boimler getting addicted to a sitcom called “landlord cop” was not the Star Trek content I thought I needed but oh did I

January 27: 2x04 Mirror Mirror

Had some technical difficulties but finally managed to watch Mirror Mirror. (Now I’m very tired.)

I see these aliens are more intense pacifists than Spock.

When Kirk says “But we won’t [force you], consider that,” right over his shoulder and into camera, it looks like he’s posing for a commercial.

Ah ha, the Classic Transporter Accident. (Aka how that became a classic trope lol.)

I love that they zero in on Spock’s beard first thing, like that’s the weirdest part of this universe.

Oh no, the agonizer!

So my big question is: do all the ISS Captains wear that gold vest or is it a Kirk thing? I just find it very funny that the men in the mirrorverse wear about the same amount of clothing as in the regular universe, and the ladies wear a lot less...and then there’s Kirk, conspicuously showing off his arms. Vests are NOT regulation!

When does he get a chance to record his log? And wouldn’t it be... recorded in the mirrorverse?

Kirk’s salute is hilarious. Uh, yeah, salute and wave, I guess??

He’s really focused on Spock. “Another ship. Another Spock.”

Kirk’s patented reassuring upper arm grab.

Uhura on the bridge! You can’t tell she’s nervous because she’s brave and strong.

This episode, and to a lesser extent The Naked Time, are why I think Sulu has a thing for her. I know it’s a different universe, but I still think it’s true.

Kirk’s salute is getting better. More confident.

He just doesn’t know how to be evil. He’s too good, too pure.

Hmmm, Security Chief Sulu? He really does have a lot of interests.

I wonder what Vulcan is like in this universe. They are still clearly post-Reform. But more ruthless. Scarier. Probably meat eaters.

Damn little Chekov. Just waiting for his chance to mutiny.

Security Chief, like the Gestapo. Did not know that was what the reference was supposed to be.

Hmm, male computer voice. This MUST be an evil universe.

“I’m a doctor, not an engineer.”

Evil Kirk strikes again! Honestly, this scene of the ISS crew on the regular Enterprise might be my favorite in the whole ep. Yet again obsessed with Spock’s facial hair. And Spock is obviously just loving it. “I find it extremely interesting.”

I think Kirk and Spock BOTH know what would buy Spock.

“I should regret your death.” I mean that’s basically a love confession. I love how they depict the K and S relationship in the mirrorverse. The subtle ways in which they’re still a team.

Spock would absolutely have killed Chekov for trying to kill Kirk.

I find evil!Spock the most convincing of all of this universe. I think he simultaneously feels true to the original character, and is also obviously of this universe, and that’s a pretty impressive feat.

“Terror must be maintained or the Empire is doomed.” Print that on a t-shirt.

“Conquest is easy. Control is not.” A lot of the mirror verse is over the top cartoony villainy but this is a very good point, and this scene in general is super interesting and subtle.

Kirk is so tunred on by that conversation with Spock. Like even in these circumstances, he still looks at Spock like he’s in love.

Hmmm, I like Marlena.

Of course evil!Kirk has an on-ship girlfriend, which good!Kirk would never do.

Evil!Spock is still very loyal, so much for all that “I would be a formidable enemy” stuff lol. “You’ll never find another man like him.” Too true.

Of course there’s some plundered alien tech plot device. I actually think that’s an interesting twist in a way... of course the ISS wouldn’t care about stealing, and so some...interesting artifacts might find their way onto starships.

Spock is upset he wasn’t included in this landing party meeting.

Hmmm, Sulu already wants to be Captain.

WHAT? SPOCK HAS OPERATIVES? VULCAN OPERATIVES? WHO ARE THEY? I MUST KNOW MORE. (Is one of them T’Pring?)

Marlena’s Starfleet uniform was hotter than this...paisley nightgown thing.

She’s so dramatic. Kirk is busy one time and she’s like well! I guess we’re over! Transfer me to another ship!

Another Captain Kirk arm grab moment.

I love how literally no one was surprised by that Uhura and Sulu moment on the bridge. “I’ve changed my mind again whoops.”

I can’t believe getting kicked once and then knocked on the head would almost kill Spock lol--seems like probably he might just have a concussion?--but I do like the concept of McCoy risking being left behind to help him. (And Kirk signing off on it because duh.) McCoy is just so good hearted.

Captain Sulu strikes again. Everyone has their own agenda lol. So many obstacles when everyone’s just out for himself.

Haha well that solved that. Zap zap zap and they’re gone.

As suspected, Spock recovered pretty fast. And he goes straight for the mind meld, obviously. That does seem pretty evil of him.

And another obstacle lol. I like that Kirk says Marlena can’t come with them because they can only bring 4 people because of the Calculations, even though... like surely he should already be able to guess there’s another Marlena in his universe and she can’t exactly replace a person who already exists? That would be bad.

Damn Uhura, saving the day again and looking damn fine doing it.

“I must have my Captain back.” Not even subtle about it. He MUST.

The Empire is illogical because it cannot endure.

Is Kirk literally asking this Spock to overthrow his other self and become Captain?

Also...is Marlena going to attach herself to the new Captain?? What does she think of all this?

This is probably one of the best end-of-episode bridge banter scenes in the series. “If I read my Spocks correctly.” Spock is a bit of a pirate. (I think Sarek would agree.) Spock loving the evil humans. Being jealous of Marlena. Kirk probably wondering how Mirror!Kirk and his Spock got along.

I think this is a really great episode, obviously, and I liked all of the intrigue. I thought the double, triple, quadruple crossing was really well plotted. Marlena is one of the better Love Interests and I thought she was really compelling. I LOVED Mirror Spock, and the general characterization of and subtleties to both Spocks. Mirror Sulu was interesting (what does he say about real Sulu I wonder?) and of course we got great Uhura moments and a good Bones moment too. I thought Kirk was interesting in this ep also, not quite confronting his evil side like in The Enemy Within, but...well I do think that was a part of him, the inferred characterization of mirror!Kirk, ambitious, single-minded--”inflexible, disciplined once you’ve made up your mind”--isn’t so outrageous or hard to understand.

I think the weakness of the ep is in the Mirror verse itself. It’s always struck me as a bit too cartoon-villain-y, painted in too broad strokes. Everyone wants to use violence to gain power. If deaths are so common, how has anyone survived this long lol? They allude to this sometimes--Spock not wanting command because it makes him a target, Kirk telling Spock the Empire is wasteful and ultimately unsustainable and thus illogical--but that just invites scrutiny under which the premise doesn’t hold. Imo, an organization like the Empire could never have lasted as long as or become as powerful as the Federation. As Kirk says, control is harder than conquest. I’m not even sure that all of the planets of the Federation could have come together in an Empire, and any allegiance would be very unstable. In other words, I don’t think “the Federation but make it evil” is even a sustainable premise.

Also, while people surely do crave power for the sake of power, I... tend to need a little more in my villainous characterization. Like, when I see that kind of villain, I always think of Price in Mr. Robot: “Every room I’m in, I ask myself ‘am I the most powerful person here?’ and I don’t stop until the answer is always yes.” That really is the core of him--and yet he’s still a subtle villain. That’s kind of the standard for me, I think. To put it another way, maybe the core of all villainy is just lust for power (and/or money) and maybe the best way to get power is brute strength, but the manifestations of evil are usually more subtle: some people who just want power, some people who have more narrow goals and can’t see the whole, many people who have been manipulated, and then just human ills like laziness, ineptitude, selfishness, short-sightedness. Only the most blunt of those traits and instruments really made it into the Mirror verse.

I would have liked to see the mirrorverse be more like... the mob.

...But it is only a 50 minute episode lmao.

Anyway, I find it very interesting that mirror!Spock has Vulcan operatives. His personal security guard is Vulcan, and taking these facts together, I think it’s safe to say that there are more Vulcan officers and enlisted on the ISS Enterprise than USS Enterprise. I’m not sure what to do with that but I find it very interesting. Is he more powerful on Vulcan? Is he more attuned to his Vulcan side? Are Vulcans more impressed with or deferential to him?

Anyway I am exhausted rn and I still have two more days this week so... off to bed. Next week’s ep is The Classic, The Apple.

New top story from Time: East Germans Were Welcomed to the West with Free Money. Here’s What They Bought After the Berlin Wall Fell

Peter Keup can still remember how it felt to hold deutsche marks in his hand.

“It was special to even touch this money,” he recalls. “It felt solid. The East German mark was thinner, flimsier.” As a boy growing up in East Germany, he was sometimes sent West German currency by his grandparents on the other side of the border, be it as a birthday gift or a reward for good school grades. Keup pored obsessively over the notes, minted with the mysterious–sounding titles and images of unknown cities and historical figures. “Names from behind the Iron Curtain, an invisible world,” he reflects. Their worth to him was far more than simply financial.

In any case, there was only so much the 16 million citizens of the communist German Democratic Republic (G.D.R.) could buy in a sealed-off country of scarcity, shortages and joyless austerity. Tantalizing tastes of Western consumer goods could be obtained on the black market and at state-run “Intershops,” which only accepted hard currency, like dollars or deutsche marks. Cigarettes, coffee, chocolate and pop records were on offer to those who could afford them. Others had to find their pleasures where they could. “I loved the smell of Persil and Ariel detergent in the clothes,” reminisces Nicole Hartmann, of receiving packages of hand-me-downs from relatives in the West as a young girl. “I always wanted to keep them unwashed.”

When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, followed by the inner German border that ran from Czechoslovakia to the Baltic Sea, the gates to the West were opened to all, and the bounties and temptations that lay beyond. By foot and by row upon row of Trabant and Wartburg cars, the “Ossis” (as East Germans were known) began to pour across what had been one of the most secure borders in the world. Were that not all reason enough to feel euphoric, there was more awaiting them on the other side: free money.

Nanna Heitmann—Magnum Photos for TIMEA 100 Deutsche Mark bill.

Since 1970, East Germans arriving to the Federal Republic of Germany by whatever means were paid a grant, initially of 30 deutsche marks (DM) twice a year, later rising to 100 DM once a year, under a program known as Begrüßungsgeld or “welcome money.” Under Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik policy of peaceful rapprochement, the measure was intended to help the few people who did manage to depart the G.D.R., legally or otherwise, to pay for food or travel. The amount is equivalent to about $100 in today’s money.

After the abrupt and entirely unforeseen rupture of the Berlin Wall, demand for welcome money surged—and the West German authorities stuck to their promise. As word spread like wildfire among arriving Ossis, long queues began to form outside banks and building societies. The state-sanctioned handout triggered a colossal spending spree across Berlin’s River Spree. It was a commercial revolution, and a moment of mass transactional transference from socialism into capitalism and the material world. Considered a gift by some and a bribe by others, it helped set the tone for full and swift reunification by October 1990, firmly on West German terms.

No official statistics exist as to exactly how much was claimed in all, but by the time payments were halted on Dec. 29, 1989, replaced by a foreign currency fund that both German states contributed to, it’s estimated that at least 4 billion DM had been paid out in a matter of just seven weeks. “I think over 95% [of East Germans] got this money,” speculates Sören Marotz, historian at the DDR Museum of East Germany’s history. “Some people found ways to claim the money more than once.”

On West Berlin’s glittering technicolor shopping boulevard, the Kurfürstendamm, the famous KaDeWe department store was a first port of call for many—to spend or simply to stare in awe at its luxurious abundance. In supermarkets in the borderlands of West Germany, witnesses remember seeing shelves stripped bare. Almost everyone claimed their 100 DM, from the current Chancellor Angela Merkel, then a 35-year-old physicist living in East Berlin, to sports stars, doctors, artists, political dissidents, musicians, families, pensioners and Stasi agents. Even babies were eligible for a payout.

Cash injections to the former G.D.R. have in some ways never ceased. Since 1991, Germans have paid a so-called solidarity surcharge, a fee on income, capital gains and corporate taxes currently set at 5.5%, in order to help the former communist east. Yet despite receiving €243 billion in “Soli” taxes since 1995, the economy in the country’s East continues to lag far behind the West’s. Unemployment is higher, wages are lower, and the population of the former G.D.R.’s territory has dropped to its lowest level in 114 years. It has given rise among some to what is known as “Ostalgia,” a longing for the simplicity and cradle-to-grave comforts of life in the G.D.R. Political disaffection has seen parts of the former East become a heartland for populist parties; in the eastern state of Thuringia on Oct. 27, the far-right anti–migrant Alternative for Germany party finished ahead of Merkel’s -center-right party in local elections.

