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

The post Going deep on deep fakes appeared first on Reason.com.

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Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” plays as you drive south out of Tel Aviv in a heavy rain. It’s incongruous with what you are driving toward, a visit with the family of Ahmad Abu Latif, the Bedouin soldier killed, along with 20 other members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), when the buildings on the Gaza border his company was preparing for controlled demolition were hit by RPG missiles.

Some Israelis have criticized the IDF for putting so many soldiers in one small location, essentially making them sitting ducks. You do not think any possible strategic failure behind Ahmad’s death, at age 26, will matter to his mother. You also have no idea what gift to bring her.

“How should I know?” asks the young salesman at the counter of the roadside shop in Rahav. Then: “Maybe dates.”

You carry the 5-kilo pack of dates, as big as an overnight case, past a dozen men smoking in an outdoor tent by an open brazier. That way, one indicates, pointing toward an open door. Inside, a woman is looking at you. She is wedged into the far edge of a couch, in order, you will realize during your visit, that the people who file in and out might sit beside her, as they take her hand, as they tell her, in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, that they are so sorry.

Nearly all of them are strangers to her. They have learned of Ahmad’s death and feel compelled to be of what comfort they can. It is unclear if any are succeeding. Ahmad’s mother is today’s terrible avatar; a place to which people carry their collective grief. It’s been nearly four months since the October 7 massacre and nothing is close to being settled. By the end of the day, three more IDF soldiers and an uncounted number of Gazans will have been killed, deaths you hear about on the car radio, news delivered between the DJ playing the favorite songs of individual hostages at the top of every hour, including one called “Sunbeam” that is gaily sweet and under the circumstances makes you cry.

But first you eat the dates, you drink the Turkish coffee, you listen to a sister-in-law tell you, through a translator, that Ahmad was “a golden guy, a hero, he brought the sunshine.” You learn he worked very hard; that in high school he cleaned an oncology unit at the hospital and, more recently, was a security guard at Ben Gurion University, where he would tell the students, “One day I am going to be teaching you.” His dream was to teach social sciences or maybe math, like his wife Zahara, who sits in a plastic chair beside you looking as though all the viscera has been sucked out of her. She watches over her 11-month-old daughter, named Mansoora (“Winner”) after Ahmad’s mother, and offers short nods to those who press toward her; what else can she give? Her husband has been dead four days, and you are relieved when she breaks to ignore the room, to stare at a photo of Ahmad on a phone someone has handed her.

From the couch, a woman shows you photos of the Sea of Galilee. “Look how blue,” she says, as a little girl of maybe three runs barefoot into the room laughing and runs out again. It’s getting busy and maybe that’s good, better than the weeks and years ahead, when your son’s name is no longer in people’s mouths.

“We read about Ahmad on Facebook,” says a man in his forties. He and his friend have driven from the Golan Heights to pay their respects; they themselves had tried to reenlist, but the IDF told them no.

 “They said we’re too old,” one says. “They want to win the war.”

“It’s so sad, she will never know her father,” says a former commander of Ahmad’s, holding Mansoora. Yes, you say, but he knew her, and you ask to hold the baby, to offer whatever safe harbor you can in 14 seconds to someone whose most pressing concern is chewing on a soda cup.

The family has been visited by five members of the Knesset and by a former prime minister. Ahmad’s older brother tells you that Ahmad was the youngest of 11 and the most devoted to their mother (“They talked ten times a day”) and also, that he wanted to unite people.

“Jews, Arabs, he didn’t care, he would be host,” he says. “Even in IDF, he says, ‘I have no place to host you? I will host you in my tank.'”

He Airdrops you a video featuring Ahmad and Cedrick Garin, a Filipino reservist killed in the same attack, a young man who’d told his mother that he could’ve taken leave but was going to let the married guys with kids go home from the front first.

The room is filling up, a soldier with his rifle slung over his shoulder holds Ahmad’s mother’s hand. One of Ahmad’s former commanders tells her, “You raised a fine boy.” And a minister of defense whose job it is to coordinate letting families know of their loved one’s deaths sits in the tent with the smoking men.

“I hope there will not be any more work,” he says to Ahmad’s father, who, before you leave, wants to show you something. He goes to his car and takes out a plaque from the university where Ahmad worked, an Employee of the Year Award his son won four years running. 

“He was a genius guy,” he tells you, of his youngest son. “We hope, inshallah, he will be the last fallen soldier.”

An hour later, there is another.

The post Dispatch From Israel: A Soldier Dies, Strangers Gather To Mourn appeared first on Reason.com.

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A journalist asked the police a few questions and was arrested by that same agency for publishing the answers.

That this happened not in China or Russia but in the U.S. may raise some eyebrows. Yet that’s the conduct a federal court greenlit last week when it ruled that law enforcement in Laredo, Texas, did not obviously violate the Constitution when officers allegedly misled a magistrate judge and arrested Priscilla Villarreal for doing basic reporting, adding another twist to a case that in some sense asks the following: Exactly who is a journalist?

