Judge Rejects Defense That FBI Illegally Hacked Silk Road, on a Technicality - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/10/silk-road-judge-technicality/ <comment><USER4> > Ulbricht hadn't sufficiently demonstrated that the server belonged to him, > and thus can't claim that his privacy rights were violated by its search.

Wait, wait, wait. Hold the phone.

So any property which, at the time of a search, hasn't been "sufficiently demonstrated [that it belongs to you]" isn't protected, according to this judge, by the fourth amendment?

So for one example, if you sign up to gmail or Facebook using anything other than your real name, they can break it, conduct a search and then whatever they find is totally admissible in court just because they didn't know who it belonged to?

Isn't it now in the best interests of the police to avoid finding out who something belongs to since without knowing the fourth amendment doesn't exist and warrants aren't a requirement?

Here's what I don't get about this case: The FBI is obviously lying about how they got the information they have. They clearly broke into the Silk Road servers. However they could have certain got a warrant to do so had they just presented what they knew at that time about the enterprise. So why didn't they? Laziness? Incompetence? Or just because they knew they'd get away without it (per this)?

Honestly I hope they fight this case on that matter of law and it gets thrown out. We cannot have the fourth getting chucked out any time someone invokes anonymity, that's not how it was meant to work.

<comment><USER5> > So any property which, at the time of a search, hasn't been "sufficiently > demonstrated [that it belongs to you]" isn't protected, according to this > judge, by the fourth amendment?

That's not what this means. You can't claim fourth amendment protection on someone else's property: I can't claim my rights were violated because the police searched your car. The court is saying that you have to claim it's your car first before you can claim that your rights were violated by the search. (Well, not exactly. The situation is more nuanced.)

To put it another way, the court's not saying that this was legal, or that nobody's rights were violated. The court is only denying Ulbricht's specific claim that his rights were violated, and the denial seems to be based on a procedural technicality.

Yes, this is bad.

<comment> X-Istence However if the government then claims that this server is owned by you, doesn't that then imply that your privacy rights were violated since they illegally hacked into your computer?

The government can't have it both ways. Either the server is owned by Ulbrecht and they violated his rights, or the server is now owned by Ulbrecht, and thus they can't prove he is the DPR.

<comment><USER5> > The government can't have it both ways. Either the server is owned by > Ulbrecht and they violated his rights, or the server is now owned by > Ulbrecht, and thus they can't prove he is the DPR.

It's not that simple. The courts follow procedures for these things: the courts respond to claims made by various parties, and if there is no claim that the evidence is dirty, or if the claim that the evidence is dirty is not proved for whatever reason (even silly technical reasons), then the evidence is admitted.

Don't forget that this is only one court. Higher courts could find the judge's ruling incorrect.

<comment><USER6> I started to read Alderman v. US after Forrest said that 4th Amendment rights cannot be vicariously asserted. I'm a little unclear on how this works. Could an investigator warrentlessly burgle the residences of two conspirators A & B, and use evidence found in B's place against A and evidence found in A's place against B, all without violating the fourth amendment? How about email accounts? If so, why don't investigations against known conspirators proceed this way all the time?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't fathom why the FBI would have been required to obtain a search warrant in this case because they weren't the ones who searched the servers - <USER2> Reykjavik police seized the data under Icelandic law and handed it over to the FBI[1]. According to the FBI's testimony[2], the CAPTCHA on the login page was leaking the site's IP address. The "hacking" that the defense is accusing the FBI of conducting was apparently entering a few invalid logins which caused the CAPTCHA to appear.

As an analogy, if I keep a murder weapon hidden on my property, the police are required to get a search warrant. If I instead keep it at my friend's house, I have no 4th Amendment rights when my friend gives it to the police, especially if the crux my defense is "it wasn't my gun."

[1] [http://www.scribd.com/doc/238796613/Silk-Road- Prosecution-4t...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/238796613/Silk-Road- Prosecution-4th-Amendment-Rebuttall) (page 12)

[2] [http://www.scribd.com/doc/238844570/FBI-Explanation-of- Silk-...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/238844570/FBI-Explanation-of-Silk-Road- vulnerability) (page 3)

<comment><USER8> The hacking is what let them know which server to have the Icelandic authorities seize.

<comment><USER7> The "hacking" was speculation on the defense's part when they filed their motion in August. If you read the motion[1], because the defense didn't yet know how the FBI located the server, Ulbricht's lawyer wrote a long statement speculating that the NSA/DEA was providing the information to the FBI through parallel construction. The defense did not show any proof of their accusation.

A month later, the FBI gave sworn testimony[2] indicating that they found the server because Ulbricht had failed to configure it properly and it was leaking out its actual IP outside of Tor channels. There hasn't been any proof shown that the FBI hacked his server. A number of people have claimed in the past that they came across the actual IP for Silk Road's server as a result of misconfiguration[3][4], so frankly it doesn't surprise me at all that the FBI also found a leak.

[1] [https://www.scribd.com/doc/235692879/Silk-Road-4th- Amendment...](https://www.scribd.com/doc/235692879/Silk-Road-4th-Amendment- Memo) (starting on page 40 of the PDF - the page number in the document itself is 28, entitled "The Searches and Seizures In This Case Failed to Satisfy the Fourth Amendment")

[2] same link as my grandparent comment ([https://www.scribd.com/doc/238844570/FBI-Explanation-of- Silk...](https://www.scribd.com/doc/238844570/FBI-Explanation-of-Silk-Road- vulnerability))

[3] [http://www.reddit.com/r/SilkRoad/comments/1b1lvy/warning_the...](http://www.reddit.com/r/SilkRoad/comments/1b1lvy/warning_the_silk_road_revealed_its_public_ip_last/)

[4] [http://www.reddit.com/r/SilkRoad/comments/1dmznd/should_we_b...](http://www.reddit.com/r/SilkRoad/comments/1dmznd/should_we_be_worried_showing_on_login_page/)

<comment><USER9> Have you actually read [3] and [4]? Based on the comments, the two posts (Made by the same person) were from a notoriously anti-Bitcoin troll on the day that market prices were at an all time high.

I was with you up until I actually read the posts, which I suspect you did not.

<comment><USER10> I agree [3] looks that way, but [4] certainly doesn't. The thread is filled with people who saw the debugging screens. I think this user's post history is the most informative:

[http://www.reddit.com/user/sjadhdaskjd/comments/](http://www.reddit.com/user/sjadhdaskjd/comments/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not sure this counts as a technicality. Do all foreign objects get 4th amendment protections (the servers were in Iceland)? Can I invoke defense of someone else's 4th amendment rights -- even without specifying who that is? Both of these appear to have the answer "no", so I'm not sure this is a "letter but not spirit of the law" thing. Sounds like the judge was just doing his job.

If the servers aren't his, how can he say his privacy was violated? Therefore, the violation is contingent on establishing it was his, which he hadn't done.

<comment><USER12> Wait no. The 4th amendment is an unalienable right. It doesn't (shouldn't) matter where in geologically a person or his property are.

We can think about it this way. The United States (well, certain bureaus) do not believe that the Bill of Rights contains unalienable rights because:

1.) Foreigners ("aliens") are not 'given' what is presumably 'unalienable' to them (e.g. GitMo)

2.) Snowden Docs (in particular the US) shows how intelligence agencies will spy on one anothers' citizens on their behalf to skirt domestic law. A serious commitment to unreasonable searches and seizures would entail protecting citizens rights from foreign actors, not encouraging it. And it would also refrain from doing it to others.

3.) Fair trials are suspended where convenient, even before executions (e.g. Americans overseas, Bin Laden).

By tautological definition there are no 'extreme' circumstances under which natupal rights are no longer granted; for natural rights are not given, cannot be taken away, suspended or invalidated by geolocation.