What East Germans decided to buy when the Wall fell says a lot about that moment in our history, 30 years ago—about the true value of money, about competing economic systems, and about the hopes, freedoms and tensions of reunifying a country. Each purchase tells its own story. Here are 10 of them:

The All-American Doll

Nanna Heitmann—Magnum Photos for TIMESusan Penquitt and her daughter Nora play with the Barbie she bought in 1989.

“There was a long row of cars in the middle of the night,” Susan Penquitt remembers vividly, despite being just 8 years old when her family drove across the border into West Germany for the first time. The road led to the city of Fulda in Hesse, about 65 miles east of Frankfurt, and the toy section of a department store, a sight the little girl had barely dreamed of. “When I saw the Barbie on the shelf, you know, that was it. I don’t remember any other toy in that shop.”Lovingly looked after for three decades, the iconic American doll today belongs to Penquitt’s eldest daughter Nora, 8, in their home outside of Leipzig. It’s a happy token of what was not always a happy time. Like millions of East Germans working in largely state-owned industries, both of Penquitt’s parents lost their jobs following reunification. “They never had so many sorrows really,” she says.

A Grand Scheme for a Piano

Nanna Heitmann—Magnum Photos for TIMEElse Gabriel, left, and Ulf Wrede with their Bösendorfer piano.

The bohemian East Berlin performance artists Else Gabriel and Ulf Wrede celebrated their first days and nights in the West like many Germans did: together in a beer-soaked haze. “We gave pieces of the Wall to people in bars and they gave us drinks,” 57-year-old Gabriel recalls. “Everyone was so out of control. It felt like you could do anything, there was two systems just collapsing into each other.” By ripping out pages from their passports to remove collection stamps, they say they claimed their Begrüßungsgeld multiple times between them. “I spent 27 years of my life in f-cking East Germany,” Gabriel says. “There was no guilt about [taking] a few hundred deutsche marks.”

Gabriel had been permitted to leave the G.D.R. just days before the Wall fell, and had earned some deutsche marks there already. The couple combined their funds left over after the revelries and changed it all back to Eastern currency, taking advantage of a black market exchange rate to convert around 2,000 DM into around 10,000 Eastern marks. After smuggling it back into East Germany in Wrede’s socks (“It stank when we pulled the money out,” Gabriel laughs), the pair used their haul to pay off a loan on a Bösendorfer grand piano. In his Neukölln studio apartment today, Wrede, 51, still plays the dusty black keyboard, now worth many times the price he paid for it 30 years ago. “Best deal ever,” Gabriel grins proudly.

Black Adidas, White Stripes

At the time the Wall fell, Andreas Thom was already living a privileged life. At 24, he had played 51 matches for the East German national soccer team, and won the G.D.R. Premier League five times with Dynamo Berlin. Surely Thom had no need for his Begrüßungsgeld? “Of course I got the money,” he says. “Everybody got the money!” On a shopping trip to the KaDeWe, he purchased a pair of soccer shoes: “Adidas Samba Spezial, black with white stripes.” Just 37 days after reunification, Thom made history as the first East German player to sign for a West German club, when he moved to Bayern Leverkusen for a fee of 2.5 million DM. He thinks back to his debut game in February 1990 vs. FC Homburg. “Everybody was watching [as if] I had four arms, two heads, four legs,” he says. “But I scored, and everything was O.K.”

An Exotic Feast of Rare Foods

A dissident photographer, Harald Hauswald’s evocative black-and-white street scenes from behind the Wall were published in West German magazines as well as in a controversial book, making him a person of interest to the hated state security police. Hauswald escaped serious imprisonment only because of his connections to influential Western journalists, who would help him smuggle his film reels out. Shooting sometimes literally from the hip, he wielded his camera like a weapon. “I felt so trapped by the Wall,” says the 65-year-old. “Taking photographs was the work I did to fight against that feeling.” Hauswald and his friends bought a victory feast of foods unavailable in the East with their welcome money. “Kiwi and radicchio, that kind of stuff,” he says. “Today I know my way around exotic fruits better than many Westerners. And I still love to cook.”

A Pen Unlike All the Others

Nanna Heitmann—Magnum Photos for TIMETasso with an Edding marker pen like the one he bought in 1989.

Jens Müller, a.k.a. graffiti artist Tasso, owns many black Edding 850 marker pens today, but he is pretty sure that jumbled somewhere among them in his warehouse studio in Meerane is the one that changed his life. “For me it was the first time I had seen graffiti tags, on every corner in every place,” he says, of driving with friends around Kreuzberg in West Berlin as a 23-year-old. “I was wondering, ‘How have they done this?’ And then I see it must be a pen, a marker, and so I said, ‘I want to have this marker.’” He found one in a Karstadt department store that cost 10 of his 100 DM. “That was a lot. My friends thought I was crazy.” He worked in construction following reunification, eventually becoming a freelance artist. Today his tag is recognized around the world. He has visited 32 different countries to make, exhibit and promote his work.

Reading Material for the Runway

On a gray day in November 1988, 23-year-old fashion model and designer Grit Seymour was given four hours to leave the G.D.R. Her exit-visa application had been unexpectedly approved. “I had to speed pack,” she says. “My mother walked me to say goodbye. Of course we shed a lot of tears.” She stepped penniless into West Berlin, but remembers feeling instantly liberated. “It was like this huge block of concrete had fallen off my body.” With her Begrüßungsgeld she bought a copy of fashion magazine Vogue Italia, a window into a glamorous new world. On the night the Wall fell, Seymour was already modeling for Gianni Versace in Milan. She returned as fast as she could to Berlin to be reunited with family and friends. “It was like a dream coming true,” she says.

A Bouquet of Flowers for Grandma

“It set me free,” says Peter Keup, of how ballroom dancing made him feel while growing up in Dresden. He excelled at it competitively in partnership with his sister Uta, and in 1981 they were offered the chance to represent the G.D.R. internationally—but only if their family first withdrew a long-standing exit-visa application. They refused. “That’s when I took the decision to escape,” he says. In 1981, aged just 19, Keup set out for Czechoslovakia with a plan to swim across the River Danube from Hungary into Austria. He had 80 DM from his grandparents hidden in the seam of his jeans, which he hoped would pay his way to freedom. Instead he was caught on a train to Bratislava, arrested for currency smuggling and returned to the G.D.R. After a confession extracted under brutal interrogation, he was jailed by the Stasi for 10 months, spending long periods in solitary confinement. Keup’s grandparents’ lawyer helped convince the West German government to pay a $55,000 ransom, and suddenly he really was free. “For the first time it made me feel like an independent human being,” he says, of receiving his Begrüßungsgeld. The yellows and violets of the bouquet of freesia flowers he bought for his grandmother Anna remain bright in his mind. Keup boarded a train for the West German city of Essen and a new life. Years later, the Wall fell, and he and his sister danced together again.

Nothing: “I Was Not a Beggar”

Bernd Roth, a former major in the feared Stasi, is adamant he never claimed his Begrüßungsgeld. “I was not a beggar,” he says. Today Roth, 68, rejects the system that he served, yet is unapologetic about his own actions, which led to the known arrests of 14 people, including a CIA spy. “Why should we be pressured to have a bad [conscience]?” he asks. “We didn’t build concentration camps.” His love of music helped him preserve his individuality, he says. He thought nothing of singing along to “Born in the U.S.A.” at a Bruce Springsteen concert in East Berlin in 1988. “It was just music!” he laughs. Roth still lives in the same town in Thuringia where he grew up. The West has never held any appeal for him, he says. “I found it overwhelming and oppressive. I think oversaturated consumption is harmful.” Was there really nothing that he wanted there? “I might have bought myself some Grundig speakers,” he admits. “That was really just about being able to enjoy a better sound.”

Legos, a Radio and a Trip

Cornelia Guenther first entered the West at Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie, the infamous Cold War crossing point. Then 29, and a single mother working as a translator, she gingerly stepped across the border in late-November 1989. “I looked at my foot,” she says, as she crossed the military checkpoint that she had overlooked every day from her office window. “I thought, ‘Now I’m walking on West Berlin soil; how amazing is this?’” Having collected their 200 DM, she and her son Christian, 6, bought carefully selected spoils at the KaDeWe: a backpack, some Legos, a radio for the kitchen. The rest of the cash they put toward a trip to England a few months later. “Buying experience was much more important to me than material things,” says Guenther.

A Computer, and a Future

When the Wall fell, Gordon van Godin was a 19-year-old newly discharged from national service in the East German army. He put his welcome money toward an Amiga computer so he could play Tetris and Formula 1 games. Today, he is director of Berlin’s DDR Museum of East German history, and qualified to bust some popular myths about Begrüßungsgeld. Is it true, for instance, that many people bought… bananas? “This is really a cliché, 100%,” he replies. “Because bananas we knew. We didn’t know, for example, kiwi fruit.” He believes the money helped establish a lasting hierarchy between West and East in a reunited Germany that still endures today. “I learned in school that in capitalism, nothing is for free,” Von Godin says. “You have to pay for everything sooner or later.”

via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

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The audacious plan to bring back supersonic flight — and change air travel forever

One of the odd aspects of modern air travel is that it’s not really getting any faster. Ever since British Airways retired its money-losing supersonic Concorde in 2003, airlines have generally stuck to top speeds of around 615 miles per hour. That’ll get you from New York to San Francisco in five or six hours, depending on the winds, but you can’t find a plane that will get you there significantly sooner.

We’ve largely learned to tolerate our slow, boring aircraft. But there’s a compelling case that we shouldn’t — that air travel should actually be much, much quicker.

Right now there are a host of energetic startups and NASA engineers working on sleek new supersonic jets that could fly twice as fast as today’s commercial planes, if not faster. These jets would be major upgrades on the noisy, fuel-squandering Concordes of old, and they could be ready within the decade.

When you talk to people working on these super-fast planes, it’s hard not to get swept up in the excitement. Take Blake Scholl, the CEO of Boom, a startup that’s working with Virgin Galactic to put a new supersonic business jet into service by the early 2020s. He envisions a day when anyone could cross the Pacific or Atlantic in just a few short hours. “It changes how you think about the world,” he tells me.

“In aerospace, there are two great passions,” Scholl says. “You either want to build rockets and go colonize Mars — or you want to go really, really fast. People like Elon Musk are focused on the former. We’ve built a team that’s obsessed with the latter.”

So what’s the holdup? For some, it’s mostly politics. In a new paper for the Mercatus Center, titled “Make America Boom Again,” policy analysts Eli Dourado and Samuel Hammond make the case that outdated regulations are hindering innovation in air travel. Since 1973, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has banned civilian aircraft from flying faster than sound over land, to avoid the house-rattling sonic booms that the Concorde use to make. Yet recent technological advances have enabled supersonic designs that don’t create loud booms. So why not replace the FAA’s blanket ban with a simple noise standard, and let supersonic travel flourish?

Yet there are also skeptics who argue that regulations aren’t the only thing holding back our supersonic future. In practice, faster air travel isn’t always worth it, and airlines have excellent reasons for preferring those slow, boring planes — from fuel efficiency to airport noise to concerns about climate change. “I wish them all the best!” says longtime aviation consultant Robert W. Mann Jr. of the push for supersonic flight. “But it’s still not clear that there will be a market for this.”

That is to say, there are two tricky questions to explore here: Can we actually bring back supersonic flight? And even if we can — should we?

The Concorde, revisited: Why early attempts at supersonic flight failed

Anyone who wants to build a supersonic plane today first has to grapple with the tragic failure of the Concorde jet, a joint venture between Britain and France that began carrying passengers in 1976.

The Concorde was a technical marvel, flying at at Mach 2 (twice the speed of sound, or 1,512 mph) to go from New York to London in just 3.5 hours, instead of the usual seven or eight. But it suffered its share of economic woes, and British Airways finally retired the jet in 2003:

[embedded content]

The Concorde’s demise is a complicated tale, but it suffered from two mortal flaws. First, it was a horrendous fuel-guzzler and expensive to operate. Under the laws of physics, the air resistance or drag that a given object faces in flight increases rapidly as you approach Mach 1. So a plane flying supersonic requires a lot more energy than one flying below the speed of sound.

The Concorde’s designers tried to reduce drag by giving their plane a sleek body and short, slender delta wings. Even so, the Concorde required staggering amounts of fuel, burning roughly eight times as much oil per passenger mile for a trans-Atlantic trip as a modern-day 777. That made tickets forbiddingly expensive: $10,000 or more for a New York–London round trip. As oil prices rose, British Airways and Air France (which operated the jets) struggled to consistently fill the jets’ 100-125 seats. Bad for profits.

A second problem, meanwhile, is that whenever the Concorde traveled faster than the speed of sound — about 767 miles per hour — it created noisy sonic booms in its wake. To put it simply, the air in front of the Concorde couldn’t get out of its way fast enough, so it bunched up into large shock waves in a cone trailing the plane. Wherever those shock waves reached the ground below, they’d be heard as a loud “BANG, BANG” that could rattle windows, shake structures, and startle people.

