Tag: regulations

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privacy regulation

Driving VPNs South

Canada, VPN, privacy, regulations, Ottawa, government

Public Safety Canada, an agency responsible for safety, security, emergency preparedness and this kind of thing, recently urged Canadians to protect themselves when using public Wi-Fi by also using a VPN. 

“Using a VPN protects your data,” the agency said. 

True.

Unless — unless others in the government succeed in requiring VPN companies to uniformly sabotage the privacy of their customers.

The mechanism for crippling VPN’s? That would be the pending legislation to force VPN providers to retain personal data which users expect them not to retain, in this way killing these companies’ very reason for being as well as Canadian Internet users’ reasons to employ these companies. 

We netizens want some security. A VPN required to track and store information  on customers seeking security is, ipso facto, insecure.

Bill C-22, or the Lawful Access Act, introduced by the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness in March, would require customers’ data to be retained for a year. Everybody’s data, mind you, not just the data of persons suspected of a crime.

“Oh this is just rich,” says Windscribe, a VPN provider based in Toronto. “Bill C-22 is driving VPN businesses like ours out of Canada because of the required user logging. And in the same breath you tell people to secure their data with VPNs.”

If things go on like this, Ottawa’s impulse to destroy or try to destroy online privacy will override any contrary impulse to help people preserve online privacy. Thereby obliging Canadians who do value it to figure out a way to override the override.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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regulation too much government

Regulating BBQ

Los Angeles, busybody, regulations, busybodies

Los Angeles councilwoman Nithya Raman wants city officials to impose new regulations on backyard grilling when conditions are dry and windy. The mayoral candidate proposed restricting “backyard barbecues, fire pits and other open flames” in residential neighborhoods when such conditions exist.

Cities often prohibit burning leaves on windy days, in part because burning leaves may spread too easily when it’s blustery. But barbecues are more contained.

National Review’s Noah Rothman suggests that the caution would be more plausible if California had ever suffered a “rash of fires — or even just one — attributable to the careless mishandling of charcoal briquettes.”

Accidental causes of conflagrations tend to be things like lightning strikes and faulty power lines. These work in conjunction with poorly managed forests.

Arson, a big danger in recent years, comes in a variety of forms, as Mr. Rothman explains. “The record-breaking 2024 Park Fire was set by an intoxicated motorist who pushed his car into some flammable brush after an accident.”

The Palisades Fire was “first set by an embittered anti-capitalist vigilante” who hated the rich.

Arson and drunk driving are already illegal.

Anybody can try to cook hamburgers by setting a fire in the middle of high vegetation and calling this a “barbecue.” But that’s not the kind of thing Raman had in mind.

Fortunately, another councilwoman, Monica Rodriguez, managed to block Raman’s effort to toss a wet blanket on barbecues.

“The last thing Angelenos need,” Rodriguez says, “is a ban on hosting a carne asada in their own backyard.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets regulation

Alas, Poor Yorick

Australia, regulations, labor, internet

Working from home is a very old idea, becoming new again during this Age of the Internet. 

COVID made telework something of a mania. But there’s been some withdrawal of support for the arrangement from major corporations, and one of the main results of Elon Musk’s DOGE effort in government was to bring government workers back into the office.

Well, sort of. A few months later, some of the measures implemented by DOGE were halted or scaled back.

How goes the trend elsewhere? As soon as something becomes possible, someone in politics wants to make it mandatory. A Reason article by Reem Ibrahim takes a look Down Under: “Do You Have a Right To Work From Home? This Australian Politician Thinks So.”

This politician being Victoria’s Premier Jacinta Allan, who aims to lead Australia into a new era of labor paradise, giving “all employees, regardless of the size of the business, the right to work from home. The legislation — which will be introduced in July as a provision of the Equal Opportunity Act and go into effect in September — does not include exemptions for small businesses.

“Working from home,” Ibrahim writes, “is often a win-win for businesses and employees,” but he fails to say it often isn’t. How do you dig ditches or construct skyscrapers or fish in the deep sea from home? To handle the necessary exemptions and complexity, of course, plenty of red tape would be required, which Mr. Ibrahim does mention.

So, does Jacinta Allan advance this innovation because she is a leader of extraordinary foresight?

Doubtful. A few months ago she had to deal with a mini-scandal: Yorick Piper, her husband, was convicted of drunk driving and had his driver’s license taken away.

Gotta get hubby back to work!

Well, it was a temporary license revocation. But alas, poor Yorick: see what you’ve spawned?!?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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general freedom nannyism national politics & policies

The Unstoppable Kill Switch

Congress, regulations, control, authoritarianism

Fifty-seven Republicans in Congress worked with the bulk of Democrats, and the President of These United States, to continue funding development of a “kill switch” on new cars. On Tuesday, the bill became law.

