OpenMarket

This week, The Wall Street Journal published an exclusive story detailing how Amazon uses its algorithms to prioritize its brands and products that are more profitable for the company. Amid the flurry of antitrust scrutiny and investigations into big tech, this seems like a big deal. Yet outside of big tech, prioritizing your own products and the products that make you the most money is called the basics of staying in business.

All technology policy debates fall victim to the same general fallacy—that Internet-based businesses are fundamentally different than those with four walls and a front door and therefore ought to be held to different standards.

We increasingly take the wonders that tech companies have given us for granted. The...

Thanks go to Tony Heller, who first collected many of these news clips and posted them on RealClimateScience. 

SUMMARY

Modern doomsayers have been predicting climate and environmental disaster since the 1960s. They continue to do so today.

None of the apocalyptic predictions with due dates as of today have come true.

What follows is a collection of notably wild predictions from notable people in government and science.

More than merely spotlighting the failed predictions, this collection shows that the makers of failed apocalyptic predictions often are individuals holding respected positions in government and science.

While such predictions have been and continue to be enthusiastically reported by a media eager for sensational headlines, the failures are...

Over the last three months, the news has been filled with stories of people falling ill from a mystery lung ailment supposedly caused by vaping. The majority of the coverage has been incomplete, inaccurate, and done little more than scare and confuse the public. Anti-vaping activists and certain public health agencies that have long wished to ban e-cigarettes have skillfully exploited this confusion to convince people the outbreak is a manifestation of the health threat posed by e-cigarettes, of which they have long warned. Worse, they are using such scare tactigs as justification for restrictions or bans on these products, which have helped millions of adult smokers quit their deadly habit.

Congress returned from recess, the Democratic presidential candidates had a debate, and the 2019 federal deficit topped $1 trillion with a month left to go in the federal fiscal year. Meanwhile, rulemaking agencies published new regulations ranging from Kaspersky Lab services to Foskett speckled dace.

Ahead of the September 12th Democratic presidential primary debate, activists from the group Greenpeace were arrested after pulling a stunt that briefly held Houston commuters hostage and interfered with operations in the Houston Ship Channel. Hoping to “confront the oil industry” and using proximity to the debate to attract attention, a van full of activists caused a three car crash that sent one person to the hospital when they abruptly stopped to offload the protesters on the bridge.

There are a lot of useful conferences, meetings, and conventions that fill our calendars, and one that we're especially looking forward to this year is the Policy Circle’s 4th Annual Leadership Summit in Chicago. The Policy Circle is a non-profit organization committed to advancing women’s leadership through expanding knowledge of public policy, and they've got some excellent speakers lined up.

Cartels need government support because they contain the seeds of their own destruction. Self-interested companies acting selfishly naturally undo their own cartels.

In The Wall Street Journal today, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is spearheading a multistate antitrust investigation into Google, made an egregious error.

Congestion is a persistent and growing problem facing America’s road networks. The challenge facing policy makers is how to address this growing problem. Given that traffic congestion is inherently a local phenomenon, the federal government has a limited set of tools to address it.

Key Insight of the Day: While not every aspect of life in Taiwan is dominated by the relationship with the People’s Republic of China, every policy conversation will come around to the topic quickly.