Category: Regulations

Silicon Valley Warms to Trumps Lower Taxes and Deregulation

(p. B1) SAN FRANCISCO — Two days after Donald J. Trump won the 2016 election, executives at Google consoled their employees in an all-staff meeting broadcast around the world.
“There is a lot of fear within Google,” said Sundar Pichai, the company’s chief executive, according to a video of the meeting viewed by The New York Times. When asked by an employee if there was any silver lining to Mr. Trump’s election, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin said, “Boy, that’s a really tough one right now.” Ruth Porat, the finance chief, said Mr. Trump’s victory felt “like a ton of bricks dropped on my chest.” Then she instructed members of the audience to hug the person next to them.
Sixteen months later, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has most likely saved billions of dollars in taxes on its overseas cash under a new tax law signed by Mr. Trump. Alphabet also stands to benefit from the Trump administration’s looser regulations for self-driving cars and delivery drones, as well as from proposed changes to the trade pact with Mexico and Canada that would limit Google’s liability for user content on its sites.
Once one of Mr. Trump’s most vocal opponents, Silicon Valley’s technology industry has increasingly found common ground with the White House. When Mr. Trump was elected, tech executives were largely up in arms over a leader who espoused policies on immigration and other issues that were antithetical to their companies’ values. Now, many of the industry’s executives are growing more comfortable with the president and how his (p. B5) economic agenda furthers their business interests, even as many of their employees continue to disagree with Mr. Trump on social issues.
. . .
. . . quietly, the tech industry has warmed to the White House, especially as companies including Alphabet, Apple and Intel have benefited from the Trump administration’s policies.
Those include lowering corporate taxes, encouraging development of new wireless technology like 5G and, so far, ignoring calls to break up the tech giants. Mr. Trump’s tougher stance on China may also help ward off industry rivals, with the president squashing a hostile bid to acquire the chip maker Qualcomm this month. And Mr. Trump let die an Obama-era rule that required many tech start-ups to give some workers more overtime pay.
Mr. Trump “has been great for business and really, really good for tech,” said Gary Shapiro, who leads the Consumer Technology Association, the largest American tech trade group, with more than 2,200 members including Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook.
Mr. Shapiro said that he had voted for Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump’s opponent, in 2016, but that he and many tech executives had come around on Mr. Trump. While they disagree with him on immigration and the environment, they have found areas where their interests align, like deregulation and investment in internet infrastructure.
“This isn’t Hitler or Mussolini here,” Mr. Shapiro said. And even though the president’s new tariffs on steel and aluminum could hurt American businesses and consumers, “disagreement in one area does not mean we cannot work together in others,” Mr. Shapiro said. “Everyone who is married knows that.”

For the full story, see:

JACK NICAS. “Silicon Valley, Wary of Trump, Warms to Him.” The New York Times (Saturday, March 31, 2018): B1 & B5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MARCH 30, 2018, and has the title “Silicon Valley Warms to Trump After a Chilly Start.”)

“Science Didn’t Lie”

(p. 22) In the words of The Saturday Evening Post: “If America doesn’t keep out the queer, alien, mongrelized people of Southern and Eastern Europe, her crop of citizens will eventually be dwarfed and mongrelized in turn.”
According to Thomas C. Leonard, who teaches at Princeton, the driving force behind this and other such laws came from progressives in the halls of academia — people who combined “extravagant faith in science and the state with an outsized confidence in their own expertise.” “Illiberal Reformers” is the perfect title for this slim but vital account of the perils of intellectual arrogance in dealing with explosive social issues. Put simply, Leonard says, elite progressives gave respectable cover to the worst prejudices of the era — not to rabble-rouse, but because they believed them to be true. Science didn’t lie.
But barring undesirables was only half the battle; the herd also had to be culled from within. In 1907, Indiana became the first state to legalize forced sterilization, starting a landslide endorsed by progressive icons like Theodore Roosevelt and the birth control champion Margaret Sanger.

For the full review, see:
DAVID OSHINSKY. “No Justice for the Weak.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, March 20, 2018): 1 & 22-23.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 14, 2018, and has the title “‘Imbeciles’ and ‘Illiberal Reformers’.”)

The book under review, is:
Leonard, Thomas C. Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.

