Blog Ipsa Loquitur

Matthew Butterick, whose book Typography for Lawyers ought to be mandatory reading in law school, doesn’t like Medium. He sounds a little ambivalent about it typographically. Really, you get a sense of where the bulk of his antipathy lies from the title of his blog post, Billionaire’s Typewriter:

Whereas the tra­di­tional type­writer of­fered free­dom at the cost of de­sign, the bil­lion­aire’s type­writer of­fers con­ve­nience at the cost of freedom.

As a writer and tool­smith, I’ve found the rush to em­brace these sys­tems per­plex­ing. Not be­cause I’m cur­mud­geonly. Not be­cause I fail to un­der­stand that peo­ple, in­clud­ing writ­ers, en­joy things that are free and convenient.

Rather, be­cause gen­tle scrutiny re­veals that these sys­tems are pow­ered by a form of hu­man frack­ing. To get his frack­ing per­mit on your ter­ri­tory, Mr. Williams (the multi­bil­lion­aire) needs to per­suade you (the writer) that a key con­sid­er­a­tion in your work (namely, how & where you of­fer it to read­ers) is a “waste of time.”

Human Fracking as a Service probably won’t catch on, but it’s a pretty apt description of these platforms that offer nothing so much as the chance to power a platform.

A quick lesson in the irrational economics of social justice:

Matthew Yglesias, writing for Vox, cites a study performed by the Central Florida Commission on Homelessness that found giving homeless people free housing and casework saves tens of thousands of dollars per homeless person.

The region spends $31,000 a year per homeless person on “the salaries of law-enforcement officers to arrest and transport homeless individuals — largely for nonviolent offenses such as trespassing, public intoxication or sleeping in parks — as well as the cost of jail stays, emergency-room visits and hospitalization for medical and psychiatric issues.” By contrast, getting each homeless person a house and a caseworker to supervise their needs would cost about $10,000 per person.

It’s not just Central Florida; this sort of study has been performed with the same findings in North Carolina and Colorado.

In the interest of making sure none of these homeless people receive even a sliver of free help that they might not have earned, it appears we as a society have opted to spend an extra $20,000 per homeless person. The rational choice would be to go for the ounce of prevention, rather than the pound of cure.

Likewise, a study by the Vera Institute for Justice in 2012 charted 40 states’ spending on prisons, per person in prison. Tal Yellin at CNNMoney charted this against those states’ spending per K-12 student, and the result isn’t pretty.

Again, we could spend a lot less money keeping people in jail if we spent more money providing an education that gave kids a real opportunity for bettering themselves. We’re certainly not going to empty every prison in America by throwing more money at schools; however, high school drop outs are subjected to certain socioeconomic forces that send a lot of them to prison. The incarceration rate for 16-24 year old dropouts is 63 times higher than non-dropouts. An education can help kids get out of that pipeline. An underfunded school system simply can’t.

The Guardian has a story about a creepy, creepy old man who took photos of a child’s underwear by kneeling down and sticking a camera under her skirt. The guy apparently committed no crime in Oregon:

An Oregon judge has ruled that a 61-year-old man did nothing illegal when he crouched in the aisle of a Target store and snapped photos up a 13-year-old’s skirt. It was lewd and appalling, but not outlawed, Washington county judge Eric Butterfield said.

“From a legal point of view, which unfortunately today is my job to enforce, he didn’t do anything wrong,” the judge said on Thursday. Patrick Buono of Portland didn’t dispute using his cellphone to take upskirt photos on 3 January at the store in suburban Beaverton, the Oregonian reported.

But his defense lawyer, Mark Lawrence, argued Buono didn’t violate the laws against invasion of privacy and attempted encouraging child sexual abuse, a child abuse images count.

Well, this is just crazy. I can’t believe that photographing a kid’s underwear under her skirt isn’t actually a crime in Oregon. The article mentions that Buono was charged with two crimes. One of them has to fit, right?

