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didanawisgi · 6 years

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For Heller, thank the scholarship of Joyce Lee Malcolm

Arlington, Va.– In the hours after February’s school massacre in Parkland, Fla., Joyce Lee Malcolm watched the response with growing annoyance:

“Everybody seemed to leap upon it, looking for a political benefit, rather than allowing for a cooling-off period.” As a historian, Malcolm prefers to take the long view. As a leading scholar of the Second Amendment, however, she is also expected to have snap opinions on gun rights, and in fact she often has engaged in the news-driven debates about violence and firearms. “Something deep inside of me says that people never should be victims,” she says. “And they never should be put in the position of being disarmed by their government.”

Malcolm looks nothing like a hardened veteran of the gun-control wars. Small, slender, and bookish, she’s a wisp of a woman who enjoys plunging into archives and sitting through panel discussions at academic conferences. Her favorite topic is 17th- and 18th-century Anglo-American history, from the causes of the English Civil War to the meaning of the American Revolution. Her latest book, due in May, is The Tragedy of Benedict Arnold, a biography of the infamous general. She doesn’t belong to the National Rifle Association, nor does she hunt. She admits to owning an old shotgun, but she’s unsure about the make or model. “I’ve taken it out a couple of times, but the clay targets fall safely to earth,” she says in an interview at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School in Virginia, where she’s a professor who teaches courses on constitutional history as well as on war and law.

She is also the lady who saved the Second Amendment — a scholar whose work helped make possible the Supreme Court’s landmark Heller decision, which in 2008 recognized an individual right to possess a firearm. “People used to ask, ‘How did a nice girl like you get into a subject like this?’” she says. “I’m not asked that anymore.” She smiles, a little mischievously. “Maybe they don’t think I’m a nice girl anymore.”

Back when Malcolm was a girl, she lived in Utica, N.Y. A state scholarship sent her to Barnard, the women’s college tied to Columbia University, where she majored in history. “It was a process of elimination,” she says. “I took calculus and chemistry, but history seemed the least narrow. You could study the history of math or the history of science. It had the widest scope.” She got married as an undergraduate — “people did that in those days” — and by the time she was 23, she was both a college graduate and a mom.

Malcolm wanted to continue her education. Living outside Boston, she applied to graduate school at Brandeis University, thinking that she might attend part-time. Administrators, however, talked her into the normal, full-time option. So she launched into a Ph.D. program, focusing on England in the early modern era. “I really liked the period,” she says. “It was wonderfully complex, with divisions between the rights of the state and the rights of individuals.” For her dissertation, she moved to Oxford and Cambridge, with children in tow. Now separated from her husband, she was a single mother. “It took some balancing. I’m not sure I was the best parent I could have been, but my kids grew up seeing what you can do when you put your mind to working.” (One of them is Mark Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize–winning health and science journalist at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.) In Britain, she met a Scotsman who became her second husband. She brought him back to the United States and took his surname.

Malcolm’s doctoral dissertation focused on King Charles I and the problem of loyalty in the 1640s, and much of her scholarship has flowed from this initial work. The Royal Historical Society published her first book, and she edited a pair of volumes for the Liberty Fund, totaling more than 1,000 pages, on political tracts in 17th-century England. As she researched and wrote on the period, she noticed something peculiar. “During the English Civil War, the king would summon the local militia to turn out with their best weapons,” she says. “Then he would relieve them of their best weapons. He confiscated them. Obviously, he didn’t trust his subjects.”

At a time when armies were marching around England, ordinary people became anxious about surrendering guns. Then, in 1689, the English Bill of Rights responded by granting Protestants the right to “have Arms for their Defence.” Malcolm wasn’t the first person to notice this, of course, but as an American who had studied political loyalty in England, she approached the topic from a fresh angle. “The English felt a need to put this in writing because the king had been disarming his political opponents,” she says. “This is the origin of our Second Amendment. It’s an individual right.”

As she researched, Malcolm taught at several schools and worked for the National Park Service. In 1988, she took a post near Boston, at Bentley College, a school best known for business education (and now called Bentley University). Fellowships allowed her to pursue her interest in how the right to bear arms migrated across the ocean and took root in colonial America. “The subject hadn’t been done from the English side because it’s an American question, and American constitutional scholars didn’t know the English material very well,” she says. Some Americans even resisted looking to English sources because they wanted to stress their country’s uniqueness. Moreover, law-school textbooks and courses skimmed over the Second Amendment. “The subject was poorly covered.”

Her research led to a groundbreaking book on the history of gun rights, To Keep and Bear Arms. Before it went to print, however, she faced something she had not expected: political resistance. “I had a hard time finding a publisher,” she says. After several years in limbo, To Keep and Bear Armscame out in 1994, from Harvard University Press — an excellent result for any scholar in the peer-reviewed world of publish-or-perish professionalism. “The problem was that I had come up with an answer that a lot of people didn’t like.”

The Second Amendment, she insisted, recognizes an individual right to gun ownership as an essential feature of limited government. In her book’s preface, she called this the “least understood of those liberties secured by Englishmen and bequeathed to their American colonists.” Confusion reigned: “The language of the Second Amendment, considered perfectly clear by the framers and their contemporaries, is no longer clear.” The right to keep and bear arms, Malcolm warned, “is a right in decline.”

She aimed to revive it at a time when governments at all levels imposed more restrictions on gun ownership than they do today. Many legal scholars claimed that the Second Amendment granted a collective right for states to have militias but not the individual right of citizens to own firearms. With To Keep and Bear Arms, which received favorable reviews and went through several printings, Malcolm joined a small but increasingly influential group of academics with different ideas. Her allies included Robert J. Cottrol, of George Washington University, and Glenn Reynolds, of the University of Tennessee (and best known for his Instapundit website). “I was so naïve,” she says. “I thought the idea of research was that you find information and people say, ‘Good! Now we know the answer!’”

She learned the truth in 1995, when House Republicans invited her to testify before a subcommittee on crime. The subcommittee’s ranking member was Representative Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York (and today’s Senate minority leader). In his opening remarks, Schumer scoffed at Malcolm and other witnesses. “The intellectual content of this hearing is so far off the edge that we ought to declare this an official meeting of the Flat Earth Society,” he said. “Because the pro-gun arguments we will hear today are as flaky as the arguments of the tiny few who still insist that the Earth is flat.”

Malcolm still bristles at those words. “I was a Democrat at the time,” she says. “I was raised a Democrat. I was just there to tell them what I had found out. It wasn’t a political issue for me. But the Democrats were nasty. Schumer was nasty.” After the hearing, Malcolm came to a realization: “For some people, opposition to individual gun rights is an article of faith, and they don’t care about the historical evidence.” Ever since, she has received regular reminders of this fact. In 1997, for example, Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia praised Malcolm’s “excellent study” but also erroneously called her “an Englishwoman.”

The unfortunately named legal scholar Carl T. Bogus jumped at the blunder: “Malcolm’s name may sound British, and Bentley College, where Malcolm teaches history, may sound like a college at Oxford, but in fact Malcolm was born and raised in Utica, New York, and Bentley is a business college in Massachusetts.” This irritates Malcolm. “They’re always trying to write me off because of Bentley, this ‘business college,’” she says. “It reminds me of the saying that if you don’t have the law, argue the facts; if you don’t have the facts, argue the law; and if you don’t have either, attack your opponent. The attacks have helped me grow a really thick skin.”

Along the way, the popular historian Stephen Ambrose provided Malcolm with inspiration. “He spent most of his career at the University of New Orleans,” she says, noting that it’s not considered a top-flight school. “He said he wanted to write himself to the top of his profession. It doesn’t matter where you teach. So I tried to write and write and write. You can lift yourself.”

Even so, some people continue trying to keep Malcolm down. The latest slight occurred at a symposium sponsored by the Campbell University School of Law in February, when the legal scholar Paul Finkelman equated the Supreme Court’s Heller decision with its notorious 1857 ruling in Dred Scott, which denied citizenship to blacks. Right after this provocative claim, Finkelman raised the old canard about Bentley in a bid to damage Malcolm’s credibility moments before she addressed their audience.

It didn’t matter to Finkelman that Malcolm had written her way up in the academic world’s pecking order: In 2006, she left Bentley and became a professor at George Mason’s law school, now named for Scalia. By this time, not only had Scalia praised her work, but so had other judges, including Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, who cited To Keep and Bear Arms in an opinion.

Then, in 2008, came Heller, arguably the most important gun-rights case in U.S. history. A 5–4 decision written by Scalia and citing Malcolm three times, it swept away the claims of gun-control theorists and declared that Americans enjoy an individual right to gun ownership. “If we had lost Heller, it would have been a big blow,” says Malcolm. “Instead, it gave us this substantial right.” She remembers a thought from the day the Court ruled: “If I have done nothing else my whole life, I have accomplished something important.”

A simple idea has motivated her work: “For me, trust in the common man is such a basic principle. Few governments actually allow it. They want to keep their people vulnerable and disarmed. I find it awful that people wouldn’t be allowed to protect themselves.” She also calls attention to a cultural aspect: “City people who grew up without guns think it’s just a bunch of rednecks.” She recalls an incident at Bentley, years before Heller: “I was in my office one day and a groundskeeper came up. ‘I just want to shake your hand and thank you,’ he said. What else could I have been writing about that anyone would want to thank me for?” She pauses. “There’s just so much vilification of the people who want to ‘cling’ to their guns,” she says, echoing the words of Barack Obama, who as a presidential candidate in 2008 said of rural and working-class whites — future Trump Republicans — that “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”

Malcolm is now a Republican herself. When she hears gun-control advocates say they don’t want to ban all guns — “just the ones that look scary,” as she puts it, with a tone of contempt — her thoughts turn back to Britain. In 2002, she published Guns and Violence: The English Experience. It showed, among other things, that crime rates were low in the 19th century, a period with few gun restrictions. Things are different today: Crime has worsened in the United Kingdom, while gun ownership is rare. “Britain has gone down the road of taking away guns,” she says. “And look where it got them.”

She points to a website of the U.K.’s Police National Legal Database, which includes an online forum called “Ask the Police.” One question inquires about self-defense products. Are any legal? The answer: Only one, a “rape alarm” that looks like a car remote. Its panic button emits a screeching sound. The website also warns against using nontoxic sprays against assailants. If “sprayed in someone’s eyes,” such a chemical “would become an offensive weapon.” In other words, potential rape victims can push panic buttons but must not dare to injure attackers — not with sprays, let alone knives or guns. “Can you believe it?” asks Malcolm. “They don’t let people protect themselves.”

Americans probably won’t face such a predicament, even in the aftermath of the Parkland killings and whatever reforms are enacted as a result. State legislatures have taken strong steps over the last generation to protect gun rights, and the Supreme Court has clarified the language of the Second Amendment. Even so, Malcolm is worried. “Some judges are ignoring Heller, and unless the Supreme Court agrees to hear these cases and overturn them, we’ll see an erosion,” she says. Liberals in the media and at law schools cheer on the renegades. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has called for the overturning of Heller itself, and if a single seat now held by a conservative were to flip to a liberal, she could get her way.

In the meantime, however, the right to bear arms will not be infringed — thanks in part to the pioneering scholarship of Joyce Lee Malcolm.

#Joyce Lee Malcolm #second amendment #constitution #bill of rights #gun control #Guns #philosophy #sociology #social commentary #controversy #supreme court

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letsimportanttreecollection-blog · 6 years

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What cars would give a 17-year old just-passed Male a reasonably cheap insurance? Is Ford Ka a good choice? How much are these cars and what do you think would be their insurance from this information?

Can anyone help me regarding a huge fine for driving without insurance.?

Man, Im screwed. A few years ago I let my insurance lapse on my vehichle and didnt hand the license plates in. Failure to do so means an instant 150 dollar fine for the first month and 7$ a day afterwards. Ok, I was being a complete jackass at that time in my life and figured I would deal with it when the time comes. Well, its that time. I finally got my license back and went to buy a cheap used car. The dealer told me he cant get me plates for it cause I have a violation due to a fine for driving uninsured. The fine is off the charts, $4,455.00. Has anyone ever gotten the MVA to reduce this fee or waive it. I havent tried yet. They offer payment plans at 20% down and the rest must be paid within 2 years. I dont want to do anything illegal per say but just wanted to know if anyone has any ideas. I know, im a jackalope for letting this happen. anyone, let me know""

Need advice on qualifying for subsidized health insurance?

I'm an older full-time college student and my husband works full-time at Walmart. In the past three years, I've been through 4 cancer related surgeries, which were paid for by the breast/cervical cancer Medicaid program. Unfortunately, follow up care and monitoring aren't covered and I was dropped from Medicaid. I'm now on my husband's health insurance, which is basically worthless because our income is under $20,000/yr and the policy has a $4500 deductible plus 20% after. I haven't seen my oncologist for over a year because we can't afford the expensive scans, biopsies, and lab work associated with cancer follow-up with a deductible that high. I thought my situation would change in 2014 with Obamacare. I recently learned from the healthcare.gov website calculator that our income is low enough to qualify for expanded Medicaid (which our state decided not to expand), but I don't qualify for the health insurance subsidies I desperately need because the outrageous deductible health insurance from my husband's job covers spouses. How can a couple with an income so low they would qualify for expanded Medicaid be ineligible for subsidies? I am completely devastated over this and I don't know what to do. Not being able to afford cancer follow up care is putting my life in danger. Even if my husband's employer (Walmart) quit covering the spouses of full-time employees, I think that would only apply to new hires because of the grandfather clause. If getting subsidies was based on income alone the way it should be instead of access to employer provided coverage, I would qualify for a zero deductible policy and $3 co-pays with a monthly premium of around $60. I could then afford the expensive health care I need. We live in a college town so if my husband got a different job, he'd make even less than he does now and we would probably end up homeless. If my husband transfers and we move to a state that's expanding Medicaid, I'll have to quit school and get rid of my German Shepherd and Siberian Husky since it's almost impossible to find a landlord that allows them. We thought another option might be to get a divorce on paper and co-habitate until our situation changes (completing my degree and getting a good job so I can afford the deductible), then re-marry. When I asked about that, someone actually accused me of wanting to commit fraud! How can anyone think of something like fraud when a situation is endangering someone's life? I am desperate to somehow qualify for health insurance subsidies without lying, which could get us in trouble. Any ideas?""

