HIT & RUN BLOG

R. HeywardUber has responded to efforts by the city government of Newark, N.J., to impose fees and service charges on its drivers exceeding those paid by taxi drivers, by warning it would exit the city if the measure passed.

Cab drivers in Newark pay $300 a year for a license for their vehicle, plus $50 for their hack license, according to NJ.com. They are also required to have $35,000 worth of insurance coverage. The new regulations being proposed by Newark for Uber would require its drivers to pay a $500 fee to operate in the city, and additional $1,000 for a license to operate at the Newark airport and Newark Penn Station. Cab drivers do not have to pay extra to pick up or drop off fares at those transit centers.

Newark's mayor, Ras Baraka, rejected Uber's complaints about the onerous regulations being imposed on its drivers, by relying on anti-Wall Street rhetoric. "The company is not fighting for its drivers," Baraka said in a statement. "UBER cares only about preserving its inflated valuation by Wall Street." The mayor called Uber "a cash rich company that can afford to pay its fair share of taxes and fees."

It's unclear who Baraka and supporters of the new Uber regulations claim their measures are intended on behalf of, but it's certainly not Newark residents, neither those who generate income for themselves as drivers in a city whose political leadership is consistently complaining about a lack of jobs, nor those residents for whom the introduction of Uber has meant vastly lower fares.

I've lived most of my life in Newark, and continue to have friends and family that live there. Over the course of my life, I've taken my fair share of cab rides within the city of Newark at all hours of the day and night. In the last two years I've exclusively used Uber. Uber fares are consistently lower than cab fares in Newark—three to five times lower in some instances.

Many cabs in Newark do not use their meters, so prices vary but are uniformly on the high side. Fare for a cross-town trip from Newark Penn Station to my childhood neighborhood will be cited at about $35 by cab drivers. Others may have a lower price cited for them, but I'm often profiled as not a Newark resident despite living there most of my life. Before I started taking Uber, I could usually hold out for a $25 cross-town fare, though found that increasingly difficult toward the end. Many cab drivers at Newark Penn Station are not even interested in picking up passengers going anywhere but the Newark airport.

Uber, according to drivers and residents who use the service that I've talked to, has filled a gap in transportation services for many Newark residents. In some parts of Newark, a 3 a.m. cab ride a short distance is prohibitively expensive, if possible at all. Some cab drivers will simply not service certain neighborhoods or make it difficult to get a cab out there. Not so with Uber, which looks for drivers further and further away until someone accepts your fare request. I have never had a problem hailing an Uber ride in Newark, irrespective of the time or place, even in situations where previously I had been unsuccessful in hailing a cab.

Baraka's distraction about Uber's "cash rich" status notwithstanding, the attempt to bilk Uber out of money hurts those Newark residents whose lives have been made easier by the ride hailing service far more than it hurts Uber. I suspect Baraka, who was a public school administrator and city councilmember before being mayor, has rarely taken a taxi in Newark in his life. He has a city car now that he's a mayor, and he had a city car when he was a city councilman. In fact, many city employees get access to city cars and gas cards.

Breakthrough Starshot

A fleet of laser-boosted nanocraft could be on their way to the Sun's nearest neighboring star, Alpha Centauri in a couple of decades. Breakthrough Starshot is the ambitious proposal announced by Russian internet entrepreneur Yuri Milner in New York today. As outlined by Milner, the idea is that a fleet of gram-sized spacecraft - StarChips - kitted out with diaphanous lightsails will be boosted into orbit and then blasted with a ground-based "light beamer" consisting of phased 100 gigawatt array of lasers. This would get the StarChips traveling at about 20 percent of the speed of light enabling them to reach Alpha Centauri in just over 20 years. According to the Breakthrough announcement of the project:

The Alpha Centauri star system is 25 trillion miles (4.37 light years) away. With today’s fastest spacecraft, it would take about 30,000 years to get there. Breakthrough Starshot aims to establish whether a gram-scale nanocraft, on a sail pushed by a light beam, can fly over a thousand times faster. It brings the Silicon Valley approach to space travel, capitalizing on exponential advances in certain areas of technology since the beginning of the 21^st century. ...