You may have thought that most new cars driving down the road could already be switched “off” remotely. After all, the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, signed by former President Joe Biden, required the National Traffic Safety Administration to develop just such a technology for passenger cars. “The sweeping infrastructure law passed Congress with bipartisan support,” MSNBC pointed out last week.

But government isn’t fast, and the kill switch project “needed” more funding, which was included in the new $1.2 trillion spending package.

Still, a minority did try — unsuccessfully, alas — to put a halt to this “advanced impaired driving prevention technology.”

Calling the R&D “Orwellian,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) asked a relevant question: “When your car shuts down because it doesn’t approve of your driving, how will you appeal your roadside conviction?”

Competitive Enterprise Institute fellow Clyde Wayne Crews further explained: “The vehicle ‘kill-switch’ is precisely the kind of overreach that will empower regulatory agencies to manage behavior without votes by elected representatives in Congress or real accountability.”

Though Republican Massie had proposed an amendment to defund the kill switch, and a few Democrats joined him — Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, Lou Correa of California and Val Hoyle of Oregon — a Heinz 57 sauce of GOP representatives sided with the overwhelming bulk of Democrats to keeping the kill switch funding flowing.

Separate efforts to repeal Section 24220 outright, such as H.R. 1137 (the No Kill Switches in Cars Act), remain pending but likely paralyzed in committee.

The Leviathan rumbles along, no kill switch in development.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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political economy property rights regulation too much government

Too Damn High?

unintended consequences, renter, landlord, regulations, private property, property

It’s getting tougher to rent a place to live.

Applications now often entail fearsomely intrusive scourings of financial history. And, writes Jeffrey Tucker, “if you are unbanked or missed a payment at some point, you can forget it.”

This is about more than digital intrusiveness or the end of privacy. It’s about aversion to risk. 

The aversion may have many causes. Tucker stresses a factor that’s pretty glaring once you think about it: the federal government’s assault on private property rights during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some tenants eagerly exploited a federally imposed moratorium on rent payment — plus ban on evictions — only finally stopped by a 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court. 

At the state level, evictions continued to be outlawed until 2022.

So property owners assume that they cannot at all count on government to be in their corner. If a tenant fails to pay rent, folks in government (who include the ones with guns) protect the person who cannot or will not pay his or her bills. 

The concern must be even more intense if an owner’s property is located in a town with a track record of demonizing landlords and in the process of launching further assaults on property rights. (Example: New York City, where high rents are now officially called rip-offs.)

Landlords want to avoid tenants who would use any law or bureaucratic tendency to rationalize skipping rent payment. Since owners can’t count on government to protect their property rights, they are becoming ultra-cautious. 

That is why conscientious prospective tenants who may have a blot or two in their financial history are paying the price.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies responsibility

On the Government’s Diet

MAHA, food, regulations, responsibility

One could argue that our dietary habits are something government shouldn’t be involved in. 

I do. But the federal government taxes, regulates, subsidizes, and researches for food production in these United States “bigly.” 

And then the government taxes, regulates, subsidizes and researches for medical interventions that mitigate the consequences of how we eat. 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Brooke L. Rollins, the current secretaries of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Agriculture (USDA), respectively, have signed their names to a new set of Dietary Guidelines for Americans — an interesting document. 

“The message is simple,” it says: “Eat real food.”

The fact that much of our food industry has been constructed in collaboration with the USDA makes this advice . . . piquant.

While Vitamin D intake was mentioned several times, I notice that the fact that our bodies produce Vitamin D when exposed to sunlight went undiscussed. Also unrecognized? That Vitamin D levels have been shown to be a key indicator of how well people fight off infections . . . like COVID.

Alcohol use is discouraged. Drinking “water (still or sparkling) and unsweetened beverages,” highly encouraged.

“Pay attention to portion sizes” is just common sense.

The advice to “increase protein consumption” ruffles some feathers, according to The Epoch Times’ coverage.

“Since the first edition was published in 1980, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans have provided science-based advice on what to eat and drink to promote health, reduce risk of chronic disease, and meet nutrient needs,” explained the previous Guidelines. 

But how science-based is all this, really? Seems “the Science” in the Guidelines changes with each innovation in political and economic pressure. 

Now and previously.

Most of all, however: Our diets remain our own responsibilities. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people regulation too much government

Submit to Our Plans, Shivering Peasant

Colorado, natural gas, climate, energy, fuel, regualtions

How to defuse resistance to tyranny: helpful information.

Colorado now mandates that emissions from burning natural gas be cut, over the next ten years, by 41 percent — the perfect percentage, elsewise it would’ve been rounded to 40. 

No more natural gas emissions at all by 2050. 

“News that Colorado has set hard target dates for an end to burning natural gas in our daily lives prompted many ‘wait, what?’ questions from Colorado Sun readers,” says Sun columnist Michael Booth. He is here to help.

Propane tanks? These may not be banned by the current law, but do try to convert to electrical appliances. (If the power goes out, Coloradans can always use some other electrical thing as backup. Think batteries, lots of batteries!)

