Unrealistic Murders

Monday, February 17th, 2014

I’ve never seen the hit UK TV show Midsomer Murders, but a recent NHS study has found that it portrays homicide unrealistically — which concerns the psychologists leading the study, because it could be affecting public health messages:

“The typical fictional homicide is part of a planned series committed by a middle-aged white man or woman who is not intoxicated, sometimes using a bizarre weapon. In contrast, real homicides were almost all single, and were usually carried out by often intoxicated younger men from a more diverse ethnic origin, in an unplanned attack using a kitchen knife. They were also more likely to have a diagnosed mental disorder.”

Steve Sailer has made the same point about American crime dramas.

I couldn’t help but chuckle at the first comment on the Independent‘s site:

To be honest, I would rather they had focussed their attention on our right wing politics and their hate campaigns against the poor and disabled…now that is an area where we see a lot harm being caused, not only by the measures they introduce, but also the likes of Benefit Sttreet and the Daily Mail who just love to hate. They need their fix of hatred every day…influencing society at large to hate.

Posted in Crime, Media | 4 Comments »

The Coming Anarchy

Monday, February 10th, 2014

Robert Kaplan’s The Coming Anarchy appeared in The Atlantic 20 years ago. Now he notes that the anarchy unleashed in the Arab world has other roots not adequately dealt with in his original article:

The End of Imperialism. That’s right. Imperialism provided much of Africa, Asia and Latin America with security and administrative order. The Europeans divided the planet into a gridwork of entities — both artificial and not — and governed. It may not have been fair, and it may not have been altogether civil, but it provided order. Imperialism, the mainstay of stability for human populations for thousands of years, is now gone.

The End of Post-Colonial Strongmen. Colonialism did not end completely with the departure of European colonialists. It continued for decades in the guise of strong dictators, who had inherited state systems from the colonialists. Because these strongmen often saw themselves as anti-Western freedom fighters, they believed that they now had the moral justification to govern as they pleased. The Europeans had not been democratic in the Middle East, and neither was this new class of rulers. Hafez al Assad, Saddam Hussein, Ali Abdullah Saleh, Moammar Gadhafi and the Nasserite pharaohs in Egypt right up through Hosni Mubarak all belonged to this category, which, like that of the imperialists, has been quickly retreating from the scene (despite a comeback in Egypt).

No Institutions. Here we come to the key element. The post-colonial Arab dictators ran moukhabarat states: states whose order depended on the secret police and the other, related security services. But beyond that, institutional and bureaucratic development was weak and unresponsive to the needs of the population — a population that, because it was increasingly urbanized, required social services and complex infrastructure. (Alas, urban societies are more demanding on central governments than agricultural ones, and the world is rapidly urbanizing.) It is institutions that fill the gap between the ruler at the top and the extended family or tribe at the bottom. Thus, with insufficient institutional development, the chances for either dictatorship or anarchy proliferate. Civil society occupies the middle ground between those extremes, but it cannot prosper without the requisite institutions and bureaucracies.

Feeble Identities. With feeble institutions, such post-colonial states have feeble identities. If the state only means oppression, then its population consists of subjects, not citizens. Subjects of despotisms know only fear, not loyalty. If the state has only fear to offer, then, if the pillars of the dictatorship crumble or are brought low, it is non-state identities that fill the subsequent void. And in a state configured by long-standing legal borders, however artificially drawn they may have been, the triumph of non-state identities can mean anarchy.

Doctrinal Battles. Religion occupies a place in daily life in the Islamic world that the West has not known since the days — a millennium ago — when the West was called “Christendom.” Thus, non-state identity in the 21st-century Middle East generally means religious identity. And because there are variations of belief even within a great world religion like Islam, the rise of religious identity and the consequent decline of state identity means the inflammation of doctrinal disputes, which can take on an irregular, military form. In the early medieval era, the Byzantine Empire — whose whole identity was infused with Christianity — had violent, doctrinal disputes between iconoclasts (those opposed to graven images like icons) and iconodules (those who venerated them). As the Roman Empire collapsed and Christianity rose as a replacement identity, the upshot was not tranquility but violent, doctrinal disputes between Donatists, Monotheletes and other Christian sects and heresies. So, too, in the Muslim world today, as state identities weaken and sectarian and other differences within Islam come to the fore, often violently.