In April 2017, Villarreal reported the identity of a Border Patrol agent who killed himself by jumping off of a local overpass. A few weeks later, she published the last name of a family involved in a fatal traffic accident. She confirmed both of those identities with an officer in the Laredo Police Department (LPD). In response, that department set in motion a criminal investigation—complete with subpoenas for various people’s cellphone records—that saw Villarreal arrested months later for violating an obscure Texas law, § 39.06(c), that prohibits soliciting “nonpublic information” if done “with intent to obtain a benefit.”

The supposed benefit, the government said, was followers on her Facebook page.

Villarreal’s Facebook is indeed central to her story. She is known almost ubiquitously in Laredo, where she gained popularity by livestreaming local crime scenes and traffic accidents, infusing her videos with provocative, and often-profane, commentary. Some of that reporting has been critical of law enforcement, attracting their ire and culminating, she says, in their attempt to shut her up via the criminal justice system.

It didn’t work. But it did kick off a multiyear debate over whether or not her arrest violated the Constitution, and, if so, if those officers should be shielded by qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that prevents alleged victims of abuse from bringing civil suits against state and local government actors if the way in which those employees violated the law has not yet been spelled out precisely in a prior court ruling.

After years of a legal back-and-forth, Villarreal got her answer last week from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit: It was not clear that officers had violated the Constitution when they charged her criminally for her journalism, the majority ruled 9-7. But the decision, which was challenged forcefully by several dissenting judges, raises further questions about what qualifies as journalism and if those who adhere to a more traditional approach are entitled to a different set of rights.

“Villarreal and others portray her as a martyr for the sake of journalism. That is inappropriate,” wrote Judge Edith Jones. “Mainstream, legitimate media outlets routinely withhold the identity of accident victims or those who committed suicide until public officials or family members release that information publicly.”

According to Jones and the majority, a reasonable officer could not be expected to know that it is unconstitutional to bring charges against someone for asking the government questions. That obscure Texas law, Jones said, understandably supplied law enforcement with the notion that Villarreal was indeed a criminal, despite that the statute appears to have been written to discourage corruption in government, not boilerplate journalism.

The way Villarreal communicates information, however, is anything but boilerplate. She is not employed by a publication, and her livestreams are raw and unfiltered. That general spirit is summed up well in what she named her page: Lagordiloca, or “the crazy, fat lady.”

In that vein, the 5th Circuit’s decision is dripping with contempt for Villarreal’s enterprise; Jones makes little attempt to hide it. Lagordiloca’s rough-around-the-edges, muckraker approach can certainly be jarring. But one wonders if the court would have ruled the same way if Villarreal had been employed by, say, the Laredo Morning Times, where her alleged “benefit” for seeking information would arguably be more significant: a salary. It is also unclear if the police would have had the gumption to arrest her had she fit a more conventional mold.

At least in terms of the latter, Villarreal’s contention is “no.” The officers leveraged the law illegally, she maintains, to retaliate against her. Buttressing that theory is the fact that no one had ever before been prosecuted under the law Villarreal was charged with breaking. 

“Those who arrested, handcuffed, jailed, mocked, and prosecuted Priscilla Villarreal, far from having to make a snap decision or heat-of-the-moment gut call, spent several months plotting Villarreal’s takedown, dusting off and weaponizing a dormant Texas statute never successfully wielded in the statute’s near- quarter-century of existence,” wrote Judge Don Willett in dissent. “This was not the hot pursuit of a presumed criminal; it was the premeditated pursuit of a confirmed critic.”

Core to the majority’s error in judgment, Willett wrote, is a double standard that holds the most powerful people to the lowest standard and the least powerful to the highest. “While the majority says the officers could not have ‘predicted’ that their thought-out plan to lock up a citizen-journalist for asking questions would violate the First Amendment—a plan cooked up with legal advice from the Webb County District Attorney’s Office, mind you—the majority simultaneously indulges the notion that Villarreal had zero excuse for not knowing that her actions might implicate an obscure, never-used provision of the Texas Penal Code,” he wrote. “In other words, encyclopedic jurisprudential knowledge is imputed to Villarreal, but the government agents targeting her are free to plead (or feign) ignorance of bedrock constitutional guarantees.”

The alleged obviousness of the constitutional violation here—punishing someone for their speech—drives much of the dissents. In 2020, the Supreme Court reversed a ruling that awarded qualified immunity to a group of prison guards who locked an inmate, Trent Taylor, in two cells at the John T. Montford Psychiatric Facility Unit: one that was allegedly filled with “massive” amounts of human feces and the other with sewage from a clogged floor drain. The original ruling immunizing those officers had been too exacting, the high court said, when evaluating if it was clearly established that government employees should know such treatment violates a person’s right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment.

The federal court that originally handed down that myopic ruling: the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.

