Reports From My Nanocosm

Tags: Casimir, family, sprout

I wrote about the need to sign up to receive coupons for the analog to digital television converter coupons back in January (See: Digital Television Transition: Start Preparing Now). Our two coupons arrived this week.

The envelope:

A coupon:

They came with a list of qualified converter boxes and a list of local retailers (all big box stores) that sell them.

This whole television transition is one big bloated boondoggle. These stores and the converter box makers scored with this one. For one, the coupons are good only with stand-alone devices that will convert the signals and not for multi-purpose devices like VCRs, televisions, etc. that build in a converter. Two, television broadcasters don’t need to pay a penny for their broadcast licenses. Three, the converters are expected to cost $75 or more. Four, the converter boxes don’t even include a V-chip (this was a missed opportunity to get a V-chip in every home). There is more to complain about, but I’ll spare myself the time and effort.

Tags: boondoggle, fcc, government, media, policy, television

Tags: Casimir, family, sprout

Tonight, we had the best asparagus I’ve ever tasted.  Here is the recipe.

1 bunch, thick asparagus
grapeseed or olive oil, to drizzle
sea salt, to sprinkle
fresh ground pepper, to taste
two cloves, diced garlic

1) Turn on broiler, set the rack at the second notch from the top.
2) Clean and snap off the bottoms of the spears where they turn from green to white. This removes the fiberous part.
3) Place the asparagus in a broiler pan. I use a cast iron griddle.
3) Drizzle olive or grapeseed oil over the top, sprinkle sea salt and the pepper.
4) Then brush the mixture over all the asparagus spears. Be sure to flip them over to get both sides.
5) Put in oven for fivce minutes.
6) Remove from the oven, flip the asparagus spears over, sprinkle on the garlic and rebrush the oil using oil in the pan.
7) Broil another ten minutes or so. You want the asparagus to blister and brown.

Tags: asparagus, broil, cooking, food, recipe, vegetable

Six year old graffiti artists.

Tags: economics, funny, video

Tags: Casimir, family, sprout

Tags: Casimir, family, food, sprout

Because geeky professors can feel empowered to make videos in which they sound alarms and spread their message virally, while they enjoy their morning coffee.

Very cool, however the message given in the video isn’t. The professor, Brad DeLong, rings the alarm, saying evasive action taken by the Fed may not work and that government needs to start talking about solutions before we get another depression with deflation or the inverse, inflation.

Tags: , economics, government, internet, politics, video

You will now, for some things at least. Check out this chart from Good Magazine. For example, did you know Naked Juice is owned by Pepsi and Odwalla by Coca-Cola? I didn’t, until now. Boca (as in Boca Burger) Foods is a Kraft company.

Note: I would have loved to paraphrase them, but all they have is this chart that I ended up pulling from their site. Check it out. Well worth your time.

Tags: food

Tags: Casimir, family, sprout

I’ve been fairly geeked about the challenge to the Washington D.C. gun control ordinance currently in front of the Supreme Court. This might be the first time the Court directly addresses whether the Second Amendment provides for an individual or collective right to bear arms. I believe it is a collective right.

Historic case may decide U.S. gun rights – Christian Science Monitor (via Y! News)

Some legal scholars believe the amendment protects a right to keep and bear only those firearms that are necessary for ongoing service in a state militia. Other equally distinguished scholars hold the view that the amendment guarantees individual Americans the right to possess and use firearms, even when the guns are not related to service in a militia.The US Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments Tuesday in a potential landmark case that could settle the question once and for all.

The high court last addressed the issue almost 70 years ago in a case called US v. Miller. But that decision left the debate unresolved.

The Second Amendment says: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

First, the text of the amendment can be read literally to support an individual right to keep and bear arms but it also can be read to provide no such right. Because there isn’t a clear answer in the text I think we need to look elsewhere, such as history, for an answer.

The early United States had a serious distrust of a standing army and only had one official battery, stationed at West Point, after the Revolutionary War ended. Instead of having a large, professional, standing army, the United States relied on the state militias. In 1791, the year the Bill of Rights passed, the United States reorganized and expanded the standing army. The Second Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights to provide assurances to the states that the standing army would not replace the militias (remember, the founders distrusted standing armies). The militias have subsequently become the National Guard.

Second, the Bill of Rights was not initially considered applicable against the states as the Supreme Court held in Barron v. Baltimore. This means that a state government had a right to limit arms within its own territories. It wasn’t until the 14th and 15th Amendments were passed after the Civil War that courts started applying parts of the first ten amendments (Bill of Rights) to the states (and even that took a long while). For the Second Amendment to apply to the states, the Supreme Court will need to find that the Second Amendment was incorporated by the 14th and 15th Amendments.

I’ve seen some supporters of the argument for an individual right to bear arms use a few choice quotes from some of the founding fathers, such as Patrick Henry but I don’t think they are the only source of the founders’ intent and are not dispositive. When I see the quotes, context has not been provided and several allude to the responsibility of all men to join their local militias (conscription?).