Dockless Scooter Startups Follow Uber in Asking Regulators for Forgiveness Instead of Permission

(p. B1) Electric scooters have arrived en masse in cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, with companies competing to offer the dockless and rechargeable vehicles. Leading the pack is Mr. VanderZanden’s Bird, with rivals including Spin and LimeBike. The start-ups are buoyed with more than $250 million in venture capital and a firm belief that electric scooters are the future of transportation, at least for a few speedy blocks.
The premise of the start-ups is simple: People can rent the electric scooters for about a $1, plus 10 cents to 15 cents a minute to use, for so-called last-mile transportation. To recharge the scooters, (p. B5) the companies have “chargers,” or people who roam the streets looking to plug in the scooters at night, for which they get paid $5 to $20 per scooter.
The problem is that cities have been shocked to discover that thousands of electric scooters have been dropped onto their sidewalks seemingly overnight. Often, the companies ignored all the usual avenues of getting city approval to set up shop. And since the scooters are dockless, riders can just grab one, go a few blocks and leave it wherever they want, causing a commotion on sidewalks and scenes of scooters strewn across wheelchair ramps and in doorways.
So officials in cities like San Francisco and Santa Monica, Calif., have been sending cease-and-desist notices and holding emergency meetings. Some even filed charges against the scooter companies.
“They just appeared,” said Mohammed Nuru, director of the San Francisco Public Works, which has been confiscating the scooters. “I don’t know who comes up with these ideas or where these people come from.”
Dennis Herrera, the San Francisco city attorney who sent cease-and-desist letters to Bird and others, described the chaos as “a free for all.”
Mr. VanderZanden said given how enormous a social shift he believes his scooters are, he was not surprised it ruffled some feathers. But people would eventually adjust, he said.
“Go back to the early 1900s, and people would have a similar reaction to cars because they were used to horses,” he said. “They had to figure out where to park all the dockless cars.”
If there is something familiar about these scooter companies’ strategy of just showing up in cities without permission, that’s because that has now become a tried-and-true playbook for many start-ups. In its early days, Uber, the ride-hailing giant, also barreled into towns overnight to launch its service and only asked for forgiveness later.
“Cities don’t know what it is,” Caen Contee, the head of marketing for LimeBike, said of the arrival of electric scooters. “They don’t know how to permit it until they’ve seen it.”
. . .
“My brother and sister legislators from Santa Monica warned me that that phenomenon has hit their cities,” said Aaron Peskin, who is on San Francisco’s board of supervisors, the city’s legislative branch. Referring to the scooter start-ups, he added, “These people are out of their minds.”

For the full story, see:
Nellie Bowles and David Streitfeld. “Charged Up Over Scooters Despite Uproar.” The New York Times (Sat., April 21, 2018): B1 & B5.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 20, 2018, and has the title “Electric Scooters Are Causing Havoc. This Man Is Shrugging It Off.”)

The Role of Progressives in the Forced Sterilization of Thousands

(p. 22) Progressivism was always more than a single cause, however. Attracting reformers of all stripes, it aimed to fix the ills of society through increased government action — the “administrative state.” Progressives pushed measures ranging from immigration restriction to eugenics in a grotesque attempt to protect the nation’s gene pool by keeping the “lesser classes” from reproducing. If one part of progressivism emphasized fairness and compassion, the other reeked of bigotry and coercion.
“Imbeciles,” by Adam Cohen, the author of “Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America,” examines one of the darkest chapters of progressive reform: the case of Buck v. Bell. It’s the story of an assault upon thousands of defenseless people seen through the lens of a young woman, Carrie Buck, locked away in a Virginia state asylum. In meticulously tracing her ordeal, Cohen provides a superb history of eugenics in America, from its beginnings as an offshoot of social Darwinism — ­human survival of the fittest — to its rise as a popular movement, advocating the state-sponsored sterilization of “feeble­minded, insane, epileptic, inebriate, criminalistic and other degenerate persons.”

For the full review, see:
DAVID OSHINSKY. “No Justice for the Weak.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, March 20, 2018): 1 & 22-23.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 14, 2018, and has the title “‘Imbeciles’ and ‘Illiberal Reformers’.”)

The book under review, is:
Cohen, Adam. Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck. New York: Penguin Press, 2016.

Dockless Bikes Flood Dallas as Officials Scramble to Regulate

(p. B4) . . . in recent months, Dallas has become ground zero for a nascent national bike-share war, as five startups armed with hundreds of millions of venture capital dollars have blanketed the city with at least 18,000 bikes.   . . .    . . . , the bikes flooding Dallas are “dockless.” In other words, these bikes–popular in many Chinese cities–can be left almost anywhere when the rider is done.
. . .
City officials are scrambling to write regulations. “You drive down a street, you see bikes everywhere, all scattered out,” said Dallas City Council member Tennell Atkins. “We’ve got to think it through. It’s a mess.”
Other U.S. cities are having a similar experience, if on a smaller scale. The startups, which include China’s two leading bike-share companies, are in the early stages of a plan to blanket U.S. cities with hundreds of thousands of dockless bikes in the coming year.
Typically acting with cooperation and encouragement from city governments, companies seed a city with bikes placed on sidewalks, by bus stops and throughout downtowns. Users pay $1 per half-hour or hour for a bike they locate and unlock with an app on their smartphones, eliminating the need for a bike rack.