Where can i find some good affordable health insurance?

i was cut off tenncare in 2005

How do I know if my auto insurance settlement offer is fair?

Car Insurance for Teens?

If my dad is a co signer for a car will my insurance be cheap?

I'm 19 and its my first car and my dad is the co signer will my insurance be low? What are cheap insurance agencies for teenagers?

Does My Car Insurance cover me to drive any car?

I got stopped by the police today for driving a car that I bought a week ago which was not registered on the MID. Although I have fully comprehensive insurance on my other car is there a way I can get away showing cover on this vehicle(even if it is just 3rd party) Sadly the police seized my vehicle and now I face 6 points on my license and a 200 pound fine. Any useful tips to get out of this? p.s I am In London UK.

What is the difference between ordinary life insurance and term insurance?

I heard about term insurance whose meaning is not clear to me. Can anybody please explain what is the difference between ordinary life insurance (like those offered by LIC) and a term insurance? What are the advantages and disadvantages of the two?

Car crash and no insurance?

My partner bought a car he was driving it home but had no insurance. He was driving about 5 mph due to a Traffic jam, he hit the car in front there was little damage to his car. He told the driver he had just bought the car and had no insurance, he said don't worry we will do it between us. My partner told him he will pay for the damage to his car. We received a letter from the drivers insurance to ask to put it in writing that we are willing to pay for the car. A few days later they rang and told us he has put in for whiplash there is no way he could of got whiplash as i was going to slow, no sure what to do please help""

Range rover sport supercharged car insurance...?

I am in the process of buying my range rover sport supercharged (im 18) and i have found some really good quotes, i was wondering if it is posible to insure with a insurance company (mabey arabic car insurance company) because they might be able to do it much cheaper.... please help.....""

Why do you have to have full coverage on certain cars?

I have only liability right now on a 2000 ford. I am trying to figure out how much my insurance will go up, and if I have to get full coverage or not. Also what is the longest you can have a car loan? I really would like a Nissan Murano maybe around 12,000-15,000 at the abs. maximum. What do you think my monthly payments would look like? Thank you for any advice.""

Can someone recommend a good and affordable dental plan?

I'm trying to find a good dental insurance that is very affordable for a middle/lower class citizen like myself. Can somebody recommend anything for somebody in my case?

My daughter was in a multi vehicle car accident and i cant seem to find an estimate for car insurance?

It was a 2001 hyundai elantra. My insurance was 9 star. My daughter just turned 21 and wasen't given permission to drive the car.

Does anybody know where to get cheap auto insurance for a 18year old?

What is the best company to buy term life insurance?

I'm trying to find a company to purchase term life insurance. I want a good brand and not some scam. Thanks to anyone that replies.

How much is cost of insurance of car driven by Indian driving licence holder in UK?

What type of insurance do I need to run a cleaning business in Michigan?

My son's teacher said that the preschool he attends are taking bids on cleaning there facility but you need to be insured so I was just wondering if anyone knows what type of insurance I would need to carry to place a bid. There current company is not very good cleaners and they want to hire me but I need insurance please help! but please if you dont know the answer please dont post! Thanks

How do insurance comparison sites work?

Sites like go compare and compare the market? I have searched for car insurance using both and get the same company coming up but offering a different price, why is this?""

How much does it cost to repair a small dent?And also insurance question/?

well i have two questions... how much does it cost to fix a small dent maybe 8 inches in diameter no paint scratches. Im really mad this happened to me this guy who is a complete jerk said i hit his car which i did but he claims it was in the back of his car where the dent is located but i barely tapped it on the front door not the back while i was trying to get out of some dudes parking spot. Also my other question is will insurance cover it if insurance is under my dads name but the car is under my name? we live in evansville indiana. and i think it is farmers insurance.

Life Insurance / Burial Insurance help please (ENGLAND)?

I need advice about applying to and paying for some type of insurance. This would be on behalf of my mother so when the time comes for her to leave me, I will be able to pay for her funeral. I have spoken to her but she is stubborn and set in her ways and thinks I will automatically be able to cover the financial costs for her funeral when she does pass away. I dont care for money for myself, I just want to know that I can pay into something so upon her passing I will be able to pay for her funeral costs (instead of my mum taking out the insurance/policy it would be me on her bahalf as she is terrible for thinking about stuff like that). I am an only child as so I am solely responsible for paying the expense""

Can i pay gor someone elses car insurance?

Right so my mum bought a car and I love my mummy so I offered to pay for her car insurance but she said I won't be able to do that for some reason so (I'm her son btw) what I'm asking is if I put all the details in her name but put me down as an additional driver can I pay for the car insurance ?, it's cheaper that way too (for me) lol""

I'm trying to get rental insurance?

I'm getting rental insurance well trying to but I had a doubt my Heath insurance is in my mothers name and not mine so she pays it so say I get rental insurance under my name would it mess up or even kick me off her insurance plan if I did get the insurance in my name

Can i insure 2 cars by 2 different insurance companies?

i already have car insurance with my first car but i have just bought another. to insure it on my current insurance is expensive. iv looked at other insurance companies and its cheaper to insure with them. Am i allowed to have a different insurance company for each car?

**Average Homeowners Insurance for Condo in DC???**?

If the condo was $50,000 1bd/1bth in washington DC not many amenities cept fire alarm and enxtinguisher. once car garage.""

What is the best auto insurance for an adult driver?

For a driver that is under 25 but older than 21, what is the best auto insurance for a minivan or an suv? No accident history. No tickets. Clean driving record.""

Temporary Car insurance??

Need temporary car insurance for about 3-4 weeks, our own policy runs out the middle of next month, but we have just ordered a mobility car, and it wont be here until 1st week in June. We call our current insurance company and was basically told they would charge us for 6 months and then a cancellation fee. What company offers the lowest price insurance for that short amount of time??""

How much would insurance be for a road/offroad dirtbike?

I'm looking into buying a honda CRF 230 that has headlights, breaklights etc.. everything it needs to be road legal. I'm wanting it because I ride alot of trails that you need to get on the road for so long to get on the next trail and I'd figure id license it so I dont have to worry about outrunning the cops but if the insurance would be high, I'd just forget it so whats the cheapest you can get insurance for that and by the way I'm 19 and have my motorcycle permit.""

What is the best dental insurance I can buy?

Where can you get insurance for a 16 year old travelling alone?

Hi, a group of my friends and I, five of us, are travelling to Germany and are looking for a place that would insure us, we are all 16 years old. Thanks :)""

How much would car insurance be for a used 2012 Dodge Charger SXT?

I am an 18 year old male with no accidents or tickets and my parents and i are looking to get a new car for me. (well not new but new to me) So i was just wondering what might be the ...show more

Car Insurance for Teens?

Does it cost more money to ad your spouse with your car insurance?

My wife keeps asking for my car. But I dont feel comfortable giving it to her becuase her name's not under my car insurance. How does it work if i want to ad her on? Do the insurance company charge you more money or is it still the same? If they do charge more money, do you know any insurance that's reasonable price? thank you""

Will a honda accord coupe have higher insurance than a sedan. (for a 16 year old)?

for my first car i am debating a mazda 3, a toyota camary or a handa accord coupe (2 door). how much higher is insurance on a honda accord coupe than a 4 door for a 16 year old driver. will it be rediculous. Also, my parents have a 7k spending limit and i have found some with under 100k mies. how long will they last if i treat it right?""

Anyone know a cheap Health Insurance Cover for myself?

Im single, 27 years old and living in Victoria/Melbourne""

What is the cheapest car insurance in michigan?

I am looking for cheap car insurance I live in battle creek mi. I am 22 years old and on ssi. I have autism diagnosis. And I want to be able to get a car I do not have a license right now. But can get one social worker told me that. I would be allowed to drive. I do not own a car right now. But I have $2000 save up for a car. Before I take anymore steps I need to find out if i can afford insurance. I have about $30-$45 to spend a month on insurance for a car. That cost about $2000 I only need the bare minimum that will allow me to drive with a license legally. Dose anyone know where in i can get cheap car insurance? Any help would be greatly appreciated.Thanks

Please I Need Help On My Car Insurance?

I just bought a car and i don't want to pay huge car insurance. Anybody care to help me out may be a recommendation of place i can get it a little bit cheap

Can You Give Me Any Tips for Finding Low Cost California Medical Insurance?

Where can i find cheap auto insurance?

i'm paying 150 a month for a 94 ford thunderbird, but i'm looking for something cheaper that i can afford. i'm just wondering how much other people pay for cars like mine...""

I work per diem and have no insurance. do you know any good insurance that is affordable?

I am also a student so I need something that won't break the bank and that I will hopefully be able to use after school

Insurance on a car lease?

My insurance guy gave me below basic coverage on a lease which requires something like 100,000/300,000/100,000 but he did basic full coverage(something cheaper like 10/20/10) In the contract it states i must have 100/300/100 as the requirement but the insurance guy who does insurance for a lot of people says lower coverage should work. I just added it on and it's fine, so the insurance (progressive) sent me a letter saying I have to pay extra for adding a 3rd vehicle but nothing about the coverage amount. Will they later require I add more coverage? I don't see why I need 300k on a car that costs only 40 grand. people drive around with PIP 10/20/10 and that's good enough for the state. I have an excellent driving record with 0 accidents and have been driving for about 10 years. I realize I have ****ty insurance but insurance is a huge rip off so I want to spend as little as possible and deal with accidents out of my own pocket.""

Where can a Construction company get a cheap insurance and bond?

Hello, I just started a small family construction company ( tile ) and would like to know where you can get a cheap bond from. Our company is in Seattle Washington. Can someone please help me with this. It would be great if it can be as cheap as it gets. we are on a budget. Thanks in advance""

Insurance california?

hi I'm an international student who goes to college in Iowa. I have a college insurance and I guess it convers most of meetings with doctors. Now, I'm taking 3 months-summer session at University of California. I think I 've heard some stuff that I need to have Californian insurance to stay here. What is this? Is it wrong? Plus, my wisdom teeth is coming out recently. It starts to hurt. Does insurance in America covers dental work?""

Can i cancel my car insurance immediately? cancel same day and not pay for the following month?

The reason is i sold the car and the insurance guy said the car is still in the system (1st of the month), so i would have to pay still. he said if i canceled on the 15th it could have been canceled sooner and i wouldn't have to pay. i just think it's odd since i don't even have the car anymore. not sure if this makes sense? thanks""

Do you think $250/person premium for supplemental insurance for seniors too high?

If so, could you recommend a cheaper one that you may have?""

How much will my auto insurance cost?

Ok...so I'm looking at an old 73' Bug to possibly buy for college and all. Cost- of the car at least- is not a problem, as its $100, and I have $100. (Yes, it does have issues and looks horrible, but hey it runs and drives). So...that brings up insurance. There is NO way I can get in on my mom's insurance- she won't let me get a car so the only way is if I do all myself, and I'm 18 now and going to college in a few weeks, so a=Im looking at my options. I know as a male teenage driver its going to be high, but what is high? How much will good grades and all that help? Just, what would you recommend and how much could it end up costing? Thanks...""

No health insurance?

without insurance, how much does clomid and metformin cost? where can I get it?""

How much does car insurance cost on average for a 18 year old female drive in florida?

???????????????????

Im 20 years old. Just wondering when i should buy life insurance?

Im 20 years old. Just wondering when i should buy life insurance. ? I have a bf live at home with my parents. I have a car loan out for 18,000. Have a full time job. Just wondering if its better to purchase when your younger. My bf and I have been together for 6 years.""

Could I get a subsidized health insurance when I retire?

Since the affordable health act will most likely go through, could I get a subsidized insurance when I retire at 60? I will have about 2 million dollars in mostly non-taxed retirement accounts, and some in taxed accounts. If I only have say $35,000 in taxable income when I retire, am I still eligible for the subsidized health insurance as it's determined by taxable income I believe and not how much a person have in retirement accounts?""

How much will my car insurance be?

Im getting my own can insurance when i turn 18 in about a month, my parents are kicking me off there's i have had 3 tickets and i drive a 1998 toyota camry...""

How much would my car insurance be ?

Im getting a car in a few weeks ( sitron caxo forte) its for free of my girlfriends grandad. I need to know what else its going cost me though, because all the car insurance websites make me fill out to much information and I don't even have the car yet.. I will be 17 in a few weeks and it will be just me driving the car.""

Pay As You Go Insurance! Where can I get it? Cheap Insurance!