As such, I don’t think the Second Amendment provides an individual right to keep and bear arms. Furthermore, it is up to states to decide through their police powers when and what type of guns and weapons can be possessed and used within its borders. Do I think people should be allowed to own guns, yes. But there isn’t a Constitutional right.

That said, I don’t think the Federal government has the power to restrict your possession of guns. However, it can and does use its commerce power to limit the transport of guns across interstate lines and when the sale of a gun will affect interstate commerce.

Tags: constitution, guns, politics, supreme court

Tags: Casimir, family, sprout

I gave a presentation during my privacy law class this afternoon regarding the research paper I’m working on. I warn you that it is very wonkish and raw. The ideas aren’t completely fleshed out and the whole thing is very much a work in progress.

This contains my personal thoughts and work product. Sorry for the image quality of some slides. I might distribute the slideshow file itself one day.

• The image has no special meaning
• My paper and this presentation just serve as a high level overview of the zones of privacy.
• My goal is to make a more responsive framework to consider privacy interests and to help the dialog regarding the right to privacy.

• Outline of my discussion

• One of the earliest arguments in the Supreme Court for implied rights to privacy came in Olmstead in 1928.
• Olmstead was the first case in front of the Supreme Court to challenge a wiretap of phone conversations.
• The court held that wiretapping did not require the police to enter the home, therefore did not require the higher standard of probable cause.
• Brandeis, in his dissent, identified an overreaching privacy interests:
  • privacy of the individual
• Holmes provides the first mention of privacy rights in penumbras I can find.

• Justice Douglas replaced Brandeis on the Supreme Court
• In Pollak, the Court sustained a challenge to a policy that allowed public bus to play a local radio station over speakers.
• But Douglas dissented, arguing that it violated the sanctity of thought and belief.
  • Douglas built on what Brandeis had to say in Olmstead.
  • Argued that a right to privacy is found in the Fourth Amendment which protects the home from invasion, as well as the First Amendment which respects the thoughts and beliefs of people.
    • This presented two different zones

• Toward the end of the McCarthy era, Douglas gave a few speeches that he then published as a book entitled The Right of the People.
• Douglas talked through much of what he was thinking about privacy and then later used in his Griswold opinion less than ten years later.
• The second section was: The Right to be Let Alone
  • Douglas focused on privacy related to:
    • Conscience
    • Person/body
    • Home
  • He also picked up on Holmes dissent in Olmstead which identifies penumbras, or shadows, of the Bill of Rights as potential origins of privacy.

• Douglas referred to a natural right to privacy underlying the Bill of Rights.
• He concluded that privacy extends to:
  • matters of conscience
  • sanctity of the home
  • sanctity of the person and their body

• These zones of privacy have been described in terms of Concentric Circles.
• The further you go towards the center, the more protected that privacy interest is.
• Here, the privacy interests move outward from conscience to body to home.
• I’ll return to this model later.

• The case that put â??zones of privacyâ? into the lexicon is Griswold.
• Douglas, in his opinion, built on ideas he talked through in Right of the People.
• He also revisited the Holmes dissent in Olmstead which identified penumbras of the Bill of Rights as potential origins of the zones of privacy.
• Right of privacy lies within
  • 1st Amendment
  • 3rd Amendment
  • 4th Amendment
  • 5th Amendment
  • 9th Amendment

• Next in the progression establishing zones of privacy were the abortion cases: Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton.
• Roe confirmed that there are zones of privacy
• It provided that the zones of privacy are broad enough to protect a woman’s right to abortion, but it was not an absolute right.
• Roots of the right to privacy lie in the
  • First Amendment,
  • Fourth and Fifth Amendments
  • penumbras of the Bill of Rights
  • Ninth Amendment
  • concepts of liberty guaranteed by the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment.

• In Doe, Douglas penned a concurrence in which he broadened his initial zones of privacy to be more inclusive
  • autonomy over development and expression of intellect
    • corresponds with matters of conscience
  • freedom of choice over basic decisions over life
    • corresponds with sanctity of body/person and home
  • freedom to care for health, from bodily restraint or compulsion
    • corresponds with sanctity of body/person

• Returning to the visual model of concentric circles used earlier
• Justice Douglas broadened his original zones of privacy from the Right of the People so the circles encompass more broad freedoms enjoyed in life.
• Here, the privacy interests move outward from autonomy of the mind to freedom of basic life decisions to freedom of health and movement.
• Again, the idea of concentric circles is a visual model I’ve seen used by others commenting on the zones of privacy.

• I think a better way to visualize the variety of privacy interests is a stack, like a stack of pancakes, stacked on top of one another.
• This visual model can serve as a framework for further identifying and analyzing the zones of privacy.
• The more fundamental interests live at the bottom, or foundation, of the stack.
  • Here, the most fundamental right and privacy interest belongs to the mind
  • Then the body
  • And on up.
• A stack is a more scalable framework with which to consider privacy interests.
• In addition to the interests here, we can add additional interests as they arise.

• A stack can be broken down into generic, high-level categories
• Or like here, take a sectoral approach that considers privacy on a more granular level.

