Drone carries a taser
A Texas firm has revealed a personal security drone with a stun gun capable of unleashing 80,000 volts.
The firm showed off the drone in a series of shocking demonstrations bringing a volunteer to the ground.
It says the drone uses a smart app to track intruders, and once it had received the go ahead from a human operator, it fires taser darts and unleashes 80,000 volts.
…Called Cupid which stands for Chaotic Unmanned Personal Intercept Drone, the security product was revealed today at the SXSW Festival in Austin as a concept for the future of security.
Furthermore there is an app:
It can find a subject and send live video to the owner’s phone and ask if you want to authorise the subject or detain them.
‘If you detain them, it drops into fully automomous mode to detain them until police arrive, if need be stunning them with 80,000 volts of electricity to render them incapacitated.’
There is more here, with video demonstration. For the pointer I thank Mark Thorson.
Constitutions Quantified
The Comparative Constitutions Project has collected data from 720 of the 800 or so constitutions written since 1789. The shortest constitution, for example, is that of Jordan at 2,270 words while the longest is that of India which at 146,385 words is more than twice as long as the next longest constitution and considerable longer than the US 
constitution at 7,762 words. The New Zealand constitution grants the fewest rights, namely zero, while the Bolivian constitution grants the most rights at 88.
Among the rights in the Bolivian constitution are “Every person has the right to health.” That does seem ambitious, although I cannot guarantee the translation perhaps it says health care in the original? There are also rights to homes, sewers, and telecommunication services. I cannot go along with those but I do think this is an advance:
Neither the public authority, nor any person or body may intercept private conversations or communications by an installation that monitors or centralized them.
Venezuela offers almost as many rights in its constitution as Bolivia, 81 according to the data. Nevertheless, I think I would feel more secure in my rights living in New Zealand than Bolivia or Venezuela. A constitution with a long list of rights is a bit like a prenup with a long list of rights, looks good on parchment but parchment does not a marriage or a constitution make.
The Great Male Reset
Men between the ages of 25 and 54 are in their prime working years. Generally speaking, they’re too old for college and too young for retirement.
In February 2008, 87.4 percent of men in that demographic had jobs.
Six years later, only 83.2 percent of men in that bracket are working.
That is from Binyamin Appelbaum.
Your porn is not Canadian enough
For failing to broadcast sufficient levels of Canadian-made pornography — and failing to close-caption said pornography properly — a trio of Toronto-based erotica channels has earned a reprimand from the Canadian Radio-television & Telecommunications Commission.
Wednesday, the CRTC issued a broadcast notice saying AOV Adult Movie Channel, XXX Action Clips and the gay-oriented Maleflixxx were all failing to reach the required 35% threshold for Canadian content.
Based on a 24-hour broadcast schedule, that translates to about 8.5 hours of Canadian erotica a day.
There is more here, and for the pointer I thank TH.
Sentences to ponder heroin markets in everywhere
Stephanie Predel, a stick-thin 23-year-old freshly out of jail, said she was off heroin. But she knows precisely where she could get more drugs if she ever wanted them — at the support meetings for addicts.
“I can get most of my drugs right at the meeting,” she said. “Drug dealers go because they know they’re going to get business.” She added, “People are going into the bathroom to get high.”
Bennington, a pre-Revolutionary town of 17,000 people, presents another face of the heroin epidemic that has swept through Vermont.
There is more here. This article suggests that the crackown on prescription drug abuse helped fuel a surge of interest in heroin. And here is a story on Vermonters for a New Economy.
Daniel Drezner on sanctions against Russia
The piece is here, here is one excerpt:
The only case of economic coercion succeeding in a similar case in history was the 1956 Suez crisis. In that case, Britain, France, and Israel withdrew their forces from the Suez Canal following a U.S.-inspired run on the pound sterling. Except that the Suez case is not at all similar to Russia/Crimea. Britain was a treaty ally of the United States; not so much with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The Suez was far away from British soil; the Crimea is just across the Sea of Azov. And, perhaps most importantly, Britain was in a fragile economic state trying to protect a fixed exchange rate. Russia’s economy has its problems, but a shortage of hard currency reserves ain’t one of them.
