SnarfoBlog

Health Care: A Parable

2009-09-07T11:42:00.000-07:00

The White House, October 4th, 1957

Anonymous staffer #1, rushing into the Oval Office: Mr. President, the Soviets have just launched a satellite!

President Eisenhower: A what?

Anonymous staffer #1: A satellite, a man-made object circling the earth.

President Eisenhower: Like an airplane?

Anonymous staffer #1: No, much, much higher. Above the atmosphere, like the moon.

Presidential adviser #1: My God, how did they do that?

Anonymous staffer #1: They used a rocket to boost it into orbit.

President Eisenhower: If there is a race into space, we seem to be falling behind. Do we have anything similar?

Presidential adviser #1: The Army has the Explorer Program, and the Navy has Project Vanguard. We could rush one of these into full production.

President Eisenhower: Any other suggestions?

Presidential adviser #2: We could copy Sputnik. It's cheaper than making our own design, we know it works, and simply having a satellite would show we are are world-class superpower.

Presidential adviser #3: I hate the idea of just copying the Soviets. How about we copy the Soviet rocket engine, take the body from a German V-2 – since we have plenty of German scientists kicking around – and then copy the fuel from a Chinese rocket?

Presidential adviser #1: The Chinese don't have rockets.

Presidential adviser #3: The ones they shoot fireworks up with. Those are really pretty.

Presidential adviser #2: Will it work?

Scientist #1, clearing throat: Mr. President, we could have teams of scientists and engineers test the various proposals against each other, and then pick the best one. As we gain experience with rocketry and outer space, we can propose and test design suggestions, and then roll out any improvements we discover. With adequate funding, we could land on the moon in a dozen years or so.

Presidential adviser #1: A dozen years? Are you out of your mind? The President will be a decade out of office, and you are looking at six election cycles between now and then. I say we rush Explorer or Vanguard into production.

Presidential adviser #2: Copy Sputnik!

Presidential adviser #3: Copy bits and pieces from other rockets!

President Eisenhower: Well, I'm a lame duck anyway, and don't have any political capital to spend. Let's turn the problem over to Congress.

Scientist #1: Are there any scientists in Congress?

Presidential adviser #1: Lawyers, mostly. But it's not like it's rocket sci – er, they can consult with scientists, and then work out the differences in the various designs in committee.

Scientist #1: You are going to design a rocket with a group of lawyers? I mean, I like the idea of using wind tunnels, but --

Presidential adviser #2: Oh, good point. Better bring on board labor unions, the National Rifle Association, AARP, and the American Bar Association. We will need their votes in the next election.

Presidential adviser #3: And once we have hammered out the differences between Democratic and Republican rocket plans, and brought the various interest groups on board, we will have the best spacecraft ever!

President Eisenhower: Get to it! I want everyone to see what American ingenuity is all about!

***

Sometime in 2050:

Anonymous staffer #5006: Mr. President, we beat Lithuania into orbit!

Anonymous staffer #5007: Making sure that each congressional district and interest group got precisely the same amount of money did the trick!

***

Okay, now I will be serious.

We have something called the scientific method that can tell us what health care proposal is the best for the United States, and 47 million uninsured Americans who would benefit from any sort of health care access. Why not come up with an experiment – along the lines of a much-expanded Rand Health Insurance Experiment (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Health_Insurance_Experiment ) – and test the various proposals against each other?

Give each political party and interest group a set amount of time to come up with a universal plan conforming to specific criteria – you could have the Liberal Democratic Plan, the Blue Dog Democratic Plan, the Republican Plan, the Green Plan, the Libertarian Plan, plus plans by AARP, the American Medical Association, the Insurance Lobby, and even the American Bar Association, if you wanted. Throw in copies of the Canadian, French, English, German, Swiss, Japanese, and Singaporean plans, plus any other national plan that seem to be working well and can be applied to the United States.

During the time the designated interest groups are coming up with their “optimal” plans, decide on a standard set of criteria to judge the success or failure of each plan, and an amount of money to spend. At the end of the design period, select plans that conform to the starting criteria (things like universality, funding, and the like). Randomly assign the 47 million uninsured Americans to the plans, and give each plan the equal amount of money and a set time period.

If one plan is clearly worse than the median of all plans during the course of the experiment, remove it and randomly assign the people involved to one of the remaining plans. Continue until the agreed time period has completed, or there is only one plan remaining, and then use the winning plan as the national system. Or you could have an experimental group and a buy-in group, where the experimental group includes the uninsured Americans above, and the buy-in group includes individuals, groups, and companies that wish to access a particular plan with their own funds, which would provide additional data as to what plans are popular with which groups, but wouldn't affect the experiment itself.

There is a far greater chance of finding the best plan using the scientific method than there is using the wishes of the loudest interest group and the most highly-paid lobbyists interacting with a bunch of lawyers and politicians. It would also quiet (though admittedly, not completely silence) the loudest critics, since their pet health care plans would have been shown to be inferior to the winning plan.

And not only would this method provide a means of continuing improvement – since the experiment could be continued with a small group even after the vast majority goes on the universal plan, and improvements rolled out to the nation as a whole – but it would provide valuable information for every other country on the planet. So much so , in fact, that some countries may be interested in contributing scientific proposals and/or funds, in order to share in the rewards of such research. A plan that contributes not only to the welfare of the United States but to mankind as a whole would seem to be a goal worth pursuing.

Just a brief note about tit-for-tat in game theory

2008-01-13T07:41:00.000-08:00

Four words:
Cooperate
Retaliate
Negotiate
Forgive

In other words, cooperate as long as the other party does, punish them for any defections, negotiate a return to cooperation, then forgive them for their defection.

/And it's been a half year since I wrote anything in the blog. I really need to A) Post some stuff I've written about balanced senary notation (specifically, the cool truncation/rounding part, including things like prices), B) Post some thoughts on IFNOP/ILOOP Condorcet completion methods (Ignore Fewest Number Of Preferences/Ignore Lowest Order of Preferences), and C) Post some ideas on the Single Tax, and how much cooler it is than the mis-named "Fair Tax." (grin)

Five lessons learned from Iraq

2007-07-22T06:09:00.000-07:00

This came to mind from a Fark thread entitled Ten Iraq lessons learned. You won't like them.

1. Only attack other countries who actually attack you first. Massive retaliation is preferable to incorrect pre-emption.
2. Wars should only be fought to protect the people and the Constitution of the United States, not to reshape the politics of the Middle East or other parts of the world.
3. "Allies" share danger, so that both are safer together than they would be apart. If one group shields another at the cost of their own safety -- shifting danger from one group to another, rather than sharing it -- they are more accurately called a patron, benefactor, or protector, and the quote about "entangling alliances" comes into play.
4. People have friends, countries have interests. The interests of the most annoying state in the union come before even the nicest country overseas.
5. If terrorists hate us for our freedoms, taking away our freedoms to fight them is a stupid idea.

Health Saving Accounts -- updated

2007-07-05T23:14:00.000-07:00

I updated this in a post on Slate.com, so I thought I'd copy it so I had a record for future reference (and possible inclusion in Fark and Slashdot threads). Here goes:

It seems like most of the plans proposed by the major candidates for President require mandatory enrollment and government-control. Still, it's not necessary to have a super slush fund set up by the federal government to pay for medical treatment -- it's perfectly possible to have universality with mandated private health savings accounts, which not only remove the stranglehold of insurance companies on the process, but the government temptation to redirect funds (e.g. Social Security).

For example, how about the following:

1. Calculate the amount of money a person is likely to require for healthcare throughout his life, factoring in pre-existing conditions and genetic predispositions. Adjust this amount to reward good healthcare decisions (regular exercise, immunizations, annual checkups) and punish bad ones (overeating, smoking, etc). You might also give a break for those who are regular blood donors, or have signed a consent form for organ donation.

2. Figure out how much money a person can afford to set aside for their health savings account, up to some maximum percentage of income. Require at least that amount to be saved (though of course they could save more if desired), until their account matches the actuarial estimate in #1. In addition, front-load the account so that it is fully-funded before the person retires, barring accident or illness. This would be pre-tax, to provide an incentive to those who are saving the most.

3. Have the government calculate a standard fee for a wide range of medical services, and reimburse health care providers up to a set amount based on the drug, procedure, or treatment. A person could opt for a more expensive option, but they would have to pay the difference out of their own pocket, and if they are able to take advantage of a cheaper option, then less would be taken from their account.

4. If there is any shortfall in the account, the state would cover it, but treat it as a loan with interest. If the person's financial situtation improved, they would start paying off the debt, and then return to funding their account.

5. Once an account is fully funded, the owner of it would no longer be subject to automatic withholdings, unless there is a future shortfall. If there is a surplus in the account, a reasonable rate of interest could be paid, and the owner allowed to spend the excess, or transfer it to another account.

6. Parents would be responsible for all healthcare costs for their children until they reach adulthood.

7. If a person dies with an account shortfall, the money to retire the debt would come out of the estate, if possible. If there is a surplus, it will be treated as an asset, and transferred to one's heirs.

8. Since there will probably still be a shortfall over the entire system (since surpluses are fully transferred, but shortfalls after probate are not), a graduated tax rate could be imposed to make it fully solvent.

This system would be universal, and since the state would have a direct say in the maximum payment per procedure from the HSA, there would be a two-prong approach to limiting costs and minimizing fraud -- patients wouldn't want to spend more from their account than necessary, and the state would set a limit for their reimbursement, kind of like insurance companies do nowadays. By making patients fully aware of the costs for treatment, they can make more informed health decisions, turning the system into a means of exploiting the "wisdom of crowds" rather than the "opinions of bureaucrats."

In addition, this plan would reward people who were frugal, and encourage conserving scarce resources without requiring the state to ration care. On a related note, people in the final stages of their lives who have no hope for recovery would be less likely to choose the most expensive, herculean efforts to prolong their suffering, since the cost would be taken from their estate.
Finally, it would also severely curtail the free-rider problem, since a person demanding expensive, unnecessary care would be paying more for the privilege than a thriftier person.

Most arguements against this kind of system are that it's unfair (what could be fairer than paying as much of your own way as you can?), punishes the sick (but treatment is guaranteed, and repayment only necessary if you can afford it), is mean-spirited (okay, it doesn't give freebies to anyone), or is inefficient (but the government would still controll the maximum payment per service, it would simply have a second pair of eyes -- the patient -- trying to minimize the bill as well). Compare to a system where the government puts the money in a big pool, and ladles out coverage as necessary, this has less potential for fraud and abuse, and is probably more in tune with American desire for individuality than most of the "socialized medicine" alternatives.

/I wonder if anyone will bother reading this far? Oh well, it's fun to craft plans like this and see how people respond.

The hunter and the bear

2007-06-27T08:45:00.000-07:00

I argue a lot on Fark, and typically, political arguments are of the form "Candidate A doesn't believe in X, so you are an idiot if you vote for him." Of course, this completely ignores who you should vote for. I finally wrote the following:

These threads are a bit like a religious argument between a Mormon and a Muslim. Sure, it's easy for one side to poke holes in the wacky beliefs of the other, but only when their own beliefs aren't subject to the same scrutiny.

Which is probably why a lot of people seem to be against everything and for nothing. There are relatively few arguments like "I believe Ron Paul is mistaken in the role of the Federal government in universal health care, which is why I support John Edwards," while there are plenty saying "Ron Paul is a racist homophobe, and if you vote for him you are an idiot."

There is a joke about two hunting guides walking in a forest. On the other side of the canyon they see a grizzly bear stand up on it hind legs, sniff the wind, then take off running toward them. The first guide looks around the scrubby pines in vain for a tree to climb, while the second grabs a pair of running shoes from his backpack and starts to hurriedly put them on.
"Why are you doing that? You can't outrun a bear!" The first guide exclaims.
"I don't have to outrun the bear," the other replies. "I just have to outrun you."

Likewise, Representative Paul is far from a perfect candidate, but he doesn't have to be perfect, he just has to be better than the others -- as President, not king, or emperor, or whatever, but as a chief executive that must defer in certain matters to the Congress, the Court, the various states, or to the citizens of the United States.

There is plenty of time between now and election day, and there is a very good chance I may change my mind in the interim, either by some policy statement of Paul's, or by another candidate really impressing me, but at this point I don't trust any of the other Republicans to keep us out of unnecessary wars, and I prefer some form of divided government to offset the Congress, rather than a Democratic rubberstamp. With Paul, it would be like divided government no matter which party held Congress, and that situation works for me.

Ron Paul -- spamming or swarming?

2007-06-02T08:43:00.000-07:00

I wrote this (as "anonymous") on the Elephant Biz blog, and I thought I'd put it here as well, since it's a brief synopsis of what I think about the accusations that Ron Paul supporters are "spamming" online polls:
***
Are the same people voting in multiple polls? Probably. Are they voting multiple times in the same poll? Probably not -- or at least, not any more than supporters for other candidates. Checking the IP address, using cookies, and validating e-mail addresses would prevent the vast majority of that from happening.

Thus, I don't think "spamming" is the correct word, though "swarming" might be. While it can be annoying for websites that prefer other candidates, it does show how excited some people are about the election. Rather than ban a particular candidate, I think other candidates should differentiate themselves from the pack in order to generate the same excitement -- people tend to root for the underdog, and a person standing for his convictions in the face of widespread opposition is attractive to many. For example, John McCain impressed me with his principled stand against torture, especially since he was the only person on the stage to have endured it (granted, he lost most of that goodwill with his stand on immigration, but that's another subject).

Finally, the Republican Party has to decide whether their platform is a big tent or a pup tent. If they can't defend their views against a person in their own party, how will they fare in the general election? The Iraq issue isn't going to go away between now and Novemeber 2008.
***

For me, "spamming" means a small group of people voting over and over in the same poll, while swarming means a larger group of people who vote in many (most? all?) of the polls they see, but only once per poll. The latter might annoy some people, but it's no more unethical than if Gallup and Pew called the same person on the same subject, and they answered both times. "I'm sorry, I already answered that question for a Gallup poll, so I can't answer it here" seems a little excessive.

My suggestion for other candidates (as mentioned above) is to find an important position where you disagree with the majority of your compatriots, and give a firm, reasoned defense of that position. It will help differentiate you from the rest of the pack, and generate excitement with those who agree with your position. Saying "Me, too!" and "I'd do that -- twice as much!" doesn't give anyone a reason to vote for you over anyone else in the race.

Ron Paul did not say the U.S. invited the 9/11 attacks

2007-05-26T15:33:00.000-07:00

I see this pop up on blogs (and even in some newspapers, which one would assume know better), and it's kind of irritating to see a lie repeated over an over, as if it will become the truth.

He said (and I quote):

"Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us? They attack us because we've been over there; we've been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We've been in the Middle East -- I think Reagan was right. We don't understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics."

Let me give an analogy. Let's say a little girl is visiting Yellowstone, and she is mauled by a bear. One park ranger insists that bears are inherently evil, and should be hunted down and exterminated.

Another ranger disagrees, saying:

"Have you ever read the reasons bears attack humans? They attack us because people feed them, and they associate humans with food and seek them out. We don't understand that wild animals are not pets."

Is this blaming the child for being attacked? Is this blaming the majority of park visitors, who heed the warning signs to not feed the bears? I would say it does not. Instead, it is giving helpful information about how to avoid future attacks. Much like the warning signs in parks, Paul believes the U.S. would be better off if we follow the Constitution rather than ignoring it.

Of course, not feeding bears and not occupying foreign countries only helps most of the time. Sometimes you have to hunt down a vicious bear and shoot it, and sometimes you have to invade a foreign country to protect your own. It's interesting that Paul actually voted for the invasion of Afghanistan, which indicates that he knows the difference between non-intervention and pacifism.

Declarations of War and Authorizations For Use of Military Force

2007-05-21T16:53:00.000-07:00

Ever since the first Republican debate on May 3rd, 2007, where Congressman Ron Paul made the case that if Congress wanted war, it should have declared war, there apparently exists some confusion as to what constitutes a Declaration of War. Many Iraq War apologists claim that there was such a declaration. I would like to illustrate the difference here.