A sonic boom is a cone-shaped shock wave produced by supersonic aircraft, heard the entire length of its flight path. Image from the US Air Force pamphlet “The Sonic Boom” (n.d.), modified by David Suisman. (Suisman, 2015)

Opposition quickly mounted, and in 1973 the FAA banned civilian aircraft from traveling at supersonic speeds over the United States. The Concorde could only exceed Mach 1 over water, limiting its market. British Airways and Air France mainly flew the Concorde out of New York and Washington DC to London and Paris, though there were a number of other international routes over the years.*

After the Concorde went bust, airlines shied away from supersonic flight. The extra speed didn’t seem to justify the hassle. At least, until recently.

How new technology could make supersonic flight viable again

Over the past decade, a number of aerospace engineers and entrepreneurs have been revisiting the Concorde’s demise. And some of them have walked away thinking that supersonic flight could work today — with just a few important (if difficult) tweaks.

A few years ago, Blake Scholl, a former coder and longtime amateur pilot, was messing around with spreadsheet models and realized that a number of recent advances in aerodynamics and engine technology could, in theory, allow engineers to build a plane that was far more fuel-efficient than the Concorde. “If you could do that, you could have a plane that was competitive with existing business travel,” he says. “I started running these numbers by various experts and realized it wasn’t just science fiction.”

In 2014, Scholl founded Boom, an aviation company based in Denver, Colorado. He has since assembled a team that includes accomplished former NASA, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin engineers to design a working successor to the Concorde.

A large model of Boom’s new XB-1 Supersonic Demonstrator at the company’s hanger at Centennial Airport. (Boom)

They’re not alone. Back in 2002, a group of investors led by Robert Bass formed a company called Aerion that aimed to harness innovative new drag-reducing technology to create a much more efficient supersonic business jet. Aerion is pretty far along in this task: In 2014, the company announced a partnership with aerospace giant Airbus to build and certify a supersonic craft within the decade. (Gulfstream, an established jet manufacturer, is also working with NASA on its own designs for supersonic flight.)

The race is on.

So what makes these companies think they can do better than the Concorde’s designers and build a vastly more fuel-efficient plane? In interviews, Boom and Aerion pointed to three broad technical advances that make this all seem feasible:

First, modern-day computer modeling makes exploring new aircraft designs far easier than it was in the 1960s. If the Concorde’s designers wanted to test a new shape to see how it affected drag, they had to build a scale model and put it through large wind tunnels — a clumsy process that could take months. Nowadays, genetic algorithms can explore and tweak new shapes much more quickly and effectively.

Newer composite materials, like carbon fiber, allow aircraft designers to pursue shapes and contours that weren’t possible for the Concorde’s designers, who worked with aluminum. (These materials can also better deal with the serious heat that builds up on the leading edge of the plane’s wing at speeds above Mach 2.)

Today’s jet engines are far more efficient than they were in the Concorde’s heyday.

“The breakthrough will be in the sum of those parts, not any one invention,” Scholl says. Put those three factors together, and he thinks Boom can build a plane that goes at top speeds of Mach 2.2 while being 30 percent more fuel-efficient than the Concorde. It will still create sonic booms, though quieter than the Concorde’s.

The proof, of course, will be in the testing. Boom unveiled a design for its supersonic XB-1 jet in mid-November. The company will then team up with Virgin Galactic to build and test a prototype at Edwards Air Base in California by the end of 2017. The hope, Scholl says, is to have a working plane in service by “the early 2020s.”

Aerion, meanwhile, is pursuing a different design that harnesses supersonic natural laminar flow, a concept it developed (and tested with NASA) to reduce the turbulent airflow around wings and reduce drag. Aerion will work with Airbus on the engineering and is in the process of selecting suppliers to manufacture the engines. The plan, says spokesperson Jeff Miller, is to get the plane into service by 2021:

(Aerion)

Assuming these planes work, the next challenge will be finding a market. Scholl’s goal is to introduce a plane that will cost just $5,000 to fly round-trip between, say, New York and London. At that price, his market research suggests, there will be enough business travelers willing to pay a premium for speed that he can fill small 45-seat jets. (As part of their deal, Virgin has an option to buy 10 of Boom’s planes.)

Consider the advantages: A flight between San Francisco and Tokyo might take just four hours instead of 11. A flight between New York and London, three instead of eight. “You could leave early in the morning from New York, have afternoon meetings in London, and be back home in time for dinner,” Scholl notes.

Still, it’s far from clear that Boom and Aerion can succeed in luring enough passengers to turn a profit. For one, notes Mann, the aviation consultant, their planes will still be less fuel-efficient than conventional planes, which means they could be more vulnerable to sharp swings in oil prices. Plus, there are market risks. The most profitable Concorde route lay between the great financial centers of New York and London. But what happens if, say, Brexit ends up shrinking the size of London’s banking industry?

“Obviously we’ll have to see,” says Mann. “But those are just examples of the sort of external shocks that could impinge on the practicality of supersonic travel.”

Boom and Aerion remain optimistic. The broader hope is that if supersonic flight gains a foothold with business travelers, costs will eventually come down as technology improves. Scholl’s ultimate goal is to make supersonic flight affordable to everyone. “It’s the same thing that Tesla did,” he says. “They started with the luxury Roadster and are now focused on mass-market cars.”

Because Boom and Aerion’s planes would only fly supersonic over water at the start, they could coexist with the FAA’s current ban on overland travel (although both companies could face regulatory hurdles around the noise their planes will make on takeoff and landing; more on that below).

That said, oceanic flights are still a relatively limited market. For supersonic travel to truly conquer the entire world, someone would have to take the next step and develop a plane that doesn’t produce terrifying sonic booms over land.

And that’s where NASA comes in.

The next big challenge: silencing sonic booms to allow overland flights

Ever since the 1970s, NASA has been wrestling with the math around the pressure waves that create aircraft sonic booms, trying to figure out how to reduce them. And, over the past decade, its engineers think they’ve finally cracked the problem.

“We’re at the point where we think we can design a quiet supersonic airplane,” says Peter Coen, the commercial supersonic technology project manager at NASA’s Langley Research Center. His team is currently working with Lockheed Martin on a $20 million project to design a prototype X-plane with much, much softer booms.

The science of what Coen’s team is doing gets a bit complicated (see this report for the gritty details), but here’s a very basic explanation. When a plane like the Concorde travels at supersonic speed, it creates a bunch of invisible shock waves, sharp pressure disturbances emanating from all the objects that stick out of the plane — the nose, the windshield, the wings, the tail. They’re shaped like this:

Although shock waves aren’t usually visible to the naked eye, NASA used schlieren imagery to see the disturbances made by a USAF Test Pilot School T-38C aircraft flying at supersonic speeds over the Mojave Desert. (NASA)

These shock waves are all different strengths, and they as they travel through the air, they coalesce into just two powerful waves — a strong positive pressure wave at the nose and a strong negative pressure wave at the tail. This “N-wave” configuration is highly stable and doesn’t decay much as it travels toward the ground. When this wave hits people below, our ears register it as two noisy bangs from each of the two sharp swings in pressure.

“So the trick,” Coen says, “is to keep those shock waves from coalescing into a N-shaped signal.” In theory, a plane with a different shape would create shock waves of more uniform strength that coalesce more gradually as they move through the air. If done successfully, people on the ground would experience a gentle rise in pressure when the wave hits rather than two sharp pressure changes.

Recent experiments have been promising. The Concorde created booms that were perceived to be as loud as 135 decibels on the ground — about as loud as the sound a jet engine makes from 100 feet away. But by experimenting with different shapes, NASA has developed aircraft models that, in wind-tunnel tests, create booms as soft as 79 perceived decibels, roughly comparable to a car passing 10 feet away. Eventually, NASA would like to get that down that to 70 decibels.

The goal is to design an actual plane using these concepts. Here is an artist’s conception of what the new X-plane might look like.

Artist’s conception of a low boom flight demonstration quiet supersonic transport (QueSST) X-plane design. (NASA/Lockheed Martin)

NASA will then plan to build a one-third-scale prototype and conduct the first test flight in 2020.* The idea is that they’ll gather data on what sorts of sonic booms the planes actually make, and then the FAA can use that data in deciding whether it makes sense to replace the blanket ban on overland supersonic travel with a noise standard — saying, for example, that supersonic flight is acceptable overland so long as the booms are below a certain threshold. (If that actually happened, Gulfstream says planes with quiet booms might be a possibility by 2025 or 2030 or so.)

But changing those rules will require wading into the murky world of politics — which is never easy.

The US government could still put the kibosh on supersonic flight

In theory, the FAA is open to the idea of revising its blanket ban on supersonic flight over land. In 2011, an FAA official gave a public presentation explaining that research on silencing sonic booms has progressed far enough that it may be time to consider a noise standard.

But the FAA is moving very slowly on revamping the rules — in part because it’s focused on other challenges, like overhauling the nation’s air traffic control system. The agency is also waiting for NASA and other companies to demonstrate their quiet-boom technology before crafting fresh regulations.

In their paper for the Mercatus Center, Dourado and Hammond argue that the FAA’s current approach is precisely backward. It would be much better for the agency to set guidelines ahead of time on what type of overland sonic booms would be acceptable — so that companies can have some certainty and know what to aim for in developing new designs. “Right now, the FAA is saying we’ll accept supersonic when we hear what’s acceptable,” says Hammond. “We’re trying to point out the absurdity in that.”

Even if the boom issue gets sorted out, however, there’s still another hurdle for supersonic planes: takeoff and landing. While all supersonic planes would fly at less-than-supersonic (or “subsonic”) speeds around airports, they’d still make a fair bit of noise on takeoff and landing. And that’s where things get a little tricky.

Over the years, the FAA has developed strict standards for the noise that airplanes can make around airports. Aircraft manufacturers have responded to these rules, in part, by doing things like building high-bypass engines with large-diameter fans that propel air out of the engine more slowly and hence reduce the noise from the exhaust.

The trade-off with these high-bypass engines is that they’re not as fuel-efficient at takeoff and the large fans create more drag while the plane’s in the air. That’s not a huge deal for normal aircraft, but it could be ruinous for supersonic jets. If the FAA requires supersonic jets to adhere to the newest, strictest noise standards coming into effect by 2018 (known as Stage 5 standards), those jets will take a major fuel efficiency hit. By contrast, if the FAA merely asked supersonic aircraft to adhere to the standards that were in place back in 2006 (known as Stage 3 standards), Scholl estimates, that would reduce supersonic ticket costs by some 15 percent.

Dourado and Hammond argue that the FAA should allow looser airport noise standards for supersonic jets in the very beginning, at least, to allow the technology to get to market. Engineers can then work on making them quieter. The companies making the supersonic planes agree. “The physics of supersonic aircraft are just so different, so saying you need to meet the standards of subsonic regulations could put a damper on development,” says Aerion’s Miller. “We’re hoping to reach a compromise with the FAA on this, since we’re talking about a new industry that could be beneficial.”

This could prove a contentious subject, however. The politics around airport noise can be extremely dicey (in separate research, Dourado and Raymond Russell have found that most airport noise complaints to the FAA come from just a small handful of people). While a strict airport noise rule wouldn’t necessarily kill supersonic flight, it could increase prices and dampen the market, particularly in the early days.

The deeper question: Do we really want supersonic flight?

Good old Concorde. Photo by Ian Waldie/Getty Images

The noise issue raises a bigger philosophical question around supersonic flight: How much do we really value speed, anyway? After all, the structure of our current aviation industry is the result of a series of compromises around competing values. And over the past 30 years, airlines have shown that there are a lot of other things we value more than simply going really, really fast.

Back in the 1970s, Mann explains, the industry realized that if it wanted to keep growing, it needed to be a good neighbor. That meant replacing their existing fleet of loud and dirty airplanes with much quieter models — even if it meant some trade-offs in terms of performance. Similarly, ever since the oil shocks of that decade, the industry has made a point of valuing fuel efficiency over raw speed.

“The optimal cruise speed has basically declined over the years,” Mann says. “Above about Mach 0.8, you pay so much for that speed in terms of fuel.” Today, a flight from New York to Denver or from DC to Miami actually takes longer than it did in the 1970s — because airlines have realized that the fuel savings are worth the delay.

Going forward, there’s another important value to weigh on the scale: climate change. Aviation is already the fastest-growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, and the world’s airlines just agreed to a sweeping deal under the International Civil Aviation Organization to offset the growth of their emissions starting in 2020. Conventional aircraft manufacturers have worked hard to reduce fuel burn by 45 percent since 1968, and companies like Boeing and Airbus are now pushing to cut fuel use even further, through the use of lighter materials and novel engine designs. Still, this remains one of the toughest sectors to decarbonize.