So the conditions under which sanctions would force Russia’s hand in Ukraine are far from ideal. The proposed sanctions coalition is equally flawed, however, as my FP colleague Colum Lynch has noted. European Union leaders are not exactly keen on the idea of broad-based economic sanctions, for understandable reasons. Britain needs Russian finance capital; the rest of Europe needs Russian energy. France is traditionally the most hawkish country in Europe, but that country is too busy planning to export warships to Russia to organize European sanctions.
And here is Dan’s conclusion:
Sorry, but the fact remains that sanctions will not force Russia out of the Crimea. This doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be imposed. Indeed, there are two excellent reasons why the United States should orchestrate and then implement as tough a set of sanctions on Russia as it can muster. First, this problem is going to crop up again…
Second, while sanctions cannot solve this problem on their own, they can be part of the solution. Over the long term, Russia does need to export energy to finance its government and fuel economic growth. Even if planned sanctions won’t bite in the present, the anticipation of tougher economic coercion to come is a powerful lever in international bargaining.
My earlier post on Drezner on sanctions is here.
Assorted links
Claims about Bitcoin mystique
Still, Bitcoin watchers said that the creator’s supposed anonymity had played a vital role in the growth of a virtual currency that has become a potent symbol for privacy advocates and critics of government power.
“Having this level of mystery allowed people to project their optimism and their hopes onto the currency,” said Richard Peterson, the chief executive of MarketPsych, a research company that has studied virtual currencies. “If it’s true and people start to believe it, it undermines that mystique.”
There is more here, and Timothy Lee adds relevant remarks. And as you all probably know it remains uncertain whether the Newsweek story is to be trusted.
How many of the previously uninsured have signed up for Obamacare?
Amy Goldstein reports:
The new health insurance marketplaces appear to be making little headway in signing up Americans who lack insurance, the Affordable Care Act’s central goal, according to a pair of new surveys.
Only one in 10 uninsured people who qualify for private plans through the newmarketplaces enrolled as of last month, one of the surveys shows. The other found that about half of uninsured adults have looked for information on the online exchanges or planned to look.
…The McKinsey survey shows that of people who had signed up for coverage through the marketplaces by last month, about one-fourth described themselves as having been without insurance for most of the past year. That 27 percent, while low, compares with 11 percent a month earlier.
There is more here. You will note that a low rate of sign-up is distinct from a rate of sign-up skewed toward the elderly and the sick. In this sense we still do not know how the new law is doing, though in a broader sense a low rate of sign-up should not be considered good news.
The History of Ethno-National Referendums 1791-2011
That is the title of a useful article by Matt Qvortrup (or here, both possibly gated). Here is one excerpt:
To be sure, the British were not adverse to using the referendum as a tactical means of international politics (for example, in the case of the referendum in Moldova in 1857 — where the referendum was a convenient excuse to curb the influence of the Russian Empire after the Crimean War). Here at the request of the British, a poll was held to unify the two territories Moldavia and Walachia (previously an area that had been under Turkish Suzerainty, though often dominated by Russia) under the name Romania. However, it should be noted that the referendum was anything but free and fair; “Intimidations and arrests were not infrequent” and up to “nine-tenth of the population were denied the right to vote,” and that the vote only was held after some “bizarres manoevres diplomatiques.”
Here is an older (free) historical book on the employment of plebiscites to determine sovereignty. Here is the new, well-timed, and not free March 2014 book by Matt Qvortrupp, on same topic. Qvortrup, by the way, helped design the referendum for South Sudan.
