Category Archives: Regulation of the Day

Regulation of the Day 219: Cat Cafes

Posted on April 23, 2012 | Leave a comment


In a city as big as Tokyo, there is plenty of room for niche businesses. One niche is the neko cafe; neko is the Japanese word for cat. Besides coffee, the main attraction at cat cafes is, well, cats. Furry friends live in the cafes, and patrons can play with them and pet them while they sip their coffee. They are especially popular with professionals who work long hours and live in apartments too small to have pets.

Animal rights activists want cat cafes to be strictly regulated. They have succeeded in passing an ordinance, set to take effect later this year, that bans animals from being publicly displayed after 8:00 PM. The main targets are pet shops, some of which can be dodgy. But cat cafes are not, and their very existence is threatened; their peak hours are in the evening.

Shinji Yoshida has strict rules for patrons in his cat cafe. If a cat is sleeping, customers shall not disturb it. They are not otherwise to be harassed. And, as animal activists concerned about caged animals have overlooked, Shinji’s feline colleagues also have the run of the place, as well as a giant cat furniture tree.

This is a wise business practice, as well as a humane one. As a cat owner, trust me. If your cats aren’t happy, you won’t be, either.

Still, that’s not enough:

Animal welfare campaigner Chizuko Yamaguchi says the sheer number of customers in cat cafes can make life difficult for the animals.

“From morning to night these cats are being stroked by people they do not know. For the animals, that is a real source of stress,” she said.

Chizuko must not be a cat owner. Cats are less than subtle about avoiding people when they aren’t in a social mood. And cat cafes wouldn’t stay in business for long if the stars didn’t show up; clearly they do. Besides, anyone who has been around a cat knows that they really do enjoy being petted.

One way cats show affection is by literally sitting on you. If they want attention, they are not shy about letting you know. Mine aren’t above waking me up at the crack of dawn with a friendly head-butt, well before the alarm clock goes off. Chizuko’s concerns do not hold ground.

Cats being nocturnal animals, they tend to be more active at night. Not surprisingly, business is best precisely when cat cafes will soon be required to close. Shutting them down early is really the same thing as putting them out of business. Where would the cats go then? Shinji has 13 in his shop.

Times are tough. Jobs are scarce. Animal rights activists and regulators should think about animal and human welfare alike. They should leave cat cafes alone. A lot of cats and a lot of people would all be happier if they did.

(via Jacob Grier)

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Regulation of the Day 218: Bagpipes

Posted on April 16, 2012 | 1 Comment

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Street musicians were recently banned from playing bagpipes in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Mayor Gregor Robertson was not happy about it. He takes great pride in his Scottish heritage, to the point of wearing a kilt to the swearing-in ceremony for his second term. So when Vancouver’s engineering department went over his head, he vowed to fight back.

Most city council members are from Robertson’s Vision Vancouver party, and they agreed to review the bagpipe ban. Just in time for the city’s Scotland Week celebration, Robertson happily announced that the ban was lifted:

“Buskers play a very important role in making Vancouver’s streets lively and dynamic, particularly in our vibrant downtown. The council won’t support an outright ban on specific instruments. The restriction on bagpipes has now been lifted. Staff will continue to gather noise level readings, monitor complaints and work with musicians and performers to see how these instruments can be permitted in a way that is acceptable to the public.”

 Say what you will about bagpipe music. Banning it is bad policy. Kudos to Mayor Robertson and Vancouver’s city council for giving buskers the opportunity to make a little bit of money and add to the city’s cultural life.

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Regulation of the Day 217: Etiquette

Posted on April 9, 2012 | Leave a comment

Civility is at the very heart of civilization. Those two words, along with other words such as “city” and “citizen,” come from the Latin “civitas,” which means a body of citizens bound by common laws and rules. In other words, civilized people agree to be nice to each other. Think of how both you and the cashier usually say “thank you” when you buy your morning coffee, even if you’re complete strangers. Getting along in modern life would be impossible without at least passable manners.

Which brings us to today’s Regulation of the Day. La Toba, Spain’s mayor, Julian Altienza Garcia recently issued a 65-plank Courtesy Charter making it illegal to commit tactless acts in public from burping to slurping soup. To this writer’s knowledge, La Torba does not have a reputation as a bastion of barbarity.

The charter even contains a mandate of sorts – children are required to spend some time with their grandparents on a regular basis. It is not known how Spain’s Supreme Court would rule if they were to decide on the grandparent mandate’s legality.

Some of the other offenses include:

  • Nosepicking
  • Touching your genitals
  • Flatulence
  • Yawning without covering your mouth
  • Coughing without covering your mouth
  • Talking with your mouth full

None of these breaches of decorum are punishable beyond a dirty look and a wag of the finger. People convicted of other minor offenses will, however, be able to have their fines waived if they take etiquette courses. Mayor Garcia defends his Courtesy Charter, saying “It is a compendium of basic rules of politeness that are being lost and should not be forgotten.”

