Improving Elections

NPR did a survey asking what people would like to see in the constitution.  I think quite a few of them are bad ideas, but there are some good ones.

Here's my own answer to such a survey:

No one party may hold more than 25% of the seats in any elected body.   Nearly all the founders were terrified of political parties--they'd seen the damage they caused in England.  Unfortunately the best of intentions didn't last long.  They weren't able to figure out a way to define what a party is sufficiently to create an effective ban.   My thinking is that any specific political leadership must not be allowed to lead more than a tiny number of votes over some fairly short period.  Coalitions must be highly topical.

All elected offices must include "None of the Above".  Nobody scoring lower than NotA may run for that office for at least one term following.  This will encourage third and alternate parties and eliminate bad politicians with no opposition.  It doesn't permanently disqualify anybody for office but it opens up the runoff.

All votes include instant runoff.   Several venues have tried this and it works very well.   You get several choices on your ballot.   All the first place votes are tallied and if nobody gets a clear majority (I think 51% at least, maybe more), the bottom candidate is eliminated and ballots listing that candidate as #1 get their second place vote tallied.  Repeat until you have a winner.  This will encourage "protest" votes and third party candidates.    

Organized bodies such as corporations, unions, PACs, 527s, political parties and so forth, may not directly advertise for or against any candidate or ballot measure.   Before Citizens United, something like this was the law and the extreme judicial activists decided to change it.

No individual or organized body may spend more on lobbying than 10 median incomes.  Right now that's about $500K.  "Free" lobbying and under the table payments must be counted.

No one entity may gross more than 1/2% of US  GDP.  any income exceeding this would be taxed at >100%, to force such companies to break themselves up.  Right now this threshold is about $75B, and there are 97 such companies, about half which do a majority of their business in the US.  One major complication of this is that companies subect to this limit would be at a disadvantage against competitors who do not do business in the US.   Passing a law which has the same threshold in the EU is about a 90% solution, although China and Japan are a factor too.

Lying  in political advertising is a felony offense.  (today, lying in any political speech is protected free speech) (lying is saying something you know is false.  ignorance is a defense, but it only works once).

Things for the 99%

Here's a list of things the 99%/Occupy movement should be advocating.  A little of this is based on FDR's "second bill of rights":

Everybody deserves to have a decent living from 40 hours work per family.  If you want to work more that's ok, but it should not be necessary to work multiple jobs or have multiple family members working full time to earn a decent living.

A decent living means safe, comfortable housing, clothing, food, education, health insurance, retirement, transportation, not just to and from work, but for recreation and vacation.

"Everybody" is probably impossible--it was found, for example, that while unemployment could be driven under 5%, it came at substantial cost in inflation.  But we should come as close as we can.


The people who broke the economy, for example by creating derivatives with ridiculous levels of leverage, and the fraudsters who enabled them, need to go to prison and serve real time.   The victims need whatever support we can give them.  In particular we need some sort of moratorium on foreclosures and put more pressure on banks to renegotiate.  Anybody who received a bailout has an obligation to spend at least that much doing this.


We need a LOT more financial regulation.  In particular, perverse incentives such as bonuses for short term profits with no corresponding punishments for long term losses can't be allowed.   There are a lot of things in the financial market that serve no public purpose other than to make money for a few people.  If they're harmful, they should be banned.  Extremely high speed trading is an example.  The purpose of the financial markets is to promote businesses which actually do produce something useful.   Finance is a service industry.  It is of no intrinsic value--only the companies that are financed have value.


I think we need to create an economy where no entity controls more than about 1/2% of US GDP or 1/10% of worldwide GDP (around $65B in 2011).   Given nationalized economies like China and Saudi oil I recognize that there are complications to this.   I think it's also appropriate that no entity control more than 5 or 10% of any given market without being subject to the sort of regulations imposed on AT&T between 1918 and 1983.


None of this is in any way socialist or communist.   It may be redistributionist, but that's not the same thing at all.   The ideal way to implement redistribution is to provide services for everybody.   If everybody has access to the same health care, education, pension system, transportation, etc., then nobody's being treated unfairly.  It may be that the rich pay a little more than the poor, but they're benefiting more than the poor too.  (A number of politicians in countries with single payer health care systems have been asked whether they'd consider going back to a more capitalist system.  None would.  The people love single payer everywhere it's been tried.)

Nicky Hopkins

My favorite Rock and Roll Pianist is Nicky Hopkins, aka "Edward".  He played with nearly every important group involved in the English Blue Eyed Blues movement, the related British Invasion, San Francisco Music and more.  He had health issues that made it difficult for him to tour, so rather than play in a single band, he mostly worked in recording studios.   He was classically trained and rarely practiced, although he played so constantly that practice probably wouldn't help him, and he often found that his best take of any given song was his first. (He did join bands for a tour or two--Cyril Davies, Jeff Beck, Quicksilver, as well as shorter tours with the Airplane, Jerry Garcia, Steve Miller, and others when he was living in California).   Practically everybody he played with was influenced by him and quite a few preserved a some of his style after he'd moved on.  Here's a short sampler of his contributions.  A full list would be thousands of songs and a hundred or more groups.

She's Like a Rainbow  - The Rolling Stones.  The opening piano...
Sympathy for the Devil - The Rolling Stones.  Jean-Luc Goddard made a film that details how this song came to be arranged as it was, intercut with some other strange scenes that has nothing to do with it.  Ignoring the strange scenes, it's interesting, and Nicky Hopkins figures prominently.
Time Waits for No One - The Rolling Stones
Nicky worked with the Stones on almost every studio album they did.  The Stones had amazingly many wonderful pianists working with them--starting with the great Ian Stewart, who was their "Road Manager" despite having founded the band.
C C Rider - Cyril Davies and His R & B All Stars
Cyril Davies & His R & B All Stars
Jeff Beck, Mick Jagger and many others who would later become famous played with Cyril Davies at one time or another, who unfortunately died shortly after these recordings.
Got to be Free - The Kinks
Revolution - The Beatles
Nicky worked with the Beatles a lot, but most of his work lost to George Martin's sparer versions in the final mix.
The Song is Over - The Who
Nicky worked on a lot of albums with the Who.
Blues De Luxe - Jeff Beck Group with Rod Stewart vocals, Ron Wood bass, Mickey Waller drums.
My personal favorite.   Everything Rod Stewart did after his tour with Beck was anticlimax.
Barabajagal - Donovan, with Jeff Beck.
Nicky played with Donovan several times.  A semi-relevant story: On his previous album, Donovan's backing band had been Beck's friend Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham, on the verge of forming a new group.  They asked Nicky to join them but he was exhausted from touring with Beck and turned them down for health reasons. They also considered Donovan, but they decided he had too much history, so instead they went with Bonham's friend Robert Plant.
That's What Love Will Make You Do - Jerry Garcia Band
I saw them perform this live about 2 months earlier at the Concord Pavilion.  I think that's the only time I ever saw "Edward" in person. Another personal favorite.
Volunteers - Jefferson Airplane
Nicky only played with the Airplane for a little while--but that included Woodstock.  He suffers in the mix here and the cameraman was more interested in how tired the band was after having waited all night to do their set.  The version on the album of the same name is much better.
Baby's House - Steve Miller Band
Nicky played on several of Miller's early albums.  This Hopkins showpiece is from their "Your Saving Grace" album. with Ben Sidran on organ.  (Sidran also does the wonderful organ on the title track, which was plainly influenced by Hopkins)
Kow Kow (Calqulator) - Steve Miller Band
Edward, the Mad Shirt Grinder - Quicksilver Messenger Service
The source of Nicky's nickname.  It's an impressive performance but I don't think it's great music.  The longest he played with any one band was with Quicksilver.
Who Do You Love - Quicksilver Messenger Service
Fresh Air - Quicksilver Messenger Service


Nicky Hopkins died in 1994 at age 50.  John Cippolina, Dino Valenti, Jerry Garcia, John Entwistle, Keith Moon, Cyril Davies, Brian Jones, Ian Stewart, John Lennon, George Harrison and quite a few others on this list have also passed on.  What a band they could make!

The Falacy of Very High Level Languages

During my career as a systems programmer, I interviewed hundreds of candidates and was intimately involved with dozens of development projects, from one man teams to teams of hundreds, writing in binary, assembler, C, and various "high" level languages, and a few very high level languages,.  Over the course of all of this one of the things I realized was that language tools, such as big libraries, extremely high levels of abstraction, object orientation, and quite a few other "tools" are at best crutches, which can actually get in the way of solving the problem.  During the 70s and 80s, a bunch of people noticed that developers writing in assembler had a much higher success rate than developers working in BASIC or several other high level languages.  Without thinking very carefully, they blamed the particular high level language--for example, lack of structured programming tools.  But that's not the problem.

