iftttwall

Sometimes reckless officer behavior that doesn’t kill someone
can be a sign, as
reported in the UK Daily Mail:

A driver has come forward saying the deputy who shot dead a
13-year-old California boy after mistaking his fake AK-47 as real
pulled a gun on him also, after he failed to signal a lane change
during a carpool. 

Jeff Westbrook, 57, of Santa Rosa said he was mistreated by
Deputy Erick Gelhaus after being pulled over Aug. 21 in Cotati, so
much so that at one point he asked Gelhaus: ‘Sir, is there
something wrong with you?’

‘I felt like I was watching somebody I needed to help,’ Mr
Westbrook, a program manager at an information technology company,
told CBS of Gelhaus.

‘This was not right. He did not manage this correctly.’

Gelhaus shot Andy Lopez seven times at a Santa Rosa parking
after recieving reports of a suspicious and believing his toy
machine gun was real.

Mr Westbrook was pulled over by Gelhaus for not using his
indicator.

He said he pulled into a shoulder, but offered to move the car
forward because there was not much room next to the driver door for
Gelhaus.

When the car started moving, Gelhaus is alleged to have drawn
his gun.

‘It was about a foot from by face,’ Westbrook said.

‘I’ve never had a gun pointed at me before.’

Reason on the shooting of Andy
Lopez.

British Prime
Minister David Cameron, who has promised to hold a referendum on
British membership of the European Union by the end of 2017 if the
Conservatives win a majority in the next general election, has said
that British support for E.U. membership is “wafer thin.”

From the
BBC:

British people’s support for staying in the European Union is
currently “wafer thin”, David Cameron has said.

The prime minister argued that his promise to renegotiate powers
with Brussels before holding an “in-out” referendum had the
“overwhelming support” of the public.

Follow this story and more at Reason
24/7.

Spice up your blog or Website with Reason 24/7 news and
Reason articles. You can get the widgets
here. If you have a story that would be of
interest to Reason’s readers please let us know by emailing the
24/7 crew at 24_7@reason.com, or tweet us stories
at @reason247.

British Prime
Minister David Cameron, who has promised to hold a referendum on
British membership of the European Union by the end of 2017 if the
Conservatives win a majority in the next general election, has said
that British support for E.U. membership is “wafer thin.”

From the
BBC:

British people’s support for staying in the European Union is
currently “wafer thin”, David Cameron has said.

The prime minister argued that his promise to renegotiate powers
with Brussels before holding an “in-out” referendum had the
“overwhelming support” of the public.

Follow this story and more at Reason
24/7.

Spice up your blog or Website with Reason 24/7 news and
Reason articles. You can get the widgets
here. If you have a story that would be of
interest to Reason’s readers please let us know by emailing the
24/7 crew at 24_7@reason.com, or tweet us stories
at @reason247.

Law-enforcement excesses grab an ever-growing
share of headlines. Doors kicked in, people killed, dogs shot,
phone lines tapped, curfews imposed—they’re all examples of
official overreaching at that unpleasant intersection of private
activity and state disapproval. For some people, the implication of
such abuses is that more scrutiny and the right people in charge
will make law enforcement an enterprise which people need not fear.
But that’s not necessarily the case, writes J.D. Tuccille. It may
be that lawmakers have assigned law-enforcers goals so
frustratingly elusive that even angels couldn’t resist the
temptation to escalate tactics to insane extremes, trampling
liberty and decency along the way.

View this article.

Law-enforcement excesses grab an ever-growing
share of headlines. Doors kicked in, people killed, dogs shot,
phone lines tapped, curfews imposed—they’re all examples of
official overreaching at that unpleasant intersection of private
activity and state disapproval. For some people, the implication of
such abuses is that more scrutiny and the right people in charge
will make law enforcement an enterprise which people need not fear.
But that’s not necessarily the case, writes J.D. Tuccille. It may
be that lawmakers have assigned law-enforcers goals so
frustratingly elusive that even angels couldn’t resist the
temptation to escalate tactics to insane extremes, trampling
liberty and decency along the way.

View this article.

According to a
recent
analysis by the consulting firm McKinsey and Company, about 7
million Americans will qualify for free health insurance policies
under the Affordable Care Act once federal subsidies are taken into
account. That includes about 6 million people who are currently
uninsured and about 1 million who have policies purchased on the
individual market. All of them have incomes that are too high for
Medicaid but low enough to receive subsidies that will fully cover
the cost of a “bronze” or “silver” plan on a government-run
exchange. The New York Times says
this free medical coverage is not only a boon to the
recipients but also a shot in the arm for Obamacare, since “the
availability of zero-premium plans may make the deal especially
enticing to the healthy young people the marketplace needs to
succeed.”