Information Technology. Various forms of electronic communication, often transmitted by smartphones, can empower the crowd against a hated regime, as protesters who do not know each other personally can find each other through Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. But while such technology can help topple governments, it cannot provide a coherent and organized replacement pole of bureaucratic power to maintain political stability afterwards. This is how technology encourages anarchy. The Industrial Age was about bigness: big tanks, aircraft carriers, railway networks and so forth, which magnified the power of big centralized states. But the post-industrial age is about smallness, which can empower small and oppressed groups, allowing them to challenge the state — with anarchy sometimes the result.

Posted in Crime, Policy, War | No Comments »

What can a mere rifle do?

Sunday, February 9th, 2014

The target analysis methodology US Special Ops forces use is unclassified, Weapons Man notes:

It is described by the acronym CARVER. That stands for Criticality, Accessibility, Recuperability, Vulnerability, Effect, and Recognizability. A brief definition of Criticality might be: “how critical is the targeted node to the target system, or to the enemy’s war-making capability?”

[...]

CARVER works as well when planning to protect or defend a target. For instance, it systematizes developing CT countermeasures or securing a target against exploitation by reconnaissance, surveillance, or attack. The primary product of CARVER is a thorough understanding of the target, target system or target complex by the assigned team, but they also produce a target folder. (In the real world, they’re usually updating a preexisting target folder, which might be a half-century old). One of the documents they produce, for each target, is a CARVER matrix which can be unweighted, but in the real world is usually drafted with weighted values. The weights depend on overall mission objectives and priorities. (For example, CARVER values are weighted differently for a clandestine attack in a time of nominal peace, than they are for an overt attack in time of war). This example of a simple, unweighted CARVER Matrix is from Appendix B to FM 34-36.

CARVER Matrix from FM 34-36 Appendix B

Herschel Smith describes the terrorist attack that America cannot absorb:

The most vulnerable structure, system or component for large scale coal plants is the main step up transformer — that component that handles electricity at 230 or 500 kV. They are one-of-a-kind components, and no two are exactly alike. They are so huge and so heavy that they must be transported to the site via special designed rail cars intended only for them, and only about three of these exist in the U.S.

They are no longer fabricated in the U.S., much the same as other large scale steel fabrication. Its manufacture has primarily gone overseas. These step up transformers must be ordered years in advance of their installation. Some utilities are part of a consortium to keep one of these transformers available for multiple coal units, hoping that more will not be needed at any one time. In industrial engineering terms, the warehouse min-max for these components is a fine line.

On any given day with the right timing, several well trained, dedicated, well armed fighters would be able to force their way on to utility property, fire missiles or lay explosives at the transformer, destroy it, and perhaps even go to the next given the security for coal plants. Next in line along the transmission system are other important transformers, not as important as the main step up transformers, but still important, that would also be vulnerable to attack. With the transmission system in chaos and completely isolated due to protective relaying, and with the coal units that supply the majority of the electricity to the nation incapable of providing that power for years due to the wait for step up transformers, whole cites, heavy industry, and homes and businesses would be left in the dark for a protracted period of time, all over the nation.

As bad as the recent Metcalf, California attack was, it could have been worse. The West Point Combating Terrorism Center found that an attack on well-chosen nodes could take down one of the three regional grids powering the US.

Posted in Crime, War | 1 Comment »

Groups Responsible for Most Terrorist Attacks in the United States, 2001-2011

Sunday, February 9th, 2014

When you look at the numbers, you may be surprised by the groups responsible for the most terrorist attacks in the United States in the last decade:

Groups Responsible for Most Terrorist Attacks in the United States, 2001-2011

Posted in Crime, Policy, War | 7 Comments »

No Stress At All

Friday, February 7th, 2014

Chris Hernandez once participated in a raid on a crack house:

The owner of the house was about 60. His house was disgusting; no electricity or running water, trash everywhere, roaches scattering at our approach, holes rotted through the floor, buckets full of urine and feces in the kitchen. An officer asked him, “How can you stand to live like this?”

The man answered, very articulately, “Officer, I have no stress. I don’t have to work. I get free food. I get free money. If I want crack, I let a dealer use my house to deal from, and he gives me free crack. If I want sex, I let a crack whore stay here and she lets me have sex with her. I have no stress at all.”