The court’s latest ruling in Villarreal’s case “magnifies the troubling trend of police and prosecutors abusing their power to silence speech and punish speakers they dislike,” says J.T. Morris, an attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, who represents Villarreal. “The majority decision spurns [a] core First Amendment protection, allowing public officials to evade accountability when they jail Americans who say something the government disapproves of.”

Interestingly, there’s been a counterintuitive relationship between Villarreal’s polarizing approach and the supporters she’s united during her protracted litigation in the 5th Circuit. Among those who urged the court to rule in her favor: Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative Christian legal advocacy group most known for defending religious liberty; the libertarian Cato Institute; the left-leaning Constitutional Accountability Center; and the far-right Project Veritas. It would be difficult to pinpoint very many topics that bring these groups together. That is, after all, the spirit behind the First Amendment: You can disagree with someone’s message but still support their right to say it.

“If the First Amendment means anything, surely it means that citizens have the right to question or criticize public officials without fear of imprisonment,” wrote Judge James Ho, who previously ruled in favor of Villarreal, in dissent. “It would make no sense for the First Amendment to protect the right to speak, but not to ask questions—or the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances, but not for information.”

No matter how you feel about Villarreal and her project, however, it’s undeniable that law enforcement’s actions, while intending to silence her, expanded her platform. When reached for comment, her response was instructive.

“This is not a loss,” she told me. “I said it several times. I want to go all the way to the Supreme Court!”

The post She Was Arrested for Her Journalism. A Federal Court Says She Can't Sue. appeared first on Reason.com.

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Happy Tuesday! This week’s Rent Free includes:

• An Ohio Church countersues the city criminally charging its pastor with zoning violations.
• Vancouver, British Columbia, approves another indigenous-owned megaproject.
• A new report shows that America’s housing affordability problems are getting worse and spreading to more areas of the country.

But first, our lead story on the one California zoning reform that’s working out really well, and why all the others haven’t been nearly as productive.

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Why Is California’s Building Boom Limited to ADUs?

California YIMBY, one of the OG YIMBY groups that advocate for zoning reform in California, has released a new report heralding the building boom kicked off by an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) reform.

Since the California Legislature got serious about eliminating local restrictions on granny flats, in-law suites, and the like in 2016, ADU production has increased by 15,000 percent. In 2022, they made up a quarter of California’s housing production, according to the report.

It’s truly a YIMBY success story. The sad fact is that it might be California’s only major YIMBY success story.

Since 2016, the California Legislature has passed dozens of bills that remove regulatory barriers to housing production. And since 2016, overall housing production has increased only modestly, according to permitting data from the state Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD). When ADUs are subtracted from the mix, permitting activity has more or less flatlined.

The state is permitting about as much housing today as it was in the 1990s, and much less than it was in the 1980s or early 2000s, according to U.S. Census Bureau numbers. (It is at least producing more than the recession-ravaged early 2010s.)

Meanwhile, indicators of the state’s housing shortage—including the ratio of rents and home prices to incomes, the percentage of cost-burdened households, measures of housing underproduction, and homelessness rates—are all flashing red.

So, what’s going on? Why haven’t other YIMBY housing laws kicked off a boom in new duplexes and transit-adjacent apartments as they have with ADUs?

I’d boil it down to two basic problems. Firstly, many YIMBY reforms have focused on handing down better bureaucratic mandates to local governments who have no interest in reforming their own housing laws. Secondly, the Legislature lards down what could be productive housing laws with endless interest group carveouts and handouts.

State Orders, Local Controls

On paper, California does have an elaborate, decades-old system requiring local governments to plan for more housing called Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA).

The state hands down housing production goals to localities. Localities then produce plans called housing elements to meet those goals. Housing elements identify sites where new housing will be allowed, and outline the regulatory “constraints” on new construction localities will eliminate.

For a long time, RHNA was kind of a joke. A major focus of YIMBY reforms has been on improving the once-useless system.

New laws try to make state production goals reflect actual market demand, and ensure housing elements more realistically plan for growth. State bureaucrats more closely vet local housing elements. New state enforcement units are putting pressure on local governments to follow through with removing regulatory constraints.

The hope is that a souped-up RHNA will make all of California’s local governments more accommodating of new housing.

RHNA’s approach is premised on the idea that localities won’t do this on their own. The problem is even a souped-up RHNA still leaves them in the driver’s seat.

The state might review and certify housing elements, but localities are still the ones responsible for writing them, implementing them, and then approving individual housing projects. That leaves plenty of wiggle room for localities to loosen constraints on housing construction on paper while maintaining them in practice.

The state can theoretically strip localities out of “substantial compliance” with state housing law of state grants, force them to allow “builder’s remedy”  projects, or even petition a court to rewrite their housing element.

For all the excitement about “builder’s remedy” projects, none have actually been approved. Local governments have proven pretty adept at blocking them or forcing the developer to settle for a smaller project.

