REASON – Free Minds & Free Markets | This, That and The Other

Great moments in unintended consequences—when something that sounds like a great idea goes horribly wrong. Watch the whole series. PART 1: High Ground The Year: 2014 The Problem: Colombia produces too much coca, the raw material for cocaine. The Solution: Announce a crop substitution program designed to pay farmers to voluntarily eradicate coca and replace their fields with legal crops. Sounds like a great idea, with the best of intentions. What could possibly go wrong? Turns out, farmers like money. Since compensation was tied to having coca plants to destroy, many farmers decided to plant new coca plots or expand existing ones before the program went into effect, allowing them to qualify for the government subsidies. Coca production surged, and potential cocaine output more than tripled. And when the government was unable to make good on its promises, many farmers decided to keep growing their new lucrative crop. Way to blow it. PART 2: The Gig Is Up The Year: 2022 The Problem: App-based food delivery drivers don't earn enough. The Solution: Seattle's Pay Up law, promising $26.40 an hour for drivers—before mileage and tips. Sounds like a great idea, with the best of intentions. What could possibly go wrong? Turns out, when prices go up, demand goes down. What a novel concept. Someone should write that down. In the first three months after the ordinance took effect, orders fell by 30 percent, and Seattle businesses lost more than $17 million in sales. Fewer sales meant fewer deliveries, which meant less pay for drivers. One study found that driver earnings per hour dropped 28 percent, prompting the Seattle City Council president to admit the minimum wage fee hurt small business owners, consumers, and…the very drivers it was meant to help.  All Seattle delivered was disappointment.  PART 3: Zero Bark Thirty The Year: 1941 The Problem: The Red Army needs to blow up more Germans. The Solution: Strap explosives to the backs of dogs and train them to run under enemy tanks.å Sounds seriously depressing…man, this is dark.  Turns out, it's easier to train a dog to roll over than it is to make it suicide bomb a 25-ton armored Panzer in an active war zone.  To conserve fuel, the dogs were trained using stationary Soviet tanks. As a result, many were reluctant to dive under moving vehicles. Some avoided the odd-smelling gasoline-powered German machines—and… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Iran has allowed 10 "big boats of oil" to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, President Donald Trump said on Thursday. The president heralded the ships as a "present" from Iran and a sign that peace negotiations are going well. Meanwhile, at the Pentagon: Maybe we should send in 10,000 additional ground troops! Ah, yes, 10,000 more soldiers—the universal sign that peace negotiations are going well. The 10,000 troops "would likely include infantry and armored vehicles, would be added to the roughly 5,000 Marines and the thousands of paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division who have already been ordered to the region," reports The Wall Street Journal. "It is unclear where precisely forces will go in the Middle East, but they will likely be within striking distance of Iran and Kharg Island, a crucial oil export hub off Iran's coast." Tune in April 6 at 8 p.m.: For now, Trump has continued holding off on the threat he made last Saturday to start bombing Iranian power plants. But he has also announced a very particular time when the threatened strikes will happen, in a Truth Social post that reads more like an announcement of an upcoming televised appearance than a major escalation of war. "As per Iranian Government request…I am pausing the period of Energy Plant destruction by 10 days to Monday, April 6, 2026, at 8 p.m., Eastern Time," it says. Mediators of the U.S.-Iranian negotiations said Iran did not request the pause and has not yet responded to the Trump administration's 15-point plan for ending the war. "The odds of success for a cease-fire remain low," reports the Journal, "with Iran and the U.S. staking out maximalist demands that are unacceptable to the other side, the mediators said." Back on the home front: Trump says he'll pay Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers by emergency order amid turmoil at U.S. airports and an ongoing Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown. Does he have the legal authority to do this? Many suspect the answer is no, but Trump has invoked the National Emergencies Act and, tacitly, the rule of "yeah, well, who's going to stop me?" The whole situation suggests how much those in power don't care about the actual results, so long as they can spin the results to their advantage. Trump "was initially opposed to the idea, believing Democrats were getting the blame for chaos at… [TheTopNews] Read More.