Breakthrough Starshot aims to bring economies of scale to the astronomical scale. The StarChip can be mass-produced at the cost of an iPhone and be sent on missions in large numbers to provide redundancy and coverage. The light beamer is modular and scalable. Once it is assembled and the technology matures, the cost of each launch is expected to fall to a few hundred thousand dollars.

Milner plans to spend $100 million on the research and engineering program to demonstrate proof of concept for the project.

This is not the first time Milner has financed visionary projects. Last year he announced that he is bankrolling the Breakthrough Listen project with the Unverisity of California Berkeley. That project will use radio telescopes to search space for signals from extraterrestrial intelligences. He has committed $100 million over the next ten years to Breakthrough Listen.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Cambridge University physicist Stephen Hawking will join Milner on the board of the Breakthrough Starshot project. The executive director will be Pete Worden, former director of NASA Ames Research Center. 

Bon Voyage!

*To those commenters who alerted me to this, many thanks (you know who you are). My apologies for getting to it so late in the day.

Dreamstime: Daniel RaustadtOn Earth Day, April 22nd, President Barack Obama plans to sign the Paris Climate Agreement along with representatives from about 130 other countries. According to the text of the Agreement, it "shall enter into force on the thirtieth day after the date on which at least 55 Parties to the Convention accounting in total for at least an estimated 55 percent of the total global greenhouse gas emissions have deposited their instruments of ratification, acceptance, approval or accession." It is the position of the Obama Administration that the Paris Agreement is not a formal treaty requiring Senatorial advice and consent, so issuing an executive agreement is supposed to be enough to commit the U.S. to abiding by its provisions. Since 130 countries are going to sign on April 22, the 30-day clock for coming into force could begin ticking and the Agreement could come into force as early as June. In other words, the U.S. could well be committed to honoring the Agreement before the election of the next president, be the winner Trump, Cruz, Sanders, Clinton, or Johnson.

Once the Agreement is in force, according to Article 28: "At any time after three years from the date on which this Agreement has entered into force for a Party, that Party may withdraw from this Agreement by giving written notification to the Depositary." Furthermore, the official withdrawal can take place only after waiting an additional year. That means that U.S. commitments could last through 2020.

The Washington Post notes: 

Any attempt to abandon or withdraw from the Paris agreement — either before or after its entry into force — would likely create international uproar.

“Entry into force does in a sense create a higher hurdle in terms of reversing course essentially. But the political consequences are there under any circumstances,” says David Waskow, who directs the international climate initiative at the World Resources Institute.

In March, Trump told the Washington Post, "I think there's a change in weather. I am not a great believer in man-made climate change. I'm not a great believer."

For a would-be president who aims to force Mexico to build a border wall, the consequences of ignoring the Paris Climate Agreement would be pretty small potatoes. Consider what happened to countries - Canada and Japan - that violated their solemn treay obligations to cut greenhouse gases under the "legally-binding" Kyoto Protocol. Nothing.

That being said, see for more background my December 9 Paris dispatch, "Bottom-Up Paris Climate Accord May Surprise Activists and Skeptics."

In his superb new book Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era, Thomas C. Leonard of Princeton University tells the story of the "progressive scholars and activists who led the Progressive Era crusade to dismantle laissez-faire, remaking American life with a newly created instrument of reform, the administrative state." It's a fascinating and frequently depressing story. As Leonard documents, while the progressives did introduce a number of helpful, legitimate reforms, they also threw their weigh behind some of the most destructive government policies of the era, from race-based restrictions on immigration (justified in the name of protecting U.S. workers from degrading competition) to the South’s racist Jim Crow regime (justified on the grounds that state officials should have broad leeway to control economic affairs). The progressives were "so convinced of the righteousness of their crusade to redeem America," Leonard observes, "that they rarely considered the unintended consequences of ambitious but untried reforms." I would also add that the progressives didn't just bestow vast new authority on the government, they also undermined many traditional checks on government power, such as judicial review. It was a foolproof recipe for the state-sanctioned abuses that followed.

Perhaps the most glaring example of this phenomenon is eugenics, a notorious branch of pseudo-science that was championed by most leading progressive politicians and activists and ultimately given the stamp of legal approval by progressive judicial hero Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Writing for the majority in the 1927 Supreme Court case of Buck v. Bell, Justice Holmes upheld the state of Virginia's efforts to forcibly sterilize a young woman who had been raped and impregnated by the nephew of her foster mother and sent to a home for the "socially inadequate" by her foster parents. "We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives," Holmes wrote (likely alluding to his own military service in the Civil War). "It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices.” The forced sterilization of Carrie Buck went forward.