Outside the few communities purposefully thumbing their nose at the state, there’s also a  lot of legal uncertainty about when jurisdictions are actually out of “substantial compliance” with state housing law and thus subject to state remedies.

San Francisco was arguably still substantially compliant with state housing law last year when it was dragging its feet on passing reforms the state was telling the city it needed to adopt in order to meet its RHNA goals.

If the remedies for floating RHNA don’t clearly apply to San Francisco—the subject of a scathing state audit finding the city takes over three years to approve housing projects—that suggests even a reformed RHNA is kind of toothless.

Pork Barrels Full of Poison Pills

Even when the California Legislature does try to pass direct reforms forcing local governments to allow certain types of housing projects, interest group wrangling in the Legislature often ensures these bills don’t produce many new units.

New housing is a valuable thing. The groups that are in a position to say no to it aren’t keen on giving away their veto for free. As a result, state bills allowing builders to route around local zoning standards or skip environmental review end up getting loaded down with all sorts of carve-outs and poison pills.

To appease unions, state-streamlined projects have to pay union wages. To appease environmentalists, they have to be built to the highest green design standards. To appease tenant advocates, they can’t replace existing rental housing. To appease affordability advocates, they need to include money-losing affordable units. To appease NIMBYs, these projects can only go in certain areas and exceed local density caps by only so much.

At a certain point, all these special interest handouts end up eating up the value of whatever regulatory relief state law offers. When higher construction and financing costs are already putting serious headwinds on construction, these handouts are proving particularly fatal to new development.

What is to be done?

According to the California YIMBY report, ADU reform was a success because it set clear, permissive statewide standards that were binding on local governments and easy for builders to comply with.

The state should do that with all types of housing. Instead of relying on the “rickety and complicated conveyor belt” that is RHNA to hand down planning targets that local governments then try to skirt at the risk of potentially severe but legally uncertain penalties, the state could just tell local governments they have to approve certain types of housing.

And when the state does pass laws telling local governments to approve certain types of housing, those laws should come without a bunch of cost-increasing labor, affordability, and environmental provisions. Better yet, the state could directly permit housing projects without the need to trouble NIMBY local governments at all.

These are of course useless prescriptions in the same way that it’s kind of useless to say the way to lose weight is to diet and exercise. It’s no secret what the state’s problems are or what effective solutions would be.

Many YIMBY reforms keep underperforming because passing clean, effective reforms is politically impractical.

The California YIMBY report stresses that even with ADUs, housing reform is a process. It took over 30 years of marginal tweaks and fixes to get the state’s ADU laws working right. The same will likely be true for other YIMBY zoning reforms.

The trouble is that California doesn’t have 30 years to get housing policy right. Its problems are too immediate and too severe.

I’m not sure what could be done to speed up the process of reform.

Perhaps YIMBY lawmakers should gamble on politically riskier, but more impactful bills. Fewer will pass, but the ones that do will have a greater impact.

California also has a ballot initiative process that can allegedly be used to route around a special interest-captured legislature. YIMBYs haven’t really used it but they should. Offer up a ballot initiative legalizing 10-unit market-rate apartments on all residential land with no setbacks, parking requirements, impact fees, or prevailing wage mandates and see if voters go for it.

Maybe that won’t work, but the current pace of reform isn’t working either.

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Ohio Church Sues City Criminally Charging Its Pastor for Zoning Violations

Last week at Rent Free we covered the case of Chris Avell, the pastor of Dad’s Place in Bryan, Ohio who’d been criminally charged with 18 violations of the city’s zoning code. The charges stem from Dad’s Place’s decision to stay open 24 hours a day and let people sleep in the church building.

In response, the church has filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Bryan and individual town officials. The church’s lawsuit argues that the city’s zoning crackdown violates the First Amendment’s religious liberty guarantees and federal law limiting the kinds of zoning restrictions states and localities can apply to churches.

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Another Indigenous-Owned Mega-Project Approved in Vancouver

This week, the Vancouver City Council gave initial approval to the massive 13.5 million square foot, 13,000-unit Jericho Lands project. The development is being sponsored by MST Development Corporation, a for-profit consortium of the Musqueam Indian Band, Squamish Nation, and Tsleil-Waututh Nation.

It’s not the first indigenous-owned mega-project in the Vancouver area. The 6,000-unit Senakw project being built on Squamish reserve land has made headlines for its size and the fact its location on reserve land means it doesn’t have to comply with Vancouver’s zoning laws.

The Jericho Lands project, which will redevelop a former military base, did have to get the city’s approval. That didn’t end up being an obstacle.

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New Report Shows America’s Housing Affordability Problems Widening, Deepening

A new report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies finds that the median sale price for a single-family home was 5.6 times greater than the median income. That’s the highest ratio price-to-income ratio on record.