I spent quite a bit of time thinking about this.  What's happening, I think, is that the various tools promote barriers to entry.

On this chart, every programmer/development environment has a point.  A poor programmer is toward (or off) the bottom, better ones toward the top.   Working in a lower level language puts you toward the left, higher level toward the right, as exemplified by a few languages listed across the top.    As everybody knows, working in a lower level language makes it harder to get a program working than in a higher level language.  I think there are actually two thresholds at work.  The lower threshold, the lower, blue line, is the "can get it limping" level.  If you're below that level, you'll never get anything to work at all.  As you can see, a lot more programmers can get something going at the higher level languages than at the lower level.

The higher, red line, is the "good program" level.  If a programmer is working below the red line, they'll never produce something good.  The red line is at a very shallow slope for a simple reason:  The things that make a good program--critical thinking and analysis, memory, good planning, deep grasp of the problem and effective use of approaches to solving it--are largely independent of programming language or style.   If your thinking is muddled, you won't do a good job, irrespective of language, tools, design approach, or whatever.

The key, and the reason the "best" programmers seemed to be working in the hardest language, is that assembler provides such a high barrier to getting anything working at all that most of the muddled thinkers can't ever get anything that even looks like it's working.  There's not much space between the red and blue lines when you're working in assembler.   The lower level languages allow more programmers to look like they're producing something useful, while not actually doing much.  90% of the productive work is done by the 5 or 10% that are above the red line.

Up until about 1990, a programmer's ability to work in assembler was a pretty good calibration of their overall competence.   A good assembler programmer working in a higher level language would simply be more productive.  But after that time, astonishingly few professional programmers really understood the machine.  By 1997, it was rare to find a entry level candidate for an operating systems team that had more than a smattering of assembly experience.  And the higher level languages allow a lot more muddled thinkers into the process.  In the 70s and 80s, we couldn't tolerate much muddled code into the final product--there was some, but memory and disk space was too precious.  Nowadays, nobody seems to care.  The muddled thinking--and remember that with today's very high level languages, which functionally consist of gluing libraries together, that's an extremely high percentage--becomes a very high percentage of the shipping project.  One consequence of this is that you must download and install 700MB to update your telephone.  If all the programmers involved were working above the red line, it would probably be about 20MB.

Job Creators and Tax Cuts for the Rich

The republicans tell us that if we increase taxes for rich people, we will be impacting job creators.  Who are these "Job Creators"?  We're told that most of these are small businesses.  This is wrong in quite a few ways.  Here's the official data from the small business administration for 2008.

the first few lines:

size of firms	Firms	Establishments	Employment	Payroll ($1,000)
Total	5,930,132	7,601,169	120,903,551	5,130,509,178
0-4	3,617,764	3,624,614	6,086,291	232,062,907
5-9	1,044,065	1,056,947	6,878,051	222,504,912
10-14	418,270	435,392	4,892,838	166,372,257
15-19	214,871	232,071	3,604,553	127,162,095

You will notice that even though businesses with fewer than 20 employees are about 90% of all businesses, it's only 17% of all employees.    So while it's true that there are a lot of small businesses, the majority of them are tiny.   If these magic tax cuts managed to create 10% more employment in this sector, this is only 2 million jobs.  But this is totally implausible.  The average employment in this sector is 4 employees.  To add a single employee is a 25% increase, and for almost 3/4ths of them a 50% increase or more.  How is a 4.6% tax rate cut going to generate enough extra revenue for these businesses to increase payroll 25 or 50%?

The premise that lowering the individual tax rate affects small business hiring is that over 60% of businesses are S-Corporations, meaning that the business doesn't pay corporate income taxes, but passes revenue on to the owner where it is taxed as income.  There are a few S Corps that are bigger than 5 employees, but very few.  For over 90% of all jobs, a change in the personal income tax rate of their employer has zero effect on how the business is taxed.

The Bush tax cuts had two parts.  For incomes under around $350K, all tax brackets were reduced by 3%, while the top bracket was reduced by 4.6%.  Then capital gains, which had been taxed at 28%, and dividends, which had been taxed as ordinary income, were reduced to 15%.   So who is mostly affected by the Bush tax cuts?  Everybody took 3% from their ordinary income under $350K. In 2007, just over 1 million people (of the 140M filers) were affected by the cut to the top marginal tax rate and they had a cumulative AGI of about $2T.    Those with incomes under $100K had on average less than 1% of their income as dividends and capital gains, while those with incomes of a $million or more had almost half of their income in these things.

So who is it who benefits from the cuts?  Basically three groups:  The savings from the ordinary rates are small, but real.  If you're making the median $50K, after exemptions and deductions, those 3% are under $1K.  If you got a salary of a $million, you got about $40K. If you made a profit selling your house, you may have had a big capital gains windfall.  During the bubble, lots of people did.  But the real beneficiaries are people who invest in the equity markets: stocks, bonds, commodities and so forth.  If you make most of your income this way, and among $million earners, that's most of them, your tax rate roughly halved.

So to our big point: does any of this create jobs?  Well, an executive or lawyer who brings in an extra $10K because of these cuts might be able to have a little extra work done: some gardening, a nanny or such.  Per person this is not much, but together, a few of these people add up to an extra job.  The extra home sales definitely created a market for realtors.  It wasn't what caused the housing bubble, but the low capital gains rate surely added a small amount of lift to it.  But the big thing is the equity markets.  These things create very few jobs.  The way they're supposed to work is to provide an incentive to invest in new businesses.  That does create jobs.  But once the IPO is done, the only work that's generated is for stockbrokers.  It creates nothing, and removes money from the "real" economy.  During the downturn, there have been very, very few IPOs. 

The bottom line here is that tax cuts for the rich have almost no effect on job creation.  Not zero, but certainly not enough to justify undermining other types of government job creation.

Republicanese

The neocon publicity machine has generated an enormous amount of what George Orwell called “Newspeak”.  Neocons have fallen out of repute since most of this was written, during the GW Bush administration, but today's Republicans are still doing it.  Here are a few examples:

Non-Starter:  We can't find any fault with this idea at all, but we're immovably against it anyway. E.G., R51 is a non starter.  It would result in huge improvements to our congested highways at a trivial cost to taxpayers, proportionate to their use of the highways, but we're against it anyway.  Therefore it is a non-starter.

Clear Evidence: Not one shred of evidence, or sometimes fraudulent evidence. E.G. We have clear evidence that Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction, therefore we will attack him and commit ourselves to many years of "peacekeeping" in a hostile environment, in the process alienating ourselves from the rest of the world.   The scant evidence we have shown publicly is in fact a complete forgery. E.G.  We have clear evidence that tax cuts help the economy and increase employment.   every single previous tax cut has triggered a significant rise in unemployment and the majority have provoked an economic downturn, therefore we are going to try it again, this time in a way guaranteed to bankrupt the government at the same time.

Defending freedom: Suspending or overthrowing constitutional protections of freedom and civil liberties. 

Fighting terrorism: Starting or provoking conflicts that make people who were already angry at us willing to go to almost any extreme, including suicide bombings, to revenge themselves upon us.   Also: Wasting huge amounts of money in bureaucratic boondoggles that make it much more difficult to deal with the social and political problems behind terrorism.

Overwhelming majority:  between 20 and 49.9% approval. E.G. President Bush enjoys support from an overwhelming majority of the American people.

Completely baseless charges:  Guilty as hell.  E.g., the corruption charges against Tom DeLay and the influence pedaling and bribery charges against his crony Abramov are completely baseless.  They did them and more.

Clear Skies: Allowing polluters to do whatever they want with impunity.

Healthy Forests: Allowing lumber companies to do whatever they want with impunity.

Abstinence only: Disseminating lies about, and promoting legal impediments to,  any means of contraception more effective than wishful thinking. (the studies aren't all in yet, but it's starting to look like "abstinence only" may have caused the largest increase in abortions in our country's history)

Junk Science: Anything which is carefully researched, peer-reviewed, and widely accepted by people with expertise in the topic.

Fact: Something which has no basis in reality except for how it sounds to someone with no particular expertise in any relevant subject.

Bipartisan: Supported by most republican legislators and maybe (but not necessarily) one or two extremely conservative democrats.

Saving ____: cutting funding to ____ in such a way as to severely undermine its future sustainability but ensure that the ultimate collapse doesn't occur on the present administration's watch.  e.g. Saving Social Security, Saving Medicare.

Class Warfare:  The victims of long term, sustained attacks finally waking up and complaining about it.

Fairness: Anything that gives wealthy corporations and individuals an unfair advantage, power or money.

Average Person: A person with income between the 90 and 99th percentile.  in 2003 this was the range $125,000 to $300,000.   The actual median family income then was just over $44,000.