Credit: Library of CongressWriting recently in The New York Times, David Oshinsky reviews Leonard's Illiberal Reformers and confronts the ugly legacy of the progressive movement. In one notable passage from that review, Oshinsky puzzles over the fact that Justice Louis Brandeis, a progressive luminary best remembered today for his legal advocacy on behalf of privacy and "the right to be let alone," also signed on to Holmes' notorious pro-eugenics decision.  

"Why did Justice Brandeis, the so-called people's attorney, join the majority?" Oshinsky asks. Perhaps "Brandeis may have been trying to placate Holmes," his frequent ally in other cases, Oshinsky suggests. “Or perhaps Brandeis truly believed in using state power 'to create a better world' through sterilization. Both versions are plausible, but the evidence is flimsy.”

Brandeis is an admirable jurist in certain ways, but it's not like Buck v. Bell is the only blemish on his otherwise shiny legal career. Most feminist legal scholars today, for example, look none too kindly on the sexist, collectivist brief that Brandeis filed as a lawyer on behalf of the state government in Muller v. Oregon. At issue in that 1908 case was a state regulation that forbid women from working more than 10 hours per day in a laundry. According to Brandeis, the law was perfectly justifiable because the state had a special interest in controlling the ways in which women used their bodies. Because those bodies might give birth to future generations, Brandeis argued, they counted as a form of collective property. "The overwork of future mothers," Brandeis wrote, "directly attacks the welfare of the nation." The Supreme Court agreed with Brandeis. "As healthy mothers are essential to vigorous offspring," the Muller decision held, "the physical well-being of woman becomes an object of public interest and care in order to preserve the strength and vigor of the race."

And then there's the fact that in 1928, one year after voting in support of eugenics, Brandeis invoked Buck v. Bell in another case, in which he cited the Buck v. Bell ruling as a permissible example of the government "meeting modern conditions by regulation." Perhaps the evidence against Justice Brandeis isn't so flimsy after all.

Related: Louis Brandeis' Partial Justice

Kris Krug / photo on flickrMy Uber app offers options to hail a ride from Pool, uberX, uberXL, UberBLACK, UberSUV, uberTAXI, and uberX+Car Seat. As a Washington, D.C., rider I can choose how many people I ride with, what kind of vehicle I hire, the level of professionalism of the driver, and even get a car equipped to schlep kids.

What I can't choose is the gender of my driver: There's no such thing as UberXX.

A new company, set to launch next week, aims to test the business and legal landscape for offering a female-only* car service to compete with Uber. Chariot for Women is a Boston-based company that will hire only female drivers and will pick up only female passengers. 

Just one problem: What Chariot wants to offer almost certainly illegal. The same anti-discrimination laws that are supposed to protect women also prevent them from being able to buy and sell what they want. And that sucks.

• Screenshot via YoutubeIt's "Equal Pay Day," which means everyone is supposed to talk about how horrible and sexist it is that modern society permits employers to pay women 22 cents less for every dollar a man earns—an argument that ignores the very different choices working women make. Anyway, Obama dedicated a national monument to the struggle for female equality.
• Paul Ryan is definitely not running for president... or so he says.
• More violence between Trump supporters and anti-Trump protesters.
• North Carolina Gov. pat McCrory issued an executive order making some changes to the controversial transgender bathroom bill.
• Watch the most recent trailer for Game of Thrones season 6.

Screenshot via YoutubeIn a recent interview with Nick Gillespie, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education President Greg Lukianoff lamented that college students have become less reliable supporters of free speech and due process. 

"For the overwhelming majority of my career what I've been fighting is administration overreach," said Lukianoff. "During that entire time the single constituency on campus that seemed to have the most common sense and seemed to understand free speech and due process the best was always the students. And somewhere, two or three years ago, it just kind of changed." 

I've been writing about federally-supported, student-driven censorship efforts on college campuses for the past several years, and I share Lukianoff's perspective. 