For the full story, see:
Eliot Brown. “It’s the Wild West for Bike Sharing.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, March 27, 2018): B4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 26, 2018, and has the title “Dockless Bike Share Floods into U.S. Cities, With Rides and Clutter.”)

Blockchain Tested to Speed Property Transfers

(p. B8) The blockchain technology that underpins cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin could change the way property deals are done and recorded more than any other new technology, real-estate and technology experts say.
And Sweden’s nearly 400-year-old land mapping and registration authority is likely to become one of the first government agencies to test using blockchain technology for conducting property sales.
The Lantmäteriet expects to conduct the first such transaction in the next few months and is shortlisting volunteers who want to buy or sell a property using the blockchain system. “From the technology point of view, we are quite ready,” said Mats Snäll, Lantmäteriet’s chief digital officer.
Proponents of blockchain say the technology would make recording and transferring titles faster and much more efficient. Transactions that today take months to complete could take days or even hours, they say.
Blockchain technology also is practically bulletproof when it comes to fraudulent transactions, experts say.

For the full story, see:
Shefali Anand. “Test of Blockchain for Real Estate Is Readied.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, March 7, 2018): B8.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 6, 2018, and has the title “A Pioneer in Real Estate Blockchain Emerges in Europe.”)

Patients Lower Blood Pressure Best When It Is Self-Monitored

(p. D4) The most effective way to monitor blood pressure may be to do it yourself.
British researchers randomly assigned 1,003 patients with hypertension to one of three groups.
. . .
The study was published in Lancet.
“People who monitor their own blood pressure and share the readings with their physician get better control,” said the lead author, Dr. Richard J. McManus, a professor of primary care at the University of Oxford. “Seventy-five million Americans have hypertension. If a good proportion of those self-monitored, it would lead to a big reduction in stroke.”

For the full story, see:
NICHOLAS BAKALAR. “The Best Way to Monitor Your Blood Pressure? Do It Yourself.” The New York Times (Tuesday, MARCH 13, 2018): D4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MARCH 6 [sic], 2018, and has the title “The Best Way to Monitor Your Blood Pressure? Do It Yourself.”)