War of 1812:
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That war be and the same is hereby declared to exist between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the dependencies thereof, and the United States of America and their territories; and that the President of the United States is hereby authorized to use the whole land and naval force of the United States to carry the same into effect, and to issue to private armed vessels of the United States commissions or letters of marque and general reprisal, in such form as he shall think proper, and under the seal of the United States, against the vessels, goods, and effects of the government of the said United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and the subjects thereof
APPROVED, June 18, 1812

Spanish-American War:
DECLARATION OF WAR WITH SPAIN
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, First. That war be, and the same is hereby, declared to exist, and that war has existed since the 21st day of April, A. D. 1898, including said day, between the United States of America and the Kingdom of Spain.
Second. That the President of the United States be, and he hereby is, directed and empowered to use the entire land and naval forces of the United States and to call into the actual service of the United States the militia of the several States to such extent as may be necessary to carry this act into effect.
Approved, April 25, 1898.

World War I:
Joint Resolution Declaring that a state of war exists between the Imperial German Government and the Government and the people of the United States and making provision to prosecute the same.
Whereas the Imperial German Government has committed repeated acts of war against the Government and the people of the United States of America; Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress Assembled, that the state of war between the United States and the Imperial German Government which has thus been thrust upon the United States is hereby formally declared; and that the President be, and he is hereby, authorized and directed to employ the entire naval and military forces of the United States and the resources of the Government to carry on war against the Imperial German Government; and to bring the conflict to a successful termination all of the resources of the country are hereby pledged by the Congress of the United States.

World War II:
JOINT RESOLUTION Declaring that a state of war exists between the Imperial Government of Japan and the Government and the people of the United States and making provisions to prosecute the same.
Whereas the Imperial Government of Japan has committed unprovoked acts of war against the Government and the people of the United States of America:
Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the state of war between the United States and the Imperial Government of Japan which has thus been thrust upon the United States is hereby formally declared; and the President is hereby authorized and directed to employ the entire naval and military forces of the United States and the resources of the Government to carry on war against the Imperial Government of Japan; and, to bring the conflict to a successful termination, all of the resources of the country are hereby pledged by the Congress of the United States.
************

Now for Iraq War 2: Desert Boogaloo

AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF MILITARY FORCE AGAINST IRAQ RESOLUTION OF 2002
[[Page 116 STAT. 1498]]
Public Law 107-243107th Congress
Joint Resolution
To authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq. <>
Whereas in 1990 in response to Iraq's war of aggression against and illegal occupation of Kuwait, the United States forged a coalition of nations to liberate Kuwait and its people in order to defend the national security of the United States and enforce United Nations Security Council resolutions relating to Iraq;
Whereas after the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, Iraq entered into a United Nations sponsored cease-fire agreement pursuant to which Iraq unequivocally agreed, among other things, to eliminate its nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs and the means to deliver and develop them, and to end its support for international terrorism;
Whereas the efforts of international weapons inspectors, United States intelligence agencies, and Iraqi defectors led to the discovery that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical weapons and a large scale biological weapons program, and that Iraq had an advanced nuclear weapons development program that was much closer to producing a nuclear weapon than intelligence reporting had previously indicated;
Whereas Iraq, in direct and flagrant violation of the cease-fire, attempted to thwart the efforts of weapons inspectors to identify and destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction stockpiles and development capabilities, which finally resulted in the withdrawal of inspectors from Iraq on October 31, 1998;
Whereas in Public Law 105-235 (August 14, 1998), Congress concluded that Iraq's continuing weapons of mass destruction programs threatened vital United States interests and international peace and security, declared Iraq to be in ``material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations'' and urged the President ``to take appropriate action, in accordance with the Constitution and relevant laws of the United States, to bring Iraq into compliance with its international obligations'';
Whereas Iraq both poses a continuing threat to the national security of the United States and international peace and security in the Persian Gulf region and remains in material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations by, among other things, continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability, actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability, and supporting and harboring terrorist organizations;
Whereas Iraq persists in violating resolution of the United Nations Security Council by continuing to engage in brutal repression of its civilian population thereby threatening international peace
[[Page 116 STAT. 1499]]
and security in the region, by refusing to release, repatriate, or account for non-Iraqi citizens wrongfully detained by Iraq, including an American serviceman, and by failing to return property wrongfully seized by Iraq from Kuwait;
Whereas the current Iraqi regime has demonstrated its capability and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction against other nations and its own people;
Whereas the current Iraqi regime has demonstrated its continuing hostility toward, and willingness to attack, the United States, including by attempting in 1993 to assassinate former President Bush and by firing on many thousands of occasions on United States and Coalition Armed Forces engaged in enforcing the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council;
Whereas members of al Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq;
Whereas Iraq continues to aid and harbor other international terrorist organizations, including organizations that threaten the lives and safety of United States citizens;
Whereas the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, underscored the gravity of the threat posed by the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by international terrorist organizations;
Whereas Iraq's demonstrated capability and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction, the risk that the current Iraqi regime will either employ those weapons to launch a surprise attack against the United States or its Armed Forces or provide them to international terrorists who would do so, and the extreme magnitude of harm that would result to the United States and its citizens from such an attack, combine to justify action by the United States to defend itself;
Whereas United Nations Security Council Resolution 678 (1990) authorizes the use of all necessary means to enforce United Nations Security Council Resolution 660 (1990) and subsequent relevant resolutions and to compel Iraq to cease certain activities that threaten international peace and security, including the development of weapons of mass destruction and refusal or obstruction of United Nations weapons inspections in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 687 (1991), repression of its civilian population in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 688 (1991), and threatening its neighbors or United Nations operations in Iraq in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 949 (1994);
Whereas in the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution (Public Law 102-1), Congress has authorized the President ``to use United States Armed Forces pursuant to United Nations Security Council Resolution 678 (1990) in order to achieve implementation of Security Council Resolution 660, 661, 662, 664, 665, 666, 667, 669, 670, 674, and 677'';
Whereas in December 1991, Congress expressed its sense that it ``supports the use of all necessary means to achieve the goals of United Nations Security Council Resolution 687 as being consistent with the Authorization of Use of Military Force Against
[[Page 116 STAT. 1500]]
Iraq Resolution (Public Law 102-1),'' that Iraq's repression of its civilian population violates United Nations Security Council Resolution 688 and ``constitutes a continuing threat to the peace, security, and stability of the Persian Gulf region,'' and that Congress, ``supports the use of all necessary means to achieve the goals of United Nations Security Council Resolution 688'';
Whereas the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 (Public Law 105-338) expressed the sense of Congress that it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove from power the current Iraqi regime and promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime;
Whereas on September 12, 2002, President Bush committed the United States to ``work with the United Nations Security Council to meet our common challenge'' posed by Iraq and to ``work for the necessary resolutions,'' while also making clear that ``the Security Council resolutions will be enforced, and the just demands of peace and security will be met, or action will be unavoidable'';
Whereas the United States is determined to prosecute the war on terrorism and Iraq's ongoing support for international terrorist groups combined with its development of weapons of mass destruction in direct violation of its obligations under the 1991 cease-fire and other United Nations Security Council resolutions make clear that it is in the national security interests of the United States and in furtherance of the war on terrorism that all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions be enforced, including through the use of force if necessary;
Whereas Congress has taken steps to pursue vigorously the war on terrorism through the provision of authorities and funding requested by the President to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such persons or organizations;
Whereas the President and Congress are determined to continue to take all appropriate actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such persons or organizations;
Whereas the President has authority under the Constitution to take action in order to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States, as Congress recognized in the joint resolution on Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40); and
Whereas it is in the national security interests of the United States to restore international peace and security to the Persian Gulf region: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress <> assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This joint resolution may be cited as the ``Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002''.
[[Page 116 STAT. 1501]]
SEC. 2. SUPPORT FOR UNITED STATES DIPLOMATIC EFFORTS.
The Congress of the United States supports the efforts by the President to-- (1) strictly enforce through the United Nations Security Council all relevant Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq and encourages him in those efforts; and (2) obtain prompt and decisive action by the Security Council to ensure that Iraq abandons its strategy of delay, evasion and noncompliance and promptly and strictly complies with all relevant Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.
SEC. 3. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.
(a) Authorization.--The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to-- (1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and (2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.
(b) Presidential Determination.--In connection with the exercise of the authority granted in subsection (a) to use force the President shall, prior to such exercise or as soon thereafter as may be feasible, but no later than 48 hours after exercising such authority, make available to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate his determination that-- (1) reliance by the United States on further diplomatic or other peaceful means alone either (A) will not adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq or (B) is not likely to lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq; and (2) acting pursuant to this joint resolution is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorist and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.
(c) War Powers Resolution Requirements.-- (1) Specific statutory authorization.--Consistent with section 8(a)(1) of the War Powers Resolution, the Congress declares that this section is intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution. (2) Applicability of other requirements.--Nothing in this joint resolution supersedes any requirement of the War Powers Resolution.
SEC. 4. REPORTS TO CONGRESS.
(a) <> Reports.--The President shall, at least once every 60 days, submit to the Congress a report on matters relevant to this joint resolution, including actions taken pursuant to the exercise of authority granted in section 3 and the status of planning for efforts that are expected to be required after such actions are completed, including those actions described in section 7 of the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 (Public Law 105-338).
[[Page 116 STAT. 1502]]
(b) Single Consolidated Report.--To the extent that the submission of any report described in subsection (a) coincides with the submission of any other report on matters relevant to this joint resolution otherwise required to be submitted to Congress pursuant to the reporting requirements of the War Powers Resolution (Public Law 93-148), all such reports may be submitted as a single consolidated report to the Congress. (c) Rule of Construction.--To the extent that the information required by section 3 of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution (Public Law 102-1) is included in the report required by this section, such report shall be considered as meeting the requirements of section 3 of such resolution.
Approved October 16, 2002.
****

As you can see, there is a slight difference.

S.A.F.E. -- Savings Accounts For Everything (#1)

2007-05-02T19:53:00.000-07:00

Continuing on the health-care theme I had a while back, I came up with S.A.F.E. (Savings Accounts For Everything). I would cover Health, Education, Welfare (good ol' HEW), Retirement, and Legal expenses. First, Health:

1. Figure out the amount of money a person is likely to require for healthcare throughout his life, including pre-existing conditions and genetic predispositions. Adjust this amount to reward good healthcare decisions (generic drugs, regular checkups) and punish bad ones (overweight, smoker, etc).
2. Figure out how much money a person can afford to set aside for healthcare.
3. Mandate contributions by law. If #2>#1, then the person should save as much money as necessary, either by payroll deductions or regular payment. If #1>#2, the person should set aside as much as he or she can afford.
4. Reimburse health care providers a set amount based on the drug, procedure, or treatment. A person could opt for a more expensive option, but they would have to pay the difference out of their own pocket.
5. The state should cover any shortfall in the account, but treat it as a loan with interest. If the person's financial situtation improves, they start paying off the debt.
6. If there is a surplus in the account, the state should pay a reasonable rate of interest into the account.
7. In addition to rewarding people for good healthcare decisions, people who do things like donate blood, sign themselves up as anatomical donors, or other activities that (potentially) improve the health of others should get a break on their withholdings.
8. If a person has saved an amount sufficient to cover healthcare costs and taxes (#11, below) for the rest of his life, he is no longer subject to automatic withholding unless the account has a future shortfall.
9. Parents are responsible for all healthcare costs for their children until they reach adulthood.
10. If a person dies with an account shortfall, the money to retire the debt will come out of the estate if possible. If there is a surplus, a portion (all?) of that surplus will go to one's heirs.
11. Since there will probably still be a shortfall over the entire system, a (possibly graduated) rate of taxation will also be imposed to cover it.

There are probably a few flaws in it, but it's fairer than most of the suggestions I see, and far less subject to abuse than the current system, both in the U.S. and in foreign countries.

I'll concentrate on the "For Everything" part of the proposal (education, welfare, retirement, and legal expenses) at a later date.

On jury selection

2007-03-18T20:31:00.000-07:00

Like I generally do when I'm exposed to something (and I've been called to jury duty a couple of times, once seated and the other dismissed), I like to think of ways to make the process more efficient. I'm not very knowledgable about the lawyer side of the equation, but I do happen to be fairly familiar with voting methods and selection theory, and here are my thoughts on how to empanel a fair jury:

Have all people eligible for jury duty fill out a questionaire covering a series of questions that can be reasonably asked by the court in a wide range of cases. Split the information, so one department has questionaires only identified by juror number, and another with juror numbers matched only with contact information, so the two are kept separate.

For each court case, let prosecution and defense rank as many potential jurors as they want from the entire pool of potential candidates based solely on the information from these questionaires -- essentially, voting for the ones they want. Using a recognized voting method (Range, Approval, Condorcet, Borda, Kemeny, or whatever else can be agreed on), pick the eligible jurors with the highest combined score from both sides, plus as many alternates as are needed.

Once the jurors are chosen, the juror numbers are given to the contact office, which calls them, asks a few questions to make sure they have not heard about or formed an opinion on the case, and then schedules them for jury duty.

This would prevent things like kicking off people because of race or appearance, and you would almost certainly get fairer trials than you currently have in high-profile cases. There might be some concern as for privacy because of the jury questionaires, but separating the questionaire from personal information should do a lot to alleviate that concern.

Some thoughts on universal healthcare

2007-01-30T17:42:00.000-08:00

The best universally-accessible health care would have the following attributes:

1. Preventive care is preferred to emergency care.
2. Inexpensive care is preferred to expensive care of equal effectiveness.
3. Necessary care is preferred to cosmetic (or superfluous) care.

In addition, you want people to get the care they need, but conserve resources wherever possible. Since people will not do this when others pick up the check, you have to appeal to their own self-interest. We will add the following attributes:

4. Everyone pays something.
5. Every poor health care decision will have financial consequences (if you're a hypochondriac, you'll pay for it).
6. Every good health care decision will have financial benefits (if you go in for regular checkups, the amount taken out of your paycheck will almost certainly go down).
7. Interest will be paid to the account for surpluses and removed from the account for shortfalls.

Basically, I was thinking of a variation of the health savings account. People would have money deducted from their income and placed into an account, the amount depending on their actuarial risk, pre-existing conditions, and dependents. To prevent people from being forced into bankruptcy, there would be a graduated rate that would be the absolute maximum a person would have to pay at once (poor people would have a lower percentage than rich people), but any shortfall would be a loan on the account, and their rate would be set equal to the maxixum allowable until the debt and interest was paid off. If there is an account shortfall for all Americans, then there would be a minimum, graduated rate set to bring it into balance.

If you made a graph of it, you would have income on the horizontal axis, percentage tax on the vertical axis, another horizontal line at the maximum cap (for argument, say at 50%), a sloped line from the origin to the upper right that crosses the cap (graduated upper rate), and a much smaller, sloped line from the origin that also crosses the upper cap somewhere in the far distance (lower graduated rate). Everyone's rates would fall somewhere in that triangle.

To encourage smart spending toward the end of life, I'd add the following two items:

8. A portion of the funds remaining in an account would be passed on to a person's heirs.
9. A portion of a person's estate will be used to help settle any account deficits.

A new idea for education funding

2006-11-13T07:55:00.000-08:00

This is a brief idea I came up with in a thread at Fark.com, concerning how to fund education. Their was an argument about having property tax pay for it, since single people without children paid for those with children, including illegal aliens. Here is my thought:

***

How about mandatory education insurance? Rates would be based on pre-existing conditions (children), and the likelihood you will have more children. If the rate is higher than you can pay, the government covers the difference. People with large families would generally have a greater portion of their paycheck taken out than those with no children, but if the cost would push the family into poverty they would still be covered. At the other extreme, people who decide to get their tubes snipped would have very low rates.

You could then use your education insurance card to pay for the schooling of your choice at any accredited school, though the amount paid would be limited to the full tuition for a public school. You could even extend this payment to home-schooling, though there would have to be mandatory testing of some kind to qualify, so parents didn't use all the money for beer and pretzels.

***

I'm going to have to do more thinking on this, and I may write up a more in-depth proposal.

SciAm article on the Socialist State

2006-11-11T10:52:00.000-08:00

There was an interesting article on the Scientific American website that was at once remarkably sweeping in generalization and remarkably vague in fact. Thanks go to a socialist Farker that brought it up in an argument. It is available here: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000AF3D5-6DC9-152E-A9F183414B7F0000

Here is my response:

The problem with the SciAm article (and your conclusion) is that it lumps countries together without telling us what the individual breakdown is. So we have English speaking countries vs. Nordic countries -- what countries scored where? You can't tell, because while the countries are mentioned, their individual scores are not.