And new supersonic jets that burn fuel at higher rates than conventional planes seem to go in precisely the opposite direction — even if they do save travelers time. True, a few supersonic business jets flying around wouldn’t have a major impact on emissions. But if cheap supersonic flight became ubiquitous, the global warming impact could be staggering (particularly if the planes fly at higher altitudes, due to the contrail effect). With the world already struggling to avoid dangerously large temperature increases, a new fuel-inefficient plane seems like a luxury the planet can ill afford.

When I asked NASA’s Coen about the climate consequences of a world filled with supersonic jets, he agreed that it was a real concern. But he also pointed out that there might be ways to square these different values. Future caps on aviation emissions could, for instance, spur supersonic jets to adopt low-carbon biofuels. (Or there’s another way this could all go: As Mann pointed out, it’s possible that stricter carbon caps could simply make supersonic flight unviable.)

It’s still too early to say how these issues will play out, but it’s a good reminder that our slow, boring planes have quite a few things going for them.

Even so, at the end of the day, the prospect of faster flight will remain forever tantalizing. The reduction in travel times has been one of the great technological breakthroughs of the past 200 years. This isn’t merely convenient; in some ways, it’s been the very marker of progress. Humans have long been obsessed with breaking new barriers, with going faster and faster. Even if on a purely romantic level, it would be a shame if we’re currently stuck going about as fast as we’ll ever go.

——

* Correction: I originally wrote that NASA and Lockheed Martin are working together to build a prototype of a quiet supersonic plane. That’s not quite accurate. Lockheed Martin has a contract to design a plane. But NASA hasn’t yet selected a company to actually build the prototype.

Further reading:

Via

The CIA created quite a stir in the federal IT community as word spread over the last week that it’s ready to upgrade its commercial cloud offering called Commercial Cloud Services (C2S). As the industry day documents spread like wildfire across industry and the media, the question we have to ask is the CIA, the intelligence community more generally, trying to give the Defense Department some top cover for its controversial and protest entangled Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative (JEDI) cloud procurement? When you review the CIA’s market research survey as well as its industry day presentation, everything about it seems to be saying “Hey DoD, we have seen the light and multi-cloud, multi-vendor is the only way to go.” The intel agency said in its market research survey that it “will acquire foundational cloud services, as defined in the scope section below, from multiple vendors.” Insight by Cornerstone OnDemand: Examine a case study on implementing a modern LMS for the new skills economy at DAU in this free webinar. In industry day documents, the CIA said that the Commercial Cloud Enterprise’s (C2E) program objective is to “acquire cloud computing services directly from commercial cloud service providers…” The CIA said it plans to award one or more indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity type contracts. Industry experts said the message couldn’t be any clearer to DoD and it’s plans for JEDI. Trey Hodgkins, president and CEO of Hodgkins Consulting, said the CIA’s C2E puts the conversation around DoD’s JEDI on a different trajectory. “C2E puts the conversation on a different trajectory. It puts out there that the IC has identified new needs so the prudent person would go back and ask the question, ‘if they need hybrid, on premise and commercial cloud, does that change the thinking at DoD?’” said Trey Hodgkins, president and CEO of Hodgkins Consulting. “I don’t think there is any visibility into DoD’s thought process, but you’d have to think they are asking the same question at the department.” DoD currently is conducting an internal review of JEDI after a bid protest from Oracle highlighted a potential conflict of interest. Additionally, DoD and JEDI are facing a potential FBI investigation. Sam Gordy, the general manager of IBM federal, said the CIA strategy with C2E should not only inform DoD, but influence the Pentagon’s plans going forward. “These [C2E and JEDI] are diametrically opposed approaches. Clearly the CIA has five-to-six years of experience in a single cloud environment and they are making a strategic decision to wholeheartedly move into multi cloud world. It’s a critical next step for the evolution of IT support for the IC,” Gordy said in an interview with Federal News Network. “DoD should take advantage of those five-to-six years of experience in the IC and the national security community to inform what they are doing going forward.” Gordy said the CIA is taking the approach that the private sector has moved to over the last few years. He added that unlike JEDI, the CIA is making it clear why the multi-cloud approach is necessary because they are saying in the industry day documents and the market survey what they want to use the cloud for today and in the future. Under phase 1, the CIA said it wants vendors to provide infrastructure-, platform- and software-as-a-service capabilities as well as support services. Source: CIA industry day presentation from March 22, 2019. “Knowing they have an enterprisewide cloud contract already and that they are using that capability, this tells me they need hybrid, on-premise and commercial solution and this creates a mechanism to do that,” Hodgkin said. “I didn’t see anything shocking or that caught me off guard. The CIA has clearly spelled out to the industrial base what they need, and one of them is to deliver some or all of the three types of cloud, and when they put their data into those clouds, it must be portable so they can move it to another cloud or somewhere else. Those are the two elements that are different than what they have now, and ones that you haven’t seen it called out in previous acquisitions, at least not at this level.” CIA needs cloud diversity, data portability John Weiler, the executive director of the IT Acquisition Advisory Council and an outspoken critic of JEDI, said the CIA’s approach for C2E is a recognition that the current C2S contract isn’t working like they expected. “If it had worked they would’ve just resigned up with Amazon Web Services,” Weiler said. “One cloud can’t solve all your problems. When you look at workloads on Oracle or legacy Microsoft platforms, it makes no sense to move them to Amazon or Google or IBM. Those cloud are not designed for those environments. These strategies to be effective have to acknowledge that there are certain platforms that are legacy can move to a specific cloud and not just to any cloud.” Related Stories DoD’s new JEDI investigation is focused on one Amazon employee, court filings say Defense FBI, DoD IG conducting preliminary investigation into JEDI, procurements Exclusive 10 BILLION DOLLARS and other reasons why contractors feel so much angst around DoD’s JEDI program Reporter's Notebook Thirst for new technologies, new capabilities driving IC’s cloud expansion Exclusive Industry experts said there is a growing desire inside the intelligence community for something more than C2S. One industry source, who requested anonymity in order to talk about inner working of the IC, said there have been varying degrees of unhappiness with the Amazon contract, including at least two IC agencies rejecting the C2S cloud and building their own. Another industry source said in many ways C2S was a long-term pilot and now the CIA and others in the IC recognize they weren’t happy with the price they were getting for cloud services, interoperability was more difficult than first imagined especially between C2S and existing data centers, and they were limited in the ability to add new features in a timely manner. “They’ve had time to see what works and what doesn’t, and they’ve realized cloud providers are becoming specialized. It’s easier to move workloads from on-premise to the cloud with the same vendor. They realized migrations can be expensive,” the source said. “The CIA realized that cloud diversity and price competition help bring down costs. The industry and the CIA weren’t in a position to do that six years ago, but now they are, which is good.” The first industry source added the IC had real concerns about vendor lock-in and how hard it was to move data between cloud infrastructures. “I’ve heard that a lot that people didn’t expect going into Amazon to have the level of lock-in that they have. Once they migrated data to Amazon, it became much more difficult to lift and shift to say a Microsoft cloud because the systems was configured in way that was only good for the Amazon cloud,” the source said. Implementation of cloud services is key A third industry source was even more blunt about the C2S contract: “AWS has relentlessly leveraged C2S since its inception, proclaiming to federal agencies that there was only one cloud service provider good enough for the CIA, so they needn’t look further. But like a handsy, insecure boyfriend, it seems like AWS held the CIA a little too close, proudly boasting about their exclusive relationship while competing suitors flexed their innovation muscles,” source said. “Not surprisingly, since the relationship first began, the CIA has noticed it has options and doesn’t need to commit. So while it’s understandable AWS wants to put a ring on it, the agency would clearly rather stay friends and play the field.” An AWS spokesman said they are excited about C2E and the CIA’s intent to build on the existing C2S efforts. “As a customer obsessed organization, we’re focused on driving innovation that supports the mission and spurs solutions that allow for missions to be performed better, faster, and in a more secure manner,” the spokesman said. Weiler said no matter the strategy that the CIA or DoD chooses, the key is the implementation. He said nearly every agency needs to address legacy systems and the consistent challenge of cloud migration. IBM’s Gordy said C2S shouldn’t be considered a failure by any means as it greatly helped inform the CIA’s current strategy. “This does sync up with a recompete on C2S, but I don’t think C2E is in anyway a replacement for C2S,” he said. “The CIA will probably continue to have the need for a broad business application cloud which is what C2S is being used for today. And then they will need to have a mission oriented cloud, which is the reason they are going to C2E, which seems to be for the optimization of those mission workloads.”

Tucker Carlson, Dennis Prager. The Student Debt Crisis and the Overrated College Pedigree.

Tucker Carlson, Dennis Prager. The Student Debt Crisis and the Overrated College Pedigree.

Tucker Carlson on the Student Debt Crisis

Dennis Prager on Student Debt

Prager University- DivestU

Dennis Prager. Fireside Chat- College Pedigree is Overrated

  Tucker Carlson Tonight. The Student Debt Crisis

Congress must address the student loan debt problem and stop colleges from scamming our kids.

  The Dennis Prager Show. Student Debt

Tucker Carlson outlines the scam of student debt and its consequences. Dennis comments… Dennis talks to Charlie Kirk, the founder and president of Turning Point, USA. He teaches the newest PragerU video, DivestU. Wed, Mar 20, 2019

  From Prager University.

DivestU

https://youtu.be/AcD5YVg9Z1Q

PragerU

It’s no longer a secret that many college campuses today are nothing more than leftist indoctrination camps. But what can we do about it? Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, offers a simple and effective solution. This video was made possible by a generous grant from Colorado Christian University. Learn more at Script: Year after year, Americans pour billions of dollars into colleges and universities. I'm not talking about the outrageous tuition costs, living expenses, and fees – the debt pit students fall into. And I'm not talking about the tax money – our money – colleges and universities get from federal and state governments. I'm talking about the money Americans are handing over to these institutions of their own free will. In 2017, that number was $44 billion. $44 billion in donations in one year from alumni and other donors. And for what? To enhance the education of America's youth? Do you really think our college graduates are better educated, more literate, more versed in classical philosophy and American history than they were ten, twenty, or fifty years ago? If your child goes to college and spends four years partying, skipping class, and playing video games, consider yourself lucky. It's when they actually listen to their radical professors that you're in trouble. So what have our institutions been doing with all this money? Well, the University of Michigan's Vice Provost of Equity and Inclusion makes $400,000 a year. The university spends close to eleven million dollars annually on diversity and inclusion staff and programs, according to a recent report. What do you think Vice Provosts of Equity and Inclusion (and almost all schools have one now) do all day? They, and the small armies they supervise, spend all day, every day, looking for racism, sexism, classism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia and any other phobias they can dream up. If they don't find some bias somewhere, they're out of a job. So, guess what? They find it – even where it doesn't exist. The University of California at Santa Cruz now has an "activist-in-residence." His job is to mint new leftist activists – as if we have a shortage. Why are we voluntarily giving billions and billions of dollars to hopelessly corrupt institutions that overcharge, underdeliver and undermine the most basic values of Western Civilization? We should be starving this beast. Instead, we're feeding it. Are there exceptions to this rule? Colleges that are actually dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom? Of course, there are – and they are worthy of your financial support. But you can count them on two hands. The rest have a different mission. And they have more than enough coin to carry it out. The aforementioned University of Michigan has an endowment of 12 billion dollars. But that's small potatoes compared to Yale's $30 billion or Harvard's $40 billion. And donors keep giving them more. It's time to stop. You'd be better throwing your money into a bonfire. That's just a waste. But when you donate to your average university, you're actually hurting your society. For the complete script, visit https://www.prageru.com/video/divestu  Published on Mar 18, 2019

    Fireside Chat. College Pedigree is Overrated

https://youtu.be/RtzNiUuUwII

PragerU

Premiered Mar 28, 2019

In this week’s Fireside Chat, Dennis Prager breaks down the hysteria of climate change and why we shouldn’t be concerned for the world’s end. Dennis continues to tell parents not to obsess over what college their kid goes to: it is far more important to care about a kid’s character over their grades. Dennis follows with a Q&A submitted by viewers. • Hysteria Over Climate Change (Article: https://l.prageru.com/2FHlFJo) • Value Your Kid’s Character Over Grades (Column: https://l.prageru.com/2HZavl0) • Why Isn’t Communism as Hated as Nazism (Video: https://l.prageru.com/2FGyYcV) • How Feminism Affects Young People • Controlling Partner In a Relationship • Dennis’s Favorite Economists Never miss a new video. SUBSCRIBE to the Fireside podcast on iTunes! 👉https://l.prageru.com/2WjJ2OS

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Natural Gas NOW Picks of the Week – December 1, 2018

Tom Shepstone Shepstone Management Company, Inc.