Coastal California remains the worst place for housing affordability, with almost all coastal metros posting price-to-income ratios above 10. Ratios nearly as high are popping up across the Mountain West, coastal Florida, and the mid-Atlantic.

In 1980, unaffordable housing was mostly confined to coastal South California. By 2000, it had only really spread to the NY-Boston corridor.

Before the pandemic, it had spread up the West Coast, the Mountain States, and Florida.

Today, unaffordable housing is everywhere. pic.twitter.com/0n4tWOJg7x

— Jeremy 'adjusted for inflation' Horpedahl ???? (@jmhorp) January 23, 2024

This is a new development. “Price-to-income ratios that low were the norm across much of the country in prior decades. Indeed, fully two-thirds of large markets had price-to-income ratios below 3.0 as recently as 2000,” reads the report.

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Quick Links

• Montgomery County, Maryland, is considering a proposal to let religious institutions build affordable housing on their land. A number of states and cities have passed similar “Yes In God’s Backyard” laws.
• Virginia might be the next state to replicate California’s ADU building boom. A bill in the Virginia Legislature would require localities to allow ADUs on residential land. Encouragingly, the bill forbids local parking requirements, high-impact fees, and separate utility hookups.
• Yet another church is coming under fire from local zoning officials for letting people sleep inside.
• The U.S. Supreme Court decided to not take up a challenge to a Seattle policy prohibiting landlords from checking rental applicants’s criminal history.
• St. Paul is considering further tweaks to its disastrous rent control policy.
• It turns out the real solution to high housing costs isn’t zoning reform, it’s purchasing land in the path of regular lava flows.
• Gainesville, Florida, is taking one step forward, one step back approach to housing affordability. Its city council is considering both minimum lot size reform (which would make starter homes easier to build) and an inclusionary zoning policy (which requires builders to include money-losing units in their projects.)
• “We really need to lean into property rights,” said Colorado Gov. Jared Polis to Colorado Public Radio on his approach to housing reform.
• Baltimore, Maryland, revives its inclusionary zoning law.

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Regulation of the Week

Portland requires people to get tree permits when removing trees on their property as well as public “street trees” in the right-of-way. The city isn’t waiving this requirement for trees that have already been blown onto people’s homes by recent winter storms.

 

The post The 2 Reasons California's YIMBY Reforms Are Failing appeared first on Reason.com.

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The drone attack that killed three Americans at a military outpost in Jordan on Sunday occurred amid confusion about the approaching craft, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

“The enemy drone approached its target at the same time a U.S. drone was also returning to base,” the paper reported, leading to “some confusion over whether the incoming drone was friend or foe.” It was not friendly and the attack left 40 American troop members wounded in addition to the three killed.

The three soldiers killed were Sgt. William Jerome Rivers, Specialist Kennedy Ladon Sanders, and Specialist Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, the Pentagon reported Monday.

The attack risks dragging the U.S. further into the chaos that’s engulfed much of the Middle East in the months since Hamas’ October attack on Israel. As Reason’s Robby Soave detailed on Monday, some hawkish Republicans have unsurprisingly used Sunday’s attack to call for greater bloodshed.

So far, the Biden administration seems to be resisting those calls.

“We do not seek another war. We do not seek to escalate,” John Kirby, a spokesman for the White House National Security Council, said Monday. “But we will absolutely do what is required to protect ourselves, to continue that mission, and to respond appropriately to these attacks.”

Despite (or perhaps because of) those assurances, the continued presence of American troops in the region might unintentionally tilt toward escalation.

“The attacks underscore how much these residual U.S. deployments have entailed costs and risks far out of proportion to any positive gains they can achieve,” argues Paul Pillar, a fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Pillar writes that the ongoing presence of American troops in the Middle East creates the risk of escalation and is “a needless vulnerability that ought to be ended sooner rather than later.”

Former President Donald Trump wants a huge tax increase on imports from China—which means, of course, that American individuals and businesses buying those goods will foot the bill.

“Privately, Trump has discussed with advisers the possibility of imposing a flat 60 percent tariff on all Chinese imports,” The Washington Post reported on Sunday. That would be a significant escalation of Trump’s first-term trade wars, which saw the average tariff on imports from China climb from about 3 percent to more than 12 percent (due to a variety of changes Trump imposed, including hiking tariffs on steel, aluminum, solar panels, and many industrial and consumer goods imported from China). Studies show that Americans paid roughly 93 percent of the tariff costs, despite Trump’s repeated and ongoing claims that higher tariffs are a way of extracting payments from China.

Trump’s plan for 60 percent tariffs on goods from China “would harm U.S. farmers, manufacturers, and consumers (especially those with low incomes); upend supply chains and impose significant costs as businesses deal with resulting fragmentation; and create a world in which the United States is increasingly left behind on the global stage,” writes Erika York, a senior economist at the Tax Foundation. “It would be an abomination.”