In addition, his numbers for purchasing power seem suspicious. Here are the numbers from the CIA "World Factbook" online:

GDP per capita (Purchasing Power Parity)
Sweden: $29,800
Finland: $31,000
Norway: $42,800
Denmark: $34,800

United States: $41,600
United Kingdom: $30,100
Australia: $31,600
Canada: $33,900
New Zealand: $25,300 (slackers)
Ireland: $41,100

Note, I have no clue what "working age wages" would be in comparison, since the brief article didn't mention how he came up with those numbers.

Now, this all looks roughly even, until you realize the U.S. has 300 million people, and the rest of the English-speaking countries have a total of 122 million, which means the average will be a wee bit higher than simply adding the GDP per capita and dividing by 6.

In comparison, the combined population of the Nordic countries mentioned is 24 million, of which the highest-scoring country (Norway) makes up 4.6 million, or 19%. It looks like the average is going to be a bit lower per capita than in the English-speaking countries, unless their definition of "working age" is remarkably different.

(Feel free to check the numbers, I just used the internet and a calculator, and might have mis-typed something somewhere. I will say that this particular article is far from proving the superiority of the Nordic system, and it would be nice to see a breakdown to check his facts.)

A suggestion for campaign finance reform

2006-09-22T20:27:00.000-07:00

I posted this on thenation.com, but I thought I'd quote myself. Here is an idea to fund elections that is cheap, fair, and reduces the influence money has.

1. All campaign contributions go to the Federal Election Commission.

2. 50% of each contribution goes into the account of the candidate named, and the remaining 50% is spread evenly among all valid candidates for the office. (In a 2 candidate race, that would be a 75-25 split, in a three person race it would be a 66.6-16.6-16.6 split, etc.)

3. All campaign spending must come from the FEC account, and must go to legitimate campaign expenses. A list of such expenses for each candidate will be immediately made available to all interested parties as they are incurred.

4. No limits on campaign donations, but all donations above a certain amount (to be determined) will have full disclosure on the person giving the money. In the case of money aggregated by a corporation, union, or other group, the names of any individuals giving above this threshold as well as the names of those disbursing the money will be given.

5. Any money left over will be used to fund the general election.

This would be self-financing, result in more representation for minor parties (since they get a portion of what the major parties collect), and disclose precisely who is giving the big bucks and where it's being spent. In addition, it wouldn't violate first amendment protections, since people could give as much as they want with the understanding that part of the money goes to ensure a more level playing field in the election. You could call it a "funding redistribution payment" or some other euphemism.

One person wrote back the following:

Just one problem. The other would be the fact that nothing in your proposal would stop the "527s" or their relatives.

This is a good observation. Here are my thoughts.

Identifying if a 527 is advocating a particular issue or advocating a candidate is a problem under the *current* system. If you can do that, the problem becomes trivial -- those that campaign for a particular candidate fall under FEC rules. Unfortunately, the line is often blurred, and groups like MoveOn and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth use any loophole available to slam major opponents of their preferred candidate. This is an issue for any system that allows unlimited spending and tax-exempt status.

You could do something draconian, and in the same way companies have "corporate personhood," advocacy groups and PACs could have "corporate candidatehood" subject to the same laws as natural candidates. In other words, they would be subject to the same 50% rule mentioned above (they get 50% directly, the remainder split among every candidate and group in a particular race). You could drop the requirement to refrain from candidate advocacy as well.

Something this drastic would probably require legislation the size of an encyclopedia (if not a constitutional amendment), though. On the other hand, it would definitely reduce if not eliminate the power of PACs and 527's, since people would get more bang for the buck just donating their money directly to the candidate.

Still, I don't need to prove the method is perfect, just better than the one we have at present. :)

A twist on a classic saying

2006-09-03T07:03:00.000-07:00

In a Theater

First they came for the smokers
and I did not speak out
because I was not a smoker.
Then they came for the crying babies
and I did not speak out
because I was not a crying baby.
Then they came for the cell-phone yakkers
and I did not speak out
because I was not a cell-phone yakker.
Then they came for me
but by that time the movie had ended
so I didn't care.

Slashdot moderation applied to patents

2006-08-17T10:02:00.000-07:00

I came up with the following after a tongue-in-cheek suggestion to use the Slashdot moderation system for patents:

Normal -- Average invention, will sit and gather dust somewhere
Offtopic -- Invention won't do what it claims
Flamebait -- Violates known laws of physics
Troll -- Attempt to steal another person's invention
Redundant -- Has been "invented" before. Multiple times.
Insightful -- What a cool invention! Also known as troll attractant.
Interesting -- Not sure what it's used for, but fun to watch
Informative -- Will be referred to in future inventions
Funny -- It blows up when someone uses it
Overrated -- Does something redundant, but with just one click!
Underrated -- No one knows what it does, but it will form a completely new industry

Land Taxation and the McMansion Solution

2006-08-05T16:01:00.000-07:00

In any comprehensive description of land use and taxation, Henry George’s idea of “land rents” and the related idea of “resource taxation” (taxing for clean air and water, for example) encourages equally free access for all while providing a basis for funding government that is not only fair, but conserves limited resources. The basic idea is this: Land, since it is intrinsically limited and not created by the hard work or genius of mankind, yet is required by all of mankind’s endeavors, has the peculiar characteristic of belonging to all of society. Since one person’s use of a particular plot of land prevents others from using it, he should pay society a “land rent” for its use.

The same is true with natural resources. One that has been mentioned is a pollution tax – polluters would pay for the privilege of consuming clean air and water, for example. If I burn a ton of coal and use up a volume of clean air to do so, thus depriving my neighbors of it, then I should reimburse them. Because taxation would depend on how much pollution was produced, there is an incentive to limit such pollution as much as economically feasible. Another is a tax on natural, non-renewable resources – things like petroleum, minerals, and the like. Anything that cannot be created by mankind costs society as it is used up.

This idea can be extended to anything else that has societal costs – for example, if alcoholic beverages cause a certain dollar amount of health-related costs and property damage (from drunk driving and the like, as well as more subtle things like missing work because of a hangover), then a tax on those beverages covering the societal cost makes sense. Thus, cigarette, gasoline, and alcohol taxes make sense, although their current level and justification may not.

Now on to the McMansion problem and its solution. One direct offshoot of land value taxation – one that I have not seen discussed elsewhere -- is a “viewshed tax.” To quote Wikipedia, “a viewshed is an area of land, water, and other environmental elements that is visible from a fixed vantage point.” If someone plops up a huge skyscraper that blots out the sun, then it has an immediate effect on the quality of life – and property values -- for its neighbors, and they should be compensated.

As a personal example, my single-story house used to be in the middle of a field, with a beautiful view of the town where I live, and privacy from my nearest neighbors. The privacy and beauty was worth a lot to me. The owner of the property decided to put in a subdivision, meaning an opaque six-foot-tall fence and an additional seven houses immediately adjoining mine (there were a total of 92 added to the 13 acre lot). To make matters worse, the houses were all 2-3 stories, with ample views of my back yard, changing my location from viewer to viewee.

How should we encourage homeowners to “play nice” in a neighborhood without ruining the viewshed (and the privacy) for existing residents? The simplest method is to charge for the square footage of visible surface area at the same rate as you charge for the square footage of land it sits on. Let’s say you have a 100x100 foot lot, want 2500 square feet of living space, and have three different possible house plans. The land would have a 10,000 square foot base land value tax rate. A 1-story ranch house 25 foot wide, 100 foot long, and ten foot high adds an additional 5000 square feet of surface area (25x100+2x25x10+2*100*10), for a total of 15,000 square feet. If you have a 50’x50’x10’ house, you have 4500 square feet of surface area plus the land, or the equivalent of 14,500 square feet. If the builder decides to make the house a bit more efficient, a cubical 30’x30’x30’ house would have the same amount of visible surface area as the 50’x50’x10’ house and 200 square feet more living area. Going still further, put this house halfway underground, and you’d only use a total of 12,700 square feet of “land value tax.” Home builders would have an incentive to make buildings as compact and out of sight as possible, and there would more interest in underground (and partially underground) housing. In order to make it fair (as well as easier to calculate), we should calculate the minimal surface area of the solid that completely encloses the building. Nooks, crannies, and cul-de-sacs add surface area without blocking the view any more than a more regularly-shaped object. If two or more buildings that are close together could be enclosed with a single larger building with less overall surface area, that surface could be used instead. This could include buildings on adjoining properties, which would further encourage efficient, compact, multi-unit housing.

With the creation of any structure, there is going to be land moved around the structure to make it more amenable to the people living there. To take an extreme case, consider the top of a mountain. If the owner decided to blast the peak away, and build a structure just below the original surface but now clearly exposed, he might argue that since he is underneath the former ground level, he should not have to pay any taxes based on the exterior surface area. Or the converse case, a person could build a house, then dump loads of soil over it to create his own artificial peak, and claim no additional taxes because he is under the current ground level. The solution is to consider the lower of the two values (current or previous ground level) when determining the surface area of structures. A person could still blast away a peak, put up a mansion, then rebuild the peak with the removed soil, and only be charged for the actual area of the exposed structure.

This can lead to another problem, of which I have first-hand experience from the construction around my home: building up the land in one area so that an adjoining area has an increased risk of flooding. Even if a homeowner is charged for the exposed area of structures, bulldozing the land so that the “level” portion is several feet higher than the surrounding area still alters the landscape and inconveniences the neighbors. One solution would be to come up with a rate based on the soil volume displaced. You could pick a standard in keeping with the “surface area” approach, either the surface area of the cube or sphere of volume equivalent to the displaced soil, or a straight fee per volume could be enacted. This could be further extended to things like mining and oil and water wells (where the person pumping is charged a “volume fee” in addition to pollution taxes and land use fees).

There are a couple of questions that need answered. First, how do we classify living quarters that are also vehicles, (like travel trailers), former vehicles that have been turned into housing (converted school buses and airliners for example), and “vehicles” that are moved only once (mobile homes)? The simplest method is to count their exterior surface area the same way as fixed housing. We can also add automobiles, pickups, and other standard vehicles – a car wouldn’t add that much to the cost, but a tractor-trailer (which actually blocks a fair amount of view) would be charged accordingly. If desired, a vehicle that is housed in a garage could be covered by the “enclosed space” rule, though there would have to be some way of making certain the vehicle was indeed stored there consistently and not parked in the driveway or on the street while the garage was used for storage. In addition to garages, barns, storage sheds, and outhouses block the view just the same as anything else, and should be charged accordingly.

And now for something a bit more esoteric – what about radio towers, bridges (and other scaffold structures) and fences? For radio towers and bridges, simply calculate the smallest simple closed surface that would completely enclose it. Fences are a bit different – they can range from a single strand of barbed wire all the way to solid brick walls, and they can be a simple divider to a completely enclosed space. A simple rule would be that if an average adult can walk normally through a space (no ducking, climbing over, or turning sideways), then that space is not considered part of the fence or structure. This would count three-strand barbed wire the same as chain link and solid wooden fences of the same height.

Hedges would be a special case: as living things that generally enhance privacy and value without annoying neighbors, they should be exempt from “surface area” taxes unless they are seamlessly connected to non-living or man-made barriers. “Seamlessly” would mean the “normal adult walking through it” rule – if there is a gap between living and man-made barrier large enough for a normal walkway, then only the manmade section is charged; if the gap is narrower than that (with a fence, gate, wall, or other obstruction), then the entire exterior surface is calculated.

Another set of structures that needs to be considered are roads, parking lots, sidewalks, and other paved areas. There are two extremes: totally natural, where a path is made by the actions of humans and vehicles directly on the soil, and totally artificial, where the surface is paved with manmade materials and impervious to water and plants. With “totally natural” paths, the land tax should remain the same as unimproved land. For minor improvements – loose shale, gravel, pumice, etc. – there may be the determination that only a percentage of the improved surface is counted, though this would have to be studied to make certain it is not a possible loophole. At the other extreme, if concrete and asphalt pavement was counted the same way as natural land, the Wal-Marts of the world would have an incentive to having acres of parking lot instead of using the land more efficiently with parking garages. The entire surface area of a paved road or sidewalk should be counted as any other manmade building and charged the full land tax.

A further annoyance: signs and billboards. As Ogden Nash said:

I think that I shall never see
A billboard as lovely as a tree
Perhaps unless the billboards fall
I’ll never see a tree at all

Signs, billboards, and other advertisements on public display can be counted as part of a building structure (if attached or near enough to a structure) or as freestanding “improvements.” Companies would have an incentive to build such advertisements into existing structures rather than sticking billboards around town. The latter would still be legal, but the additional “viewshed” tax would tend reduce their number and increase dual-purpose use.

There is also the question of other viewshed items that don’t belong to the class of structures, vehicles, fences, pavement, and signs. It can be from something as desirable as a swimming pool to as unwelcome as a junkyard. There are many possibilities, but perhaps the easiest to understand conceptually is the “tarp test.” The tarpaulin with the minimum area that can completely cover one or more manmade objects represents the area subject to the viewshed tax. There can even be tarpaulins designed with a square-foot or square-meter grid, so a tax assessor or interested person could easily estimate such areas, or as proof in case there is a dispute.

Finally, in order to close any potential loopholes, any activity that lowers the property value in an area should require the person doing the activity to pay for the difference. Someone putting up an incinerator, junk yard, or other undesirable structure – or even one that leaves uncut weeds and trash to make the area look like a slum – should reimburse his neighbors (indirectly, through taxes) for any assessed value lost. For the converse, anyone who puts up something that raises the value of his neighbors’ land (reflected in higher assessed land rents) – say, a park, or something that beautifies the neighborhood -- should receive a reward from his neighbors. Things that lower value should be paid at the time of occurrence, while things that raise value should have the increase split between the government and the person doing the improvements at the time land rents are paid. A person who raised the value of his neighbor’s land by $1000 might get a $500 rebate, with the remaining $500 increase in neighbor’s taxes split between federal, state, and local governments. This is to not only reward people for improving their neighborhood, but to encourage government to help them do so. The ratio might be set differently, though there is something appealing and easy to calculate about an even split.

One further addendum to the concept of land and viewshed rents: competitive bidding for land. Local government should have an assessor for both property and for the visible improvements cited above, but how do we make sure such assessments accurately reflect market value? The solution is to allow anyone to competitively bid on the rental value of a property by putting down a year’s land/viewshed rent as “earnest money,” plus agree to pay the current resident the amount necessary to replace all physical improvements and move all personal property. The current resident would have one year plus the time until the next “land rent” payment to match the amount. If they match it (thus raising their annual rent and possibly forcing an adjustment for the land rents of surrounding properties), then nothing changes except for the amount of taxes paid, and the bidder can either raise or drop their bid . If the current residents fail to match it (or any higher bid) in the time allowed, the property is transferred to the new residents, adjustments are made in the amount paid by surrounding property owners, and the former residents receive a lump-sum check for the replacement cost of their physical improvements and moving costs.

This would neatly sidestep the issue of a business convincing local government to condemn a person’s land in order to increase tax revenue (such as in the recent Supreme Court decision) – the neighborhood could opt to match the amount, and if they could not they would have the chance to build a new house and have moving expenses taken care of. On the other hand, a single homeowner would not be able to hold out for vast sums of money, either, at least without being willing to pay higher taxes for the privilege.

How would such taxes be collected, and who would get which portion? Well, the taxes could be assessed nationally, with a base value given to all areas depending on location, national infrastructure and services that affected its value, and the like. Each state would be liable for the portion of the land not under federal control. States could add their own portion for their “value added” infrastructure, as could counties and cities, with the change in value paid for by the land holder. This means that if Oregon (for example) made a state road, they would reimburse the federal government for the land and the surface area paved, but would receive a rebate from the federal government for any federal land value increase, and an increase in taxes for any citizens whose land increases in value. The land “owner” could pay either locally (in which case the appropriate funds would be disbursed to the state and federal level) or they could pay all funds to a national service – like the current IRS – with that agency sending the appropriate funds to state and local government.

Such “land rents” and viewshed taxes could be collected annually, like property taxes and most income taxes are now. Unlike income taxes, they would be charged for the following year rather than the preceding one, and a refusal to pay would result in eviction, just like not paying rent on an apartment would.

Let’s assume for a moment that a combined land/viewshed tax was put into effect, with the reduction or elimination of sales and other taxes to make it revenue neutral. What results should we expect?

