Secrets In Plain View: Obamacare Is Working →

Most people would consider it pretty bad luck if they had three inches of rain dumped on their city in a 24-hour period. That is, unless they had just missed being hit by a hurricane. That analogy captures how we should feel about Obamacare.
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This isn’t idle speculation. In 2009, President Obama’s first year in office, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services projected that health care spending would take up 19.3 percent of GDP in 2016. The most recent projections show health care costing 18.1 percent of GDP this year.
That sounds really nerdy, but the difference between these two projections amounts to more than $220 billion in savings this year. That comes to $690 per person in savings or $2,750 for an average family of four. This is real money to most people.
One reason that the slowing in health care costs is not widely recognized is that most people are not studying the projections. While just about everyone living in a coastal city will know about the forecast of a hurricane strike, few people spend their time studying health care cost projections. This means that when spending slows sharply, as it has in the last seven years, most people don’t recognize the slowdown. They just know that health care costs more than it used to. This is the case of people getting hit by three inches of rain and not recognizing that they just missed a hurricane...

3D-Printed Guns Hit the Courts →

As three-dimensional printers have become widely available in electronics and appliance stores, they have begun to raise hard legal and regulatory issues related to firearms. The laws that govern firearms were not written with 3D printers in mind, and it remains to be seen how widely available self-made firearms will be treated by our firearm regulatory rules.
In September, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit grappled for the first time with this question. The three-judge panel rejected a preliminary injunction request that would have temporarily halted the State Department’s efforts to control the uploading of 3D-printable firearm files onto the web under Export Control regulations. Earlier this month, the plaintiffs in that case filed a petition for an en banc hearing, which is still under consideration. In the meantime, this post will review the court’s decision rejecting a preliminary injunction, consider its implications for the case, and attempt to place the ruling in the larger context of 3D printed firearm regulation...
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Typically, making one’s own firearm means starting with what is called an “80% receiver” or “unfinished receiver”—receivers being the component of the gun that the 1968 Gun Control Act deems to be a firearm, separate from other parts like the barrel or magazine. An “80% receiver” is a piece of metal that looks like a receiver, but requires some work before it could be considered a firearm (some examples of unfinished receivers are available here). Using drills, jigs, and other tools, craftsmen can lawfully turn these pieces of metal into un-serialized, untraceable firearms. But this takes a kind of skill and specialized labor that has so far prevented such firearms from being widely distributed.

3-D printers dramatically alter the significance of the exception of the 1968 Act. Now, anyone with the right computer files and a 3-D printer can make his or her own anonymous firearm.  The impact of this innovation extends beyond the United States, since any file uploaded to the internet can be downloaded anywhere in the world—including by terrorists or criminals and in countries with strict gun regulations.

The Migrant Kidnapping Epidemic Next Door →

Crimes against Central American migrants in Mexico—including kidnapping, rape, and murder—are one of the most systematically underreported large scale human rights violations in the Western Hemisphere. Most casual observers know that the journey is dangerous, but the extent of the dangers, the sheer number of victims, and the close ties to organized criminal groups are harder to see.
One reason that crimes against Central American migrants go unnoticed is that assigning real numbers to the scope of the problem is nearly impossible. Central American migrants are a shadow population moving through Mexico. We don’t even know with certainty how many Central Americans are on the move every year, although back of the envelope calculations suggest the figure is well over 400,000. This past year, around two-thirds of these migrants were families or unaccompanied children.
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Similar to Daniela and her family, most migrants don’t report crimes—since they don't trust the local police or fear being deported—making it hard to get a sense of problem’s true scope. But the few numbers that we have on kidnapping boggle the mind. A 2011 report from Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission reported knowledge of 198 mass kidnappings that included 9,758 victims over just a six-month period from September 2008 to February 2009. A second report noted 214 kidnappings from April to September 2010 that included 11,333 migrants. And these are just those kidnappings that the Commission was able to document.
Add this up, and it starts to become a pretty lucrative side-business for groups like the Zetas that also control human trafficking routes. Migration officials and business leaders estimate that these cartels or cartelitos (little cartels) are raking in somewhere between $100 and $250 million a year from kidnapping migrants.

Ending Trump's Conflict of Interest Problem in Three Easy Steps →

Another aspect of Trump's seriousness as the nation's number one public servant is what he plans to do to avoid his businesses interfering with governing.

Many of us have been raising the issue that Donald Trump is apparently prepared to defy well-established precedent and continue to maintain his business empire even as he serves as president. For the last fifty years presidents have put their assets in a blind trust so that there would not be a question as to whether they were working to fatten their own pockets or for what they considered the good of the country. This also prevents the most blatant forms of bribery by those seeking to curry the president's favor. 
It is hard to see any reason that Donald Trump should not be held to the same rules, as argued by Jeff Hauser at CEPR's Revolving Door Project. But some have made the argument that, given his extensive holdings, it would be almost impossible to sell them off in the two months remaining until he takes office. This means that he could not avoid the problem of making decisions that will have a direct impact on his business interests.
Actually it is not hard to find a way around this problem:...