<comment><USER11> The Fourth Amendment is part of a document legally defining and describing the rights in American legal tradition, in this case a right that you and I both find to be a core part of our humanity and social contract (which is why it is so important it is legally respected, although I personally find the principle worthy of extending much farther).

While we recognize in a moral and philosophical sense today that we should treat all people of the globe identically, that isn't the group of people the Fourth Amendment protects. In a general sense, people in other countries are not subject to American law (despite being part of the same humanity and, we can agree, deserving of being treated with respect). If people and objects in other countries were subject to American law, there is a deep sense in which there would only be one country (The United States) with charming colonies labelled things like "Iceland" on maps.

<comment><USER12> > The Fourth Amendment is part of a document legally defining and > describing...

No disagreement there. But that doesn't mean that the document grants the right. It merely recognizes the rights.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that __all __men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...

These rights __are not __granted by the United States. The United States cannot grant or take away natural rights. That 's what they are and how they were intended to work.

<comment><USER13> The Declaration of Independence is not part of the Constitution, you know.

Also, there are limits on those rights. There's one example in the opinion; if the police somewhere else discover some incriminating information about you and voluntarily pass it along to American police, it is admissible regardless of whether the foreign investigation would have been valid under the 4th amendment if initiated by American law enforcement.

As a simple example, imagine a drug bust in Thailand which would not be 4th amendment compliant turns up evidence that 50% of the money from the drug operation is always send to John Doe, who lives on 123 Main Street in Anytown, USA. The FBI duly arrests John Doe and he's charges with international drug trafficking. The Thai evidence is admissible notwithstanding the non- compliance of Thai investigative procedures with US law.

This isn't meant to be an analogy for this case, BTW, just an illustration of one limiting case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This begs the following questions: Did the Icelandic government give FBI permission to hack a server that resides on their sovereign soil? If the identity of the owner of a piece of property cannot be confirmed, it's okay to sieze/hack/etc? If I hid evidence in YOUR car, wouldn't the police/FBI still need a warrant or at least permission from YOU to access it?

Bottom line here is there was no warrant, and as far as I can tell, no attempt to gain any sort of permission to access property-- and in a foreign country no less. I thought the FBI's purview was limited to domestic soil.

Anyone here a security expert with experience with TOR? The FBI's claim that they just typed random values into a login to accidentally reveal the server's IP address seems far fetched.

<comment><USER15> > Anyone here a security expert with experience with TOR? The FBI's claim that > they just typed random values into a login to accidentally reveal the > server's IP address seems far fetched.

That's hardly related to TOR, but most probably a misconfiguration of the web- server or application which leaked the IP.

<comment><USER16> > That's hardly related to TOR, but most probably a misconfiguration of the > web-server or application which leaked the IP.

According to [http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-did-the-fbi-find-the- si...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-did-the-fbi-find-the-silk-road- servers-anyway) "He also says that the logs provided in the new evidence don't match up with the pages described in Tarbell's declaration." So it's most likely a case of parallel construction

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I believe Ulbricht has just been given grounds for appeal if the trial goes against him. I find it highly dubious that the FBI has legal authority to access that server without the permission of its "owner" or a warrant. Regardless of whether Ulbricht was in possession of the server (as renter) or it belonged to someone else, the FBI would still need permission of that person or a warrant to search the server. In this case, I suspect that a U.S. warrant would not do as the server was located in Iceland. Probably, they would need cooperation from the Icelandic police and a local warrant. On top of all of this, don't forget that the FBI does not have authority to operate outside of the U.S. without cooperation from the locals.

<comment><USER18> 'I find it highly dubious that the FBI has legal authority to access that server without the permission of its "owner" or a warrant.'

The server was public, the Feds don't need a warrant to investigate public facing web content any more than they'd need a warrant to look at a storefront. They fuzzed some content to get the thing to leak an IP (according to their account). Given the incompetence of the Silk Road admin, that's honestly not a real stretch. There were SQL injection bugs in the search on the site, and he left PHPMyAdmin running on the server. It was amateur hour. With that IP they contacted the ISP in Iceland who gave up the data since the server was violating it's TOS, and the Iceland authorities got legally involved (with no legal issues in that search).

The fuzzing of input to get the IP is iffy, but it's certainly not a cut and dry case where a warrant would be required.

The investigators did get warrants for some of the evidence they collected (esp. the evidence that tied , and I'd imagine if there was a a clear legal requirement for a warrant to investigate the web server, since they had overt probable cause it would have been trivial to get one.

Besides that the only way Ulricht can claim that the search was illegal is to admit that he owned the server, at which point that admission will certainly put him in prison, so an appeal isn't going to do him any good.

<comment><USER19> The defense wasn't arguing that the FBI didn't have the right to fuzz the captcha. They were arguing that the FBI was not being honest about how they had located the server IP, and that they found it by some other means that they may not have had the legal authority to use at the time. That's why the defense was asking for permission to cross-examine the FBI. They wanted to try to pick holes in the FBI's story. If they could show that IP had been obtained illegally, then they could challenge the subsequent search as well and try to get all of the evidence thrown out.

Also, the article specifically states that the defense could have "claimed" the server as part of their motion to suppress evidence in such a way that the claim could not have been used as evidence against Ulbricht.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, I've seen them claiming that the captcha wasn't leaky, which well could be the case. Having looked at the config files and logs now, the Feds account seems somewhat shaky. They were hitting the PHPMyAdmin page and authenticating, but didn't mention this, which is very iffy. It sounds more like the "typing in miscellaneous entries into the username, password, and CAPTCHA fields" wasn't exactly 'miscellaneous' so much as using some kind of a targeted exploit that they used to get the machine to leak enough to pwn it pretty well. Ulbricht was not nearly as skilled as he gets credit for, his machine had leaked the IP on the login screen in March and May, and his notes show he was scrambling to patch bugs, but if the Feds. had gotten PHP dumping $_SERVER or something just by fuzzing they would have mentioned it which makes their account suspicious. So that's in the air.

On a separate note, there are two separate cases against Ulbricht, one in New York happening now, and the other Maryland (which is where the contract murder charges are). So he probably does need to be very cagey about any claim of ownership of the server given that this isn't the only trial he faces. As I understand it, while the claim wouldn't be admissible as evidence in the NY case, it could still be germane to the future case.

It also means the "Fruit of the poisonous tree" issue could be mitigated even if the NY case is dismissed, given there's different evidence and claims presented in the MD case, and some of that evidence is not tied to the IP leak at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So...the government gets to have it both ways? The reason it didn't require a warrant for a search is that it can't be shown that it was his server, but the case itself hinges on proving that it was indeed his?

<comment><USER13> That's not contradictory; you're conflating past and future. Suppose you're a cop and you find a box with a label on the outside saying 'drug ca$h LOL.' You open it and to your surprise find $1 million dollars, some cocaine, and a passport in the name of K Ingpin. Later you establish K. Ingpin's whereabouts and arrest him. It turns out his fingerprints are all over the box and contents.

You had probable cause to investigate what appeared to be a cache of proceeds from the sale of contraband, despite not knowing who it belonged to. On discovering the identity documents in such close proximity to actual contraband, you had probable cause to locate and arrest that person on suspicion of drug dealing.

It's actually Ulbricht who wants to have it both ways. Asserting 4th amendment rights effectively amounts to saying 'hey, that's mine and you snoops had no right to access it.' Ulbricht refuses to admit or assert that the servers were his in any meaningful way, _even though the prosecution could not put such an admission before the court as evidence_. The only way the prosecutors could bring it up is if he took the stand and said 'no way, that's not my server,' in which case they'd say 'but you told the court that it is.' So as a defendant you can say that evidence is the result of an illegal search, or you can disclaim ownership of it, but not both at the same time.

