Tag Archives: regulation

Bank Experts Need Risk Management Advice from Government Bureaucrats

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Federal Reserve System Governor Lael Brainard actually said that with a straight face [Wall Street Journal‘s paraphrase]:

…financial regulators should direct the nation’s biggest banks to take new steps to manage climate-related risks as part of a broader effort to monitor potential hazards posed to the financial system.

She said this (quoted by WSJ) at last week’s conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston:

Ultimately, I anticipate it will be helpful to provide supervisory guidance for large banking institutions in their efforts to appropriately measure, monitor, and manage material climate-related risks.

Yeah. Because finance businessmen, bankers, whose businesses live or die on their abilities, are incapable of understanding the financial risks to their businesses without the…guidance…of government bureaucrat/regulators.

Essential Services

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A Florida bill is starting to make inroads on defining what services are essential in an emergency.

State Senator Jason Brodeur (R, Sanford) filed Senate Bill 254 on September 17. It stipulates that “emergency orders may not expressly prohibit religious institutions from regular religious services or activities.”
On Thursday, state Representative Nick DiCeglie (R, Indian Rocks Beach) filed a House companion, House Bill 215, which reiterates that an emergency lockdown or shutdown order must apply equally across businesses and religious institutions.

The bill, a shockingly concise one-pager, says

An emergency order…may not expressly prohibit a religious institution from conducting regular religious services or activities. However, a general provision in an emergency order which applies uniformly to all entities in the affected jurisdiction may be applied to a religious institution if the provision is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest and is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.

I’ll go them one further. Keeping our economy open and running is an essential service. Unless bombs are falling, there is no emergency that justifies shutting down, damaging our economy, destroying businesses, destroying livelihoods, even lives.

On the contrary, an open and operating economy is the best means of dealing with the emergency because that keeps operational the ability to generate the weal and mechanisms necessary to bring the emergency quickly and efficiently to a favorable conclusion.

 

The bill can be read here (the bill actually spills onto a second page by one line).

It’s a Start

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A coalition of 10 States, led by Texas, has filed an amicus brief in the 11th Circuit Appellate Court supporting Florida’s law requiring Big Tech to

consistently apply content-moderation practices and disclosures to affected users.

The Texas law, in particular and on which Florida’s law was modeled, specifies that

…social media sites in question must…disclose their content management and moderation policies and create a complaint and appeals process. The new law also prohibits email service providers from impeding the transmission of email messages based on content.

So far, so good for the two laws, but not far enough for either.

These platforms’ moderation teams also must be required to advise the poster/communicator, in advance of any adverse action, that the team is contemplating such action. In that advance notice, the moderation teams must advise the poster/communicator which platform criterion or set of criteria that the moderation team believes is being violated, and how—in concrete, measurable terms—the team believes that violation(s) is occurring.

For instance, in the case of “might offend some,” that notice must specify the group or groups the team believes might be offended and how that offense might occur—vis., if the potential offense is along the lines non-inclusiveness, the team must specify precisely how the non-inclusion is believed to be occurring.

The team also must suggest alternative phrasings (yes, plural) and for each alternative explain how the team’s suggestion conveys the same message as the original.

This advance notice also must provide the name and business contact data of the moderation team lead and the name and business contact data of the platform Director or Senior Vice President overseeing the platform’s moderation function.

The appeal itself must go to an independent arbitration board agreeable to both the poster/communicator and the platform and at the platform’s sole expense.

Tech in the Classroom

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In a Wall Street Journal article centered on the classroom distractions provided by the smart watches students bring into their classrooms, Julie Jargon asked,

Which tech option makes more sense for students, smartwatches or phones?

I say neither of the above. Technology that jams the radio signals these devices depend on so that only 911 calls can get in or out is the option that’s needed. The kids need to stop being pupils and need, instead, to be students, and their parents need to step back and let them.

That move by the parents is, of course, entirely different from the parents’ need to be actively involved in their kids’ education itself, from monitoring the schoolwork they bring home (or should be bringing home) to monitoring the curriculum the school and teachers are pushing and correcting that curriculum where necessary.

California’s Regulations

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Do they impact other States?

One regulation, in particular, concerns California’s potential regulation, under the upcoming Proposition 12, which seeks to control the amount of space hog farmers devote to each hog.

Nominally, Prop 12 is causing non-California hog farmers (and, presumably, the two or three California hog farmers) confusion, according to Tasha Bunting, the Illinois Farm Bureau’s Assistant Director of Commodities & Livestock Programs:

Prop 12 really doesn’t have all of their rules implemented yet. What exactly it is going to look like hasn’t been finalized. It is really putting our producers behind the eight ball from the get-go[.]

And then California finalizes its rules—however late in the game—and confusion supposedly disappears, and hog farmers around the US begin to adjust.

Or not.

Prop 12’s impact spreads beyond California’s borders only to the extent other States, hog farmers domiciled in other States, allow it to. There are plenty of markets, domestic and foreign, for hog producers. They don’t have to sell into California at all.