Uber Driver in California Will Be Considered Employee, Not Contractor →

An Uber driver is an employee, not a contractor, according to a ruling from the California labor commission. This is horrible news for Uber but good news for anyone concerned that the ruthless ride-hailing service is building a corporate empire by dicking over its drivers.
Uber insists that it’s a merely a tech company peddling a mobile platform that happens to connect drivers with riders, not a driving service. That’s a convenient way to think about the service, since it means Uber can shrug off the responsibility of treating is growing supply of drivers like they work for the company.
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Even though Uber tries to paint itself as a matchmaking platform for riders and drivers, it sets strict controls on how drivers conduct their business. Uber sets fare rates and prohibits drivers from collecting tips, and it has rules about what kind of cars they can drive. It’ll also boot drivers who receive low ratings on the app. As the ruling pointed out, that heavy level of control fits the profile of an employer.

Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church’s Place in Black History Almost Certainly Made It a Target →

On Wednesday night, a gunman—identified as 21-year-old Dylann Roof of Columbia, South Carolina—murdered nine people at a weekly prayer meeting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. Among the dead is 41-year-old Rev. Clementa Pinckney, pastor at the church and a four-term Democratic state senator. The shooter is a young white man, and police are calling the murders—the worst mass shooting in South Carolina’s history—a hate crime. It’s appropriate...

Senate passes torture ban despite Republican opposition →

More than 20 Republican senators rejected a ban on the use of cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners on Tuesday, voting against an ultimately successful measure to permanently prevent a repeat of the CIA’s once secret and now widely-discredited torture program.
The bipartisan amendment reaffirms President Barack Obama’s prohibition of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding and sleep deprivation, which were developed by the CIA under the administration of his predecessor, George W Bush.
The measure passed in the Senate, 78-21.

Research on The Trade-off Between Free Services and Personal Data →

Our findings, instead, support a new explanation: a majority of Americans are resigned to giving up their data­ -- and that is why many appear to be engaging in tradeoffs. Resignation occurs when a person believes an undesirable outcome is inevitable and feels powerless to stop it. Rather than feeling able to make choices, Americans believe it is futile to manage what companies can learn about them. Our study reveals that more than half do not want to lose control over their information but also believe this loss of control has already happened.
By misrepresenting the American people and championing the tradeoff argument, marketers give policymakers false justifications for allowing the collection and use of all kinds of consumer data often in ways that the public find objectionable. Moreover, the futility we found, combined with a broad public fear about what companies can do with the data, portends serious difficulties not just for individuals but also -- over time -- for the institution of consumer commerce.

The Shift from Public to Private Markets in Tech Funding →

Very interesting notes in relation to the "tech bubble" talk:

Yesterday, the folks at Andreessen-Horowitz released a slide deck on their reasoning why “this time it is different” on tech funding and bubbles. It is worth a little of your time but here are the take aways:
  • The amount of money going into tech start-ups is still much less than it was in the dot.com bubbleof 2000. Indeed, as a share of GDP funding has been flat since that time. It is also flat as a function of people online.

However:

  • The tech funding is heavily geographically concentrated. We know that this is the case with entrepreneurial activity (see here) and I think it is becoming more so.
  • That means that while an economy-wide view of funding shows flatness in the aggregates, I wonder if we did just a Silicon Valley analysis, it would look like this. My guess is that funding from Silicon Valley to Silicon Valley has increased.
  • Given this, I think the heart of the move to earlier stage funding is doing hand in hand with the increase in wealth concentration...

Conservatives, Universal Registration, and “Informed Voters” →

If I can expand Foster’s thought a bit, he’s making a simple argument: Democracy requires informed citizens, but the larger the pool of voters, the less likely the average citizen is especially informed. Far from enhancing democracy, universal voter registration might make it worse.
(It’s a classic “perversity thesis” for those of you who read your Hirschman.)
I’m sympathetic to this view, especially since it seems inevitable that more voters—even if they’re just potential voters—equals a less intelligent electorate. But consider this: The story of our democracy is of progressive expansion: Landed white males to all white males, all white males to all males, all males to men and women. Each expansion brought in “uninformed” people, and yet, the electorate isn’t less informed than it was when voting was the privilege of a few. What gives?
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I said there were two things, and here’s the second. Conservatives have a genuinely different view of voting than liberals. For liberals, voting is good in its own right, and universal registration affirms that everyone is a valuable member of society. That they count, and their voice should too. Conservatives, by contrast, tend to see voting as a means to an end: Good governance and wise leadership. And if that’s true, then there’s every reason to limit the franchise; to put obstacles to voting and to ensure that only the most motivated people come to the polls.
But they should know that this argument doesn’t just apply to universal registration: It applies to every voting expansion, from the 15th Amendment to women’s suffrage. In other words, it proves too much.
Which is to say this: Maybe our history shows that, far worsening our politics, making it easier to vote is how we give all Americans a chance to be great—and informed—citizens.

Protecting public safety while reducing the prison headcount →

Three things to like about Ross Douthat’s Sunday column on incarceration:
1.  He starts in the right place: the sheer scale and horror of mass incarceration, especially as practiced in this country. (Douthat is right: by any reasonable definition, SuperMax is torture.)
2. He acknowledges the key fact: there aren’t enough harmless prisoners that releasing them would solve the problem. If we want to get to civilized levels of incarceration we need to let out some seriously guilty and possibly dangerous people.  Just to get back to the U.S. historical level – already about 50% above European rates – we would have to let out four out of five current inmates. That means freeing large numbers of armed robbers, rapists, and murderers.
3. And he asks the right question: how to do that without ending our twenty-year winning streak in crime reduction...