Posted in Crime, Economics, Policy | No Comments »

I don’t do nuthin’

Thursday, February 6th, 2014

Chris Hernandez shares a story from another officer:

Years later, in the late 90’s, an officer I worked with told me about a call he was on at a housing project. About three in the morning there was a fight. When the officer showed up he encountered a crowd cheering the fighters on. One of the people cheering was a healthy woman, about 40 years old, who we knew pretty well. She wasn’t a real troublemaker, but every time there was a late-night fight or shooting (which was several times a week), she’d be out there drinking a beer and enjoying the show.

Since the woman was a witness to the fight, the officer interviewed her. During the interview, he asked her, “Why do you just hang out here every night? Shouldn’t you have a job or something?”

The woman very calmly asked him, “Officer, how much money do you make?”

The officer told me he was surprised by the question. But he gave her an honest answer: his salary was about $38,000 a year.

She answered, “Well, I make almost as much as you do. And I don’t do nuthin’.”

Posted in Crime, Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Assault on California Power Station

Thursday, February 6th, 2014

I’m not surprised by last year’s assault on a California power station — just by the lack of media coverage until now:

The attack began just before 1 a.m. on April 16 last year, when someone slipped into an underground vault not far from a busy freeway and cut telephone cables.

Within half an hour, snipers opened fire on a nearby electrical substation. Shooting for 19 minutes, they surgically knocked out 17 giant transformers that funnel power to Silicon Valley. A minute before a police car arrived, the shooters disappeared into the night.

To avoid a blackout, electric-grid officials rerouted power around the site and asked power plants in Silicon Valley to produce more electricity. But it took utility workers 27 days to make repairs and bring the substation back to life.

[...]

The country’s roughly 2,000 very large transformers are expensive to build, often costing millions of dollars each, and hard to replace. Each is custom made and weighs up to 500,000 pounds, and “I can only build 10 units a month,” said Dennis Blake, general manager of Pennsylvania Transformer in Pittsburgh, one of seven U.S. manufacturers. The utility industry keeps some spares on hand.

[...]

Mr. Wellinghoff said a FERC analysis found that if a surprisingly small number of U.S. substations were knocked out at once, that could destabilize the system enough to cause a blackout that could encompass most of the U.S.

[...]

Overseas, terrorist organizations were linked to 2,500 attacks on transmission lines or towers and at least 500 on substations from 1996 to 2006, according to a January report from the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry-funded research group, which cited State Department data.

This attack wasn’t the work of bored teenagers or drunk hunters:

At 12:58 a.m., AT&T fiber-optic telecommunications cables were cut — in a way that made them hard to repair — in an underground vault near the substation, not far from U.S. Highway 101 just outside south San Jose. It would have taken more than one person to lift the metal vault cover, said people who visited the site.

Nine minutes later, some customers of Level 3 Communications, an Internet service provider, lost service. Cables in its vault near the Metcalf substation were also cut.

At 1:31 a.m., a surveillance camera pointed along a chain-link fence around the substation recorded a streak of light that investigators from the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s office think was a signal from a waved flashlight. It was followed by the muzzle flash of rifles and sparks from bullets hitting the fence.

The substation’s cameras weren’t aimed outside its perimeter, where the attackers were. They shooters appear to have aimed at the transformers’ oil-filled cooling systems. These began to bleed oil, but didn’t explode, as the transformers probably would have done if hit in other areas.

About six minutes after the shooting started, PG&E confirms, it got an alarm from motion sensors at the substation, possibly from bullets grazing the fence, which is shown on video.

Four minutes later, at 1:41 a.m., the sheriff’s department received a 911 call about gunfire, sent by an engineer at a nearby power plant that still had phone service.

Riddled with bullet holes, the transformers leaked 52,000 gallons of oil, then overheated. The first bank of them crashed at 1:45 a.m., at which time PG&E’s control center about 90 miles north received an equipment-failure alarm.

Five minutes later, another apparent flashlight signal, caught on film, marked the end of the attack. More than 100 shell casings of the sort ejected by AK-47s were later found at the site.

At 1:51 a.m., law-enforcement officers arrived, but found everything quiet. Unable to get past the locked fence and seeing nothing suspicious, they left.

A PG&E worker, awakened by the utility’s control center at 2:03 a.m., arrived at 3:15 a.m. to survey the damage.

