Will “smarter” cars start snitching on us?

  By

After a Ford exec in a panel talk raised a (supposedly) hypothetical scenario whereby the company could collect live driving data like speed and relative location from embedded GPS and other services linked back to headquarters by satellite, and noted that it would include illegal/dangerous driving behaviors, Eugene Volokh of TVC started thinking through the legal implications of such a world. Here’s an excerpt from the piece:

Ford could technically gather this information, and could use it to prevent injuries. For instance, if GPS data shows that someone is speeding — or the car’s internal data shows that the driver is speeding, or driving in a way suggestive of drunk driving or extreme sleepiness, and the data can then be communicated to some central location — then Ford could notify the police, so the dangerous driver can be stopped. And the possibility of such reports could deter the dangerous driving in the first place.

Ford, then, is putting extremely dangerous devices on the road. It’s clearly foreseeable that those devices will be misused (since they often are misused). Car accidents cause tens of thousands of deaths and many more injuries each year. And Ford has a means of making those dangerous devices that it distributes less dangerous; yet it’s not using them.

Sounds like a lawsuit, no? Manufacturer liability for designs that unreasonably facilitate foreseeable misuse is well-established. And the fact that the misuse may stem from negligence (or even intentional wrongdoing) on the user’s part doesn’t necessarily block liability, so long as the user misconduct is foreseeable. I should note that I’m not wild about these aspects of our tort law system, and think they should likely be trimmed back in various ways; but there is certainly ample legal doctrine out there — whether one likes it or not — potentially supporting liability in such a situation.

 

The full piece is pretty long and gears gradually toward the technical side, for legal professionals, as it progresses, but the opening sections are for a more general audience. It’s certainly thought-provoking — the idea that companies might be able to use increasingly computerized and data-rich vehicles to monitor driving behavior and report it to the police (or to insurers, or… who knows where it ends).

Might they even make the data signals go two ways so they could control someone’s vehicle to slow them if they’re speeding out of control (or aid the police in controlling it, to stop a high-speed chase for example)? After all, some of these cars already have automated lane-finders and swerve-correctors as well as numerous other safety features. But those are locally-run by the onboard systems. Does the company have an obligation to control or report its vehicles when they’re being used dangerously or illegally? If they don’t, will they be sued? Interesting (and troubling) questions from a brave new world…

Study: Rich pretty sure they’re inherently awesome

  By

This is one of those studies with results that more or less obvious to those who aren’t the ones being studied, but Matthew Huston’s Slate analysis of it is still an interesting read. Excerpt:

In several experiments published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Michael Kraus of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and Dacher Keltner of the University of California at Berkeley explored what they call social class essentialism. Essentialism is the belief that surface differences between two groups of people or things can be explained by differences in fundamental identities. One sees categories as natural, discrete, and stable. Dogs have a certain dogness to them and cats a certain catness.

[…]

Kraus and Keltner looked deeper into the connection between social class and social class essentialism by testing participants’ belief in a just world, asking them to evaluate such statements as “I feel that people get what they are entitled to have.” The psychologist Melvin Lerner developed just world theory in the 1960s, arguing that we’re motivated to believe that the world is a fair place. The alternative—a universe where bad things happen to good people—is too upsetting. So we engage defense mechanisms such as blaming the victim—“She shouldn’t have dressed that way”—or trusting that positive and negative events will be balanced out by karma, a form of magical thinking.

Kraus and Keltner found that the higher people perceived their social class to be, the more strongly they endorsed just-world beliefs, and that this difference explained their increased social class essentialism: Apparently if you feel that you’re doing well, you want to believe success comes to those who deserve it, and therefore those of lower status must not deserve it. (Incidentally, the argument that you “deserve” anything because of your genes is philosophically contentious; none of us did anything to earn our genes.)

Higher-class Americans may well believe life is fair because they’re motivated to defend their egos and lifestyle, but there’s an additional twist to their greater belief in a just world. Numerous researchers have found that upper-class people are more likely to explain other people’s behavior by appealing to internal traits and abilities, whereas lower-class individuals note circumstances and environmental forces. This matches reality in many ways for these respective groups. The rich do generally have the freedom to pursue their desires and strengths, while for the poor, external limitations often outnumber their opportunities. The poor realize they could have the best genes in the world and still end up working at McDonald’s. The wealthy might not merely be turning a blind eye to such realities; due to their personal experience, they might actually have a blind spot.

 

I also, in particular, recommend checking out the second page of the article, where Huston gets into assessing the practical ramifications of these findings.

Understanding the psychology of both the wealthy and the reasonably comfortable economic strata will give us a better idea of which rhetoric by supporters of various social justice agendas (and justice system reform agendas) is effective or ineffective, in terms of selling the agenda to the unconverted. That kind of thing — figuring out whether rhetorical appeals are landing or missing the mark within people’s existing worldviews — is right in my area of interest.