Hey people Basicly im insured with Admiral under third party fire and theft. Im doing their 10 month insurance thing which equates to 1 years insurance after the time. I was insured with them last year the price was 1090, this year its gone up to 1250 (had an accident which was my fault). Im paying monthly which has increased it to 1550. Im paying about 150 a month. My question is, where can i get cheap insurance from? Preferbably Pay as You go type. Has anyone done PAYG insurance before?""

Cheap Auto Insurance Deals?

Whats the best car insurance deal you know?

Is nationwide a good car insurance?

im thinking of switching from geico to nationwide it would be way cheaper but i know cheaper isnt always better

How much would full coverage auto insurance be?

I plan on getting a 2010 Dodge Challenger R/T Classic and was wondering about how much would full coverage be in Northern Virginia,I would ask the insurance company but I'm not the one with the policy and if you're wondering what insurance we have its Farmers.""

""Insurance for 6 months, changes mid policy?""

I'm looking at buying insurance for a 6 month period, but 2 months into the period there will be a change that causes a significant price drop (3 points removed from my license and my birthday). Will they generally allow me to have my rate adjusted mid-policy? I'm talking of a price difference of about 100 a month, so I really want to see how I can make this work.""

Car Insurance for Teens?

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-insurance-group-rating-carter-pennington/"

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kniteropfreeh1987 · 4 years

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honda civic coupe insurance

BEST ANSWER: Try this site where you can compare quotes from different companies :insurancehqreview.xyz

honda civic coupe insurance

honda civic coupe insurance, a Honda Civic Hybrid XL and a Citgo 2.0? And can you get car insurance on a Honda? After all, the insurance costs on the streets of Oakland are quite high. If the cost of your . That is, how will you know if your insurance company will pay your claims or not? There is nothing you can do. If you find yourself with a car insurance company that you could not afford to buy from (at ), you can also compare quotes online. You may want to do a keyword-based comparison by using the search bar below, where you may get to see the top insurers in Oakland for the specific quotes you want to put your car in. Don t do so! If you are an active or retired military personnel, you are considered a risk for car insurance. This means that a policy can cost as little as $1300 dollars per month for car insurance. For this price range, you will have to file an insurance claim if any. You may think. honda civic coupe insurance is only available to drivers with two years or less on their major driving record. If you are looking for extra insurance coverage to protect your vehicle, we suggest you purchase the following insurance coverages from Progressive: If you re looking for an extra safety feature on your new car, we suggest installing the following devices during your new car s first month at the insurance companies facility: While the car insurance industry doesn’t seem to be exactly as friendly on the market as it used to be, the fact is the car insurance industry has been in a state of cauldron. In an , an insurance company their customer was in an accident, and had not been properly reimbursed for the damages or losses they have suffered. They did get a reimbursement in the third-party amount to cover the portion that was paid out by the other party’s insurance company, but the damage to the car was limited to the $1.6 million in damage alone due to the. honda civic coupe insurance. While there are lots of affordable car insurance quotes out there, finding one that works for every driver is important. While researching cheap car insurance quotes in Ohio, it can be overwhelming to and the process can take a little time. Take the time to get some auto insurance quotes online so you can compare the best companies to make sure you re getting the best car insurance policy for the amount of coverage you need. Before you start, though, you might want to consider a few things you can do that will help keep your rates as low as possible. First, be sure you ve tried and failed to get at least the cheapest car insurance rate before you get your quote. You can start by contacting your local department of insurance and asking them to help you with your search. All it takes is a bit of digging and a little bit of information about yourself to reveal just how much your rates will change when you turn on the quote engine. If your.

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What do insurers think about compact cars in general?

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About Honda Car Insurance. Find an in the , and save! ©2020 Compare.com. All Rights Reserved. Compare.com is a registered trademark. Compare.com Insurance Agency, LLC is a Virginia domiciled licensed insurance agency in 51 US jurisdictions. Licensing information may be found above. Compare.com does business in California as Comparedotcom Insurance Agency, LLC (License: 0I22535). Admiral Group plc. is a majority member of compare.com. If you’re looking for cheap car insurance, it pays to do a little research. Rates can change dramatically based on your driving record, location and other factors. Before you buy auto insurance, it pays to compare different companies. Shopping around is the easiest way to find the lowest quote you can get. Start comparing personalized auto quotes by using a quote comparison tool with our in this post. In order to estimate.

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Honda Civic insurance costs around $1,879 with some states $3,874 with others $1,821 The Civic Camry is a brand of Honda Civic insurance company, which is based in Los Angeles, California and operates out of the Golden Gate, California in the United States. Compare quotes from the top insurance companies and save! Eric Stauffer is a former insurance agent and banker turned consumer advocate. His priority is to help educate individuals and families about the different types of insurance they need, and assist them in finding the best... : We strive to help you make confident insurance decisions. Comparison shopping should be easy. We partner with top insurance providers. This doesn t influence our content. Our opinions are our own.

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charlasolly6 · 4 years

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Why An Agreement Car Hire Could Sound Right For Your Small Business

1) I am choosing on exactly the car that i wanted. This plan is not going perform if an individual might be at the stage where are usually just looking for a automobile. In my case, the way I decided was to rent the kind of car I need for 1 week. What happened was that the dealership where I had my car leasing websites serviced rented me a Jeep Liberty. I had the car in a solid week so I a chance to get to understand the car's basics. Operate drove, what the visibility was like, what the gas mileage was like, etc. Even though it was a base model, I absolutely loved it. Regardless of whether not really you are renting or leasing, ensure that you look for deals and also away from fees that you don't want to fund. Doing your research can help you make the right financial pick. They're offering $3,000 earn cashback best auto lease deals OR 0% financing for 60 months on the 2008 Tribute Hybrids. 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lewepstein · 4 years

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How to Treat Your PTSD (Post Trump Stress Disorder)

I wonder how many people reading this post have said to themselves or others, “When I listen to or watch President Trump it feels like I’m in an abusive relationship.” You don’t need to be a student of psychology to know that his overt hostility and his hateful, verbal attacks are designed to inflict pain and humiliate people. But Isn’t this exactly what abusive, toxic males have always been accused of doing? Trump’s hyper-aggressive, threatening tone often reminds people of someone from their past - perhaps a rageful father, but more often an insecure and manipulative partner whose selfishness and arrogance knows few limits. The quality that Trump shares with other weak and bullying men is his need to control others. He will lie, cheat and intimidate in order to achieve his narcissistic whims. Abusers like Trump see all who challenge them as threats and harbor a thinly disguised contempt for their victims.

One could argue that we as American citizens aren’t in an “actual” relationship with Trump and therefore why should his behaviors be experienced as abusive? I believe the answer to that question lies in our symbolic relationship to leaders and the way that they key into our deepest connections to parents, teachers and other adults from our formative years. The personas and behaviors of presidents, governors and others in positions of authority connect with our primal needs to feel safe and be cared for.

Donald Trump may seem quite familiar to people who grew up with a certain kind of father and learned to tolerate and accommodate his controlling nature. Some may experience his behaviors as “normal,” having come to make excuses for things they felt powerless to challenge or to change. They may have identified with the aggressor and received “rewards,” both practical and emotional for going along with the demands that he made and for keeping the peace. Others may have lived with the disempowering behaviors of these types of fathers and partners and drawn lines in the sand signifying that they would never tolerate this type of behavior again. We have all been victims of patriarchy in one form or another but there is a profound difference between those men and women who listened to the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump boasted about “grabbing women’s pussies” and said, “boys will be boys” versus those who said, “This is abusive and assaultive behavior and is unacceptable on every level.”

The reason I think many of us will require a post-Trump recovery period is that we have all been subjected to four years of abusive language, hostile imagery and threatening behaviors and policies. We have lived in fear of a leader who has often seemed unhinged and has been willing to act out his selfish wishes to the detriment of the rest of us. Whether it is his twenty thousand false or misleading statements - abusive men believe they have a right to lie - his willingness to have a nuclear standoff with Kim Jong un, his mimicking of a journalist with a disability, his current, implicit threat to unleash violence if he loses the presidential election or his bringing federal forces into cities to intimidate racial justice protesters, these are just a few of the many trauma inducing behaviors of a man who has had power over our lives and whom we could not simply divorce or walk away from.

As Trump mishandled the pandemic to suit his whims and the bodies began to pile up, symbolic abuse became genocide by neglect and certain vulnerable groups were clearly expendable to him. Trump’s politicizing of mask wearing and his modeling machismo in the face of a killer virus leaves the blood of as many as one hundred thousand Americans on his hands. His catastrophic failure of leadership has severely damaged the American economy, disabling small businesses and depleting jobs in numbers that could have been avoided had the initial handling of the pandemic been run by experts and not politicized. The documented differences in managing the pandemic by certain countries in Asia - notably Taiwan and Vietnam - is so stark when compared to the United States that all Trump can do is try to to deflect and distract from his abject failure.

So how can we best deal with our Post Trump Stress Disorder? First, we need to get to a post-Trump era. We need to use our collective power at the ballot box to leave this abusive relationship and also leave Trump behind. We need to get him out of his position of presidential authority and thereby out of our heads. And even if he still has the power to stir up trouble he will no longer have the “bully” pulpit. Post election, he may be kept busy as he is pursued by prosecutors for his illegal deals and his many abuses of power and finance.

The symptoms that we may be left with from the Trump era that mimic the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that results from other abusive relationships are anger, anxiety, mood problems, a high degree of vigilance, flashbacks and trust issues. Some might be left with shame or guilt, feeling on some level that they should have been able to prevent this. And, as with those who have been taken in by a cult leader, some will believe that they got what they deserved.

The behavioral part of our PTSD therapy has to do with disempowering the abuser and doing whatever possible to not let political conditions deteriorate to the point where a demagogue again comes to power. If hypervigilance is one of the negative byproducts of abuse then it needs to be replaced by political vigilance. Thomas Jefferson said that, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” I pledge to continue to participate in and contribute to groups like Indivisible and Move On, but not just around election time. I will not never make the mistake again of taking a break from political action just because a Democrat has been elected to higher office.

The “victim” in an abusive relationship is often suffering from what is called “learned helplessness” and hopelessness. It is a core part of depression and often includes anger that has been turned inward against the self. If we can identify the feelings of helplessness and hopelessness we have experienced during this era of Trump along wth the outrage behind it, then we may be able to mitigate what can become a downward spiral in our moods.

The cognitive approach to overcoming the emotional burdens of an abusive relationship involves challenging or disputing certain thoughts. There is a kind of brainwashing that comes with an abusive partner, especially a narcissist such as Trump who needs to mold people and reality to suit his needs. The sheer repetition of certain lies can bring us to question what is true and to doubt our own reality. The thought that “there must be something true about what the abuser is saying,” can begin to seep in. Having a core group of like minded friends along with intimate relationships that validate facts and uphold opinions that challenge the abuser’s worldview are critical to mental health. This especially applies to the historical period we have been living through that includes Trump’s reign of terror and whatever will be its aftermath.

We should all be aware of our “all or nothing thinking” as a response to having lived under a repressive regime. Seeing the world as “either-or” and “all or nothing” is an understandable response to an extreme and authoritarian leader. It may take time to get back to more nuanced thinking and not responding reflexively to what may be meaningful differences. The more Trump has been experienced by us as an existential threat, the more we need to be aware of the intensity of our thoughts and feelings.

If we find ourselves flinching a little when we listen to or watch the news over the next year, understand that this is the normal response of people who have been exposed to or witnessed emotional abuse in a relationship which they could not extricate themselves from. We may also be reacting from our own traumatic history - it makes sense that our PTSD may have been triggered and compounded due to the emotionally abusive relationship that we have been forced to endure over the past four years with our president. We will all need to heal from what we have been living through and I include in that assessment the “cult followers” who cheered on the cruelty and abuse that Trump meted out. All of this will require profound changes in the way we view the political world and the ways that we respond to it. It reveals to us once again how often what is thought to be political and that which is seen as “personal” intersect.

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izcgza · 5 years

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iamsoyoshihiro · 7 years

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Journey 1

For a little background before I start, I am participating in a school program called Metro Journeys. The program was started by D.C. natives who were homeschooling their children and thought that their kids’ week could use some more excitement. The program sends children into the D.C. area with an itinerary and no chaperone. The goal of the program is to achieve a higher level of independence and knowledge for its participants. Our school decided to include our class in the program and so began our Metro Journey.

Friday the 22nd was scheduled as our first Metro Journey. Our itinerary listed our plan of events including: take a tour of the Capitol Building, eat at a native D.C. restaurant, buy a book related to our themes of Democracy and Human Rights, visit the Supreme Court, take a picture in front of the Replica Liberty Bell at Union Station, and visit Eastern Market.

My sister and I met the rest of our group inside the Bethesda Metro station at around 8:45. Now because we were a somewhat uncoordinated group due to this being our first journey, we were all a bit late. Some of my classmates had to add money to their Metro Cards, and others just had turnstile trouble. However we pushed through and were on our way to Union Station in just under 20 minutes. We took our picture at Union Station (Not included) and made sure to picture the Liberty Bell on it’s own as well.

- Replica Liberty Bell outside of Union station. Photo credit to Summer.

We started off towards the Capitol Building, which was only about a 5 minute walk away from the metro station.

Our tour of the Capitol Building began in the Crypt, a structure located right under the Rotunda which is used to support the floor above it. The Crypt functions not only as a support structure but also as an actual crypt, designed to hold the body of George Washington after he died. Although it would have been quite cool to see the skeleton of America’s first president, our tour guide explained that George isn’t actually held in the crypt. Instead his body is buried at Mount Vernon in Virginia. A string of design flaws and delays tempted the Washington family to keep the body buried at Mt. Vernon instead of transferring it to the capitol, which explains the absence of George’s body.

