Author: Andrew Sullivan

Brian Ries sees Google’s $3.2 billion acquisition of the smart-home tech company Nest as part of a push for total data dominance:

No longer satisfied crunching data gleaned from the lives we lead on computers and smartphones, Google will soon have a hand in data that maps the patterns of our lives in our homes. Our home-data. Smart-thermostats will lead to smart-sinks. Smart-sinks will leak into smart-refrigerators. Smart-refrigerators to smart-stoves. Smart-stoves to smart-beds (already a thing). And so on. … The company, it can be surmised, could soon know the hours we sleep. The time we wake up. The amount of water we used when we bathe.

Madrigal’s take:

I think it’s easier to slot in this purchase with Google’s recent push into robotics, led by the former head of Android, Andy Rubin. Nest always thought of itself as a robotics company; the robot is just hidden inside this sleek Appleish case. Look at who the company brought in as its VP of technology: Yoky Matsuoka, a roboticist and artificial intelligence expert from the University of Washington. In an interview I did with her in 2012, Matsuoka explained why that made sense. She saw Nest positioned right in a place where it could help machine and human intelligence work together: “The intersection of neuroscience and robotics is about how the human brain learns to do things and how machine learning comes in to augment that.”

Joshua Gans worries that Google’s acquisitions are stifling innovation:

Some are concerned about the data. Nest have said that it will remain private. Frankly, that is the last of my concerns. The data is something that can be used to make things work better. In any case, my bet is that Google will provide an option to opt in to share data in return for some better features down the line. As with pretty much every other case involving privacy, people will give it up in a heartbeat without much in the way of negative consequences. That was inevitable — Google or no Google — and, in fact, Google has a reputation to stabilise with this and so is surely a better place for that data to reside.

My main worry is on the innovation front. I don’t want Nest to stop. But there are precedents for that happening with Google. My favourite example is GrandCentral. In 2007, GrandCentral had done the seemingly impossible — finally worked out a sensible way for people to have a single contact number. David Pogue described it quite perfectly and enthusiastically. Soon after Google bought GrandCentral. The hope is that they would bring it to scale and move it beyond the US. In other words, do what they are promising to do for Nest. It then lay dormant for 2 years before being relaunched as Google Voice. Apart from some basic integration, not much has changed. This was a service that should have replaced all others — including Skype — and it didn’t happen. It is hard to point the finger anywhere else but Google for that.

Henry Blodget wonders why Apple didn’t snatch up Nest first:

Nest makes connected thermostats and smoke detectors. It was founded by Tony Fadell, one of the guys who designed Apple’s iPod. Nest products look like Apple products. Nest products are beloved by people who love Apple products. Nest products are sold in Apple stores. Nest, in short, looked like a perfect acquisition for Apple, which is struggling to find new product lines to expand into and has a mountain of cash rotting away on its balance sheet with which it could buy things. But Apple didn’t buy Nest. Google did. And this appears to continue a pattern in which — in the bitter head-to-head battle between Apple and Google — Google is fixing its weaknesses (hardware) much faster than Apple is fixing its own weaknesses (software and services). At first glance, in other words, it appears that Google’s aggressiveness has once again caught Apple snoozing. And now a company that looked to be a perfect future division of Apple is gone for good.

Yesterday, SCOTUS heard oral arguments for National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning, the case challenging Obama’s controversial recess appointments made during an intrasession Congressional break. Lyle Denniston observes that “some of the Justices whose votes the government almost certainly needs to salvage an important presidential power were more than skeptical”:

Perhaps the most unfortunate moment for presidential authority was a comment by Justice Stephen G. Breyer that modern Senate-White House battles over nominations were a political problem, not a constitutional problem.  Senators of both parties have used the Constitution’s recess appointment provisions to their own advantage in their “political fights,” Breyer said, but noted that he could not find anything in the history of the clause that would “allow the president to overcome Senate resistance” to nominees.

Serwer analyzes the case:

The question is how big of a headache the high court wants to give the Obama administration and future presidents–from either party.

Siding with the D.C. Circuit ruling entirely would make it much harder for the government to function, especially if the opposing party controls the Senate. With the filibuster nuked for presidential appointments, the stakes are lower because nominees can be confirmed by a majority vote. But the high court could rule that the Senate gets to decide when it’s in recess, ruling that only Obama’s recess appointments, made in defiance of unprecedented Republican obstruction, are invalid.

“If the Court does not allow the traditional recess appointments, you’ll have a federal bureau created by Congress but one that Congress won’t allow the president to staff,” said Adam Winkler, a law professor at the UCLA School of Law. It would also mean the recess appointment power would be all but useless to future presidents if the opposite party controls the Senate, because they could just keep it in session virtually all the time. That could be Obama’s fate if Republicans take back the Senate in 2014.

Ilya Sharpiro weighs in:

Justice Kennedy said that he was “in search of a limiting principle” to the government’s position—so as not to simply give the president sole discretion to determine when the Senate is or isn’t in recess. Justice Kagan was left asking both sides how the Court should rule given that the presidential practice—whose history prior to the Truman administration the parties dispute—seemed to so clearly contradict the constitutional text and structure.