…

…

Natural Gas NOW readers pass along a lot of stuff every week about natural gas, fractivist antics, emissions, renewables, and other news relating to energy. As usual, emphasis is added.

Andrew Cuomo’s Renewable Fiasco Runs Into Reality

Andrew Cuomo, at the instigation of the NRDC gang, made a foolish pledge a few years ago to make sure 50% of the state’s electricity will come from renewables by 2030. It might have seemed remotely feasible because New York has access to so much hydro-electric power but, as I have said many times, solar and wind projects tend to engender fierce NIMBY opposition. That’s exactly what’s happened, leading to still further foolishness, according to Robert Bryce who offered this in a New York Post article:

he New York State Energy Research and Development Authority released its “offshore-wind master plan.” The agency said it was “charting a course to 2,400 megawatts” of offshore capacity to be installed by 2030. That much capacity (roughly twice as much as now exists in all of Denmark) will require installing hundreds of platforms over more than 300 square miles of ocean in some of the most navigated, and heavily fished, waters on the Eastern Seaboard.

It will also be enormously expensive. According to the latest data from the Energy Information Administration, by 2022 producing a megawatt hour of electricity from offshore wind will cost a whopping $145.90.

Offshore wind promoters claim costs are declining. Maybe so. But according to the New York Independent System Operator, the average cost of wholesale electricity in the state last year was $36.56. Thus, Cuomo’s presidential ambitions will require New York consumers to pay roughly four times as much for offshore electricity as they currently pay for juice from conventional generators.

Why is the governor pushing so hard for offshore wind? The answer’s simple: The rural backlash against Big Wind is growing daily.

Just a few hours after NYSERDA released its plan, the Somerset town board unanimously banned industrial wind turbines. The town (population: 2,700) is actively opposing the proposed 200-megawatt Lighthouse Wind project, which, if built, would be one of the largest onshore-wind facilities in the Northeast…

Numerous other small communities are fighting the encroachment of Big Wind. In the Thousand Islands region, towns like Cape Vincent and Clayton have been fending off wind projects for years. Last May, the town of Clayton approved an amendment to its zoning ordinance that bans all commercial wind projects.

Last September, the Fort Drum Regional Liaison Organization announced its opposition to eight proposed onshore-wind projects due to the deleterious effect those projects could have on radar systems and military aviation…

The onshore backlash has left Cuomo with no choice but to move his renewable-energy obsession offshore… but plenty of fishermen… are none too happy at the prospect of having hundreds of offshore platforms obstruct their fishing.

To protect their interests, fishermen and fishmongers from New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Massachusetts have filed a federal lawsuit to block an offshore wind lease won by Norwegian oil company Statoil ASA, at the site of one of the best squid and scallop fisheries on the Eastern Seaboard. That lawsuit is still pending.

In short, Cuomo’s push for offshore wind shows how desperate he is to show his pals at the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club how much he loves renewable energy. Never mind that New York’s electricity prices are already 40 percent higher than the US average or that his offshore scheme will send those rates even higher.

Bryce gets it right. This is nonsense—very expensive nonsense—promoted by those with special interest agendas who don’t give a damn about the impacts on other New Yorkers.

And, Cuomo and the NRDC Gang Are Selling Out the Adirondacks for the Agenda

If you thought Robert Bryce was overstating the opposition to Cuomo’s solar and wind plans or that the NRDC gang is all about protecting the Adirondacks, check out this letter to the editor in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise (excerpts):

Are you aware the Adirondack Park Agency has quietly made a move toward embracing industrial wind and solar development inside the Blue Line in its Nov. 9 “Policy on Renewable Energy Production and Energy Supply Guidance” document? We believe the impact of this decision would scar the Adirondacks forever…

Click image for the reality

Learn what Gov. Cuomo’s “50 by 30” plan really means for the North Country and the Adirondacks…

Urge your local government to adopt a moratorium on wind and solar development to allow them time to research and create laws that will protect you from many negative health, environmental and economic impacts…

For more information visit nnywind.com or Facebook.com/CitizensForRuralPreservation.

And, you thought the NRDC gang just wanted save the wilderness.

Perry to New York: It’s Pipelines or Russia

S&P Global Platts reports that US Secretary of Energy Rick Perry spoke to the Consumer Energy Alliance this week and sent another strong message to FERC, New York and states who would deny energy to New England and make it dependent on Russian LNG:

When Perry spoke at a House of Representatives Science, Space and Technology Committee hearing in May, he questioned whether “states have the right to block a pipeline across their state that will have a national security implication or an economic implication on individuals.”

On Thursday, Perry was asked to weigh in on New England’s infrastructure constraints. “Why in the world today, with America being the number one oil and gas producing country in the world, would Boston and the Northeast have to have to rely upon gas from Russia? I don’t get that,” he said.

He was likely referring to the offloading of a tanker originating from Russia’s Yamal plant during a cold snap last winter to replenish stocks at the Distrigas LNG terminal in Boston. New England leans on imported LNG to supply power plants during cold weather when the region’s gas pipeline capacity is dedicated to home heating…

The ship that brought Russian LNG to Boston

Perry said politics in New York make it very difficult for US-produced gas to travel across the state. On a recent trip to Ukraine, Perry talked up US LNG as an alternative to Russian gas, “because the Russians are not necessarily reliable,” he said, spurring chuckles from the audience.“I would suggest that those that are making decisions in the United States that think somehow or another Russian gas is more reliable than US-produced gas, they might want to think about that,” he saidTwo major projects have been blocked by New York — Williams’ 121-mile, 650 MMcf/d Constitution Pipeline (CP13-499), and National Fuel Gas Supply and Empire Pipeline ‘s 97-mile, 497 MMcf/d Northern Access 2016 project (CP15-115). Both were denied water quality certifications. But FERC recently waived New York’s Clean Water Act Section 401 review for Northern Access on the grounds that state regulators took too long to act.

Right on, Rick!

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Glam or Sham

In late January, a troupe of makeup obsessives were sent on an all-expenses-paid trip to paradise. The YouTube beauty “gurus” – whose makeup tutorials have amassed them almost 30 million loyal viewers – were flown by the cosmetics brand Benefit to Soneva Jani: a Maldives resort where a night’s stay ranges from $4,000 to $15,000. On the final night Benefit announced the reason for the gathering: a new mascara that retails for $24.

The YouTubers on the trip were not Benefit loyalists. Take Chloe Morello, for instance: one of Australia’s most-watched YouTubers with more than 2.4 million subscribers.

In accordance with Australian consumer laws, paid-for content must be clearly marked as “sponsored”. Last year the US Federal Trade Commission updated its guidelines on social media disclosures for the first time since 2010, when the thought of people earning millions for recommending lipstick on YouTube was unheard of. About the same time the Australian Association of National Advertisers established a new code for social media users, who can now be fined up to A$220,000 a post if they fail to disclose a commercial arrangement or are found to be “misleading by omission”.  But a grey area still exists when products are sent to an influencer, unprompted and without prior agreement. Being added to a PR list for mailouts is how vloggers can prove their industry cred.

I found this article to be super interesting on just how strict and regulated sponsored videos can be. The article goes on to expand on other popular YouTubers who talk about their sponsorship experiences. For example, Finch states, “Finch says it’s often unclear what – if anything – is expected. “A lot of brands send stuff to my PO box and don’t expect anything back … But some brands will send you [product] and then send an email saying, ‘Can’t wait to see your post!’”

Another YouTuber, Jackie Aina shared her opinions when she tested a new line of foundation by Tarte, she found it featured a dozen fair/neutral shades and only three designed for people of colour. “This brand embodies the exact opposite of everything that I stand for,” she said in her video.

After posting an earlier video criticising the brand for a product that didn’t cater to shoppers with dark complexions, Aina told her viewers she had been removed from Tarte’s PR list and would be receiving no more product.

It made me think back to the reading where “Jenkins argues that participatory culture advances cultural diversity… but overlooks that not all voices have the same power and that produced content and voices are frequently marginalized because visibility is a central resource in contemporary culture that powerful actors, such as media corporations, can buy” (Fuchs 60).

Where exactly is this cultural diversity if YouTubers are not allowed to share their TRUE and REAL opinion on a certain company? This all leads to false advertising for their viewers which also results in viewers liking the YouTuber less just for making a paid sponsor video. It’s really sad to think of gurus who sit in front of a camera focusing on all the pros of a brand without being able to really be their “true selves.”

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2018/mar/08/glam-or-sham-are-youtubes-beauty-vloggers-selling-out

The Locksmith Trade - The Great, the Undesirable and the Ugly

Are you contemplating about becoming a locksmith? Curso de Serralheiro Em Fortaleza question me about my occupation when I arrive at a occupation website. The concept of doing work with the public, working with hand equipment, making a swift buck on lock-out calls, and of training course the electricity and ability to unlock doorways, cars and safes is quite intoxicating for some people. I never location assist desired adverts, but however I common one particular unsolicited résumé a month by way of e-mail. Normally it comes from an eager teen looking to do an apprenticeship. O.J.T. (on-the-job coaching) is a fine way to go if you can get the gig. That's exactly how I started out. That and looking through each trade magazine I could get my hands on, unlimited hrs doing study on the net, taking lessons, attending trade expos, and speaking with any locksmith who would just take the time to chat with me (and many would, so prolonged as I wasn't 1 of their competitors). But which is how it is for most lock jocks. Once you start operate as a locksmith it receives underneath your pores and skin. It consumes you and becomes an obsession. Which is not specifically a bad factor soon after all to be (God prepared) financially effective at what you get pleasure from is a excellent way to pay out the charges. There is, nonetheless, a price to pay that does not in shape with most people's life style, and thus -- the goal of this post. The Good: Supporting the community and making a few bucks although doing it. Very first off, I not often cost to unlock a vehicle or home when there is a little one locked inside. When I get the contact, normally from a panicked mother or father declaring his or her little one is locked inside a automobile, I hurry to the scene. There are few better moments for me as a locksmith than seeing the aid in a mother's eyes when I unlock the door and she pulls her child from a sweltering vehicle on a heat summertime day. "You might be my HERO," she suggests as she retains her kid close with tears in her eyes. "No demand ma'am. We will not demand for kids locked in cars. If you like, for a little charge, I can make you a copy of your car's door important so it's less very likely to occur once again." They virtually constantly say indeed, and the payment for the key typically accompanies a idea. The "up sale" is merely to cover my gasoline likely out on the contact, and the idea, if any, buys me lunch. The rest of my positions are normally for-earnings positions. Nonetheless, in excess of half of what I demand goes appropriate back again into the firm in the kind of gasoline, insurance, promoting, trade group dues, license costs, automobile routine maintenance, equipment, materials, and other expenses. As a locksmith you will by no means get abundant, but if you perform your cards right you could retire nicely. The plan, as I go through in a popular trade magazine, is to promote a properly-set up store with a long listing of consumer accounts, even though possessing and gathering hire on the property the store sits on. It is even greater if you very own an complete complicated and collect lease from your shop's neighbors, too. I individually know a retired locksmith who did exactly this and I recognize he is performing really properly for himself. Several locksmiths make and offer resources and/or reference publications, or educate courses (as I do) to health supplement their revenue. The Negative: Becoming on contact 24/7. After-hours and weekend support can account for a massive component, if not most when initial commencing out, of your income. Then there are the late night time phone calls. 2am, fifty percent drunk and he can not discover his car keys: "I'm sorry sir -- I cannot help you push your car tonight, but if you get in touch with me in the early morning I will be pleased to assist you." The locksmith sector is a hugely regulated (but automatically so) safety business. The licenses, insurances, and bonds you have to carry can expense a tiny fortune. I have a town business license, a point out locksmith license, a Point out Contractor's License for lock and safety work, two insurance coverage policies (standard legal responsibility and commercial automobile insurance policy), two various bonds, and I am a member of two major nationwide trade corporations. In California, you want to be fingerprinted and go State and Federal history exams. I am also a member of some local companies including the Chico Chamber of Commerce and the North Valley Property Owner's Affiliation. The expense of working a organization like this can be overwhelming and there is always one more device you need to have to acquire, an additional software update, or substitution areas/equipment that need to have to be ordered. I am currently saving up for a high security essential equipment that retails for $5,800. Let's not overlook the paperwork. You will want to hold authorized forms for clients to fill out and detailed data of who, what, exactly where and when. The very last issue you want to do is make keys to a car or house for an individual who does not have authority to maintain a crucial to that house. Finally, buy a wonderful shirt and tie simply because there is a very good chance you will discover by yourself in a court docket of regulation before long for, amongst other factors, domestic disputes. The Unpleasant: Evictions, repossessions (R.E.O.'s), and re-keys right after a domestic dispute. There are few issues as humbling in this profession as producing a invoice for following-hours provider and handing the new keys over to somebody donning a clean black eye. I vividly don't forget one particular woman who was standing next to a gap in the drywall exactly where her head was forcibly inserted only a handful of several hours before. The neighborhood sheriffs know me because it is not uncommon to perform the re-essential and stability checks while they are nevertheless there, filling out their report. Can you say fleas? Yep, now I preserve flea powder in the van simply because you never ever know what issue a recently foreclosed home will be in. Indignant former tenants who have been kicked out can also existing a challenge. Sometimes the locks are disabled or ruined, and I keep latex gloves in the van in circumstance I ever have to select open an additional lock that has been urinated on. The base line: I am quite pleased becoming a locksmith, most of the time. The pay, the liberty of the job (I can depart my timetable open up if my youngsters have a college event), and the fulfillment of aiding people although generating a income for myself keeps me heading. My tips to you: one. Do your study prior to coming into the marketplace as a locksmith. My city has as well several locksmiths for each capita. There is barely enough work to go around much of the time. two. Get on with one more locksmith and be inclined to relocate, as you might be essential to sign a "no compete" deal stating you will not depart to be your boss's competitor. Locksmith faculties are ok, but a seasoned locksmith can present you some tips of the trade that can help you make increased earnings or complete jobs greater and faster than the fundamental capabilities taught in most colleges. 3. Be prepared to spend your dues. It will get a lot of years to create up a consumer foundation, and a name for your self. A clever locksmith after instructed me it requires at the very least three years before they (the consumers) know you might be there, and 7 prior to they notice you are long gone. four. When you start off out on your own, get an effortless to recognize brand and place it on everything: your van, invoices, pens to hand out, and every single other piece of advertising (see our emblem underneath). five. C.Y.A. Document everything and have pre-printed, professionally prepared, authorized types for your clients to fill out. six. Do not get as well carried absent. If you have other obligations, like a spouse and/or kids, make certain to make time for them. It truly is difficult to flip the cellphone off, or turn down calls simply because you might be turning away income, but you are unable to get again the days you miss out on. A previous employer of mine at times tells the story of how he produced $two,000 in one weekend dispatching calls to his on-phone locksmith, even though he was on a boat on Lake Shasta with his wife. It was a exceptional weekend trip for them and he expended a very good element of the day on the cellphone. She died of most cancers two quick many years later, and he later advised me he would give just about something to have that day back again. I know this tale personally as I was the on-contact personnel that weekend.