He’s right that manners are important. They shouldn’t be forgotten. And it certainly is useful to have a written etiquette primer. In fact, many already exist. You can look here, here, here, and here, for starters. But even if Mayor Garcia’s job description is as broad as he believes it to be, his constituents would be better served if he turned his attention to more pressing matters than other peoples’ boogers.

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Regulation of the Day 216: Selling Ice Cream to Kids

Posted on April 2, 2012 | Leave a comment


It can be hard for parents, but they need to tell their kids “no” from time to time. Letting children know that they can’t always get what they want is an important lesson in life. In Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, not all parents are up to the task.

Across the country, ice cream vendors will stroll through parks in the summer months; they go where ice cream trucks dare not tread. A lot of their sales are to kids. And parents know what happens when you get between a kid and ice cream: screaming, wailing, and gnashing of teeth are only the beginning. It isn’t fun.

That’s why some Park Slope parents want to ban ice cream vendors from parks. One parent wrote on a message board, “I should not have to fight with my children every warm day on the playground just so someone can make a living!”

One sees where her priorities are in these hard economic times.

This being Brooklyn, there is another wrinkle. The New York Post reports:

But Sarah Schenck says just say no to frozen confections.

Schenck, a mother of two and co-founder of the eco-friendly parentearth.com, said statistics back her up.

“Nobody wants to be a crank, but one in three kids are going to be obese or diabetic by high school,” she said. “When my kids see other kids get ice cream, they just start begging me. I just don’t think these are the fights we should be having.”

Most people have more nuanced views than Schenck; everything in moderation and all that. But there are people who think like her, and they are not afraid to use regulation to get their way. We should tell them no.

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Regulation of the Day 215: TacoCopter

Posted on March 27, 2012 | Leave a comment

Correction: According to Wired, TacoCopter turns out to have been a prank. It says a lot about the advancing state of technology that the concept was believable. So worry not, delivery drivers. Your jobs are safe. For now.

Whatever one’s feelings about unmanned attack drones, a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have found a peaceful use for them that almost everyone can support: delivering food to hungry people.

It works like this: place an order from their taco shop using a smartphone with GPS. The restaurant cooks up your order, loads it into an unmanned drone, and the TacoCopter flies to your location and delivers it to you right where you stand.

It’s a pretty cool idea. But even though TacoCopter has been around for almost a year, they have yet to get off the ground – figuratively or literally. FAA regulations don’t allow unmanned drones to be used for commercial purposes. Maybe TacoCopter should re-charter as a non-profit?

TacoCopter co-founder Star Simpson told the Huffington Post, “Honestly I think it’s not totally unreasonable to regulate something as potentially dangerous as having flying robots slinging tacos over people’s heads … [O]n the other hand, it’s a little bit ironic that that’s the case in a country where you can be killed by drone with no judicial review.”

Non-FAA critics argue that TacoCopter-style automation would put delivery drivers out of work. If TacoCopter becomes a success, it almost certainly would eliminate some delivery jobs. But those critics haven’t proven that this would be a bad thing.

There was a time when about 90 percent of Americans were farmers. Automation has reduced that to about two percent today. Despite all those lost jobs, the main reason unemployment is over 8 percent isn’t new technology. It’s a recession. Something about anti-automation arguments doesn’t compute – they forget that economies are filled with change and dynamism. Technology marches on, yet most people still find work.

If a machine takes away a man’s job, that man is now free to pursue another opportunity. Remember, opportunity is not a zero-sum game. Economic prosperity requires creating more wealth with less labor. Reducing the amount of labor used on food delivery frees that labor for other, higher-valued uses.

The FAA should reconsider its ban-first-ask-questions-later approach. And latter-day Luddites need not fear for the deliveryman’s future.

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Regulation of the Day 214: Flipping the Bird

Posted on March 20, 2012 | Leave a comment


Steven Pogue, 64, was cited by police for flipping the bird while driving in Ballwin, Missouri. He was exonerated on free speech grounds, and the city is now moving to repeal the law.

Such impolite behavior is par for the course in New York City, among other places. Should such rude people find themselves in a certain part of eastern Missouri, they now have nothing to fear.

The ordinance in question prohibits motorists from extending body parts outside vehicle windows. It was intended more to prevent people from sticking their legs out of windows than to discourage profanity, though at least one officer thought the ordinance also applied to middle fingers.

Your mild-mannered correspondent has also, admittedly, been known to let loose now and then. Usually it’s while in pain, though the DC area’s spectacularly inept drivers do occasionally draw my ire. But should linguistic decorum be a matter of law? In this case, discretion should be the better part of valor.

A local ACLU spokeswoman comments that “Repealing the law fits within our nation’s finest traditions of allowing free expressions without fear of arrest.” Right on.

Similar cases have been successfully fought in Philadelphia, and with less success in Milwaukee.