The Child Pornography Charge

In Oregon, they call child pornography “the crime of encouraging child sexual abuse,” and it has three degrees. The third degree of the crime has a number of provisions, but one of them says that whoever:

Knowingly possesses or controls, or knowingly accesses with the intent to view, a visual recording of sexually explicit conduct involving a child for the purpose of arousing or satisfying the sexual desires of the person or another person;

Is guilty of encouraging child sexual abuse in the third degree. There are a lot of elements in that crime, but they’re almost all straightforward. The guy took a photo on purpose, so he “knowingly possessed” it; it’s a photo, so it’s a “visual recording”; 13 years old is definitely a “child”; and we can assume that “sexual desires” were involved in the particular photos.

The only hitch there is “sexually explicit conduct” – it’s not immediately apparent that the child was doing anything like that. However, the definition of sexually explicit conduct in Oregon is:

1. Sexual intercourse or deviant sexual intercourse;
2. Genital-genital, oral-genital, anal-genital or oral-anal contact, whether between persons of the same or opposite sex or between humans and animals;
3. Penetration of the vagina or rectum by any object other than as part of a medical diagnosis or treatment or as part of a personal hygiene practice;
4. Masturbation;
5. Sadistic or masochistic abuse; or
6. Lewd exhibition of sexual or other intimate parts.

I’m not going to bother to look up the case law to figure out how the courts in Oregon have defined each of those terms, because this case is depressing enough already without getting a complete picture of the landscape of exploited children in this particular jurisdiction.

Going with the plain meaning of those terms, none of the first five really apply. That last one, though; it seems like the part of a child covered by a skirt and by underwear would qualify as an “intimate part.” However, the law is specific not just about the area of a body being photographed, but also the “lewd exhibition” of that area. And, uh, the child wasn’t doing anything like that.

Why these crazy stipulations? Well, we’ve all got those embarrassing baby pictures that our parents trot out at the holidays. There’s a photo of my brother, then 2 years old, taking a bath in the kitchen sink, and a photo of me at bath time with a beard made from bubble bath bubbles. We’re both naked, but neither of those photos are child pornography – nor should they be. Everyone’s family has pictures like this. So Oregon’s law tries to draw those boundaries to keep regular old parents from being … sex offenders.

However, this boundary-drawing has accidentally left out Creeper McPervsalot in this case. He’s apparently committed no crime.

Invasion of Privacy

Well, okay. So this guy skates on the child pornography charge. It seems more than a little messed up. The other charge is Invasion of Privacy, which seems like a bit of an understatement. But sure. Let’s give this a shot.

A person commits the crime of invasion of personal privacy if: the person knowingly makes or records a photograph, motion picture, videotape or other visual recording of another person in a state of nudity without the consent of the person being recorded;

Well, the kid wasn’t naked. So there goes that charge. Also, the victim would have had to be in a location and under circumstances where she had a reasonable expectation of personal privacy. In Oregon, they have a list:

Places and circumstances where the person has a reasonable expectation of personal privacy includes, but is not limited to, a bathroom, dressing room, locker room that includes an enclosed area for dressing or showering, tanning booth and any area where a person undresses in an enclosed space that is not open to public view.

A random aisle in Target probably doesn’t count. Geez, Oregon, what’s wrong with your laws? Upskirt photos (of kids or otherwise) ought to be a crime. It’s not hard. Massachusetts has one.

Of course, just because you have a law doesn’t mean you’ll keep that law. In Texas, pervy photos of other peoples’ underwear is protected speech:

The state’s highest criminal court on Wednesday tossed out part of a Texas law banning “improper photography or visual recording” - surreptitious images acquired in public for sexual gratification, often called “up skirting” or “down blousing” - as a violation of federal free-speech rights and an improper restriction on a person’s right to individual thoughts.

Oh, come on.

An opinion piece by “The Editors” at Bloomberg View thinks the government is getting ripped off in the student loan game:

It makes sense for the government to encourage young people to go to college, and it’s right to deal compassionately with cases of genuine hardship. But a better deal for taxpayers can be struck.

First, instead of offering affordable income-based repayment as an option, make it automatic, as Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida proposed last year. That way, small initial payments from graduates not making much money would be balanced by larger initial payments from graduates making more.