We also visited a few of the retired government rooms used in the early days of the American government, including: The Old Supreme Court Chamber, The Old Senate Chamber, Small House Rotunda (Not Pictured), and Small Senate Rotunda.

- Old Supreme Court Chamber ( I apologize for the blurry quality, I had to take this on my tippy toes.)

- Old Senate Chamber

- Small Senate Rotunda Photo credit to Summer.

You can learn more about the different parts of the Capitol Building at: https://www.aoc.gov/us-capitol-building

And finally we reached the most spectacular feature of the Capitol Building, “The main ROTUNDA!!” The Rotunda as we soon learned is much more than a simple dome. At the very top of the rotunda lies a mural so appropriately named “The Apotheosis of Washington” which depicts George Washington surrounded by beings representative of the values that America stands for, and 13 women representing the 13 original colonies.

- The Apotheosis of Washington (George Washington is sitting covered by a purple blanket with 2 ladies to his right and left whom represent liberty and victory.

The Rotunda also features multiple paintings depicting important parts in history including but not limited to: Declaration of Independence, Surrender of General Burgoyne, Surrender of Lord Cornwallis, General George Washington Resigning his Commission, Landing of Columbus, Discovery of the Mississippi, Baptism of Pocahontas, and Embarkation of the Pilgrims. The designers of the rotunda also did not limit the dome; there are many statues of generals and well renowned Civil Rights figures. One of the most important pieces of artwork in the Rotunda is the frieze that wraps around the entire dome, depicting many events significant to America’s history. Not to be confused with the paintings that lie below it.

You can learn more about the Rotunda and it’s many works of art at: https://www.aoc.gov/capitol-buildings/capitol-rotunda

The last room that we visited was the National Statuary Hall. The hall serves many purposes at many different times, it hosts a governmental lunch every 4 years to coincide with the inauguration or election of a new president, and was at one time used to house the House of Representatives. The hall is also known to host many events surrounding the arrival of foreign dignitaries. The hall itself has a unique design not found anywhere else in the Capitol Building. The hall was modeled after the ceiling of a roman amphitheater, the curved domelike shape of the hall encouraged sound to bounce around more and has created a unique side affect. If you stand at one side of the hall, and a friend of your’s stands at the other side, you could have an almost normal conversation without yelling. This means that the closer you are to another person the bouncing effect will weaken, and if you move farther away the effect will enhance.

- National Statuary Hall Unique Ceiling Photo credit to Kira.

Historically the Hall has been subjected to many different events. The most unfortunate being it’s complete destruction during the fires present in Washington in 1814, when British troops burned most of the Capitol Building to the ground. The hall currently holds a select number of statues, donated to the Capitol Building by certain U.S. states. States from Pennsylvania to New Jersey have sent statues of their favorite pioneers which sit peacefully in the hall.

- National Statuary Hall Ceiling Photo credit to Kira.

Once finished with our tour of the Capitol Building, we proceeded to the Supreme Court. (There were no guided tours available so we explored the spaces that were open to the public.) The Court Room and Ground floor are open to the public, so we grabbed the opportunity to study one of the best pieces of architecture in the Supreme Court. The East Wall Frieze.

- Miniature version of East Wall Frieze

For some more insight. The East Wall Frieze does depict many figures, but the most important are the two that sit in the middle of the frieze. On the left sits the Majesty of Law with a book of law on his right. On the right, sits The Power of Government holding the fasces. The book of law in particular represents “The Defense of Human Rights and Protection of Innocence.” Therefore solidifying what the supreme court stands for.

- Hall Ceiling of the Supreme Court

And then it was time for lunch. We walked down Pennsylvania Avenue to reach District Taco. Our lunch was delicious and I would definitely recommend trying D.T. if you happen to be in the D.C. area. Back to our story, we sat and waited as our group split for the Seven Eleven across the street. They took forever. But we were out quickly and continued on towards Capitol Hill Books.

Capitol Hill Books is a very cool 3 story bookstore right across the road from Eastern Market. The bookstore is a thrift store for books. People can donate books to the store or the books are bought from families who don’t want them anymore. The vast majority are categorized by genre and author, making searching for books easier and more convenient. And most shockingly, the books are piled literally from the floor all the way up to the ceiling; it almost reminded me of something out of Harry Potter.

- I Couldn’t fit any pictures here. My apologies.

Go see the store for yourself using: http://www.capitolhillbooks-dc.com/

And lastly we reached our final stop, Eastern Market. The Market hosts a grouping of local venders, ranging in products from meats, cheeses, fruits, vegetables, seafood, a florist, and even arts and crafts. It’s open most week days and I would highly recommend trying some of the pastries from the bakery. The Market is also pretty resilient; interestingly enough on April 30th, 2007 a fire tore through the market and although the damage was quite extensive the market was rebuilt.

- Couldn’t fit anymore pictures here either. My apologies.

And so concludes our journey for now. Tune back in Oct 7th to see what we’ve done in the coming week.

Your’s truly, Kenji S.

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crystalracing · 5 years

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Former Formula 1 driver Stefan Johansson has written an in-depth, all-encompassing plan to make motorsport, and particularly F1, ‘awesome’ again.

Background

This document is an effort to offer my views on the current state of motorsport, and Formula 1 in particular. For some time now, and for whatever reason, there seem to be a lot of negative comments and chatter from the people inside the business as well as from the fans all over the world.

Why is that? How did we arrive at this situation from a time not that long ago when things were seemingly mostly positive, viewership was huge, the cars were fast and spectacular to watch, we had some great personalities in the paddock, superstar drivers racing the cars and plenty of action and drama on the race track, both between the teams and the drivers? Money was flowing into the business and global corporate sponsors as well as manufacturers were all lining up to be part of the show. Teams were selling at a huge premium and everyone involved in the business was prospering.

Of course, there is not a simple answer to any of this. For sure, the majority of negative comments today is in part due to easy media accessibility for all, but it seems to me there are real elements of concern in the sport and they have arisen from a gradual process of poor decisions. In some cases on the technical side, knee jerk decisions based on either a bad accident, complaints from the fans and media about the racing not being good enough; in other cases, based on pressure from certain teams or manufacturers in order to keep them in the championship; and finally, but very importantly, a level of political correctness has crept in that, at least in my opinion, has done nothing to make the racing any better on any level, but has instead only contributed to pushing the costs through the roof and created a greater division between the teams, and, as such, made the racing too predictable and less interesting to watch. As a result of all this, the technology has evolved to where we are today, and most importantly, was allowed to evolve to a point where the budgets suddenly went into the stratosphere.

At the same time, the business model for the commercial rights holders have changed dramatically since the introduction of pay-per-view instead of free-to-air television, which means that there is (theoretically) more revenue, even if derived from significantly fewer viewers. The by-product of this is that there is less interest for sponsors to spend big money as their metrics are primarily based on the number of eyeballs watching, and in particular, eyeballs in places where the demographics support purchase of the sponsors’ products; not all eyeballs are created equally in the minds of the sponsor. In addition, there are now a number of different viewing platforms besides TV, which is causing even more confusion and a hard to quantify environment for companies to select the best strategy to market their products. The challenge the series and the teams are now facing is how to grow or even just maintain their eco-system.

So, as a result of there currently being a less attractive return-on-investment proposition for the global sponsor, we now have a situation where every team is more or less wholly dependent on the money they receive from the series, ie from FOM, as this represents the bulk of their income. This was never the case before, when major sponsors were the main contributors and the money the teams received from the series was almost the icing on the cake, especially if they did well. Hence, there are now several teams racing without a main sponsor, or if they do have one, it’s for a fraction of what a title sponsor used to pay.

Through all these various rule changes that have occurred in recent years I have a feeling that F1 has somehow lost its identity and I am not sure anyone, whether it’s the FIA or Liberty (FOM), really know what F1 stands for anymore. I believe we are now at a point where another two or maybe three decisions in the wrong direction could spell the end of F1 as we know it. People are already tuning out because they have either lost interest or it’s too predictable or not exciting enough or whatever the reason may be. The younger generation doesn’t seem to care, F1 and motorsport in general is struggling to catch their attention. I challenge anyone to define in three words what F1 stands for today.

In order to arrive at a situation that has the right balance between economics, competition, entertainment, and relevance, it’s important to first identify the individual areas that matter the most and focus on getting these right and at the same time eliminate the areas that matters the least.

I will first attempt to identify the areas that I feel are important and will then go into more detail on each individual item and come up with what I believe could be a solution, or at least open the door for a debate or dialogue in order to find the best way forward.

Economics

Background

There’s been talk for some time now about various ways to bring the costs down but no decisions have been made on how to achieve this. In the meantime, the costs are gradually creeping up every year and it’s now got to the point that even the world’s largest automotive manufacturers and the largest corporate sponsors are reluctant to compete in F1. The cost to compete is so high, so prohibitively expensive, that it serves as a barrier to those who would naturally be and traditionally have been involved in the sport. It’s been clear to everyone for some time now that the costs are unsustainable under the current set of rules.

The major cost is in the constant development war, with the aerodynamics and the power units being the largest contributors of excessive expense for the teams and the engine manufacturers. Despite efforts to curb the costs through various sets of rules, such as limitations on the number of engines and gearboxes used in a season, all it seems to have done is the exact opposite and in fact driven the costs of producing these units much higher. The cost of manufacturing an already developed engine or gearbox is not that expensive in the overall scheme of things, but the cost of developing and manufacturing an engine that must last a third of a season is extremely expensive and seemingly far outweighs the cost of using several engines during the course of the season

Adding the hybrid component to the powertrain has done more damage than all the other rule changes combined in my opinion. It seems that in order to meet the politically correct agenda that is now creeping in to every facet of life, it’s somehow been decided that this is the future of automotive engineering and needs to be part of F1 as well. Pushed by the manufacturers (under the premise of wanting the formula to have relevance to the manufacturer’s production line-up) who put pressure on the FIA, F1 had to follow, along with the World Endurance Championship. Interestingly, both series are now completely controlled and dominated by the OEMs and would not survive in their current formats without the money being poured in by the manufacturers competing. The privateer or independent teams are now just the clowns that make up the show in both series and have no realistic chance of ever winning a race. So, this means we are stuck with three teams in F1 and currently only one team in the WEC that have any chance of winning. This seems an incredibly high trade-off just to be doing the politically correct thing. By introducing this rule and subsequently allowing the manufacturers to effectively take control of both series, it will take some major undoing to get things back on the right track again. What we have now is an engine formula that is turning manufacturers away rather than inviting them to join, which is a very dangerous path. As we all know from past experiences, it’s only a matter of a board decision for any manufacturer, except Ferrari, to stop any racing program if it doesn’t suit their purpose for whatever reason. None of them have any real emotional attachment to racing, which has been shown by Toyota, Honda and BMW who all pulled out of F1 within a few years of each other.

I strongly believe that the current concept of race car design needs a complete reset in almost every major category, but particularly in F1. There has been no real innovation since the discovery of aerodynamics. Every aspect of a current race car design always has the aero as the first priority, as this is what gives the most gain in lap-time by far. But as we all know, aside from making the car go faster, there are very few benefits from aerodynamics, if any. It’s the number one factor in driving the costs higher, it’s the number one factor in making the racing less interesting, it has no relevance aside from making the car go faster, yet it’s been the primary focus in every single form of racing the past 30 years or more. It’s time for a major reset. The cost of the development war is escalating every year and will continue to do so as long as aero is the prime factor in making the cars go faster.

Another contributing factor to the high cost is the fact that each team must build most components themselves rather than buying ‘off the shelf’ components already manufactured and tested. A loose interpretation of the old ‘B team’ concept (using the parts and resources from another team that is legally allowed) has slowly crept in with teams like Haas, Sauber (Alfa Romeo), Toro Rosso and Force India (Racing Point) to some degree. Under the current set of rules this is by far a much better approach rather than trying to design, manufacture, test and run every single component yourself. We can clearly see the result of this where Haas and Sauber are now consistently the ‘best of the rest’ teams.

The result of this is that the ‘A teams’ are starting to gather more and more control of the teams they are supporting, including the choice of drivers in some cases. The concern the midfield teams have is that if we are not careful the entire grid will be controlled by the major manufacturers and it will turn into another version of the DTM where three or maybe four manufacturers control the entire field with satellite teams that are under their complete control.

There has been much discussion about a cost cap, and how to implement it. I don’t believe you can ever entirely control a fixed cost cap because teams will always find a way to circumvent a rule like that. The most effective way in my opinion is to limit the development in all the key areas on the cars that are irrelevant in the bigger picture. There are many areas or components on a car that I believe could be standardised and no one would even know or notice the difference. This would have the same or similar effect to the ‘B team’ concept but it would be the same for everybody, and it would automatically level the playing field in the process. Some of these areas are:

Aerodynamics

Set a fixed limit on maximum downforce (more details to follow below under Competition). This will eliminate the massive spend on aero development that is currently by far the biggest line item in the budget.

No aero add-ons allowed on any surface parts of the car. This will still allow for each team to design a car that is unique looking and will have its own interpretation of the rules, but the emphasis will shift away from purely being made to optimise aerodynamic downforce, and instead shift to other areas that will be of equal importance.

By having a fixed limit on downforce, it will stop teams spending time and money on constantly finding different avenues on aero development in order to gain back the original loss. If the amount of downforce is always fixed, they will be forced to look in different areas to get more performance out of the car. This will drastically reduce the budgets as a large majority of the research and development budget is spent on the never-ending aero development war.