I don't know whether the original warrant was deficient or not, and haven't looked it up. but bear in mind that the job of the trial court is not to establish whether it was valid (unless there is glaring evidence to the contrary), but whether it is _admissible_ as evidence to be considered by the finder-of-fact (typically a jury). It's up to the defense counsel to raise those arguments, not for the court to preempt. In this case, the court is pointing out that it told the defense exactly what it needed to do to to make a procedurally valid 4th amendment challenge, and the defense failed to do so.

It's _not_ the court's job to step in and assist the defendant if the the defendant's lawyer is no good, although bad lawyering is sometimes the basis for an appeal (on the grounds of ineffective assistance of counsel, in which case the appeal court could order a new trial if it agreed with the claim). In the American legal tradition (and the English one from which it derives), courts are not investigative bodies, they are determinative ones, which can only rule on matters brought up by one of the parties. This is completely different from how courts operate in jurisdictions based on Napoleonic law, in which the functions of prosecutor and judge and virtually combined. Obviously this is a highly simplistic summary, please take it with a grain of salt as I can't compress centuries of different legal traditions into a few sentences.

<comment><USER21> > even though the prosecution could not put such an admission before the court

Can anyone explain "though it could be used to impeach him should he take the witness stand" from the article? Sounds like this pre-trial statement could effectively constrain his options during the trial, so it's not like it's perfectly safe or inconsequential for him to have said this pre-trial.

<comment><USER22> Yes, your pre-trial statements definitely constrain your options during the trial. Your pre-trial statements guide how your opponent prepares and presents the case against you. You don't get to suddenly shift your ground halfway through the trial because you don't like the way that your first approach panned out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As a refresher to what exactly happened in the investigation that the judge ruled "not an illegal search":

1\. FBI agents noticed the captcha mechanism on Silk Road was not configured to go through Tor (revealing the server IP address)

2\. They asked Icelandic police to get an image of the server.

Another part of the argument is that the TOS of the data center said that servers could be "monitored" for lawful use (probably removing expectation of privacy questions, independent of localisation, in the prosecution's mind).

I wouldn't call this "hacking", but the constitutional question remains. I think the crux of this is that information obtained from foreign agents seems to be admissible independent of how they obtained it. Not a fun state of affairs.

<comment><USER24> They went through the proper channels though, didn't they?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The judge states in the ruling that she relied in part on this Supreme Court decision:

 _" A person who has been aggrieved by an illegal search and seizure only through the introduction of damaging evidence secured by a search of a third person's premises or property has not had any of his Fourth Amendment rights infringed."_

Prosecutors have long found our constitutional protections to be inconvenient in their pursuit of "justice". Over the years, however, they have managed to obtain Supreme Court decisions, like this one, that pierce through these protections in every meaningful way. This particular ruling opened up the floodgates, and it seems that the FBI is actively utilizing it.

</comment><comment><USER26> Key quote:

> If successful, the move would have likely made Ulbricht nearly impossible to > convict on the central charges of narcotics and money-laundering conspiracy > that he faces.

The judge's instructions to his clerk was probably something like: We're going to deny the defendant's motion; find me the legal precedent to do so.

<comment><USER27> I'm sure it has nothing to do with his lawyer screwing up:

>Forrest writes that Ulbricht could have nonetheless claimed the server in a pre-trial statement that couldn't be used against him as evidence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> strangely how the ruling goes against the logic. I mean the server either belongs to the guy and then the 4th applies ie. the evidence from the search of the server should be thrown out, or the server doesn't belong to the guy and thus the same evidence don't have a place here. Logically these are the only 2 options. Yet the ruling follows the 3rd way - the 4th doesn't apply and the evidence still can be admitted.

<comment><USER13> No, logically those are not the only two options. What about the possibility that the guy says it doesn't belong to him, but he's lying? That's essentially the prosecution's position right now, since the defendant has refused to admit the server is his even though that admission would not itself be admissible (as it would have been made to the court, not the prosecution).

Legal rulings are like scientific papers - you should not rely on how the press reports them to get a full understanding of what they mean. Read the original document on which the report is based, which addresses the dichotomy you are imagining.

<comment><USER29> Huh? How is that a different option. What he says shouldn't matter at all to what evidence is admissable.

<comment><USER13> But it does, for reasons laid out on page 12 of the opinion. In short, a 4th amendment attack requires _your_ privacy to have been violated, not just anyone's. You can't say 'that box is not mine, and looking inside it was a violation of my privacy rights'; you must pick one argument or the other.

If it really is not your box then you don't have any privacy expectation. The 4th amendment protects '[t]he right of the people to be secure in _their_ persons, houses, papers, and effects [...' (emphasis added). You don't have a right to security in other people's property, eg if we are both drug dealers and I keep notes about you in my notebook, you can't make a 4th amendment claim about the privacy of _my_ papers even though they incriminate you.

Even if those papers are the fruits of an illegal search of my apartment, only I have the right to demand that evidence is suppressed. If I don't (perhaps because I cut a deal for immunity, or perhaps because I was smart and blew town before the police suspected me) then that's just too bad for you.

<comment><USER29> I have to say that's one of the worst rules I've ever heard. Anyone should be able to object to illegally-obtained evidence. And consent should not be retroactive, in the case of cutting a deal.

Is the a reason the rules are this way? It's certainly not because of what the 4th amendment actually says.

This seriously hurts my faith in the entire common law system.

<comment><USER13> If I understand you right, you'd like a third party at the table that argues to the collective rights of he people to be free from overbearing police and so, notwithstanding their lack of individual interest in any given case - <USER3> rather, you'd like the court to take up that function. This turns on how you interpret 'the people' \- individually, or collectively. I lean towards the former because the collective right you're worried about also has to be balanced against the collective right to delegate security to law enforcement agencies, and because the threshold of legality in each case is highly individualized depending on the circumstances. I also think that leaning too heavily on dictionary definitions runs the risk of being exclusionary, eg the 4th amendment doesn't mention telephones or other sorts of information storage, so if we are going to take the most narrowly textual approach we might end up honoring the letter but not the spirit of the law.

IF I understand the court in _Payner_ correctly, the problem is the lack of an objective standard for determining when the cost of government overreach outweighs the benefit of truth-seeking in criminal cases, or as the court puts it 'After all, it is the defendant, and not the constable, who stands trial.' The court ad established a standard a year or two before in another case called _Rakas_ (involving the objections of passengers in a car to the admission of incriminating evidence found in the car that the owner of the car did not attempt to suppress). The court in that case took the simplistic but nevertheless straightforward view that only the owner of a property that is illegally searched has standing to complain about a 4th amendment violation. While acknowledging that this is a flawed standard that will sometimes result in injustices, it is nevertheless an unambiguous standard and was a core holding that case. The _Payner_ court, while admiring the principle that the lower court was trying to uphold, agreed with the government that the standard laid down by the Supreme Court in _Rakas_ should control despite its shortcomings, _because_ it came from the Supreme Court.

In other words, it's sort of pointless having a hierarchical court system (as established by the Constitution) if lower courts can interpret constitutional issues without reference to the standards established by the Supreme Court. If those standards have to be abandoned,it must be the Supreme court that abandons them, or the whole system collapses. To quote Justice Jackson: 'We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final.'

[http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vo...](http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=447&invol=727)

[http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi- bin/getcase.pl?navby=case&...](http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi- bin/getcase.pl?navby=case&court=us&vol=439&invol=128#138)

I think you've raised some very interesting questions here. While I said your earlier statement was wrong legally, I _don 't_ disagree with your comment that 'it's one of the worst rules [you've] ever heard.' Morally it's very problematic, because as Justice Marshall observed in his _Payner_ dissent, it provides the government with a sword that allows them to deliberately infringe upon one person's 4th amendment rights in order to obtain evidence against someone else. It might well be that the decision was influenced by the perception of out-of-control crime levels in the late 1970s, and might have something to do with the exponential rise in incarceration rates that took off in 1980, which bears thinking about.

