Blind justice

Can you go into debt for something you logically can’t owe?

It sounds like a neat trick, but the Czech justice system is Just That Good.

Prague’s public transit system is an honor system with inspections.

You are required to have a valid ticket in order to ride, but they don’t check you on your way onto the bus with a farebox, or on your way into the subway with a turnstyle.

But they carry out random inspections, and if they ask you for a ticket and you don’t have one, you pay a substantial fine—currently 800 Kč (about $40) if you pay the inspector right there, or 1,500 Kč if you simply take the ticket and pay later.

People who are blind are entitled to free travel on public transportation. The transit system issues you an ID card explaining your condition, and you show that when the inspectors come around asking to see people’s tickets.

In other words, it is logically impossible for you to be riding without a ticket.

Vladimir Patera lost his sight in childhood and has the appropriate travel card from Prague Public Transit, so he was surprised when he started getting debt collection notices relating to incidents of riding without a ticket between 1998 and 2003.

(Details of Patera’s case are from “Úspěch Vladimira Patery [Vladimir Patera’s success]”, Respekt, April 23-29, 2018, pp. 27-8.)

Maybe someone had misused the birth certificate he’d lost while moving house? He’d show his transit ID and the mistake would be recognized.

But two levels of courts said that Patera should have defended himself what is known as the “discovery process,” and that once a debt-collection proceeding has been started, it’s too late to deal with the factual substance of the case.

Patera said he had never received notice of the discovery process, but that didn’t help him.

The debt collectors garnished his wages and ended up collecting 200,000 Kč from him.

The gun-lover's Catch-22

It’s never the gun.

Whenever something happens that looks like it might, there’s a need to show that there’s some other reason this horrible thing happened that, just coincidentally, involved a gun being fired and killing people.

One popular approach is to claim that the thing never really happened, but was instead staged as an excuse to come and take everyone’s guns.

So those people claiming to be Florida high-school students who had survived a shooting were actually “crisis actors” playing the role of apparently not-sufficiently-traumatized teenagers.

And of course the murder of 20 children and 6 teachers in Newtown, CT, was all a hoax, and the “grieving” parents were actors who hadn’t actually lost children.

I haven’t yet seen anyone claim a flat-out hoax in this case, but maybe they’re being discouraged from that by seeing Alex Jones get sued for defamation over his Newtown “hoax” stories.

But there’s still the trustworthy “FBI screwed up” story line.

People used it after Parkland, and it’s now been trotted out again in the Waffle House shooting near Nashville.

The starting point for the claim is the FBI’s statement that they investigated the murderer last summer, combined with the fact that they nonetheless didn’t stop the murders.

Here’s the FBI’s statement, in a rush transcript from CNN:

In July of 2017, the FBI's Springfield, Illinois Field Office received information regarding Travis Reinking from the U.S. Social Service [presumably “Secret” Service]. In coordination with the Secret Service and state and local law enforcement, the FBI took investigative steps to include database reviews and interviews. Coordinate action was taken with the Illinois State Police to revoke Mr. Reinking's prior arm owner's identification card and the Tazeville, County Sheriff's Office to then remove firearms from his possession. 

After conducting all appropriate investigation, the FBI closed this assessment on Mr. Reinking in October of 2017. I feel confident the FBI took the appropriate steps and did everything within our federal jurisdiction that we could at the time. So thank you for your time.

It may seem pretty straightforward to you or me, but if you go to the news site Grabien News, you can find it framed as, “FBI admits being warned about Waffle House killer, defends not taking further action.” (I don’t feel like putting up the link; if you use that headline plus Grabien, you should be able to find it.)

The Nikulin file

Amidst the insanity that is closing in around Donald Trump, a seemingly bit player is a Russian named Yevgeniy Nikulin. But while he’s peripheral to the events in the U.S., he’s been a prominent part of the political narrative here, and the growing tug-of-war over whether the country will continue the alignment with the U.S. and Western Europe that it’s built since 1989, or will instead revert to its post-World-War-II position in Russia’s orbit.

As the Guardian reported all the way back in January, 2017, Nikulin was arrested in Prague the previous October (i.e., of 2016) “on an Interpol arrest warrant issued by US authorities.”

The U.S. requested his extradited in connection with various alleged pieces of hacking, including on the site Formspring, used by Anthony Weiner for his public-self-immolation-via-sexting.

But once he was arrested, it turned out that the Russian government wanted him extradited to their country, on allegations from 2009 that he hacked into a bank account and stole 110,000 rubles.

“He was never formally accused at that time. I think the reason is that he was recruited [by the Russian security services],” said Ondrej Kundra, political editor with the Czech weekly magazine Respekt, which has reported that the Russian services offer alleged offenders immunity from prosecution in exchange for collaboration.

At the time of that Guardian article, the expectation was that the Czech Ministry of Justice would make a determination by the end of February—of 2017! That obviously didn’t happen, because last fall there was an article in Respekt about him still being held in Czech prison, and under somewhat unusual conditions. I don’t have the article at hand, but if memory serves, his detention was accompanied by special security measures, not because he was especially dangerous or a flight risk, but because of the sense that somebody might try to do him in while in prison.