But not all students are thrilled about an academic landscape where offensive speech is vigorously policed under the banner of harassment and students accused of sexual misconduct are denied fair hearings. Tufts University freshman Jake Goldberg has put together a petition asking Congress to defund the Office for Civil Rights until it revises its Title IX guidance to comport with basic principles of due process—and 250 students have signed it. 

"We believe that no further funding should be provided to this department until OCR revises its illegal and immoral guidance to our colleges and universities," the petition reads. "We ask that you withhold funding for the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education until they change their guidelines to conform with constitutionally established principles of free speech and due process." 

Goldberg is still looking for more students to sign the petition, and plans to submit it before the period for public comment on OCR's proposed budget comes to an end, according to The College Fix. 

Goldberg's actions come at a time when FIRE is openly calling on a student or institution to sue OCR.

kate.gardiner/FlickrFor years, the city of Chicago has prohibited businesses from mixing alcoholic beverage sales with nude dancing. Strip clubs within the Windy City limits have to choose between serving booze and featuring dancers that exhibit their "genitals, pubic hair, buttocks" or, if female, "any portion of the ... breast below the areola," though clubs may permit patrons to bring their own drinks. But now some Chicago city lawmakers are trying to open topless establishments for alcohol business. 

The idea was first endorsed by the Chicago City Council's Zoning Committee in 2014, according to the Chicago Tribune. But of course the dispensation doesn't come without strings attached: "If a would-be owner sought to open a new club with drinks and partial nudity, it could do so only if it obtained a cabaret license," a new designation which would require meeting "strict zoning codes" and "a special-use permit that would require community hearings." 

The new measure, notably, drops the ban on booze sales at topless clubs yet doesn't up zoning or licensing requirements, though it somehow includes an arrangement whereby strip club owners will pay $400,000 to fund a domestic violence shelter and a sexual assault prevention program. This arrangement is not in the bill's text but is mentioned frequently by the bill's sponsor, Ald. Emma Mitts (Ward 37). The measure was approved by the Chicago City Council’s Zoning Committee last week. But Mitts is now asking the committee chairman to temporarily hold the bill after learning that, as written, it actually allowed for the union of fully-nude stippers and alcohol sales.

"I didn’t know the language had changed in it," said Mitts.

When it came out, I thought, 'Did I misread the ordinance or something?' I went back to look at it and it was nudity all the time. We [weren’t] trying to make it a nudity ordinance. I was trying to regulate an industry … that we have out here to try to get a little revenue and try to help out some of our domestic violence shelters.

Still, Mitts hopes to go forward with her proposal after editing the language to only allow for topless dancing at clubs that serve alcohol. Or, as Mitts put it, "put a G-string on" and it will be OK. 

Support is mixed among Mitts' colleagues and in the media. A Chicago Sun-Times editorial opined that the City Council "should walk away from this one," which "encourages the expansion of a type of entertainment that exploits women" and "heightens their chance of abuse by patrons." In a column that whimsically declares himself "a Milton Friedman, live-and-let-live kind of guy," Sun-Times writer Neil Steinberg came out against the proposed rule-change, insisting the status quo is "about safety, for both performers and customers." And Ald. Matthew J. O'Shea (Ward 19) condemned the measure as "a huge step backwards" in stemming "the tide of sexual violence in our city."

But supporters, including "powerful Southwest Side Ald. Edward Burke" (Ward 14) and Ald. Anthony Beale (9th Ward) say allowing establishments to serve beer and other alcoholic beverages could cut down on excessive drinking from patrons, who now simply show up already intoxicated or bring their own bottles of liquor, which encourages excessive consumption. If clubs controlled alcohol consumption, they say, bartenders could cut off patrons who appeared too drunk.

Beale and Mitts have also pushed back on the idea that combining alcohol and topless dancing will increase prostitution or sex trafficking. Of the "numerous" complaints Beale has received about a strip club in his district, none have related to prostitution, he told Chicagoist. 

aj hanson/flickrHillary Clinton has a 200+ pledged delegate lead over Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary process. In the primaries and caucuses so far, she's received more than 2 million more votes than Sanders has, despite losing seven of the last eight contests to the Independent Senator who caucuses with Democrats.

