Richmond, VA – In the name of “safety” and the “best interests” of children, the Virginia Senate this week passed a draconian age-verification bill for online platforms which would require youth who want to use social media to provide exhaustive proof of their age and to seek parental consent. This legislation is not as common-sense as its backers would have voters believe. SB 359 outlines…
Since when do government agencies applaud business deals that fall apart, resulting in hundreds of layoffs and loss opportunities for consumers who depend on those products? That’s what happened earlier this month, when the Federal Trade Commission issued a press release applauding the failed $1.7 billion acquisition of the technology firm iRobot by the ecommerce giant Amazon. The FTC, as well as Democratic Senators and…
February 5, 2024 – On February 2, the European Union’s ambassadors green lit the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act). Next week, the Internal Market and Civil Liberties committees will decide its fate, while the European Parliament is expected to cast their vote in plenary session either in March or April. The European Commission addressed a plethora of criticism on the AI Act’s potential to stifle…
Banning products will not make them go away. It will only create incentives for illicit markets to offer them to adult or high school students alike. In 2013, Vermont became a New England leader by loosening its laws on cannabis possession, making it the first to do so by a legislative vote. Reporting on these events for Vermont Watchdog, I noted how this move was…
Dressed up as comedy, John Oliver dedicated an entire segment of his “Last Week Tonight” HBO program to focus on the ills of America’s freight rail industry. A self-professed train aficionado, Oliver had choice words for our commercial railroads on the matter of dangerous cargo loads, labor concerns, and an overall lackluster attention to safety. However, he doesn’t compare the industry to the troublesome safety…
I’m interviewed by Jim Lokay on Fox 5 DC on the latest legislative moves by Elizabeth Warren to undermine tech innovation. From grocery store mergers and sandwich monopolies to the breaking of phone encryption and Bitcoin, she is consistently singing a progressive, populist message that too often views technology as something to wrestle and regulate. However, this style of political campaigning is all too present…
Has air pollution improved in our lifetime? The narrative is that our atmosphere and air quality are more polluted than ever, requiring drastic economic and societal reform to clean it. But in the United States, the opposite is true. According to the EPA’s data, air pollution — measured using the six most common air pollutants — has reduced 42 percent since 2000. This measure considers…
Elizabeth Warren and other critics seized on the October 7 Hamas attacks to crack down on Bitcoin. But the terrorists use cash, not crypto. In war, the Greek poet Aeschylus said, the first casualty is truth. In the war between Israel and Hamas, there have been plenty of opportunities for lies to achieve political ends. In the United States, we’re seeing the demonization of and…
Fun Police Episode 2: The Billionaire Every prohibitionist movement needs its funders. Its moneymen. Usually, there are powerful industrialists who’ve made it big and are “giving back” by restricting choices of the little people. For popular movements against alcohol in the 1900s, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford were the principal philanthropists. Neoprohibitionists now rely on a man with a name as iconic…
Nearly half of all US states have pledged to go totally carbon-free by at least 2050. While many states and the federal government are pushing and subsidizing entrepreneurs to scale up carbon-free alternatives to fossil fuels such as nuclear energy, wind, and solar – other states are hoping to reach their goals by seemingly suing oil and gas companies into extinction. Though American consumers have been…