Tag: news

Former Reason editor Virginia Postrel has a

great piece at Bloomberg View about how the Authors
Guild (est. 1912) is attacking an upstart group, the Authors
Alliance, and teh Internet BECAUSE COPYRIGHT!

It’s only a little more complicated than that. The Authors Guild
sued Google for daring to digitize books, thus allowing potential
readers to discover them online (the Guild lost its case).

On the Guild’s official blog, a member attacked the Author’s
Alliance as “an astroturf organization” tailored to “academics and
hobbyists” rather than real writers. The alliance bills itself as
support for “authors who write to be read.” 

Postrel neatly dissects what’s wrong with the Authors Guild’s
attempt to hold back the march of time, technology, and a rival
advocacy group.

The Internet has unquestionably made it more difficult to make a
living as a writer. But the problem isn’t copyright infringement.
It’s competition. We’ve gone from a world in which reading material
was relatively scarce and expensive to one in which it’s
overabundant and nearly free. And it’s much, much harder to get
readers to hear about your book. Reviews and excerpts get lost in
the vast sea of online content. Online retailers haven’t found good
substitutes for bookstore browsing. Scanning books to make them
searchable doesn’t hurt sales. It gives those works a prayer of
being found.

It also saves books from
“digital oblivion.” For increasing numbers of readers, a book that
doesn’t show up in a Google search or can’t be linked to in some
way online might as well not exist. The scanning the Authors Guild
wants to block rescues old titles from the memory hole. Going
forward, it means that today’s new titles will have a chance of
enduring, at least as searchable files, for as long as the websites
are preserved by the Internet Archive. Do you want your latest book
to be as easy to discover in 10 years as one of today’s cat videos
or Buzzfeed listicles? Or do you want it to go down the memory hole
unless you post it online for free?

Postrel notes that there is a “perverse logic” to the Guild’s
stance. Its members who are writing new books benefit if older ones
are not as easy to find (even as that makes it harder to write
well-researched new books). But this is bad thinking, especially
from folks who typically talk about how important it is to be
grounded in history and tradition. Fact is, the publishing
establishment and certainly those who are well compensated under
the status quo publishing world hate change and the general
leveling that’s been made possible via the Internet. If you’re,
say, Erica Jong (a
critic of the Authors Alliance and anything that threatens a
system that has rewarded her handsomely), it’s easy to understand
why you fear change. But for the rest of us trying to make a living
putting pixel to page? Not so much.

Whole Postrel piece here.

Pro-Russian militants staged a predawn
400-man attack near Ukraine’s eastern border today, prompting the
U.S. government to reaffirm its support for the unstable
nation.

The Associated Press (AP) reports
on the battle, which took place at a border guard base and
persisted into the afternoon:

Serhiy Astakhov, the spokesman for the border guard service,
[said] that a preliminary assessment indicated that five rebels
were killed and eight wounded in the attack on the walled compound
on the western fringes of Luhansk, a major city not far from the
Russian border. He also said seven servicemen were wounded, three
seriously. …

An AP reporter saw at least one dead rebel soldier about a
kilometer (half-mile) away from the base. Fellow fighters
approached and broke into tears as they viewed the body. One
insurgent said the dead man was a leading rebel commander.

The militia was armed with rocket-propelled grenades. Whether or
not they were part of a larger, coordinated offensive is unknown,
but in another city, Sloviansk, rebels apparently laid landmines
around power plants and in yet another, Donetsk, they kidnapped a
local newspaper editor.

Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security
Affairs Derek Chollet said at a press
conference today that the Luhansk attack is “a further example of
the destabilizing activities that we believe are supported by
Russia in the east.” He reiterated at a press conference this
morning that the U.S. has pledged $18 million toward “strengthening
our long-term defense cooperation, especially in helping Ukraine
build a highly effective armed force and strengthening its defense
institutions.” The State Department maintains that the funding,
which was first announced
in May, will only be spent on “non-lethal security assistance.”

According to the Kyiv Post, though, Chollet also
hinted that the U.S. may provide “more aggressive help” to Ukraine
after today’s attack.

On Wednesday, President Obama will meet with President-Elect
Petro Poroshenko, who has
requested direct military aid to rebuff the forces.

For its part, Russia offered “humanitarian aid” to
eastern Ukraine last week. The Ukrainian government rejected this
and maintains that Russia is engaged in “undisguised aggression”
against Ukraine. The situation increasingly looks like an all-out
war. Rebels recently shot down a military helicopter, and although
Russia officially denies it, some militants
claim themselves to be part of a Chechen “savage unit” on
official orders. One Russian official shrugged this off saying, “We
can’t control where our citizens go.”

Here
is a video of a fighter seemingly dragging himself to safety.
Below is
a video allegedly from the early hours of today’s attack:

Back in 2009 at the Copenhagen UN climate change conference
President Barack Obama promised to cut by 2020 U.S. planet-warming
carbon dioxide emissions by 17 percent below the level emitted in
2005. Today, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced the
president’s
Clean Power Plan that aims to cut carbon dioxide emissions by
2030 at existing electric power generation plants by 30 percent
overall. Each state will be given a specific goal and be
responsible for figuring out how to achieve its mandated reduction
goal using a mixture of policies that include switching from coal
to natural gas, building more wind and solar power, and/or pricing
emissions in carbon markets.