And indeed that is the question: If it’s true, as an overwhelming majority of the justices seemed to think, that the president was only supposed to have the power to make recess appointments during intersession recesses, and only for vacancies that arose during such recesses, what does it mean that this correct interpretation has never been followed?

Last week, Eric Posner urged the Supreme Court not to rely on originalism when deciding the case:

[C]onsider what the originalist must ignore: the huge growth of the country, and the vastly expanded federal bureaucracy that allows the national government to be much more involved in the regulation of everyday life. In 1789, the president made do with a single part-time attorney general. Today, the Justice Department employs more than 100,000 people. The founders did not anticipate the party system, and could not foresee that opportunities for conflict between the president and Senate would multiply infinitely. They surely did not foresee all the opportunities for obstruction afforded to a Senate with 100 members (compared with 26 at the founding) that often operates by consensus, or supermajority rule.’

Andrew Rudalevige thinks Obama is in the wrong:

The basic issue facing the court is what counts as a “recess” — and, along the way, whether the Senate, or the president, gets to decide whether the Senate is sitting. Here I tend to agree that the Obama administration overstepped. In its memo in January 2012, the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel concluded that “the President… has discretion to conclude that the Senate is unavailable to perform its advise-and-consent function and to exercise his power to make recess appointments.” But as the D.C. Circuit responded, “Allowing the President to define the scope of his own appointments power would eviscerate the Constitution’s separation of powers.”  The president was acting rationally in the face of opposition obstructionism, seeking to activate the CFPB and rescue the NLRB from quorum-less impotence. But that doesn’t mean his actions were legal.

Bernstein approves of Rudalevige’s solution:

Presidency scholar Andrew Rudalevige runs though the issues involved, and suggests the Supreme Court should opt for a middle ground: Retain the president’s traditional recess appointment power, but allow senators to prevent recess appointments by remaining in session — even if “in session” means only holding pro forma meetings. That’s not a bad outcome. The Senate should have the ability to block presidential appointments; if a Senate under divided government really wants to refuse to staff the government, that desire is probably constitutionally protected, for better or worse. Those senators who refuse the president’s requests would risk the possibility of a backlash.

Earlier this month, Victor Williams hoped that the Court will decline to rule on the issue at all:

As I argued in amicus briefs to the DC Circuit and the Supreme Court [PDF], this case presents a non-reviewable political question. Throughout our Republic’s history, the court has recognized that some questions are committed by the Constitution’s text to the exclusive discretion of the elected political branches.

Allahpundit dismisses this argument:

Per Gabe Malor, there’s a chance that the Court could decline to rule at all on grounds that this is a political question, i.e. a dispute over powers between the executive and legislature on which the Constitution provides no meaningful guidance. Let the political process sort that out, not the courts. Two problems with that in this case, though. One: The plaintiff challenging O’s recess appointments in the NLRB case isn’t the Senate, it’s a corporation. Technically, this is a case about the executive’s power to regulate private entities by making appointments to regulatory bodies through dubious procedures.

Lastly, Harsanyi argues that, contra Andrew Rosenthal, that the extremism of the GOP is no excuse for abusing executive power:

“In this particular case” is the favored argument for ignoring tradition and the law. Neither party is innocent. I noticed John Yoo making a similar rationalization in a NRO piece criticizing Obama for executive overreach (snicker if you must) on NLRB appointments: “Presidents, I think, should make broader claims of presidential power when the stakes for the nation and the office are higher than whether Boeing should be allowed to open a plant in South Carolina,” he wrote.

If only Obama had a better imagination and loftier goals! Then, misusing executive power might be worth arguing for. For Yoo, The War on Terror trumps any concern about abuse. For Rosenthal, and many liberals, it’s Republican obstinacy to Obama’s agenda that is an unprecedented roadblock that excuses overreach.

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Joshua Hammer profiles the photographer and video artist Adam Magyar, who creates stunning panoramas of urban life:

In a growing body of photographic and video art done over the past decade, Magyar bends conventional representations of time and space, stretching milliseconds into minutes, freezing moments with a resolution that the naked eye could never have perceived. His art evokes such variegated sources as Albert Einstein, Zen Buddhism, even the 1960s TV series The Twilight Zone. The images – sleek silver subway cars, solemn commuters lost in private worlds – are beautiful and elegant, but also produce feelings of disquiet. “These moments I capture are meaningless, there is no story in them, and if you can catch the core, the essence of being, you capture probably everything,” Magyar says in one of the many cryptic comments about his work that reflect both their hypnotic appeal and their elusiveness. There is a sense of stepping into a different dimension, of inhabiting a space between stillness and movement, a time-warp world where the rules of physics don’t apply.