From City of Scranton v. Coyne, decided Tuesday by the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court, Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt, joined by Judges Michael H. Wojcik and Lori A. Dumas; I'd love to hear what list members think about it: Coyne discovered boxes of personnel records labeled "Shred 2033," that had been placed outside the rear entrance of City Hall. The boxes contained the personnel files of former employees that included their names, dates of birth, social security numbers, addresses, phone numbers and other personal information. Coyne took pictures of the contents of the personnel files and made a video to document his discovery. After Coyne contacted the police, he and an officer carried the boxes into City Hall. At the April 30, 2024, City Council meeting, Coyne informed councilmembers that there had been a data breach by the City. That same day, the City Solicitor sent Coyne a letter instructing him not to disclose any information obtained from the personnel files and to destroy all photographs of the file contents. At a City Council meeting of October 8, 2024, Coyne disclosed the name of one former City employee from the personnel files. He further stated that he would continue to name the other former employees until the City notified all of them that their personnel records had been subject to "exposure." On October 15, 2024, the City filed a complaint seeking injunctive relief. The complaint alleged that Coyne had examined and photographed property belonging to the City that had been mistakenly placed outside for recycling pickup. The City property consisted of boxes of personnel files of former City employees, containing their names, social security numbers, personal contact information, dates of birth, health information, and disciplinary actions. The boxes had been marked with a date for record destruction of 2033. The complaint asserted that Coyne violated a City ordinance, which states as follows: All recyclables as defined by this article and placed for collection by the City under the provisions of this article and any other City regulations shall, from time of placement at the curb, become the property of the City. This article forbids scavenging of recyclables once they are placed at the curb and are the property of the City. Any scavenging of recyclables can be subject to the penalties and fines included in this article…. On October 15, 2024, the trial court entered a preliminary injunction ordering Coyne …… [TheTopNews] Read More.

A nice passage, which strikes me as much worth keeping in mind. (How it applies to any particular controversies, of course, is necessarily a complicated and usually contested matter. In the Steel Seizure Case itself Justice Frankfurter voted against executive power, and to affirm the District Court's preliminary injunction; but the philosophy he laid out below often led him to take a more minimalist view of constitutional restraints in other cases.) Before the cares of the White House were his own, President Harding is reported to have said that government after all is a very simple thing. He must have said that, if he said it, as a fleeting inhabitant of fairyland. The opposite is the truth. A constitutional democracy like ours is perhaps the most difficult of man's social arrangements to manage successfully. Our scheme of society is more dependent than any other form of government on knowledge and wisdom and self-discipline for the achievement of its aims. For our democracy implies the reign of reason on the most extensive scale. The Founders of this Nation were not imbued with the modern cynicism that the only thing that history teaches is that it teaches nothing. They acted on the conviction that the experience of man sheds a good deal of light on his nature. It sheds a good deal of light not merely on the need for effective power, if a society is to be at once cohesive and civilized, but also on the need for limitations on the power of governors over the governed. To that end they rested the structure of our central government on the system of checks and balances. For them the doctrine of separation of powers was not mere theory; it was a felt necessity. Not so long ago it was fashionable to find our system of checks and balances obstructive to effective government. It was easy to ridicule that system as outmoded—too easy. The experience through which the world has passed in our own day has made vivid the realization that the Framers of our Constitution were not inexperienced doctrinaires. These long-headed statesmen had no illusion that our people enjoyed biological or psychological or sociological immunities from the hazards of concentrated power. It is absurd to see a dictator in a representative product of the sturdy democratic traditions of the Mississippi Valley. The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a… [TheTopNews] Read More.

From Tuesday's decision by Chief Judge Richard Seeborg (N.D. Cal.) in Bouck v. Meta Platforms, Inc.: This case is the latest installment in an expanding genre: suits against social media companies for participating in the creation and promotion of fraudulent advertisements. Plaintiffs here are victims of a pump-and-dump scheme involving shares of a Chinese penny stock, China Liberal Education Holdings Ltd. ("CLEU"). The scammers targeted Plaintiffs on Facebook and Instagram (both Meta products) through advertisements for investment groups promising handsome returns. When a plaintiff clicked on the ad, he was led to a group on WhatsApp (another Meta product) wherein the scammers would persuade the plaintiff to purchase CLEU shares. Those shares ended up being nearly worthless. Plaintiffs sued for, among other things, aiding and abetting fraud and negligence, and the court rejected Meta's attempt to get the case dismissed on § 230 grounds: Section 230(c)(1) of the Communications Decency Act provides that "[no] provider … of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." … The statute defines the term "information content provider" to "mean[ ] any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information provided through … any other interactive computer service." Therefore, if Meta was sufficiently involved in the "creation or development" of the fraudulent ads, then those ads were not just "provided by" the scammers—they were also provided by Meta…. Plaintiffs aver that Meta contributed materially to the fraudulent ads through three tools offered in its Ads Manager suite. The first is called "Flexible Format." Plaintiffs explain that through Flexible Format, "Meta automatically optimizes the ad and shows it in the format that Meta predicts may perform best" by "selecting the specific images and other content that will be included, the layout, the platform (Facebook or Instagram), and how the ad will be displayed to a particular user (e.g., in the user's feed, as a story, etc.)." The second tool is called "Dynamic Creative." Dynamic Creative "takes multiple media, such as images and videos, and multiple ad components, such as images, videos, text, audio, and calls-to-action, and then mixes and matches them in new ways to improve … ad performance." In that way, "[i]t allows the advertiser to automatically create personalized creative variations for each person who views the ad, with results… [TheTopNews] Read More.