Tech at Night: Here they come, disempowering ordinary folks from new technologies

Tech at Night

I called it, I called it, I called it. When I pointed out that proposed regulations of drones were being done purely to keep ordinary folks from being empowered, I got a lot of flak for it. I got told no, we needed big government because drones aren’t safe. Every argument the gun grabbers use, were being used to defend the drone grabbers.

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Now they’ve gone and proven me right.

I asked on Twitter, as a half-joke, when the New York Times would come out and ask for a press exemption to drone control rules. Well, the National Press Photographers Association is lobbying FAA apparently to get just that.

If you like your freedoms, you can keep them. At least until the regulators come.


So the FCC has ended the delay it capriciously imposed on mergers. I’m disappointed, terribly much, to see Glenn Beck’s The Blaze joining in the cronyist frenzy. Beck needs to go back to studying the 9th and 10th amendments, and go back to his blackboard to remember why we don’t need all-powerful regulators in DC. I’ve always kind of liked Glenn Beck. Even when I disagree with him, I’ve thought his values are genuinely in the right place, and that counts for a lot. So this disappoints me.

Sick of cable/broadcaster disputes causing blackouts that harm subscribers? Open the free market to let cable companies buy from any broadcaster, end the market restrictions on retransmission consent, and let competition bloom. Lower prices, more consistent service, everybody wins.

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Foreign agents will never stop attacking America online. That’s why we need NSA.

Public Knowledge, one of the Soros-backed groups of the extreme left that pushes for Net Neutrality, even had to admit a big problem: Net Neutrality regs can be far reaching, and would have to be specially tailored not to do huge damage to all sorts of industries. So they’re now having to invoke special pleading just to explain why cable TV itself won’t get banned by Net Neutrality. Now that this is admitted, we’re now just negotiating how dangerously wrong it is.

Remember this is the same Obama administration that still can’t even get its flagship Healthcare.gov site right, continuing to fail for thousands of Americans under pain of the individual mandate. And they want to be trusted to pass Net Neutrality, a regulation that even its strongest defenders admit would require threading the needle not to be terribly harmful.

So the Feds are starting to get antsy about phone encryption. At least federal judges so far are realizing that demanding Apple decrypt the data doesn’t make sense.

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Interstate sales tax proponents I think really need to retool their arguments. The current arguments come off as whining, reminiscent perhaps of The Aviator and its portrayal of Pan Am going to the government when it feared innovative competition from TWA. It needs to be reworked to pass a Republican Congress as an aid to federalism. Instead of talking about how ‘unfair’ it is, talk about how states want to work together, and Constitutionally the Congress must allow them to do it. No mandates on non-sales tax states. No more woe-is-me rhetoric. That’s how this can pass in the post-2014 era.

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