Clinton's failure to close the door on Sanders has led to increasingly frustrated statements and behavior on both sides. Last week, Clinton suggested that she "wasn't even sure" whether Sanders was a Democrat. He's not—there's nothing there to be unsure about. In New York, she blamed Vermont for gun violence in a ridiculous argument that's misleading even by the standards of the generally misleading anti-gun rhetoric on the left.

Sanders hasn't fared much better. The Occupy Wall Street-informed "1 percent" rhetoric has taken Sanders about as far as it can take him. Last week he suggested Hillary Clinton wasn't "qualified" to be president because she took money from "Wall Street," a metonym for the entire financial and investment industry in the country. Americans employed in the financial sector have been donating money in favor of their preferred presidential candidates for a long time. Sanders and Democrats' anti-speech stance toward money in politics notwithstanding, who might support someone doesn't on its own disqualify anyone from running for office.

Given all this, more than two months into the voting phase of the Democratic primaries, the core demographic appears to be the low-information voter. The latest Idiocracy-level non-issue for Clinton and Sanders supporters to argue over is engagement of "super delegates," the 716 members of the Democratic Party who participate in the Democratic National Convention as unpledged delegates, free to vote for whomever they please. Sanders supporters, unsurprisingly, would like to see more of these super delegates support Sanders. Only 38 of the more than 500 super delegates who have verbally committed to a candidate have committed to Sanders so far, with Clinton super delegates remaining in virtually every state that Sanders has won so far. Even the governor of Vermont, a super delegate, is supporting Clinton.

One Sanders supporter set up a website, superdelegatehitlist.com, to help other Sanders supporters target super delegates and try to lobby them to support Sanders. The website's founder, Spencer Thayer, did not vote for Sanders in his home state of Illinois because there was a closed primary and Thayer is not a registered Democrat, according to the Washington Post, and described the site as "aimed at harassing Democratic super delegates" when soliciting support on Twitter to first design it.

Some Democratic super delegates, notably ones who support Clinton, are up in arms. They say the website, which has since launch changed its name to super delegatelist.com, has led to threats. But none of the super delegates the Washington Post interviewed actually reported any threat they received themselves.

Super delegate Bob Mulholland wrote a letter to Sanders complaining about his supporters contacting him and other delegates. "Society has been trying to deal with High School bullies and the same Rule should apply to your campaign and your supporters," he wrote, offering no direct evidence of any threats and saying only that other super delegates have complained about being harassed. "Professionally, campaign staff and representatives should be the ones calling delegates," he continued.

Imagine that. Party functionaries whose primary source of income is attaching themselves to the workings of government in an effort to acquire more power are upset that the hoi polloi might call back.  Insofar as Democrats are responsible for wrecking cities they've had one-part control over for decades, those who lead those parties who should be hearing more from the people whose lives and communities they are ruining, not less. That they complain when animated supporters call during a presidential season betrays the kind of thin-skin people attracted to government tend to have, which accounts for a lot of the silly high-mindedness and resultant nanny state-type rules that flow from them.

One of Mulholland's complaints was that a 12-year-old (a 12-year-old!) picked up the phone when one super delegate got a phone call from a Sanders supporter. Blaming the person making a phone call not the person picking it up, and treating a 12-year-old picking up a phone as something problematic in the first place, is illustrative of the kind of mentality that's driven so much of the nanny state policies that define Democrats today.

tyler_r/FlickrThe FBI may have been able to unlock San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone without conscripting Apple as an unwilling hacker, but that has not slowed down the government’s broader war on encrypted technologies. It didn’t take long for another tragic terrorist attack, this one in Belgium, to provide fresh rhetorical ammunition to stubborn officials in their quixotic battle against techniques that keep up safe online. 

But make no mistake, writes Andrea Castillo: the War on Crypto is not primarily about "terrorism" or "fighting crime" or "public safety" at all. Rather, these emotional hot-buttons are merely a cover to justify expansions in government power that law enforcement officials have long coveted, as leaked emails from top intelligence lawyer Robert S. Litt show. Unfortunately for the rest of us, this naked desire for unattainable power trumps the very real dangers of purposefully crippling our online security. 

Donald Trump’s failure to win even a single GOP convention delegate from Colorado is important less for what it does to the overall delegate count in the GOP primary race and more for what it reveals about Trump and his campaign operation.

Trump portrays himself as a master businessman who employs top experts to cut savvy deals, but he appears to have been totally blindsided by the process the state uses to award delegates.