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Regulation of the Day 213: Dying

Posted on March 19, 2012 | Leave a comment


Falciano del Massico, a small town in Italy, has banned its 4,000 residents from dying because the local cemetery is completely full. Mayor Giulio Cesare Fava’s ordinance reads, in part, “It is forbidden for residents to go beyond the boundaries of earthly life, and go into the afterlife.”

An ongoing feud with a neighboring town has made it difficult to fix the problem.

Interviewed by the BBC, Mayor Fava pleaded with a straight face: “Citizens, while we await the construction of the new cemetery, I order you not to die, so we don’t have any problems.”

While this writer is often skeptical of the power of regulation, I sincerely hope that Mayor Fava’s death ban succeeds. If it does, Falciano del Massico might be just the place for my wife and I to spend our retirement years.

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Regulation of the Day 212: Locating Your Newsstand

Posted on February 22, 2012 | 1 Comment


New York City’s Administrative Code requires all of the city’s 330 newsstands to be located at least 9 feet, 6 inches away from buildings. That way pedestrians will have a clear path to walk by. Marilyn Louie has run a newsstand in Chinatown since 1982. Before that, her father ran it. All in all, her newsstand has sat in the same spot for 35 years – precisely 9 feet, 3 inches away from the nearest building. It took inspectors a few decades to get around to measuring, but now they want Louie to tear down her newsstand, citing the three-inch shortfall. Louie’s newsstand is also 4 inches closer to the curb than regulations allow.

There have been no pedestrian complaints.

Politics may play a role here. A Spanish company named Cemusa must have friends in high places, because the city government is in the process of requiring all newsstand owners to tear down their existing structures and replace with them with new ones – made by Cemusa. The New York Post reports that the new newsstands are “prone to leaks and break-ins,” so Louie’s reluctance to go along with the plan is understandable.

Cemusa is also installing new bus stop shelters and public bathrooms throughout New York City.

The city government has offered to let Louie move her business to one of several other spots by the end of the month. Louie, who struggles to make $40,000 per year despite working 7-day weeks, scouted out the proposed locations. They either lack foot traffic, or there are already numerous competitors already there selling similar merchandise.

Football is often called a game of inches. When it comes to regulation and the right to make a living, so is the game of life. What a shame that Marilyn Louie is finding this out the hard way.

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Regulation of the Day 211: The Color of Buildings

Posted on February 21, 2012 | Leave a comment


Officials in Calcutta, India definitely have a favorite color: sky blue. The BBC reports that they are requiring many buildings throughout the city to be painted sky blue:

Government buildings, flyovers, roadside railings, and taxis should be painted a shade of light blue, a minister in the ruling Trinamul Congress government said.

Owners of private buildings will be also be requested to paint them in the same colour, the minister said.

Private building owners will be on the hook for their new look. Other cities in India and around the world have similar rules favoring certain colors. Seville, Spain famously emphasizes yellow and ochre in its buildings. The city is famous for bullfighting, and the colors symbolize the sand and blood of the arena. In Calcutta, sky blue represents a new government slogan: “The sky is the limit.”

India has made massive progress in poverty reduction since it half-embraced markets in recent years, but there is still a ways to go. These painting regulations certainly aren’t fatal to that noble project. But they do require diverting resources from other, more productive sectors to pay for all that painting. So it will be a little bit longer before Calcutta reaches that sky. But until then, at least it will look nice.

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Regulation of the Day 210: Transgendered Air Travelers

Posted on February 15, 2012 | Leave a comment

Canada is cracking down on the latest terrorist threat to innocent people everywhere: transgendered people. A July 2011 provision added to the Canadian Aeronautics Act’s Identity Screening Regulations says, “An air carrier shall not transport a passenger… who does not appear to be of the gender indicated on the identification he or she presents.”

Suppose someone was born female but lives life as a male. If his valid government-issued photo ID still identifies him as female, he may not board an airplane. It can take years of filling out forms and enduring hearings to convince courts to legally recognize that someone has crossed genders, as the economist Deirdre McCloskey (formerly Donald) movingly writes in her autobiography, Crossing. The result is a de facto ban on flying for most transgendered Canadians.

Dennis Lebel is Canada’s Transportation Minister. He supports the ban. He believes it increases passenger safety.

It doesn’t, actually. Here’s why. A passenger is a threat if he carries weapons or explosives on board. If he doesn’t, he’s not. This is true whether or not his appearance matches his ID, or whether it says “M” or “F.” This is true even if the passenger uses a fake ID, or none at all. Can this person bring down a plane? That is the question.

In other words, showing ID has precisely nothing to do with passenger safety. It’s all for show. The point is if you have weapons and explosives or not.

Lebel and the Canadian security screeners who work for him should keep this in mind. The nasty little provision may or may not be specifically targeted at gender crossers. But in practice it is discrimination, and it does not make air travelers any safer. If anything, by distracting screeners from searching for weapons and explosives, it makes passengers a little less safe. This is bad policy all around. It should be repealed immediately.

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