Category Archives: regulation

Good for Amazon

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‘Way last July, amazon asked the FAA for expanded outdoor testing permits (Amazon Petition for Exemption – Docket No. FAA-2014-0474) so the company could engage in serious testing of its planned drone-based delivery system. To date, the FAA has chosen not to respond. Amazon has renewed its request and advised the agency that continued unresponsiveness will force amazon to take its development out of the country [emphasis added].

To date, much of our Prime Air research and development efforts, including flight testing operations, have been conducted inside our laboratory and indoor testing facilities in Washington State. However, we must move beyond indoor testing if we are to realize the consumer benefits of Amazon Prime Air. In the absence of timely approval by the FAA to conduct outdoor testing, we have begun utilizing outdoor testing facilities outside the United States. These non-US facilities enable us to quickly build and modify our Prime Air vehicles as we construct new designs and make improvements. It is our continued desire to also pursue fast-paced innovation in the United States, which would include the creation of high-quality jobs and significant investment in the local community.

Their request also has from the jump anticipated risks: they’ve identified a remote area for testing and would conduct their flights within 400 feet of the ground. Other safety precautions are built in, also. The FAA, though, has continued to be unresponsive. Indeed, its disinterest is amply demonstrated by its suggestion that amazon stop bothering them with drone testing applications and go look for an Experimental Aircraft certificate—which aside from starting a wholly unrelated lengthy permitting process from scratch, is a certificate for manned aircraft and so plainly not applicable here.

The FAA’s…disinterest…also is cynically circular. They’ve already determined (under whatever pseudo-logic, but it’s their story and they’re sticking to it) that small drone operation is per force commercial in nature. Experimental aircraft, by legal definition, cannot be operated commercially—they’re for private pilots flying themselves, and maybe a passenger, for fun and no profit. Of course, the FAA knows this; experimental aircraft certificates are FAA-issued certificates.

Amazon now is emphasizing its determination to proceed:

It is also in the public interest for Amazon to keep its small UAS R&D operations in the United States, and help America establish itself as the leader in development of UAS technology. Our continuing innovation through outdoor testing in the United States and, more generally, the competitiveness of the American small UAS industry, can no longer afford to wait.

And their stick to prod the FAA:

We are poised to significantly expand our distinguished team of engineers, scientists, and aeronautical professionals at Amazon’s next-generation R&D lab in Washington State. Amazon Prime Air currently has dozens of United States job openings for highly-skilled professionals including hardware engineers and research scientists.

And

Amazon urges the FAA to swiftly approve our Section 333 petition, submitted nearly five months ago. Without the ability to test outdoors in the Unites States soon, we will have no choice but to divert even more of our UAS research and development resources abroad.

More businesses—especially large ones, which have the heft to make such claims meaningful—should take the government to task for its desultoriness in responding to requests. This would produce a far better business environment and a far better marketplace for American citizens than does big business’ current practice of crony capitalization.

Massachusetts’ Native American Senator Elizabeth Warren Objects

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The Democrat from Massachusetts is saying that

House Republicans were threatening to shut down the government if they didn’t get a chance to repeal part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law.

What Warren objects to is a provision in the proposed House funding bill—which funds the entire government, mind you—that would “undo the Dodd-Frank provision that prohibited bank units within the federal financial safety net from betting on derivatives.” This is critical because only Progressives like Warren know how to run a bank, or any other private enterprise. We’re seeing today how well government-run (VA) hospital businesses are doing, how well government-directed medical practices are working out, how well government-mandated health coverage plan businesses are doing.

Americans for Financial Reform Executive Director Lisa Donner added this:

The section of Dodd-Frank that Congress is proposing to repeal was put in place to help prevent future bailouts of too-big-to-fail banks[.]

While carefully eliding the fact that other sections of Dodd-Frank guarantee taxpayer bailouts of too-big-to-fail banks by declaring them systemically important and so subject to government seizure and “correction” outside bankruptcy law.

Finally, the only ones talking about shutting down the government are the Democrats.

The Gruber virus is spreading rapidly. This would be amusing if it weren’t so tragic.

Obamacare and Doctoring

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If you liked your doctor, you could keep your doctor. Maybe. If you were lucky, and your Obamacare Plan still had him on its cut-rate, cut-service list of acceptable (to the government) doctors.

Or, if you like the hospital that now employs him (which doesn’t guarantee you get to see him; the hospital will make that decision). After all, the government’s Obamacare

architects believe that doctors, to better bear financial risk, need to be part of larger, and presumably better-capitalized institutions.