Job Creator: Someone who makes most of their income in the stock or bond market or by collecting rent or interest, and thus creates few or no jobs.

added 27 Jan 2012

Totally Dishonest:  Exactly right. E.g.: Mitt's ads about Newt are totally dishonest.  That is, they're completely accurate.  (Very little Mitt says is truthful, but about Newt, he's right on.  Of course Newt is right about Mitt, too.)

added 28 Feb 2013
Showing Leadership: do exactly what Republicans want, in clear violation of what the voters said they wanted or any actual facts on the ground

added 28 Mar 2013
Baseless Assertion: carefully researched, well documented and reasoned.  When a republican tells you something is a baseless assertion, it's a fairly safe bet that it's true.

added 27 Apr 2013
Put Politics Aside: I've lost on the facts or the politics but I want to keep pushing my (probably nonsensical) position anyway.  (both parties use this one but the Rs use it far more)

Not Picking Winners and Losers: Rigging the game so that the powerful can do whatever they want with impunity and the less powerful have no opportunity to do more than grumble.

added 18 Apr 2014
Nobody Could Have Predicted: It isn't what our rich backers wanted, so we prevented it from happening. Scientists and other people with real expertise not only predicted, but were screaming a warning as loudly as they could.

Cooking the Books:  similar to "Junk Science" and "Baseless assertion".  Carefully researched, documented and peer reviewed.  Tends to be used for statistics.

added 18 Dec 2014
Right to Work: The right of business owners to do whatever they please to workers, especially lower pay, blocking union membership, stealing pensions and more.

Things it's not possible to both understand and disagree with

Scientific ideas are sometimes a little hard to understand.  But quite a few ideas are so compelling, that once you do understand them, it's basically not possible to disagree.  Here's a short list.  In each case, if you disagree, it's not because you have a legitimate argument with the idea, it's because you don't understand the idea.


The earth is approximately spherical.  Prior to Magellan's first circumnavigation, and more recently, spaceships from which you can actually look and see,  you had to do some slightly sophisticated reasoning to understand this.   Despite the overwhelming evidence, there are still flat-earthers.   In ancient Greece most educated people understood that it was round, and the mathematician Eratosthenes actually figured out how big it is using remarkably simple and primitive tools, and got it right within a few percent.  He also measured the distance to the sun and was pretty close on that too.

Universal gravitation.  Prior to the middle of the 17 century, apparently nobody connected the fact that things fell to earth and the motion of the planets.  Once Newton came up with a formula that predicted everything exactly, nobody was able to disagree.   A little over 200 years later Einstein realized that there were some adjustments that needed to be made at near the speed of light, and that those changes had some profound ramifications, but they didn't change the basic math.

Evolution by natural selection.  A lot of people find this controversial, but if you actually grasp the underlying statistics, the power of even very tiny advantages or disadvantages to change species over many generations is undeniable.   If you don't believe in Darwinian evolution, it's because there's something you're not understanding.   Like understanding the spherical nature of the earth without direct evidence, the math and the biological mechanisms involved are a little hard to get your head around.  But once you do, it's undeniable.   Nobody's thought of a demonstration as compelling as a circumnavigation, but MRSA, MRTB and all those experiments with fruit flies and E Coli sure work for me: These are all clear examples of evolution in action.  Over and over, purported examples of non-evolution have been debunked.  The fossil record, the eye, flagella and more, are all clearly evolutionary developments, and in fact attempts to prove that they are not have generally resulted in strengthening evolution's case. As with Newton and Einstein, there have been some refinements made over the years, but the essential concept remains undeniable.

Keynesian economics.  Even before Keynes published his great book in 1936, his ideas were becoming difficult to argue with.  He'd accurately predicted German hyperinflation, the Great Depression and its recovery during WWII and much more.  But there was a faction that disagreed, and had strong financial support from a few people who had a lot of money.  They mounted an almost completely political campaign to undermine Keynesian thought and managed to create a sizable but closed circle of economists, centered around the University of Chicago, who listened only to each other and ignored uncomfortable facts.  They got little traction until the late 70s, when one of the popular and most compelling Keynesian models, the "Philips Curve", seemed to be wrong.  In fact, there was just a parameter had previously been ignored, or more accurately, misapplied.  The basic idea was still right.  But the politics of that single failure were blown up into what looked to outsiders like a complete repudiation.  More recently, Keynesians predicted the various bubbles and crashes, Japan's lost decade, calculated that the Obama stimulus wouldn't be sufficient, and more.   If you get it, all the evidence supports Keynes' model.

Anthropogenic global climate change.  There were people worried about human-caused climate change from fairly early in the industrial revolution.  Many of these were Luddites, but the horrible working conditions and pervasive soot were serious problems that didn't really get addressed until well into the 20th century.  The solutions found were generally effective and relatively low cost.  The new boogieman is rapidly climbing CO2 emissions, which cause warming and acidification of the oceans, with widespread consequences throughout the climate. The evidence is overwhelming.  Even a little climate change will be enormously costly, in the hundreds of $trillions, and millions or even billions of deaths, while returning fossil fuel consumption to the levels of the first half of the 20th century through alternative energy sources and uses will cost only one or two $trillion.  (the famous "hockey stick" doesn't really get going until the 1970s).   But the beneficiaries of existing modes have enormous money to spend on disinformation and lobbying, and so far, it's working.

Economists who predicted the crisis

We're told by conservatives and mainstream media that nobody could have predicted the crisis.

Here's a partial list:

Brooksley Born, 1996-8 Cassandra of the Derivatives Crisis.  Warned about unregulated derivitives, especially Credit Default Swaps and other Collateralized Debt Obligations.  Greenspan and his allies destroyed her agency as thanks for her prescience.

Sheila Bair (FDIC chair at the 2006-2011) warned of derivatives and initiated the first legal actions, in March 2007, against a subprime lender, and began advocating for mortgage restructurings shortly later.

Nouriel Roubini, September 2006 Dr. Doom.  Predicted a crash of the housing bubble, an oil shock, and a long, deep recession.

Robert Shiller: August 2005: Be Warned:  of the housing bubble.  says that we'll be seeing housing decline 40% and think it's a "soft landing" compared to what might have happened.

Paul Krugman: August 2005. Greenspan and the Bubble and That Hissing Sound. Describes the housing bubble and its causes, and predicts that we're in for a "rough ride".


What do these people have in common?  They are all Keynesians.   The truth is that no anti-Keynesian could have predicted the crisis, but quite a few Keynesians did.

More:  John Paulson now famously built funds that bet against the housing bubble, and made a pile.

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's long time business partner, pointed out in 2002 that unregulated derivatives are "a sewer, and if I'm right, there'll be hell to pay in due course"

Michael Burry made a fortune betting against derivatives and was able to explain why at the time.  Michael Lewis wrote a book about him and several others, The Big Short.

Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) spoke passionately on the floor of the Senate in 1999 against overturning Glass-Steagall:  "I think we will look back in 10 years’ time and say we should not have done this, but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930s is true in 2010".  Dorgan was one of only 8 senators who voted "No" on the deregulation bill (the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act).  The timing of his prediction was almost perfect.

Non-Issues

Political parties love to create issues to divide the voters...so much so, that they'll turn issues that sound like they're plausible problems but are not, into major "wedge" issues.

Here's a partial list, in alphabetical order:

Abortion: Through history, there have been societies that gave the father the right of life and death over their children until puberty or marriage.   There have also been groups that regard not taking opportunity to procreate as a sin.  The point is that the mandates of one faction are the sins of another. There aren't many who follow these extremes today, but there's still a wide spectrum.  Some people regard life as beginning at conception, some at birth.  The bible says that "Life is in the blood" which would make it about 6 weeks after conception, yet that's not what "Project Rescue" wants to hear.  Prior to about 1870, quietly abandoning unwanted children to die of "exposure" was accepted practice in nearly every culture around the world, but with the invention of safe abortion, the loonier voices of the right decided to make this a big issue.  With Roe vs Wade, a middle ground was picked.   Nobody is ever going to be fully happy, but RvW is a compromise that works.

Increasing crime rates.  Crime rates have been DROPPING radically over recent years.  One study tells us that the rate of violent crime today is 1/100th what it was 150 years ago. It's certainly true that we hear about more crimes today: as recently as 50 years ago, spousal and child abuse was rarely reported at all, though it was clearly happening.  But since murder and other violent crimes, including against spouses, have dropped so dramatically, it's implausible that these haven't been on the decline too.  These need enforcement, but the idea that there's some new terror here is just wrong.  It's all about the increase in media.
 
The Deficit and Debt: These are problems, but there's no urgency.  The debt becomes a problem when, with high interest rates, debt service becomes a big part of the budget.  Interest rates are at historic lows and debt service is a trivial part of the budget.  When this changes, they will need to be dealt with, but when that happens, the economy will have improved.  For now, borrowing could be used to stimulate the economy.

