Forgive the Student Debt!!! (Or Not?)

There are loud and numerous calls for forgiving the student debt. We've duped the poor (former) students into buying a worthless higher education on time, and dumped them into an economy where it is really hard to pay that debt back.

(Pardon me? I did not sell that snake oil. On either end.)

Well, there would be valid reasons for helping them get out from under that burden.

But.

"We" can't exactly forgive that debt. We don't own it. That is, we don't own the burden of guaranteeing it. At least, not at this time.

Who owns the guarantees on that debt?

Well, it's difficult to untangle. The government that demands business be transparent has serious difficulties making its own operations transparent. 

We hear China owns no small part of it. We can be fairly sure that most of the several thousand billionaires and millions of other high-net-worth-individuals all over the world also own no small part of it.

If we could get them all to forgive the student debt in all countries, I'm not sure that would be a bad thing. 

But what is being called for is something else entirely -- for the US government to buy that burden back from those who bought the bonds. 

So here's how it works. Get people to borrow money from you. Some time later, sell the burden of final guarantee for the burden to the government. That means, if the people who borrowed the money can't or don't repay it, the government has to pay you. Sometime later, get the government to "forgive the debt" by paying it off to you. And you get both the interest and the principle.

Here's what is not being told: "Forgiving the debt" ultimately means paying it off -- making those who are already rich all that much richer.

Those rich people were the ones who set the rules up to demand higher education, you see. "Our worker pool needs more training!" they said. (Who gave them permission to call us "their worker pool", anyway?)

So, as I said, if we could get them, not the government, to forgive the debt for student loans, that might not be such a bad thing. 

Except, there are reasons that's not such a good idea, either. Debt is never a simple thing. Those individuals of high-personal-worth actually serve to focus our economic activities on specific business. If they suddenly lose their wealth and somebody is not ready to step in with more money, businesses fail. Jobs disappear. Etc. Economic depression.

That was the excuse for bailing out the banks about ten years back, and it is real. Uhm, well, it isn't exactly entirely the stuff of the imagination of ambitious money-grubbers. It's real enough to cause ordinary people serious harm.

 Why? is a very good question.

If you don't understand why, it's time for you to learn what money means. 

None of the popular explanations you can find in books or on the web have it right. What does

Money is a proxy for value.

even mean? 

Okay, how about something that is often claimed,

Money is value.

Really? Bits of paper and metal, ink in a ledger, charge domains in some storage medium. But it took, for instance, Ms. Rowling a long time of working hard to convert the value in her first stories into enough money to continue writing without working a day job. 

At any rate,

Money is not raw value.

So, once again, how about 

Money is a proxy for value.

Money is not a very good proxy for value. The things that are of most value to you, you wouldn't want to trade for money. (Well, you shouldn't.) And usually, if someone wants to trade you money for them, it's less for the thing it is than for the control they hope to gain over you in the trade. So,

Money is power.

Yet it isn't power to do the most important things. If I mention the power to breathe, you may counter with the idea that money can buy doctors to fix your inability to breathe, but I already have the ability to breathe. Without money.

And a man who has ruined his ability to breath is often unable, even with billions of dollars, to hire enough medical expertise to fix his lungs before he dies. So, again, something money is not:

Money is not unlimited power.

Debt actually is more powerful than money, if you simply want to control people. Is it surprising that people buy and sell debt?

How about this one?

Money is freedom.

Rich people (and many wannebee rich people) write books detailing how they had to live according to very strict daily routines to get their wealth. You have to sacrifice for that freedom.

And, once they have it, they have to keep up the routine, because with the money came responsibility to manage a company or some such thing. 

Ask them if they are really free, and they say, they are free to hire a limousine to take them somewhere. But they are not free to walk there on their own. Free to buy expensive clothes, but not to wear comfortable clothes -- unless they have enough cachet to turn their comfortable clothes into a fashion statement. 

And money doesn't buy the cachet -- not on a long-term basis. Show your money and you get attention, but the minute you put your money away, the attention dries up. Real cachet takes more work.

