Day: August 22, 2016

Following is a summary of this Daily Mail article:

Since last Friday, whenever somebody gets into a yellow cab in New York City, there will be a chance that the driver won’t know any English whatsoever.

The New York Taxi Commission eliminated the requirement that taxi drivers have a knowledge of English, and tests for a taxi license are now available in several languages to accommodate non-English speakers.

The City Council sponsors of the bill argued that the requirement was a barrier to employment for potential immigrant drivers from other countries, also citing the fact that the app-based private car service Uber does not have a language requirement which has led to many yellow taxi drivers leaving to work for that company.

Also, last year the Commission also eliminated most of the geography questions from the license exam due to the drivers being able to use global positioning devices rather than having knowledge of the city.

Only 4 percent of taxi drivers are born in the United States. The largest share of drivers is 24 percent coming from Bangladesh and 10 percent coming from Pakistan.

Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez, who sponsored the bill said the legislation was intended to “level the playing field” to compete with Uber for drivers. “They don’t have any language requirement, and no one has complained that they can’t communicate with them,” he said.  [However he failed to note that people can have a choice of drivers when calling a cab with Uber.]

Austin Finan, a spokesman for Mayor Bill de Blasio, said that ending the English speaking requirement would not do harm to the “safe and reliable customer service” in the industry.

Also see this New York Post article about the issue.

[Note:  March 13, 2020— Apparently the transfer has happened, according to the Wikipedia page about IANA, however it only mentions it very briefly in the last sentence, saying: “On October the contract between the United States Department of Commerce and ICANN to perform the IANA functions was allowed to expire and the stewardship of IANA functions was officially transitioned to the private-sector.”]

The following is a summary of this Washington Examiner article: 

Officials have confirmed that the U.S. Department of Commerce is about to hand off the last remaining American control over the Internet to unelected and unaccountable UN related international bodies on October 1, when the transition will be finalized barring what the Assistant Secretary Lawrence Strickling called “any significant impediment.”

The “Internet Assigned Numbers Authority,” which is the agency responsible for converting numerical web locations into human-readable domain names such as “openmindedrealism.com,” will be moved from U.S. control to an international body which includes influence by China and Russia.

Critics of the move have pointed out that the agency would be able to be used by totalitarian governments such as China to shut down the Web anywhere around the globe, and it would create a gateway for censorship and content regulation.  [Also since the Establishment controlled UN would have jurisdiction, it would open up the potential for internet censorship due to political reasons at the request of the organization.]

If the facilities were to be moved to China, they would go into the same building as the Cyberspace Administration agency which is responsible for censoring that country’s internet.

Opponents have found a loophole to the transfer taking place, due to the fact that the federal government is constitutionally prohibited from transferring federal property without approval from Congress.

A coalition of 25 advocacy groups including Americans for Tax Reform, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Heritage Action have sent a letter to Congress making those points last week.   Also, Americans for Limited Government issued a separate statement calling for Congress to sue in the event that the transfer occurs.

Following is a summary of this Infowars article: 

In June the European Commission published a draft document outlining a proposed online electronic ID system which would be used by each European citizen to identify and authenticate themselves online.  The document calls for the ID credentials to be “issued or recognized by national public authorities, such as electronic or mobile IDs, national identity cards, or bank cards.”

While such a system may sound as if it would be convenient, it would actually set a dangerous precedent for the political establishment to track and trace everything that Europeans say and do online, including online shopping, and it would destroy online anonymity. [Other risks also exit such as potential for increased harm caused by identity theft due to the ID being centralized to all online activity.]