akota

the 21st century pentagon

Price Floyd is is the Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Public Affairs.  He has an impressive resume that includes 15 years of service in the State Department.  He has worked on a war crimes tribunal in Bosnia, in arms control and monitoring in Montenegro, and on earthquake relief in Pakistan.  Yet, I am most surprised by a more down-to-earth accomplishment: he created a Twitter feed for the Pentagon. http://twitter.com/defensegov.  Right now the feed is full of tweets about the relief effort in Haiti.  Nice work.

a change of career

Not your usual headline.  A minor league baseball player: "retires to pursue priesthood."  Reports mlb.com:

OAKLAND -- The A's announced Friday that Grant Desme, the only player in Minor League Baseball to go 30-30 in 2009, has decided to retire from the game in order to pursue the priesthood.

He was only in Single A; at 23 years old he had little chance of making the major leagues.  Nonetheless, it must have been a tough decision, and it shows quite a commitment to his new vocation.

expertise is tough to define

In Veritas v. Microsoft (W.D. Wash. Feb. 26, 2008), Microsoft was trying to discredit Veritas's expert on damages.  The court summarized his resume: "Michael J. Wagner is a C.P.A. and attorney with extensive experience serving as an expert in federal and state litigation regarding the calculation of commercial damages."  In his deposition the attorney for Microsoft really got to him:

Q: Not to be rude, but basically you considered all this information and then you kind of sit back and you just decide in your mind what you think is fair given the information you considered.

A: That's not an unfair characterization of what I do.

Ouch.  Nonetheless, the Court was "not persuaded by this one statement that Mr. Wagner's damages testimony is impermissibly speculative. His report is 123 pages long and contains a thorough and reasoned analysis."

What makes one principled?

Here is Professor Vermeule's opinion:

[U]nder circumstances in which systemic diversity is desirable, the systemically minded judge will be a legal chameleon, who changes her colors as the environment changes. The legal chameleon acts so as to diversify the court on which she sits by adopting whatever interpretive method is underrepresented at the margin. Rather than copying her environment in order to camouflage herself, she will adjust so as to contradict the dominant tendency in her environment, reducing the risk of groupthink. The legal chameleon, then, might more accurately be called a counter-chameleon. She is a contrarian, but only insofar as contrarianism is beneficial for the group.

The legal chameleon has a measure of critical distance even from her own legal theory, whatever that is. She appreciates that the partisans of this or that interpretive theory may all do best if all are present within the Court or judiciary but none dominates. This perspective seems incomprehensible to the principled partisans, who see the chameleon as having only derivative and tactical commitments rather than unconditional ones, and who do not think they can possibly be made better off by the presence of judges who deviate from (what they take to be) the "true"  approach to understanding the Constitution. From the chameleon’s  standpoint, however, awareness of the limits of one’s own knowledge suggests that the group should hedge the risk that any particular theory is erroneous. The best way to do so is to have an overall group of judges with diverse approaches.

. . . In reality, although some judges may be legal chameleons, most will not.

Adrian Vermeule, The Supreme Court 2008 Term Foreword: System Effects and the Constitution, 123 Harv. L. Rev. 6, 70-71 (2009).

guitars & antitrust collide

Two things I love, guitars and anitrust, collided in the news today.  The Blog of the Legal Times reports:

[T]he latest anti-trust class actions against the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM), Guitar Center and major guitar manufacturers [alleges an] industry-wide plan to prop up instrument prices.

. . .

The controversy over guitar prices has been simmering since March, when the Federal Trade Commission issued a cease and desist order to NAMM after settling charges that the group had fostered anti-competitive behavior using its trade shows. Instrument makers and retailers allegedly met at the events to establish price floors for their products.

Senator Vitter doesn't like the Constitution so much

How many representatives does each state get in the House of Representatives?  The Constitution (technically the 14th Amendment) says:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.

That is pesky for Senator Vitter.  Louisiana stands to lose a seat in the House if illegal aliens are counted in the 2010 census because they don't have a lot of illegal immigrants.  By comparison, states like Texas and California have many illegal aliens and will gain seats in the House.

So what is Senator Vitter to do?  Prevent illegal aliens from participating in the census by forcing the census workers to ask about immigration status.  He didn't come out and say that on the floor of the Senate.  Instead, he offered this fig leaf, "we would have no opportunity to debate [the 14th Amendment apportionment] or to adopt a new plan unless the census distinguishes between citizens and legals and illegals, which my amendment would demand we do."

As an added bonus, he is throwing this amendment in now, after the Census Bureau has already printed and distributed the census forms.  Unforunately for Sen. Vitter, his amendment has little chance of passing.

Copyright Enforcement and Price Discrimination

Matt Yglesias says:

[T]he socially optimal level of copyright enforcement is higher than zero. A rights-holder is going to price access to his works at the profit-maximizing level. But there will always be people for whom access to the work is worth more than $0 but less than the profit-maximizing price. When those people infringe they gain a real benefit, but the rights-holder incurs no real loss.

His conclusion is that some copyright piracy is socially optimal.  While he may be right, that argument is hogwash.  He has unfortunately assumed a single price.  If copyrights were perfectly enforced, there could be perfect price discrimination.  Everyone would be charged different price for a license, so there would be no one who valued access to copyrighted material but couldn't afford it.  Of course, this is unrealistic because of transaction costs, but that is a very different argument.

The EPA's Most Wanted

The Environmental Protection Agency has a Criminal Enforcement Division.  Naturally, that Division has a most wanted list.  Many of the suspects flee the country, but sometimes even that doesn't work.  Earlier this year they caught Bhavesh Kamdar, who had been on the lam in Rajkot, India.  Fortunately, an Interpol notice paid off and the police there apprehended him.  His original crime? Defrauding New York of several million dollars as an environmental consultant.

deepak chopra strikes back

Deepak Chopra gets pissed off at Sean Hannity (emphasis added):

I was hoping to come back on your show and have a reflective, intelligent dialogue, but perhaps the attack mode is the only way you know to make a living. . . . The far right has deflated, so you are there to pump it up with hot air. If you stop blowing, you'll be out of a job.

Getting reflective, intelligent dialogue out of Hannity would require more spiritual power than even Deepak Chopra can muster.

the environment is harsh

1. Humans irrigate to help improve agricultural productivity. Sounds like a good idea.
2. Irrigation is coordinated with the seasons, so those on the California coast irrigate approximately in unison.
3. Irrigation water runs to the ocean, bringing with it salts from the fertilized land.
4. Along the coasts, surface salinity rises to unprecedented levels.
5. Diatoms (aka algae, plant plankton) are drawn to the salty surface water.
6. Diatoms of genus Pseudo-nitzschia reproduce and release domoic acid.
7. Domoic acid concentrates in the fatty tissue of plankton feeders like shellfish.
8. Seals and sea lions eat lots of shellfish.
9. Domoic acid activates certain receptors in the brain causing excess calcium to build up in neurons.
10. Neurons degenerate.
11. Seals and sea lions become lethargic, have seizures and die.  According to the NY Times, "domoic acid poisoning has killed hundreds of the animals across Southern California this spring and thousands since a major outbreak in 2002."

This sucks. It isn't like we released some deadly poison into the sea and we could have known this would happen.  This required changes in salinity, a species of algae, and a deadly neurotoxin.  It is impossible to predict the third order effects of human uses of the environment.  So, we are stuck reacting to environmental damage.  We are stuck undoing the investments we made in whatever is causing the environmental damage.  At best, we can proactively manage the risks we know.  But there are always the unknown unknowns.