The EPA has crunched the numbers and assures the American public
that benefits of implementing this program will hugely outweigh its
costs. In its
regulatory impact analysis, the EPA calculates the global
climate benefits using the social cost of carbon derived from a
controversial Interagency Working Group report. That analysis found
that social cost of carbon in 2020 ranged over $13, $46, $68, and
$137 per metric ton of CO2 emissions (2011 dollars) depending on
the discount rate picked by the analysts. The discount rates used
were 5, 3, and 2.5 percent. The Working Group derived a high-end
figure of $137 per ton in 2020 by looking at the worst 5 percent of
the distribution, i.e., the less likely but possibly catastrophic
damages using a 3 percent discount rate. 

With regard to deriving a social cost of carbon, the EPA’s
regulatory impact analysis does caution that …

…any assessment will suffer from uncertainty, speculation, and
lack of information about (1) future emissions of greenhouse gases,
(2) the effects of past and future emissions on the climate system,
(3) the impact of changes in climate on the physical and biological
environment, and (4) the translation of these environmental impacts
into economic damages.

Other than that, everything is evidently OK.

Depending on the discount rate selected, the global climate
benefits (not the climate benefits to the U.S.) from implementing
this 30 percent reduction in power plant carbon dioxide emissions
in 2020 will amount to $4.9 billion, $18 billion, $26 billion, or
$52 billion. By 2030, the global benefits would rise to $9.5
billion, $31 billion, $44 billion, or $94 billion. These are just
the benefits from lowering future increases in global average
temperatures. The vast majority of the benefits have nothing
directly to do with cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 30
percent.

The real bang for the buck comes in the form of health
co-benefits arising from cuts in air pollutants like sulfur
dioxide, ozone, mercury, and particulates. In fact, more than 70
percent of the health co-benefits apparently result from reductions
in sulfur dioxide emissions.

The EPA calculates that the maximum cost for implementing the
new regulations amounts to $7.5 billion in 2020, while the maximum
net climate and health benefits range from $27 to $50 billion at a
3 percent discount rate or $26 to $46 billion at a 7 percent
dicount rate. On it’s face, that sounds like a pretty good deal.
But as I reported last August in my article, “The
Social Cost of Carbon: Garbage In, Garbage Out,” anyone can
pretty much conjure whatever number one wants when it comes to
cranking out the social cost of carbon through integrated
assessment models that combine econometric and climate
prognostications.

Another interesting feature is that the Obama administration’s
social cost of carbon estimate is for global benefits,
although the rules from the regulatory oversight agency, the Office
of Management and Budget specify that benefits and damages of
proposed regulations should be reported in terms of domestic
impacts, with global impacts being optional. The domestic social
cost of carbon would likely hover around $2 per metric ton which
suggests that the domestic climate benefits from the proposed EPA
regulations could actually amount in 2020 to as little as $700
million a worst case of $7.8 billion. Compare those benefits with
an estimated cost of $7.5 billion to implement them.

Finally, as the New York Times helpfully points out
today, the goal of the new EPA mandates is not to save the climate
but to “reclaim
leadership on climate change.”

More analysis of the impacts of the new Clean Power Plan to
come.

Six cops from the Cleveland Police Department
(CPD) were
indicted on charges related to
a car chase that began when a cop likely mistook the sound of
an engine firing for gun shots and ended with 13 cops firing 137
rounds into the car, killing Timothy Russell, the unarmed driver,
and Malissa Williams, his passenger.

Five of the cops were charged with dereliction of duty. Their
supervisors are accused of allowing the chase, which involved up to
104 of the 227 cops on duty at the time, to get out of control. The
sixth cop, Michael Brelo, was charged with manslaughter. He is
accused of standing on the hood of Russell’s car after the chase
and firing at least 15 shots through the windshield.
Sixty three cops were suspended for up to ten days last year,
although that included none of the 13 cops involved in the actual
shooting, who were then under investigation. One supervisor was
eventually fired.

As an animation created by the Ohio attorney general’s office
showed, 12 other cops fired 122 shots at the car, with one cop
shooting 49 rounds, but none of them were indicted. The county
prosecutor explained that Brelo’s actions were “a stop-and-shoot—no
longer a chase-and shoot,” and that the “law does not allow for a
stop-and-shoot,” citing a recent Supreme Court decision that

found in favor of cops using deadly force to end a car
chase.

In its report, the Associated Press
called Russell and Williams “suspects,” even though no
evidence was found that either of them had fired a weapon toward an
officer (the claim that began the deadly chase), nor even that
anyone had fired any gun in the vicinity of the cop who claimed he
heard it. They were neither suspected nor accused of any specific
crime by the gaggle of cops who pursued them—merely of trying to
elude them.

The city of Cleveland
asked the U.S. Department of Justice to review police policies
after the chase and shooting. That review continues.