There’s also reason to be very concerned about the high levels of wealth in Congress here in America (as well as in the ruling Conservative Party in the UK, according to Huston) in terms of what legislative actions they might take to reinforce existing inequality. It’s one thing to casually neglect a population because you’re just wildly out of touch with the plight of the impoverished. It’s an entirely other and even more pernicious thing to intentionally start rolling back prior efforts to help the poor or propose expanding harsh sentencing targeted at low-income populations and (poorer than the average) minority racial populations because you think they somehow “deserve” their condition and should be kept away from the superior humans. In recent decades, that agenda is exactly what we’ve seen a lot of.

If we don’t figure out the political communication pathway to appeal to the middle classes effectively and convince them that this worldview isn’t true, we’re in for a big resurgence of open social Darwinism.

Global Warming, Snow, and Arctic Chills

  By

Whenever there’s a severe winter whether event, the conservative cranks start crowing about how this means there’s no such thing as global warming. This view starts from a pretty silly baseline — obviously there will always continue to be outlier events in either direction because that’s what outliers are and weather is not exactly the same as climate — and ignores the other obvious point that winter is typically associated with cooler temperatures than the rest of the year in higher latitudes (nearer the poles than the equator), even if the annual average is rising.

But then there’s just the relatively simple science that explains not only why global warming can exist simultaneously with severe winter weather but how it can cause it to be even more frequent and more severe. This post will explain the basics of two types of events, in the context of global warming.

1. Heavier snow storms
During the course of a year, global warming is evaporating moisture from drier climates. (Right now, for example, we’re seeing record droughts in California instead of winter rainfall to replenish water tables.) During the summer months at each pole, the warming trends are also evaporating meltwater from the ice sheets. This means that, overall, there’s more moisture going into the atmosphere — and it’s going into an atmosphere which is warmer than in the past. The warmer the air (relative to normal temperatures at that time), the more capacity it has to hold moisture.

When the capacity is reached or if the temperature of the air drops suddenly (which reduces capacity), precipitation occurs. In warmer regions or during the non-winter months, this occurs in the form of rainfall. This is why severe rainstorms and flooding have occurred all over the world, even as water shortages are happening right nearby. The moisture is sucked up into the atmosphere on one side of a geographic zone (or not dropped in the first place due to higher carrying capacity) and then dumped out very quickly on the other (usually colder) side, often on opposite sides of a mountain range.

During the winter, in high latitude places, we’re seeing warmer winter months interrupted periodically by very severe snowstorms. During the warm weeks, the atmosphere is collecting a higher than usual amount of moisture. When the temperature finally does dip suddenly, this moisture is released in the form of heavy snowfall (i.e. the much colder version of the heavy rainstorms in the rest of the year). And that’s how we can get an increase of severe snowstorms in some regions during winter, because of (not despite) global warming.

2. Deep freezes
arcticThis past week, the continental United States experienced a very deep and widespread freezing, even stretching sub-freezing temperatures as far down the latitudes as the deep American South. The more northern, higher latitudes had (depending on one’s location) windchills ranging from 15-50 degrees (Fahrenheit) below zero. In some places, exposed skin froze within a minute. Very dangerous, very cold weather.

The American media didn’t do a great job explaining how this was happening, in terms of meteorological process, let alone why it was happening (i.e. that it can be linked to global warming). This left the conservatives to snark once again that this was somehow proof that global warming is a myth. But there’s a concise explanation from the blogs of Scientific American.

Essentially, melting Arctic ice in summer, due to global warming, evaporates meltwater into the (warmer than usual) atmosphere. This weakens and disrupts polar wind patterns — known as the polar vortex — that normally “lock” the cold air into the Arctic Circle (or close to it) during winter. Once released, this cold air then pushes southward, way past where it usually is found during these months.

 
Unfortunately, both of these types events will become more frequent in the near-term due to global warming, as long as there’s still ice to melt up there during the rest of the year and as long as the temperatures are still sometimes getting cold anywhere during the winter.

Individual episodes of these weather events can’t always be tied specifically to global warming. But as a whole, in terms of trendlines, we can correlate them statistically to rising average global temperatures. And by understanding weather science, we can see how there’s also a plausible causal link. So the parallelism of the trends isn’t coincidental. And the near-universal view of the professional climatology community is that global warming is increasing and results directly from human activities such as industrialization of production and agriculture.

 
Note: This analysis is intended to help lay readers understand the general concepts involved. It is not intended to be a 100% technically rigorous article. Some shortcuts and elisions in the science have been made for ease of mass communication.

AFD 68 – War on Poverty 50th Anniversary

  By

Latest Episode:
“AFD 68 – War on Poverty 50th Anniversary”

Bill examines the War on Poverty at year 50, the state of the ongoing Iraq War, and a recent consumer protection victory. (Half episode due to UD Athletics.)