Because, of course, these Progressive Democrats know better than doctors how to provide medical care, know better than you stupid voters how to choose doctors, and know better than either of you how to conduct the business side of any doctor-patient relationship.

In addition to that bit of Gruber-esque dishonesty and dark transparency, Scott Gottlieb, at the above link pointed out this consequence:

Local competition between providers, who vie to contract with health plans, is largely eliminated by these consolidated health systems. Since all health care is local, the lack of competition will soon make it much harder to implement a market-based alternative to ObamaCare. The resulting medical monopolies will make more regulation the most obvious solution to the inevitable cost and quality problems.

This is not at all an unintended consequence. Aside from Democrat disdain for free markets and competition, it’s long been an open goal of the Democratic Party to move our health coverage and our health provision industries into a one, linked, single-payer program—carefully run by government for our benefit, of course.

Start queueing up things to be remembered in 2016: the Democratic Party needs to be swept into history’s dustbin so this damage, among all of their other damage to our country’s weal and global standing, can be repaired.

The sweeping also should be presented as a warning to the Republican Party.

An Excuse to Stall?

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In a city with a history of denying Americans their gun rights?

[Washington, DC] does not know how long it will take to process those requests [for concealed carry licenses].

“There’s no internal guideline for how long the process should take at this point,” DC police Lieutenant Sean Conboy told a Free Beacon reporter today.

Yeah. Because in the six years since DC v Heller and the four years since McDonald v Chicago and the two years since the Seventh Circuit’s Moore v Madigan gave a strong hint, it’s unreasonable for the DC cops to figure out how to assess and issue CCWs.

And there’s this:

There is still confusion about how people will complete the required 16 hours of classroom training and two hours of range training. Conboy said that the city is still working to officially license a trainer….

And there’s the matter of public firing ranges in DC: there aren’t any.

Hmm….

The 2nd Amendment is quite clear. In light of the erosion of it, it’s time to give it back its teeth. I don’t like Federal laws in general, but here’s one I could get behind: all police departments—every single one of them—must issue concealed carry licenses absent a compelling reason(s) (e.g., the applicant is a felon) for not. There must be a deadline on the application’s favorable ruling, too: if no necessarily derogatory information is turned up (that felony conviction, for instance) within a reasonable time frame—say 28 days, or 42 days—the department must issue the license.

Questions Republicans Should Be Asking

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Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson testified before the House Homeland Security Committee earlier in the week on, among other things, the subject of immigration. Johnson, by the way, also is a fully licensed and accredited lawyer as well as a politically appointed politician.

A reader wrote to Power Line with some questions for Johnson and others. [emphasis added]

So Jeh says with a smug knowing wink-and-nod “just go to any restaurant here is DC” to see illegal aliens working “under the table.” So is he saying that the employers in DC fill jobs now with illegal aliens? That he knows and the employers know that they are openly, brazenly breaking our immigration and labor laws? So why isn’t he for enforcing our democratically enacted laws? Isn’t he sworn to do so? Isn’t he an attorney? Why isn’t he advocating against the state of affairs that he implies obtains? Why is he advocating open non-feasance of his duty to enforce the laws?

It’s especially rich when he talks about their “coming out of the shadows and STARTING to pay taxes”. Got that? He knows that there are thousands of illegal immigrants and their employers—let’s not forget these scofflaws—who are not paying taxes! OK…so why isn’t he going after them?….for criminal tax evasion?….instead they’re explicitly offering something way beyond amnesty of tax evasion—and a deal that American citizens normally would never get.

Usually a tax amnesty is the government’s waiving the assessed fines, penalties and interest accrued from failure to pay taxes in full and on time—but you still have to pay the actual taxes owed. So the illegal immigrants who have not paid taxes—payroll taxes, most likely since their incomes are low—not only get a tax “amnesty”, i.e., forbearance of fines, interest and penalties—they get outright forgiveness of the actual taxes owed! It is a better deal than any citizen would get if guilty of evading income or payroll taxes. Furthermore it is outright forgiveness for the EMPLOYER’s share of arrears payroll taxes as well…even IF they knowingly hired illegals and failed to pay taxes, it’s outright forgiven.

Republicans should be asking President Barack Obama, Johnson, Democrats generally, and quite a few of their own these questions loudly: in House—and Senate, starting in January—hearings; in townhalls and neighborhoods, especially the rural and poorer ones where unemployment is high and endemic; in newspaper, radio, and television interviews; in letters to the editor.

There are lots of ways to encourage immigration into our country, and we should; we benefit greatly from that immigration. The present way isn’t one of them; on the contrary, it’s highly destructive of our nation.

 

h/t Power Line