Balancing of conflicting imperatives under the 4th amendment is a real ethical minefield, as in this unrelated but interesting case from a few years which has been bothering me ever since I read it. There should be a better rule for handling cases like this, but so far I have been unable to articulate one that doesn't have any holes in it.

[http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?q=mcgacken&hl=en&as_s...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?q=mcgacken&hl=en&as_sdt=2006&case=10492252643531776814&scilh=0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The judge in the case, Katherine Forrest, issued a courageous ruling last year in the case of Hedges vs. Obama, where she ruled that the indefinite detention powers of the NDAA were unconstitutional. Unfortunately, the Obama administration appealed the ruling and won.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedges_v._Obama](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedges_v._Obama)

<comment><USER31> That's the case that Hedges said if they lost it meant the US was clearly a tyranny. And then they lost. Seems Judge Forrest got the memo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Whoa. Anyone stopped to consider what this might mean for a future where all content becomes hash-addressable on an anonymizing network... for instance, telehash over tor. So if every site is anonymous, and isn't certain to be owned by citizen of nation X (based on geography), then it's ok to break into. Anything found on any anonymous server is admissable. Disputing the break-in would require claiming the rights of citizenship, ie. claiming ownership of the server.

So basically, any hacked system with incriminating data is almost an automatic hit against a defendant.

This seems like bad news for due process.

<comment><USER19> No, they address that in the article. There was a way under the law that the defense could have "claimed" the server for the purpose of their motion to suppress that couldn't then be used against them during trial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Never understood the whole 'illegal privacy invasion' thing. Sure, it should be prosecuted if nothing was found, BUT if something is found, who cares how it was found? Unless it was planted of course, but AFAIK these two points are not connected. Can someone explain?

EDIT: Not that it should not be prosecuted if something is found also, but WHY does the obtained evidence have to be dismissed?

<comment><USER34> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree)

In short, if illegal techniques can be used to find evidence, and that evidence can be admitted, that's a pretty powerful reason to use illegal techniques.

Barring that evidence is a way to prevent that abuse. Aggressively prosecuting the use of illegal techniques is another way, but given that we're not willing to prosecute prosecutors who railroad the innocent or government employees who torture other people, well, I'd say that's a non-starter.

<comment><USER33> Thank you and others, I think I see now. Though I think retaliation (fines or maybe some jail time) would be more effective measure to prevent abuse than passive dismissal.

<comment><USER35> Fines against the police department are just fines against the taxpayers. Fines and jail time for individual officers are not possible because of qualified immunity.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity)

<comment><USER36> That Wikipedia article doesn't say you can't prosecute, it just says that government workers are immune unless they reasonably should have known they were violating the constitution. The FBI know they need warrants, it's got to be FBI 101.

When you take the stand in court you are an individual giving testimony though. The rule of law means that if you perjure yourself you should be tried.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As someone who is not a lawyer I wonder why the defense isn't allowed to simply amend their motion to insert language "claiming" the server in the manner the judge described.

</comment><comment><USER37> I guess as a cop, if my friend breaks into a known criminal's house. I can use anything my friend finds against the criminal. This makes things easier.

</comment><comment><USER38> Why isn't in the case that if something is clearly being used for illegal purposes the police can't probe it to find out who owns it.

<comment><USER39> Does anyone know of a case in which a judge made the FBI comply with their agreements</comment></comment>


Oil Spill Fix Idea - <AUTHOR>

Here's the idea...
http://www.4freeimagehost.com/uploads/6e00961aeac9.jpg
1) Create a large cone made of some hard substance.  It has a hole in the top, and get lowered over the leak.  It's wide enough and heavy so that it seals the bottom to the ocean floor.
2) Oil comes out the top until the bottom is sealed off.
3) Once the bottom is sealed a pipe is attached to the top and oil (and some water) is pumped to the surface.  This oil is contained at the surface.
4) Now that the oil is contained, the cone can be reinforced and made more permanent. <comment><USER2> They tried something vaguely like this with the big dome they tried to lower over it, didn't they? As I recall, a bunch of slushy hydrate ice started forming on the inside, clogging up the pipe and making the dome buoyant.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a pretty good video showing that: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIdufnmoeeY>

The dome was pretty small and made of metal. It seems like if the dome was very large and heavy it would work.

My point in all of this is to argue that it's possible to contain the spill using a brute force combination of the cap's size, weight and shape. And that the reason that the spill has not yet been fixed in not due to it being un- fixable, but likely other factors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yes .. <http://static.open.salon.com/files/coneheads1245765854.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER4> guarantee it's not that easy...

<comment><AUTHOR> I am sure that my idea is gross oversimplification, but am also pretty sure that some variation of this would work just fine. It seems to me just a matter of making the cone larger or heavy enough.

Obviously it's not an easy problem to solve, but I guess I am wondering why.

<comment><USER5> Have you ever tried to hold on to a small air filled rubber ball and swim to the bottom of the deep end of a pool? Its impossible. Now think about how that is magnified 1 mile below the ocean. A small amount of buoyant hydrates create a lot of upward pressure.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Infrastructure Is So Expensive - <AUTHOR> https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/4/this-is-why-infrastructure-is-so-expensive <comment><USER3> Lack of accountability is an important, perhaps even the most important, part of the problem:

With private projects if a project is overdue or if it is exceeding the originally projected costs either of the parties will be held accountable, either through civil liability enforced by a contract or in simple economic terms.

With public projects there generally is no such accountability. If a public project is delayed and it costs more than planned the public purchaser (the state, city, you name it) - and by extension taxpayers will simply cough up the money, put up with the inconvenience of yet another unfinished and out-of- repair piece of infrastructure and move on.

If we want to change that creating the right incentives is only one side of the coin. The other side is holding both civil servants and politicians accountable for the public projects they're responsible for.

Given the amount of money typically involved in these projects personal financial liability wouldn't be practical. Disciplinary consequences for gross negligence or the outright nepotism rampant with that sort of projects shouldn't be out of the question though. I find it unacceptable that civil servants and politicians who demonstrably and deliberately waste tax money continue to climb the ladder with apparently no care for the damage they cause.

<comment><USER4> I've seen quite a few articles and studies that say that government projects aren't actually more expensive than private projects.

The impression is created because (a) the media will report on a government- run project over budget because they actually get that data (unlike private cost overruns), and the public cares more about these projects. And, (b), government projects are more likely to start with an initial estimate that is too low, because that's beneficial to getting a project approved.

Speaking to your argument about accountability: Do you think the CEO of GE is really more afraid of the shareholders than the mayor of some city in Kansas? Politicians are plenty accountable. And for something like the federal government, projects are managed by employees, who are managed by agency heads. The latter get a budget and have to work within it.

Say you're the head of the National Park Service: If your new visitor centre at Yellowstone gets swallowed in a geyser, will you not face exactly the same consequences as someone at Disneyland tasked with building a new ride?

<comment><USER3> I don't think government projects being more expensive than private projects simply is an impression created by the media. Sure, private project failures aren't bandied about as much (though sometimes they still are, especially if a failure simply is too spectacular not to be talked about), simply because they often aren't interesting to the general public. However, save for downright cover-ups project failures are usually known to the stakeholders.

Government projects starting with too low an estimate is a well-known but deeply unethical practice. Everyone involved knows that the finished project will be above budget yet there's a silent agreement to not say anything because once the public realises there's a problem it's already too late to cancel the project and the project has to continue whatever the final costs may be. That's the common argument anyway. It's a bit like the 'too big to fail' fallacy. So, we keep throwing good money after bad because we're afraid of the consequences of admitting failure. It's exactly that kind of unethical behaviour that should be punishable by disciplinary action in order to disincentivise civil servants from going down that road in the first place.