The results from Colorado show that Trump is an incompetent manager who, in the face of a complex but knowable organizational challenge, cannot even capably represent his own interests.

At this point, the GOP primary race has become a fight over convention delegates. Trump is currently leading the delegate count with 743 delegates. His campaign’s stated objective is to reach 1,237 bound delegates—delegates who are required to vote for him on the first, or in some cases second, vote at the GOP convention in July—by the end of the primary process in June. That will be a difficult task at best, because it would require Trump to win outsized victories in several remaining contests, but it may be his best hope to win the nomination. 

If no candidate obtains 1,237 (a majority) on the first vote, then the convention becomes open, as many of the delegates are released to vote as they please. At that point, it is likely that his main rival, Ted Cruz, who is generally better liked amongst the sort of people who become GOP convention delegates, would have an advantage, especially since Cruz is currently working to secure nonbinding commitments from as many delegates as possible.

In short, Trump really needs every single delegate he can get in order to win. The process by which a candidate wins delegates is different in every state, and in some cases, delegates are awarded through a complicated and arcane process.

Republicans in Colorado voted not for presidential candidates, but for the individual convention delegates themselves. So the goal for a campaign is to organize votes for delegates who support your candidate. What that entails, basically, is creating a voting slate consisting of the names and ballot numbers of candidates—there are about 600 on the ballot, so the numbers are important—who are reliable supporters. 

But Trump fired his campaign’s organizer in the state just a week before the state GOP’s convention last Saturday, where the final 13 delegates were selected. (Cruz had already picked up an additional 21 Colorado delegates in a series of seven congressional-district conventions.) The replacement manager printed up a slate to guide Trump supporters, but it was, according to CNN, "riddled with errors," including incorrect delegate numbers and, in one case, the name of a Cruz delegate. At the last minute, Trump’s team reprinted the flier listing the Trump slate, but the second print also contained errors.

Cruz, meanwhile, posted his—accurate—delegate slate on a giant screen in the convention hall, and printed it out on a bright orange t-shirt that his supporters wore around the convention.

The point isn’t the particulars of the arcane rules themselves. And it’s not even the delegate "points" Cruz put on the board in Colorado. The point is that Trump desperately needs every delegate he can possible pick up in order to win, and yet he appears totally unprepared and unable to handle the organizational and managerial challenges of doing so.

Nor is Colorado the only state in which Trump’s incompetence has been on display: As a result of not engaging with the particulars of the process, he also lost delegates to Cruz in both South Carolina and Louisiana.

Trump is not simply disorganized. He appears to have been totally unaware of the requirements in some of these states.

"Sister Wives," TLCA federal court yesterday tossed out a lower court ruling that blocked the enforcement of a Utah law that criminalized polygamous relationships. Therefore, the the anti-polygamy law is back in effect. The case was brought by the polygamous Brown family made semi-famous in the TLC reality series Sister Wives. (Update: Wording cleaned up a bit to make the ruling clearer. Apologies!)

What actually happened is a little bit complicated. At no point during this whole process did a court rule that the state of Utah had to legally recognize polygamous marriages. That was not what this case is about at all. Rather, Utah has a law on the books outlawing married people from living with other partners and declaring themselves to be in a polygamous marriage. This was all completely separate from whether marriage licenses were even involved. This was a case about religious expression, freedom of association, and free speech, not government recognition or benefits.

But it was also a case where the Brown family was not actually being threatened with any sort of prosecution under this law. They were challenging the existence of the law as a violation of their liberties, but because the state of Utah was not threatening them with prosecution, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver ruled that the family did not have standing under the law and could not sue.

Beyond having a law that violates the right of adults to freely decide with whom to associate, the state's defense of having such a law, even though it was not charging the Browns for violating it, is creepy and horribly authoritarian:

State prosecutors have a longstanding policy against charging consenting adult polygamists, but attorneys argued in their appeal that the ban should stay on the books to help authorities go after those who commit crimes related to the practice, such as sexual assault, statutory rape and exploitation of government benefits.

Prosecutors pointed to imprisoned polygamous sect leader Warren Jeffs, who was convicted of assaulting underage girls he considered wives.