Gay Marriage:  anybody who actually knows a gay couple realizes that they're pretty much like any other couple. There's a passage in the bible that speaks against homosexuality.  But there are several that speak against the handling of the flesh of a pig.  A much stronger biblical case can be made against football than against gay marriage.   

Gun Control:  Contrary to the NRA, there's no serious effort to take away the guns of law abiding Americans.  There are people who are trying to take them away from crazy people and criminals, and there are a number of groups that want guns to be registered and to mandate safety training.  There are even a few people that are trying to keep weapons specifically optimized for warfare or crime out of the hands of criminals.  There are a few people who do advocate a complete ban of handguns, but their number is minuscule, and they are not part of the platform of any major party.  The NRA has consistently advocated against all these things, including objecting to perfectly reasonable safety standards for firearms.  They have gotten basically everything they wanted.

Immigration:  A case can be made that population is too high, but that's not the problem that the anti-immigration people are fighting.   Illegal immigration in 2007 was less than 1/3rd of what it had been 10 years earlier.  After the crash of 2008, lots of those went home.  The most extreme studies put it at under 12% of the total US population and most put it at just 2 or 3%.  It never was a serious problem and it's now not a problem at all.

Everyone knows that Prayer in School is against the law.  Except it's not.  If you want to pray in school, in a manner that's not disruptive, that's perfectly legal in every school in America.  What's illegal is someone in authority in a government-funded school leading students in prayer, because that could easily be taken as endorsing a specific religion.  Those in authority in the school, and those who might be perceived to represent them, have to hold to an especially high standard, because all the rest of the educational process is so authoritarian and young children are so naive.

Social Security is not a part of any federal budget crisis.  It is not funded through the income tax.  It's funded through the payroll tax and with no changes is fully funded until the late 2030s. By simply raising the FICA payroll cap, it can be funded for much longer.  Social Security is the single most effective anti-poverty program in history.

Tax cuts for rich people don't stimulate the economy, they stimulate the stock market, which creates very few jobs.  They actually damage the rest of the economy a little, because they take the money out of the hands of people who would spend it right away.  Some tax cuts for rich people, especially on dividends, capital gains and carried interest, are strongly destimulative: they create a powerful incentive for those who can to take their income in these ways instead of things that do create jobs.

Voter Fraud.  The theory is that there are a bunch of people who either shouldn't be voting at all, or are voting twice, or some such.  Study after study has shown that this is a tiny problem, amounting to a few dozen instances a year, nationwide.  So Republicans are imposing laws that significantly raise the identification standard, in a way that would make it much harder for certain classes of  people to vote.   In an amazing coincidence, these are consistently groups which vote for Democrats by a wide margin.  In an equally amazing coincidence, what the fraud studies do show is that Election Fraud is a widespread and growing problem.   That is, elections where there is significant mis-counting, broken ballots (remember the butterfly ballot in 2000?), groups which are being wrongly disenfranchised by methods such as caging, and more.  Evidence is pretty good that in the last three presidential elections, the ultimate result was swayed by as much as a million votes toward the Republicans

The Hippy Movement

I regard the Hippy movement of 1967 as a sort of high point in American social and intellectual life.   It ended badly in many ways, but the intentions were good, and many great things resulted.    Here's a short description of the Hippy belief system:

Love.  Love your neighbor, love your enemies.  This is not about sex.  This is an old idea and is central to the dogma of many of the great religions.  The hippies really believed in it, unlike the so-called Christians.

Free Love.  This is about sex.  The pill, cures for most STDs, safe birth control removed most of the taboos associated with free love.  AIDs and the profit motive made it not work out so well as it had seemed at first, but the intentions were good.  (The "summer of love" ended when pimps and pushers moved in on Haight-Ashbury to exploit the thousands of teens who had come from all over the country)

Sharing.  Perhaps the most important thing the hippies did, it's an outgrowth of Love.  We're all in this together.  If I have something that you need, I should give it to you.  The Personal Computer and the World Wide Web are very direct outgrowths of this idea.  Jobs, Woz, Felsenstein, and many others were all Hippies at one time in their life or another.  Most of the early BBS systems were done by hippies. Ted Nelson invented Hypertext to share knowledge, and Tim Berners-Lee figured out how to put it on the Internet, so Jimmy Wales could do Wikipedia--the ultimate implementation of Ted Nelson's idea.  All were strongly inspired by the attitudes of the hippy movement.

Appearances are irrelevant.  except when they are, for example an artists work.  A persons value is their contribution to the community and how happy they are, not the way they look, how much money or stuff they have, how good they are at throwing a football, etc.  The hippies used "Beautiful" to mean something very different than the dictionary.

Drugs and Music are capable of great things.  I'm not so sure about the drugs part anymore, but the main hippy drugs, marijuana and LSD, are far less harmful than their detractors insist (and compared to Alcohol and Crystal Meth respectively, pretty harmless in absolute terms).  Music is the fastest, most direct, most universal form of communication yet invented by man.   The nomenclature is a little vague at times, there are clearly some people who just don't get some types of music.

Why Taxes Don't Matter

I've talked about this before.. It's not that hard an argument, but it seems like almost nobody gets it.  So I'll try once more.

Businesses survive or die based on costs and revenue--usually sales.  If costs exceed sales, they die.  If sales exceed costs, they can grow, or they can bank the excess against weaker times.  So anything a business can do that reduces costs without reducing revenue is good for them.

Most businesses are in competition with each other.  Apart from the direct competition against others selling similar products, even if they don't have competing products, they are competing for resources and for their customer's limited money.   Simplistically put, this is a zero sum game: in order for one business to gain, another has to lose.  It's not really zero sum, because the economy, population and exploitation of resources is constantly growing a little, but it's close enough that for simplicity we can pretend that it is.

For businesses in competition with each other, if one can lower costs while others cannot, it can lower prices and gain an advantage.  If one town lowers taxes, businesses in that town will have an advantage, and businesses with the flexibility to move have an incentive to move there.  The same thing happens at the state level, although it's generally harder to get employees and existing customers to move.  It's really hard to get them to move from country to country, although with globalization, less and less every day.

These barriers to movement are very important economically.  Within the barrier, people and money are free to move around, but across it, they are not.  Macroeconomics is the study of complete economies, within these barriers.  It turns out that there are some significant differences between these and businesses competing against one another.  One of the most important is taxation.  If everybody's taxes are changed equally, nobody gains an advantage.  To the extent that the barriers exist and the taxation is equal, this means that taxes don't matter to the economy.  They are simply pulled from the economy and the value of each remaining dollar is deflated to match.  It's not really as simple as that, because the government is part of the economy and every bit of government spending goes right back in.

Because the government is large, how the government chooses to spend can significantly impact the economy.  As conservatives like to put it, picking winners and losers.    But government has some significant advantages over private enterprise.  For example, it can do big things.  Private business would never have built the transcontinental railroads, the interstate highway system, the hydroelectric system, and more.  It can borrow money at rates impossibly lower than any business.  It can regulate businesses, to make sure that they're not committing fraud, trade restraint, or any of a host of other unfair practices.  It can create public safety institutions, from the police and fire departments to the military, and FEMA.   It can do big research projects, from NASA to NIH, far beyond the reach of any private business.

Nearly all of these things are immensely stimulative of the overall economy.  For example, building the roads employed millions of people, nearly all of whom worked for private companies at the time, and once they were built, they enabled hundreds of millions to move goods and people across great distances.

The free enterprise system is a good thing.  But like all things, it's just as possible for there to be too much as too little.

Are Electric Cars Really Green?

I've been seeing several commentators point out that to deliver power for an electric car, it has to go through several conversion phases, each of which add substantially to the inefficiency of the process.  This is absolutely true.  For example: burning natural gas to produce electricity produces at best about 60% of the theoretical conversion efficiency.  Realistically it's closer to 40%.  Line drops add 5-20% further loss, and charging/discharging the battery adds another 5-20%.     Burning coal or petroleum is even worse--30%.  Meanwhile, a Prius is able to turn gasoline into motion at about 30%.    So: picking relatively favorable numbers for natural gas, we get .4 * .9 * .85 = 30.6% conversion efficiency from the carbon in the natural gas to the motion.  The commentators are right: there's no efficiency advantage in a pure electric.

But this omits the really big point, which is that it's possible to power a pure electric car from completely carbon free resources: Hydroelectric, Wind, Solar, Geothermal, etc.  This is not true for a Hybrid, like the Prius.

Another complaint: There are a lot more batteries and they're harder to recycle.  This is true too.  Lithium and NiMH batteries are harder to recycle than lead acid batteries.  (Lead car batteries are over 99% recycled).   But several companies (including Toyota) are doing it fairly successfully.   There's another win too: even if a lithium battery does get into the landfill, it's far less toxic than a lead battery, and nowhere near as bad as the Cadmium from a NiCd, which can poison a compost heap at extremely low concentrations.