The Lancet study summarized above, is:
McManus, Richard J., Jonathan Mant, Marloes Franssen, Alecia Nickless, Claire Schwartz, James Hodgkinson, Peter Bradburn, Andrew Farmer, Sabrina Grant, Sheila M. Greenfield, Carl Heneghan, Susan Jowett, Una Martin, Siobhan Milner, Mark Monahan, Sam Mort, Emma Ogburn, Rafael Perera-Salazar, Syed Ahmar Shah, Ly-Mee Yu, Lionel Tarassenko, F. D. Richard Hobbs, Brendan Bradley, Chris Lovekin, David Judge, Luis Castello, Maureen Dawson, Rebecca Brice, Bethany Dunbabin, Sophie Maslen, Heather Rutter, Mary Norris, Lauren French, Michael Loynd, Pippa Whitbread, Luisa Saldana Ortaga, Irene Noel, Karen Madronal, Julie Timmins, Peter Bradburn, Lucy Hughes, Beth Hinks, Sheila Bailey, Sue Read, Andrea Weston, Somi Spannuth, Sue Maiden, Makiko Chermahini, Ann McDonald, Shelina Rajan, Sue Allen, Brenda Deboys, Kim Fell, Jenny Johnson, Helen Jung, Rachel Lister, Ruth Osborne, Amy Secker, Irene Qasim, Kirsty William, Abi Harris, Susan Zhao, Elaine Butcher, Pauline Darbyshire, Sarah Joshi, Jon Davies, Claire Talbot, Eleanor Hoverd, Linda Field, Tracey Adcock, Julia Rooney, Nina Cooter, Aaron Butler, Naomi Allen, Maria Abdul-Wahab, Kathryn McNicholas, Lara Peniket, Kate Dodd, Julie Mugurza, Richard Baskerville, Rakshan Syed, Clare Bailey, Jill Adams, Paul Uglow, Neil Townsend, Alison Macleod, Charlotte Hawkins, Suparna Behura, Jonathan Crawshaw, Robin Fox, Waleed Doski, Martin Aylward, Christine A’Court, David Rapley, Jo Walsh, Paul Batra, Ana Seoane, Sluti Mukherjee, Jonathan Dixon, Peter Arthur, Karen Sutcliffe, Costas Paschallides, Richard Woof, Peter Winfrey, Matthew Clark, Roya Kamali, Paul Thomas, David Ebbs, Liz Mather, Andre Beattie, Karim Ladha, Larisa Smondulak, Surinder Jemahl, Peter Hickson, Liam Stevens, Tony Crockett, David Shukla, Ian Binnian, Paul Vinson, Nigel DeKare-Silver, Ramila Patel, Ivor Singh, Louise Lumley, Glennis Williams, Mark Webb, Jack Bambrough, Neetul Shah, Hergeven Dosanjh, Frank Spannuth, Carolyn Paul, Jude Ganesegaram, Laurie Pike, Vijaysundari Maheswaran, Farah Paruk, Stephen Ford, Vineeta Verma, Kate Milne, Farhana Lockhat, Jennifer Ferguson, Anne-Marie Quirk, Hugo Wilson, David Copping, Sam Bajallan, Simria Tanvir, Faheem Khan, Tom Alderson, Amar Ali, Richard Young, Umesh Chauhan, Lindsey Crockett, Louise McGovern, Claire Cubitt, Simon Weatherill, Abdul Tabassum, Philip Saunders, Naresh Chauhan, Samantha Johnson, Jo Walsh, Inderjit Marok, Rajiv Sharma, William Lumb, John Tweedale, Ian Smith, Lawrence Miller, Tanveer Ahmed, Mark Sanderson, Claire Jones, Peter Stokell, Matthew J. Edwards, Andrew Askey, Jason Spencer, Kathryn Morgan, Kyle Knox, Robert Baker, Crispin Fisher, Rachel Halstead, Neil Modha, David Buckley, Catherine Stokell, John Gerald McCabe, Jennifer Taylor, Helen Nutbeam, Richard Smith, Christopher MacGregor, Sam Davies, Mark Lindsey, Simon Cartwright, Jonathan Whittle, Julie Colclough, Alison Crumbie, Nicholas Thomas, Vattakkatt Premchand, Rafia Hamid, Zishan Ali, John Ward, Philip Pinney, Stephen Thurston, and Tina Banerjee. “Efficacy of Self-Monitored Blood Pressure, with or without Telemonitoring, for Titration of Antihypertensive Medication (TASMINH4): An Unmasked Randomised Controlled Trial.” The Lancet 391, no. 10124 (March 10, 2018): 949-59.

Government Obstacles Slow 5G Innovation

(p. A13) . . . , governmental obstacles threaten to block a new wave of wireless innovation, known as fifth generation or “5G.” It will multiply download speeds by at least 10 times, allowing wireless carriers to compete with cable companies for high-speed internet access. With superfast speeds and low lag times, 5G will enable advances in everything from driverless cars to the “tactile internet,” in which surgeons can perform operations and builders operate construction equipment remotely, and entertainment can include sensations beyond the audiovisual.
. . .
In some places, outdated local requirements prohibit carriers from placing small cells in local rights-of-way and on government-owned utility poles. Zoning ordinances designed for much larger towers often require local zoning boards to approve small cells. Some localities refuse altogether to negotiate right-of-way access, while others impose prohibitive fees and other unreasonable conditions.

For the full story, see:
Robert McDowell. “Local Laws Imperil 5G Innovation; Misapplied zoning rules and huge fees block antennas the size of pizza boxes.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, April 3, 2018): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date APRIL 2, 2018.)

FDA Regulations Stop Vape Shop Innovations

(p. A19) After Kimberly Manor lost her husband to lung cancer, she was inspired to make a dramatic career change. Kimberly now owns and operates Moose Jooce in Lake, Mich., a “vape shop” that sells various electronic nicotine devices. These products use battery-powered coils to vaporize liquids, with differing levels of nicotine or none at all. Thus, vapers may inhale nicotine without the tar or other harmful chemicals in tobacco smoke, since there is no tobacco and no combustion. Scientific evidence suggests this is a much safer alternative to smoking.
Ms. Manor estimates that her business has helped more than 500 people quit smoking, most of them longtime smokers in their 50s or older. Yet the Food and Drug Administration is discouraging more such enterprises. In a regulation issued in 2016 known as the “deeming rule,” the agency ordered that vaping products would be subject to the same regulations developed for the cigarette industry under the Tobacco Control Act of 2009.
The deeming rule has been devastating to businesses like Ms. Manor’s. To give just one example, vape shop owners frequently experiment by mixing new flavors for the liquid “juice.” Now, each separate creation requires its own prohibitively expensive application for FDA approval, which means that vape shops have been forced to stop innovating.