Money is only temporary cachet.

In Hello Dolly, Horace says something like 

Money is like manure. It should be spread about making little green things grow. 

(US currency being printed with green ink added a certain overloaded semantic -- pun -- to that quote.)

My response when I first heard that was a bit pithy --

Money is like pus. It tends to gather where the wounds in society are.

Okay, I'll skip forward a bit. Money is a fairly good proxy for apparent value, much of the time. Thus, sales campaigns are battles to drive your own products' apparent value up in the market.

Money is an imperfect proxy, or exchange medium, for value. 

What happens when we forgive a debt -- assuming that the debt is truly forgiven and not just transferred to a new owner?

The money has already been plowed into the economy. And the former debt-owners lose the power that owning the debt gave them. But it does give the former debtor a bit more room to make more value to bring back into the economy.

I suppose I could wrap this rant up by offering one or more opinions, either on student debt or on something really abstract like the lack of dimensionality in current financial instruments, but I want to leave a certain question dangling:

The question is not why we shouldn't give the former students a little more breathing room. 

The real question is what do we keep doing wrong with money, so that it keeps ending up getting in the way when people want to do good things?

Gratitude for Political Trials

(From a post to FB:)

I have been spreading my #givethanks tags in dark corners of the web.

So I'll post a few here, too.

It's a great world God gave us, where we don't have to all do the same things, where everyone is allowed to make mistakes, even rather drastic mistakes, and we all do.

It's a wonderful world where we don't all have to be grateful for the same things.

I can be grateful it's Donald Trump and not me going the extra mile to point out how vulnerable our election process has become to foreign influence. I sure don't have the money to do it, and it needs to be done. 

I can likewise be grateful it's Joe Biden who is going to have to face the ambiguities of having won the popular vote in an election seriously marred by bad polling practices. And I can be grateful we have a few months to make it clear to as many people as possible why I have to feel this way.

And I am grateful.

And I'm very glad that enough of my fellow Americans are willing to put up with the ambiguities and continue solving their own problems while it gets worked out -- that there will be enough people who keep on keepin' on that the world won't come grinding to a halt and the country won't be torn apart.

(And, while there is a bit of irony in this post, I am not being sarcastic. I am just acknowledging ironies. We can and should be grateful that the world doesn't match our ideals.)

Once More About Elections Processes and Fraud

If you haven't yet listened to the challenges to the election results, you should.

When I posted about usually getting the president we deserve, I was assuming that none of the factions in the current contest would be stupid enough to make use this soon of the tools of voter fraud that they have been putting into place. I was naively hoping that there would be time for common sense to reign back the erosion on election practices that has taken place.

I had been hearing what the normal news outlets have been mentioning about the challenges that the Trump Campaign legal team have been mounting with a mixture of, I don't know, cynicism, ennui, exasperation, disappointment, rolling eyeballs, etc., that they would be "dragging this out yet again".

Last night, a friend posted a link to a youtube video of the Trump campaign's legal team' press conference:

https://youtu.be/buQCdCSDWQQ

I don't know why I find it astonishing. I don't know why I want to be so naive.

Voting has to be a transparent process to be valid. 

In the simplest case, where voters are not intimidated by threats from the parties presenting their proposals and candidates, secrecy is not necessary. A simple raise of the hands in favor or against is all that is necessary. Everybody can see who voted for what/whom, and everybody can count.

But people get their ego's all tangled up in the results of elections, and then attempt to alter the outcome unnaturally. So the simplest case doesn't scale well.

There are many ways to try to alter the results of elections:

• Campaigning itself is one such attempt.
  
• If campaigning doesn't appear to be working, and people aren't willing to accept that, they might use intimidation, explicit threat, and actual force to prejudice the outcome. 
• And if that doesn't work, they might prepare to attempt to alter the outcome by legal technicality after the fact. 
• But legal technicality relies on vagaries of courtroom process, so, if, during the election, it becomes apparent that they are going to lose, they might try to alter the outcome by interfering with the process, so they don't have to gamble on those vagaries.
  