Previously, the former president floated the idea of imposing a new 10 percent tariff on all imports to the U.S., regardless of the country of origin. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Trump’s chief rival for the GOP nomination, hit back against that idea during a Monday appearance on CNBC:

Donald Trump wants to tax every American with a 10% across-the-board tariff, costing families an average of $2,600 a year. They’re already paying skyrocketing prices thanks to Biden and Trump’s inflation. We can’t afford this. pic.twitter.com/TQEj19tc1H

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) January 29, 2024

It’s definitely a bit weird to see Republican voters rushing to embrace a candidate who is vowing to hike their taxes, but that’s where we are.

Elon Musk claims his company successfully implanted a device inside a human brain.

The first human received an implant from @Neuralink yesterday and is recovering well.

Initial results show promising neuron spike detection.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 29, 2024

Neuralink gained approval from the Food and Drug Administration to begin human trials last year. The company’s website says it is recruiting candidates for a first clinical trial of a device that “is designed to interpret a person’s neural activity, so they can operate a computer or smartphone by simply intending to move—no wires or physical movement are required.”

Musk has a history of exaggeration and his claims about Neuralink should be treated skeptically until confirmed by doctors and others connected to the company’s work. If true, however, this could be a very big deal, as Neuralink’s tech has tremendous potential to allow individuals with physical disabilities to interact with the online world, and communicate more easily in the physical world as well.

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Scenes from Virginia: One of the arguments for building a new arena and luring Washington’s basketball and hockey teams across the Potomac River is that the development will generate new economic activity and tax revenue in Virginia. But the proposed legislation authorizing the project would allow the stadium authority to keep all the tax revenue generated by the new development:

If I were a Virginia taxpayer I would be upset to learn that Alexander Ovechkin's personal income tax dollars weren't going to schools or transit but instead were paid directly to his boss!

— ◥◤Kriston Capps (@kristoncapps) January 28, 2024

So taxpayers will subsidize the arena’s construction with money that could be used for actual public needs, and then the new tax revenue generated by the arena (which could also be used for public needs) will be kept by the corporate entity that owns the arena. Huh, can’t imagine why there’s so much local opposition to that arrangement.

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QUICK HITS

• If you’re dreading a potential rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, you’re hardly alone: a new Morning Consult poll finds Trump leading despite getting just 44 percent of the popular vote, while a Reuters/Ipsos poll finds a majority of Americans think both Trump and Biden ought to avoid running again.
• A former IRS contractor has been sentenced to five years in prison for leaking Trump’s tax returns.
• Plastic consumption tripled in New Jersey after the state banned plastic bags.
• The New York Times investigates whether taking edibles is safer than smoking weed.
• Virginia might finally repeal a law that effectively prohibits cocktail bars.
• Amelia Earhart’s long-lost plane may have been located.
• Innovations in unexpected places: a beer glass that fills from the bottom?

The post Errors and Escalations appeared first on Reason.com.

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An excerpt from this article in Saturday’s New Yorker (the whole thing is much worth reading):

Sometime in the twenty-tens, it became common for students to speak of feeling unsafe when they heard things that offended them…. [C]olleagues at other schools [besides the law school] within Harvard and elsewhere feared that their administrators were using concepts of discrimination or harassment to cover classroom discussions that make someone uncomfortable. These colleagues become more and more unwilling to facilitate conversations on controversial topics, believing that university administrators might not distinguish between challenging discussions and discrimination or harassment. Even an investigation that ended with no finding of wrongdoing could eat up a year of one’s professional life and cost thousands of dollars in legal bills….

Students across the political spectrum, but largely liberals, have told me that they felt it would be foolish to volunteer their opinions in class discussions, or even that they routinely lied about their views when asked. These self-censorious habits became even more conscious with the rise of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, such that a large range of political remarks—questioning abortion rights, calling a fetus an “unborn child,” doubting the fairness of affirmative action, praising “color-blindness,” or asking who should compete in women’s sports—could be perceived as being on a continuum of bigotry. In this climate, it became increasingly difficult to elicit robust discussions because students were so scared of one another….

The events of October 7th—and an open letter issued that day with signatures from more than thirty Harvard student groups, holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence”—changed the terms of the academic-freedom debate…. The two sides had effectively flipped: activist students, whose politics overlapped with principles of D.E.I., were engaged in speech that some faculty members, who were supportive of academic freedom, now wanted the university to treat as harmful….

In response to calls to punish the students, Gay said, “Our University embraces a commitment to free expression. That commitment extends even to views that many of us find objectionable, even outrageous. We do not punish or sanction people for expressing such views.” This is what a university president should say. But, to many who believed that Gay would have condemned speech that offended Black or transgender people, the invocation of free speech was an outrageous permission to offend Jews, exceptionally, at Harvard. (She later did condemn the phrase “from the river to the sea.”) …

To demonstrate that it is against antisemitism, Harvard may face pressure to expand its definitions of discrimination, harassment, and bullying, so as to stifle more speech that is deemed offensive. In order to resist such pressures, the university needs to acknowledge that it has allowed a culture of censoriousness to develop, recommit itself to academic freedom and free speech, and rethink D.E.I. in a way that prizes the diversity of viewpoints.

