Afternoon roundup

• Midas Oracle hosts excellent videos explaining why you should never ever talk to the police. Never. Must watch for American readers.


• Tim Hazledine thinks ACC is just fine. I disagree. Yes, insurance schemes can run short run deficits if there's a bunch of negative shocks. But that isn't what's going on here. Rather, they're not charging anything like actuarily fair rates; heck, some classes of payouts don't even have any premia charged at all! Yes, a case can be made that ACC is preferable to transactions-costs-heavy tort litigation; that's not a case for an insurance scheme paying out for things where folks don't pay a premium. If there are classes of things for which the government wants to provide compensation but doesn't want to charge an insurance premium, or where charging a premium is too difficult, it's best not handled through the insurance system but rather through the welfare system. The more ACC is social insurance rather than risk-adjusted premium-based accident insurance, the better the case for not having ACC at all and just having generalized welfare programmes. I still prefer privatisation and actuarily-fair premia.


• Bruce Schneier applies the Lucas Critique to internet security. If you penalize companies for leaving comment spam, they'll leave comment spam for their competitors...