• Or a stack can return to more generic levels of privacy interests such as Douglas in Right of the People.

• A cross-section of each interest can then be divided into concentric circles based on the relation to the person in question.
• Relationships:
  • Self
  • Very Close: Spouse; Immediate Family; or special relation, such as priest, lawyer, doctor, etc
  • Very close would also include banks, accountants, email service providers, and anyone with a similar confidential relationship.
  • Personal: Friends, neighbors, close co-workers, house guest
  • Semi-public:
  • Public: when out on the street

• The further someone is from the center, the more that is required to pierce the veil between each relationship.
• Example: The interests of the states in the viability of a fetus has been found to reach into a woman’s interest in her body that is protected by a right to abortion.
  • State interest grows with the progression of the pregnancy and the relationship grows closer.
• Example: The tax man comes calling with questions regarding discrepancies between reported 1099 income and investment income reported on an Income Tax form.
  • The relationship becomes closer since it is more direct. Here, it is more of a personal relationship.
  • However, it remains specific to only items related to income tax filings.
  • Government can’t use taxpayer relationship to ask for health information.

• This could be similar to First Amendment jurisprudence.
  • Strict Scrutiny:
    • 1st Am: necessary to promote a compelling govâ??t interest
    • Privacy: Covers public relationships encroaching the boundaries of close and even personal relationships
  • Intermediate scrutiny:
    • 1st Am: substantial relation to a important govâ??t interest
    • Privacy: When the distance between the request is not as much
  • Rational Basis:
    • 1st Am: rational relationship to a legitimate govâ??t interest
    • Privacy: used when the relationship gap is minimal or non-existent.

• Cases immediately following Roe & Doe confirmed that zones of privacy exist
  • They include independence to make important decisions
  • And are broad enough to protect a woman from State interference when she chooses to abort a pregnancy.
• Cases generally focused on the explicit rights of privacy provided by the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.
• Cases have also refused to define certain aspects of life within a zone of privacy such as bank records.

• The court also drew lines in the sand to limit the reach of the zones of privacy
  • In Bowers v. Hardwick, the court limited the right to privacy in a home to legal rights.
    • Sexual freedom in the bedroom once deemed illegal was not protected from government interference.
  • This was overruled 17 years later in Lawrence v. Texas
• There has also been a group of unhappy dissenters who have argued strongly against a right to privacy.
  • 4 justices in Casey
  • 3 justices in Lawrence â?? this quote from Justice Thomas says it all. He can’t find a general right of privacy.

• Because the Zones of Privacy rely on implicit rights from the Bill of Rights, they are vulnerable to change
  • It is possible that Justice Thomas will get his way and the clock reversed to 1964, pre-Griswold.
• To preserve any of the implied rights currently in the zones of privacy, we need a Constitutional amendment regarding an explicit right to privacy.
  • Needs to cover people & corporations because most data is collected by private parties and the government gets a lot of its information from private parties.

Tags: constitution, government, law school, policy, privacy

“(The Constitution) is made for people of fundamentally differing views, and the accident of our finding certain opinions natural and familiar, or novel, and even shocking, ought not to conclude our judgment upon the question whether statutes embodying them conflict with the Constitution of the United States.”

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, dissenting in Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45, 76 (1905)

Tags: quote, supreme court

The bad credit and housing markets has helped to breath new life into an old story – that boomers retiring (or dying) will lead housing prices down, starting by about 2010. It is worth reading.

Aging Boomers could burst housing bubble – SF Chronicle

“[A]according to a study by two University of Southern California researchers, a bubble of even more monumental proportions lies just ahead. They call it the “generational housing bubble,” and maintain that it will be fueled by the same Baby Boomers who have been bidding up prices since 1970 as they moved higher and higher on the housing ladder.

Now, though, the 78 million Boomers are about to enter the years when people tend to become sellers rather than buyers. And as a result, they expect “many more homes (will be) available for sale than there are buyers for them.”

…

Myers’ and Ryu’s foreboding prophecies bring to mind a 1989 study by a pair of Harvard economists, who predicted a 47 percent decline in housing prices during the 1990s because Boomers would stop buying as they aged. Housing-industry economists lambasted that forecast as pure poppycock, and it eventually blew up in smoke.

…

Mankiw and Weil “may have miscalculated the timing of the decline, predicting its beginning 20 years or more prematurely,” the new study says. “But the Baby Boomers will finally start retiring from the housing market.”

….

Myers and Ryu project that the ratio of those 65 and over to people 25 to 64 will surge 30 percent in the decade between 2010 to 2020 and 29 percent more in the 2020s, altering the delicate balance between buyers to sellers for the foreseeable future.

…

Historically, seniors don’t become net sellers in Arizona, Florida and Nevada until they reach 75. In 12 other states – Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah – they become net sellers when they hit 70.

But the opposite is true in 13 other states – Alaska, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, New Jersey, New York, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Rhode Island. In those states, the crossover point starts at age 55.”

Tags: california, economics, housing