1. More efficient use of land. There would be no incentive to keep lots vacant – they would either be developed or revert to government control to prevent taxes. Lots would be large enough to comfortable fit the building desired, but no larger – oversized lots would not be quite the selling point they are today.
2. Since there would be a definite tax advantage to doing so, buildings would be more compact, with less urban sprawl and “big box” retail spaces. Wal-Mart and other stores would be less likely to be one-story behemoths, and more likely to be multi-story buildings at least partially underground and out of view.
3. McMansions would have an economic disincentive – since the surface area of the structure is added to the area of the lot, a monster house in the middle of a subdivision of normal houses would pay a larger share of the taxes.
4. As underground and partially underground homes, factories, and commercial buildings become more attractive, they become safer from a wide variety of natural and manmade disasters – fire, tornadoes, nuclear war – and as skyscrapers and other buildings become shorter and broader, they become more resistant to earthquakes and less attractive to terrorist attacks. Only mildew (from the typically cooler exterior walls), radon buildup, and flooding would be more likely in underground buildings, and there are building methods to prevent the first two, and placement (i.e. in an area without flood danger) would lessen the chance of the third.
5. In addition, there would be more incentive to make parking more compact, either with multilevel parking garages or something similar. You would have to balance asphalt sprawl with doubling your taxes for that area, depending on the land value it may be worthwhile to forego multiple acres of pavement for something with a smaller footprint or included in the building itself.
6. As surface areas diminish, heating and cooling become more efficient as well. A residence or business that is tax efficient will generally be energy efficient as well.
7. Fewer signs cluttering up the landscape, and more dual-use structures (like advertisements on the sides of buildings).
8. Fewer fences (and those both shorter and enclosing smaller areas) breaking the free travel of humans and animals.
9. People would take better care of their property, and strive to be good neighbors. There would be a financial disincentive to lowering neighbor’s property values, and a definite financial incentive to activities that improve the neighborhood.
10. A healthy property market: the state would be interested in development (since they are liable for tax receipts to the federal government), while individuals and corporations would be interested in minimizing expansion to profitable levels. This tension would ensure that the state did not place undue impediments in the way of business, yet would seek to have as broad a tax base as possible.
11. An increase in trade and value creation. Since wealth would be held in things that are made by the hands of man and not in land, there would be an incentive to emphasize the former and conserve the latter. Taxes would be based on the cost of items and activities to society as well as land rent, while taxes on trade would be reduced or eliminated.
12. Skyscrapers – which are remarkably efficient horizontally and remarkably inefficient vertically – would be reduced in height and number. More compact buildings – variations of cubes, domes, and the like – would be more popular than spires and minarets.
13. More powerlines would be moved underground, especially in areas with high land values. Not only does this improve the appearance of neighborhoods, it increases public safety (fewer downed powerlines or crashing into "telephone" poles).

There are, of course, arguments against such a comprehensive tax change. Here are some of them, plus my response:

1. Neighborhoods would become more crowded, and builders tried to cram as many buildings in an area in order to reduce taxes. Buildings would be more likely to squeeze as close to the property line as possible, to take advantage of the “larger enclosure” rule. This not a bad thing. If you have a city of 100 square miles and 100,000 people, and afterward have 100,000 on 50 square miles, since land is not created nor destroyed, you have 50 square miles to use for other activities – hiking, recreation, parks, or even additional industry. A smaller city footprint is also more efficient from a transportation and service standpoint.
2. Property owners would lose something that may have been in their family for generations. Only if they did not pay the actual land rent cost, which would indicate they were not using the land as efficiently as possible. Since people already pay property taxes – which are a version of land rents, though unfairly extended societal improvements rather than just societal costs – they are already paying a land rent and an additional improvement rent. This would be replaced by a land and viewshed rent.
3. People living where water tables are high (e.g. New Orleans) would be disadvantaged compared to those living where they are low (e.g. Las Vegas), because underground structures and similar tax reduction methods would be cost prohibitive. This is actually a positive. People should prefer to live on higher ground, not under sea level or in a known flood plain. Flood insurance gets passed off to the insurer of last resort – the federal government – which means that it is paid for by all of us.
4. It would be difficult to administer taxes based on surface area. Not any more (and I would argue, far less) than the myriad of local, state, and federal income taxes, property taxes, and sales taxes. Since the tax is based on what is directly observable – land, and manmade objects built or placed on it – and not on things easily hidden or underreported (income, purchases), it closes a lot of possible cheats and loopholes. The “Tarp Test” and using the minimum enclosed surface area are actually quite straightforward when compared to a building's actual value (which often requires an assessor to actually enter the structure to tell its construction and what it contains).
5. The government would get too much/too little tax to pay for necessary services. This is an easy one. If it’s too much, get the budget on accepted accounting practices, pay off the national debt, and then rebate the rest of the money equally to all American citizens. If it’s too little – something I seriously doubt, since it would be uniform and without loopholes – then keep one or more of the other current taxes until the budget is balanced. Frankly, I believe there would be a surplus, at least until Congress decided to spend it (which is why I stress putting the government on standard accounting practices and paying off the debt).
6. Farmers and others that require large plots of land would be hit extraordinarily hard, or we would see enormous increases in food prices. Since farms are typically not in the center of big cities – where land prices are the highest – and don’t involve covering the land with buildings (usually a barn, a handful of sheds and silos, a greenhouse, the home itself, plus fencing), their cost would be toward the cost of unimproved land. In addition, flood plains are attractive areas to farm (because of the fertile land), and by making it less attractive for regular homes, more would be available for farming. Any increases in tax rates would be shared among all farmers, so there would be no disadvantage for any particular one (in fact, it may make huge factory farms a bit less attractive than family farms, if the latter can show more productivity per acre). If such a broad-based tax did raise the costs for farmers as a whole, food prices would increase uniformly, though this would be at least partially offset by the reduction or elimination of sales taxes. The actual result would be to shift the tax burden to where it belongs – the raw materials necessary for everyone – and away from hard work.
7. The elderly would be particularly hard hit. After spending a lifetime paying off a mortgage and purchasing a home, they could lose it to “land rent” or a bidder who wants their property. They can lose their homes now, either by eminent domain or by failing to pay property taxes. They would still own their home, and if someone bid on the land rent, they could match their price, or if that was not possible, they would receive the replacement cost for their home and have a new one built in a less expensive area. The requirement that a person pay the replacement cost (and not just the fair market value, which may be less because of depreciation) means that while land is not kept from its most efficient use, neither is it transferred willy-nilly.
8. Changing from current tax rules would result in confusion and economic disruption. This is a fair criticism. Any change in taxes would do the same thing, as people struggle to minimize their taxes and governments struggle to maximize revenues. After that period of disruption, however, the tax code would be much simpler, broader based, and fairer.
9. As taxes on visible area push homes underground, it increases their cost. True, it increases the upfront costs, but in addition to improving -- or at least not degrading -- the view of neighbors, heating and cooling costs would be reduced, as would insurance rates (except for flood insurance in areas prone to them). In addition, while the home would require extra waterproofing for the area below ground, it would require less maintenance (paint, cosmetic repair) than a similar home above ground.

For those who are interested, feel free to discuss or argue with any of the points I’ve made. I actually wrote this down originally because of several discussions on Fark.com covering McMansions, and I thought it would be more efficient to put my arguments in one location for future reference.

A modest proposal for parental responsibility

2006-05-12T07:52:00.000-07:00

(With apologies to Jonathan Swift)

1. Free birth control, abortion (at least in the first trimester), and sterilization to anyone who wants it.

2. Reversible sterilization to all convicted felons (reversible after they have actually paid for their crimes in full, including monetary restitution).

3. Full legalization of drugs, each with a little "secret sauce" to prevent conception for a few months after being taken.

4. Mandatory insurance for all potential parents, to pay for all costs associated with raising a child, with rates depending on actuarial determination. In other words, a person without children would (almost always) pay less than a person with four children, and those at risk of having "special needs" children would pay more than those with normal risk. If a person can't afford an extra child -- if the rates take the existing family below the poverty line, for example -- you can either perform a reversible sterilization (which would lower the rates), or take it out of whatever estate they leave when they die. If you are *really* mean, upon adulthood you could stick each person covered by insurance with their portion of the bill for the first 18 years of their life, if their parents were unable to do so. There's still a chance that you'd have people forcing society to pay for their decisions, but at least there would be some accountability.

That should be enough to start an interesting discussion. Have at it! :)

Mexico is a failed nation

2006-05-02T17:35:00.000-07:00

Let's look at some numbers:

Country A lost 2.5 million citizens in 12 years.
Country B lost 8 million citizens in 20 years

Country A is East Germany, between 1949 and 1961. Country B is Mexico, between 1986 and 2006 (Mexicans make up roughly 70% of the12 million illegal aliens in the United States). This is despite the fact that both East and West Germany shared the same language and culture, while the U.S. and Mexico share neither -- people were willing to flee Mexico with only what they could carry into a strange land with an unfamiliar language simply because conditions back home were so terrible.

Further, a poll taken in Mexico found that 46 percent of the population, about 50 million Mexicans, would come to the United States if they had the means and opportunity. About half of that number said they'd be willing to move to and work in the United States illegally. When nearly half of your citizens express a desire to move, that would indicate the nation has failed.

The only solution I see is what West Germany did with East Germany: Annexation (we can't really use the politically-correct term "reunification" with Mexico). Without biting the bullet on this one, Mexico will remain in the hands of a corrupt elite, and continue to send their poor, disenfranchised, and uneducated population northward.

An anti-spam solution

2006-04-22T15:41:00.000-07:00

My preferred solution to the spam problem is "Store on server" email. When an email is sent, only the sender information, subject, and location of the full email would be sent. When this header hits the recipient's mailbox, it is checked against a whitelist, and if it's there the email is downloaded (from the location given) immediately. If it doesn't appear on the whitelist, it is then checked against a blacklist, and if it appears there it is deleted without confirmation.

If it isn't on either list, the originating server has to wait for approval by the recipient before the complete email is sent. This would ensure four things: the recipient expresses interest based on the subject and who it's from, the incoming mail server is not spam flooded by thousands of huge emails at once, the sender gives a valid location for the completed email, and the server is still accessible when the recipient asks for it. This prevents bogus return addresses (since there would be no way to see if a response was received) and IP hopping to keep ahead of spam blockers. It would also move much of the network burden from spam from people who receive emails to the people who send them.

I received a response to my suggestion on Slashdot, so I wrote a response (I think the quoted text is "fair use" to show what I'm replying to):

The one giant problem that your idea (and others like it) fail to address is non-support for bulk sending. One of my clients regularly sends about 60,000 copies of his monthly newsletter to opt-in customers.

If it's opt-in, the return address should already be in the whitelist. If it isn't, then the full message would only be downloaded if a person expressed interest in it.

The current system allows him to spool out mail at a pace his system can handle. Your system encourages his server to ignite at 8:15 AM whenever all his recipients get to work, check their mail, and simultaneously attempt to download the message.

This assumes that 60,000 people forget to whitelist the email, yet want to download it simultaneously. It is trivial to set up a filter to whitelist all email addresses you write to (and a simple "respond to the confirmation email" would work for that), so if it's truly "opt in" and not "oops, I forgot to uncheck a hidden box," the email would be downloaded in its entirety as soon as the header hits the mailbox.

In addition, one bit of information that can be included in the subject/sender/header info is an email expiration. If you get hammered every day at 8:15 am because many of your opt-in customers have no clue what they are doing, just set the expiration to 8 am. They would see a message that says "not on whitelist/expired" when attempting to download the message, and they can choose at that point to whitelist, blacklist, or keep current settings for future communications.

Thoughts on Education, AKA Educational Triage

2006-04-02T09:21:00.000-07:00

Q: How is it possible to measure teacher ability?

A: By comparing student progress. If a class makes significantly more progress than average, then I would say the teacher is effective. If a class makes significantly less progress than the average, the teacher is not effective. In other words, if a class goes from fourth to sixth grade reading level in one year, the teacher is probably a good one, but if the class goes from grade 6 to grade 6.5, then the teacher is probably not as good, even though the final level is higher (BTW, this would help alleviate some of the complaints concerning teachers in remedial classes, since this would measure how much is gained rather than an absolute score).

Q: When there just aren't enough teachers in raw numbers, how can you select for talent? If a business needs 10 engineers and can only find 8 competent ones, they still hire 10 people. So you have either 2 non-engineers trying to learn how to do it or 2 incompetent engineers with the other 8 trying to carry their weight.

A: Educational triage. If you don't have enough resources to help everyone, you shift the resources where they will do the most good. In your example, the best engineers would be placed on the most critical projects, and the incompetent ones would be put where they do the least harm. It sounds cold-blooded and calculating, but so does medical triage, and if we can't aim for a perfect outcome, we have to try for the best possible outcome under the circumstances.

Of course, there are two different viewpoints of the "best possible outcome." We can try to maximize overall achievement, even if some students fail, or we can try to minimize overall differences (No child left behind, anyone?), which results in varying degrees of mediocrity. If you want to emphasize overall accomplishment -- which I would suggest -- match the best teachers with the students that have most potential for learning. If you want to minimize differences, reverse the order.

A short note about immigration

2006-04-02T06:58:00.000-07:00

I posted this on Yahoo, but I like to keep copies of what I write in one place, in case I have to edit, update, or defend my statements. Here are my thoughts on illegal immigration:

Immigrants are welcome as long as they want to become Americans rather than turning America into whatever country they fled from. That means learning English, leaving the Mexican flags at home, and supporting yourself without government assistance.

For those claiming that the U.S. is heartless -- apparently, we are far less heartless than Mexico, otherwise people wouldn't be fleeing that country to settle in a place with a different language and customs. Let's see illegal aliens protest the awful hellhole they came from instead of the place they are escaping to.

I personally don't think this problem will be solved by legislation -- look at the amnesty Reagan gave, in the mistaken belief that it was a one-time deal, and people south of the border would suddenly obey U.S. laws. It probably won't be solved by a Great Wall on our border, either, not because of flawed analogies to the Berlin Wall (which was designed to keep people *in*, not *out*), but because people will still go over it, under it, or around it, even if it means building boats and using the ocean.

The only way it will be solved (in my opinion) is if the Mexican government has a string of honest, intelligent leaders -- good luck with that -- or the U.S. annexes Mexico.

More on "Affirmative Action for White Men"

2006-03-26T13:10:00.000-08:00

I've been arguing with -- or perhaps I should say, arguing *at* -- a person on Yahoo who claims to have graduated from prestigious universities in medicine, but for whom logic is a foreign concept. I might as well copy my arguments over here, with any quotes by the person in question used under the "Fair Use" provision for critiquing.
********************

>>Ahhh, I have performed pre-hire occupational exams, as a physician. NEWSFLASH - it's like that already!! (I have had clients who give us a trailer hitch in clinic and prospectives have to demonstrate they can lift and hitch it. If the job requires 50 lbs. or 100lbs. lifting, we have bags and boxes that weight and they demonstrate it as part of the work physical.)

Here's a newsflash for you: This isn't true in every field. While you use personal anecdote, here is one example: http://www.usmarshals.gov/careers/fitness.htm

>>You are such a blithering whiney idiot to make such comments while oblivious to the fact that such is the norm in hiring and has been for some time.

And you are wrong if you believe it is true in every field.

>>No problem. I'm sure your low IQ coupled with your sense of entitlement and your incredible need to make excuses for your failures will come up with something else equally untrue.

I believe this answers the question, "Was mdmba2000 ever on the debate team?" Ad hominem attacks don't disprove my argument, they only cast doubt on yours.

>>OK, then we will have to remove all the urinals too. No unfair extras to the guy's side.

I don't have a urinal at home, so I think I can manage a regular toilet at work.

>>My stuff went under the names of full profs at Harvard and Hopkins med schools.

And anyone can claim anything at all on the internet. If your argument depends on who you are -- which can't be proved -- rather than what you say, then it tends to be unconvincing.

BTW, on a strictly personal note and unrelated to the argument, I get a kick out of people who insult other's intelligence without having a full command of the facts.

********

>>Try reading what you link. It lists **Fitness* standards, not hiring standards.

I'm going to mark off the relevent portion with asterisks. Pay close attention:

MEN’S ***APPLICANT*** FITNESS STANDARDS
...
WOMEN’S ***APPLICANT*** FITNESS STANDARDS

Now the dictionary definition of "applicant":

ap·pli·cant (plural ap·pli·cants) noun
Definitions: somebody who formally applies for something: somebody who has formally applied for something ***such as a job,*** a grant of money, or admission to a school or college.

>>Try reading what you link. It lists **Fitness* standards, not hiring standards. And low and behold, there's also different (READ LOWER) standards for **older men**! I guess it is affirmative action and favoritism for old farts like you that allows them to hire guys over 29.