Another: the glass, brass and tungsten from incandescent light bulbs is worth recycling, but the largest component, the glass, is close to chemically inert.   CFCs (and other fluorescent bulbs) have about the same amount of glass, but they have a bunch of other stuff, all of which is easily recycled.   The most important, by far, is the small amount of Mercury, which is nearly as harmful as Cadmium. (The amount of Mercury in a Fluorescent bulb is tiny though, compared to the amount in a NiCd battery).  Home Depot and many others will recycle these.  I keep a box for this purpose in my garage.

Inherited Wealth and Conservatism

It seems to me that there's a correlation between conservatism and inherited wealth.  A few examples:  Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, George Soros, etc., made their money on their own, and are all fairly progressive.  The Koch brothers, Richard Scaife, Steve Forbes,  etc., inherited their money, and are very conservative.   Here's what I think is going on:

Rich people who made it on their own understand the factors that gave them the opportunity.  Buffett and Soros in particular started from very little and became wealthy on their own merits.   (Gates had money to start with, but he expanded it by three or four orders of magnitude).  They understand something about risk, spending money to make money, educating yourself and your collaborators, rewarding your collaborators, interdependency, and so forth.  The conservatives know about some of this stuff, but they're afraid of it all.  They're trying to minimize risk, both from external competition like other companies, and internal competition, from workers and unions.

Conservatives seem to see the world as a zero sum game: in order for them to stay on top, others need to be kept down.  Progressives are aware of this effect, but they know that the world is not really a limited place. Rich progressives know that if you give someone else an opportunity, you may make him rich, but you almost always make yourself richer in the process.

Conservatives have always fought the unions with all their might, and for the past 35 years they've been winning.   What they never seem to understand is that the time that the unions had the most power was the time that the economy was strongest.  The middle class has always been the key to America's economic might.  We won World War II and came out in the end stronger, not because Howard Hughes and Henry Kaiser made a lot of money (although they did) but because tens of millions of workers made lots of airplanes and ships, all of which production lines were almost immediately converted to making consumer products at wars end, and the millions of workers had money to pay for them.

Henry Ford was an interesting case, and works as a paradigm of the point I'm trying to make.  When asked why he paid his workers so much, he explained that he wanted them to be able to buy his products.  Talk about taking the long view!  He was also an ardent pacifist, regarding war as a terrible waste.  He was strongly opposed to racism.  He was also opposed to labor unions (regarding them as corrupt), and he seems to have held some anti-semitic views for a time--he later recanted these views very publicly.  By then very rich and suffering from many health issues, he didn't like FDR's New Deal, but when it looked like we were about to go to war against the Nazis, he embraced the cause completely.

Incandescent bulbs and heating

One of the popular complaints about the push to ban incandescent light bulbs is that a lot of people have been relying on them for heating.  Pretending that all the heat emitted is captured for heating (probably not a good assumption--entropy can never be zero), let's do an analysis.  (Wikipedia  does a simpler version of this)

Here are the cases:

* If you're cooling the building, the more heat the bulb emits, the worse.  Period.  Better to keep the heat out of the building.  Switch to lower heat bulbs, like LED or CFC.

* If you're heating the building with energy that costs the same as electricity, i.e. a resistance heater (e.g. electric baseboard or space heater), the thermal efficiency of incandescent lightbulbs and the resistance heater are very similar and the energy use/cost are thus identical.  Light bulbs, however, burn out fairly quickly while electric heaters last a long time.

(One factor that may be important:  The room may not have a separate heater, and the light bulbs were emitting enough heat to keep it comfortable.  Switching to low-heat bulbs may undermine this, and replacing them with an appropriate heater may be more trouble than the energy saving)

* If you're heating the building with something that costs more than electricity (e.g. gasoline), the light bulb is cheaper.  You should probably think about getting a resistance heater.  (this may not be practical in all cases, e.g. on a boat at sea)

* If you're heating the building with something that costs less than electricity (basically everything except gasoline...or burning money...), then you can lower your heating bill (and environmental impact) by switching to lower heat bulbs.   Here's a nice calculator that enumerates quite a few of the cases.  In case it goes away, here are the numbers at at the time of this writing:

Energy Source	Cost/MBTU
Electricity@ $0.09/kwhr	$26.37
Electricity@$0.12/kwhr	$35.16
Electricity@$0.046/kwhr	$13.48
Natural Gas	$17.38
#2 Fuel Oil	$33.25
Gasoline@$3.75	$41.25
Hardwood	$16.66

The prices of these commodities varies a lot.  12 cents is the national average for electricity.  Puget Power charges 9 cents here in suburban Seattle.  Seattle City Light charges 4.59 cents.  (30 years ago, PP charged 3/4 cent, about what SCL charged then.  Thanks, WPPS.)

Heater efficiency is complicated.  These days, natural gas furnaces over 90% are common.  Electric heaters and light bulbs are a little higher, but not much.   Since these are the major cases we're comparing with light bulbs, we can ignore the inefficiency differences for the most part although  the calculator (and the numbers above) factor these numbers in.

Heat pumps are an interesting special case.  Because their calculated efficiency is usually higher than 100% (COP>1...it's sounds like a second law of thermodynamics violation but it's not: they're stealing the heat from elsewhere) it's a significantly better use of electricity than a light bulb or resistance heater.

Bottom line: there's really only one case where it makes sense to stick with incandescent bulbs:  where other types of heater are impractical for some reason, and incandescent bulbs provide sufficient heat to keep the room comfortable.  In all other cases, lower heat bulbs use less energy

(There may be other reasons to stick with incandescents--for example, the aesthetics may be preferred, but that's not my topic for today)

Anecdotes and Generational Memory

One of the big differences between humans and other animals is that we can remember what other people tell us.  Books and their electronic counterparts allow this memory to extend not just across personal contacts, but across history itself.  But we get a lot of understanding from the stories told by our more immediate correspondents. 

I just read Paul Krugman's speech on the state of economics and was reminded of this.   Many people, including conservative economists, have a built-in bias towards certain ideas, but in the 1930s, the field of economics successfully repudiated them.  The success of this venture was such that there were no major banking crises for 60 years.  During that time, the conservatives found a narrative and strategy that fit their model, and starting in the late 70s, this began to get traction, to the point that by 1990, it was acceptable to snigger in professional conferences at the policies that had solved the depression and prevented financial panics for so long.  What was it that had changed?  The people who actually remembered the Great Depression as adults and professional economists had started to die off in large numbers.

As humans, we learn best by hearing anecdotes, told to us by trusted authorities.  These could be grandparents, valued teachers or professors, etc.  We can learn from dry, abstract writing, but it doesn't sink in as well if it doesn't connect to us in some personal way.  Anecdotal learning, even if wrong, affects us more deeply.  After about 1990, the economists who both remembered and understood the Great Depression were gone, and the new stories were about "The Great Moderation" and the failure of the Phillips Curve.  The stories were wrong, but they stuck.

There's a similar lesson to be learned from "The former Yugoslavia".   That region is made up of several ethnic groups and two major religions.   For hundreds of years, there had been almost constant small scale fighting, but Marshal Tito managed to unite the factions--with support of the Allies during WWII and the Soviet Union afterwards.  He was an authoritarian strongman and managed to suppress the strife that was boiling under the surface.  When he died in 1980, it was still simmering, but most people had learned to ignore it--and many former blood rivals were friends, neighbors and had even intermarried.  The peace lasted for almost a decade.  But there were too many stories, told by grandparents to gullible youngsters, about how that person's grandfather killed your great uncle.  Bad actors were able to exploit these hatreds, along with the economic pressures caused by a collapsing Soviet sphere of influence, to create a bad situation and attempted genocide.  Had the Tito regime lasted for another 20 years, the hatreds would have all been forgotten and Milosovic would have garnered no support.   The peace that's ensued from the NATO intervention seems to be lasting...we can hope that we'll get no more bad stories.

Thomas Kuhn pointed out that the way change happens is when somebody comes up with a good idea, it's often repudiated for quite a while.  What eventually happens is that the old conservatives who were suppressing the good idea die off, and their anecdotes and influence dies with them, and the new idea suddenly gets traction, seemingly out of nowhere.

In the case of Economics, there's something a lot more sinister at work.  The bad old ideas are being propped up not just by old conservatives, but new conservatives who have been getting tremendous funding to reject the new ideas.  The conservatives know this works, so they're arguing that "socialists" have been funding academia to promote Keynesian ideas.  Soros and Buffet (and Obama) are very, very far from socialists, and their contributions pale compared to how Koch and Scaife and others are funding Cato, AEI, the University of Chicago and more.  Same story in Climate Science: the most prominent deniers are funded by these same sources.   But they've been trying to sell the story (the Wall Street Journal seems to be their favorite publication) that the folks warning about Climate Change are only doing it because they think they'll get their latest research project funded.   The dry data all support Keynes and Hansen.    But it's easy to create anecdotes that tell a different story.