Finally, I suppose the larger the organisation the more lack of accountability becomes a problem. You see that with larger companies where projects often regularly are over time and budget as well. However, I still think that those in leadership positions in larger private organisations are more accountable. While there are misaligned incentives in these organisations, too (like CEOs getting a bonus or a generous severance package even though they performed badly) there are two crucial differences here: A company goes out of business if it runs out of money. It's also much easier to hold you both civilly and criminally liable if you overstepped your boundaries.

When was the last time a state or city went out of business due to lack of funds? When was the last time a politician actually did time for embezzling and deliberately wasting tax money?

<comment><USER5> The problem is time an materials - when the contractor is ethical - is the cheapest option. Anything else means that someone needs to overbid and make "excessive profits", or risk they underbid and have to make up millions of dollars to finish the contract. However ethical is a key part of this, and we know from experience that not everyone is ethical and we have no way of knowing who will be until it is too late.

They get around this by carefully fixing the work to be done - which seems like a great idea, but in construction there are always something you don't know about until you get there. What happens is they bid for standard dirt work and when they start moving the dirt they go back and say "We bid to dig down 3 feet as standard, but there is a sink hole here: do you want us to complete the job as bid knowing the road will collapse there within a week of of finishing or pay extra to fix the sinkhole" (there are millions of variations of this). Of course the only sane thing to do is pay for the design change so it is done right.

<comment><USER6> I don't understand why we don't negotiate a fixed rate and spec for each project, with financial incentives for early completion. The contractor takes some risk, but the risk can be mitigated with better research and uncertainty factored into the bid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> TL:DR - the way to combat rising costs is to constrain the supply of capital.

This isn't going to work. Infrastructure contractors will just turtle up and say that it can't be done at the lower price. Lowest-bid mechanisms are intended to harness Adam Smith's invisible hand, but aren't working as intended.

The essay touches upon two distinct points: a) the private developer cared deeply about how his money was spent, but the public developer did not b) general incompetence of public management, by misunderstanding how contractors manipulated costs to reach their estimates and establishing perverse incentives

The way you typically solve this kind of problem, at least in the private sector, is to set up a way for the manager to personally earn a fraction of what he saves the organization - the organization still saves a lot of money overall, even after paying the bonus. But if you bring up the concept of performance-based pay for public employees, you find massive opposition - <USER2> from a public worried about corruption and graft, and from public employees themselves, many of whom were drawn to public work in the first place specifically because of the stability and security of a public paycheck.

That's when you understand that what really needs to be talked about is a culture change in public work culture, and when you understand that, you understand just how high the mountain is that needs to be surmounted.

<comment><USER8> But why do public organizations in developed europe & co have infrastructure projects for cheaper then? Don't they have similar or even stronger public work cultures?

<comment><USER9> European view: the US in general seems to have a really procedurally-oriented way of doing things. There are good sides to this but it does sometimes break down: in particular the legal system seems to focus a lot more on whether the process was followed rather than taking a step back and asking whether this is the just outcome.

I understand the rationale for low-bid rules. But actually the US has pretty low corruption and a good public work culture; IMO those rules do more harm than good. If you were willing to trust the people evaluating the bids a little more and empower them to use their judgement and pick the overall best bid (and maybe pay them a little more), you'd get better outcomes.

<comment><USER10> > _in particular the legal system seems to focus a lot more on whether the > process was followed rather than taking a step back and asking whether this > is the just outcome._

The legal system in caselaw countries has a concept called "Equity". Its potency varies from place to place, but it original introduced notions of fairness and good conduct that the Common Law, in and of itself, did not always provide.

You don't hear about it because "Judge makes sensible decision" is not a headline that sells. What sells is "Judge makes decision that we will wildly distort beyond all recognition for the clicks".

Ever notice how badly the mass media represents technology issues? They do it for law too, except worse, because they have an _incentive_ to distort the reporting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The first part of the article talks about Healthcare with this: "Which is why, on the healthcare island, the conversation is about costs. Your preferences don't matter, except where they are aligned with the objectives of those on the island. Substitution doesn't matter; there are no competing services. Obscene profit margins don't invite competitors; they invite consolidation. Justifying costs to third party payers, instead of prices to patrons, is the name of the game. It's a bizarre world that doesn't make any sense to people like Goldhill when they take a critical look at it."

I haven't read the book, but it looks to me they're making the age-old argument that 'third parties' shouldn't pay for healthcare because thats why its screwed up now. But, this is far too simplistic to be true. Healthcare is not a product, its a service. That service changes depending upon the person. Its not mass-producable or competable down because of demand in many cases. And, even if it were a product, you still have the eternal problem that people cannot negotiate for their own healthcare. You can't. You physically need it, and may die without it, and there is no process by which to negotiate or even many times know what price you will be paying. That is what universal healthcare strives to solve in other countries, and does so decently.

<comment><USER12> The vast majority of health care decisions are not life and death. Many times it is still hard to know how much something will cost and it is hard to price shop. But the same thing applies to auto repair. You need a car to get around and it is extremely expensive to toll your car to other body shops. You need to take the price the person offers you a lot of the time. But in medicine some times it is not time critical and you can shop around. We don't do it know because we don't pay.

<comment><USER13> All healthcare decisions are life and death. Just not necessarily directly. That fact complicates matters significantly.

<comment><USER14> That's not true. I have mild allergies. It's not a life and death decision to get care or not. If the costs outweigh the benefits, I will opt out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> With health care, I have a hunch that it's so expensive because the system is such a tangled web of business entities, that we have no idea where the money is actually going, or what anything costs. As a result, everybody can accuse everybody else of gouging us.

I wonder if infrastructure is the same way. However, one difference is that infrastructure, while expensive, costs all of us more or less progressively, even if it costs too much. In a sense, I like that better than the health care system, which is designed to place individuals at risk of ruinous costs.

<comment><USER16> > we have no idea where the money is actually going

This is what auditors do. If anyone in government really gave a shit some auditors could get to the bottom of it in a matter of months.

<comment><USER17> > If anyone in government really gave a shit

FWIW the government gets a better deal for healthcare than private insurers do (e.g. Medicaid is cheaper per person than if they were covered in a private plan). So I would say they do give a shit and have gotten to the bottom of it. It would be cheaper still if Medicaid covered everybody.

<comment><USER18> Cheaper, and more terrible. Medicaid is not something anybody wants and in many ways is worse than the ER as a measure of last resort for acquiring care.

Medi _care_ on the other hand is much better, though still not all that great (it's better than private insurance in many if not most cases). It is universal coverage for folks over a certain age in this country. There aren't any good reasons I've seen to not lower that age to 0 (i.e. covered from birth).

<comment><USER19> > Cheaper, and more terrible. Medicaid is not something anybody wants and in > many ways is worse than the ER as a measure of last resort for acquiring > care.

So here is what I do not understand. Why does the US not do what many European nations do and split healthcare into two problems? You have a few large insurance pools (single payer for lack of a better term) that is government run, mandatory participation and that covers emergency care and basic health services. And then separately to that you run a free market private healthcare system that sits on top of that governmental system and covers the better care?

It's absurd that insurance companies in the US pay for _everything_. The cost do not add up for me as a customer. I do want choice in the non life threatening cases but I sure as hell do not want to ever have money concerns when it's really critical.

<comment><USER20> Public healthcare is sadly no silver bullet. In _ideal_ private insurance scenario you pay some amount and get increasing credit for healthcare expenses, so the user is incentivised to chose best cost performing treatment (cheapest option providing adequate treatment) and providers are incentivised to obey free market rules and keep fees under control (sans cartels/antitrust, market segmentation). In publicly funded scenario without coupling between payments and usage, user is incentivised to seek the most "premium" treatment and providers are not incentivised to reduce operational costs.