This is a curious tactic, trying to proclaim there is no difference in standards between men and women because there *is* a difference in standards between young and old people. If I were somehow arguing age discrimination and linked this page, would you have flipped the argument around and said "Look, they have different standards for men and women, so there cannot be age discrimination"? Different standards for one criterion do not preclude having different standards for another, unrelated criterion.

BTW, I clicked on your links, and they were worthless for this argument. Leaving aside the fact that a proper rebuttal would show where the United States Marshalls Service changed their hiring criteria to a unified scale, they didn't show *any* hiring standards. Perhaps if you provided a link to something a bit more useful.

>>Or if it isn't too overwhelming to your small brain, brain googling "functional capacity evalaution". I got 2,100,000 returns. Awful lot of websites out there for something you claim isn't done that much, isn't there.

I cut and pasted your quoted search and got the following:

Did you mean: "functional capacity evaluation"
No standard web pages containing all your search terms were found.
Your search - "functional capacity evalaution" - did not match any documents.
Suggestions:
Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
Try different keywords.
Try more general keywords.

Okay, I realize you made a typo, but I'm easily amused. Less amusing is that you expect me to search for you. Perhaps you could search the 2.1 million documents on the correctly spelled search and give me a link to something that actually supports your argument.

>>No, I was in the hard science classes that were too difficult for you. That's why you can't get a decent job. Debate was for the liberal arts dummies who thought their self serving babble was intelligent. It's not, it's mental masturbation.

Not that my science background has any bearing on this particular argument, but I have a B.S. in Physics and was in MSAE at the University of Texas at Austin until I went into the I.T. field. I freely admit that I have less college coursework than an M.D. or Ph.D., but I do have a passing familiarity with the hard sciences. If we were arguing medical diagnoses and treatment, I would freely bow to your expertise. However, when you argue that physical standards for men and women are identical in every field -- something disprovable after a moderate web search -- I don't believe your appeal to authority matters that much.

*******

standards, but I did see this on About.com regarding the Air Force criteria:

To graduate from Air Force Basic Training, recruits will have to achieve the following minimum standards:

Males:
Two Mile Run - 16:45
1.5 Mile Run - 11:57
Sit-Ups - 50 (in 2 minutes)
Push-Ups - 45 (in 2 minutes)

Females:
Two Mile Run - 19:45
1.5 Mile Run - 13:56
Sit-Ups - 50 (in 2 minutes)
Push-Ups - 27 (in 2 minutes)

If anyone wants to check, I found it here:
http://usmilitary.about.com/cs/airforcejoin/a/afbmtfitness.htm

Now, one can certainly argue whether it's necessary to run two miles in order to pilot an aircraft, but it does seem clear the standard for physical fitness is different depending on what sex you are.

It's possible they've updated the requirements in the past 2.5 years since this was created. Perhaps those that disagree can find out what the standards for 2006 are in order to rebut.

*********

>>This is why you will always be an employee (at least until your job gets outsourced to India -- or has that already happened and thus they need to blame someone else?) and never an employer.

Ad hominem aside, do you have a point, or are you trying to bolster your argument with incorrect and irrelevent attacks?

>>You can't show any different *hiring* standards and that doesn't bother you ...

Are you really having that much difficulty in reading comprehension? If something reads "MEN’S APPLICANT FITNESS STANDARDS," how can it possibly mean anything *but* a hiring standard? What on earth are they applying for, if not a job? And did you happen to miss the part where it says "Minimum" (wedged between "Fair" and "Poor")? If an applicant is below the minimum standard, isn't the obvious interpretation that they will not be considered for employment?

>>B) scores of objective evidence and website showing businesses and clinics that specialize in evaluating an applicant's ability to do certain physical tasks doesn't dissuade you either.

And scores of businesses selling measurement equipment and clinics evaluating physical ability is supposed to prove... what, exactly? I said explicitly (and showed with two separate links) that physical ability *was* measured, and that different standards were allowed for men and women in certain occupations. The only way a vague Google link to this would relate even tangentially is if I had somehow claimed physical ability couldn't be measured.

>>You are simply not intelligent nor logical.

Heh. I will refrain from arguing about this, I merely quote it for ironic amusement.

>>It does not and cannot by law allow people to be hired that don't meet the physical criteria that the job requires. It doesn't matter if an individual or a group on average can exceed the requirements.

The requirement is that if there is a disparate impact for employment of a protected class (women and minorities) it must be be the minimum standard necessary to accomplish the job, and no less "discriminatory" requirements exist.

At this point, I'm going to give you a gift, since it appears you are having trouble arguing your own side of the debate. According to section 106 of the Civil Rights act of 1991:

"It shall be an unlawful employment practice for a respondent, in connection with the selection or referral of applicants or candidates for employment or promotion, to adjust the scores of, use different cutoff scores for, or otherwise alter the results of, employment related tests on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin."

This would seem to explicitly prohibit gender-norming in employment. The problem is, there is a "health-based screening" loophole. This is how the U.S. Department of Defense and the Department of Justice sneaks by -- the latter has the stated policy:

"The Department of Justice is on record as supporting the use of gender-based physical fitness standards for positions, such as police officer. There are a number of cases which have adopted this position. See SEPTA and Powell. In Peanick v. Reno (8th Cir.), a case involving the selection of U.S. Marshals, the Department of Justice set forth its position on this subject. See section I.A. of the brief."

See
http://permanent.access.gpo.gov/lps9890/lps9890/www.usdoj.gov/crt/emp/faq.html#p ea
and
http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO/nsiad-99-9

This should also address the mistakes you made in your next post.

>><>

>>Sounds like an awfully crappy school and easy degree. No wonder you need so many excuses for your failures.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_texas_austin

The only thing crappy about the school are the grackles in the trees and the humidity.

Seeing illegal aliens protest proposed laws

2006-03-25T16:28:00.000-08:00

...is certainly an interesting experience. I'm not sure about other people, but when I see Mexican flags flying over American soil, waved by a group of illegals, resident aliens, and hyphenated Americans, my already low sympathy completely disappears. It's not that I don't think many Mexicans are hard workers -- many clearly are, and these would make better U.S. citizens than people who use welfare as a hammock rather than a safety net. The problem is that I do not like being told how I should think and vote by foreigners who do not have a say in my government.

My solution is thus: Annex Mexico. It'll be expensive and a logistical nightmare -- much like the reunification of Germany, except on an even larger scale -- but if we do essentially nothing like we have for the last century we'll keep having problems forever. This way, we'll at least have a handle on the problem in a generation, and in a century or so they won't be any more annoying than Texans or Californians are today. Annexation will be cheaper in the long run than being the population overflow for a corrupt government.

Affirmative Action for White Men?

2006-03-25T06:22:00.000-08:00

Katha Pollitt has an interesting (and by "interesting" I mean "wrong") couple of blogs on www.thenation.com. The first is entitled "Affirmative Action for White Men, Chap. 4,651," and here is my response:

I have to agree with Katha -- the goal should be excellence in college, not some heavy-handed attempt at "balance."

So...when are we going to make all college sports coed, and choose just the best athletes?

Equality isn't something you pick and choose a la carte. Demanding equality in one area and then demanding preference in another is hypocritical. I'd be quite happy to have everything decided based on ability rather than on what group a person belongs to -- even if it puts me at a disadvantage in some areas -- but it is clear that there are some who are only interested in what personally benefits them.

She was apparently not satisfied, though whether with her first article or simple the response to it, so she wrote a second entitled "Affirmative Action for Men, Part Deux." I recognize the futility of arguing with a blogger, especially one who tries to create a strawman out of steel (she makes a remark that she believes will provoke a chorus of "oh noes" but instead elicit "That would be fine with me" instead), but here is my response:

Katha Pollitt tries to use sarcasm in her remark, "Much better not to take race into account, and let excellence be the only criterion." Apparently, this is designed to have men (presumably of pale complexion) fall back in terror of equality. To her I say, bring it on.

BUT -- and this is a big "but" -- no picking and choosing on where you want to be equal. If an occupation or sport has a physical requirement, then the standard should be the same regardless of sex. If men are required to register for selective service in order to get student loans, then women can fill out forms with them. If lines form outside female restrooms, no "potty parity" rules to give the distaff side twice the toilets per capita. Finally, in fields where the very top tends to be male dominated -- math, science, and art -- no creative accounting in order to balance gender, just a critical examination of each person's talent.

I'm willing to live in such a world of pure equality. The question is, is Katha?

Another responder apparently rose to her bait, and argued that an under-performing class maybe should have preference for equality's sake. I then responded:

The solution to flawed criteria is to develop better criteria, not to add a fudge factor to make the solution fit one's perception. That's what led us to the current problem -- we confused "Men and women are equally deserving of respect" with "Men and women are equal in all respects." Rather than say "Men as a class tend to have different strengths and weaknesses compared to women as a class," we said "There are no differences at all between the sexes, so the numbers in every field of endeavor must be precisely equal in order to be fair."

I personally think using even flawed criteria consistently and without prejudice is better than using quotas. If the mix of men to women on campus is 30-70, then fine; if the mix of male to female mathematicians is 70-30, then that's fine as well. Demanding a percentage of any group must be a certain sex or race is harmful to the group as a whole, as is demanding equality in one area and preference in another.

As an addendum, if students -- male or female, black or white -- are falling behind because of curriculum and teaching style rather than ability, we should of course fix the problem. That doesn't mean giving a bonus to a group simply because it's underperforming, though.

Continuing...

I can certainly understand the rationale for Affirmative Action for those currently being discriminated against.

I don't, however, agree that someone should be given preference simply because of what their ancestors may have suffered -- neither guilt nor virtue is hereditary. For African-Americans, many of their historical oppressors are in their family tree (slave owners not being known for fidelity or even common decency), and for women fully half of their ancestors are men -- if their grandmother suffered under sexism, it was their grandfather (or someone very much like him) that was the cause of it. Forcing me to pay for something your grandfather did is not a basis for fairness, it is a basis for madness.

This is one reason why the criteria for both men and women (as well as blacks and whites) should be uniform, consistent, and fairly applied. There is no way we can solve the racism and sexism of people long dead, we have to concentrate on the equal treatment of those now living. If we don't, we'll end up like the Palestinians and Israelis, each claiming victim status as they fight each other.

A letter to the Arab News newspaper

2006-02-11T13:26:00.000-08:00

I wrote the following in response to "Confusing Hate Speech With Freedom of Expression, Again!" on the Arab News website at http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=77663&d=12&m=2&y=2006 :

In response to "That’s why I am calling for widening the scope of the anti-Semitism laws that protect Jews to include the rest of us. Can anyone explain to me why not?"

I agree that Muslims should have as much legal protection against free speech as Jews do. Of course, in the United States, this is equivalent to "none at all." Here people have the right to be as stupidly racist and bigoted as they want, as long as they do not threaten (or worse, carry out) violence against lives or property. We believe it is better for a person's prejudices to be exposed to alternate viewpoints than to be either repressed or radicalized, going so far as to provide police protection to the morons in the Ku Klux Klan whenever they try to march. The only exceptions I am aware of are things like slander and libel (which do not apply to dead people, even prophets), perjury, falsehoods that affect public safety (like falsely shouting "fire" in a crowded theater), and national security. Cartoons of religious icons do not fall in any of these categories.

In addition, our First Amendment protects the freedom of religion *as well as* the freedom of speech. Considering that Muslims are a minority in the United States, I would think they would be very wary about tampering with the same amendment to the Constitution that grants them the right to worship freely in our country.

Third, I don't care for George Bush and didn't agree with the invasion of Iraq, but I have to admit that he is able to withstand as many insulting cartoons in a single day as Mohammed had all last year. While he has used our armed forces unwisely, I doubt he targeted anyone simply because they had rude things to say about him. (Okay, so an argument could be made for Al Jazeera, but we already know Bush is far from being a saint or prophet.) In addition, the number of verbal and cartoon attacks against the United States is so much greater than all such attacks against the Muslim world (again, excepting Bush and his pointless war in Iraq -- luckily, he will not be in office after the next election) that there is no comparison, and yet we have fewer riots in a year than the Middle East has had this past week.

Part of the reason is power -- the United States, over the past two centuries, has affected world events (for both good and ill) far more than the entire Muslim world combined. Feel free to disagree with it if you wish, though it would be ironic if you did so using the internet or the personal computer. Because our efforts matter on the world stage, we do not feel the need to get incensed at cartoons in the paper claiming we are mindless puppets of Israel or whatever. If Islam were confident in its power, it wouldn't have to make statements like "We are the fastest growing religion" (birthrate and immigration don't prove truth) and "There are 1.2 billion Muslims" (there are nearly twice as many Christians of all denominations, and they rarely mention their numbers; and there are 300 million Americans but we generally don't feel compelled to point that out). If you want to show how much you've contributed to mankind, why not mention Nobel Laureates, useful inventions, beautiful art and music, and interesting books by Muslims? That's a far better assessment of a culture than numbers (which would indicate you are the equal of the Chinese, but no more) and birthrate.

Finally, and on a strictly personal note, the freedom of speech is every bit as sacred to me as Mohammed is to a devout Muslim. I am not indulging in hyperbole; I would fight anyone who attempted to take away the right to freely express my thoughts, peacefully if possible, but by any means necessary if not. Getting Americans to move in the same direction is a bit like herding cats, but I can absolutely guarantee that abridging their right to free speech -- including the right to make a fool out of oneself -- is one sure way to find yourself trampled underfoot.

With Apologies to "The Legend of Billy Jack"

2006-02-10T19:00:00.000-08:00

Listen, children, to a cartoon
That was lampooned long ago,
'Bout a kingdom up in Europe
And Mohammed down below.

Jyllands-Posten had a cartoon
Buried deep within a page,
And the Muslim people swore
They'd burn the Danish flag with rage.

Go ahead and hate your neighbor,
Go ahead and cheat a friend.
Do it in the name of Allah,
You can justify it in the end.
There won't be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgement day,
On the bloody morning after....
One Jihadist rides away.

So the Middle Eastern people
Sent a message, stubborn still,
Asking for reporters' heads,
Twelve cartoons for which they'd kill.

Came an answer from the kingdom,
"With our brothers we will share
All the values of our kingdom,
All the free speech that is there."

Go ahead and hate your neighbor,
Go ahead and cheat a friend.
Do it in the name of Allah,
You can justify it in the end.
There won't be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgement day,
On the bloody morning after....
One Jihadist rides away.

Now the Muslims cried with anger,
"Mount your horses! Draw your sword!"
And they killed the Danish people,
So they won their just reward.

Now they stood beside the cartoons,
In the kingdom, dark and red.
Turned the page and looked beneath it...
"Peace on Earth" was all it said.

Go ahead and hate your neighbor,
Go ahead and cheat a friend.
Do it in the name of Allah,
You can justify it in the end.
There won't be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgement day,
On the bloody morning after....
One Jihadist rides away.

Happy Holidays from Snarfangel's Blog

2005-12-21T13:38:00.000-08:00

It's been quite some time since I updated this blog -- between learning a new job, watching anime, and playing City of Heroes (which my sister got me involved with), my writing time has been severely curtailed. If only I didn't need sleep, that would be a good five hours I could do something else! (grin)

Anyway, this post is kind of a placeholder until after the Christmas holidays, when I'll write more in depth about the things that interest me -- Libertarianism, language reform, election reform, and political game theory. It'l be funny to see how many spammer scrape the site to see me junk email (one said "I'll definitely bookmark it" and then proceeded to offer me pool chemicals -- about five times in a row).

I hope everyone has a safe holiday season.

Some thoughts regarding Rep. Tom Tancredo's remarks about bombing Mecca

2005-07-20T20:08:00.000-07:00

First off, if Allah can't protect Mecca, he probably won't be able to give anyone 72 virgins and a bag of goodies for blowing themselves up.

Thinking on it a bit more, perhaps a better way would be:
Another 9/11 attack -- Dome of the Rock is leveled
First nuclear weapon in U.S. -- Medina destroyed, after giving a week or so to evacuate.
Second nuclear weapon in U.S. -- Mecca destroyed, no warning. Okay, so that would definitely be evil, we should at least give them time to get out of the blast zone. Destroying a bunch of building is still better than destroying a bunch of lives in addition to the buildings.