Election best practices has provided a means of circumventing these problems.

Elections best practices require that the ballot be cast in secret, but counted in the open.

With or without a lot of thought, it's clear that there are contradictory requirements here: cast in secret, count in the open. 

Once it's open, it's no longer secret.

Somehow, you have to reliably separate the identity of the voter with the content of the vote in between the moment the ballot is cast and the moment it is counted.

Here is one simple way to do it: 

1. A place to store the ballots which have been cast -- a ballot box -- is prepared, and inspected and shown to be empty, and secured before voting starts.
2. The ballots are counted before voting starts, to be sure there will be enough for all the registered voters, and to be able to check the number of ballots in the box and the number left over against the number of voters receiving ballots.
   
3. Judges, ballot handlers, and observers are also provided. Observers must include representatives from all parties with interest in the results, and they must be allowed to actually stop the process and ask for corrections to be taken, if irregularities are observed.
4. Votes are taken as follows:
   1. A voter requests a ballot.
   2. The voter is given a ballot and some sort of covering that hides the content of the ballot. Neither the ballot nor the cover provide a means of identifying the voter.
      
   3. The voter is provided a place to mark the ballot in private.
   4. The voter marks the ballot by hand in private,  and places the ballot in its cover before submitting it.
   5. The ballot is submitted directly to the election judges, who transfer it directly to the ballot box without exposing the ballot contents.
5. At the end of the designated balloting period, the ballot box is opened and the contents counted in the presence of the judges and observers. The counting process itself has to be observable. If machines are used, they should only be used to verify a hand count.
6. Judges and observers must be allowed to record the counts taken and take their records with them.
7. The ballots must be packaged and the packages sealed before being transported from the balloting place.
   
8. Ballots and counts must be transported to a central place where the ballots can be securely stored until the election results have been properly certified, and the counts can be tallied with the results from other ballot places, and the results for each balloting place must be published.

The reasons for being so particular are roughly as follows:

1. If we aren't careful with the ballot box, it's too easy to stuff it with fake votes.
2. Counting the ballots used and the ballots not used is a way to anonymously check that the box hasn't been stuffed and that valid ballots haven't been discarded.
   
3. Without observation and without someone competent to judge, it is way too easy for the election place staff to do all sorts of things to undermine the results. Especially, observers from each party can help to keep the others honest.
   
4. Concerning what the voter does:
   1. It's way too easy to buy the vote of someone with an unrequested ballot.
      
   2. Disclosure of the contents of the ballot also subjects a voter to potential reward and/or retribution.
      
   3. Observation of the voting being cast is another way to discover the contents of a ballot.
      
   4. Use of a machine provides places to hide devices to eavesdrop on the vote. In fact, it's hard to design an electronic machine that would not leak at least some of the details through radio noise.
      
   5. The more hands and the longer a distance a ballot passes through before being put in the ballot box, the more opportunities there are to use sleight-of-hand to misdirect the ballot, slip an added ballot in, or surreptitiously observe the contents before the ballot goes in the box.
5. Counting the votes once at the voting place helps assure that the ballots that are sent to central storage are the same as the ballots that are received there. It means that more people have to be present from the time the polls close until the counting ends, but that is a good thing. More eyes reduces temptations and provides more opportunities to blow a whistle on fraudulent activities. Moreover, no voting place should be set up to take more votes than two or three people can count and check by hand in an hour or two. And machines at this stage are too much temptation for hidden shenanigans.
   
6. The more records of the results at the various stages, the more opportunities to confirm their validity.
7. Sealed packages are significantly harder to open and alter the contents of than unsealed packages.
   
8. Central counting is too much temptation for shenanigans, if it's the first count. On the other hand, centralizing the second count allows the use of machines at that point. Secure storage and published results from each step allows greater confidence of the results, and of the results if a review and recount is required.
   

• First observation: Yes. This takes time. 

There is no necessity that the process be finished overnight, or even in a day. This can actually a good thing, because it can help prevent parties with too much interest in the results from knowing whether they want to take the risk of interfering with the process until it's over.