Diesel Cars and truck Owners May Be Spent To Stock Under New UK Sky Quality Tactics.

Given that old Wolfbelly himself would reluctantly confess under the gun that the mama of Grant had been actually the half-caste daughter of Wolfbelly's sister, white colored males kept in mind the stain when they burnt, and also phoned him Injun. That's the troublesome Trolley Concern, as well as that obtains thornier: the significant attraction of self-governing cars for city coordinators is the possibility that they'll decrease the number of autos when driving, by transforming the norm coming from personal ownership to a kind of driverless Uber. Nevertheless, inning accordance with most cars and truck manufacturers, existing sensing unit innovation is in fact acceptable. Along with the recent fad in reduced interest rates, house equity finances to pay much higher enthusiasm debt and even feature a brand-new automobile in the purchase have actually come to be a pipe for an acquisition. Along with the advent from vehicle versions which have made complex electric functionalities, there is actually higher requirement for trained automotive electrical experts. Some researches have revealed that it can take as long as 35 to 40 seconds for vehicle drivers to take efficient management of an auto when changing back from autonomous mode. After the tanning treatments embrace moisturizing the skin however stay clear of a moisturizer along with a mineral oil as this will definitely prevent you coming from acquiring a good tan. In the New Testimony there were 13 people existing for Jesus's final supper on Maundy Thursday, the time before Christ's crucifixion on Really good Friday. Utilizing a property bettor to pull out the damages in the car's body system is just one of the earliest and most trustworthy means to repair auto damages. Russel Spinella searches for brake as well as automobile service promos so he can conserve a ton of funds when he needs job done. In long races where you have actually pressed the auto difficult For example you'll see a quite refined loss of brake efficiency or the gear wheel changes having a lot longer. Of course the personality that the heroine makes an effort the hardest to entice herself readies individuals misbehaves folks. And there is actually consistently visiting be your insurance coverage premium, servicing costs (used autos will certainly be actually greater), and so on If you discover your own self in a session where you don't have a cars and truck, you are free of charge to car loan one - there are no restrictions listed below either. Put the mic, connect the cord to the controller as well as you excel to go. First time round you'll have to improve the control pad to earn sure every little thing functionalities effectively yet the method takes a matter from minutes - merely affix the headset to the operator, connect that to the console using the feature USB cable television and follow the onscreen urges. Wi-Fi connection is actually consisted of, but the Regera is stuck to a 3G net link that's not quite as quick as the auto on its own. Update: Evaluation as well as rating improved to reflect the latest software application upgrade that adds Android Automotive as well as Apple CarPlay to the Tucson along with navigation. Listed here's a checklist I would certainly hand out to my customers just before they purchased a vehicle with me. For those who have any kind of questions concerning where by and also how to make use of pinlotenze.info, you'll be able to e mail us with the web-page. That was actually an uncomplicated fact-finding way that can help my customers load their needs and also assist all of them. When the autos are swerving right into yet another street without the spin sign on, more recent innovation makes use of audio or a vibrating guiding wheel to sharp drivers. His books have actually been equated right into over forty foreign languages, marketed over thirty million copies worldwide, as well as have been adjusted into movies and also television tasks. A representative for Tesla said the attributes were intended to maintain the cars and truck in its own lane as well as created for motorway owning simply. This reasonable costs combines along with reduced CO2 discharges to earn the 1.6 and also the lower-powered 2.0-litre diesel budget-friendly firm auto choices. While about Italian vehicles, this is actually the Fiat 124 Crawler, which shows up 35 years after the authentic Fiat 124 Crawler blew up sale. That is good method to conserve or even publish websites or even, a lot better, utilize a plan like Adobe Acrobat to maintain your own copies for future reference. This standard variance is going to enhance as the cost of the cars and truck boosts as well as the source from the cars and truck lessens. The authorities may not be happy regarding this and purpose to carry your hue-based wrongdoings to a close, by ramming your automobile right into oblivion. Choose SE specification or even over and you likewise acquire an automated parking brake unit that may slow and even stop the cars and truck if it detects you are probably to reach the motor vehicle ahead. You can easily pay attention to songs by means of Android Vehicle while making use of the onboard navigating or even enjoy SiriusXM while utilizing Google Maps. On Could 6, 2016, the Commercial Publication stated Apple was actually looking at up a huge home in The golden state to examine out its own deceptive driverless Apple Vehicle project. The firm is spending more than $1 billion over five years in artificial intelligence made to earn their automobiles smarter-and avoid disruption or irrelevance from their well-funded, tech-savvy competitions. That is actually a moderate aggravation, yet along with the Entune app, the cars and truck utilizes your phone as a net connection instead of the app's API, which will stream audio using Bluetooth along with some high quality loss. Purchases of diesel cars have actually hit document levels in spite of federal governments all over the world exploring means to obtain them off the street. Tesla attracts consumers even more like obsessed followers of Ferrari and Maserati - both which that has outperformed in market portion - in comparison to like the watchful buyer of a family car more probable to purchase a GM auto. Trash-powered motors aside (and our experts are actually not even entering into pretty how that would certainly create adequate energy to create a cars and truck fly) this doesn't seem to be that our team'll view taking flight cars overhead at any time quickly.

[Eugene Kontorovich] Israel anti-boycott bill does not violate free speech

The Israel Anti-Boycott Act is a minor updating of a venerable statute that has been at the center of the U.S. consensus on Israel policy — the laws designed to counteract Arab states’ boycott of Israel by barring Americans from joining such boycotts.

Now, the American Civil Liberties Union has dropped a bomb: It says the proposed act unconstitutionally abridges free speech. Although the ACLU is only lobbying against the current bill, its argument is against the entire system of federal anti-boycott law, including the anti-boycott provisions of the 1977 Export Administration Act, a consequence that the group seems unwilling to admit (see Eugene Volokh’s post). Indeed, the ACLU’s position would make many U.S. sanctions against foreign countries (Iran, Russia, Cuba, etc.) unconstitutional.

The ACLU’s claims are as weak as they are dramatic. I should note that I have been involved with state-level “anti-BDS” (boycott, sanctions and divestment) legislation and have advised on some of the federal bills. Although well-crafted measures avoid First Amendment problems, there are ways such laws can get it wrong, and I have been open in calling out measures that go too far. (For example, the application of such laws to prevent a Roger Waters concert is quite problematic.)

Current law prohibits U.S. entities from participating in or cooperating with international boycotts organized by foreign countries. These measures, first adopted in 1977, were explicitly aimed at the Arab states’ boycott of Israel, but its language is far broader, not mentioning any particular countries.

Since then, these laws and the many detailed regulations pursuant to them, have been the basis for a large number of investigations and prosecutions of companies for boycott activity. The laws are administered by a special unit of the Commerce Department, the Office of Antiboycott Compliance.

The existing laws cover not just participation in a boycott, but also facilitating the boycott by answering questions or furnishing information, when done in furtherance of the boycott. For example, telling a Saudi company, “You know, we don’t happen to do business with the Zionist entity” would be prohibited. It is no defense for one who participates in the Arab League boycott to argue that they happen to hate Israel anyway. Nor is it a defense to argue that one loves Israel and is simply being pressured by Arab businesses. It is the conduct that matters, not the ideology.

That is why the law has been upheld against First Amendment challenges in the years after its passage and has not raised any constitutional concerns in nearly four decades since. Refusing to do business is not an inherently expressive activity, as the Supreme Court held in Rumsfeld v. FAIR. It can be motivated by many concerns. It is only the boycotter’s explanation of the action that sends a message, not the actual business conduct. Those expressions of views are protected, but they do not immunize the underlying economic conduct from regulation.

This distinction between the expression and the commercial conduct is crucial to the constitutionality of civil rights acts. In the United States, hate speech is constitutionally protected. However, if a KKK member places his constitutionally protected expression of racial hatred within the context of a commercial transaction — for example, by publishing a “For Sale” notice that says that he will not sell his house to Jews or African Americans — it loses its constitutional protection. The Fair Housing Act forbids publishing such discriminatory notices, and few doubt the constitutionality of the Fair Housing Act.

If the anti-boycott measures are unconstitutional, as the ACLU argues, it would mean that most foreign sanctions laws are unconstitutional. If refusing to do business with a country is protected speech because it could send a message of opposition to that country’s policies, doing business would also be protected speech. Thus, anyone barred from doing business with Iran, Cuba or Sudan would be free to do so if they said it was a message of support for the revolution, or opposition to U.S. policy, or whatever.

It is little wonder, then, that opponents of the Israel Anti-Boycott Act feel the need to exaggerate what the act does. It only makes clear that the old and existing anti-boycott law applies not just to the Arab League boycott, but also to the new foreign anti-Israel boycotts, such as those being organized by the U.N. Human Rights Council.

The best example of a criticism based on exaggeration is a claim that the bill would forbid anti-Israel activists from even expressing “support” for boycotts. There is nothing in the bill to sustain such a criticism. The old law already forbids “support” for foreign state boycotts of Israel, and the many regulations enacted pursuant to the law already define “support” to be limited to “certain specified actions” that go well beyond merely “speech” support. See 15 C.F.R. § 760.1(e)(1). Those actions, enumerated in detail in 15 C.F.R. § 760.2, allow for none of the free-speech-scare scenarios conjured by the ACLU. The new bill does not change or alter the meaning of “support.” It simply clarifies the list of foreign boycotts covered by the law.

The current law’s ban on “support” of the Arab League boycott has never been used to punish opponents of Israel simply for expression. The expansion of the list of covered boycotts in the new bill would not make it any easier to go after “boycott activists.” Anti-Israel divestment campaigns unlinked to foreign boycotts clearly “support” the Arab League boycott in the sense of promoting the same views and seeking the same goals. But they have never fallen within the scope of the existing prohibition, and they would not under the new bill.

It is easy to invent absurdly broad readings of statutes that would make them unconstitutional. The real question is if the statute would ever be applied and interpreted in that way. With the current bill, one need not wonder how it would be enforced: There are decades of administrative regulations and enforcement policies under the existing law that would apply to the new one. These all confine the prohibition to commercial conduct.