What Is the Post-Hillary Feminism? →

Clinton has been the face of second-wave feminism for nearly her entire career. She is a Baby Boomer who came up through the American university system and fought her way—as a lawyer, senator, and secretary of state—to the top of one male-dominated career after another. Clinton has embodied, as Namara Smith put it in an essay in n+1, the ideal of “women’s liberation from traditional forms of authority through participation in the paid workforce.” She is a pathbreaker whose accomplishments and accolades were supposed to clear the way for others to follow. 
The problem with this kind of feminism is that it focused too strongly on putting women in positions of power—on elevating them to the elite, which would then redound to the benefit of all women down the economic ladder. Every female law firm partner, every woman CEO, was a victory for the cause. Ironically, in these anti-elitist times, Clinton was damned for following the very steps that were deemed necessary for a woman to put herself in a position to run for president, as Traister noted in her essay. But in its gaudiest form, this animating principle only made Clinton seem out of touch on the campaign trail: a millionaire hanging out with other rich and famous women like Lena Dunham and Katy Perry. It was not entirely clear whether Clinton breaking the glass ceiling would break it for all of us. Even her campaign slogan—I’m With Her—suggested it was all about the triumph of one person.
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There is also the question of framing. Clinton’s feminist push never quite deviated from the idea that benefits should only be doled out to those who work. This is an especially damaging notion for women, many of whom shoulder an outsized amount of informal labor—child care, household chores, elder care—that is often not recognized as “work” in the eyes of the market. Take, for example, Clinton’s original college plan, which required students to work ten hours a week—to have “skin in the game”—to receive benefits.
She also struggled with the legacy of her husband’s welfare reform bill, which, possibly more than any other piece of legislation, codified a division between “deserving” and “undeserving” poor women. During the campaign, Clinton could only muster a milquetoast rejection of the bill, stating that “we need to take a hard look at it again.”...

Bolivia Declares State of Emergency Amid Drought →

"...Bolivian President Evo Morales has declared a state of emergency as residents of La Paz and other major cities struggle with extreme water shortages amid Bolivia’s worst drought in a quarter-century. On Sunday, protesters gathered outside the Chinese Embassy to protest mining projects they say are exacerbating the water scarcity. Scientists say the retreat of Bolivian glaciers caused by global warming is also responsible for the lack of water, as 2 million people in the area rely on glacier melt as their water supply..."

Mark Zuckerberg Is in Denial →

...I encountered thousands of such fake stories last year on social media — and so did American voters, 44 percent of whom use Facebook to get news.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief, believes that it is “a pretty crazy idea” that “fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of content, influenced the election in any way.” In holding fast to the claim that his company has little effect on how people make up their minds, Mr. Zuckerberg is doing real damage to American democracy — and to the world.
He is also contradicting Facebook’s own research.
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In 2012, Facebook researchers again secretly tweaked the newsfeed for an experiment: Some people were shown slightly more positive posts, while others were shown slightly more negative posts. Those shown more upbeat posts in turn posted significantly more of their own upbeat posts; those shown more downbeat posts responded in kind. Decades of other research concurs that people are influenced by their peers and social networks.
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These are not easy problems to solve, but there is a lot Facebook could do. When the company decided it wanted to reduce spam, it established a policy that limited its spread. If Facebook had the same kind of zeal about fake news, it could minimize its spread, too.
If anything, Facebook has been moving in the wrong direction. It recently fired its (already too few) editors responsible for weeding out fake news from its trending topics section. Unsurprisingly, the section was then flooded with even more spurious articles.
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In addition to doing more to weed out lies and false propaganda, Facebook could tweak its algorithm so that it does less to reinforce users’ existing beliefs, and more to present factual information. This may seem difficult, but perhaps the Silicon Valley billionaires who helped create this problem should take it on before setting out to colonize Mars.

Regulation of the Internet of Things →

Your security on the Internet depends on the security of millions of Internet-enabled devices, designed and sold by companies you've never heard of to consumers who don't care about your security.
The technical reason these devices are insecure is complicated, but there is a market failure at work. The Internet of Things is bringing computerization and connectivity to many tens of millions of devices worldwide. These devices will affect every aspect of our lives, because they're things like cars, home appliances, thermostats, light bulbs, fitness trackers, medical devices, smart streetlights and sidewalk squares. Many of these devices are low-cost, designed and built offshore, then rebranded and resold. The teams building these devices don't have the security expertise we've come to expect from the major computer and smartphone manufacturers, simply because the market won't stand for the additional costs that would require. These devices don't get security updates like our more expensive computers, and many don't even have a way to be patched. And, unlike our computers and phones, they stay around for years and decades.
An additional market failure illustrated by the Dyn attack is that neither the seller nor the buyer of those devices cares about fixing the vulnerability. The owners of those devices don't care. They wanted a webcam —­ or thermostat, or refrigerator ­— with nice features at a good price. Even after they were recruited into this botnet, they still work fine ­— you can't even tell they were used in the attack. The sellers of those devices don't care: They've already moved on to selling newer and better models. There is no market solution because the insecurity primarily affects other people. It's a form of invisible pollution.
And, like pollution, the only solution is to regulate...

Regardless of what you think about regulation vs. market solutions, I believe there is no choice. Governments will get involved in the IoT, because the risks are too great and the stakes are too high. Computers are now able to affect our world in a direct and physical manner.

Security researchers have demonstrated the ability to remotely take control of Internet-enabled cars. They've demonstrated ransomware against home thermostats and exposed vulnerabilities in implanted medical devices. They've hacked voting machines and power plants. In one recent paper, researchers showed how a vulnerability in smart light bulbs could be used to start a chain reaction, resulting in them all being controlled by the attackers ­— that's every one in a city. Security flaws in these things could mean people dying and property being destroyed.

...Our choice isn't between government involvement and no government involvement. Our choice is between smarter government involvement and stupider government involvement. We have to start thinking about this now. Regulations are necessary, important and complex ­— and they're coming. We can't afford to ignore these issues until it's too late.