Space Aliens Save the Economy!

Paul Krugman explains here how to use a fictitious threat of space aliens to save the economy.  The jist is:  the economy was saved in 1941 by an external threat that united the country and allowed the huge deficit spending, that had previously been blocked by congressional republicans, to have near universal support.  What they spent it on was actually negative social product--even less productive than Keynes example of paying people to dig a ditch and fill it up again--but they got greater than full employment by doing it.  A threat from space aliens could clearly do the same thing today.  By composing the threat appropriately, a clever fake could encourage needed infrastructure and social welfare spending.

Krugman says that this was in an old episode of the Twilight Zone (it turns out it's really from The Outer Limits), where a group of scientists faked an alien threat and tricked the world into world peace.   This is an old story, rewritten by many science fiction writers.  The first that I knew about was Arthur C Clarke's "Childhood's End", in which a benevolent alien race called the "Overlords" demonstrated that they could easily overpower any military on earth, illustrated the fraud of all religions and political and national partisans--generally with video--and convinced everybody to work together for the betterment of the world and succeeded in creating something fairly Utopian.  In the end, Clarke goes off the rails with some ESP claptrap, but it gave me an idea, and for a high school creative writing class, I wrote a version of the same idea, where a group of scientists commandeered part of the TV network to convince the world that such an invasion had taken place and to pursue world peace (VietNam was still a very active war at the time).  The "aliens" lived in zero G and could supposedly not tolerate earth's gravity or atmosphere, so they spoke over the TV in disembodied, godlike voices, destroyed military facilities, and commissioned "agents" (the conspiring scientists) to convey their wishes to the earthlings.  It wasn't a very good story (I was only about 15).  But I've never seen that episode of the Outer Limits, so I really did invent it.  (update: I just watched "The Architects of Fear" on YouTube and like Clarke, they drifted off into ESP claptrap and also a morality tale about solving your problems without trickery.  Sadly, troublemakers rarely have such morals)

The hard part would be getting real incriminating video like the "Overlords" did on the religions and partisans.  I bet the NSA could help.  Hacking the communications is clearly fairly easy, and once the "aliens" story has a little traction, unnecessary.  Homemade UAVs and cruise and ballistic missiles could convince most of the world of the reality of the alien threat, and prior to 1980 or so probably everybody, but the US intelligence community of today could probably see through it.  Again, NSA would be a good ally to have.   A real, working death ray might do the trick.

One story along this line that I did read was "Occam's Scalpel", by Theodore Sturgeon.   A brilliant but shallow businessman is convinced by a fake corpse and a story that invading aliens have been masquerading as human business leaders and intentionally polluting the atmosphere to terraform the earth in advance of their takeover--apparently the aliens need smog to live.  The shallow businessman seems to have been convinced by the fraud and when the story ends, we're thinking that with his brilliance he might be able to reverse the pollution trend.  There are, of course, lots of other stories about aliens solving our problems...perhaps the most famous is "The Day the Earth Stood Still"....klaatu barada nickto!

The Most Socialist Presidents

I've been getting robocalls and push polls from various right wingers lately.  One of the standard talking points is that Obama is our most socialist president ever.  To anyone with the slightest knowledge of history and an understanding of the meaning of the word, this is an absurd claim.  Among the presidents since 1900, he's among the most pro-business.  He has done nothing to earn the term socialist.  The nearest is the new health care law--a requirement that everybody buy insurance from private companies, a few minor regulations of those companies with nothing that would prevent them from gouging, and a new exchange to give purchasers of that insurance a more convenient market.  This is pretty much a republican program: socialism for insurance companies, private enterprise for people.

Lots of other presidents are more socialist:

#1: Abraham Lincoln:  Our most socialist president ever, by far.  After the civil war, his three biggest achievements were the Homestead Act, the Transcontinental Railroads and the Land Grant Colleges.  All of these were major government incentives to stimulate growth by spending the resources he had available--giant tracts of land. Moreover, he was a supporter of workers--what we would come to call union rights.  From his first state of the union speech: 

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. 

In context, he makes it clear that he's including both free workers and slaves in what he calls "Labor".  Lincoln also pushed through the very first nationwide income tax, mainly to pay for the war.


 #2: FDR: I think most people are aware of the New Deal, the National Relief Agency, the WPA, and Social Security in his achievements.   In what will be news to most FDR haters, he didn't raise taxes to pay for his social programs.  Hoover had done that earlier.  FDR did eventually raise taxes, to pay for the war. 

#3: Lyndon Johnson was a brilliant political strategist and infighter.  He skillfully exploited a widely held sense of fairness, the worship of the martyred President Kennedy and the philosophy of government defined by FDR to push through the programs of the Great Society: expansion of Social Security, creation of Medicare, and the implementation of Civil Rights that FDR and Ike had started.   He was cornered by Goldwater, very much against his will, into allowing the Viet Nam war to expand.  His full throated support of civil rights transformed the South into a permanent stronghold for Republicans to this day, and their unthinking hatred of him has given the forces that would like to destroy his and FDR's legacy a far stronger hand than they would otherwise have.

#4: Theodore Roosevelt was simultaneously very pro business and very socialist.  He understood the need for public institutions, creating the National Park system, and boosting anti-monopoly regulation.

#5: Dwight Eisenhower ranks fairly highly because of one thing: The national interstate highway system.  He also did the first real civil rights enforcement and created NASA.

#6: Woodrow Wilson: not initially a supporter, he signed the constitutional amendment (pushed for by his predecessor Taft) that allowed a peace time income tax because he understood its necessity in the face of rising social needs and the realization that war was soon coming.

#7: Richard Nixon: Our most fervently anti-communist president also instituted wage and price controls, took us off the gold standard, created the EPA, OSHA and several other agencies.  He famously repeated Milton Friedman's line "we're all Keynesians now", a statement that was interpreted (wrongly) as supporting socialism.  And he went to China.    The price controls proved a disaster economically, as did his war policy, but otherwise, most of this stuff worked.

#8: Thomas Jefferson ignored the advice of his economic advisers and bought "Louisiana" from the French, at what was then a terribly high cost.  He quickly created expansionist programs to explore and settle it.  One of these many socialist contributions was "The National Road", the first government funded highway.  It still exists: it's called US Highway 40 and goes from Frederick, MD to St Louis, although Jefferson only planned to reach the Ohio River.  Today, the route is largely shared with I-70.

James Polk, Grover Cleveland, William Howard Taft, and Harry Truman all did things which today would be described as socialist.  Reagan, GHW Bush and many others things that would cause them to be ranked in the same general range of socialism Obama.  Did you know that Reagan raised taxes and increased government spending? And also:  "...where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost." Ronald Reagan, Labor Day 1980 (while running for president)

I'd rank Obama at about #15 or so on the socialist spectrum.  He did push for a slightly more socialist health care program than we got, but he caved to give us a program similar to the ones Dole and others were pushing for in 1993.   He undermined the already too-weak ARRA stimulus bill by filling it with tax cuts, as well as caving on tax cuts for the rich as he promised in the fall of 2010.  He gave up pushing stimulus and began pushing austerity before the 2010 election.

There definitely are more conservative presidents than Obama: GW Bush, Herbert Hoover, Warren Harding.  Note that history (including some pretty conservative historians) also rank these as having been among our worst presidents.

Reinventing and Glue

Engineers are prone to something called NIH--Not Invented Here--because that is what engineers like to do: figure out how to do something and implement it.  They'd like to "Reinvent the world".  That's hyperbole, of course, but it's a tendency that their managers try to get them to resist:  If somebody has already done it, the current team doesn't need to do any new work and chances are good that the previous, ostensibly successful implementers, did a better job than the current team would.  By and large, this is good advice.  But not always.

A lot of the time, the old implementation doesn't quite exactly do what the new one needs to.  To repurpose the old work, we have to invent a new interface, to be able to fit it into the new work.  In software, we call that "glue code", or just "glue".    It's rare that glue is simple.  If the old work was well designed and modularized, it's at least a few lines of code.  It's usually quite a lot more than that, and surprisingly often, it turns out to be more than the code that's being reused.   The code that's being reused doesn't have to be tested, says management.  Perhaps, but the glue does have to be tested just as hard, and since the fit isn't perfect, the old code does have to be tested.  Suppose the old component was 2000 lines long.  If the glue is anything up to, say, 300 lines or so and the function really is similar, it's probably worth trying to make the glue work.  But if the glue is more than a thousand lines, you're really getting into diminishing returns.  It's very likely that reinventing the thing from scratch will work better for the new application, and even if it's 2000 lines long, you've eliminated the need for glue, saving a thousand lines and a bunch of testing.