Though some argue that D.E.I. has enabled a surge in antisemitism, it is the pervasive influence of D.E.I. sensibilities that makes plausible the claim that universities should always treat anti-Zionist speech as antisemitism, much in the way that some have claimed that criticizing aspects of the Black Lives Matter movement—or even D.E.I. itself—is always discrimination. The post-Gay crisis has created a crossroads, where universities will be tempted to discipline objectionable speech in order to demonstrate that they are dedicated to rooting out antisemitism and Islamophobia, too. Unless we conscientiously and mindfully pull away from that path, academic freedom—which is essential to fulfilling a university’s purpose—will meet its destruction.

The post Prof. Jeannie Suk Gersen (Harvard Law) on <i>The Future of Academic Freedom</i> appeared first on Reason.com.

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CNN reports on remarks Justice Sonia Sotomayor gave yesterday at the University of California at Berkeley.

“I live in frustration. And as you heard, every loss truly traumatizes me in my stomach and in my heart. But I have to get up the next morning and keep on fighting,” Sotomayor, the court’s senior liberal member, said at an event at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.

“How can you look at those people and say that you’re entitled to despair? You’re not. I’m not,” she said, responding to a question from the school’s dean about how students there increasingly feel discouraged by the current court and how it’s shaping American law. “Change never happens on its own. Change happens because people care about moving the arc of the universe toward justice, and it can take time and it can take frustration.”

According to this Bloomberg report, she also finds the work taxing.

“And to be almost 70 years old, this isn’t what I expected,” Sotomayor said Monday during an appearance at the University of California, Berkeley’s law school. “But it is still work that is all consuming and I understand the impact the court has on people and on the country, and sometimes the world. And so it is what keeps me going.” . . .

“Cases are bigger. They’re more demanding. The number of amici are greater, and you know that our emergency calendar is so much more active. I’m tired,” she said. “There used to be a time when we had a good chunk of the summer break. Not any more. The emergency calendar is busy almost on a weekly basis.”

Justice Sotomayor also expressed concern about they way some advocates present their cases to the Court. From the CNN report:

“I can’t tell you how often I’ll look at (Justice) Neil Gorsuch and I’ll send him a note and say, ‘I want to kill that lawyer.’ Because he or she didn’t give up that case. Because by the time you come to the Supreme Court, it’s not about your client anymore. It’s not about their case,” she said. “It’s about how that legal issue will affect the development of law and how you pitch it – if you pitch it too broadly, you’re gonna kill the claims of a whole swath of people.”

These later remarks may well provoke some interesting discussion about the obligations of Supreme Court advocates. It is a fair observation that zealous advocacy for an individual client may come at the expense of a broader cause otherwise aligned with that client’s interest, as may happen when a criminal defendant’s attorney petitions for certiorari in a case that is likely to result in a pro-prosecution ruling from the Court. Whether this means that lawyers should refrain from such representation, or simply consider the likely downside risks in crafting and presenting arguments, is an important question.

The post Justice Sotomayor Voices Her Frustration with Supreme Court and Advocates appeared first on Reason.com.

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Scammer, by Caroline Calloway, self-published, 150 pages, $65

Caroline Calloway is not exactly famous for telling the truth. Whether she’s hiring her former best friend to ghostwrite her Instagram captions or peddling a ramshackle collection of plastic flowers and salad bowls in the guise of a “creativity workshop,” the American-at-Cambridge influencer turned performance-art memoirist—propelled to national fame by a New York Magazine exposé written by said former best friend—has made an entire career, and a personal brand, out of gleeful mendacity. Back in 2021, she even sold a $75 skin care product she straightforwardly labeled Snake Oil.

So when Calloway announced, several years after returning the six-figure advance for a memoir she never delivered, that she would at last be self-publishing her memoir as a trilogy, starting with Scammer—and that fans could preorder the volume for $65—one could be forgiven for doubting that any bookswould actually materialize. Preordering Scammer,outlandish list price and all, seemed to double as a kind of ironic celebration of Caroline Calloway’s freewheeling disregard for reality: a winking acknowledgment that we all want, deep down, to be scammed by someone with the confidence to scam us unapologetically. As the circus impresario P.T. Barnum, himself an infamous scammer, wrote in 1855: “The public appears disposed to be amused even when they are conscious of being deceived.”

The first surprise is that Scammer does, in fact, exist: a slender 150-page “daybook” (Calloway’s term) of 67 chapters. The second surprise is that it’s actually quite good. Less memoir than manifesto, Scammer is a manic, extravagant celebration of the impulse to transform our lives into works of art, even—perhaps especially—when we don’t know why art even matters in the first place.