Front wing: Provide a standard front wing issued by the FIA. Even Adrian Newey agrees that if you painted all the wings white and put them next to each other no one would know what wing belong to what car. A large portion of the aero budget would go away if the front wings were fixed and the same for all the teams, supplied by one manufacturer chosen by the FIA. As there is no innovation involved in any aspect of this because of the way the rules are written, it is purely a matter of optimising to the umpteenth degree. Whoever has the most resources will eventually gain an edge, and the money being spent on this entirely worthless endeavour is just mindboggling.

Brakes: To put things in perspective, a top F1 team’s brake budget is nearly equivalent to a winning IndyCar full season budget. No one can see or relate to the insanely complicated brake ducting systems each team now must develop, all for nothing in the end. If they were all given the same brake system and brake ducts it would be the same for everyone and no one would even know. With the greatly reduced importance of downforce, it would make sense to go back to a simple brake system whose primary function is to stop the car, not to add more downforce or create more efficient aero.

Monocoque: The FIA should produce a standard tub for all the teams to use that fits their safety criteria and that’s been crash tested by them. It’s a very expensive and unnecessary cost to have every team design, build and then crash test their monocoques before the start of each season. It would make much more sense for the teams to build their engine, cooling and aero package around a tub that is being provided by the FIA at a fixed and reasonable cost. It would save a huge amount of money and again no one would know the difference. Whatever creativity goes into the design of the tub would simply shift to a different area. It may not be the ideal solution for every team and engine manufacturer, but so what? The tub has little relevance apart from bolting the engine, suspension and all the aero bits onto it.

Electronics and driver controls: Implement standard electronics for all the teams. Eliminate most of the current adjustments on the steering wheel. Every button, dial and switch on the steering wheel ultimately leads to somewhere on the car, whether it’s the diff, engine, brakes, steering or whatever. Assume then that each one of these functions requires a significant number of people to design, develop, build, test and maintain for each system. Rinse and repeat every race. The sheer manpower required to develop and maintain all these functions is staggering, and in the end, every team must do the same in varying degrees, and all it does is eliminate more and more skill elements in the driver’s arsenal. This may be the most obvious area that needs to be addressed in order to make the racing a little less predictable and put the emphasis back on driver skills, and by doing so reduce the costs dramatically.

Gearbox: The gearbox on a current F1 car is a work of art, the engineering is simply mindboggling and the size of some the components are so small they almost look like a Swiss watch in certain areas. Then bear in mind that each team must design, build and maintain these gearboxes. It would be very easy to have one independent manufacturer build the same gearbox for all the cars, no one would know or indeed care. We are already at the point now where the ‘B teams’ are using the complete backend of the ‘A team’ they are associated with. This includes the gearbox, differential, rear suspension and electronics. It would bring the costs down massively if everyone would just use the same gearbox, supplied by the FIA. It would also help level the playing field as this is one very costly component that has very little relevance to the overall importance of the package.

Ban all forms of communication with the factory during race weekends: This is another area which is completely and utterly unnecessary. I have seen the set-up from one of the top teams first hand and although it’s incredibly impressive, it does absolutely nothing to add to overall package. Do we really need a team of 20 to 30 people at the base to assist the race team with set up and race strategy, including test drivers running intra-session set-up scenarios or overnight full-race simulations of various set-up alternatives? It’s just another added cost that one team started and then everyone else had to follow. Why they did not nip this in the bud immediately is beyond me. It’s only helping teams to optimise the set-up and race strategy, and by doing so, taking another element of unpredictability away, again at a huge cost.

Will these changes make f1 lose its original DNA? F1 lost its original DNA a long time ago as far as I’m concerned. The original rule which was kind of the foundation of F1 and what made it different from almost every other category in racing was that every team had to manufacture their own cars. The argument from the purists is that if we allow standard parts F1 will just become another form of IndyCar, where all the teams use the same chassis. If we are brutally honest, F1 is already at that point more or less due to the incredibly strict rules every team have to operate under. There is little room for innovation in any area under the current rules, so every team basically ends up doing the same thing, instead of just using a number of items that are supplied directly from the FIA at a fraction of the cost of having to manufacture every component themselves.

Cost savings: A very rough ballpark estimate of the potential savings from the suggested changes above would be somewhere in the region of $80 to $100 million per year, maybe a lot more than that for the top teams as their development would effectively stop in many areas. The breakdown would look something like this:

Brakes: $5-7 mil

Aero development: $30-40 mil

Monocoque: $3-5 mil

Fixed front wing: $10-15 mil

Gearbox: $10-15 mil

Electronics: $5-7 mil

Power unit: $20-30 mil

I’m not sure how many jobs these changes would eliminate, but it would be more than a few. Payroll is always one of the highest line items in the budgets. I understand and I am sympathetic that there will be many jobs lost due to these changes but like in any business, sometimes you need to change to make things work. Car manufacturers are not afraid to shut down entire factories, with tens of thousands of jobs lost, if it doesn’t fit whatever decisions they make at the time. Just because the teams have themselves gradually created a monster, in large part thanks to the manufacturers pouring crazy money into the series, and the governing body not recognising this until it was too late to stop it, they are now faced with how to fix all this in order to ensure their long-term survival.

Revenue flow: The total payout from Liberty (FOM) to the teams over the past three years is averaging around $950 million per year. This is then distributed through a complex formula among all the competing teams with a very complicated set of rules based on different tiers and how long each team has been competing, the importance of each team, and not insignificantly, what deal each team was able to cut with the old F1 owners when they needed some sort of concession. As things stand today, the FOM payout is heavily biased towards the top teams. Hardly any fans or followers of the sport are aware of how this works except the die-hard fans. It would be much fairer and also more interesting to the fans if a payout system was used that started with a fixed amount for each team. The total amount could be $500 mil ($50 mil per team). The remaining funds would be the official prize money paid out based on performance in each race, so a rough total of $450 mil per year paid out over 21races. These number should be official, transparent and the same for each race. If the winner of each race, for argument’s sake, get $5 mil, then there would be something to talk about. Money talks and people are intrigued about it, it’s human nature and the way we are programmed. Why keep one of the key talking points for people a secret when it’s already one of the highest payouts in sport and would create some excitement and intrigue among the fans? If we use a very simple formula that everyone can understand based on $200,000 per point scored, the total payout for 2018 would look like this:

In addition, there could be a $25 million bonus for winning the championship, bringing the total payout to $950 mil.

With the proposed technical rule changes, there will be sufficient income for every team to operate and be fiscally sound. If they then wish to improve their competitiveness it is up to each team how hard they are willing to work to find more sponsors, hire better drivers and personnel; and there will still be a level of skill placed on spending money efficiently on the right things to bring the success each team aims for, whether it be winning the championship or having the nicest hospitality unit.

Competition

Background: What I am proposing below are very radical changes that will require a complete reset philosophically on every level of how we go racing. Over time, the focus on downforce and aerodynamics has completely taken over every other aspect of racing to the point where it affects not only the car design (that only keeps growing each year on a massive scale), but also how every new race track is designed. Sadly, the end result is that the racing is getting more boring, with less passing as each year goes by, to the point where we instead have to come up with band-aid solutions to try and spice up the show by implementing artificial ways to pass such as the DRS device, and forcing the tyre manufacturer to essentially produce an inferior product to make the racing a little less predictable. As we know, none of this has worked out very well. In addition, over time there’s always been attempts at slowing the cars down either by reducing the horsepower and at one point they even went down the road of introducing treaded tyres. Yet at no time has there even been a decision to stop the focus on aero development, except for tiny isolated solutions that have been minimally effective and only added to the overall cost each iteration of change.

Learning from other racing series can be extremely instructive as the same physics apply universally. IndyCar and NASCAR have in the past gone in the wrong direction by increasing aero grip, only to find out it was a huge, expensive mistake, and in each case backtracked to a less aero dependent package. If we count how many times there have been small changes to the aero rules to slow the cars down, or speed them up, or help the overtaking, or whatever the reason was each time, and then count the amount of money that was spent by each team, it’s staggering. A perfect example is the 2019 rules, expected to cost each team an additional €15 million and they likely won’t make any difference whatsoever. Yet, not once has the problem been fixed, maybe masked it slightly for half a season before the teams catch up to where they were before. At some point the penny has to drop!

Massive reduction in downforce. Reduce downforce to a level of drivability, but not more: Obviously, the cars should always be safe to drive and this will not be a problem. But beyond that, they should always be balanced on the edge of adhesion in both low and high-speed corners. By doing this there will be more emphasis on the drivers requiring the use of delicate car control and, in some corners, bravery will again make the difference. The engineering focus will shift more towards mechanical grip; to the vehicle dynamics and tyre performance to get back the lost grip from the limited aero downforce. The cars will be much more difficult to drive which will force teams to hire the best drivers available. Many of the great traditional tracks that have been outgrown by the current cars and become boring due to the massive downforce will again become interesting both from the driver’s and the spectator’s point of view. Someone recently suggested a drop of 40 to 50 percent downforce but I don’t think it’s enough to make the cars lose their aero sensitivity enough to be able to follow another car closely. The current F1 cars have such a huge amount of downforce that I believe a minimum 70 percent drop is required to reach the right target where the cars won’t be fully dependent on aero for performance. The turbo cars of the 1980s had roughly 70 percent less downforce than the current cars, and they were already on the limit for being aero sensitive when you followed another car. With the current knowledge and technology, I think a lot of the sensitivity can be eliminated compared to back then, but it’s a good indicator. And no one at the time considered those cars to be undrivable because they had too little downforce and too much power, we just wanted more, as you always do as a driver. But one thing was for certain, the cars were awesome to drive.

Implement a fixed maximum level of downforce: In order to eliminate and enforce the overwhelming importance of aerodynamics on any current car design, there should be a fixed maximum level of downforce. This can be monitored real time from the strain gauges off the suspension pushrods. It will be no different than checking the engine parameters to make sure they are always within the legal parameters or the tyre pressures or any of the other multitude of parameters that are currently monitored in real time. It will feed straight into the ECU along with all the other data being collected from the car while running. So, for example, if there are spikes on the boost level for more than a certain time, or the fuel flow, there will be a penalty, or perhaps the car will be disqualified. The same thing would apply to downforce levels. We have fixed limits on almost every other aspect on the cars today, so why not also on downforce? There are several different methods that can be applied on how to control this so there will be no room for interpretation or ways to cheat the system by the teams. It could either be controlled by a form of an active ride system, that would alter the ride height by small increments in microseconds once the maximum level is reached. The active ride system was already quite well developed in the early 1990s, so with the current technology available, it would be a relatively easy system to implement. It could also be controlled from the front and rear wings or the rear diffuser, all with microsecond adjustments so the car would be safe to drive at all times. Once the research on how to best achieve a consistent and safe way to control this is under way, the right answer will be found very quickly. The FIA will then issue and manage the same system for each team.

Sort out the design elements so the cars will look attractive, aggressive and fast: By implementing the rule on maximum downforce, the current hideous front wings will be eliminated automatically and if the rule of standardised parts will be implemented, there will be one front wing design for all the teams to use. No add on aero bits will be allowed on any of the car’s surfaces. Any aero development will be more focused on drag and aero efficiency, which will then also translate to road relevance eventually. As a result of this we will hopefully find a number of interesting and visually appealing solutions.

Increase power by 30 to 40 percent, with a formula based on thermal efficiency and energy consumption. Allow more freedom to explore new technologies based on this formula: Create a formula based on thermal efficiency and energy consumption that will have a maximum limit on how much energy a car can use for the duration of a grand prix. This will allow and hopefully encourage manufacturers to develop new technologies that are not restricted to the hybrid/internal combustion engine concept only, which is now the only option allowed. Everyone with even a basic interest in engineering knows that there are a number of far more interesting alternatives on engine technology than electric/hybrid. This would truly open the door for F1 to genuinely be at the cutting edge of technology instead of constantly fine tuning a politically correct concept at a cost that is astronomical to everyone involved. Set a target of around 300 to 400hp increase in power as long as it can meet the energy consumption criteria, which will offset about 30 percent of the loss in lap time from the reduction of downforce. By using this formula, it will eventually become apparent what energy source is actually the most environmentally friendly and efficient from a performance point of view. The immediate response I get when I mention this idea to anyone is that the manufacturers will never accept it and will leave instantly. If this is the case, F1 is doomed anyway. If there is one thing that is historically consistent in any form of motorsport, it’s when the manufacturers end up controlling a championship, they will eventually screw it up or simply pull out when it doesn’t suit their purpose any longer. Sometimes they then come back again when they’ve had a rethink (Honda most recent example), but there is zero loyalty or emotional engagement to the sport; for them it’s purely business. If the current manufacturers don’t like the idea for whatever reason, I am certain that there will be other manufacturers that would look at F1 very seriously if it had a more sensible set of rules that would allow for more innovation and had a lower barrier of entry than the current rules provide. Interestingly, there is not one senior executive from any car manufacturer that I have spoken to that is in favour of the electric concept; they all feel this is a political agenda that’s been forced upon them.

Noise: If the rules are open for different alternatives on engine technology, we will again get back the engine noise as a factor in the overall experience. Fans can hear the difference between the different engine concepts and there will be very noisy engines and some that are not, but there will be something for everyone to relate to and talk about.