(If I can dig up that article, I’ll come back and amend this.)

As it turns out, Nikulin was finally extradited to the U.S. just at the end of last month and has entered a plea of “not guilty” in San Francisco.

We’ll see where his case goes from here and whether and how it ends up being linked with Russian interference in the 2016 election. According to the Guardian last year, “One theory is Nikulin – even if not personally involved in the election hacking – may know other hackers who were.”

But it was also something of a flashpoint here in the Czech Republic.

A market for democracy

When the Women’s March was being organized for the day after Trump’s inauguration, I was happy to see a statement of opposition to the new regime, and I was glad to see my wife joining some friends in going to D.C. to add their voices to that statement, but I didn’t expect anything larger to come from it. I’d seen demonstrations come and go without having any noticeable effect.

I’m glad I was wrong.

The women organizing the march had no intention of letting it be an end in itself, some sort of cathartic yawp after which everyone would go home self-satisfied.

The organizers, and the participants, and the supporters from a distance have all succeeded in making the March an energizing beginning, not an end. And you can see the results in voter registration, voter turnout in special elections, and record numbers of candidates, particularly women candidates.

A week later, when Trump announced his first attempt at a travel ban, I was heartened to see the rapid and vociferous response at airports around the country.

The march and the airport protests were visible signs of a public that had been roused from a political torpor.

But it’s the registering, and voting, and running for office that matters in the long run.

And the question is, how do we keep people energized for those activities over time?

Protesting at airports is necessary when the government is undermining the Constitution, but in the long run it’s not viable to spend your whole life preventing damage to society by running out into the street every week, or even every few months.

The point of a democratic republic is to choose people to run public affairs competently and more or less in line with the will of the majority, within the limits of the constitution.

There’s a tricky paradox here, related to some basic insights of economics.

Know your audience

Yesterday evening I got an invite in my email.

It was from Josef Seják, an environmental economist here in Prague, and a man who played a crucial role in enabling my stay here seven years ago after taking an interest in an article I’d written.

The invitation was to a recital by his daughter, Barbora K. Sejáková, a well-regarded pianist in Czech chamber and solo music.

The recital was in a gothic former church, a small piece of medieval Prague lurking behind a garden wall in the Malá strana district, just below Petřín Gardens.

Why is climate change hard to solve? - VI

(Sixth part of a series)

Part IV in this line of posts looked at time paths of individual countries in terms of GDP per capita and energy efficiency, measured in terms of tonnes of oil equivalent (toe) per million $ of GDP.

Rich countries have been improving in this regard for decades. Poorer countries came closer to the present with increasing energy use per GDP, but even they have shifted to decreasing energy use (i.e., increasing efficiency).

That’s the good news.

But while the increasing efficiency is real, it seemed perhaps to be slowing as it approached 50 toe per million $ GDP, as if that were some sort of limit that would be hard to break through.

Part V looked at country time paths of a different sort, comparing GDP per capita with energy use per capita. The application there was to look at the phenomenon of “decoupling,” in which a country manages to keep its GDP growing even as its energy use is stable or even slightly decreasing.

Figure 1 (from the end of Part V)

With those same GDP-and-energy paths, you can make an argument that 50 toe per million $ is not an unbreachable boundary, but that there is nonetheless a serious problem in terms of total use.

The key to the visual representation is to take the path diagrams from Part V, that show energy use per capita, and find a way to represent efficiency on them as well.

And there’s actually a clean way to do this.

Whaddayaknow?

From here

Back in Soviet times, the two main newspapers were Pravda (The Truth) and Izvestia (The News). And the standard joke was,

“There’s no truth in The News and there’s no news in The Truth.”

It was understood that the Communist Party, through its own organ Pravda and through the “government” newspaper Izvestia, was telling the people what it felt they needed to know. People read the paper, but also tried to divine what the authorities might be hiding.

The extent of the propaganda was evident in the experience of one of my Russian-language professors at Indiana University. In the summer of either 1986 or 1987 he led a student group to the Soviet Union, and they were supposed to visit Sochi, on the Black Sea. But once they were in the USSR, they were informed that they would be unable to go Sochi because of “civil unrest” in the city.

When they got back to the U.S., my professor learned that the real cause was a catastrophic malfunction of the city’s sewage system. As he commented, adopting a mock-Russian accent, “Yes, is civil unrest in Sochi. Can only mean that streets are full of shit.”

The remarkable thing, of course, was what it revealed about the information policy of the Soviet regime. It was understandable that they would try to hide the reality of what bad shape their infrastructure was in. It was more surprising that they would rather give foreigners the impression that people were rioting in one of their cities.

Why is climate change hard to solve? - V

(Fifth in a series; Parts I, II, III, and IV)

The previous installment looked at the strong trend toward increasing efficiency, measured as tonnes of oil equivalent per million dollars (with 2016 purchasing power) of GDP, or toe / million $ GDP.