Wait a minute. It’s true that younger, healthier policyholders
are expected to subsidize medical care for older, sicker
policyholders, especially now that it’s illegal to charge people
based on how much covering them is expected to cost. But that works
only if the younger, healthier policyholders are paying for medical
coverage they rarely or never use; if they are not putting any
money into the system, how can they possibly improve its financial
condition?

Instead of paying for the premiums of the young and healthy, the
government could directly subsidize coverage for people who really
need it. Wouldn’t that be cheaper? More generally, Obamacare seems
like an unnecessarily complicated way of forcing some Americans
(the ones who do not qualify for subsidized premiums) to pay for
other Americans’ medical treatment. The mandates, the exchanges,
and the individual insurance requirement combine to transfer
resources from richer, healthier people to poorer, sicklier people.
This hardly seems like the most straightforward or efficient way of
helping people who cannot afford health care, but it does serve to
conceal what is actually going on, to the point that a leading news
outlet claims each healthy person covered at taxpayers’ expense is
somehow saving taxpayers money. 

According to a
recent
analysis by the consulting firm McKinsey and Company, about 7
million Americans will qualify for free health insurance policies
under the Affordable Care Act once federal subsidies are taken into
account. That includes about 6 million people who are currently
uninsured and about 1 million who have policies purchased on the
individual market. All of them have incomes that are too high for
Medicaid but low enough to receive subsidies that will fully cover
the cost of a “bronze” or “silver” plan on a government-run
exchange. The New York Times says
this free medical coverage is not only a boon to the
recipients but also a shot in the arm for Obamacare, since “the
availability of zero-premium plans may make the deal especially
enticing to the healthy young people the marketplace needs to
succeed.”

Wait a minute. It’s true that younger, healthier policyholders
are expected to subsidize medical care for older, sicker
policyholders, especially now that it’s illegal to charge people
based on how much covering them is expected to cost. But that works
only if the younger, healthier policyholders are paying for medical
coverage they rarely or never use; if they are not putting any
money into the system, how can they possibly improve its financial
condition?

Instead of paying for the premiums of the young and healthy, the
government could directly subsidize coverage for people who really
need it. Wouldn’t that be cheaper? More generally, Obamacare seems
like an unnecessarily complicated way of forcing some Americans
(the ones who do not qualify for subsidized premiums) to pay for
other Americans’ medical treatment. The mandates, the exchanges,
and the individual insurance requirement combine to transfer
resources from richer, healthier people to poorer, sicklier people.
This hardly seems like the most straightforward or efficient way of
helping people who cannot afford health care, but it does serve to
conceal what is actually going on, to the point that a leading news
outlet claims each healthy person covered at taxpayers’ expense is
somehow saving taxpayers money. 

Over at Locus, sci-fi
author and Boing Boing co-editor Cory Doctorow outlines an
intriguing proposal on how to crowdsource a defense against
patent and copyright trolls. The basic collective action problem is
that trolls have a huge incentive (concentrated benefits) to demand
payments from thousands of allegedly infringing companies and
individuals (diffuse costs) under the threat of expensive lawsuits.
Doctorow reports that patent trolls extort $29 billion annually
from lawsuit-wary companies.

In his new article at Locus, Doctorow offers what he
calls the Magnificent
Seven solution. In that 1960 western movie, a farming
village hires seven gunslingers to help defend themselves against
extortionist bandits.

To counter patent trolls, Doctorow suggests that it might be
possible create a Kickstarter-like mechanism to aggregate fees from
companies and individuals to fight back against the trolls, making
it too expensive for them to threaten infringement lawsuits. From
Locus:

Imagine a Kickstarter-style service for a new kind of
class-action lawsuit: the class-action defense…

What would a Kickstarter for Class Action Defense look like?
Imagine if you could pledge, ‘‘I promise that I will withhold
license fees/settlements for [a bad patent/a fraudulent copyright
fee/a copyright troll’s threat] as soon as 100 other victims do the
same.’’ Or 1,000. Or 10,000. Hungry, entrepreneurial class-action
lawyers could bid for the business, offer opinions on the
win-ability of the actions, or even start their own kickstarters
(‘‘I promise I will litigate this question until final judgment if
1,000 threat-letter recipients promise to pay me half of what the
troll is asking.’’)