More power, higher top speeds, less downforce, longer braking distance, slower cornering speeds, more overtaking. With the massive reduction in downforce and a significant increase in horsepower we will see a huge increase in top speed, and as a result, much longer braking distances. This should radically improve the opportunities of overtaking as the entry and mid-corner speeds will be significantly lower, which will again require the drivers to slow the cars down much earlier and a lot more before they turn in to the corners. The target should be somewhere close to 400km/h in top speed, it will be super exciting to watch and it will definitely give people something to talk about. It’s hard for people to relate today when there are road cars with higher top speed and more horsepower than an F1 car; no one cares or can appreciate that they are insanely fast in the slow and medium corners. We were close to the 400km/h in some cases in the 1980s with the turbo cars, at tracks that were infinitely more dangerous than any of the tracks are today, yet there were hardly ever any incidents except when a freak accident of some sort occurred, when something broke on the car for example. We need to get the ‘awesome’ factor back somehow. With the added horsepower and less downforce, the cars will become beasts to drive and you will see the drivers really wrestling with the cars on exit and entry to the corners. I can guarantee that Lewis Hamilton, Sebastian Vettel, Daniel Ricciardo, Max Verstappen, and all the rest of the top guys will love every moment of it, and it will automatically weed out the average guys as the teams will be forced to hire the best drivers they can.

Weight reduction: Put more emphasis on weight reduction. With all the focus on the current electric vehicles being the future of not only motor racing but also road cars, the weight of all these cars has increased dramatically, due to the weight of the batteries and the systems to run them. A current F1 car is now 50 percent heavier than they used to be. At one point the weight limit was 500kg. As an example, 30kg equates to roughly one second in lap time on an average lap of 1:30s. If there was an emphasis on weight reduction as well as an option on engine technology, based on my idea of a fixed amount of energy over the duration of a race distance, there would be some very interesting alternatives surfacing very quickly. And if a good portion of the money currently being spent on the endless and worthless aero development would instead be spent on material technologies and more efficient engine technologies, we would very soon find some very exciting alternatives that would eventually filter down to road relevance. Imagine if every car on the road weighed 30 to 40 percent less than the weight of a current car, how much would that save in fuel consumption and subsequently in emissions each year on a global scale? The results would be massive! It seems strange to me that all focus is on electrification when the gains from lightweight cars would most likely outweigh the benefits from all electric vehicles, yet there seems to be almost no effort in this area. Road cars today are essentially made of the same materials they were in the early 1900s; surely with some effort there has to be a lighter, safer and cheaper alternative. There are already materials in existence, both alloys and composite materials, that could be implemented, and if there was more focus in this area it would not be long before we would see some incredibly light and strong materials surface that would also eventually be cost effective enough to use for production vehicles. I refuse to believe there are no better alternatives than what is currently being used.

Tyres: improve tyre technology, wider tyres and bigger diameter: Another by-product of the high downforce cars is the current generation of tyres. For years, Pirelli has been forced to make a tyre that is purposefully poor in performance just to slow the cars down or ‘make the racing more interesting’ since it’s nearly impossible to pass when you follow another car due to the turbulence and the highly sensitive aero on today’s cars. None of this has worked out very well as we can witness every weekend watching any form of racing with aero-dependent cars. In order to offset the reduction in downforce, the tyres could very easily be made to have significantly more grip and durability. It’s almost comical that every weekend teams at the highest level get caught out with the tyres not working at their optimal level. Teams spend hundreds of millions of dollars on aero development and engine development, yet on the day, they lose races because the tyre pressures were off or the temps didn’t come up their optimal working range, or the fronts didn’t heat up as quick as the rears or whatever. Literally, most races are won or lost depending on how the teams make their tyres work. So why isn’t there more focus on the tyres in the overall performance of the car from the outset? There are chassis and engine manufacturers competing fiercely against each other, why not allow the tyre manufacturers to do the same? Aside from the driver, there are three things that make a car go fast or slow: engine, chassis, and the tyres; and the tyres are at least equally important to the overall performance of the car as the chassis or the engine. If they would open up the rules and allow more than one tyre manufacturer, we would very quickly see a dramatic increase in speed and lap times. This would also be by far the easiest and also cheapest way for the teams to get better performance as the tyre companies would pour money into development and marketing. Tyres have always and will always be the cheapest and easiest way to get more performance out of a race car. Teams spend millions in almost every category of racing on aero, chassis, and engine development to gain an extra second in lap times, yet you can bolt on a set of tyres that cost $3,000 and gain far more than that by just having a different compound or construction in the tyre. Tyres are by a huge margin the cheapest way to gain performance.

Allow more than one tyre manufacturer to compete: There are at least four tyre companies I can think of today that would look at F1 very seriously if the rules were changed to reflect a more modern style of tyre. Each of these companies is already spending considerable amounts of money in other forms of motorsport, both on development and team support. If they were to engage in F1, we would see benefits not only on the competition side, but also in marketing and development as they would all spend significant money to promote their products through F1. This would help the series and teams, and the entire eco-system would grow accordingly.

18” rims to correlate to road car technology: All other forms of racing except F1 have by now adapted to the more modern, low-profile size of tyre versus the mandated 13” rim that has been part of F1 for nearly 50 years. F1 has been slow to adapt as it would interfere to much with the current aero packages, and as it’s the engineers that now write the rules, this idea has been shut down every time it arises. If there’s a wholesale rule change on aero reduction, this would be the perfect time to switch to the bigger diameter wheel and tyre to make the tyres more relevant to tyre manufacturers high-performance road tyre production, make the cars look more relevant to current road car design, and it will make the cars look far better from a pure aesthetic point of view rather than the image created by these silly looking little balloon tyres they are currently running on. If F1 claim that they are on the cutting edge of technology and that it’s important to have some level of road relevance, you’d think one of the first things they would move away from are tyres that have not been seen on any road car since the late 1970s!

Summary of proposed changes: To summarize these changes and how they will relate in overall performance, I’ve provided a “ball-park” guess at the loss or gain from the different changes based on an average lap of 1m 30seconds:

Reduce downforce by 70%: + 10-15 sec.

Wider, taller and improved tyres: – 3-5 sec.

Increase horsepower by 300-400hp: – 3-5 sec.

Reduce weight by 150-200kg: – 3-5 sec.

Again, this is a ball park guess without having done any significant research but based on my own experience and discussions with other drivers, engineers and designer. But it’s clear that we will be very close to the current lap times quite quickly, but it will be achieved in a completely different way. Hopefully in a way that will bring back the ‘awesome factor’ to F1, with a visually fast looking car that the drivers will have to really fight with in order to get the most out of them. The spectators will be able to see the drivers working hard with the cars moving around a lot more.

Four-way matrix consisting of chassis/power unit/tyres/driver: Based on the ideas I’ve presented above, when the new rules are being created, there should always be a focus on what I refer to as a four-way matrix mentioned above. The rules should always strive for each of the four elements to have an equal importance in the performance of the car. This will also help spread the load of development costs between the teams, engine manufacturers, the tyre companies and it will help promote the best drivers to graduate to F1.

Reduce the importance of electronics: By eliminating all the electronic aids the drivers currently use, except the ones absolutely necessary to operate the car, the emphasis will shift back more towards car control instead of the engineer’s optimizing the car’s performance by studying the data to see where the drivers need less or more support in certain areas, with the help of a multitude of settings all controlled via the electronics on the cars. One of the technical directors was quoted recently saying, “We need to throw some things in there to make the racing more unpredictable”. If we instead threw a bunch of things away, we would get to that point a lot faster, and save a lot of money in the process. The electronic driver aids would be a good starting point of that. This is a perfect example of poor governance, that could and should have been stopped immediately when this trend started and has subsequently gotten completely out of hand.

Governance: Eliminate the designers and engineers in the rule making process and simplify the rules: Since the rule making process became a democracy of sorts, which allowed all the teams to have a say through the introduction of the Technical Working Group, we have seen a progressive decline in the overall quality of the racing. The rules have become more and more complicated each year to the point where the team principals no longer bother to even try to understand them. They simply leave it to their technical team to make the decisions; the 2019 aero rules are a perfect example of this. We have yet another new rule on the aero, apparently to make overtaking easier. This rule will make absolutely zero difference and will only add tens of millions of expense to the already stretched budgets for most of the teams. The engineers are all great and highly intelligent people, and it’s great working with them and talking to them, but they only have one thing in mind which is to make the cars go as fast as they can. It’s very difficult for them to see the bigger picture of what is required to make all the elements of the package work. I think it’s actually irresponsible of the team principals and the FIA to allow this to have happened in the first place, bearing in mind that the car rules are by far the most important element to make the business model work. The engineers are there to make a car go as fast as possible within a set of rules handed to them. Now we instead have this bizarre situation where the inmates are running the asylum; what could possibly go wrong? Allow the engineers to do what they are good at and leave the governance to people that know what they’re doing. It’s evident that the democratic approach is not working. The teams can’t agree on anything most of the time, and, as such, we always will end up with some form of a compromise that will in the end make no difference, or at best, very little. Instead, it should be governed by putting together an unbiased and well-rounded group of independent people that understand the business from a competition, technical as well as a practical and economic point of view; people who can see in advance when things are heading in the wrong direction before they do, and then act forcefully before it’s too late to course correct. Make a set of rules that are challenging and exciting for manufacturers and private teams alike, and make them fair and equal and, most of all, easy to understand for both teams and the fans.

Modify the race tracks to make them more difficult and more interesting to watch: Virtually every race track today is either designed or modified to suit the current type of high downforce cars. As such, we end up with tracks that are full of low and medium speed corners, first gear hairpins, and boring chicanes. These types of corners are not very interesting either for the drivers or the spectators, but are merely there in order to slow the cars down. Chicanes should be banned as far as I’m concerned, and for a track designer to put one in when they have a clean sheet of paper is beyond me. Abu Dhabi is a perfect example, they could have done pretty much anything they wanted with a budget that was through the roof, and we end up with arguably the most boring race track ever made. If the downforce is reduced significantly, many of these tracks can be modified, or in the case of some of the older tracks, put back to their original design as the cornering speeds will again be much lower. Brake distances will be longer and with run off areas now much bigger than they were when they changed them in the first place, they will be much safer. The fans will love watching the drivers balancing the cars on the limit rather than perfecting the art of jumping a kerb in a low speed chicane which is currently the case and where you gain the most time in a modern car. Although the runoff areas are there for a reason, it’s important to find a method to ‘punish’ a driver if he goes over the limit, something that will significantly slow him down to the point where there will be an automatic loss of time that far outweighs the potential gain of trying too hard and going over the limit. As it is today, every driver can find the limit on most tracks within the first five laps as there is no real penalty for going too fast and all you have to do is peg it back slightly the following lap. Interestingly, there are no more incidents on the street circuit where there are often no run off areas at all, which goes to show that drivers will be more disciplined when they have to be.

Replace DRS with push to pass (P2P): The introduction of the DRS system was a typical knee jerk reaction based on the fact that there were too many complaints that the racing was getting too boring and there was not enough overtaking. Although it has certainly helped the overtaking, it is of no interest as the driver in front is nothing more than a sitting duck, and there is no skill or strategy involved as you can use it as many times as you like during the course of the race. The push to pass system that is being used in IndyCar, for example, is far more interesting in that each driver is given a certain number of seconds per race where they can use the P2P, it is then up to the driver to distribute this to his best ability for the duration of the race. For example, if he’s too aggressive in the beginning of the race and he’s run out of seconds he’ll be in trouble at the end of the race if there is a restart or a dice for position with another driver who still has enough P2P time left in the bank to attack. The time consumed could be displayed on the TV monitors so the fans can see what each driver has consumed. It adds another element of intrigue both on the track and for the commentators to discuss during the broadcast. Depending on what engine concept is used, a percentage performance gain could be used to achieve the same result.

Race format: The current race format is working quite well; it has a good balance of speed and endurance for both drivers and cars. By reducing the downforce significantly, the importance of gaining positions in the first couple of laps will become less important and we will see a more balanced approach from the drivers of where and when they decide to attack in the races, rather than risking everything in the start as they know that’s pretty much their only chance to overtake the way the current cars work. Allow teams to run the full distance if they wish to gamble on tyre strategy; no mandatory pitstops. Race tactics will become more important, with more options on fuel strategy, tyre wear, and overall speed of the cars as the race progress. With the new rules, drivers should be able to attack at full speed for the duration of the race, with enough energy and tyres to race hard from start to finish.

Longer pitstops/one person per wheel: Although it’s fascinating to watch the coordinated ballet of 16 people during an F1 pit stop, once you’ve seen it a couple of times it’s all the same as far as I’m concerned. It doesn’t bring any further elements that add to the show. In fact, because the pit stop is so fast, it makes the overall race strategy more predictable than if you had a longer stop. If you only have one person on each corner, it will make the time of the stop about five to seven seconds longer than the current two- to four-second stops. This will alter the strategy calls and we will most likely see some drivers choosing to stay out and others going all out risking the extra time the pit stop will take. Tyre strategy will become more important and as such add an extra element of unpredictability.