Related links:

– New York Times: “Fifty years later, War on Poverty is a mixed bag”

– BBC (2005): US used white phosphorus in Iraq (Please note that I mistakenly stated in the episode that this article and admission came in 2009, rather than 2005.)

– New York Times: “Qaeda-Linked Militants in Iraq Secure Nearly Full Control of Falluja”

– New York Times: “American Express to pay $75 million over credit card practices”

– AFD: “Another win for the Credit CARD Act of 2009”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Op-Ed: Chinese Antarctic Rescue A Positive Signal

  By

My latest op-ed in The Globalist:

Last week, a Chinese helicopter crew rescued 52 people trapped on a Russian icebreaker stuck in Antarctic pack ice.

A difficult mission like this would, in the past, usually have fallen to the United States – and indeed, a U.S. ship is in turn now rescuing the Chinese crew from their own trapped vessel. But China has now joined the small ranks of those nations with the capacity to help in such a situation.

This situation – a Chinese air transfer of an international team on a Russian ship to a waiting Australian icebreaker, accompanied by a U.S. follow-up mission – is symbolic of international cooperation in Antarctica as a whole.

 

Read the full text here.

2022: Slavery World Cup

  By

2022-world-cup-logoAs ethically bad as the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia are going to be, the 2022 World Cup in Qatar is going to be worse. Several years ago, that Persian Gulf absolute monarchy, a country the size of Connecticut, won its bid to hose the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament for the summer of 2022.

Most criticism at the time focused more on the superficial (though valid) points about how hot the desert country would be in the middle of the summer and how that might affect the tournament. There was also consternation over the government’s human rights laws (the lack of them) and some allegations of possible bribery in the bid. But more recently, concerns over labor conditions in the World Cup preparation stage have pushed to the fore.

Current estimates say hundreds of marginally compensated foreign laborers preparing for the tournament have already died during construction and as many as 4,000 may be dead by the time construction ends. Some workers haven’t been paid at all in the past year and a half and all live in dangerous, packed tenements. 

This is, to be clear, not a problem solely restricted to the World Cup, though that’s the angle with the most global ramifications. The overall foreign worker population in Qatar is more than six times the size of the ruling Qatari population, at about 1.65 million to 250,000. The foreign population has grown very sharply in the past few years so the numbers are a bit hard to track.

Due to oil wealth and concentrating it in native hands, Qatari citizens are among the world’s wealthiest populations. But they’ve also preserved their wealth by chronically underpaying (even enslaving) the huge migrant worker population. According to IMF data, even if the national wealth were distributed annually over the whole population, including non-citizens, everyone would still be making well over $100k a year, even adjusted for purchasing power.

Instead, through pure avarice, the kingdom is determined to keep its foreign workers — who make the country function daily — in horrid conditions.

If Qatar doesn’t make a big change soon, there’s going to be an awful lot of blood on the hands of the world through the World Cup’s presence there. And sadly, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Surprise! The “surge” in Iraq never worked.

  By

iraq-map-ciaNew York Times headline today: “Qaeda-Linked Militants in Iraq Secure Nearly Full Control of Falluja”

The city of Fallujah, located on the Euphrates river, is 43 miles west of Baghdad, the capital, which is on the Tigris. It’s a major Sunni city and was the site of heavy civilian casualties in the 1991 Gulf War and then of bitter fighting in 2004 between the United States military and Sunni insurgents aligned with al Qaeda. The United States lost control of the city then, but regained it with a very heavy push that year, which included the intentional use of chemical weapons against insurgents and the destruction of tens of thousands of homes. The city has now essentially fallen to Sunni insurgents once more.

Remember how conservatives just spent the last five years insisting that George W. Bush’s “surge” actually “won” the War in Iraq and made it possible to leave? It’s pretty clear right now that that was a bad assessment.

I mean, on its merits it was clear to me that it always had failed, because it never achieved its primary goal of creating space for political solutions to the civil disarray. Well, it may have created the “space” but no solutions — or even dialogue — ever happened. And that was the entire premise upon which success should have been measured.

So we just left later than we should have, with a higher body count than before the surge and nothing to show for it. But conservatives kept insisting it was a huge success. Anyone who disagreed was supposedly just a Bush-hating liberal who couldn’t admit being wrong.

Now Iraqi violence is the highest it’s been in five or so years and large parts of the Sunni areas are falling like dominoes to a miniature, transnational Syria-Iraq militant empire affiliated with al Qaeda. It’s the successor group to the old Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia unleashed after the U.S. invasion in 2003, except now they’ve gotten control of giant sections of not one but two countries, away from the respective non-Sunni national governments of the bordering countries.