Our Laws So Weak

Virginia has a thriving export trade, a trade in guns. The Brooklyn district attorney announced indictments of 24 people according to the Times:

 "The indictment of 627 counts charged 24 people, some of whom have violent criminal records and ties to the Bloods street gang, with conspiracy and illegal weapons sale and possession. In all, the authorities recovered 217 guns, including 41 assault weapons like AK-47s, AR-15s and a Thompson submachine gun."

Wiretaps recorded comments such as:

“There is no limits to how many guns I can go buy from the store, you know what I mean?” he said."

Delay on Perdue II

I blogged earlier about the delay in getting Sonny Perdue's nomination for Secretary of USDA to the Senate.  Today the Times had an article suggesting he has less than sparkling clean ethical history.

Terrorists Capture Building Blocks from White House

John Kelly writes a local column for the Post.  Today he excavates a page from ancient history, 40 years ago today, the takeover of the DC Municipal Building, past which I'd walk home every night, up to a year before, and two other buildings by the Hanafi Muslim group.

It's a reminder of the turmoil of the late 60's and 70's, and a caution not to take current times too seriously.

Specialty Crops and Technology

A good piece on produce which avoids the usual crunchy critique that produce and specialty crops are so expensive because they haven't  been subsidized by the government.

The idea that junk food is cheaper than produce because of farm subsidies is so often repeated by food movement leaders like Michael Pollan that almost everyone assumes that it’s true. But the reality is more nuanced.
Subsidies on their own don’t explain why processed foods are cheaper than produce, calorie for calorie. Fruits and vegetables, first and foremost, are highly perishable, which makes everything about growing, harvesting, storing and shipping them infinitely more complicated and expensive. Many of these crops also take a ton of labor to maintain and harvest. Economists who’ve crunched the numbers have found that removing agricultural subsidies would have little effect on consumers’ food prices, in part because the cost of commodities like corn and soybeans represent just a tiny share of the cost of the food sold in the grocery store.

Mainly the piece is about the technology which is impacting the harvesting and marketing of these crops, kicking off with the recent advent of packaged spinach.

The Delay on Perdue

A piece on AGweb notes the delay in getting Sonny Perdue's nomination to the Senate, but doesn't explain why he hasn't gotten his act together.

[Update:  Here's another piece which suggests either it's Perdue's fault or the Office of Government Ethics is snowed under in clearing the paperwork.]

Today's Great Sentence

" if there's anything we native-born Americans excel at, it's crime."

Kevin Drum in a long discussion on the statistics of immigrant crime rates.

Contra Free Market From Israel?

Conservatives tend to be more supportive of Israel these days.  The nation has long since put the kibbutz behind them and is now a booming economy, with particular expertise in IT, high tech and military equipment.  The World Bank has a piece on how that's happened, including this:

Hasson highlighted the key role played by public-private partnerships over the last 40 years. Those partnerships have resulted in the establishment of an innovation infrastructure — including educational and technical institutions, incubators and business accelerators —anchored within a dynamic national innovation ecosystem built around shared social goals.

Specifically, to reduce the risk for investors, the government has focused on funding technologies at various stages of innovation — from emerging entrepreneurs and start-ups to medium and large companies. Strengthened by that approach, the Israeli ecosystem is maturing: according to Hasson, mergers and acquisitions have increased and exit profits have almost tripled over the last three years, with more and more new projects being started by returning entrepreneurs.

What Scares You?

For Dan Drezner:

What scares me the most about the Trump administration isn’t what the federal government will do to me. What scares me is my own ability to look away if the federal government does things to more marginalized segments of the population.

CrowdSourcing the Self-Driving Car

NYTimes had an article on the problems of creating the very detailed map needed by self-driving cars, which led to descriptions of the use of crowdsourcing to solve the problem.  

The idea is simple: have the equipment in each self-driving car update the imagery in the database that guides all self-driving cars.  To me it's a similar idea to my bottom-up car, or trainable car: the data from traversing a route at time A is available to be used to help traverse the same route at time B.

Stockman and Mulvaney

This Politico piece on Republican libertarians such as Amash and Mulvaney brought back memories of another bright young congressman who knew all the numbers in the federal budget and took a job as OMB director: David Stockman, the inventor of the "magic asterisk".   One can only wonder whether he too will write a memoir entitled "The Triumph of Politics, Why the Trump Revolution Failed".

Amazingly his wikipedia article doesn't mention the asterisk.