If the public system covers anything more than emergency care (patch a patient up and let them go) it automatically creeps into all service levels (have a basic cough? maybe that's bacterial pneumonia, better issue referrals for microbiological analysis and a CT scan. /s) if an answer to the question "if family doctor/general practitioner cannot appoint diagnosis and/or treatment and refers patient to a specialist and/or analyses, scans, etc. are those covered too?" is yes.

The payer (government, taxpayers) probably has 3 mechanisms to keep [total] costs from skyrocketing all with their disadvantages:

      1. Reduce usage count (doctor visits) - free visit quotas (possibly dependant on service level), fixed or percentage mandatory user fee, etc;
      2. Fix service costs - e.g. 100$ for a GP visit from public pool;
      3. Auction paid service quotas.

While option 3 provides most incentives to optimise costs, it greatly punishes small players.

<comment><USER21> > user is incentivised to seek the most "premium" treatment

They can "seek" it, but in the public system you don't really have a route for doing that. You might want a CT scan, but if your doctor doesn't think you need it you're not going to get it.

Your list left off (4) queueing. In the UK public system, if your condition is not urgent you'll have to wait, possibly for months. Unless you have private top-up insurance which will cover the specialist you're waiting for.

(It's difficult to estimate how much money the NHS saves by people on queues for non-urgent operations dying from something unrelated in the meantime - e.g. dying of a heart attack while waiting a year for a hip replacement)

<comment><USER20> Queues are a _result_ of mentioned instruments. Say a hospital has a CT scanner capable of 10 scans per day, 3,5k scans per year. NHS pays for 500. A hospital can fully utilise the scanner and blow their yearly budget of publicly funded scans in two monts, do 10 free scans a week or do 8 scans and save 2 for emergencies. Placing more scanners does not reduce queues.

<comment><USER21> The CT scanner is usually owned by the NHS trust, which makes the marginal cost of using it rather small. It's almost the other way round: having bought a big capital asset, the incentive is to make sure it's kept busy being used effectively. The NHS "internal market" obfuscates this hugely, but there is still no incentive to over-provision because the system can't drive up external insurance costs.

See e.g. [https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=RyJfEbwGwgkC&pg=PA4&lpg=...](https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=RyJfEbwGwgkC&pg=PA4&lpg=PA4&dq=nhs+owned+ct+scanners&source=bl&ots=QK5hgf30r-&sig=bgQA8-ePsnAAwQ- tUJfYFfL3Qak&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi7q9bq4LDUAhVPKFAKHWLtDto4ChDoAQhOMAg#v=onepage&q=nhs%20owned%20ct%20scanners&f=false)

(random googling found confirmation of this in someone's FOI request: www.heartofengland.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/FOI4797.docx )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> >The more lane miles a state has, the more federal transportation dollars that state qualifies for. What is the incentive? It is, of course, to build more lane miles. Add to this the fact that federal transportation programs generally pay 90%+ for new construction, but only ~50% for maintenance, and we have a system that encourages states to build more than they can ever maintain.

This is a microcosm of a larger systemic problem with state budgets that started with the Sixteenth Amendment. Not because income taxes are bad (they're fine) but because that was the first step in a process where nearly all revenue in the United States is collected by the federal government. This was a shift from the original situation where the government was funded by excise taxes and most taxes were collected by the states. This didn't become a problem however until the federal government's fiscal advantage became so large that federal outlays began to dominate state budgets.

The result is a growing clusterfuck of incentives that would make Roman Polanski blush. State governments used to get more money by growing their states' economies. Now they pursue the twin goals of getting more money from Uncle Sam and generating more of the kinds of economic activity that they can most easily derive revenue from, because federal income taxes are too high for states to collect very much money from income tax, and because states compete against each other to lower taxes to attract businesses so are better off seeking federal funds than raising taxes. If a state raised its own taxes to build roads they'd never overbuild the network like this. It's completely insane.

It's possible that the election of Senators by state legislatures also served to prevent this slow transfer of fiscal power from happening during the first century of our country's existence.

<comment><USER23> States and local governments collect lots of revenue.

[http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/](http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/)

And for the point you are making, it would be sensible to pull out some spending as "other" (Social Security, maybe Medicare, some portion of defense spending).

<comment><USER22> I can't agree. I did not find state revenue numbers at your link, but I did find them:

Total state revenue is $930M (across all states): [https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/...](https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk)

Federal revenue is $3180M: [https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget- basics/federal-bud...](https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget- basics/federal-budget-101/revenues/)

From your link, states spend approximately $1860M per year. According to the revenue numbers I've found that means that _half_ of all money spent by states must be supplied by the federal government or by debt. That is certainly sufficient to account for the perverse incentives I've noted, since states unlike USG cannot print money to cover debts.

There is a slight discrepancy since my revenue numbers are from last year, but generally, I would not agree that your source contradicts my claim.

<comment><USER23> Your factfinder deep link breaks for me.

If you go to [https://www.census.gov/govs/local/](https://www.census.gov/govs/local/) and click "2014 State and Local Summary Table by Level of Government and by State", "General revenue from own sources" is $2.16 trillion.

It also has a number for federal transfers, $600 billion.

<comment><USER22> The fact that you have chosen to quote the _combined_ state and local taxes rather than the states themselves in a conversation where I have focused exclusively on state budgets makes me doubt your sincerity. And to the original point, high levels of deficit spending by states are by themselves an indicator of reliance on spending by the federal government, which is the guarantor of state debts. I'm not going to re-find the state tax receipt number; you can do that yourself, and you should have already considering the amount of numbers you've bothered to find.

<comment><USER23> Look at the first words of my first comment, I'm not being inconsistent, I'm arguing against _where nearly all revenue in the United States is collected by the federal government_. It's obviously not the case, state and local taxes account for a great deal of government revenue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> We know it's cheaper outside of America. Instead of playing Not Invented Here why not just ask what other countries are doing better?

<comment><USER19> Same reason that does not happen with healthcare: the mindset is different. In many ways changing the system means giving up some things Americans value more than citizens of other countries.

<comment><USER25> I'd argue that some foreign examples would actually match well culturally. Take Switzerland. Highly decentralised (imagine county-sized administrations having about as much sovereignty as US states). Very high salaries. Similarly wealthy (about 20-30% higher than US median per capita PPP). Similarly libertarian (privatization is has been a favourite topic of polititians as well). Similarly conservative. Yet building a tunnel through arguably more difficult terrain (read: risk of death, costly insurance policies) cost 10-20x less per KM in Switzerland compared to the US. It did so again tunneling right through the city of Zurich, extending one of the busiest train stations in Europe with an underground station and a new large new above ground ramp. Both projects stayed on budget.

I really think that looking abroad has a point. As an example, for Swiss railway managers it has been a regular occurance to go abroad and learn from other countries what they do better and what to avoid.

The US is just a nation and Americans are just humans, like everyone else - trying to stop with the "we are special" thinking would give the US quite a boost in certain areas IMO.

<comment><USER19> Sometimes I feel the US would indeed be better off if the individual states were in competition with each other more. In particular I feel the mobile market in the US would work better for instance if it was carries that only run infrastructure for a handful of states rather than all.

This is what makes infrastructure cheap in Europe. The Swiss rail companies build infrastructure for Switzerland primarily (unless they are contracted out) and not for all of Europe.

<comment><USER25> Not sure whether there is any one reason, but yes, I think that more competition and more local administration is a good thing. Switzerland even has communes in competition with each other with their tax system, which IMO works well (albeit I'd like some more stringent rules).