Or we could tell them to evacuate, and then fake them out and drop in Marines rather than bombs to secure the perimeter. Barbed wire, minefields, machine gun emplacements, no-man's-land, the whole nine yards. Every pilgrim coming in has to be fingerprinted and suspicious ones DNA-tested. Innocent lives would be saved, and with a well-fortified perimeter and a few massively-armed checkpoints (or chokepoints), Americans wouldn't even need to step inside the "holy" city.

I think Bush should come out on national TV and clearly say "The United States will never, under any circumstances, attack non-militarized Islamic holy sites in response to a conventional attack on the U.S."

When the press hounds him about "What about a nuclear attack?" he should just say "Look, I don't want to get into hypotheticals here." President Bush is pretty good at repeating things over and over, and sooner or later reporters will have to leave.

More seriously, someone in the government had darned well better be deciding exactly how to respond to both conventional and nuclear/biological/chemical/unconventional attacks on the U.S. The best time to be making decisions on what stuff gets snuffed out of existence is probably not in the heat of anger after the bombs explode.

Finally, if the Left wanted to make a more persuasive argument, they probably should say something more convincing than "he's a dangerous moron who should apologize and resign immediately." Something like
If a nuclear attack were to be carried out on the U.S., all resources of the U.S. military -- including our nuclear arsenal -- should be available to the President to permanently remove the ones responsible. That having been said, such weapons are too horrifying to release upon innocent people, and under no circumstances should someone be targeted simply because they share the same race or religion as the perpetratrors."

Or something like that, I'm not much of a speechwriter. It does seem to me that if hundreds of thousands of Americans were to die in an attack, they should preach precision payback rather than holding hands and singing kum-ba-ya.

*********
As a side note, someone complained that such an attack would alienate a billion Muslims, to which I responded with a few key words changed:
Osama, there is no justification for dropping a bomb on New York, the focal point for an entire country of 300 million farking people, you seem to think you can pacify a colony of bees by whacking a hive with a stick, are you truely this dumb, or are you just trolling?, there are 300 million Americans in the world if we piss them all off, this is a really bad thing, their nuclear weapons outnumber those in the muslim world 400 to 1, get some knowledge, you ignorant fool.

What I think is odd is aljazeera.net has not a peep about this story (at least nothing comes up on a search for "tancredo" on their site).

Article matches for tancredo on Aljazeera.net
Results are sorted by date.
Results 0-0 of 0
No document found

Now, I *know* they don't ignore things just because they make the U.S. look bad. I wonder why they did so in this case?

Some thoughts on "Campaign Finance Reform"

2005-07-09T19:07:00.000-07:00

One person on Fark suggested we should have 100% Federal funding of elections now. I'm not very fond of that idea, so I suggested this instead:

All campaign contributions go directly to the Federal Election Commission. Half the money goes directly into into a candidate's account, with the remaining half split evenly among all qualified candidates. (For a two-candidate race, this works out to a 75/25 split for every dollar donated.) A candidate can *only* spend the money that is in his account, and it can only be used for campaign expenses (no "become a candidate and get a redwood deck and hot tub"), with the record of all expenses made public in a timely manner.

In addition, drop all limits on campaign contributions (there's no real need, since a portion of each donation can be used by all candidates), and have the FEC report every individual donation above a certain amount, as well as all corporate and foreign donations of *any* amount. A candidate can only start accepting donations and start drawing money once they have entered the race, which would force them to state their intentions fairly early in the campaign, and all money that isn't spent by election day can help fund the election itself.

This way, only the people who want to contribute are "taxed" for the campaign, and third parties would gain a voice that is drowned out by the two major parties.

I realize this isn't the "pure Libertarian ideal" for financing elections, but it is fairer than taxing everyone *or* putting limits on donations.

Some thoughts on Libertarianism

2005-07-07T22:48:00.000-07:00

Here are some thoughts on Libertarianism, provoked by a Fark post that quoted The Daily Kos:

Foreign Policy: Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.

Executing Minors: the ethical opinion is all over the place, but most would go with the cheapest alternative, which would be incarceration.

Dissention: Who cares, as long as my rights are respected.

Self-image: People are free to believe, consider, argue against, or ignore another's viewpoint. Their personal belief in their own infallibility is irrelevent as long as they don't impose their views on other people.

God: Irrelevent in political discourse, though as a matter of observation, he tends to be on the side with the biggest guns.

Stem Cell Research: Private companies can do whatever research they like.

Leaders: As much as possible, people should govern themselves, and if a leader is necessary he or she should be freely chosen by the people. God doesn't get a vote.

Use of Force: As the most efficient means to protect the lives and/or rights of citizens.

Bush's War in Iraq: Too expensive in lives and money, very little expected return.

Press: Freedom of the Press (even more so than Liberals like Catharine MacKinnon)

Free Speech: It doesn't matter if someone disagrees with me or not, I'm free to argue or ignore them as I wish.

Individuals: People should be free to act as they wish as long as they allow others the same right, but they are under no obligation to "celebrate" or "embrace" anyone.

Cooperation: People are free to band together in common cause or act as individuals.

Tolerance: Do what you want, but with your own money.

Conscience: Personal choice

Origins: Anything involving "creationism" is best left up to whatever church you attend. Publicly-funded schools should teach science without religious bias.

Fear: Fear is your body telling you that you are doing something stupid before Darwin does.

Women: Women should have the same rights and responsibilities as men under law.

Marriage: The definition of marriage should be left to individual's conscience, not government edict. Government should get out of the marriage business, and be concerned only with enforcing contracts.

/Other Libertarians are free to expand, edit, or argue as you wish.

The stupidest conspiracy theorists on the planet

2005-07-07T20:17:00.000-07:00

Since the first hour I saw coverage of the terrorist bombings in London on 7/7/05, I've seen theories so bizarre as to be laughable, if they were not so reheated as to be boring. The dumbest one I've seen is one slyly suggesting Bush was responsible for the attack because it was conveniently timed, which made me type the following post:

Yeah, but a damned inconvenient place, especially when he has the bulk of "Old Europe" just across the Channel.

Another poster disagreed with me, to which I made the following response:

Explain to me this, considering the Brits are the one steadfast ally we have, why would Bush target them? If he targetted Paris and got away with it, it would embarrass Chirac -- and who knows, maybe the French would be more cooperative with the "War on Terror." The same with Berlin. The same with Madrid, with the added bonus of showing that caving into terror doesn't make you any safer.

No, of course not, he is supposedly Machiavellian enough to plan a terror attack, yet dumb enough to pick the one country backing him. I'm not suggesting that he won't try to take advantage of the attack -- he's a politician, they all do that often enough to be nauseating -- just that this particular conspiracy theory is uncreative (in that every disaster on the planet is attributed to Bush) and unbelievable.

Oh, and I lied when I agreed about it being a convenient time -- a convenient time would be a year from now, before midterm elections, or three years from now before the next Presidential election.

Finally, my personal theory is Bush is not clever enough to come up with a plan more detailed than a beer run, and any advisor evil enough to suggest a convoluted scheme like this is smart enough to come up with a better time and place to carry it out.

Teachers want $40K/year to start. I want merit pay. Let's see if we can work something out.

2005-07-04T20:11:00.000-07:00

I made a point on Fark about merit pay for teachers, which someone took issue with (or perhaps I should write that as "with which someone took issue" to prevent ending it with a preposition). This person asked me to enlighten everyone on how I would do so. Here is my response:

I'm glad you asked. See, I'm not an educator, so I don't know every measurable quality necessary for being a meritorious teacher, but I know for a fact that other occupations are able to come up with ways of deciding who is earning their money and who is filling space. If a teacher has the ability to determine which students in his or her class merits an "A" and which ones deserve an "F," wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that school administrators should have the ability to determine which teachers encourage their students to excel and which do not?

Presumably, there are expert educators out there who would be able to put together a set of reasonable, unbiased, and measurable criteria to judge teachers by. Using such criteria, even if imperfect, would be better than not holding anyone accountable for the success or failure of their teaching methods.

Sure, it may be difficult, but if they can determine excellence -- albeit crudely -- in something as hard to pin down as acting (Oscars) and writing (everything from Hugo's to Nobel Prizes), why wouldn't they be able to do it in teaching? Your question almost makes it sound like there is no way to measure success in teaching, which if true means there is no possible way to determine if any teacher is earning his or her pay.

SCOTUS makes another dumb ruling

2005-06-27T08:06:00.000-07:00

Just a brief blurb from The News Tribune and my response:

But in Monday's ruling, Souter said lower courts could find the file-sharing services responsible by examining factors such as how companies marketed the product or whether they took easily available steps to reduce infringing uses.

The simple way to enforce this ruling is to require entertainment companies (possibly through the RIAA and MPAA) to provide free, open source tools to help reduce infringement. After all, if the steps are "easily available," they should have no problem supplying them, and being open source, the P2P companies and knowledgeable programmers can make sure there is no hidden spyware crap before including them.

Some thoughts on the Eminent Domain decision

2005-06-24T22:17:00.000-07:00

The Supreme Court just ruled that local governments can condemn private property in order to give it to other private parties. Well, patents, copyrights, and trademarks are all considered property, and if the government can confiscate property and hand it over to another private party, it shouldn't be restricted to real estate.

What's to stop the court from saying "Paramount, you've screwed public for the last time with Enterprise, we are now confiscating your Star Trek property and handing it over to Pixar." Or giving Linus Torvalds the Windows source code, under the argument that he could do a lot more good for the community than Bill Gates?

Frankly, I wish legislators would get smart and draft a Private Property amendment instead of worrying about flag burning.

An addendum:

I'm trying to think of *any* way to force this decision into something approaching sanity, but it's freaking difficult to figure out any way to keep the government honest.

The only thing I can imagine is requiring the government to come to you and say "Your land is worth $X," at which point you can either sell it to them for that price, or accept the (presumably) higher valuation of the land and pay higher taxes. In other words, your property is assessed at $250K, the government wants to condemn it to give to another private party, and offers you $300K. At that point, you can either accept the $300K offer, or your new assessed valuation is $300K.

This would somewhat lessen the chance that the government would bid too low -- you could simply pay the tax difference and keep the land -- and from taxing you off the land, since you could always accept any truly outrageous "offer."

This of course is imperfect, and probably has holes you could drive a Winnebago through, but at least it would prevent an artificially-low offer, and somewhat lessen the probability that the local government would condemn it for a low price and then turn around and sell it for a profit.

*********

As an off-topic point, on the argument about private vs. public enterprise, I consider myself Libertarian, but my personal view is:

If private enterprise doesn't provide a necessary service, the govenment must provide it.

If a service is a private monopoly, the government can provide a non-subsidized, competitive alternative.

If a service is in a competitive market, the government should stay out of it.

***

There was a disagreement about whether or not the above was a Libertarian position on Fark, so here is my answer:

#1 *has* to be provided by the definition of "necessary service," and if private enterprise isn't providing it, then government has to.

#3 is fairly non-controversial, since most Libertarians agree that the government should stay out of competitive markets as much as possible.

Now on to #2, the one that might annoy other Libertarians. The reason that I include it is because I don't consider non-competitive markets to be free markets -- if a private company has a true monopoly on a necessary service, a person is not free to choose a competing service. Things like phone service and electricity are close to this in many parts of the country.

This is why I suggested that the government could provide a non-subsidized, competitive alternative if the service provided were wholly self-supporting, did not have an unfair advantage because of subsidies, and operated under the same laws and regulations as the original monopoly. If anything, the private company would have a huge competitive advantage, considering the rules and bureaucracy inherent in a government-run agency.

So in this specific case I fall on the side of competitive markets over government non-interference. If the market were to mature and become competitive, then the government should get out of it. Many people of course disagree, but hey...

The importance of being English

2005-06-24T05:21:00.000-07:00

...just kidding, though I would definitely argue that it is important to *speak* English in the United States. I made this fairly uncontroversial (I thought) observation with the following paragraph:

Which is one reason why, as annoying as it might be for Mexican immigrants, it really is important to have one basic language that everyone in the community can understand. By default, that language in the U.S. is American English.

Strangely enough, this was questioned on Libertarian grounds, to which I responded:

Is it the libertarian position that the government must provide services in every possible language? If not, what would be the cutoff? IMO, the property of "limited government" would suggest the smaller the number of necessary languages (for things like Constitutions, laws, legal forms, ballots, etc), the better. I didn't suggest that people should *only* use English (or whatever the primary language of a country is), or that shopkeepers and private citizens should be forced to use it, only that it is important that citizens should be able to communicate with the government, which requires a language understandable by everyone.

If you disagree, I'd be interested in how many different languages you feel the U.S. should use in government communication. If this number is greater than one, please show how supporting multiple languages would be an example of "limited government."

It's just a freaking book

2005-06-04T17:00:00.000-07:00

With all the stories about "flushing" the Koran, I feel close to screaming. It's a freaking book. A bunch of paper pages with ink scribbles on them. It's one thing if you rip it out of the hands of a believer to "desecrate" it, it's quite another to do so with a copy you own. I'd rather have someone flush their own Koran or burn their own Bible than have them do the same to the trashiest novel someone else has.

Which brings me to this point: If the guards flushed a Koran (and if so, I want that toilet -- it would be better than the low-flow one I have now), it is no big deal (other than telling them to knock it off) if they bought it from Amazon.com. If they grabbed it from the prisoner and flushed it, then that's a different story. I don't go wild and start hunting Muslims because some kook rams a plane into a skyscraper, why in the hell should they start hunting Americans because some moron flushed a Koran?

An addendum: This is the story that refuses to die, so I've decided to write some more (originally posted on Fark).

We really should pay more attention to Muslim sensitivities. Those of us in the more mature parts of the world need to remember the Middle East is inhabited by people who throw childish temper-tantrums if they think someone is making fun of them. One of these days they will grow up to be valuable members of society, but until then we need to do our best to make sure we don't hurt their feelings.

/Sarcasm off.

This was a book they abused, not a person. Just like I don't riot in the streets every time some guy in the Middle East burns an awful cartoon of an American flag, I expect adults in the Middle East not to riot because someone might have done something to a bunch of scribbles on a piece of paper (I'm deliberately being "insensitive" here).

The thing is, I know the vast majority of Muslims aren't going to riot because of something stupid like this. I would guess most of them think that attacking innocent people and burning things is a tad overreacting. Unfortunately, they don't appear to be willing to stand up and tell the nutcases in their midsts that they are acting like spoiled children. I don't doubt that it's real fear on their part, but that doesn't mean I have to sugarcoat what I say just because some fanatic might get upset.

The Koran is just a book. So is the Bible. A person has more inherent worth than either. If you hurt someone because they damaged a thing, then you deserve to be locked away from society. If Allah wants to punish blasphemy, let him, but if someone takes it upon themselves to do so, my personal beliefs force me to taunt them unmercifully.

"Potty Parity" or, "How People Pick and Choose Equality"

2005-05-26T16:54:00.000-07:00

Moronic "potty party" laws have been around for awhile, the latest in New York City: Story in New York Daily News.

Basically, it goes something like this: Women tend to visit restrooms in packs, plus they take longer than men. Therefore, the answer to this problem is not to tell them to go one at a time or hurry up, but to give them twice the number of toilets as men (this is on top of things like locks on all the stalls, while men often get the equivalent of a trought to go in).

Call me crazy, but I'm of the opinion that you can't pick and choose equality. A more fair solution would be to make all of the bathrooms unisex with locks on the stalls -- remember the cry "separate but equal is not equal" -- or have equal-sized men's and women's bathrooms plus a unisex one for whomever wants to use it (this would also solve to problem of which bathroom transexuals and transvestites use).

Frankly, the unisex version would be fairer. For those that worry about privacy -- well, men would probably be pretty proactive if they found a camera peeping at them, up to broken equipment if not broken bones. The difference in safety would be minimal, since as it is those with a screw loose can hide in the women's restroom anyway (and if attacked in a unisex restroom, there's always the chance some burly trucker is going to come through the door to pummel the assailaint).

I think the thing that bothers me most about such proposals is the whole "We want equality here, here, and here, but since we are women we should still keep the privileges here, here, and here" idea. If you are going to make the whole claim of biological necessity, well, men on average die several years earlier than women, but I don't see groups rushing to double the funding for male medical problems to rectify that particular issue.

Smallpox-infected blankets, and other blather on Slashdot

2005-05-18T19:36:00.000-07:00

A person on Slashdot made that unsubstatiated argument that the U.S. passed out smallpox-infected blankets to native Americans. Here is my response:

I won't comment on your other blather, but the United States did not pass out smallpox infected blankets. Lord Jeffrey Amherst, commanding general of British forces in North America during the French & Indian war, may have. It is also reported that the British fort commander in Quebec -- you know, that place in Canada -- tried to infect the American Revolutionary army after the capture of Montreal.