Grid officials routed some power around the substation to keep the system stable and asked customers in Silicon Valley to conserve electricity.

In a news release, PG&E said the substation had been hit by vandals. It has since confirmed 17 transformers were knocked out.

Mr. Wellinghoff, then chairman of FERC, said that after he heard about the scope of the attack, he flew to California, bringing with him experts from the U.S. Navy’s Dahlgren Surface Warfare Center in Virginia, which trains Navy SEALs. After walking the site with PG&E officials and FBI agents, Mr. Wellinghoff said, the military experts told him it looked like a professional job.

In addition to fingerprint-free shell casings, they pointed out small piles of rocks, which they said could have been left by an advance scout to tell the attackers where to get the best shots.

“They said it was a targeting package just like they would put together for an attack,” Mr. Wellinghoff said.

Posted in Crime, Technology, War | 6 Comments »

Blood-Smeared Cans of Beer

Wednesday, February 5th, 2014

Officer Chris Hernandez describes a problem family living in a housing project:

The father worked, mom stayed home with the teenaged kids, they all got snot-slinging drunk every weekend. They had a satellite dish in their front yard, at a time when satellite TV was rare and not cheap. They went through cases of beer and had lots of parties. During one party mom stabbed dad under his arm, hitting an artery. While dad was at the ER, maybe about to die, and mom was under arrest, maybe for murder, the kids kept asking the officers on the scene if they could get the blood-smeared cans of beer in the roped-off crime scene. When officers pulled down the tape, the first thing the kids did was rush in, wipe blood off beer and continue drinking.

Our tax money was supporting that family. Without welfare, could they have afforded all that alcohol?

Posted in Crime, Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Disability

Tuesday, February 4th, 2014

Chris Hernandez tells a story about disability:

Many years ago I arrested a well-known dope dealer, “Sammy”, in the small town where I worked. Sammy was in his early twenties, tall and thin, and could have been an Olympic sprinter. He had outrun almost every officer on the department. Several times I had turned corners and encountered him by chance; he would immediately sprint for the nearest fence, vault over it in a second and be out of sight before I could even call it out on the radio. And Sammy wasn’t just fast, he was cunning. Maybe not book smart, but street smart. Smart enough to sell a lot of drugs and almost never get caught.

One day we were notified Sammy had a felony probation violation warrant. That’s nice, I thought. Unfortunately we’ll never catch him. But a couple of nights later I turned a corner, and there he was. He saw me, the escape reflex kicked in, he started to step off into a sprint. Then he apparently realized, I don’t have any crack on me, so he just stood there. He didn’t know he had a warrant.

I pulled up beside him, threw the car in park, jumped out and grabbed him. He was shocked. He went to jail without a fight.

At the jail I asked him standard questions for the arrest blotter. Address, phone number, next of kin, and so on. When I got to “occupation”, I jokingly asked, “Hey Sammy, what kind of work do you do?”

Sammy answered, “I get disability checks a month!”

I remember giving him a curious look. I knew he was an unemployed dope dealer, and I was just being a smartass when I asked the question. I also didn’t understand what the hell he was trying to say.

“What?”

“I get disability checks a month!”

Very slowly, I asked, “Are you saying you get disability checks every month?”

He answered, “Yuh!”

“Sammy, you are the fastest human being on earth. You’re in better shape than most professional athletes. What’s your disability?”

“I can’t work!” he blurted. “I can’t get along with the boss man. My lawyer got me disability.”

That conversation was, to say the least, illuminating. I had no idea someone could receive disability just because they’re too undisciplined to work.

Posted in Crime, Economics, Policy | 1 Comment »

Occasional Marijuana Smokers

Monday, January 27th, 2014

Most illicit drug users are occasional marijuana smokers:

About 75% of the people who use any illicit drug, use only marijuana. And most of those people only use relatively small amounts of marijuana. When people talk about “drug users,” what they have in their mind is often a junkie nodding off on a street corner or a hopped-up crack head. But most drug users, meaning illicit drug users, are occasional marijuana smokers.

[...]

If you took marijuana out of the equation, you would be left with relatively few — several million — illicit drug users. You’d still be left with more than 85% of the total revenues of the illicit drug business. So the vast number of marijuana users don’t account for much of the total dollars spent.