My utopia would be an virtualized, decoupled administration system based on the blockchain and decentralized contracts. I can simply choose what org I want to be citizen of and subscribe to them. An org would itself subscribe to a set of infrastructure and get volume rebates. Each piece of infrastructure has a blockchain address - if I want to use it and I'm not subscribed, I just pay as I go. Essentially, free market meets governance. Some exceptions where IMO socialism works best: Schooling, National defense, emergency services and Healthcare. Same high standards and opportunities for everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> In ye olde days in Germany, the municipalities had their own construction teams, employed by the municipality. That meant that e.g. road constructions were done by the government - which also means that the "feedback loops" were way shorter, and there was no incentive for the construction teams to delay the construction or similar.

Now, with the privatization trend and "cheapest-bidder-wins", it's a catastrophe. Especially when construction companies from foreign countries are involved (thanks to EU-wide tender crap)... the language barrier is a huge issue.

One thing the article totally leaves out: in ye olde days, there were next to no changes to a project when it was approved. Now replannings in all stages of a project are common - be it due to politicians trying to gain something, NIMBY morons, environmental protection or, the worst case as can be seen at BER, changing technological requirements. Every replanning causes delays and cost overruns.

<comment><USER27> BER and "changing technological requirements"? BER (primarily) got doomed because they rearranged the layout to be able to sell more shopping space halfway through and didn't properly plan out the consequences of that change.

<comment><USER26> I didn't mean to allude to this, rather to an article I read half a year ago that when the construction permit expires before the thing is built that they'd have to rip it half apart AGAIN because regulatory frameworks changed :'D

Your point more fits into "politicians and personal gain", imho.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interesting and disturbing article.

The author ends with some ideas about how to solve the problem. I would like to make a suggestion.

To start, I think it is a good principle that whenever there is a problem in this country, we should look at other countries to see if they handle it better, and if any do, look in detail at how they do it, and then think about adopting their methods to the US. My suggestion is simply we do this with the infrastructure construction problem.

</comment><comment><USER29> I feel like the blame too often goes to insurance companies, but insurance companies are a natural player in a free market system. When you are sick, last thing you will do is shop around 10 different doctors and compare prices, instead insurance companies do this for you. They negotiate a price with the provider, and if the insurance company isn't happy the provider risks not being in-network and loosing a large pool of patients. In an ideal world, this system should work.

What I'm worried about is hospital consolidation. [https://image.slidesharecdn.com/annenberg- frakt-150324142714...](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/annenberg- frakt-150324142714-conversion-gate01/95/austin-frakt-changing-how-we-pay-for- care-webinar-31915-7-638.jpg?cb=1427207315)

We have created a regulatory environment with high fixed overheads, so: a) consolidation lowers the fixed costs, encouraging entities to centralize these fixed costs to minimize them b) makes it difficult for new independent players to enter the market

Rather than a metro area having 8 independent hospitals all competing against each other (giving insurance companies a lot of leverage in negotating prices with providers), that metro area might have 2 companies with 4 hospitals each, so you have 2 companies that know what the other's hospital charges for services, and in their own interest of profit aren't interested in getting into a price war with the other.

</comment><comment> throwaway-1209 Because of the law of budgets: use it or you'll get less next year. We have a few streets here which have been undergoing "repairs" pretty much constantly for the past decade. They aren't getting wider or better, perfectly serviceable pavement gets torn up again and again, several times a year. Why? Hell if I know. The most plausible explanation is someone needs to "use up the budget".

<comment><USER30> You must live in a funny-mirror version of my world. I'm in the pothole belt and there is never enough in the budget to fix all our roads. Yes, for various reasons, sometimes a stretch gets replaced that's in much better condition than other deplorable streets (usually because it coincides with some other development), but the funding is never there to fix all the outstanding urgent problems much less ripping up and redoing good pavement.

<comment> throwaway-1209 Actually same here: there are plenty of potholes elsewhere, but only these few good roads get continually torn up and repaved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> >Tolls, maintenance districts and direct user fees are less popular but actually more empowering for people in that it allows them to speak their preferences more forcefully and clearly.

How about land tax? This way you can still provide free movement to poor people, but you can collect funds very locally. ( I can admit I'm die hard Gergist.)

</comment><comment><USER32> > He goes through and dismisses all of the usual suspects. Union wages drive > up infrastructure costs (yet not true in countries paying equivalent wages). > It's expensive to acquire land in the property-rights-obsessed United States > (yet countries with weaker eminent domain laws have cheaper land acquisition > costs). America's too spread out or our cities are too dense (arguments that > cancel each other out). Our environmental review processes are too extensive > (yet other advanced countries do extensive environmental reviews with far > less delay). I concur with all these points, by the way.

> Smith concludes with this:

> That suggests that U.S. costs are high due to general inefficiency -- > inefficient project management, an inefficient government contracting > process, and inefficient regulation. It suggests that construction, like > health care or asset management or education, is an area where Americans > have simply ponied up more and more cash over the years while ignoring the > fact that they were getting less and less for their money. To fix the > problems choking U.S. construction, reformers are going to have to go > through the system and rip out the inefficiencies root and branch.

A thing that isn't mentioned (but might be mentioned in the book) is the obstructionist effect of NIMBYism. To them, the above-mentioned "inefficiencies" are a critical feature and not a bug. Why does shit (the kind that can't be built overseas and transported here in a shipping container) cost so much in US? Obstructionist NIMBYs (and the laws that enable them, like zoning / land use regulations) play a nontrivial role. There's nothing wrong with regulations that, say, preventing wanton dumping of toxic chemicals in the air/ground/water, but NIMBYs are scum that pervert well-intentioned environmental-protection laws to prevent harmless and critical infrastructure from being built.

NIMBYs will oppose _everything_ \-- regardless if it's an airport ([https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr- gridlock/wp/2016/03/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr- gridlock/wp/2016/03/07/are-you-the-person-who-filed-6500-noise-complaints- against-national-airport/?utm_term=.bd044f080999)), rail rights of way, high- density housing (whether public _or_ private), medical clinics, cell sites, and literal _clothes lines_ ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothes_line#Controversy_in_No...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothes_line#Controversy_in_North_America)). You got that right, _clothes lines_.

Cell sites don't pollute, aren't used by equipment that pollutes, don't create noise (OK maybe if you're sitting next to it you can hear fans), don't litter, don't have any sort of odour, and really...don't hurt anyone. It's difficult to find _more_ innocuous infrastructure! Of course, increasing the cost of building out infrastructure (the kind that needs to be local to the area served) decreases supply and decreases quality (and increases cost) -- but the NIMBYs are happy because their precious feelings are preserved because they don't have to see a cell tower or whatever. They don't care if your cell phone bill is higher than it'd otherwise be, or if you get shitty cell service. They don't care if a rail line doesn't get built, they don't care if land use regulation means that real-estate costs for your doctor are huge and thus so is your healthcare costs. They do, however, care if your rent is super high -- in fact, it's what they _love_ to be the case, because it means that their damn single-family home has more worth. NIMBYism -- this desire to prevent one's fellow citizen from benefiting from slightly better and cheaper public goods and infrastructure -- on this scale is incompatible with any sort of high-trust society.

A society cannot have this many citizens with this much power and desire to obstruct the construction/maintenance of critical infrastructure that most citizens benefit from. It's antisocial backstabbery, pure and simple, and to indulge in it (as the US has done) is a horrific corrosive mistake and poisons society from the bottom up. Infrastructure -- health care, transportation (of people, material goods, of data), housing -- should be a nation's pride!

Until NIMBYs are forced to relinquish the obstructionist powers that they so preciously hold, infrastructure construction/maintenance will keep being expensive and inefficient. Any reform that doesn't explicitly address NIMBYs (either via the carrot or the stick) will fall prey to NIMBYs who will somehow reintroduce inefficiencies so their goals of preventing construction will be met.