The Economic Origins of the Territorial State
That is a recent paper by Scott Abramson of Princeton (headed to Rochester), here is the abstract:
This paper challenges the long standing belief that changes in patterns of war and war-making caused the emergence of large territorial states. Using new data describing the universe of European states between 1100 and 1790 I find that small political units continued to thrive well into the “age of the territorial state,” an era during which some argue changes in the production of violence led to the dominance of geographically large political units. In contrast, I find evidence that variation in patterns of economic development and urban growth caused fragmented political authority in some places and the construction of geographically large territorial states in others. Exploiting random climatic variation in the propensity of certain pieces of geography to support large populations, I show via an instrumental variables approach that the emergence of towns and cities caused the formation of small and independent states. Last, I explore how changes in economic forces interacted with patterns of war-making, demonstrating that the e ffect of urban development was greatest in periods associated with declines in the costs of producing large-scale military force.
Here is Abramson’s forthcoming book on that same topic., summarized here:
Under what conditions do some political units expand and others contract? Why do some fail and others persist? In which periods should we expect universal empires and why in others systems of states? My dissertation answers these questions by explaining variation in the number and size of the basic unit of political life, the state. Using a combination of formal, statistical, and historical methods, this book length project explores the origins of the territorial state between 1100 and 1789. I first develop a game theoretic model of state formation that captures both war-making and economic constraints on state-makers. The theory’s implications are then empirically tested through a series of quasi-experimental research designs and historical case studies. While many macro-historical accounts highlight the consequences of changing patterns of war and war-making for processes of state formation, this book argues that these effects have been overstated. Rather, I show that changes in economic geography caused variation in the number and size of states across both time and space.
His introductory chapter you will find here (pdf). For the pointers I thank Mark Koyama.
Bureaucracies can act swiftly when they wish to
Russia’s takeover of Crimea is already so complete that commercial flights to Kiev from the region’s main airport, located outside Simferopol, the regional capital 50 miles from Sevastopol, now leave from the international terminal instead of the domestic one as they did until last week.
There is more here.
Assorted links
Profile of Satoshi Nakamoto, creator (?) of Bitcoin
Mitchell suspects Nakamoto’s initial interest in creating a digital currency that could be used anywhere in the world may have stemmed from his frustration with bank fees and high exchange rates when he was sending international wires to England to buy model trains. “He would always complain about that,” she says. “I would not say he writes flawless English. He will pick up words and mix the spellings.”
And he worked in secrecy:
Not even his family knew.
The full story is here, fascinating throughout.
Addendum: Andrea Castillo adds comment.
Strange sentences about Mexico and China (and other places too)
Mexican security officials this week launched a major crackdown on the cartel’s business smuggling iron ore to China, which another senior government figure confirmed had become more profitable for the Knights Templar than drug running.
There is an FT article here. The smuggling accounted for 44 percent of the iron ore produced in Mexico. And why smuggle iron ore? The New York Times adds:
Chinese buyers, law enforcement officials have said, have been pressured into buying ore from the gang under threats.
Furthermore many of the mines were not legally registered or the iron ore was stolen. There is more detail here, and here is another exotic sentence:
In a scene that could have been imagined by Gabriel García Márquez, last Christmas three Sinaloa drug cartel members were arrested in a cock fighting farm close to Manila.
The broader question here is whether “drug gangs” could find new outlets for their shenanigans, if drugs were to be legalized or decriminalized. For more on that you can read this older MR post.
By the way, via Craig Richardson, here are photos of a Chinese ghost town in Angola.:
Kilamba is an enormous and largely empty housing development 30 km (18 miles) from Luanda,the capital city of Angola, designed to accommodate 500,000 people, with a dozen schools and other facilities. As of July 2012 only 212 houses had been sold, due to difficulties in obtaining mortgages. The cost is reported as US$3.5 billion, financed by a Chinese credit line and repaid by the Angolan government with oil. The city of Kilamba is a government project that coincides with President Jose Eduardo dos Santos 2008 election pledge to build one million homes in four years. (He just didn’t promise people would live there.)