As police body cameras catch on, a debate surfaces: Who gets to watch? →

A legal fight's brewing:

Officials in more than a dozen states — as well as the District — have proposed restricting access or completely withholding the footage from the public, citing concerns over privacy and the time and cost of blurring images that identify victims, witnesses or bystanders caught in front of the lens.
In the wake of fatal shootings by police of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Mo., North Charleston, S.C., and elsewhere, government watchdog groups, journalists and protesters say keeping the videos secret undercuts the point of an initiative designed to improve trust between citizens and law enforcement.
In the District, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) tucked a proposal into a budget bill to exempt videos from the Freedom of Information Act, effectively barring access to the public. That came weeks after she announced a new era of open government and a police force held accountable through the widespread use of body cameras to allay fears of misconduct that are roiling other American cities.

State seizes 11-year-old, arrests his mother after he defends medical marijuana during a school presentation

The absurdity here of course is that a woman could lose her custody of her child for therapeutically using a drug that’s legal for recreational use an hour to the west. It seems safe to say that the amount of the drug she had in her home was an amount consistent with personal use. (If she had been distributing, she’d almost certainly have been charged by now.)
This boy was defending his mother’s use of a drug that helps her deal with an awful condition. Because he stuck up for his mother, the state arrested her and ripped him away from her. Even if he is eventually returned to his mother (as he ought to be), the school, the town, and the state of Kansas have already done a lot more damage to this kid than Banda’s use of pot to treat her Crohn’s disease ever could.
Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-wat...

An Autonomous Car Might Decide You Should Die →

We're moving into a science fiction future, where artificial intelligence (however defined) will be programmed by us for us, but, like all other policy, we're not really thinking through to the end, logically:

On some level, I believe many of us realize we are fast becoming inefficient parties in the face of artificial intelligence. Science fiction movies where the robots have “deemed us expendable” give many people cause for concern, fleeting as the thought might be. However, we may find out all too soon that autonomous cars will have been the first salvo fired off by robots in such a future. We program them to understand our values. They make decisions that reflect our values. The decisions frighten us. What does that mean?

So how do we program these things, when, right now, we can't solve fundamental moral problems? I really like the examples and logic puzzles. Well worth the read.

The real "middle class" is even worse off →

Recent research from the St. Louis Fed's Center for Household Financial Stability attempts to overcome these problems by adopting a demographic definition of the middle class. And it makes a difference. As the authors, William Emmons and Bryan Noeth noted, changing the definition reveals that "the middle class may be under more financial pressure than has been otherwise reported."
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Comparing income in 2013 with income in 1989 for each of these three groups, the researchers found little change in the median income of Thrivers and Stragglers. For Thrivers, median income rose 2 percent over this time period, while for Stragglers it rose 8 percent. However, for the Middle Class, median income fell by 16 percent between 1989 and 2013.

The Myth of Police Reform →

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Thus it was not surprising, last week, to see that the mayor of North Charleston ordered the use of body cameras for all officers. Body cameras are the least divisive and least invasive step toward reforming the practices of the men and women we permit to kill in our names. Body cameras are helpful in police work, but they are also helpful in avoiding a deeper conversation over what it means to keep whole swaths of America under the power of the justice system, as opposed to the authority of other branches of civil society.
Police officers fight crime. Police officers are neither case-workers, nor teachers, nor mental-health professionals, nor drug counselors. One of the great hallmarks of the past forty years of American domestic policy is a broad disinterest in that difference. The problem of restoring police authority is not really a problem of police authority, but a problem of democratic authority. It is what happens when you decide to solve all your problems with a hammer. To ask, at this late date, why the police seem to have lost their minds is to ask why our hammers are so bad at installing air-conditioners. More it is to ignore the state of the house all around us. A reform that begins with the officer on the beat is not reform at all. It's avoidance. It's a continuance of the American preference for considering the actions of bad individuals, as opposed to the function and intention of systems.

Use of E-Cigarettes Rises Sharply Among Teenagers, Report Says →

I've been amazed at how quickly smoking [cigarettes] went of fashion in the U.S. That may be reversing:

E-cigarettes have arrived in the life of the American teenager.

Use of the devices among middle- and high school students tripled from 2013 to 2014, according to federal data released on Thursday, bringing the share of high school students who use them to 13 percent — more than smoke traditional cigarettes.

About a quarter of all high school students and 8 percent of middle school students — 4.6 million young people altogether — used tobacco in some form last year. The sharp rise of e-cigarettes, together with a substantial increase in the use of hookah pipes, led to 400,000 additional young people using a tobacco product in 2014, the first increase in years, though researchers pointed out the percentage of the rise fell within the report’s margin of error.

Americans Love Paying Taxes →

For my doctoral research on Americans’ experience of taxpaying, I conducted interviews with 49 people in 21 states about their sentiments on taxes. The single most surprising thing I learned is that Americans feel a deep pride about being taxpayers. “It feels good to be able to contribute,” said a 28-year-old from Utah, “and to know that you’re part of the reason why there’s an infrastructure in place.” A woman from Florida agreed. “I feel like it’s a contribution to society and for the future,” she said. “When I’m gone, maybe my little bit of money that I’m putting in is paying somebody else’s Social Security or Medicare or whatever.” (Because the interviews also covered tax evasion, all respondents were promised anonymity in exchange for their participation in the study.)

These respondents are not exceptional. In national surveys, over 95 percent of Americans agree with the statement, “It is every American’s civic duty to pay their fair share of taxes,” and more than half see taxpaying as “very patriotic.” One man from Ohio called it a responsibility to “the Founding Fathers.” A former Marine said taxpaying is “the cost of being an American,” while a man from California said tax avoidance is the equivalent of “shorting the country.”

The feeling is bipartisan. Surveys show that Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats to agree that taxpaying is a moral responsibility...