Presumably, Utah has laws against sexual assault, statutory rape and exploiting government benefits. Jeffs, by the way, was not actually convicted of violating this polygamy law, but of two counts of "rape as an accomplice."

We should be disturbed about the justification for keeping this law not just for the implications on free association and liberty, but the implications for the purpose of the laws themselves. The state's argument makes it implicit that the law itself is not intended to be enforced, but rather as something to throw at people when they violate laws that the state actually cares about. As a result, citizens end up living in a situation where enforcement of the law is ambiguous and unpredictable. Polygamists in Utah are fine until they do something else the state doesn't permit and then they may be punished for the polygamy as well. What that "something else" may be is up to the state, apparently. And while the state may say "Well, the Browns weren't actually prosecuted," The Washington Post notes that they were, in fact, being investigated for bigamy.

In a way, it's reminiscent of how laws against sodomy persisted all the way until 2003. Very few people actually wanted to charge or imprison people just for sodomy, which made it very hard to challenge the laws in the courts. The laws, though, could be used by prosecutors to threaten and cajole people over other crimes and force plea agreements. They are tools of intimidation. Under this logic, the state of Utah could declare anything at all illegal and avoid having to address constitutional violations by never actually charging anybody with the crime. They sure as hell could threaten those who don't have the capacity to fight back like the Browns could.

While the ruling is against the Browns on a technicality and does not create any sort of precedent, it is nevertheless a blow against freedom of speech and association. The Cato Institute had filed an amicus brief in support of the Brown family. Read about Cato's argument here.

The case also dovetails with the activism of Detroit pastor Neil Patrick Carrick. He has been challenging Michigan's marriage laws, which appear to criminalize "solemnizing" any marriage that is not recognized by the state. The law is unclear as to whether it is referring to marriages where the participants intend to seek legal recognition. Carrick sued to argue that he has the right to perform private marriage ceremonies for consenting adults who may not be looking for "official" recognition. Carrick's case ended just like the Brown case. Carrick was not actually charged with violating the law, and so a judge ended up tossing his lawsuit out due to lack of standing.

The Brown family said they plan to appeal this ruling. 

If you're in Washington, D.C. and care about libertarianism, freedom, liberty, and conviviality come on out to this:

Every year, the National Constitution Center sponsors this unofficial holiday to "bring together the top liberal, libertarian and conservative thought leaders in America for a national conversation about the future of freedom." This year's theme is an exploration of how Americans' freedoms of speech and expression are exercised, threatened, and protected. 

We'll honor the day with some brief remarks by Reason.com Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie and an open bar. 

When: Wednesday, April 13th from 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Where: Reason's DC Headquarters
1747 Connecticut Avenue NW
(Metro: Dupont Circle, Q St. exit)

All are welcome but RSVP is required. Please contact Jordan King (jordan.king@reason.com) by 7 P.M. on April 12th.

Below: Word cloud based on tweets by members of Congrees.

Quorum

OSGSpace junk is annoying now—small objects have already popped holes in the International Space Station—but it will become an increasingly serious problem as we enter the era of cheap, frequent commercial launches. (Pretty solid work in April, by the way, SpaceX and Blue Origin. Kudos.) 

Just in the last month, debris was spotted flaming over the Sri Lankan coast and a rogue object was briefly blamed for knocking out Japan's new research satellite (unfairly, as it turned out).

Enter Astroscale, the Singaporean company that just received $35 million in funding to work on clearing out some of the estimated 150 million pieces of junk floating around the ol' blue marble—especially antique microsatellites, which have a relatively short two- to five-year lifespan and will soon be deployed by the dozens and hundreds for all kinds of reasons, including mapping and communications.

Here's the plan:

Step 1: Find the junk. Astroscale will do this using a Japanese microsat called OSG IDEA 1 launched on a Russian rocket, designed to map objects less on a millimeter across—including stuff that's not visible to ground-based systems.

Step 2: Send up sticky space roombas to roam around cleaning up the junk, especially those discarded microsats. ADRAS 1 spacecraft will be covered in adhesive which will grab debris and then pull the stuff that's in low-earth orbit down to be incinerated on re-entry. Junk that's higher up will be nudged away from high traffic areas. 

Step 3: Profit. 