• Second observation: Machines which can be used to hide or expose parts of the process must not be used in the voting or counting process.
  

Except, there might be limited use for those voters whose physical limits would prevent them from marking the ballots by hand. And they can be used at a central location to confirm the original hand counts.

• Third observation: Mail-in ballots prevent the use of both observers and judges in critical parts of this process. Their use must be limited to by-necessity-only.
  

It's extremely frustrating for me to have to point this out, but it's just not possible for judges and observers to see what happens between the time the ballot is requested and the time it is submitted, to make sure that the ballot does not get diverted to fraudulent purposes. 

And it's not easy for them to observe the request and submission process, either.

Cries of "But mail-in is so much less stressful!" notwithstanding, mail-in, if allowed, must be limited to cases of necessity.

• Fourth observation: Society must support the polling process in ways we do not presently support it, if we want valid results.
  

People whose jobs prevent them from attending a regular voting place during the designated times are prevented from voting, and that also biases the results.

But mail-in is not a solution.

This is a place where we can improve current practices. I can suggest a few things that would help:

1. Employers should be required to give employees necessary paid time off to go vote.
2. Voting judge, observer, and counting duties are no less important than jury duty. Failing to properly staff a voting place is just begging for fraud to occur. We should be willing to do something similar to jury duty for election duty.
   
3. Alternative voting places and times should be provided instead of mail-in. Alternative voting places would make it easier to provide election judges and observers, and more possible to confirm who has already voted. Computer systems could also legitimately be used to determine who has voted already, but only carefully secured systems.
   
4. Mail-in ballots, if used, must never be opened and counted until after the voting places have closed and all voters have been confirmed, to avoid encouraging ambitious voters from doubling up. They must also be stored securely and opened and counted in the presence of judges and observers, just as in-person ballots.
   

• Fifth observation: Counting votes by machine to confirm the original hand count is an extremely simple process. It does not require the use of software developed by big companies, and especially not by foreign companies. 

I suppose I should expand a little on my impressions of the charges being made.

People working for the election are supposed to be working under oath, or as if under oath. Trump's legal team has found people willing to testify under penalty of perjury that people who are working for the election have broken their oaths.

Should I believe a hundred or so odd-ball malcontents who are willing to cooperate with the monkey pretend president with the orange hair? Or should I believe the thousands and hundreds of thousands of dedicated election workers?

I know how easy it is to get swept up into following the egoist.

And I have also worked real jobs for a long time. I know how easy it is for dedicated, hard-working, well-intentioned workers to say, 

This is unreasonably difficult. Getting the job done is more important than getting it done right!

and carelessly invoke truisms like

The perfect is the enemy of the good!

and convince each other to do things that shouldn't oughta be done.

I don't know who has broken their oaths. But it is apparent that a number of people have. At bare minimum, a number of people are seriously deluding themselves about what is right. 

I hope we can solve this without somebody starting witch hunts, but it looks difficult, unless one side yields things they think they shouldn't yield, which is also a bad result.

Whatever happens in these challenges to the election results, we should be looking at these as a wake-up call. We shouldn't be so caught up in our pursuit of good ends that we ignore the potential damage from our methods. 

We are treating our elections processes way too lightly.

We Usually Get the President We Deserve

Trump has been a far better president than we had any right to expect.

What? you say, No! Trump didn't implement any of your favorite hobby-horse ideals!

That's actually a good thing.

We have heard, over the last fifty years, how "The perfect is the enemy of the Good."

Pure and utter mental waste.

Perfect and ideal are two separate things, although it is easy to confuse one for the other.

Let's borrow some ideas from arithmetic. 

One added to one is two, right?

It's a perfect rule -- built on ideal principles. Some people think it a fundamental fact. 

But it isn't.

One crabapple added to one Fuji apple does not make two Fuji apples. Nor does it make two crabapples. 

One balloon's worth of air plus one balloon's worth of air may be two balloons' worth of air, but the volume does not double.