In fact, George Washington himself developed a severe case of smallpox when he was 19, which probably led to his decision to have the American Army be the first to try wholesale vaccination against the disease. It was definitely not something he would want used as a weapon of war.

Of course, diseases like smallpox and cholera did pass from the colonists to the native Americans, but I have yet to see a single credible story that the United States deliberately infected the natives with the disease.

BTW, as an interesting side fact, did you know that Asians (Crimean Tatars) deliberately spread bubonic plague to Europeans by catapulting dead bodies over the wall of Kaffa, leading to the death of perhaps a third of the population in the "Black Death"? IIRC, the Tatars were Muslim, which means that in the clash of civilizations, Islam isn't always the innocent victim of Christianity

A question on capital punishment

2005-05-10T11:30:00.000-07:00

This question has bothered me for awhile (most recently in the "Nazi scientists [brought] to the US" thread) since I'm apparently missing some argument that some people apparently feel is compelling: Why is it considered less morally objectionable to execute someone who is intelligent than it is to execute a moron?

Comparing retarded adults to children is flawed because children can grow up and contribute something to society. Intelligent people can also (theoretically at least) pay part of their debt to society as well. If there is a death penalty anyway, shouldn't there be some calculation like (potential contribution to society) - (potential threat to society) > 0 or something?

/Something is wrong when people try to feign stupidity or craziness to lessen their punishment. Let them pretend to be smart and coherent instead.

What we should do to "terrorproof" the new WTC

2005-04-21T19:35:00.000-07:00

This is an idea I had a while back which I posted here on Fark:

If we give the top third of the building [the Freedom Tower] to the United Nations, the current location can go back to NYC, the UN would get updated facilities (which they have complained about fairly recently), and diplomats would have their attention concentrated on the problem of terrorism. It's a win-win-win situation.

Later on, I went into more detail on one reason:

The United Nations currently wants to complete overhaul its current headquaters, to the tune of a $1.2-billion interest-free loan, and an additional $650 million spent on a 35-story building to house UN employees during the renovation as well as a 100,000-square-foot park. The total bill may be as much as $2.5 billion, with U.S. taxpayers expected to foot at least a fifth of that. For the same amount of money, they could get a penthouse view of New York with state-of-the-art facilities. One would wonder why they wouldn't want to do so.

Other than fear, of course, which I'm told concentrates one's attention quite effectively.
*******

/Posting here because I'll lose the Fark thread otherwise :)

I'm number 2 in a Fark voting thread! Hooray!

2005-04-19T07:03:00.000-07:00

I guess being in TotalFark helps, since I get to see things before the majority of Farkers do. Here's the link to the survey If you were pope, what would your name be?

"Deadly influenza virus shipments missing!"

2005-04-16T05:06:00.000-07:00

There is a story going around about a pandemic strain of flu virus being sent around the world. The story became even more frantic when those sent to Mexico and Lebanon turned up missing: CTV.ca link.

Since it's early in the morning here, I decided to come up with a fun conspiracy theory on this (specifically, why they didn't just say "this shipment is contaminated and unusable, please dispose of it" rather than "run for your lives, this is a killer pandemic in a bottle!").

Perhaps different harmless "tracker" viruses were sent to various labs with this particular cover story. A terrorist group sees the headlines and grabs the "killer virus." Once it is released, it can be traced back to the lab and a terrorist cell can be shut down before they release something really nasty.

Okay, so it's not the most exciting conspiracy, at least it's more clever than claiming the jets on 9/11 were radio-controlled.

Questions for those opposed to the death penalty.

2005-04-15T18:51:00.000-07:00

I argue a lot on message boards, especially Fark. One question that comes up quite often is the morality of the death penalty. I've discovered a handy way to figure out whether or not it's worth arguing with someone opposed to it. It's a set of very simple hypothetical "button pushing" questions:

1. You have in front of you a button that will kill a single random, innocent person. If you do not push the button, two equally random, innocent people will be killed. Do you push the button or not?

2. An innocent people has been sentenced to death. By pressing a button, you can spare his life by sacrificing the life of a murderer. Do you push the button?

3. If you do not press a button, there is a 1% chance that 1000 people will die. If you do press the button, there is a 100% chance that a single person will die. Do you press the button?

For me, in every case I would press the button. Anyone who cannot answer these questions or would not press the button is not worth arguing with, because his or her moral calculus is different from mine. Mine is simple: max(good-bad) -- maximize the good and minimize the bad for the greatest number of people.

There is a valid arguments against the death penalty, and that is the cost compared to life in prison. If the cost to society is less to incarcerate than to execute, then prison is the way to go. If one can statistically show the death penalty harms more innocent people than it saves, that is a worthy argument, but claiming the death penalty is evil because it isn't perfect is not just nonsensical, it is evil if not acting harms more people.

Thoughts about the death penalty

2005-04-15T12:50:00.000-07:00

People opposed to the death penalty claim many often contradictory things. They claim that execution is too cruel in one breath, and then claim it is less painful than life in prison. They claim they are against it because those wrongfully convicted can be executed, without even considering that those wrongfully convicted die in prison as well, and with fewer appeals. Finally, they claim to be against the religious sentiments of an "Eye for an Eye" while at the same time using "Thou shalt not kill." Apparently, anything that isn't perfect is not worth doing at all.

To which I offer this thought experiment:

You are sitting in front of a button and told that if you press it, there's a 5% chance an innocent person will die. Unfortunately, if you don't press it, there's a 10% chance an innocent person will die. Do you press it or not?

The same thing with the law. Justice is not perfect, and if you punish anyone there's always a chance that person is innocent. You have to balance the possibility of punishing the innocent with the chance that releasing a guilty person will cause other innocent people to suffer. The best course is to try to minimize suffering, not refusing to act.

That said, the cost of invoking the death penalty is very high, so it should be done only in the most egregious, clear-cut cases. Probably a cheaper way would be to drop those convicted of "capital" crimes on a barren island somewhere, to live out their lives as best they can.

Another idea: Death by cryogenics.

Take a person convicted of capital murder and dump him into a tank of liquid nitrogen, instantly freezing him. Alcor charges $150,000 for whole-body freezing, which is much less than the appeals process.

Sure, we don't have a way of unthawing them yet, but if the court ever determines they were not guilty on appeal we can keep them on ice until there is a way to revive them.

Plus, this would give valuable research data in cryogenic freezing for regular people and future space travelers.

/Thank you, Larry Niven.

Ode to a Chili Finger (to the tune of Mrs. Murphy's Chowder)

2005-04-11T09:58:00.000-07:00

Ms. Ayala ate at lunchtime
Just about a week ago.
Shakes and fries was plentiful,
At Wendy's, they're not slow.
They treated her like gentlemen;
She tried to act the same,
If it weren't for what happened...
Well, it was a doggone shame.
When Ms. Ayala dished the chili out,
She fainted on the spot;
She found a human finger
That had floated to the top.
Her lawyer, he got roaring mad,
His eyes were bulging out,
He jumped onto the table
And loudly he did shout:

"Who threw the forefinger
In Ms. Ayala's chili?"
Nobody spoke, so he
Shouted willy-nilly.
"It's a Wendy's trick that's true,
I can sue the prick that threw
The forefinger in Ms. Ayala's chili."

They dragged the finger from the beans
And laid it on the top;
Each man swore upon his life
It never entered in the pot.
It was small and clearly manicured
From a woman, if you please,
It had several ups and downs
As we could plainly see.
And when Ms. Ayala, she came to,
She b'gan to cry and pout,
She'd put it in her bowl that day
And forgot to pull it out.
Her lawyer, he excused himself
For what he said that night,
So we put music to the words
And sang with all our might:

"Who threw the forefinger
In Ms. Ayala's chili?"
Nobody spoke, so he
Shouted willy-nilly.
"It's a Wendy's trick that's true,
I can sue the prick that threw
The forefinger in Ms. Ayala's chili."

Some thoughts about discrimination in the workplace

2005-04-03T18:49:00.000-07:00

(I originally posted this on Fark)

I personally believe that private business should be allowed to make decisions on hiring and firing as long as they state explicitly what those criteria are up front. I also believe the government has the obligation not to discriminate at all except on the basis of consistent, justifiable criteria, nor to purchase any good or service from a company that does discriminate.

For example, if a private business advertised a job opening, they would have to state any limitations on who they would hire in the advertisement. If they restricted access to a certain clientele, that would also have to be advertised as well as displayed prominantly at the entrance to the business. In addition, government agencies would be prohibited from doing any form of business with a company that practiced discrimination.

This all comes down to what I consider a fundamental right, the freedom of association. A business has the right to associate with whomever they want, but they have to explicitly tell all interested parties what the criteria are. Since government also has the right to purchase goods and services from whomever they want, they have the right to only purchase from companies that do not discriminate. It's all self-consistent.

I got lucky on Slashdot

2005-04-02T11:52:00.000-08:00

I normally post as an Anonymous Coward on Slashdot, and this time I got lucky by starting one of the first threads (which typically get seen by mods a lot more often than later posts). Here it is:

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=144720&cid=12119589

I took one of those online grammar tests

2005-03-28T15:39:00.000-08:00

...so let's see if I can post the results here.

English Genius
You scored 100% Beginner, 92% Intermediate, 100% Advanced, and 82% Expert!

You did so extremely well, even I can't find a word to describe your excellence! You have the uncommon intelligence necessary to understand things that most people don't. You
have an extensive vocabulary, and you're not afraid to use it properly! Way to go!

Thank you so much for taking my test. I hope you enjoyed it!

Automatic Gerrymandering

2005-03-14T08:48:00.000-08:00

I generally look at gerrymandering as a problem that is to be avoided at all costs, but I thought I would have a little fun and come up with an "automatic gerrymandering" method that might yield bizarre representative districts but would still be relatively fair. Here's what I came up with:

1. Count the total votes cast in an election and use the Droop Quota to calculate the minimum number of voters to be represented by a single legislator.
2. Determine the winners of each precinct.
3. If a contiguous group of precincts have the same winner, and the number of voters in the precincts is equal to or greater than the cutoff, the winning candidate becomes a representative.
4. If a winning candidate has "surplus precincts" above the cutoff , the surplus becomes available for the closest candidate on down in each precinct as long as they do not eliminate an existing district by changing the winner, making the district non-contiguous, or dropping the number of voters below the Droop Quota. In other words, if a candidate won 100 precincts of equal size but only needed 90 to win, 10 precincts are available for redistribution to second-place candidates. Unallocated precincts then become available to the third-place candidates, and so on.
5. If a group of unallocated precincts is surrounded by one or more completed districts, then they are added to the neighboring completed district with the highest-scoring candidate as long as they do not alter his election. His surplus precincts then become available to other candidates (you are basically adding precincts on one side and making them available on the other).
6. If there are still representatives needing to be picked, unallocated precincts are combined into "super-precincts" until there is a winner. (I'm not sure what method of combination would be best, since there might be multiple ways of adding precincts together which would yield different representatives).

Of course, the downside to this would be the amount of calculation necessary to determine an election -- candidates who win outright are easy to pick, but choosing a winner among the other candidates is much more difficult -- but at least with this version of gerrymandering it's the voters in each precinct that makes the decision, not the politicians. You might also want to make a rule that unallocated precincts are first given to candidates who have won a sufficient number of non-contiguous precincts, and/or candidates with the highest total number of votes overall.

I'd be interested in seeing other ideas or refinements that others might come up with, To be honest I still prefer anti-gerrymandering districts (a vector quantization/Voronoi cell method would be great), but this method might yield interesting results in states like California and Texas. :)

Jewish holidays have such cool theme songs

2005-03-11T14:09:00.000-08:00

(With apologies to The Knack and Weird Al)

Ooh my little pretty one, pretty one.
When you gonna celebrate Rosh Hashana?
Ooh you blow the shofar too, the shofar too
Blowin' in a year that's new, Rosh Hashana
Never gonna stop, eat it up.
Such a tasty snack. Honeyed apples are on this day
quite a bit like crack. My my my i yi woo. R R R Rosh Hashana...

A brief note about global warming

2005-03-11T08:49:00.000-08:00

For those that take every sign of decreased rainfall as a sign of global warming, don't. Global warming might cause localized drought because of changes in weather patterns, but a higher average temperature tends to put more moisture in the air, just like raising the temperature on a covered pot on the stove. A disruption in the Atlantic Conveyor would cool temperatures in northern Europe which could definitely lead to drought there, but that will probably mean more extreme weather and flooding somewhere else -- you might see rain in the Sahara and force-5 hurricanes hitting the Atlantic seaboard.

That's the weird thing. Global warming is probably a bad thing for most of the places people like to live at present -- people like pleasant weather, and any disruption in the climate is generally going to be worse for them. For those now living in harsh conditions -- Siberia, Alaska, Northern Canada, the Sahara, Southwestern U.S., etc -- some places might actually have improved climate.

Space-filling Moore curves and data compression

2005-03-10T14:37:00.000-08:00

Ever since I found out what a Huffman tree was, I've found data compression to be a fascinating subject. I've tried to apply the concepts to language ("Plan B" style -- for history of it, Google Lojban "plan b"), election methods (vector quantization of voting districts), and graphics (Google "hextar curve" or visit this Fractint L-system page).

Unfortunately, to quote the famous philosopher Barbie, "Math is hard." I'm fine with arithmetic, geometry, algebra, even basic calculus, but things like Abelian algebra, Hilbert space, and bra-ket notation make my hair fall out, and the math used in data compression can be a real pain without some kind soul to explain it.

Even so, I like the ideas involved. Another field I like is fractals -- I love things combining symmetry and uniqueness . For awhile, "fractal compression" held my interest, until I realized it was not any better (and often worse) than vector quantization. Wavelet compression is also quite interesting (once again, love the concepts, have a hard time with the math).

Then I saw some people doing interesting things with the Hilbert curve. Basically, a Hilbert curve is a way to map data in multiple dimensions onto a one dimensional string. It also tends to be compact -- points close together on the Hilbert curve are close together in space (though the converse is not always true). It is a plane-filling curve in two dimensions, and there is a three-dimensional space-filling version as well -- see Mathworld's Hilbert curve page.

Still, there is something about the Hilbert curve I do not like. It isn't closed for one thing -- the start and endpoint are on opposite sides of the square. There is however a variant known as the Moore curve where the start and endpoint are only one unit apart -- a single segment is sufficient to make it a closed curve. It can be seen here on this plane-filling curves page. I'm not certain if there is a 3-D variant of the Moore curve as there is for the Hilbert curve, but it does seem quite likely.

Which leads me to the compression idea. There are two major ways to attack the problem: top-down, taking the complete picture and subdividing with some function, then taking the subpictures and subdividing them, continuing to the level of individual pixels; and bottom-up, taking individual pixels and combining them, and continue the combination algorithm until you complete the picture. In addition the algorithm can choose for greatest difference, or nearest neighbor (I'll mention some variants later).

Top-down, greatest difference:
1. The Moore curve makes one loop of the entire picture, visiting each pixel once. If you imagine this as one big circle, with each pixel given a certain value, find the diameter that results in the greatest difference between combined values. For example, if the left side of a picture is black and the right side white, the greatest difference will be equivalent to a verticle line between them.
2. Take each subloop and join the endpoints, and find the diameter that results in the greatest difference in combined values. Repeat until you have subdivided the picture into pairs of pixels.
3. Run your compression algorithm on the final data sets (more on that later).
4. If you are interested in video compression, you can like of a video stream as a three dimensional block. A 3-D version of the Moore curve can be used, with the same subdividing and looping.

Bottom-up, least difference:
1. Take the Moore curve of the image or video, and compare the absolute difference in pixel pairs and choose the smallest value. For example, if comparing the pixels A, B, C, and D, you would compare |A-B|+|C-D| and |A-D|+|B-C| and choose the smaller of the two.
2. Combine pairs of pixels the same way, and choose the combination with the smallest total.
3. Continue until you have two halves of the image or video, and run your compression algorithm on the data sets.

Either method should yield good results. Basically, the bigger the blocks the more we want there to be a difference between them (because like colors will preferentially be in each block), while the smaller the block the more we want them to be the same (to improve data compression). Which brings us to the final method.