Last month, Astroscale received a big second infusion of cash, primarily from a Japanese government-based public-private partnership, but also from the private venture firm JAFCO. The first round of funding was $7.7 million in venture money a little over a year ago. The company is aiming to launch the ADRAS in 2018.

Astroscale certainly isn't the only player in this area: Last week, NASA announced an investment in a Brane Craft, a 2D membrane designed to drag space junk down to burn up, and some Russkie academics have a few ideas as well. 

Looks like the market for space maids is heating up.

P.S. Space junk also causes ongoing diplomatic problems, since the U.S. has historically had more and better info about floating debris than other nations and also created more than its share of the man-made portion of that debris. Some fear space junk could even trigger global war if strategic sats are destroyed under suspicous circumstances. So we'd better get to work tidying this place up.

Dreamstime: IqonceptA startling new study* just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences probes "the moral consequences of becoming unemployed." The researchers led by University of Nottingham social scientist Abigail Barr use economic games to see how the views of 151 young European adults regarding how money should be distributed change depending on how their employment status changes. In the first year, 85 participants were employed and 66 were full time students. In the second year, 59 participants were still employed, 26 unemployed, 51 full time students, and 15 former students were unemployed.

The participants play an anonymous four player distributive justice (DJ) game in which the researchers endow each with different sums of money - €16, €12, €10, and €6 - and each player knows how much the others got. Before the DJ game, some participants had engaged in real effort task that determined the size of of their monetary endowments - the more successful received €16 and the less €6.

Once the play was over, each participant was given a tray divided into four sections. One section belongs to him or her and the other three sections belong to fellow participants. In two-thirds of the cases how the money is divided up in the trays is related to how much work each participant did and in the remaining cases the amounts are allocated more or less randomly. Each participant can decide how to divvy up the money between himself or herself and the other three players. Once all of the participants have made their allocation decisions, the decisions of one, randomly selected, determine the final payoffs.

The goal of the experiment was to see how the employment status of participants who affect how they would choose to divvy up the funds. So what did they find? Phys.org reports:

"We found that the employed people tended to re-distribute the money less when they knew people had earned their money in the first part," asserted researcher Luis Miller from the School of Economics and Business at the University of the Basque Country. "By contrast, they tended to re-distribute it almost equally when they knew that the initial distributions were just due to luck."

In other words, the researchers found that people who are employed or full time students want to keep what they earn but tend to share what comes by luck. But what happens when they become unemployed? Phys.org more broadly notes:

In general, both people in employment and those in full-time education believe that people should be allowed to keep most of what they earn and that it is OK for those who work harder or who are more productive to earn more". Miller went on to say, "When people become unemployed, our study indicates that they let go of this belief. They put a higher value on the redistribution of money, which, in social terms, would mean higher taxes on those earning more in order to fund increased public spending."

"In our study," explained Miller's colleague Paloma Úbeda, "we didn't ask the participants about re-distribution, taxes or public spending, as the responses to questions of this type could be biased by the self-interest of the interviewees. So high earners who look after their own interests would prefer lower taxes, while low earners who also have their own interests in mind would want higher taxes. What we were really interested in was understanding how, when becoming unemployed, people change the way they see what is fair in terms of re-distribution, in other words, whether they change their moral values. We found that they do; when becoming unemployed people change the way they think about fairness and re-distribution."

In their PNAS study, the researchers observe:

The finding that becoming unemployed erodes individual acknowledgment of earned entitlement can be explained with reference to dissonance reduction. On becoming unemployed, individuals who previously adhered to the value of earned entitlement let go of that value instead of either: enduring a decline in material well-being; or receiving resources to which they do not feel entitled and enduring the psychological effects of the resulting dissonance. In turn, the finding may help to explain why, especially following the financial crisis of 2008, young people are disengaging from the labor market; on becoming unemployed, individuals let go of the value of earned entitlement and, thereby, let go of one of the motivations for finding a new job.

The researchers suggest that ...

...we need to establish whether unemployed individuals have to reacquire the value of earned entitlement before effectively reengaging with the labor market. Then, assuming they do, we need to investigate how this process occurs and whether and how different interventions enable the process.

Does unemployment teach folks to become fatalists who believe that the rewards of life are largely due to luck? And then vote to redistribute those rewards from the lucky to the unlucky?

*sarc.

Hat tip: Mark Sletten.