For the full commentary, see:
Todd Gaziano and Tommy Berry, “Career Civil Servants Illegitimately Rule America; Leslie Kux has never been elected or confirmed by the Senate. She’s issued nearly 200 regulations.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, March 1, 2018): A19.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Feb. 28, 2018.)

Italian Bureaucracy Leaves Innovative Restaurateur Feeling “Psychologically Violated”

(p. A7) ROME–The campaign leading up to Italy’s national elections on March 4 [2018] has featured populist promises of largess but neglected what economists have long said is the real Italian disease: The country has forgotten how to grow.
Take Gianni Angelilli’s pizzeria in downtown Rome. He uses an innovative dough mix and flexible cooking methods, drawing long lines and rave reviews. But Italy is too bureaucratic, the locals have no money and his ambition isn’t what it used to be, Mr. Angelilli said. If he opens more outlets, they will be abroad.
“Now, foreigners have more desire to eat well than Italians,” he said. “Italy is dead. Italy is finito.”
. . .
Italian politics have become measurably more chaotic since the country’s old party system–largely frozen during the Cold War–collapsed amid corruption scandals in the early 1990s. Data collected by Einaudi economist Luigi Guiso and others show that since 1992, coalitions have become more likely to crumble, lawmakers to defect and governments to need confidence votes in parliament. Politicians jostling for attention push more frequent, longer and more-complicated legislation.
“An excess has cluttered the bureaucratic machine,” says Mr. Guiso. “The country has become cumbersome.”
Yet the weakness of transient politicians has paradoxically made the public administration more powerful, at the same time as constant legal changes immobilize it, he says.
Mr. Guiso has practical experience. He is helping to set up a government-supported program to send young Italians to learn about entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley and at U.S. business schools, and he said Italian civil servants decided a tender offer inviting U.S. organizations to participate could be published in Italian only. After much persuasion, the civil servants agreed to publish the tender in English too–but insisted all applications must be in Italian, said Mr. Guiso. He said political friends apologized, saying there was nothing they could do.
Mr. Angelilli said his encounters with Italian bureaucracy while running his Pinsere pizzeria have left him feeling “psychologically violated.” He said he had to pay a fine recently because his oven’s air extraction, made to comply with European, national and regional laws, ran afoul of new city rules.

For the full story, see:
Marcus Walker and Giovanni Legorano. “The Real Italian Job: Rev Up Productivity.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2018): A7.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Feb. 27, 2018, and has the title “Italy: The Country That Forgot How to Grow.”)

Occupational Licensing Hurts Military Spouses

(p. A15) Heather Kokesch Del Castillo launched a dietary advice business in Monterey, Calif., in 2014. The business grew and Ms. Del Castillo eventually established a nationwide client base as a “health coach.” But when her husband, who is in the Air Force, was transferred to a base in Florida, her business hit a roadblock. A Florida Department of Health investigator showed up at the door of their new home with a cease-and-desist letter and a $750 fine.
After nearly two years of operating her business in Florida, Ms. Del Castillo learned that she had run afoul of a law requiring any person offering dietary advice to possess a state-issued license. Qualifying for that permit requires a bachelor’s degree in dietetics, a 900-hour internship, a passing grade on an exam administered by the state Commission on Dietetic Registration, and a $355 fee. A licensed dietitian had tipped off the Health Department that Ms. Del Castillo was giving unauthorized advice. She retained the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm, to fight the law that stripped her of her livelihood.
State licensing laws pose a particular burden on military spouses like Ms. Del Castillo. About 1 in 4 Americans need licenses to perform their occupations. In some states, florists, taxidermists and even fortune-tellers need licenses to operate. Far too often, these licenses serve less as safeguards of public health and safety than as barriers to entry. In many cases, the state-appointed boards that issue licenses are stocked with industry insiders seeking to restrict competition.
. . .
Military spouses were 10 times as likely to have moved to a new state in the past year than the average American, according to a combined 2012 study by the Treasury and Defense departments. Surveys suggest that anywhere from 35% to 50% of military spouses work in professions that require licensure, and nearly 75% of them would need to be relicensed upon transferring to a new state. Perhaps as a result, the unemployment rate for military spouses is 16%, while the national unemployment rate is only 4.1%

For the full commentary, see:
Shoshana Weissmann and C. Jarrett Dieterle. “Why Do You Need a College Degree to Give Diet Advice?; State licensing laws overly burden military spouses, who move frequently only to find they can’t work.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, February 1, 2018): A15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Jan. 31, 2018.)