The same thing is true if you look among marijuana users. The couple of million who stay stoned all day, every day, account for the vast bulk of the total marijuana consumed, and thus the total revenues of the illicit marijuana industry. That’s typical. The money in any drug, including alcohol, is in the addicts, not the casual users. There was a big fuss during the 80s about how much casual middle-class drug use there was and how respectable folks were supporting the markets. It’s certainly true that most people who are illicit drug users are employed, stable respectable citizens. But it doesn’t follow that if we could get the employed, stable respectable citizens to stop using illicit drugs, the problem would mostly go away.

That turns out not to be true; the problem is concentrated in a relatively small hard core. Four-fifths of the cocaine consumed in this country is consumed by about 2.5 million very heavy cocaine users. All the rest of the cocaine users, the bulk of the survey reported cocaine use, accounts for very little quantity. We use about $30 billion a year worth of cocaine in this country. If there were 10 million people, and the survey says there aren’t that many anymore, but if there were 10 million people, each of them using $500 worth of cocaine a year — that’s a couple of rocks a week — that would only be $5 billion worth. The other $25 billion has to go to people who use a lot of cocaine.

If we took marijuana out of the equation, the number of illicit drug users would collapse dramatically. The drug problem wouldn’t change much at all, because the drug problem we really have isn’t much about marijuana.

[...]

Marijuana generates more arrests than any other illicit drug. Much of that doesn’t have anything to do with law enforcement specifically targeting drug infractions. Much of that is literally somebody’s driving a little funny, gets pulled over and the cop smells the marijuana smoke or sees the baggie on the seat. There are relatively few police officers out there who are spending their time trying to catch people using marijuana. More in suburban and rural areas obviously than in urban areas, but marijuana enforcement isn’t a very high priority, it’s just that there’s a lot of marijuana smoking.

And there are a lot of people that still act as if it were more or less legal. And therefore, violate Cheech and Chong’s first rule of marijuana smoking, which is don’t blow smoke [in a] cop’s face. So there are a lot of arrests. Most of them don’t lead to much of anything, except annoyance and embarrassment.

Now at the federal level, where there is a lot of effort at domestic marijuana production, you get a substantial number of people going to prison for mostly large scale cultivation. There are relatively many marijuana prisoners in the federal prison system, but that system holds only about 10% of the nation’s prison population; the other 90% are in state and county institutions.

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Two Points of View about Marijuana

Saturday, January 25th, 2014

There are two points of view about marijuana, Mark Kleiman explains:

One is that of all the illicit drugs, and of all the intoxicants including alcohol, marijuana is probably the least dangerous on a number of dimensions. Certainly, compared to alcohol, it is much less toxic and much less likely to lead to violence.

The other viewpoint is that marijuana is the illicit drug most likely to be used by juveniles, and that it is a much more dangerous drug than many people believe. In particular, it has a higher capture rate to addiction — a higher fraction of the people who use marijuana go on to use it heavily for a long time — than people give it credit for, though marijuana addiction is not, for most people, nearly as serious as chronic alcoholism can be.

So one point of view is why are we making this huge fuss about this relatively benign chemical? The other point of view is that eighth-graders shouldn’t be using intoxicants. Too many of them have now started to use marijuana, and General McCaffrey said the other month that the most dangerous drug in America is marijuana in the hands of a 14-year-old.

Keeping middle-class kids from drugs has always ranked very high among the goals of American drug policy. It’s never quite stated that way, but it’s their parents who are organized into a powerful political force.

So one group looks at the broader drug problem and says, “We ought to be concentrating on heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and on alcohol and nicotine.” And other people who say rising marijuana use among kids is a huge problem. It’s hard to find anybody who gets really worried about marijuana use by adults. That’s just not at the top of anybody’s list. But because it’s the most prevalent of the illicit drugs, especially among kids, it gets a lot of attention; maybe more than it deserves.

Posted in Crime, Policy | 2 Comments »

Are We Ready to Legalize Drugs?