Brute-Force, maximal compression:
For a picture 1024 x 1024 pixels, you are looking at a little more than one million ways of partitioning the image. For a 1024 x 1024 x 7200 seconds x 30 FPS video, there are roughly a quarter of a trillion ways to partition the image. Short of some kind of quantum computing or dramatically faster processors, a brute-force method of video probably won't happen.
On the other hand, a test of different partitioning algorithms over a simpler subset would probably be a good idea. A 1024 x 1024 x 1024 cube -- equal to a 1024 x 1024 x 34 second movie -- can be partitioned with a Moore curve with roughly 1 billion possible partitioning methods (think a 30-bit number). If one were to calculate all the various possibilities as well as how much they compressed, and then compared them to the methods above, one could get a feel for the most efficient algorithm.

I'll go over this a bit more when the inspiration strikes (grin).

A rant about the legal system

2005-03-07T14:36:00.000-08:00

I recently wrote the following rant in response to the following statement:

jlowejd
Not for nothing, but some of you farkers need to STFU. You have to understand that the 95% of us who are just plain lawyers absolutely freaking HATE that other 5% that make the rest of us look like shiat in the eyes of the uneducated public.

Is that like the 95% of Muslims who aren't terrorists?

/Some goats are trying to cross my bridge. BRB.

Okay, I'm being facetious, but if 5% of the doctors started spreading vials of contagious disease around in order to drum up business, I would hope the other 95% would do more than feel offended. Where are the groups of lawyers dedicated to simplifying the legal system so the average person can understand it? Which ones are trying to close the loopholes that unscrupulous lawyers use to extort money from others? I'm sure there are some -- though nowhere near 95% -- but apparently they have a pretty poor publicity department. You don't see physicists trying to complicate physical laws just for the hell of it -- they gain fame (not to mention Nobel Prizes) if they can explain things better.

Unlike some, I actually see a need for lawyers -- a day in court is better than a duel at sunrise. I just wished they were more concerned with clearly and concisely defining person's rights and responsibilities in society rather than trying to increase the complexity (and the number of billable hours) of the legal system.

As a thought, why not require law students to write a thesis taking a complex existing law and simplifying it so the average person can understand it? You could add points if it removes loopholes, and an automatic passing grade if the law is submitted to the legislature and approved.

/I'm well aware my rant will attract a bit of heat, but when it takes longer to read the shrinkwrap agreement on a program than it does to install it, something is wrong.

From Income Tax to National Sales Tax

2005-03-05T18:18:00.000-08:00

I live in Oregon, and for the past three decades or so I've been told by the politicians in power how wonderful a sales tax would be. Yep, I live in one of the few states that do not have a sales tax.

Well, if a state sales tax is so wonderful -- and believe me, Democrats have tried to push is at least as hard as Republicans (remember, this is Oregon), why would it suddenly become regressive when applied nationally?

My only problem -- and the reason I vote with majority of other Oregonians to defeat the sales tax every time -- is that politicians want it in addition to the current taxes, not instead of them. Most of us learned our lesson after we voted for a lottery -- the money was supposed to go to education but instead a huge chunk found its way into the general fund.

As for me, there are some good points to a national sales tax -- tax shelters for the rich are a bit less effective when their purchases are taxed (and they do like to buy things -- offshore investments don't do them any good until they actually spend the money), plus those in the "hidden economy" (illegal aliens, drug dealers, whatever) and those who cheat on their taxes still like to buy things. As long as all transactions are taxed (including income, which represents a sale of service) so there are no loopholes, I'm willing to at least consider the idea.

Healthcare reform

2005-03-04T15:58:00.000-08:00

There is actually a congresscritter who wants to make the following amendment to the constitution:

"all persons shall enjoy the right to health care of equal high quality."

U.S. Rep. Pete Stark, D-Fremont

As others have pointed out, there are other even more basic requirements than health care. Why not an amendment:

"all persons shall enjoy the right to food, clothing, and shelter of equal high quality."

What about legal services? The legal system is one of the functions of government, but while poor people charged with a crime can get a court-appointed lawyer, I'm pretty sure most of them aren't the Johnny Cochran's of their class. Shouldn't we have an amendment mandating legal representation of equal high quality? We can put price caps on it and everything, and if we mess it up and lose our brightest lawyers at least is wouldn't be as bad as losing our brightest doctors.

All this may seem like I'm against universal health care. Actually, I wouldn't have an objection to it as long as the following criteria are met:

1. Preventative services (vaccinations, prenatal care, etc) are funded before anything else.
2. Medical expenses for things caused by lifestyle choices (obesity, drunk driving, smoking) are paid by the patient.
3. Medical services are preferentially given to those with a greater chance of contributing to society -- young people get organ transplants before old people, with criminals on death row at the back of the line.
4. Some mechanism for restricting "vanity" and unnecessary care (facelifts and hypochondria are kept out).
5. People who use more health care pay a greater percentage of their take-home pay for insurance.

There are probably other criteria as well, but that would be sufficient to start with.

Taking the long view

2005-03-04T13:20:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I want to throw up my hands in disgust at people. The "long view" in Congress is limited to the next election, every problem is seen through a partisan lens, and we just go from crisis to crisis without planning for things ahead of time.

You know what would be great? If Congress would make a list of all foreseeable threats, their probable distance in the future, the best long-term solution, and how much money would be needed per year to fix the problem. Just picking numbers at random, you would have something like the following:

Universal Heat Death/Big Chill (total destruction) 100 trillion years -- unknown, $10 million/year basic research
Sun going Nova -- 5 billion years -- leave solar system -- $10 million/year space science
Earth becomes uninhabitable -- 500 million years -- leave earth/$50 million per year space science
Earth is struck by an asteroid -- 1 million years -- $25 million/year global watch to determine threats and $25 million/year for space science research
Storage of nuclear waste -- 100,000 years, $100 million/year storage, $100 million/year fusion research.
Global warming (climate change, coastal flooding) -- 100 years/reduce greenhouse emission/$1 billion per year industry loss/$100 million per year research
Social Security bankrupt -- 50 years, {very large number} billion to make it perpetually solvent.
National Debt/Depression / starting at 10 years/ Balanced budget in place before then, pay down the debt over next 50 years

/etc

(Yes, I just pulled numbers out of thin air. I just wanted to give an example of what I mean by long-term planning)

As new information becomes available, simply adjust the budget accordingly -- if we discover cold fusion, there's less need to find out a cheap method of disposing nuclear waste. Sure, that means that my generation might have to pay for things that will never directly benefit us, but I know the country would be a lot better off today if the founding fathers had had the foresight to fix certain things from the start -- a "balanced budget" amendment to the Constitution, perhaps, prohibition of slavery, etc. -- so I'm willing to make that sacrifice for future generations.

Education in America -- year-round schooling

2005-03-03T15:39:00.000-08:00

One easy improvement to our current school year is to get rid of summer vacation and have more frequent but shorter breaks throughout the year. Some schools already do this -- sometimes called year-round schooling or 45/15 (for the number of schooldays on and off, or 9 weeks of school followed by a 3-week vacation).

Such schooling has been around for quite a while -- I attended a 45/15 class from second to third grade at Highland Elementary in Norco, California in 1972-73, and still remember it fondly -- and in my opinion is far superior to the current method used by most schools.

It can be improved, however. If we are going to keep roughly the same number of school days, why not move to a 4-day school week (Monday-Thursday)? Twelve 4-day weeks equal 48 days per quarter, with a week off between quarters. The occasional Monday or mid-week holiday (Thanksgiving, New Years) would bring it down to 45 days. Make certain one break covers Christmas and the rest of the breaks will fall into place, one per season -- you'd have Spring, Summer, and Fall Break as well as a break during the holidays.

The nice thing about this is that it keeps Friday free -- which is not only where many public holidays land, but the day many schools set aside for sports competitions (football and others). This way, sports and extracurricular activities are less likely to interfere with schoolwork.

As a side note, the truly optimal method of year-round schooling IMO would be to have a 3/2 schedule -- three days on, two days off -- with appropriate vacations during the year. Unfortunately, that is extremely unlikely, since we'd need a 5-day week ( a calendar I'll blog about at a future time mainly as a fun idea). With a five-day week, you could have 18 weeks (16*3 or 48 days) per quarter, with two weeks off between quarters and an extra week off between school years. Since education would be less compressed, with plenty of breaks, students would have a better chance of learning the material required.

The cost of war in Iraq

2005-03-03T08:21:00.000-08:00

I've seen articles on the value of human life from an actuarial and statistical point of view. Most people value their lives at $7-$10 million. The U.S. uses about 18 million barrels of oil a day. If you are able to decrease the price of oil by $1/barrel, it's worth (in statistical terms) about two lives per day -- less, if you figure the cost of transportation, training, and equipment.

Now, if you figure $200 billion dollars and 1500 lives (taking the higher $10 million price tag per life), this works out to the equivalent of $215 billion (or conversely, the equivalent of 21,500 lives) over two years. If we take current oil prices of $53/barrel (total around $700 billion over two years), then we should expect oil prices to be about 30% lower than they would be otherwise. Somehow, I don't think they are.

Education in America -- what should be done

2005-02-28T09:23:00.000-08:00

This is based on a post on Fark. I'm copying it here to flesh out a bit a little later:

Education has (or should have) two goals which sometimes conflict: strive to maximize individual achievement and try to instill shared values (what E. D. Hirsch called "Cultural Literacy").

Unfortunately, it seems like public schools instead try to minimize differences instead of maximizing achievement (to be fair, home schoolers sometimes ignore socialization and replace cultural literacy with religious indoctrination).

I'm not sure if there is any solution to the problem -- at least not one that will be acceptable to everyone. If I could wave a magic wand, I would pick a system that allocate resources like investments -- if investing $7 in student A and $3 in student B yields a better result for society than $5 apiece, I'd go with the unequal distribution. I'd also be a lot more fluid in school promotion, with a bit finer control than simply skipping or holding back a grade.

Finally, I would definitely switch to year-round schooling (45/15 or switch to 4 days per week and increase the number of weeks until it balances out), and experiment with things like vouchers and a la carte schooling (students partially home-schooled but who pay for certain subjects taught at a public or private school).

I posted my "Snarfoblog discovers the Universe"

2005-02-24T15:11:00.000-08:00

...comment on Slashdot as an Anonymous Coward, and actually got a +5 Interesting rating

Starting Score:		points
Moderation	+5
60% Interesting 20% Informative 10% Funny
Extra 'Interesting' Modifier	0	(Edit)

Total Score:	5

The discussion is available here: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=140377&cid=11756218

I just thought I'd post the link, since I'm not sure if copyright law allows me to paste other people's comments into my blog. I'm not sure how other people will view it, but I thought it was interesting.

Fark headlines that didn't make the front page

2005-02-21T09:40:00.000-08:00

Fark is one of the main websites I visit several times a day (the other two are Slashdot and AnimeNation). It has the option to submit news stories with clever headlines.

Unfortunately, none of my headlines have ever made it to the front page of Fark. On the plus side, Fark saves a copy of these rejects, so people won't have the pleasure of reading the current news story, they can at least see what I submitted before it disappears into digital heaven.

Here, for your amusement, are the articles I've submitted:

2004-11-12: Girl discovered sealed in piñata, luckily found before being beaten to death for delicious candy
2004-11-09: Showing she's the power behind the throne, the Fist Lady reopens avenue outside White House to pedestrians
(Note, original article had "Fist Lady" typo)
2004-11-07: Tony Blair wary of receiving "controversial" Medal of Honor. Apparently "controversial" means being offered a different medal. (Second paragraph)
2004-11-02: Dutch filmmaker who depicted Islam as violent killed in protest
2004-10-21: Swatch, Microsoft to join forces. "When do you want to go today" to be new slogan
2004-07-28: The "fabric of our lives" causing trade talks to unravel in Africa
2004-07-24: Scientists discover chick flicks more romantic than the Godfather. Cancer apparently unaffected by offers it can't refuse
2004-07-20: Want that healthy, natural glow? Drink refreshing radon water
2004-07-20: Old and busted: betting money. New hotness: betting babes (third story down)
2004-07-19: Photoshop the difference Founding Mothers would have had on the U.S
2004-07-15: In addition to being more fun to look at, women have better color vision
2004-07-15: Hong Kong, Singapore beat the U.S. in economic freedom. In an unrelated story, the Axis of Evil gains two new members
2004-07-08: Theft of chicken mascot rocks Oregon town. Sadly, the Smoking Gun is not there
2004-07-07: Divorced wife wins right to future earnings, manhood of former husband
2004-06-27: Man withdraws consent for embryo implantation against partner's wishes. Infertility ensues
2004-06-22: Betty Botter bought a bit of butter, but bugs sense bitter better
2004-06-17: Beans, Artichokes best source of antioxidants, claim stinky scientists
2004-06-07: 95% of all statistics made up. Scientific papers weigh in at a painfully-honest 38%
2004-05-05: University of Iowa refuses to play Braves. Wimps, Cowards still acceptable mascots
2004-05-03: In a bid to confuse future archeologists, New Zealand astronomy enthusiasts recreate Stonehenge

SnarfoBlog discovers the universe

2005-02-16T11:04:00.000-08:00

Since everyone seems to be doing a blog, I thought I might as well do so as well. This is easier than putting up another page on my domain (www.mrouse.com), and should allow me to get ideas out there more quickly.

First off, I've figured out dark matter, and it doesn't require exotic quarks, leptons, or baryons to work.

Okay, that's an enormous (and highly unlikely) exaggeration, but I *have* thought of an interesting possibility. A Dyson Sphere surrounding several stars (or in a Type 3 civilization, an entire galaxy) would block visible light – the problem is it would glow in the infrared, so it wouldn't really be dark. Black holes are dark, but they tend to fling stuff around, and matter sucked into them gives off bursts of energy before they disappear.

The solution: a dark bubble. At the center of our galaxy there is a supermassive black hole, which is (according to some estimates) roughly three million solar masses. A civilization putting a bubble around it would have 1 (earth) gravity a little beyond the orbit of Pluto, perhaps 40-45 A.U. or so. The problem is that you still would need to stick some stars around it to supply energy, and a Klemperer rosette would be pretty noticeable.

Well, light falling onto a blackhole blue shifts, increasing its energy. Increase the bubble enough (remember, we're talking a civilization that can harness the energy of a galaxy), and the mass of the bubble itself starts to warp space around it. There comes a point where the size of the bubble and the mass that makes it up can be just under the Schwarzschild limit – a bit more massive and it would be a black hole – even without a central singularity. For humans, we'd want a bubble that has a surface gravity equal to earth's, and a blue-shifted energy equal to the average output from our sun.

As a back-of-the envelope calculation, using v^2=2*g*R, where v is the escape velocity, g is the gravitational attraction at the earth's surface, and R is the radius from the center of mass, and setting v=c (the speed of light) for the maximum size, you get a bubble with a diameter just a bit under a light-year across (354 light days, if I figured correctly). The surface area would be about 3 square light-years, 2.6 x 10^26 square kilometers, or 5.2 x 10^17 times the surface area of the earth. The mass would be equivalent to 1.5 trillion suns – roughly twice the mass of our galaxy. Assuming you use buckytubes as the material of choice, you'd have a shell 7000 kilometers thick of solid buckminsterfullerene.

Of course, this is the absolute maximum size and mass just before it becomes a black hole, so the actual construct would be a bit smaller and less massive, balancing surface gravity and blue-shifted energy hitting the surface. You'd also want to carve out mountain ranges and oceans for a bit of variety – a galactic Kansas would be kind of boring. For safety reasons, you would have to stick these bubbles in the empty space between galaxies, or just use all of the mass in one large galaxy (you'd have to be careful, though, to keep relativistic rocks from flying at the completed project). You'd have a sky that would look kind of like a slow-moving aurora, perhaps -- infrared would be shifted into visible light, visible stars would have their peak shifted to ultraviolet -- especially since the gravitational warping would slow down time considerably compared to the rest of the galaxy.

To detect them, you'd have to aim telescopes at the "empty" parts of the sky and see if there was any gravitational lensing. If something was there that was far too massive to be a neutron star but didn't have the characteristics of a supermassive black hole, that could be a sign of it. The largest ones would have the gravitational mass of a large galaxy, so if a supercluster appears to be missing a galaxy's worth of stars that stellar motions demand, it might not be exotic matter but instead bubbles of normal matter from some vast engineering project.

Of course, it might be too early in the evolution of the universe for a type 3 civilization to appear, or you might not be able to make a buckytube bubble big enough that would also support its own weight, so exotic forms of matter might still be necessary. One thing's for certain, though – a bubble like this would make Ringworld look as spacious as a phone booth.