Second, stop forgiving loans after 20 years. For those on low-to-moderate incomes, capping payments in relation to pay is a generous concession in its own right. And the federal government already offers some loan forgiveness to graduates who enter any one of dozens of public-service professions. Adding the promise of forgiveness at a fixed point in time, regardless of the borrower’s financial circumstances, is an incentive to overborrow and a disincentive to early repayment. A system that forgave debt in cases of hardship would be defensible, as would allowing student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy (which amounts to the same thing). Automatic forgiveness has no such rationale.

The Bloomberg View: offering forgiveness at a fixed point in time is an incentive to overborrow and a disincentive to early repayment. The very next sentence: ‘hey, also we could just let student loans be discharged in bankruptcy.’

Are you kidding me? If student loans could be discharged in bankruptcy, I’d go to law school again, borrow the entire $200,000 cost and declare bankruptcy as I moonwalked across the damn stage. There’s an argument to be made for sensible reforms to the student loan regime in this country, but this isn’t it.

Former NBA player Charles Barkley doesn’t like analytics:

During TNT’s studio show following the Houston Rockets’ victory over the Phoenix Suns on Tuesday night, Charles Barkley ripped Rockets GM Daryl Morey – and the NBA’s burgeoning advanced stats movement by extension – saying: “I’ve always believed analytics was crap.[…]”

“The NBA is about talent,” Barkley added. “All these guys who run these organizations who talk about analytics, they have one thing in common – they’re a bunch of guys who have never played the game, and they never got the girls in high school, and they just want to get in the game.”

Having an intuitive mastery is one thing. Having a demonstrably empirical basis for decision making is another. They’re not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Fetishizing the intuitive and dismissing the empirical by hashtag humble bragging about how many girls you got in high school is just sad, man. If the statute of limitations on your teenage years hasn’t expired, neither has the statute of limitations on your support of exploitative prostitution.

Jason Stoddard, co-founder of an audio equipment (think headphones and amplifiers and such) company, wrote an exhaustive accounting of what it’s like to try to run a small business selling physical products. I do desperately hope folks in MBA programs learn about the sorts of hustles that resellers run on suppliers. I’m sure I’d fall prey to stuff like that my first time out.

Stoddard’s piece is centered around what it’s like to deal with Amazon.com as it sells his company’s products. It’s incredibly informative. The part that I found most intriguing was (naturally) about intellectual property disputes on Amazon’s site.

The Amazon Brand Registry. Okay, let’s say you’re selling on Amazon…and one day, you find that you’ve lost the “buy box.” That is, you’re not the first result listed—when someone clicks on “buy,” they’re not buying from you. Worse, your replacement is claiming to sell the exact same product you make…but they are not you. They’re not your brand. Their product might do something similar, but it’s most definitely not you…and you don’t have any authorized distributors.

Impossible? Not at all. It happened to Rina, in her business. Multiple times. […] So, when this happened, she went to Amazon and said, “What the heck? (but spelled with F and U). Amazon eventually replied that she had to get into the brand registry to protect her brand — something they offered to [Stoddard’s company] at the beginning.

One catch: she had to have a registered trademark.

Yes, that’s right: with Amazon, the rules change depending on who you are…and who you are rhymes exactly with “how much you sell.” Well, okay. She went out and got a registered trademark. Her business was already legally sound, as an LLC. She applied for Brand Registry, and got it. Problem over, right?

Wrong. To this day, she has to chase off competitors who glom on to her listings. Big deal, right? She’s the brand owner and registered trademark holder.

Again, wrong. Amazon doesn’t understand—or seem to care—that a manufacturer with a registered trademark and no distributors is the ONLY entity that can list its particular products. It does NOT allow the trademark holder to approve and disapprove resellers of their product.

If you’re thinking to yourself “how has Amazon not been sued into the ground?” you’ve got good company. Well, you’ve got okay company. Well, you’ve got me. Dear Reader, the fact is that if Stoddard is telling Rina’s tale accurately, that’s a huge problem for Amazon. Why’s that?