Wednesday, January 15th, 2014

Steven Levitt has thought a lot about the war on drugs:

Levitt: And it’s a great question to philosophize on I think, because…most people approach it from a more moral or philosophical point of view, of should drugs be legal? The libertarian perspective says maybe drugs should just be legal, maybe people should be able to do whatever they want. That’s what Milton Friedman thought. Other people think it’s immoral, there’s something wrong with drugs. But you know, that’s not the Freakonomics way. The Freakonomics way is to actually look at the data. And I do have a paper with Roland Fryer and a former student of mine, Paul Heaton, and Kevin Murphy. And we set out to look at the crack epidemic and the costs of the crack epidemic from a purely practical perspective. How bad was it? Do the places that had a lot of crack, did really bad things happen there, and why? And it was really interesting; it was really one of the most surprising results. Because almost all of the big costs that we saw had to do not with the consumption of crack itself. Consumption of crack had some negative effects, but they weren’t great. The really big social costs had to do with the prohibition of the legality of crack. And so it was the case that the greatest costs we saw were the violence related to the fighting for property rights, and the imprisonment of people. And it was interesting because it doesn’t say that legalization is necessarily a good thing. That’s a big jump to have. But it says that in a regime where drugs are highly illegal, hard drugs like cocaine, in the U.S., the real costs that we feel then are the costs of the prohibition, not the costs of the use, because the prohibition is reasonably effective at lowering the use. Now what would happen if we got rid of the prohibition and let anybody and everybody use crack cocaine? I think that wouldn’t be a great outcome either.

Dubner: And you say that, and you say that because the nature of crack is destructive, more so than say marijuana, or no?

Levitt: Absolutely. So crack cocaine is a really devilish drug because it gives you such an intense high for such a short period of time that your desire is just to get high over and over and over. It’s highly addictive, and it’s really hard to function when you’re a crack addict. But what it makes me think is that this experimentation we’re doing now with policy towards drugs like marijuana, and potentially it would be expanded over time is a good idea. Because I think when it comes to marijuana, the social costs of the prohibition of marijuana are just really low. Very few people in the United States are being killed over marijuana. The gangs are not making their money off marijuana. Marijuana in some very real sense is too cheap. It’s too easy to grow yourself and so it isn’t the source of all of the ills that come with prohibition. And so, so the gains of legalizing marijuana for society are much smaller than the gains would be to legalizing cocaine if you could control how the outcome came.

Dubner: So let me ask you this, whenever I hear a police department or some organization representing law enforcement talk against legalizing marijuana, the skeptic in me says oh well that’s because prosecuting and pursuing marijuana is a big part of police work and if it were decriminalized then the police would get unfunded. Is that a ridiculous thought to have?

Levitt: No, I like the…We always think about incentives, and certainly if one of the incentives that a police department has is to be busy. We know there are a lot more police officers in places with a lot more crime. So if there was no crime to deal with there wouldn’t be many police officers. I mean, if you think about firefighters, talk about putting yourself out of a job, there aren’t any fires anymore. I don’t know what firefighters do all day. They’ve been pretty good I think at figuring out how to do things other than go put out fires. But, you know, you could imagine that if all the crime went away, the police would end up looking a lot more like firefighters than they would like police officers. And we just wouldn’t need that many of them around. So I think that’s sensible. But I also think that it’s deeper than that in that there is a mindset among the police which is that the law says that marijuana is illegal and it’s my job to uphold the law. And therefore marijuana is terrible.

Dubner: And Levitt let me just ask you one more thing before we move on about marijuana in particular. So Gallup polls, which are pretty consistent over time show that about 40 years ago, 12 percent of Americans favored marijuana legalization. And that number is up to 58 now. So almost five times as many. What do you think that represents, anything dramatic, or are we just seeing one of those gradual lines shifting that happens in society and nothing more than that?

Levitt: I think it’s a reaction to the fact that marijuana just hasn’t proven to be that damaging, that a lot of people smoke marijuana, it doesn’t ruin their lives, and they go on to be regular folks who no longer smoke marijuana. It’s just, a lot of it comes down to how much weight you put on the utility of the user. Right, if you really think that the people who are smoking a lot of dope are having a lot of fun with it, then probably you tip the calculus toward let them smoke it. Otherwise if you think that’s the wrong kind of fun, you shouldn’t count that, then you think it shouldn’t be legal. But in a lot of ways I think it comes down to that simple issue.

Dubner: And and Levitt just for the record, when’s the last time you smoked dope?

Levitt: Oh, man it’s been a long time. I think it’s been…I think it’s been…It’s been at least probably close to 20 years.

Dubner: If marijuana were totally and entirely decriminalized in Illinois and you could go to a nice little deli right outside the U. of C. there and buy some, would you do it tomorrow, or the next week?