Fewer investigations and penalties: Eliminate the endless investigations and penalties for every little incident that occurs during the races. By using a random group of former drivers as race stewards, we are only causing confusion as each one of them have their own views of what is acceptable or not. If these things have to be policed based on a subjective viewpoint, it’s critical that the decision is made by the same person or team of people every time, otherwise it’s inevitable that there will be inconsistency. We need one person with great experience and is somewhat current, that is respected by everyone, to be appointed Chief Steward and attend all the races. This way, there will be consistency and all the drivers will eventually know what they can and can’t get away with. This person needs to be extremely tough and firm at all times. Because as we know, each generation have at least one driver who is pushing the envelope to the absolute limit to what they can get away with. They’re always in trouble with the stewards and historically these guys have such a strong conviction that they’ve never done anything wrong, that they are able to gradually wear the stewards down and often get away with stuff they shouldn’t. As it is, we currently get some very odd penalties and decisions depending on who is stewarding each particular race. Again, a lot of this is an unfortunate side effect of trying to sanitize the tracks to a point where there is no longer any punishment for going over the limit.

No penalties for engine and gearbox changes: Can anyone even remember the original purpose why this rule was implemented? I think it was in the interest of cost reduction that it was decided that teams would only be allowed a maximum of three engines per season and the gearbox had to run at least five consecutive races before it could be replaced. It is clearly evident that this rule has had the exact opposite effect and have made the costs spiral even higher. By implementing a Draconian set of rules that are being enforced in an equally Draconian manner, the manufacturers are being forced to develop and build engines that are infinitely more expensive to produce than it would be by simply allowing a sensible number of engines and gearboxes over the course of the season. Every team and manufacturer is struggling to meet the strict criteria of making both the engines and gearboxes last, and by enforcing the rule as strictly as they do, the competition and subsequently the entertainment side have become a complete farce in many instances. The constant grid penalties are ruining the races and the competition is becoming a joke when a driver starts a race from last on the grid with 50 or more grid penalties. The teams’ (rational) behaviour of strategically taking penalties in order to position themselves for a better future race leads to even more confusion amongst fans and adds nothing to the racing. As always, the best way to reduce the costs in the long run is by having rules stability. The constant tinkering with the rules is just driving the costs higher every time, and the top teams with big budgets will always gain more from these rules changes as it’s the R&D that drive the costs through the roof, not the manufacturing of parts.

Entertainment

Make the drivers more accessible: The drivers are the stars and they will always be more important to the fans than the cars or the teams. Every series other than F1 have some form of planned fan engagement either the day before the race weekend starts or for an hour at some point during the race weekends. Make it compulsory for each driver to do a certain number of days as part of the super license. It’s a pain for the drivers but in the long run it will benefit everybody. Make it mandatory for the promoters, broadcaster and drivers to provide x hours of promotional appearances prior to each race in each country. By forcing/helping each promoter to better promote the races, each driver will be helping themselves by building a better audience and a more valuable ecosystem. Cross promote the drivers in other forms of entertainment in order to gain a larger following and new demographics.

Make the racing less predictable: By implementing some of the rule changes I have already mentioned in the chapter on Competition, the racing will become less predictable without the use of any artificial devices such as the DRS. The combination of less aero, more power, less forgiving tracks, fewer driver aids and longer pit stops will all contribute to more human errors and will not only make the racing a lot more interesting to watch but it will also sort out the good from the average. By definition, the more well engineered a car is, the less chance of something unpredictable to happen as it makes the life of the driver much easier. By eliminating some of the electronic aids and making the cars have significantly less downforce, this will automatically help making the races less predictable. By enforcing the track limits there will be more occasions for drivers to make a small mistake which is often all a following driver needs in order to make a move that would otherwise be impossible. The reduction in downforce will help the car following to stay much closer to the car in front, and as such he will be able to get a run on the car in front on the exit of a corner without having to rely on DRS to pass on the following straight. It’s no coincidence that some of the best races we’ve had in recent years have come when there have been changing conditions, usually unexpected weather, thus making it difficult for the engineers to model the race strategy to the nth degree in their race simulations. We won’t be stuck with “He’s now in the DRS zone” or “Will he do an undercut or an overcut?” which it is pretty much what it’s reduced to at the moment.

Bring back the ‘awesome’ factor: F1 should be defined by one word: AWESOME! With these proposed rule changes, we will arrive at a point where we will again have some beautiful and spectacular looking cars that will also sound great. Make bravery one of the tools that count in a driver’s arsenal, and allow the drivers who are willing to stick their neck out to gain a couple of extra tenths in a high-speed corner do so, and let the fans enjoy that show! The massive reduction in downforce will visibly show the car control of the drivers as opposed to the current cars which are on rails all the time. We will have talking points like “top speed around 400km/h” and “1,300-1,400hp” power units, which to anyone is awesome and it will get people’s attention. It’s difficult to explain that F1 is the ultimate in motorsport when we have a number or regular road cars today with similar power and top speeds. How do you explain why F1 is the ultimate when you can buy a Jeep with 800hp for less than $100,000? “Well, the F1 cars have a huge amount of downforce which means they are really fast in the slow and medium speed corners… and because they are so fast in these corners, they have had to reduce the power in order to slow them down. And because the cars have so much downforce it’s made it very difficult to follow another car which makes overtaking really difficult, so to fix that we came up with this idea called DRS. This is a really clever device that that the engineers who design these cars came up with, that the driver following another car can use when he wants to overtake the car in front. There is nothing the driver in front can do at that point to defend himself, but it’s supposed to spice up the show.” Not a great or easy explanation for someone who is trying to understand the sport. Anytime you have to explain why something is great you’re already in trouble, this is why we need to simplify everything so that anyone can immediately see and understand that this is really AWESOME!

How simple would it instead be to use the formula of less aero/lower cornering speeds/more horsepower/more acceleration/higher top speeds/longer braking distance/more passing/more visible car control? No one understands or can appreciate downforce, you can tell them the cars produce 5,000kg of downforce or 50kg, most people wouldn’t know the difference between that and a bar of soap. But everyone understands 1,400hp and 400km/h top speeds, everyone is immediately impressed by that!

Improve the broadcast and the graphics: I find it very difficult to follow any race and fully understand the dynamics of what is happening especially once the pit stops have started. The graphics and the information you get is very limited and quite poorly presented. It has improved recently but there is still a massive amount more that could be done to keep the viewers better informed of what is going on. I don’t think you can have too much info or data displayed; anything that will keep the viewer better informed is a plus. The teams already look at a lot of interesting data so a lot of the information is there and just needs to be presented to the audience so they can better understand what’s transpiring. With the emerging drone technology, it would be possible to show a completely different view of the cars and how a battle between different cars transpire that will add a whole new element. I’ve seen some prototype footage of this already done at some minor events, and it’s a completely different experience than with fixed cameras. This is one area that I believe could really be a game changer for the viewing experience.

Create a huge prizemoney fund for each race that is transparent and official: As I have already outlined earlier in this article, allocate a large portion (30 to 40 percent) of the total pool of funds from FOM as prizemoney rather than a guaranteed amount before each season starts. This a common management tool to align incentives with performance. Money talks and people are always curious when there’s big money involved in anything. If Mayweather would be fighting for a few thousand dollars each match no one but the absolute die-hard boxing fans would bother tuning in, but because it’s tens of millions at stake, everyone is curious of the outcome, even people that don’t like boxing. This is human nature. As it is, not many even know what the prize money is in F1, only the diehard fans have some idea what each team get before the season even starts, based on an incredibly complicated payout schedule. If we use the already mentioned formula of $200,000 per point, the prize money for each race would be:

Relevance

How important in the bigger picture is it that F1 or motorsport in general is relevant? Does anyone know what F1 stands for today? This may be the most important question of all in order for F1 or motorsports in general to survive. In order to be relevant, it is obviously important to understand in what context you want to be relevant. In the case of F1, does this mean you must be socially relevant or more relevant towards the fans, or can both be achieved in a realistic way? If you focus on being socially relevant, it is critical to understand if you are following an objective and realistic path or just a narrative. Is it more important that we have an engine formula that is seen to embrace the environment than it is to have fast, loud and spectacular cars? Is it more important that we have engines that can last one third of a season than it is to have a hugely powerful engine that may break every now and then, but will either reward or punish the driver and team instantly if they win or the engine breaks? Is it more important that we have race tracks that are so sanitised and safe that it’s become almost impossible to have a bad accident than it is to have tracks that will punish a driver if he goes over the limit?

Political correctness has now crept in to every aspect of life. In some cases, it seems that companies are more interested in doing what is perceived to be the politically correct thing, than it is to make a profit or even do what makes good common sense. Everyone is paranoid about not upsetting anyone. Is motorsport about being correct in every way, does it have to satisfy all the various agendas that are currently being promoted through every possible platform by anyone who cares to voice their opinion? Is it even possible to keep everyone happy anymore? I think it’s time to do some serious soul searching in order to work out what it is that really matters both for the competitors and the fans.

F1 could become the global leader in innovative thinking and implementation of new technologies: By creating a formula that will be based around a maximum amount of energy, wherever the source is coming from, it could be petrol, electric, hydrogen fuel cells, kinetic, or anything else that may not even be invented yet. I believe this is the one area F1 could really make a difference and lead the automotive world towards a truthful and honest direction in power unit technology. Instead of following one politically motivated directive it would be better to do the complete opposite and create your own directive, that will by default eventually become the correct and obvious path forward. It will very soon become apparent which is the most efficient alternative based on the principles of thermal efficiency, energy consumption, weight and power output. For the first time in a very long time, F1 could justify the spend of the manufacturers by inventing and creating things we may not even know exist at this point. Unleash all the bright minds that are already working in F1 and let them get creative! Instead of pouring away money on silly aerodynamic tweaks, it could be spent on something that would truly make a difference. Imagine if someone realised some of Nikola Tesla’s ideas for example, or a number of other incredibly brilliant concepts that are already out there. Sport is the perfect arena for this as we are talking about competition before a concept is proven. Once it is proven and everyone can see how brilliant it is, it’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle and the world will have to follow whether it’s following the politically correct agenda or not. Whomever comes up with any of these new concepts will be known worldwide for doing something that really made a difference in human history and F1 will again find its rightful place in the automotive world.

Eliminate the importance of aerodynamics: I’m repeating myself here, but it’s important to understand that aerodynamics is the only item that falls under all four categories that are the key areas of F1. The fact that aerodynamics is affecting all four categories in a negative way should be a wake-up call more than anything. Aerodynamics have the least relevance of anything on a race car, except making the car go fast. Yet it’s the highest spend by a massive margin for every team. It’s the largest contributor to the lack of racing and the entertainment is suffering because of this, yet we just keep on piling on more and more of the same, year after year! Eliminate the importance of aerodynamics and shift the focus to other areas to gain back the speed.

Summary: It’s become quite evident that in order to get things back on the right track it will not be enough to continue with small band-aid fixes here and there, in fact, it will only make it worse as history has shown over and over. What I am proposing is based on what I believe is a realistic and objective analysis rather than following a narrative based on a number of external factors and political motives; motives that will never add anything to help maintain the popularity or grow the sport into the future. In order for the sport to survive, it is imperative that we all understand that it’s unsustainable in the long run to deviate from the core elements of what made F1 such a huge sport to begin with.

There are a number of initiatives being proposed – adding to the show, bringing the costs down, make the racing less predictable, branding, digital media etc. None of this will make any difference unless we get to the core of the problem, which is the cars and how they are designed. If I may use the analogy of a restaurant, you can do all the slick and fancy stuff, new signs on the front, social media campaigns, celebrities, new menus, etc, but if the food sucks no one will come back or show up in the first place.

If we don’t fix the cars and make them exciting and interesting to watch again, it won’t matter what else we do. Once we fix the cars everything else will fall into place automatically. The tracks will become interesting and challenging again, the racing will be close and exciting to watch, the human component will become at least as important as the technical, and the drama will unfold accordingly.

F1 has always been about brave young men driving these crazy fast cars on the limit, and if we lose that stigma, there is nothing that makes it unique in any way. It will be just as interesting to watch a bunch of gamers racing online. From a driver’s perspective, there is nothing that comes close to the experience when you’re on the limit and you decide to step into that unknown territory by taking a highspeed corner flat for the first time in order to gain that extra tenth or two, not knowing for sure what the outcome will be, when you’re literally staring at your own soul for that brief moment. Those are the things that every driver worth his salt is craving. They define who you are as a person and go much further than just that brief split second. Everyone who is present can see and appreciate it, and this is what makes, or at least used to make, our sport so incredibly different and special compared to most other sports.

F1 should and could write its own rules. It’s a big enough sport to set the directive for anyone that wants to compete in it or follow the sport. If not, as we can clearly see at the moment, we will end up with a very confusing and complicated product that’s neither here or there, and no one can fully understand it. We want to see brave drivers on the race track, but we also need brave leaders in the boardroom to make this happen.

#f1 #stefan johansson #Formula One #Formula 1

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gloriasousaus · 7 years

Text

Smart Cities and the potential Misuse of Data

Context

During the seven weeks of the Pre-College Summer Intensive English Program at The New School, my class was divided into groups of three to work on a Capstone project. Each group received a broad theme, and our job was to narrow it down to build a presentation with a specific thesis, which was presented to an audience composed by The New School Faculty and Staff on August 3rd. We also had to write separate research papers with paraphrased academic sources.

My team got Technology as a topic. The following text consists on the final research paper I handed in, named Smart Cities and the Potential Misuse of Data.

Credits: Gabriella Ullauri

Introduction

Smart Cities are emerging hotspots. Huge producers of Data, these are places that aim to use the personal information collected from its citizens to improve public infrastructure. Cities like Singapore, London, and New York are among the few that openly declare their attempt to adapt to this new model. In the case of NYC, this undertake exists since the year 2000: presented on September 28th of that year, at the 2nd International Life Extension Technology Workshop in Paris, the document entitled “The Vision of A Smart City” stated the early solid efforts of the city government (in consonance to Brookhaven National Laboratory) to integrate the city. According to this report, the main strategies at that point included underground utility mapping and passive structural integrity monitoring.