Basically, it’s the scene where the villagers decide to stop
paying the bandits and offer the next round of protection money to
the Magnificent Seven to defend them.

There’s a lot to like about this solution. Once a troll is
worried about a pushback from his victims, he’ll need to raise a
war-chest, and since the only thing a troll makes is lawsuits,
he’ll start sending more threats. Those threats will attract more
people to the kickstarter, raising its profile and its search-rank.
The more the troll wriggles, the more stuck he becomes.

Doctorow’s proposal does help solve this particular collective
action problem inside the bounds of our current legal environment.
As he notes:

Getting screwed by thieving, amoral ripoff artists sucks. The
reason people give in to the blackmail is because it is
unimaginably, impossibly expensive to fight back. I think that if
we can nudge ‘‘unimaginable and impossible’’ into the realm of mere
‘‘expensive and time-consuming,’’ we’d have armies lining up to
hand these crooks their asses.

As I have argued, a far better solution would be for Congress to
entirely eliminate software and business practice patents, and to
limit copyright to the life of the author plus ten years. In the
meantime, let’s go with Doctorow’s proposal.

For more background on how patent trolling stifles innovation,
see my column, “Patent
Trolls of Tech Fairy Godmothers.”

H/T Jeff Patterson.

Over at Locus, sci-fi
author and Boing Boing co-editor Cory Doctorow outlines an
intriguing proposal on how to crowdsource a defense against
patent and copyright trolls. The basic collective action problem is
that trolls have a huge incentive (concentrated benefits) to demand
payments from thousands of allegedly infringing companies and
individuals (diffuse costs) under the threat of expensive lawsuits.
Doctorow reports that patent trolls extort $29 billion annually
from lawsuit-wary companies.

In his new article at Locus, Doctorow offers what he
calls the Magnificent
Seven solution. In that 1960 western movie, a farming
village hires seven gunslingers to help defend themselves against
extortionist bandits.

To counter patent trolls, Doctorow suggests that it might be
possible create a Kickstarter-like mechanism to aggregate fees from
companies and individuals to fight back against the trolls, making
it too expensive for them to threaten infringement lawsuits. From
Locus:

Imagine a Kickstarter-style service for a new kind of
class-action lawsuit: the class-action defense…

What would a Kickstarter for Class Action Defense look like?
Imagine if you could pledge, ‘‘I promise that I will withhold
license fees/settlements for [a bad patent/a fraudulent copyright
fee/a copyright troll’s threat] as soon as 100 other victims do the
same.’’ Or 1,000. Or 10,000. Hungry, entrepreneurial class-action
lawyers could bid for the business, offer opinions on the
win-ability of the actions, or even start their own kickstarters
(‘‘I promise I will litigate this question until final judgment if
1,000 threat-letter recipients promise to pay me half of what the
troll is asking.’’)

Basically, it’s the scene where the villagers decide to stop
paying the bandits and offer the next round of protection money to
the Magnificent Seven to defend them.

There’s a lot to like about this solution. Once a troll is
worried about a pushback from his victims, he’ll need to raise a
war-chest, and since the only thing a troll makes is lawsuits,
he’ll start sending more threats. Those threats will attract more
people to the kickstarter, raising its profile and its search-rank.
The more the troll wriggles, the more stuck he becomes.

Doctorow’s proposal does help solve this particular collective
action problem inside the bounds of our current legal environment.
As he notes:

Getting screwed by thieving, amoral ripoff artists sucks. The
reason people give in to the blackmail is because it is
unimaginably, impossibly expensive to fight back. I think that if
we can nudge ‘‘unimaginable and impossible’’ into the realm of mere
‘‘expensive and time-consuming,’’ we’d have armies lining up to
hand these crooks their asses.

As I have argued, a far better solution would be for Congress to
entirely eliminate software and business practice patents, and to
limit copyright to the life of the author plus ten years. In the
meantime, let’s go with Doctorow’s proposal.

For more background on how patent trolling stifles innovation,
see my column, “Patent
Trolls of Tech Fairy Godmothers.”

H/T Jeff Patterson.

Unless just about every polling outfit in
the country is wrong, Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe should
cruise to victory in Tuesday’s election. Some conservatives blame
Libertarian Robert Sarvis for taking votes from Republican Ken
Cuccinelli. A. Barton Hinkle explains that it’s Cuccinelli’s
campaign could have fared better if he cared more about personal
and civil liberties.

View this article.