<comment><USER33> NIMBYism exists because home ownership is basically the most accessible mechanism to grow personal wealth in the US. People are not willing to risk their financial stability and future by allowing basically anything they view as a threat to their primary wealth generation asset in life. More housing, bad views, whatever all challenge people's bottom line.

<comment><USER34> > NIMBYism exists because home ownership is basically the most accessible > mechanism to grow personal wealth in the US.

That _has_ to be due a lack of financial education and knowledge of what options exist to grow personal wealth. You need at least $50k to put 20% down on a median US home. You need only $2.5k to start an index fund account with Vanguard. Guess which one will give you a better return on average _and_ is more liquid?

<comment><USER33> Sure, but you can't live in your Index Fund. Housing is already a sunk cost for everybody. You're either paying rent and getting nothing out of it or getting a mortgage and at the end of it you have an actual owned asset.

<comment><USER34> I was referring to the relative accessibility. You need $50k (or $25k if we're going for 10% down) to even start living in the median house. Even a $100k house would require you to save up $10-20k. $2.5k is a far lower bar to start building wealth.

<comment><USER35> As true as all that is, you still have to have somewhere to live. You can put some of that money back in your own pocket, or you can put all of it in someone else's.

<comment><USER36> Alternatively, you can calculate how much you'd pay and save/invest in particular scenarios after taking into account ROI, rent, maintenance, mortgage interest, property taxes, closing costs incl. risk of wanting to move earlier than expected, and personal discipline to save when not compelled by a mortgage.

Phrases such as "put it into your own pocket or someone else's" are a vast oversimplification that has more to do with faith and indoctrination than actual fiscal outcomes. It's true some of the time, but you should never make a decision based on a blanket statement like this one. It's not that hard to make an individual analysis for your very own situation, so make yourself some data points rather than listen to biased generalizations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The article is very high level, looking at root causes and (correctly) pointing out the flawed incentives in how America builds infrastructure. Here are some lower level observations:

I've been watching construction and similar projects at a government site lately. It seems that there are always more people watching than working. But that's not too bad, as often construction projects will languish with no one working on them for months (meanwhile, the site gets dirty due to rain water filling the site, etc) due to red tape requiring certain people to do certain parts of the job (such as cost exceeding a certain amount and thus the work needs to be put out to bid instead of using the on site contractor).

The exception is if it's something simple, like erecting a temporary meeting tent rented by some company. In that case, it seems like EVERYONE is busy and is doing something. Stuff gets done rather quickly. Maybe they have a lot more practice? I bet they also do multiple types of job, i.e. a guy doesn't just tie the tent down, but also helps unroll the fabric from the truck or moves chairs to the seating area, etc.

Regular road projects seem to be not so bad, more people working than during a building construction. But I noticed another thing: huge machines which must cost almost a million dollars sitting idle with no one using them.

I think the secret might be just to ensure that work starts and finishes on a project as soon as possible, that both people and expensive equipment have work ready for them so they can keep busy constantly until the job is finished. This probably would require a responsive, competitive, well-managed, and very well practiced company to do this. And maybe it'd help if people were cross-trained to do multiple trades, so that after one task is completed, they could immediately go work on another. But if people & machines were simply kept busy constantly on the project, I've gotta think the project could be done for far, FAR less money (and time).

And the author is correct that the way to establish those is via the proper incentives. Constructing a building by contract with a government agency is not a very dynamic environment. Renting a meeting tent, on the other hand, is something very amenable to competition even if the customer happens to be the government.

I'd really like to see some sort of study that simply observed construction projects and crews, on-site, in multiple locations in the world and multiple types of projects. We could get some decent answers.

<comment><USER38> > I think the secret might be just to ensure that work starts and finishes on > a project as soon as possible, that both people and expensive equipment have > work ready for them so they can keep busy constantly until the job is > finished.

You gotta have buffers for bad weather, malfunctions, changing stuff when it turns out some worker did bad job, yadda yadda yadda. Otherwise your construction ends the same way as any software project with tight schedule - buggy, low quality and over budget due to subsequent three years of fixing.

Transporting large machines from place to place is expensive and time consuming, so if you need to lift something heavy once a day, you have to keep them where they are. The company that provides those machines also needs buffers between jobs - otherwise two days of heavy rain on one site would delay start of work on another site (which usually means contractual fines).

I don't mean to say that the construction you look at is the most effective possible, certainly not. But sometimes there are reasons.

> And maybe it'd help if people were cross-trained to do multiple trades, so > that after one task is completed, they could immediately go work on another.

I would agree, but finding reliable high quality worker is hard enough. Finding one who is reliable high quality and knows two trades might be even harder.

<comment><USER39> > You gotta have buffers for bad weather, malfunctions, changing stuff when it > turns out some worker did bad job, yadda yadda yadda

Private projects face the same issues, but do not necessarily stop for these reason. After all, time is money, and a dead construction site not running cost the owner money.

<comment><USER38> Heavy expensive machinery on private projects tends to be iddle too and planning of machinery is what I was responding to.

The construction site stops idle entirely for months issue is often that fund used to pay for construction dried out or got redirected. Or that there are legal issues to be sorted - that one happen with private companies too.

Additional work "needs to be put out to bid instead of using the on site contractor" because otherwise contractors would underestimate prices and then charge a lot more or predictable "excess". There does not even need to be bad intention originally, such system would simply favor contractor who makes bad estimates "naturally".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> because in good old days they got-by by exploiting cheap labor (in other words slavery). Things went down south since they couldn't do it anymore legally.

</comment><comment><USER41> I think a major point was missed: The reason for infrastructure projects is the meta effect called "jobs." There are no projects that don't take into consideration how many blue collar jobs get created/maintained. You look at all the road and bridge projects and everything else and those projects are rarely centered around need but rather "how many jobs are preserved or created." That's what Obama's "shovel ready projects" were about. A lot of jobs are a form of welfare doled out by government. Unlike the true welfare recipients, there are people who prefer to work because it gives them a sense of satisfaction but similar to out and out welfare queens, they are recipients of a further form of welfare which they do trade labor for. But, unlike the true private sector, those who oversee these workers make sure that some new project springs up each year to keep them employed. It's a weird system...

</comment><comment><USER42> Because in badly managed projects, the managers have no idea what the project is about. They don't know how anything works. They can't distinguish good work from bad work.

Instead, they rely on rote rules and checklists to "prove" they've done their job. This happens in both public and private sectors.

For example, a friend's employer got bought by a large multinational. The multinational imposed all kinds of processes, checkpoints, checklists, etc. to "ensure product quality". They then got upset that the bids were triple the cost they were previously, and took twice as long.

And that's of course coupled with the fact that no one from the parent company paid any attention to the day to day activities of the (now) division. Instead, they relied on paperwork.

Well, paperwork is no substitute for feet on the ground.

One of my favorite books is "On the psychology of military incompetence". It uses military examples to show how organizations are run (bad vs good), and what quantitative differences there are between bad leaders and good leaders.

Paying attention to details, and ignoring superficial forms is a major differentiator between good leaders and bad leaders.

This is echoed in the story. The city didn't pay attention to the project, while the developer did.

</comment><comment><USER43> "If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." \--Reagan

<comment><USER4> People use this quote as some sort of insightful attack on the failures of government, but, in a certain light, it's exactly what government is supposed to do.

<comment><USER41> Any thinking person should question the insipid nature of government because it never seems to get perfected but is always and everywhere just a blunt object which bludgeons us into cooperating with it one way or another.</comment></comment></comment>


You never knew these 8 high-performance apps are Hybrid - <AUTHOR> http://blog.venturepact.com/8-high-performance-apps-you-never-knew-were-hybrid/

<comment><AUTHOR> Does this mean it's better for a beginner like me to focus on learning web development frameworks and Phonegap than Java/Swift?</comment>