Such updating of the 1977 anti-boycott measures could not be more timely. Several United Nations agencies have initiated secondary boycotts of Israel — that is, boycotting non-Israeli companies because of their connection to the Jewish state. In support of such secondary boycotts, the U.N. Human Rights Council is preparing a blacklist of Israeli-linked companies (using such a broad definition of “supporting settlements” that the blacklist could sweep in any Israeli-linked firm).

The UNHRC’s blacklist of Israeli companies is unprecedented — the organization has never made lists of private companies or entities for any purpose. Indeed, as has been shown in a recent report I authored, the Human Rights Council clearly does not regard businesses “supporting” settlements to be a human rights issue except when Israel is involved.

The blacklist is not a mere research project. It will serve as the basis for economic action against the listed firms. Indeed, the UNHRC has not been coy about its motives; a year after passing the resolution calling for the database, it passed a resolution that in effect calls for a partial boycott against Israel. (Existing federal boycott regulations make clear that a regulated boycott call need not be explicit.) It is quite likely that U.N. agencies will begin avoiding business with companies because of those companies’ business with Israel.

Given the timing of the legislative process, starting a bill now that responds to things that have begun to happen and will materialize at the end of the year is not prophylactic; it is merely timely. Moreover, given the United Nations’ extraordinary obsession relating to Israel, it is quite proper for Congress to take what measures it can to forcefully check and deter the increasingly severe manifestations of this bias.

In short, the proposed statute is a timely action to expand the list of prohibited foreign boycotts with which it is forbidden to comply. The legislation does nothing to restrict anti-Israel expressions or even local “BDS activity.” Anyone who wishes to express their opposition to Israel through boycotts is entirely free to do so. The real question is why the ACLU is now attacking the basic constitutional understandings that underpin decades of American foreign policy and civil rights regulation — but confining its new First Amendment standard to laws relating to Israel.

Israel anti-boycott bill does not violate free speech

The Israel Anti-Boycott Act is a minor updating of a venerable statute that has been at the center of the U.S. consensus on Israel policy — the laws designed to counteract Arab states’ boycott of Israel by barring Americans from joining such boycotts.

Now, the American Civil Liberties Union has dropped a bomb: It says the proposed act unconstitutionally abridges free speech. Although the ACLU is only lobbying against the current bill, its argument is against the entire system of federal anti-boycott law, including the anti-boycott provisions of the 1977 Export Administration Act, a consequence that the group seems unwilling to admit (see Eugene Volokh’s post). Indeed, the ACLU’s position would make many U.S. sanctions against foreign countries (Iran, Russia, Cuba, etc.) unconstitutional.

The ACLU’s claims are as weak as they are dramatic. I should note that I have been involved with state-level “anti-BDS” (boycott, sanctions and divestment) legislation and have advised on some of the federal bills. Although well-crafted measures avoid First Amendment problems, there are ways such laws can get it wrong, and I have been open in calling out measures that go too far. (For example, the application of such laws to prevent a Roger Waters concert is quite problematic.)

Current law prohibits U.S. entities from participating in or cooperating with international boycotts organized by foreign countries. These measures, first adopted in 1977, were explicitly aimed at the Arab states’ boycott of Israel, but its language is far broader, not mentioning any particular countries.

Since then, these laws and the many detailed regulations pursuant to them, have been the basis for a large number of investigations and prosecutions of companies for boycott activity. The laws are administered by a special unit of the Commerce Department, the Office of Antiboycott Compliance.

The existing laws cover not just participation in a boycott, but also facilitating the boycott by answering questions or furnishing information, when done in furtherance of the boycott. For example, telling a Saudi company, “You know, we don’t happen to do business with the Zionist entity” would be prohibited. It is no defense for one who participates in the Arab League boycott to argue that they happen to hate Israel anyway. Nor is it a defense to argue that one loves Israel and is simply being pressured by Arab businesses. It is the conduct that matters, not the ideology.

That is why the law has been upheld against First Amendment challenges in the years after its passage and has not raised any constitutional concerns in nearly four decades since. Refusing to do business is not an inherently expressive activity, as the Supreme Court held in Rumsfeld v. FAIR. It can be motivated by many concerns. It is only the boycotter’s explanation of the action that sends a message, not the actual business conduct. Those expressions of views are protected, but they do not immunize the underlying economic conduct from regulation.

This distinction between the expression and the commercial conduct is crucial to the constitutionality of civil rights acts. In the United States, hate speech is constitutionally protected. However, if a KKK member places his constitutionally protected expression of racial hatred within the context of a commercial transaction — for example, by publishing a “For Sale” notice that says that he will not sell his house to Jews or African Americans — it loses its constitutional protection. The Fair Housing Act forbids publishing such discriminatory notices, and few doubt the constitutionality of the Fair Housing Act.

If the anti-boycott measures are unconstitutional, as the ACLU argues, it would mean that most foreign sanctions laws are unconstitutional. If refusing to do business with a country is protected speech because it could send a message of opposition to that country’s policies, doing business would also be protected speech. Thus, anyone barred from doing business with Iran, Cuba or Sudan would be free to do so if they said it was a message of support for the revolution, or opposition to U.S. policy, or whatever.

It is little wonder, then, that opponents of the Israel Anti-Boycott Act feel the need to exaggerate what the act does. It only makes clear that the old and existing anti-boycott law applies not just to the Arab League boycott, but also to the new foreign anti-Israel boycotts, such as those being organized by the U.N. Human Rights Council.

The best example of a criticism based on exaggeration is a claim that the bill would forbid anti-Israel activists from even expressing “support” for boycotts. There is nothing in the bill to sustain such a criticism. The old law already forbids “support” for foreign state boycotts of Israel, and the many regulations enacted pursuant to the law already define “support” to be limited to “certain specified actions” that go well beyond merely “speech” support. See 15 C.F.R. § 760.1(e)(1). Those actions, enumerated in detail in 15 C.F.R. § 760.2, allow for none of the free-speech-scare scenarios conjured by the ACLU. The new bill does not change or alter the meaning of “support.” It simply clarifies the list of foreign boycotts covered by the law.

The current law’s ban on “support” of the Arab League boycott has never been used to punish opponents of Israel simply for expression. The expansion of the list of covered boycotts in the new bill would not make it any easier to go after “boycott activists.” Anti-Israel divestment campaigns unlinked to foreign boycotts clearly “support” the Arab League boycott in the sense of promoting the same views and seeking the same goals. But they have never fallen within the scope of the existing prohibition, and they would not under the new bill.

It is easy to invent absurdly broad readings of statutes that would make them unconstitutional. The real question is if the statute would ever be applied and interpreted in that way. With the current bill, one need not wonder how it would be enforced: There are decades of administrative regulations and enforcement policies under the existing law that would apply to the new one. These all confine the prohibition to commercial conduct.

Such updating of the 1977 anti-boycott measures could not be more timely. Several United Nations agencies have initiated secondary boycotts of Israel — that is, boycotting non-Israeli companies because of their connection to the Jewish state. In support of such secondary boycotts, the U.N. Human Rights Council is preparing a blacklist of Israeli-linked companies (using such a broad definition of “supporting settlements” that the blacklist could sweep in any Israeli-linked firm).

The UNHRC’s blacklist of Israeli companies is unprecedented — the organization has never made lists of private companies or entities for any purpose. Indeed, as has been shown in a recent report I authored, the Human Rights Council clearly does not regard businesses “supporting” settlements to be a human rights issue except when Israel is involved.

The blacklist is not a mere research project. It will serve as the basis for economic action against the listed firms. Indeed, the UNHRC has not been coy about its motives; a year after passing the resolution calling for the database, it passed a resolution that in effect calls for a partial boycott against Israel. (Existing federal boycott regulations make clear that a regulated boycott call need not be explicit.) It is quite likely that U.N. agencies will begin avoiding business with companies because of those companies’ business with Israel.

Given the timing of the legislative process, starting a bill now that responds to things that have begun to happen and will materialize at the end of the year is not prophylactic; it is merely timely. Moreover, given the United Nations’ extraordinary obsession relating to Israel, it is quite proper for Congress to take what measures it can to forcefully check and deter the increasingly severe manifestations of this bias.

In short, the proposed statute is a timely action to expand the list of prohibited foreign boycotts with which it is forbidden to comply. The legislation does nothing to restrict anti-Israel expressions or even local “BDS activity.” Anyone who wishes to express their opposition to Israel through boycotts is entirely free to do so. The real question is why the ACLU is now attacking the basic constitutional understandings that underpin decades of American foreign policy and civil rights regulation — but confining its new First Amendment standard to laws relating to Israel.

Originally Found On: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/07/27/israel-anti-boycott-bill-does-not-violate-free-speech/

Israel anti-boycott bill does not violate free speech

The Israel Anti-Boycott Act is a minor updating of a venerable statute that has been at the center of the U.S. consensus on Israel policy — the laws designed to counteract Arab states’ boycott of Israel by barring Americans from joining such boycotts.

Now, the American Civil Liberties Union has dropped a bomb: It says the proposed act unconstitutionally abridges free speech. Although the ACLU is only lobbying against the current bill, its argument is against the entire system of federal anti-boycott law, including the anti-boycott provisions of the 1977 Export Administration Act, a consequence that the group seems unwilling to admit (see Eugene Volokh’s post). Indeed, the ACLU’s position would make many U.S. sanctions against foreign countries (Iran, Russia, Cuba, etc.) unconstitutional.

The ACLU’s claims are as weak as they are dramatic. I should note that I have been involved with state-level “anti-BDS” (boycott, sanctions and divestment) legislation and have advised on some of the federal bills. Although well-crafted measures avoid First Amendment problems, there are ways such laws can get it wrong, and I have been open in calling out measures that go too far. (For example, the application of such laws to prevent a Roger Waters concert is quite problematic.)

Current law prohibits U.S. entities from participating in or cooperating with international boycotts organized by foreign countries. These measures, first adopted in 1977, were explicitly aimed at the Arab states’ boycott of Israel, but its language is far broader, not mentioning any particular countries.

Since then, these laws and the many detailed regulations pursuant to them, have been the basis for a large number of investigations and prosecutions of companies for boycott activity. The laws are administered by a special unit of the Commerce Department, the Office of Antiboycott Compliance.

The existing laws cover not just participation in a boycott, but also facilitating the boycott by answering questions or furnishing information, when done in furtherance of the boycott. For example, telling a Saudi company, “You know, we don’t happen to do business with the Zionist entity” would be prohibited. It is no defense for one who participates in the Arab League boycott to argue that they happen to hate Israel anyway. Nor is it a defense to argue that one loves Israel and is simply being pressured by Arab businesses. It is the conduct that matters, not the ideology.

That is why the law has been upheld against First Amendment challenges in the years after its passage and has not raised any constitutional concerns in nearly four decades since. Refusing to do business is not an inherently expressive activity, as the Supreme Court held in Rumsfeld v. FAIR. It can be motivated by many concerns. It is only the boycotter’s explanation of the action that sends a message, not the actual business conduct. Those expressions of views are protected, but they do not immunize the underlying economic conduct from regulation.

This distinction between the expression and the commercial conduct is crucial to the constitutionality of civil rights acts. In the United States, hate speech is constitutionally protected. However, if a KKK member places his constitutionally protected expression of racial hatred within the context of a commercial transaction — for example, by publishing a “For Sale” notice that says that he will not sell his house to Jews or African Americans — it loses its constitutional protection. The Fair Housing Act forbids publishing such discriminatory notices, and few doubt the constitutionality of the Fair Housing Act.

If the anti-boycott measures are unconstitutional, as the ACLU argues, it would mean that most foreign sanctions laws are unconstitutional. If refusing to do business with a country is protected speech because it could send a message of opposition to that country’s policies, doing business would also be protected speech. Thus, anyone barred from doing business with Iran, Cuba or Sudan would be free to do so if they said it was a message of support for the revolution, or opposition to U.S. policy, or whatever.

It is little wonder, then, that opponents of the Israel Anti-Boycott Act feel the need to exaggerate what the act does. It only makes clear that the old and existing anti-boycott law applies not just to the Arab League boycott, but also to the new foreign anti-Israel boycotts, such as those being organized by the U.N. Human Rights Council.

The best example of a criticism based on exaggeration is a claim that the bill would forbid anti-Israel activists from even expressing “support” for boycotts. There is nothing in the bill to sustain such a criticism. The old law already forbids “support” for foreign state boycotts of Israel, and the many regulations enacted pursuant to the law already define “support” to be limited to “certain specified actions” that go well beyond merely “speech” support. See 15 C.F.R. § 760.1(e)(1). Those actions, enumerated in detail in 15 C.F.R. § 760.2, allow for none of the free-speech-scare scenarios conjured by the ACLU. The new bill does not change or alter the meaning of “support.” It simply clarifies the list of foreign boycotts covered by the law.