Today’s post, like yesterday’s looks at the paths of individual countries over time, but with a slightly different metric, in order to examine the concept of “decoupling.”

Figure 1 shows Norway and Switzerland. Both countries have paths that start off by rising to the right: as they are getting richer, they are also using more energy. But each one also hits a point where that trend stops.

Figure 1. Data from BP Statistical Review and Penn World Tables. More here

Norway’s rise slows after 1990, and since 2000 it’s energy use (per capita) has declined somewhat (with some pretty large year-to-year fluctuations).

Switzerland’s rise stops in 1986, and the country’s energy use has trended very slightly downward since then.

Figure 2 shows three more wealthy countries. Germany’s rising energy use slowed after 1974 and then turned into slow decline (like Switzerland’s) after 1985.

Figure 2. Data from BP Statistical Review and Penn World Tables. More here

Canada’s rise slowed after 1977, slowed further after 1996, and has fallen noticeably since 2005.

The U.S. hit its all-time peak in 1973 (the year of the Arab oil embargo), then hit a trough in 1982, before climbing slowly back to a secondary peak in 2000. The recession of 2007-09 pulled energy use back down, and by 2014 it had not moved back up from that lower level.

These paths that are flat or slightly declining are illustrations of a concept known as “decoupling.”

Why is climate change hard to solve? - IV

(Fourth in a series)

In this trip through some basic data on energy and economic output, I’ve looked at the strong relationship between those two things, an argument that energy use causes wealth (rather than wealth causing energy use), and evidence for increasing energy efficiency over time.

The evidence on energy efficiency was in the form of cross sections, as in Figure 1. Each color represents a particular year, and each point on a chart represents an individual country in one of those years. The further to the right, the richer the country, and the further down, the more energy-efficient. (For data sources, see here.)

Figure 1. Data from BP Statistical Review and Penn World Tables

Following the black circles (1970), to the orange squares (1990), to the blue circles (2014), it looks like the mass is moving down and to the right over time. That combination suggests countries getting richer and more energy-efficient as time goes on.

(Note also the black dashed line at 50 toe per million dollars of GDP. In 1970 and 1990 there are a couple of very poor countries with better efficiency than that. By 2014, several rich countries have approached that level, but no countries (rich or poor) have surpassed it.)

While Figure 1 suggests overall movement toward improved efficiency, we don’t see the dots from a particular country: we can’t trace the US, or Czechia, or any other individual country as it changes from 1970 to 1990, or 1990 to 2014.

In contrast, Figure 2 shows exactly this kind of path for the US (blue) and the Czech Republic (black). The US data run from 1965 to 2014, whereas the Czech data only go from 1990 to 2014 (the earlier Czech data were bound up with Slovakia’s data as part of Czechoslovakia).

Figure 2. Data from BP Statistical Review and Penn World Tables

There are two main things to note here.

Why is climate change hard to solve? - III

(The third in a series)

The first post in this run looked at the crude data showing the strong link between energy use and wealth.

But a relationship by itself doesn’t indicate causality. The second post presented evidence suggesting that the relationship doesn’t run from wealth to energy use, and may well run the other way.

The data from the first post also suggested an increase in the energy efficiency of economies over time, which is the subject of this post. (For the sources of the data in all these posts, see here.)

As a reminder, we measure the energy efficiency of an economy by the energy used per unit of GDP (in this case, it will be in terms of tonnes of oil equivalent [toe] per $1,000 of GDP. A smaller number means fewer toe per $1,000 GDP, which means a more efficient economy.

One hypothesis is that countries get more efficient as they get wealthier, and there are a few reasons to think that might be true.

• A richer country can afford to build more efficient factories, more efficient houses, more efficient cars.
• As a country develops, its service sector tends to grow faster than its industrial sector. Services use less energy per worker than industry, so that shift will reduce the country’s energy per GDP.
• A piece of why the industrial sector shrinks (in relative terms) is that a more developed country may start to import a greater quantity of the goods it uses (steel, cars, TV’s, computers, etc.), and pay for that with exports of services (movies, banking, tourism, education, etc.). So the richer countries have taken some of the production of things they’re going to consume and moved it to poorer countries.

One way to examine this hypothesis is through a cross section, looking at our sample of countries in a given year. Each mark on the chart represents a country, and its wealth (GDP per capita) is shown by horizontal position, while its efficiency (tonnes of oil equivalent, or toe, per million dollars of GDP) is reflected by its vertical position.

Since using less energy per GDP represents greater efficiency, our hypothesis suggests that countries should be spread across the chart roughly as shown in Figure 1, with richer countries (far to the right) having higher efficiency (being relatively low), while poorer countries (at the left) don’t have good efficiency (so they’re positioned high on the chart).

Figure 1. Hypothesized relationship between wealth and efficiency

Figure 2 shows a cross section for 1970, and ... it’s not clear.

Figure 2. Data from BP Statistical Review and Penn World Tables