The above video is from Magyar’s Stainless series, which captures fast-moving subway trains and waiting straphangers:

Magyar shot the footage at 56 times normal speed, turning 12-second blurs into nearly 12-minute films of excruciating slowness. His commuters stand, together yet apart, with the studied, three-dimensional grace of statues – only the twitch of a lip or a finger drawn toward an iPhone indicating that these people were caught in hyper-slow motion, inhabiting an elongated moment. Magyar extracts drama from an infinitesimal flash of time. “I want to capture something that happens in milliseconds, something that you don’t even realize took place,” he told me. “I’m extending the moments – the present, the now – because as humans we live only in the past and the future. But the only existence we have is now, and that is something that we don’t even consider.”

Nine women in Sweden have received womb transplants:

“This is a new kind of surgery,” Dr Mats Brannstrom said in an interview from Gothenburg. “We have no textbook to look at.” Brannstrom, chair of the obstetrics and gynaecology department at the University of Gothenburg, is leading the initiative. Next month, he and colleagues will run the first-ever workshop on how to perform womb transplants and they plan to publish a scientific report on their efforts soon. He said the nine womb recipients were doing well. Many had had periods six weeks after the transplants, an early sign that the wombs were healthy and functioning. One woman had an infection in her newly received uterus and others had some minor rejection episodes, but none of the recipients or donors needed intensive care after the surgery, Brannstrom said. All left the hospital within days.

Victoria Turk explains why the procedure is controversial:

[O]ne of the stickiest points in this particular study is the element of risk undertaken by the donors, and not just the receivers, of the transplant uteruses.

Because more blood vessels have to be taken from around the womb for it to have a better chance of functioning well, it’s a riskier operation than a regular hysterectomy. The question then, is whether it’s fair to let healthy people risk such medical complications for the non-life-saving benefit of someone else? The UK doesn’t think so, but there is a way around this. In a similar project planned for the end of 2014, doctors in Britain will instead use wombs from brain-dead donors whose hearts are still beating for transplants in five women. That’s more comparable to what usually happens in organ donation situations, and is a lot less controversial than asking a healthy person to go through the donation procedure.

Ultimately, however, all the risks for both parties—donor and recipient—must be weighed against the benefit of having a womb in the first place. Because the womb transplant won’t allow the women to have children the conventional way, and only through IVF, the only real advantage it offers is the chance to carry biological pregnancies. While that might seem a pretty slim benefit in itself, the problem is that right now, that’s pretty pivotal to having children at all. We’re not yet growing babies in Matrix-like pods. Sure, there’s adoption—but our widespread acceptance of IVF suggests we understand the desire to have our own biological children, so should women without a womb not also be given the same opportunity, if it’s at all possible?

George Dvorsky is more succinct:

This is all quite amazing — and it’ll truly be a major step forward for science and personal reproductive autonomy if and when the first baby is born as a result of this procedure. At the same time, however, it does feel a bit… privileged.

Homosexuality has been illegal there already, but for good measure, the government just enacted a new law criminalizing gay marriage and gay rights activism:

A new law in Nigeria, dubbed the “Jail the Gays” bill, is encouraging the persecution of gays and will endanger programs fighting HIV-AIDS in the gay community, said Dorothy Aken’Ova, executive director of Nigeria’s International Center for Reproductive Health and Sexual Rights. On Monday, President Goodluck Jonathan’s office confirmed that the Nigerian leader signed the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act that criminalizes gay marriage, gay organizations and anyone working with or promoting them. In Bauchi state, police entrapped four gay men and tortured them into naming others, Aken’Ova said. She said the police have drawn up a list of 168 wanted gay men, of whom 38 have been arrested in recent weeks.

Shackford is especially disturbed by the new restrictions on speech:

Any person who registers, operates or participates in gay clubs, societies and organizations or directly or indirectly makes public show of same-sex amorous relationship in Nigeria commits an offence and shall each be liable on conviction to a term of 10 years in prison.

That’s some scary stuff right there. Much like Russia’s ban on “gay propaganda” making it next to impossible to legally advocate for gays having the same rights as their heterosexual counterparts, this part of the law essentially criminalizes any sort of organizational efforts to ultimately overturn the law or attempt to change public opinion so that Nigerians don’t see homosexuals as enemies.

Robyn Pennacchia urges the Obama administration to reconsider US aid to Nigeria:

If we’re not going to support Russia because of their hideous anti-gay laws, I certainly don’t think we should be engaging with Nigeria either, terrorism or no. The reason we’re giving them support is because the Christian government is in danger of being overthrown by the northern Islamic population that seeks to implement Sharia Law. Which is bad, but this, quite frankly, is not the biggest step up. While the aid provided by France and other European nations may not be enough to convince Jonathan to repeal the law, the military and economic aid from the U.S. just might. In all likelihood, they probably need us more than they need to send people to jail for being gay. If he wants to fight terrorism, he can do it with all his oil money and perhaps some of his jaunty hat money, not ours. Because, quite frankly, this is terrorism. If we fund Nigeria while this law is in effect, we are funding terrorism of LGBT citizens.