Monthly Archives: June 2016

Computers Sentencing Humans

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The Wisconsin Supreme Court is considering exactly that.

The state’s highest court is set to rule on whether such algorithms, known as risk assessments, violate due process and discriminate against men when judges rely on them in sentencing.

No.  Even when sentencing a criminal, where his crime is substantially similar to other criminals’ crimes, the key is that substantial part.  No two crimes really are alike, no two criminals really are identical, even the criminal convicted today is not the same man he was when he was convicted—even of a substantially similar crime yesterday—history has happened.  One size cannot fit all, even here; sentencing must be unique.

And that sentence must be handed down by a judge or, in many jurisdictions (and my personal favorite), a jury.  It takes a human to assess the man, and it especially takes a human to assess his likelihood of recidivism or rehabilitation.  It takes a human, or a collection of us, to assess the man’s potential redeemability and his likelihood of redemption.

Computers have none of the comprehension, conscience, intuition, or moral capacity that are so critical to such judgments.  Even a computer’s risk assessment must be suspect, as the inputs cannot include everything a human or that collection of humans that is a jury sees when they assess the man’s record and look into the eyes of the man standing before them.

Aside from the principle of the question, the particular tool in question in the case before the Wisconsin Court is badly flawed.

…a widely used tool called COMPAS, or Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, a 137-question test that covers criminal and parole history, age, employment status, social life, education level, community ties, drug use, and beliefs.

The assessment includes queries like, “Did a parent figure who raised you ever have a drug or alcohol problem?” and “Do you feel that the things you do are boring or dull?”  Scores are generated by comparing an offender’s characteristics to a representative criminal population of the same sex.

Tests, questionnaires, surveys, and the like are extremely easy to game, and any lawyer worthy of his pro bono fee is fully capable of coaching his client to game this one.

Computers shouldn’t sentence humans; humans should sentence humans.  And it shouldn’t be done on the basis of input-limited machine-calculated predictions of the future, in any event.  It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.

Bank Bail-ins

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But this legacy [of bank financing of trade deals] is now under threat in Europe from new regulation aimed at preventing another bank bailout.

That’s right.  The EU has decided that tools banks use to finance trade agreements between other parties must be regulated by the Know Betters of the European Commission.

The new rules are designed to shield taxpayers from bailing out distressed financial institutions again[.]

“EU authorities” are, as usual, operating from a false premise.  There’s no need for a government entity to bail out, or to avoid bailing out, any bank.  Banks don’t need bailing out.  It’s all right if they fail.  It’s good, in fact, for bad banks (e.g., those otherwise thought to need bailing out) to fail; that’s how dead wood gets got rid of.

It’s really quite simple, for all that government experts have over-complexified the thing.  The way to not to bank bail-outs is to not bail them out.  Let the free market decide a bank’s (or any enterprise’s) fitness to continue operations, and if the market turns thumbs down, let the bank fail.  Full stop.

Hillary Clinton’s Foreign Policy

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This is what Democrat Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy has been like and what President Barack Obama’s (D) foreign policy is like.

  • Compromised national security with her cavalier treatment of our most classified information—and lying about it
  • Failed to protect or rescue Americans in Benghazi—and lying about it afterwards
  • Enthusiastically pushed for the Libya war—and then failing to support efforts to control its aftermath
  • Supported the premature Iraq withdrawal—which threw away our hard-won victory and left Iraq in shambles
  • Failed to deal with the spread of Islamic terrorism
  • Failed to reset relations with Russia—not even bothering to use the correct Russian word on her “reset” button
  • Lost all of our then-ongoing wars: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya. Counting Syria, and her BFF’s badly faded and washed out pink line, four
  • Facilitated Iran’s drive to obtain nuclear weapons
  • Failed to deal with the Veterans Administration’s apparent abandonment of our veterans—many of them the very same ones whose battlefield victories her foreign affairs policies have abandoned
  • Ongoing, slow-motion surrenders of the South China Sea to an expansionist People’s Republic of China and of provinces of Georgia and Ukraine to an expansionist Russia

Clinton is loud and proud about wanting more of the same.

Elections have consequences.

The Fed’s Rule by Fiat

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Federal Reserve officials strongly signaled they will be toughening big-bank capital requirements even further than they have since the 2008 crisis, a move that will further increase pressure on the largest US banks to consider shrinking.

Fed governors Daniel Tarullo and Jerome Powell, in separate public comments Thursday, said the Fed will require eight of the largest US banks to maintain even more capital to pass the central bank’s annual “stress tests.”

Notice that they’re acting by rule and moving sharply away from their knitting, which is to concern themselves with maintaining price stability and full employment.  With this rule, they’re nakedly broadening their interference in the free market place.

Here’s Tarullo:

“Effectively this will be a significant increase in capital,” Mr Tarullo said on Bloomberg television.  He recently said in an interview that he expected big banks to have to change their size, organization, or business model in response to the Fed’s regulatory moves.

Never mind that a business’ size, organization, or business model are solely the decision of the business’ owners—private citizen shareholders—and not the interest of any government in a truly free market economy.

Here’s Powell:

“I have not reached any conclusion that a particular bank needs to be broken up or anything like that,” he said.  The point is to “raise capital requirements to the point at which it becomes a question that banks have to ask themselves.”

This is disingenuous.  When it’s government rather than owners forcing the question onto a business, it’s government dictating the answer.  Especially when using this sort of tool for the forcing.  Capital requirements and associated risk handling are solely the decision of the business’ owners—private citizen shareholders—and not the interest of any government in a truly free market economy.  Assessment of the outcomes of those decisions are solely the province of the business’ owners, customers, and a free market; they are no concern of government.

Of course these two and their fellow Fed Governors know this.  The move, though, is consonant with the Left’s general move toward ever larger government with ever larger intrusions into private affairs, driven by their ideology that Government is the answer, and where it fails the proper corrective action is to increase Government.

False Premises

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Here’s one.

The differences between China and the US over the South China Sea issue have become a matter of concern and even anxiety.  But some of the perceptions in the US and elsewhere about China’s policy and intentions in the area are misplaced.  A pressing task is to understand the facts and China’s intentions correctly so as to avoid real danger and consequences as a result of misinterpretation and miscalculation.

No, this is false.  The pressing task is to make clear to the People’s Republic of China, and to the nations rimming the South China Sea, the facts and intentions of the US.

One problem with false premises is that they contribute to timidity, in outcome if not directly.

The issues in the South China Sea revolve around territorial and maritime jurisdiction.  China believes it is doing nothing more than maintaining and defending legitimate territorial claims and maritime rights.

And they’re getting away with those illegitimate claims, their Nine-Dash Line-based seizure and occupation of the South China Sea, at the direct expense of those littoral nations, our friends and allies, potential friends and allies, and our credibility and very operational capability in that Sea.  That Sea that hosts shipping lanes that carry, annually, world trade worth trillions of dollars in goods and basic resources, including trillions of dollars that underlie the economies of Japan and the Philippines, as well as our own.