The current law’s ban on “support” of the Arab League boycott has never been used to punish opponents of Israel simply for expression. The expansion of the list of covered boycotts in the new bill would not make it any easier to go after “boycott activists.” Anti-Israel divestment campaigns unlinked to foreign boycotts clearly “support” the Arab League boycott in the sense of promoting the same views and seeking the same goals. But they have never fallen within the scope of the existing prohibition, and they would not under the new bill.

It is easy to invent absurdly broad readings of statutes that would make them unconstitutional. The real question is if the statute would ever be applied and interpreted in that way. With the current bill, one need not wonder how it would be enforced: There are decades of administrative regulations and enforcement policies under the existing law that would apply to the new one. These all confine the prohibition to commercial conduct.

Such updating of the 1977 anti-boycott measures could not be more timely. Several United Nations agencies have initiated secondary boycotts of Israel — that is, boycotting non-Israeli companies because of their connection to the Jewish state. In support of such secondary boycotts, the U.N. Human Rights Council is preparing a blacklist of Israeli-linked companies (using such a broad definition of “supporting settlements” that the blacklist could sweep in any Israeli-linked firm).

The UNHRC’s blacklist of Israeli companies is unprecedented — the organization has never made lists of private companies or entities for any purpose. Indeed, as has been shown in a recent report I authored, the Human Rights Council clearly does not regard businesses “supporting” settlements to be a human rights issue except when Israel is involved.

The blacklist is not a mere research project. It will serve as the basis for economic action against the listed firms. Indeed, the UNHRC has not been coy about its motives; a year after passing the resolution calling for the database, it passed a resolution that in effect calls for a partial boycott against Israel. (Existing federal boycott regulations make clear that a regulated boycott call need not be explicit.) It is quite likely that U.N. agencies will begin avoiding business with companies because of those companies’ business with Israel.

Given the timing of the legislative process, starting a bill now that responds to things that have begun to happen and will materialize at the end of the year is not prophylactic; it is merely timely. Moreover, given the United Nations’ extraordinary obsession relating to Israel, it is quite proper for Congress to take what measures it can to forcefully check and deter the increasingly severe manifestations of this bias.

In short, the proposed statute is a timely action to expand the list of prohibited foreign boycotts with which it is forbidden to comply. The legislation does nothing to restrict anti-Israel expressions or even local “BDS activity.” Anyone who wishes to express their opposition to Israel through boycotts is entirely free to do so. The real question is why the ACLU is now attacking the basic constitutional understandings that underpin decades of American foreign policy and civil rights regulation — but confining its new First Amendment standard to laws relating to Israel.

Originally Found On: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/07/27/israel-anti-boycott-bill-does-not-violate-free-speech/

Has the internet become a failed state? : Web News

New Post has been published on https://workreveal.biz/has-the-internet-become-a-failed-state-web-news/

Has the internet become a failed state? : Web News

Here are a few testimonies approximately the arena we now inhabit…

• In February this year, Bangladesh Financial institution become hit via the largest Bank robbery in records while thieves were given away with $101m. The heist became finished not by tunnels or explosives, however by way of obtaining the access codes for the Quick global messaging gadget, that is what banks use to pass payment orders to one another soundly. The criminals used Swift to educate America Federal Reserve to transfer money to their money owed. Then they cunningly erased their digital fingerprints using editing the Bank’s software.

• In June 2015, the United States Office of Personnel Control found out that its laptop systems were hacked and that the hackers had stolen the social security numbers, names, dates and locations of start, and addresses of 21.five million humans, together with some who had undergone history checks for touchy authorities posts.

Internet usage state

• In October 2015, nearly 157,000 customers of the UK telco TalkTalk had their personal facts stolen in a massive intrusion into the organisation’s computer systems. Police later arrested six teenage boys in connection with this cyber assault.

• Within the beyond two years, hospitals worldwide have determined themselves at the receiving end of a bad sort of cyber attack. Medical workforce abruptly discovers that their health centre’s laptop structures are locked and inaccessible to them due to the fact they were secretly infiltrated. They then receive a message telling them that their data will be unlocked on payment of a ransom in Bitcoins. The ECU police organisation Europol now reckons that the danger from “ransomware” has eclipsed all other types of online theft and extortion.

Two months ago, a younger Italian female killed herself because she changed into traumatised by way of online abuse after an exclusive video that she had sent to a chum turned into extensively “shared” across the web. As quickly because the photographs went viral, she transformed into subjected to jeering remarks, Photoshopped screenshots and merciless parodies that, in the long run, tipped her over the brink.

• In June, it changed into discovered that groups of the Russian government had hacked into the computer systems of the Democratic Countrywide Committee. Rapidly before the Democratic conference that nominated Hillary Clinton, WikiLeaks launched hundreds of emails and attachments stolen at some stage in the breach, some of which were quite unhelpful to Clinton and useful to Donald Trump.

• On 21 October, a sequence of dispensed denial-of-provider (DDoS) attacks prompted considerable disruption of Internet pastime In the US. The assaults involved directing large amounts of bogus site visitors at servers belonging to Dyn, an enterprise that is the primary provider of area name offerings (DNS) to other agencies. For a time this severely affected leading websites – which includes Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, GitHub, Etsy, Tumblr, Spotify, PayPal, Verizon, Comcast and the Ps community. The assault has conducted the use of a large botnet of unsecured “net of things” gadgets inclusive of home webcams and broadband routers.

• In keeping with Bruce Schneier, an ultimate protection professional, over the past yr or so, someone has been probing the defences of the organisations that run vital portions of the net. These probes, Schneier says, “take the form of exactly calibrated assaults designed to decide exactly how adequately These agencies can shield themselves, and what might be required to take them down. We don’t recognise who’s doing this, but it feels like a large state country. China or Russia could be my first guesses.”

Welcome to cyberspace.

It didn’t be once like this. Within the first decade after the internet we use these days changed into switched on, in January 1983, cyberspace turned into a courageous new international – an excellent sandpit for geeks and computer technology researchers. There was, in that magical virtual global, no crime, no spam, no industrial activity and little difficulty approximately protection – in large part because “netizens” (for that’s what they had been called) knew one another, or as a minimum knew what their institutional affiliations had been. Dialogue corporations (then referred to as newsgroups) had been fashioned around each doable subject matter, no matter how arcane. (Early on, There was an energetic argument approximately whether or not there must be a Dialogue organisation on intercourse, and while one sooner or later regarded, a person else insisted that logically there ought to consequently additionally be newsgroups on pills and rock’n’roll. So those have been installation too.) Codes of conduct, etiquette and social norms evolved to adjust – or at the least mild – on-line behaviour, reduce “flame wars”, and so forth. It changed into, in a way, a type of wonderland, and it gave upward push to the techno-utopianism embodied in John Perry Barlow’s “Assertion of the independence of cyberspace”, which started out: “Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and metallic, I come from our on-line world, the new domestic of mind. On behalf of the destiny, I ask you of the past to go away us on my own. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty wherein we gather…”

What it came right down to became this: In the decade 1983-ninety three, cyberspace and “meatspace” (Barlow’s term for the actual, physical International) had been parallel universes. They existed side by using the hand, and for the maximum element, the population of meatspace knew not anything of the virtual world.

But from 1993 onwards, all that started out to change. The main catalysts have been the vast world internet, the Mosaic browser and AOL. The net supplied non-geeks with a solution to the question: what’s this net factor for? Mosaic, the first present-day browser, showed them what the net should do and, greater importantly, what it may turn out to be. Call for getting entry to the internet exploded. AOL met the Call for by way of imparting a dependable, smooth-to-configure, dial-up carrier for hundreds of thousands of people, and so brought the “redneck hordes” – i.e., human beings unusual with the mores and customs of the netizen generation – directly to the internet. Scenting profits, companies and pornographers scrambled for a chunk of the motion, intently followed by way of scammers and spammers and all types of other undesirables.

internet

The result was that the parallel universes regularly merged, and we wound up with the composite networked international we now inhabit – a global that has the affordances of both our on-line world and meatspace. Which facilitates to provide an explanation for why we are having such problem coming to terms with it.

This mixed universe is an unusual location, simultaneously exceptional and terrifying. It gives its users – regular citizens – with services, delights and possibilities that have been as soon as the prerogative most effective of the wealthy and powerful. Wikipedia, the greatest keep of information the arena has ever seen, is to be had at the click of a mouse. Google has grown to be the reminiscence prosthesis for humanity. Services inclusive of Skype and FaceTime shrink intercontinental distances for families and fanatics. And so on.

However, at the same time, everything we do on the community is monitored and surveilled by way of both governments and the large organisations that now dominate cyberspace. (If you want to look the commercial side of this in action, deploy Ghostery on your browser and see who’s snooping on you as you surf.) Net customers are assailed via junk mail, phishing, malware, fraud and identity theft. Corporate and government databases are automatically hacked, and massive troves of individual statistics, credit card and Bank account details are stolen and presented for sale Within the shadows of the so-known as “darkish web”. Companies – and public establishments which include hospitals – are more and more blackmailed through ransomware attacks, which make their vital IT systems unusable until they pay a ransom. Cybercrime has already reached alarming ranges and, as it mostly goes unpunished, will continue to grow – which is why in a few societies old-style real crime is reducing as practitioners pass to the whole lot more secure and greater beneficial online variety.“All human life is there” changed into once the advertising and marketing slogan for the now-defunct News of the sector. It became by no means right of that different organ, which specialised broadly speaking in memories of randy vicars, celebrity love triangles, the foolishness of lottery winners and comparable dress.

web

But it’s far clearly proper of the net, which caters for each conceivable human interest, taste and obsession. One manner of thinking about the loss is as a replicate held as much as human nature. Some of what seems In the replicate is inspiring and coronary heart-warming. A lot of what goes on on-line is enjoyable, innocent, frivolous, fun. However some of it’s far naturally repellent: social media, in particular, facilitate firestorms of cruelty, racism, hatred and hypocrisy – as liberals who oppose the Trump campaign In the US have recently determined. For a crash path on this darker aspect of human nature, study Jon Ronson’s ebook So that you’ve Been Publicly Shamed and weep.

S o we discover ourselves residing in this paradoxical global, which is each incredible and frightening. Social historians will say that there’s nothing new Here: the sector always becomes like this. The simplest distinction is that we now experience it 24/7 and on a global scale. But as we thrash around searching out a manner to apprehend it, our public discourse is depressingly Manichean: Tech boosters and evangelists at one extreme; indignant technophobes at the other; and maximum people somewhere in among. Small surprise that Manuel Castells, the distinguished scholar of our on-line world, as soon as defined our situation as that of “informed bewilderment”.

One manner of combating this bewilderment is to look for metaphors. The idea of the internet as a replicate held up to human nature is one. But recently people have been looking for others. Sean Gallagher, the IT editor of Ars Technica, for example, reaches for a city reference. “In the New York Metropolis of the late 1970s,” he writes, “things regarded horrific. The City authorities changed into bankrupt, urban blight turned into rampant, and crime was high. But human beings still went to the City each day, because that turned into where the entirety changed into occurring. And notwithstanding the foreboding emotions putting over NY on time, a vast majority of those humans had at most minor brushes with crime.”

“Nowadays,” he keeps, “we all dabble in a few vicinity that looks loads like Nineteen Seventies Big Apple City – the internet. (For those needing a greater recent simple, assume the Baltimore of The Cord.) Low-degree crime remains rampant, while more and more state-of-the-art crime syndicates move after big scores. There may be a cacophony of hateful speech, the vice of each type… And police officers of diverse sorts looking to maintain a lid on it all – or at the least seeking to keep the chaos far from most regulation-abiding residents. But people nonetheless use the net every day, though the ones who bear in mind themselves avenue clever do so with various stages of defences mounted. Things kind of paintings…”

They do. However, the weak spot of the NYC metaphor is that the City was sooner or later wiped clean up and a type of order restored. So in that sense, it’s an unrealistic, constructive state of affairs for the internet. Therefore, people who fear that humanity will struggle to get a grip on webspace reach for more alarming metaphors. Could it, as an instance, emerge as some sort of “failed nation” like cutting-edge Somalia, with, as Gallagher puts it, “warring factions destroying the most essential of offerings, ‘protection zones’ reducing or casting off free motion, and safety prices making it prohibitive for anyone However the most nicely-funded operations to do commercial enterprise without turning into a ‘gentle goal’ for political or financial benefit”?