There are other cases too: sometimes the old implementation wasn't all that well done.  Fred Brooks, in The Mythical Man Month, talks about second systems syndrome.  When doing the first implementation, it's all they could do to get it to work at all, and they likely were changing algorithms and interfaces all along.  It's quite likely the first implementation is kludgey and not too good.  The second time, they know better, but now they have a whole bunch of new ideas and they get a whole lot of bloat.  On the third try, they're getting closer to the Goldilocks point: not too big nor too little, refined, shaken down, appropriate algorithms, well thought out interfaces.   If the code you're trying to reuse is a first or second implementation, it's very likely you're just propagating a bad thing.

Finally, there are a lot of things that are more appropriate being reimplemented.  For example, simple searches or insertions that occur at user time.   This is such a simple algorithm that nearly everyone who has written the code has done it several times, and won't get it wrong.   A new implementation will fit the new codebase perfectly and avoid any mingled source-tree complications.  Even if uses totally naive algorithms, it's often better to be simple than optimal, and it's likely that there's no actual algorithmic advantage to be gained (e.g: a bubble sort is so much simpler that it's actually faster than NlogN sorts if there are fewer than a dozen or so things to be sorted)

Debt Limit

Suppose you're someone who needs their car for their job--a traveling salesman, for example.  Your predecessor has run up ridiculous debts and left the scene.  It wasn't your fault, but you're now left holding the bag and you must deal with the situation.  One of the changes your predecessor made was to cut your hours worked, hence your income. The credit company has been on your case for months, and now they've announced that they'll send out the collection agency to take your car on August 2nd.

You've got a number of people giving you advice:

Nancy and Harry say you need to buckle down and work more hours, and do what you can to pay off at least part of the debt.

Michelle says the collection agency thing is an empty threat that you can safely ignore.

Eric and John, who incidentally were a big part of the spending spree, and have been whispering that it was you who really caused the problem even though you weren't even with the company when most of it happened, say you need to cut way back on spending, including maintenance of the car, your advertising budget, and canceling your health care.  You must not work more hours--in fact, you should work fewer.  This is so important to them that they'll willingly bankrupt the company to keep their mid-day tee times.

Barry says you need to both cut back on spending (but not anything that affects income or long term sustainability) and work more hours.

Which advice should you take?

Display Resolution and Aspect Ratio

In 1994, the "Digital HDTV Grand Alliance" decided upon a new television standard for the whole world.  They specified a list of resolutions, most of which have an aspect ratio of 16x9.  They chose to allow various aspect ratios for individual pixels, and they did not specify any resolutions past 1920x1080.  These definitions were hugely counterproductive, not just for the TV industry but also for the then rapidly growing personal computer industry, as well as being confusing for most users, and completely, utterly, unnecessary.

Between the invention of moving pictures and about 1960, nearly all video had an aspect ratio of 4x3. There was good reason for this: Many things in our environment, from buildings, to sporting events and conversation groups, fit well in the 4x3 frame.   When television came along, the movie business felt threatened and in their effort to come up with a more immersive experience, they invented wider aspect ratios.  Because of the Cathode Ray Tube display technology in use at the time, TV could not duplicate this.  Many movies, but by no means all, embraced the new mode and placed subjects wide apart in the frame.   When those movies came to be displayed on 4x3 screens, the incompatibilities were addressed with two bad options:  "Pan and Scan", which loses the width of the widescreen cinematography, and "Letterbox", which uses only a small part of the screen to show the whole picture, but in a much reduced window.  The movie people were understandably upset by damage done to their cinematography...a problem which was entirely of their own creation.

When digital TV became possible, the same people saw a way out of the box into which they'd painted themselves: they'd make the new TVs support widescreen.  These same people managed to dominate the conversation.  Never mind that movies are only a small part of TV content and that 4x3 worked very well for almost everything else.  Never mind that the new digital technology made it trivial and transparent to support any resolution you chose to transmit in.  They knew analog TV hardware and movies, and made a standard with that mindset and only the next 5 years or so in mind.  They didn't understand Moore's law, or really anything about computers at all, even those these were central to what they were doing.

What they should have done was standardize two things:  the digital data format and square pixels.  Period.   They should specifically NOT have specified resolution. If I want to watch a lot of movies, I'll buy a display with a wide aspect ratio.  If I'm a sportsfan or TV news addict, I'll buy a display with a low aspect ratio.   If I want to do the other once in a while, I'll suffer in just exactly the way I have been for movies.  But it'll be MY choice, and I'll choose the style that serves me best.  The technology to adapt easily is a necessary part of every digital TV display (and personal computer).  There's no need to standardize.

The free market is a powerful thing.    When higher resolution displays become available, the market will decide which resolutions to sell, not some committee that's stuck in the mistakes they made in the 1950s.  The software and hardware to adapt content to match the display (it's called stretching and cropping) is a necessary part of every digital TV and computer display controller.  Plugging in a different set of numbers is simple.  Adapting content resolution to style, cost and availability of the necessary bandwidth is equally simple.   If half the country is watching the superbowl or some major movie, it makes sense to use a lot of bandwidth.  If I'm watching a talking head discuss current events, I don't mind if my picture is being transmitted at 320x240.  Save the money the bandwidth costs. 

It turns out that most people have a hard time understanding resolution and aspect ratio.  I'm not sure why this simple thing should be so hard, but it is.  But because the HD Alliance chose to provide for both 1:1 and 3:4 pixels, they dramatically increased the confusion.  When 4x3 content with 1:1 pixels appear, a great many TVs stretch it to wide aspect ratio, so as to fill the screen--distorting the picture.  Moreover, the manufacturers tend to bury the necessary mode controls--I suppose because usability testing found them confusing, and consequently amazingly many people have gotten so used to watching distorted pictures they've stopped noticing.    By simply standardizing on 1:1 pixels, the TV could automatically adapt.  No user controls would be necessary.  Instead, we have various and confusing "wide" "panorama", "4x3", "Zoom", etc.,  modes.

HD aspect ratio sickness has infected computers, too.  In 2003 I bought a laptop with a 1400x1050 (so called SXGA+) display surface.  Today, it's fairly challenging to find a laptop with a vertical resolution higher than 768, 73% the size of that 8 year old computer.  This is because the market for display surfaces is completely dominated by the TV business--just as in the days of CRTs--and most small TVs are 1280x720.   You can buy a monitor with much higher resolution: up to 2560x1600, but even finding out what the resolution of most display surfaces is from the marketing literature or salescritter is surprisingly difficult.  I care MUCH less how big it is in inches,  than I do how much VERTICAL resolution it has.  Nearly all applications and websites have wide menu bands across the top and bottom, dramatically reducing the space available (the window I'm using to type this subtracts 350 pixels from the top of my window and 160 from the bottom--leaving only 258 pixels of usable space on a 768 high monitor.  Windows 7 live photo gallery (the app that provoked this flame) steals 200 pixels from the top and 95 from the bottom when in editing mode, 38%.  what could be more important in a photo app than being able to get the picture as big as possible?)

Politifact Fairness

PolitiFact, a political fact checking web site operated by the St. Petersburg (FL) Times, purports to be fair.  By and large this seems to be true, but they seem to hold people towards the left of the spectrum to a much tougher line than people to the right.  A recent example:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/may/19/nancy-pelosi/nancy-pelosi-posts-questionable-chart-debt-accumul/ in which:  she promotes this table on how much each president raised the debt:
Ronald Reagan: Up 189 percent
George H.W. Bush: Up 55 percent
Bill Clinton: Up 37 percent
George W. Bush: Up 115 percent
Barack Obama: Up 16 percent


PolitiFact concede that the numbers for Bush 1 and Clinton are correct.  They ignore Reagan because the source they used didn't go back that far.  But those numbers are easy to track down.  I get 186% under Reagan.  not the same but close enough  The big discrepancy was that Pelosi's staff made a mistake, and started Obama's term on 20 Jan 2010, not 2009 as is correct.  this moves one year of supposed Bush debt to Obama, giving Bush 86% increase and Obama 34% up to the date of the chart.

Then they double down.  They point out that some economists think that the ratio of debt to GDP is what's important, to factor in inflation and such.   GDP grew during Bush II, and collapsed in the worst recession in 70 years almost simultaneously with the election.  So under Bush, the denominator grew, and under Obama it shrunk dramatically.  So reporting things this way makes it look like Obama grew the debt much more than he did.  To be fair, nearly all of Obama's debt is stuff he had no control whatever on: increased medical costs, unemployment insurance, and very little on things like the wars.