As written in the article "Addressing big data challenges in smart cities: a systematic literature review", the gathering and use of Big Data through new technologies increases information awareness, facilitating the policy-making process while creating many alternatives for social interaction in the city. In that sense, the data compiled enhance real-time services automation, which consequently drives city administration towards making urban management more effective. Examples of that would vary from installing intelligent traffic lights to monitoring the conditions of infrastructure in public areas, transforming urban settings into more dynamic spaces. And that is what should happen in smart cities.

But although the authors’ conclusions are true and can be extremely beneficial to society, there is an aspect that is often overlooked: A Smart City is a direct product of its government. Despite the idea and the tools to implement it, what is done to the online content is not a matter of technicality. Once carrying people’s information, the success of a Smart City is an outcome of political intention. And that can be disastrous.

Songdo, a smart city in construction since 2004. Retrieved from https://youngining.wordpress.com/2015/08/08/smart-city-songdo-incheon-korea/

We know humanity is now experiencing an invisible revolution. At the beginning of the XXI Century, there were already 502 million internet users in the world [1]. In 2012, 67% of the internet users had social media accounts [2]. In 2013, 56% of American adults owned a smartphone [3]. What these numbers show is a fast transition to the globalized world. But the intrinsic fact is that the latest changes are not material, yet virtual. They consist on the interpretation of our personal lives, sprinkled in infinite bytes of Data.

In this scenario, Big Data is a key term, once it can be stated as the theoretic column of smart cities. Amply used in the sense of an amount of complex, coded information., it has intrigued tech enthusiasts for different reasons: The interpretation of this informational web has many uses, from knowing a target audience for a product to extracting index statistics. But while some agree that it can be a tool to address the Common Good, others argue that once addressing particular interests, it can be a weapon for controlling of the public opinion.

Retrieved from https://smartcity.org.hk/index.php/aboutus/background

This way, the conception of privacy and State’s power in smart cities rises as two big question marks in our future. As we go deeper in the Digital Age and the interconnection between different devices becomes clearer, the ethical aspect of technology must be discussed. Between the absence of concrete policies to regulate enterprises and the political apathy of the civil society, privacy becomes more and more of an abstract idea: In the realm of social media, is anything really private?

To answer this question, our research tries to look into the way the governments operate in smart cities. More specifically, our approach to the privacy issue focuses on how Smart cities raise privacy concerns, considering the potential misuse of Data and violation of people’s basic civil rights. For that purpose, we adopted examples of various smart cities initiatives, from those in Boston and New York City to in Rio de Janeiro.

2. Structural vulnerabilities in Smart Cities and how they afflict its inhabitants

As humans, we often don’t want to share something. Where we are going, our health records, our bank account information: These are some examples of what it’s usually considered private matters.Yet, we display so much information online without hesitating. And by doing that, we allow private companies and governmental organizations to take advantage of it by selling or incorporating (in their databases) our personal data. Still, we trust and agree to website's security policies.

In this vicious cycle, Smart cities can be extremely vulnerable places. In their article “Data Security in Smart Cities: Challenges and Solutions”, Daniela Popescul and Laura Diana Radu write about how this happens. According to the two researchers, if on one hand the use of smart objects - that is “objects connected in order to provide seamless communication and contextual services”- enables the collection, transmission, and processing of huge amounts of Data; on the other hand, it needs to be constantly protected. These devices have multiple resource-constraints, such as network requirements, hardware limitations or software restrictions, which is an obstacle to the installation of security mechanisms. Due to these difficulties, software designers often overlook the issue of device security and prioritize other aspects of the product, such as performance and energy consumption. That seems like a way to deceive the consumer: The best-ranked tech products on the market cannot guarantee your safeness in the virtual world, and they are sold as they could.

Another factor that weakens Smart Cities’ structure is the lack of regulations. Our Capstone group had the opportunity to interview New School’s Director of Information and online security, David Curry. When asked “how secure is our Data?”, Mr. Curry said: “ In Europe, particularly, and some would say in Latin America, [...] there are very specific laws about when you collect private Data you have to say exactly what is it used for, and you’re not allowed to use it for something you didn’t say you’re going to use it for. In the United States, that’s a little squishy. As for smart cities and that kind of thing, that is a real concern: What kind of Data is being collected by what? Who has access to it? It’s the whole notion of the Internet of Things. ”

Besides not being able to guarantee information security, the smart city system doesn’t make the city accessible to all citizens. In the November edition of Fordham Urban Law Journal, the authors Kelsey Finch and Omer Tene argue that, despite the nature of government’s intentions, services offered by smart cities often impact individuals in a discriminatory way. According to Finch and Tene, that happens because the system automatically favors those used to technological devices. For example, when looking closely at the case of the Street Bump app, which was an initiative aimed to report to Boston’s Public Works Department the location of potholes and road castings, it is possible to affirm that the younger and wealthier areas of the city benefited the most. By that we can infer that people who are less likely to carry smartphones, such as seniors, were indirectly excluded from the perks of such in the same manner others did.

Retrieved from https://www.bu.edu/systems/2014/12/18/boston-is-becoming-a-smart-city-with-eng-support/

This problem appears in other social and infrastructural projects. For instance, take Singapore’s regulated Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) scheme. Once the toll booth system was installed in a single cordon area, dramatic changes in traffic happened. According to the book “Transport Economics”, within few months, the percentage of carpooling with less than four passengers dropped from 48 to 21, while the use of public transportation rose from 41 to 62 percent. Despite that, the average number of cars during rush hours also declined, but the traffic after ERP’s functional hours peaked. What these numbers show, in fact, is that those who could not afford the extra fee were indirectly prevented from accessing some parts of the city. As we can see, technology itself is not inclusive, and often perpetuate the status quo.

Retrieved from https://www.lta.gov.sg/content/ltaweb/en/roads-and-motoring/managing-traffic-and-congestion/electronic-road-pricing-erp.html

3. Governance vulnerabilities in Smart Cities and how it affects individual liberties

The complete eradication of privacy in Smart Cities by the government is also a risk to the current democratic system. By exchanging our information for security and practicality, we allow the government to not only know about us but also to profile us and even forecast our actions. In her article, " Legislating Privacy: Technology, Social Values, and Public Policy", Priscilla M. Regan, Professor at George Mason University, writes about the implications of new technologies in Public Policy. According to Regan, while the use of digital media devices by enterprises is usually classified as an invasion of privacy, it usually makes the organization even more powerful over individuals. That is, the online information turns into a new source of mass control, once that by accessing it, they can know one's history, activities, and proclivities.

In this scenario, minorities are groups of special interest. Historically underrepresented in public matters and often the target of authoritarian measures, this part of the population is more exposed than any other. One key factor to explain this is society’s tendency to generalize. Although the United States of America Civil Rights Act states that “All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, and privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin”[4], ethnicity, nationality, and religion continue to result in stereotypes and hate crimes. Take terrorism as an example. After the 9/11 attacks in New York, more muslims started to be selected for security checks at airports, despite the fact that most of them were peaceful individuals. Simultaneously, less of them were accepted in the U.S. as immigrants and tourists [5]. Statistically speaking, when the numbers prove that there is a profile for people that commit certain crimes, it is almost impossible to assure that there won’t be reprisals to this particular group.

Indeed, as technology makes these kinds of web intelligence acts evident, it also broadens its scope. In that sense, one concern about the interconnection of databases is shown in the forensic use of DNA. While the use of DNA samples to identify criminals boosts the efficiency of the judicial system, it also makes us question whether this measure leads to wrongful convictions. According to the article “Building a Face, and a Case, on DNA”, some researchers doubt the accuracy of the technology used in the recreation of facial images. The argument is that such techniques could stimulate racial profiling among law enforcement agencies, consequently affecting individual privacy and resulting in a violation the Fourth Amendment, which states: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”[6]

Retrieved from http://nuffieldbioethics.org/project/bioinformation

Another example of how good ideas can become dangerous is seen in New York City. Recently, the City Hall opened the possibility to its citizens of avoiding bureaucracy when registering to its Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program through an app called HRA Mobile. Instead of handing documents directly to a social services office, applicants can quickly upload them using the platform. According to Nina Stewart, the reporter behind the New York Times’ headline “Those Needing Food Stamps Find City App Eases the Path”, from March to June 2017, more than a million documents were posted. What is not said in the news, however, is what else these Data can be used for. From mere statistic purposes to profiling people to make use of populist measures, there are unlimited possibilities.

Unfortunately, one of the effects of Big Data usage by the government can be the perpetuation of tyranny. When it comes to an actual vigilance mechanism, the lack of privacy that is characteristic of Smart Cities becomes a dangerous threat to freedom of thought and expression. In the article “The watchers”, the author, Jonathan Shaw, argues that the mere awareness of surveillance reshapes people's behavior. This happens because, once you know you are constantly being watched, you tend to be more careful in your actions. According to the text, many governments use this kind of self-censorship to perpetuate its values. One example of this comes from China. By basing its system in 24/7 vigilance and rigorous repression, the Chinese government manages to keep its population following the rules. The understanding behind this approach is that, in the words of Bruce Schneider, one of the experts working in the cybersecurity program at Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, “if you don’t know where the line is, and the penalty for crossing it is severe, you will stay far away from it.”

In smart cities, surveillance is a vivid reality. Both New York and London have special departments to deal with the information gathered from security cameras - the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) and Government Communications Headquarters (CCHQ), respectively. And even not so developed cities seem to be heading in the same direction. In the online article “The truth about smart cities: ‘In the end, they will destroy democracy'”, Steven Poole mentions Rio de Janeiro’s center of operations. In Poole’s view, “One only has to look at the hi-tech nerve center that IBM built for Rio de Janeiro to see this Nineteen Eighty-Four-style vision already alarmingly realized. It is festooned with screens like a Nasa Mission Control for the city.” The journalist also highlights what Anthony Townsend writes about the building in “Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia”: “What began as a tool to predict rain and manage flood response morphed into a high-precision control panel for the entire city.” They both make use of a quote of Rio’s mayor, Eduardo Paes, when he affirms that “The operations center allows us to have people looking into every corner of the city, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

Rio’s Center of Operatios (Centro de Operações da Prefeitura do Rio). Retrieved from http://www.metropolismag.com/cities/big-data-big-questions-data-smart-cities/

4. Conclusion

To sum up, although Smart Cities seem to be a strong tendency for the future, they still must overcome many issues. The matter of whether technology should influence in policy-making – and more importantly, remain under the realm of already rich and powerful institutions such as governments – has to be addressed in the next years. In that sense, awareness of the population over the matter needs to increase, and is, therefore, one of the goals of this paper.

In the original online survey conducted by this Capstone group, the subjects were asked to briefly tell us about their background with social media. But we included an extra question. By the end of the form, we simply put “What is Big Data?” as an optional part. From the 779 responses, we obtained only 65 answers to this particular inquiry. And even between these few, many included variations of “I don’t know.” The outcome of the process described was clarifying, even though it was somewhat expected. Living immerse in a technological environment, we understand that the loss of privacy often seems natural and that concepts like Big Data are not really discussed. What surprised us, however, was the unwillingness of people to find more about it. Most of the participants didn’t even try to google the term, they just jumped the question. And that is worrying.

Translated from Portuguese: “ Have you ever heard of Big Data?” In red, “no”; in blue, “yes”; and in orange, “maybe”.

So, the best way to address the privacy issue is to invest in ways to inform the population about it. Once we are all aware of the complexity of Smart Cities and understand the possible consequences of it, we can demand our governments to be more transparent and to formulate concrete online privacy policies. Anyway, the future is uncertain, but it is possible to minimize its risks.

References (in order of appearance):

Hall, E. (2000). The Vision of a Smart City. Retrieved from: https://ntl.bts.gov/lib/14000/14800/14834/DE2001773961.pdf

Chen, W. & Wellman, B. (2004). The Global Digital Divide. IT&Society (1) 19. [1]

Duggan, M. & Brenner, J. (2013). The Demographics of Social Media Users – 2012. Pew Research Center. 2. [2]

Smith, A. (2013). Smartphone ownership – 2013 Update. Pew Research Center. 2. [3]

Chauhan, S.; et al (2016) Addressing Big Data challenges in smart cities: a systematic literature review. The Journal for Policy, Regulation and Strategy for Telecommunications, Information and Media. 2, 2-5.

Popescul, D. & Radu, L. (2016). Data Security in Smart Cities: Challenges and Solutions. Informatica Economica. 30.

Finch, K. & Tene, O. (2013). Fordham urban Law Journal. 41. 1602-1604.

Oum Hoon, T.; et al. (1999). Harwood Academic Publishers. 289.

Regan, P. (1995). Legislating Privacy: Technology, Social Values, and Public Policy. University of North Carolina Press. 74-75.

The United States Civil Rights Act (1965). Retrieved from https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=97&page=transcript [4]

Abbas (2007); Croucher & Cronn-Mills (2011); Gonzàlez, Verkuyten, Weesie, & Poppe (2008). [5]

Pollack, A. (February, 2015). Building a Face, and a Case, on DNA. New York Times: D1

Retrieved from https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/fourth_amendment [6]

Stewart, N. (2017). Those Needing Food Stamps Find City App Eases the Path. The New York Times. Published on July 25th, 2017.

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#the new school #ganharomundo

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