Also, the “new rules are not aimed at homeowners,” Coloradans will be relieved to know. Just at utilities . . . which serve homeowners. “Under current rules, no one is showing up at your door to rip out a gas water heater against your will.” 

Those helpful government agents will show up at your utility’s door with a court order forcing your utility to rip up natural gas lines, instead.

What if the switchover happens too slowly for regulators? 

Column for another day.

Any advice on reversing the ban? 

Mr. Booth might protest that it’s not his job to lead any rebel alliance, only to give information on things. Oh, sure. Well, he might have offered info on how to contact Colorado state legislators and the governor’s office. 

Not for any purpose but just to keep readers well-informed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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litigation property rights

Miami’s Property-Grabbing Vice

Miami, property rights, permits, regulations

All Chad Tausch wanted to do was add a few rooms to his Miami home.

In many cities, homeowners need a permit to make such additions. But although the city had no problem with his proposed construction, it required something more than a permit fee: half of Tausch’s front yard — without even offering to pay for it. No land surrender, no permit.

The city has been making the same demand of other homeowners who need alteration permits. 

The city has a plan, a goal: Pile up land that the city might one day use to widen roads. The Institute for Justice (IJ) has identified “more than 1,000 homes threatened by this scheme across 66 streets.”

“The right to prevent the government from unlawfully taking your property is a right recognized from the very start of this nation,” says Suranjan Sen, an attorney with IJ. “The city of Miami cannot simply decide to take your property away because it wants it.”

Well, thus far, the city has thus simply decided. It’s been operating the scheme for years. The question is whether it’s constitutionally entitled to do so; obviously, no.

Tausch didn’t submit to the extortion. Instead, he turned to IJ for help in challenging Miami’s practice in court. As a result of the litigation, the city has waived the land-for-permit requirement in his case.

Victory! But what about all those other homes on the 66 streets, which remain in jeopardy?

Well, the Institute for Justice is continuing the lawsuit, seeking to liberate all Miami homeowners from the city’s sneaky scheme.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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regulation

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Overkill

butter, Costco, regulations, Common Sense

Butter is made from cream, which is derived from milk. Not a new truth; it’s never been anything but.

B-but — some people are allergic!

And we must protect them.

Under the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act (FALCPA) of 2004, milk is one of nine major allergens that must be explicitly declared — either in parentheses after the ingredient (e.g., “cream (milk)”) or in a separate “Contains: Milk” statement. 

Which is why Costco had to recall 79,200 pounds of butter. A labeling oversight meant that perfectly good and safe butter was placed on the big box store’s shelves without the explicit warning that butter contains milk. The FDA issued a Class II recall, and Costco began the process on October 11.

“Voluntarily,” we’re told. 

No doubt “voluntary” because neither Costco nor the bulk of its customers wants to get into arguments about government regulation designed to protect people with cows’ milk allergies.

In a world run by common sense and not a federal bureaucracy, however, even the most litigious lawyers would surely be satisfied by extra signage at point of sale — something like

ALL BUTTER IS MADE FROM MILK.
PEOPLE WITH ALLERGIES KNOW THIS.
THIS BUTTER IS NO EXCEPTION.
USE WITH CUSTOMARY CAUTION!

But even this may strike us as bending too far backward for people whose responsibility is to know what the stuff they ingest is made from. They must protect themselves. If milk makes you ill, you’ll forswear all butter and reach for some good oil, or even margarine.

Something like I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter . . . but only in its original spray and vegan versions . . . all others contain milk!

I can’t believe this isn’t Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment regulation

Fix-It Man Pardoned

Troy Lake, regulations, Trump, pardon

Troy Lake, the mechanic who helped truckers and bus drivers keep their vehicles going by removing crippling emissions systems, paid the price — jailed for this “crime,” and also fined $52,000. 

Prosecutors made an example out of the Wyoming fix-it man for following a practice that had become mandatory to keep rigs — in his case, at least 344 heavy-duty diesel trucks — on the road.

I’ve discussed his case, saying that President Trump should pardon him for this non-crime.

Though Troy Lake served about seven months in a federal prison, and he’s been out for a while, the conviction was still hanging over his head.

Now President Trump has indeed pardoned Mr. Lake.

He learned about it from a congratulatory voicemail left by U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis, calling to “let you know how very sorry I am that this even happened to you guys but how delighted I am that the pardon has come through.”

“It’s great,” says 65-year-old Lake, who broke down after hearing the good word. “It’s news that, you know — I guess I look at it as, there are some good things that happen in the world.”

Troy and his wife, Holly, also tearfully relieved by the news, are grateful to Senator Lummis, Wyoming legislators, and others who went to bat for him.

About the environmental regulations that sent him to prison for helping diesel drivers survive, he says, “We need to sit down and think about a more logical way of doing it, not putting people out of work.”

Talk about an understatement.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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