And don't forget, there's a recognized corrector for inflation:  CPI.  based on that, Obama grew it 35%, GWB 71%, Clinton 30%.

PolitiFact gave Pelosi's staiff their "Pants on Fire" rating.  A fairer analysis gives it a "Half True" rating.  This sort of thing is shockingly common on PolitiFact.

Roosevelt Conservatism

I call myself a Roosevelt Conservative.  By this I mean that I agree with the social, legal and economic perspective that the two Roosevelt administrations exemplified.  Conservatism is the idea that there are valuable lessons to be learned from the past, which can be applied to the present and future, and that we should not embark upon changes without carefully considering their consequences.  Lots of the people who call themselves conservatives today are something closer to radical reactionaries, harking back to a wonderful delusion of the past that never actually existed and determined to implement it no matter what the consequences.  Most are simply naive authoritarians, who subscribe to a narrative provided by authoritarian leadership.  This is neither conservative nor is it responsible.

Both Roosevelt presidents had a vision of government which included, simultaneously, limits on the abuses of big business while simultaneously trying to stimulate all businesses.  Most people are familiar with TR's anti-monopoly agenda.   He was not against business.

Our aim is not to do away with corporations; on the contrary, these big aggregations are an inevitable development of modern industrialism, and the effort to destroy them would be futile unless accomplished in ways that would work the utmost mischief to the entire body politic. We can do nothing of good in the way of regulating and supervising these corporations until we fix clearly in our minds that we are not attacking the corporations, but endeavoring to do away with any evil in them. We are not hostile to them; we are merely determined that they shall be so handled as to subserve the public good. We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth.

  He also fought long and hard for the Panama Canal, the National Park system and more.

His cousin FDR pushed through the construction of many bridges, dams and other projects.  These things were all incredibly stimulative of business, and flew in the face of the prevailing conservative policies.  Hoover's austerity had obviously made the depression worse, which gave FDR the election and a mandate to actually try to fix things.  First on the agenda: FDR quickly reversed the collapse of the banking industry. Initially skeptical, FDR eventually embraced the Keynesian economic policy.  Today, essentially all competent economists recognize that this was the right policy, both for then and now.  Unfortunately, there are a few people who call themselves economists who reject this.   In the words of Sinclair Lewis: It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.   Keynesianism consists of a few simple ideas:  The economy needs to grow at a relatively moderate rate, neither too slow nor to fast.  This can be controlled by regulation and through manipulation of the money supply.  The best option is by controlling interest rates, but when this fails (called a "liquidity trap": interest rates are so close to zero that no further stimulus is possible by lowering them), the government needs to stimulate the economy by borrowing money in order to create businesses and hire people.

The Roosevelts also had ideas about law that are eminently sensible: The law is there to prevent abuses.  Killing and stealing for sure, but there are lots of ways to kill and steal that writers of the constitution or the precedents set by common law could never have thought of.  The worst of these are committed by the powerful against the weak.  The law is there not to protect the wishes of the majority or the powerful, but to protect the weak from the strong.  The strong and the majority will generally get their way.  But sometimes they do this to the harm of the weak.  A lot of the time this is unnecessary.  By protecting the rights of the weak, the powerful can get most of what they want without hurting the weak.  But this is only possible if the courts are able to adapt the law to the changing needs of society.

In January 1944, FDR gave a speech called "The Second Bill of Rights."  In it, he said that everyone deserved a living wage, housing, fair competition for their business, medical care, education, and a pension.  We have come close to fulfilling this a few times in America, only to get it snatched away.

Sources of income

I've been looking at the IRS's statistical tables.  The most recent is for 2007:  http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/07in01ar.xls.  A few interesting statistics:

Of 142M total returns, only 90 million of them are taxable.  I'm not sure all the reasons why a return might be "non taxable" but of the just under 48M nonpaying filers, $615 Billion of reported income are not taxed.  Most of this seems to be coming from the 36M people who had less than $20K of income.  In 2007, a family of 4 got a total $13,600 in exemptions, after the standard deduction of $10,700.


9 million people had $382B of long term net capital gains.  23 million people had $150B of dividends.  This $532B is taxed at 15% after the Bush tax cuts of 2003 and all but about $50B is to people with incomes over $100K.  Just taxing this as ordinary income would net the government about $100B.

1 million people had AGI of over $500K, a total of $1.842 trillion dollars.  Nearly all of them had dividends, and $105B of the $150B went to people in this class.   About half of them had long term capital gains, and $260B of the $382B went to these people.   So if we were to raise the tax bracket for people making $500K or more by 4%, including dividends and long term gains, the government would net from this $67B.

Razors

A philosophical razor is a logical device that's effective at shaving away implausible explanations.  This is sometimes generalized to include any useful philosophical adage.   I intend to keep updating this list as I discover new ones.

Occam's razor:  The simplest explanation is the most likely one.  It doesn't necessarily mean the simplest explanation is right, but we can save a lot of time not worrying about unnecessarily complex stuff.

Hanlon's razor:  "never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity."  Sometimes this is expressed as "Do not invoke conspiracy as explanation when ignorance and incompetence will suffice, as conspiracy implies intelligence"

Popper's falsifiability principle:  It's not scientific unless it can be subjected to an experiment which might prove it false.  (this is actually due to Newton)

The golden rule: Don't do unto others that which you would not have them do unto you.

Rawls' veil of ignorance: When deciding the morality of something, imagine that society was completely refashioned, and you do not know who you will be.

Murphy's Law:  If it can go wrong, it will go wrong.  Sometimes this is expressed as: if there's a right way to do something and a wrong way, the wrong way will happen.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it.  -Sinclair Lewis

The Peter Principle: In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. (I think Sturgeon was being very generous....99.9% at least...)

Gresham's Law (and): Bad money drives out the good.  This is valid for any competitive system: If cheating is allowed, pretty soon everybody has to do it in order to be competitive.

Planck's Principle: Science rarely proceeds by changing the minds of those who already have a position; rather, the conservatives die and younger people familiar with the new idea take over the field.  Sometimes expressed as "Science advances one funeral at a time"

Godwin's Law: If any conversation goes on long enough, someone will bring up the Nazis.  Who ever does that is losing.

Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill the time and cost available

Parkinson's Law of Triviality:  During any meeting, most of the time is spent discussing trivial but easily understood issues, not what matters

To an uninformed person, an informed person seems insane.

  I've been looking for a source for this without success

Extended vs Nuclear Families

Prior to World War I, practically everybody in the United States lived in an extended family.  After World War II, almost everybody lived in a nuclear family.   This change has had an enormous effect on social structures.

In an extended family, there are several families living together, or at least close by, fathers, mothers, unmarried adults, children, grandparents.  This is a very powerful thing: For example, if someone needs a babysitter, or a permanent substitute parent for some reason, there's probably another family living in the same house or at least within a few blocks.  If someone can't get a job, gets sick, becomes too old to be productive, or feels compelled to do something non-remunerative, there are other family members to take up the slack.  If someone is inclined to act in self destructive way--spend way more than their means for example--there is probably a wise and respected family member there to talk them down  (I believe that fewer than 10% of people are competent to run family finances--for evidence, the average credit card debt is over $14,000).  This comes with a lot of baggage though: family members don't always get along, and often unwanted pressures are exerted.  Still, the system worked, from the dawn of humanity (or before it--the apes have extended families too), until the 20th century.

The nuclear family is the smallest family unit that can work.  Mom, dad, and a few kids, strike out on their own.  They have no support system outside of the immediate family, and as long as everybody is healthy and fulfills their assigned roles, it can work.  It's a central theme of the westward movement that started with the homestead act and reached its peak with the GI bill--and millions of people have benefited.  But it doesn't always work, and because the support of the extended family is missing, when it doesn't it can have very serious consequences.  Lots of things can cause failures: illness or injury, money problems, divorce or abandonment.  They're often related--money is a large factor in a great many divorces, and illness is a big cause of money problems.  When the family breaks down, the ones that are hurt the most are the helpless: children, the elderly or the incapacitated.  The adults are often hurt plenty too.

Supporting this trend is the  "social safety net"--unemployment insurance, social security and company pensions, employer health care and medicare, and more.  Without all of the safety net, 95% of families are just a few months from destitution.  Losing a job, someone getting sick, an investment mistake, and many other things, can destroy lives.   With them, many families end badly anyway, but a lot more can survive the loss of a job, illness, accident, divorce, or any of the other pitfalls that are part of life.   Most families have one or more these problems at some point in their lives.  When the economy is troubled, more people have problems.

The bottom line is this:  if you're in favor of anything less than a full, taxpayer funded social safety net, you're implicitly in favor of forcing everybody back into an extended family.  This doesn't have to mean a biological family--a group of employees or a "commune" may serve the same purpose.   But without the safety net, nuclear families become very difficult for most people in the face of problems.