Calloway makes no philosophical or moral claims. In rollicking, conversational prose that reads like Elaine Dundy’s expat-ingenue novel The Dud Avocado by way of early-2000s LiveJournal, Calloway demands our attention, if not our sympathy, with all the exuberant ferocity of a toddler throwing a tantrum. She wants—we learn at once—to be famous, to live a life worthy of other people’s attention, to create from the relatively anodyne raw material of her birth a narrative with which she can, at last, be satisfied. “If you build a life around an identity that springs from your own imagination, is it ever authentic?” she asks in an early passage that doubles as the book’s mission statement.

Calloway inspires little trust as a reliable narrator. Between anecdotes about faking her way into Cambridge (via doctored transcripts) and conning her way into agents’ offices (via inventing appointments), she wrenches the reader into lengthy, self-justifying monologic asides about her fraught relationship with onetime ghostwriter turned literary rival Natalie Beach. The effect is something like meeting a distraught friend for a post-breakup nightcap: listening to an evening’s worth of her side of the story. In many ways, Scammer is most successful as a telling historical document: a record of the millennial id, for whom the cultural call to lead our best lives has rendered desire the primary constitutive element of reality. (It’s telling, too, that Calloway opens with an epigram she attributes to Kurt Vonnegut: “We are only what we pretend to be.” Vonnegut’s original quote did not include the “only.”) After all, Calloway’s early-’10s Instagram fame has become the unwitting model for a far more polished generation of aspirational lifestyle influencers with a curated pretense to emotional vulnerability.

Yet it is precisely in Calloway’s frenetic self-involvement that Scammer achieves lyric poignancy. Caroline Calloway wants to tell the story of Caroline Calloway, without knowing why being Caroline Calloway matters so much to her. In so doing, she manages to capture one of the most bittersweet aspects of human existence: that all of us, in one way or another, are desperate to tell our side of the story, to be known as we hope to be known, and, in being known, to be loved. Calloway’s messiness, her compulsive self-justification, her inability to self-censor or edit—they all render Scammer,whatever its veracity, uncannily honest.

Indeed, Scammer, the self-published, unpolished $65 product of Calloway and Calloway alone, achieves something that Calloway’s originally contracted big-budget memoir, And We Were Like, almost certainly could not: a glimpse not into Calloway the Instagram character but, far more interestingly, into Calloway the author—a woman whose frustrated yearning for self-transcendence is more authentically humanthan any aspirational account of a Cambridge ball or Sicilian picaresque.

Among the book’s most oddly affecting, discomfitingly honest sections is Calloway’s account of her pandemic-era involvement with the arch-ironic downtown New York literary scene known as “Dimes Square,” for whom Calloway’s repeated cancellations were not a liability but a feature. Calloway makes no excuses for her scenester pragmatism: “I saw Dimes Square as a job opportunity,” she writes, before admitting she stopped paying rent in order to fund her proximity to literary party girls. (“How did they get their 40 grand for partying…that no one would admit it took to be on this list but me.”) In those moments, Calloway captures the alienating shadow side of contemporary self-invention, in which our aesthetic dreams and personal brands can no longer be disentangled from one another.

The authenticity is not consistent. Calloway’s more politicized attempts at self-justification read as disingenuously strategic; when she casts herself, for example, as a victim of the publishing industry’s sexism (“It frustrated me to no end that I was…forced to reduce my memoir to a misogynistic porn category for vaguely pedophilic men”), it reads as a dated attempt to garner Scammer some sympathetic #MeToo think pieces. So too Calloway’s forced recollection of being aroused when listening to Beach describe her sexual assault, which comes across as less searingly honest than salaciously contrived—a contrast all the more striking given Calloway’s equally ambiguous, and less self-consciously transgressive, explorations of her erotic attachment to Beach elsewhere in the book.

Calloway’s most insightful passages, in fact, are those that link the act of writing to erotic desire: the way we hunger to court not just the arousal but the attention of those whose gaze we long to have upon us. “I fear most,” Calloway writes, “the perception of me held by the four people who have known me best. I became a memoirist in the first place because I don’t know who I am unless my memories are shared.” The consummation that Calloway hungers for seems to be less about fame, the abstraction, and more about attention: an attention that turns out to be indistinguishable from love.

Scammer is not a perfect book. Nor is it a particularly polished memoir. But its half-finished quality is the point. Calloway has made of her life not a work of art but an unceasing act of creation, one that is both painful and moving to witness. “Accepting who we are,” Calloway writes, “is the price for who we will become.” Scammer‘s Calloway has refused for years to accept herself as anyone but the person she hopes to be. She has earned, fair and square, our attention. She leaves us wanting her to, at last, experience love.

The post An Instagram Star Walks the Fine Line Between Self-Creation and Snake Oil appeared first on Reason.com.

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1/30/1939: Justice Felix Frankfurter takes oath.

The post Today in Supreme Court History: January 30, 1939 appeared first on Reason.com.

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