Levitt: I would occasionally smoke, but it wouldn’t be a way of life I don’t think.

Dubner: would you like to say, try to play golf while stoned? Would that be a thrill for you?

Levitt: No, not at all. I take my golf pure.

Posted in Crime, Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Toddler Thug-in-Training

Thursday, January 9th, 2014

I’m surprised that the Omaha police union posted this video of a toddler thug-in-training:

The language is definitely not safe for work.

The video was posted on the child’s uncle’s Facebook page and garnered these comments:

Toddler Thug-in-Training Facebook Comments

Posted in Crime, Policy | No Comments »

Jesse Willms, the Dark Lord of the Internet

Wednesday, January 8th, 2014

Jesse Willms went on to become the Dark Lord of the Internet, but even his early scams were quite brazen:

At 16, in 2003, Willms found his first serious business opportunity. He discovered that if he picked up a cheap enough copy of, say, Microsoft Office, he could resell it at a profit through a forum like eBay. He became so good so quickly at flipping software this way that he decided to develop a full-fledged online storefront, which he dubbed eDirect Software. Before long, Willms lost interest in school completely, as, in his mother’s words, “the entrepreneurial spirit took over.” His grades plummeted. By the beginning of 12th grade, Willms was often asking his mother to ferry him home at lunch so he could put in an extra hour of work on eDirect. Finally, they struck a bargain. “I knew that if I made him go to school, it would be a daily fight,” Linda Willms told me. “So we made a deal that if he could make money by a certain time frame, he could drop out of school. If he didn’t, he would take all of his core subjects the next semester.”

But there was never any real question about whether Willms could make money online. Soon, he assembled a staff of nearly a dozen people and opened an office. Before his former classmates even graduated from high school, Willms had shaped eDirect into one of the largest Microsoft resellers on the Web. He also began to acquire a reputation around Sherwood Park as a business prodigy; those who had scoffed at him in school suddenly saw him driving around town in his $280,000 black Lamborghini Murciélago. (Willms also kept a bright-yellow one garaged in Las Vegas for whenever he visited.)

Just as with his later work, Willms’s success with eDirect seemed, on the surface, to be the product of a staggering business talent. The problem was that even then, his greatest gift was for navigating the more shadowy areas of the marketplace—which is why Willms, at 18, became the target of a lawsuit by Microsoft that accused him of trafficking in massive quantities of “counterfeit, tampered and/or infringing” copies of its software.

How, you might wonder, does a teenager achieve something like that? When Willms first launched eDirect, he filled orders on a case-by-case basis: he would find an inexpensive piece of software, sell it online, and clear a $20 or $30 profit. But if he wanted to expand, he would need access to a steadier product supply. Somehow, around the time he first started hiring acquaintances from school to handle customer service and Web design, Willms began obtaining large quantities of Windows-related CD-ROMs—some of which had once been shipped with Dell computers, some of which were of murkier provenance. “It was a gray area,” a former employee told me. “Our job was basically to convince people that it was fine to install this software.”

As eDirect expanded, so did the number of customers complaining about dubious products. “It became a frustrating place to work, because I was the one trying to convince customers that it was fine, but after a while, you’d have to lie to them,” the same former employee told me. “The reason I quit in the end was that we got these copies of Office sent back to us, and the foil on the top saying it was authentic just peeled right off. I said it was clearly pirated, but Jesse was like, ‘No it’s not!’?”

In March 2006, after receiving hundreds of complaints about eDirect-sold software and repeatedly warning Willms to stop selling copyright-infringing products, Microsoft finally sued. What the company found in pursuing the case surprised even its hardened anti-piracy lawyers. “Usually with people involved in counterfeiting and piracy, you see people acting very cautiously, very suspiciously,” says Scott Wilsdon, Microsoft’s lead counsel in the suit. “The opposite was true with Jesse. It looked like he went into this from the outset to grab as much cash as he could as quickly as he could. He seemed to have no concern for the customer and no appreciation of the consequences.”

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Somali piracy was reduced to zero this year

Tuesday, December 31st, 2013

Somali piracy was reduced to zero this year:

In all of 2013, only nine vessels were attacked by pirates off the Horn of Africa, 4 in the final 2 months of the year. None were successfully hijacked.

(Hat tip to T. Greer.)

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