San Diego’s Yoga Crackdown Leaves Yogis Bent Out of Shape
Bureaucrats go after San Diego yoga because too many people were enjoying it.
‘“San Diego is the mecca of yoga, it’s the reason people move here,” said yoga instructor Kody Hetherington. “If you don’t allow people to take care of themselves in this healthy way outside, then what are people going to do?”
‘City officials this year revised a sidewalk-vendor ordinance, and as part of that, clarified that fitness classes, including yoga, held in public parks and beaches require proper permitting—and are restricted to certain spaces.
‘That led to the park rangers’ crackdown in May, and San Diego’s yoga crowd has been in warrior pose ever since. Local yogis accuse city officials of being inflexible and bending over backward to soothe affluent NIMBY homeowners who live nearby.’
California Is Finally Awash in Water, but Its Farmers Can’t Get It
Smelt > Humans.
‘Illustrating how broken California’s vast water-delivery system is, many farmers in Central Valley, America’s fruit and vegetable basket, will get just 40% of the federal water they are supposed to this year.
‘Why? Endangered fish.
‘The pumps that transport water from wet Northern California to the semiarid south have been drastically slowed to protect threatened migrating smelt, measuring up to 3 inches, and steelhead. That means growers in the U.S.’s richest farming area are having to plant fewer crops even as they are surrounded by water.
‘The decision by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and California officials, to curtail water to farmers for the silvery fish has ignited an uproar in the southern Central Valley, and threatens to upend this important agriculture region just as it was recovering.’
The Supreme Court’s Welcome Bump Stock Ruling
Parsing how many bullets fit through the eye of a needle.
‘The opinion in Garland v. Cargill, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, is a straightforward case of statutory interpretation. Federal law strictly regulates machine guns, but it defines them as weapons that “automatically” fire multiple rounds “by a single function of the trigger.” A bump stock doesn’t do that. As the majority explains, it’s “a plastic casing that allows every other part of the rifle to slide back and forth.”
‘This helps a user to quickly and repeatedly “bump” the gun’s trigger forward against a stationary finger. The mechanics matter, Justice Thomas writes, because the statutory definition of a machine gun “hinges on how many shots discharge when the shooter engages the trigger.” A semiautomatic rifle fires one shot per trigger pull, bump stock or no.’
OpenAI Lobbying re AI Regulation
It would be naïve to think that regulation is the product of disinterested analysis. It is the opposite.
‘The San Francisco-based start-up told the Financial Times it has expanded the number of staff on its global affairs team from three at the start of 2023 to 35. The company aims to build that up to 50 by the end of 2024. The push comes as governments explore and debate legislation around AI safety that risk constraining the start-up’s growth and the development of its cutting-edge models, which underpin products such as ChatGPT.’
Mitch McConnell: Liberal Bureaucrats Threaten Democracy
The impact of the Chevron decision is going to be massive, one way or the other. It may well be the most important decision in a generation.
‘Former Solicitor General Paul Clement observed during oral argument that while Chevron deference might have been well-intended when the court adopted it in 1984, in practice it has given Congress an incentive to leave the hard work of legislating to bureaucrats.
‘Article I, in contrast, entrusts Congress with “all legislative power.” As with the president’s executive power and the Supreme Court’s judicial power, only Congress has legislative power. And yet for decades, Congress has been content to outsource that power to an administrative state that relies on Chevron to defend its power grabs in court. This is why I filed a brief in support of overturning Chevron deference.’
The Cost of Forgiving Medical Debt
This is another example of regulatory conflict. Making medical debt easier is a disincentive to obtaining medical insurance. It also illustrates the partial equilibrium thinking of the bureaucrat. He can’t see the system. He only sees the line.
‘Mr. Chopra says noting the nonpayment of medical bills is unfair given the vagaries of illness. But this is a reason to carry health insurance. Very few Americans with insurance rack up enormous medical debt. Affordable Care Act plans have deductibles and co-pays, but the ACA’s subsidies can offset premiums. Patients often prioritize other loan payments so cars aren’t repossessed or homes foreclosed. A credit-report blemish is the only tool healthcare providers have to encourage payment.’
Whether the bureaucracy understands this or not, we are living in an era of global competition. Regulation is a dimension of that competition.
‘Javier Milei is pitching to make Argentina “the world’s fourth AI hub”, an adviser to the libertarian president has said, promising hands-off regulation to lure US tech bosses to the troubled South American country.’
A Reckoning for Biden’s Lawless Labor Chief
Apparently, it’s okay to harass people based upon their sexual orientation if it enables unionization, on the margin. Rock, paper, scissors.
‘One target of the NLRB’s abuse is Stern Produce, a grocery distributor in Arizona. In 2021 the company issued a warning to two of its drivers for serious workplace violations: covering up a surveillance camera, and a threatening joke about a colleague’s sexual orientation. Both employees admitted to their actions, but Ms. McFerran ruled that the company’s warnings were illegal intimidation because the two workers had tried to unionize years earlier.
‘Dozens of rulings fit the same pattern, with the NLRB tearing up the rights of businesses or non-union workers. Its 2023 Cemex ruling is among the most destructive, making it easier for unions to gain recognition without winning workers’ support on a secret ballot. Ms. McFerran called the new standard “free and fair, and efficient,” but not so much for employers, nor the workers who will be pressured to join unions against their will.’
Bureaucracy is another word for incompetence.
‘Between the Covid-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan, the Paycheck Protection Program and the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation program, the FBI reports almost $300 billion in fraud. It was so easy, tens of thousands reportedly filed applications from jail.
‘And don’t get me started on the Department of Education. Since its founding in 1979, spending per student has been up, up and away. The results? Forty percent to 60% of first-year college students are taking remedial classes “in English, math, or both.” And they can’t deliver the critical Fafsa financial-aid application that Google could probably roll out by tomorrow.’
Private equity, in some ways, is regulatory arbitrage.
‘On Wednesday, the New Orleans-based Fifth Circuit US Court of Appeals ruled in favour of six private equity and hedge fund groups to toss out a transparency rule introduced last year by Securities and Exchange Commission. This had required private equity, hedge fund and real estate groups to start issuing quarterly performance and fee reports, perform annual audits, and to stop giving some investors preferential treatment over redemptions and special access to portfolio holdings.‘
Congestion Pricing – Josh Barro
You spend decades to open a new terminal, to make life easier for commuters. Okay. But you get there. Then, you screw up the trains so badly that you make life worse for the commuters compared to status quo ex ante.
Par for the bureaucratic course, my man.
‘Here’s the thing: the MTA, the parent agency of the LIRR, built this very expensive new terminal. But they didn’t buy new trains, which were needed to adequately service the terminal. As Nolan Hicks reported for the New York Post last September:
‘The feds began warning the Long Island Rail Road as early as July 2017 that it was falling behind schedule to order and receive the roughly 20 eight-car trains it needed to run the promised schedules at its new $11 billion terminal beneath Grand Central, according to reports from the Federal Transit Administration obtained by The Post…
LIRR officials eventually told the FTA in 2020 that they would find the trains from “the existing LIRR fleet” — which meant taking trains that already served Penn Station or Brooklyn’s Atlantic Terminal and moving them to the new Grand Central Madison site.
‘During environmental reviews, the LIRR said it would continue running 37 trains per peak commuting hour to Penn Station plus add another 24 to Grand Central. Instead, they’ve been running just 37 hourly trains at the peak combined across the two terminals. It’s quite an indignity: We waited all this time and spent all this money, and what many LIRR commuters have to show for it is a longer commute, because the direct trains they once took to Penn Station or Brooklyn got canceled, and now they have to connect.’