0.6 volts rounds up to 1 V, but 1 V + 1 V is not 2 V, if both 1s are actually 0.6 rounded up.

There are all sorts of ways one added to one might not result in two.

In order for this perfect rule to work we have to start with the assumption of an idealized non-compressible unit vector which adds linearly.

(Wrap your head around that before the next time you berate a pre-school child for having trouble with your mathematics. Arithmetic does not work without mathematics.)

Without the idealization of a non-compressible unit vector and the implicit single dimension in which it adds to itself, without the idealization of a number line, the arithmetic that we think is so basic just falls apart. 

It is basic. It is real. It's useful to understand. It is also limited in scope of application. In order to make it work for us, we have to get used to remembering to add Fuji apples to Fuji apples and crabapples to (the same subspecies of) crabapples. And it's still approximate, because not every apple on the tree is as big or as sweet -- or as small and as sour.

Each apple is different. 

A tree is a calculus of fruit, branches, and leaves.

A beach is a calculus of grains of sand, and when you look close, each grain of sand is different. 

Snowflakes? But a ski slope is a calculus of snowflakes.

Society is a calculus of individuals. We are not all our president. 

There it is. Say it big.

We are not all our president.

A president is not a king-for-four-years on whom we hang all our problems. At least he or she shouldn't be. Nor should we elect a man or woman to four years of taking the blame for all our own problems. 

We elect a president to represent us as a group, and, while he or she does not represent any one of us well as individuals, he or she usually represents us as a group pretty well. That's what the election process is about, finding someone who represents us as a group.

Recent elections have gotten us all excited about whom we choose for president. Most elections seem to be rather close. And then a winner is celebrated and installed into office.

But if you study statistics, you know that elections are a statistical experiment. And less than 2% difference in statistics is generally considered not statistically significant. Often, less than 5% is not significant.

Statistically, it made no difference whether we installed Trump or Clinton in the White House four years ago. And it will make no difference whether we install Biden or Trump in the White House for the next four years, because the United States of America is a calculus of individuals, and the president of the country is just one more of those individuals. And less than three percent is not statistically significant.

We think of the president as our leader, but we have it backwards. The president does not lead us.  

The choice of president is a synthesis, a projection of the public or social identity.

The president represents us.

Now do you understand why Trump was installed in the White House four years ago? 

All those contradictions are a synthesis of the calculus of the country, a reflection of the individuals that compose the country. We are a country of contradictions, and we have been focusing a lot on our contradictions lately. So we elected a president of self-contradictions.

And he represented us, complete with our internal contradictions.

As Biden and Harris's less optimal traits become clear, we will find something similar, because we currently compose a nation of factions.

And it wouldn't have mattered if Trump had won a second term. Less than 5% is not statistically significant.

What matters in the calculus of society is what each individual does. Biden/Harris, if the current numbers are confirmed, will represent us as a group. Biden is a politician, and Harris will soon feel the reality of what politics outside the California bubble is like, and know the burden of learning what a real politician has to do. (California's bubble is weakening, as well, but that's a topic for a rant for another day.)

For four years, we have been polarized. The choice of president was not what mattered. It was the calculus of individual discord that produced the polarization. If Hillary Clinton had been elected, it would still have been four years of polarization, because we chose to focus on how are differences don't fit together according to our ideals.

Are we going to continue to waste time and energy fighting each other? Or are we going to go back to finding unity in differences? We've done that before, you know. We have found unity in difference.

It takes many different types of people to make the world go 'round. 

We need our garbage collectors. We need our doctors. We need our farmers. We need our philosophers, including those who make rhyme and rhythm for their philosophies. We need our poor people and our rich people. 

I'm not sure we need our billionaires, their existence is a huge burden to society, warping the weave of social fabric around themselves in excessive and unnatural ways. But if they can quit trying to impose their visions of perfection -- their ideals -- on all of us, using the logic of the weight of their supposed personal worth, we should be able to get along with them.

We definitely don't need to keep our desperately poor in their condition of desperate poverty. If we can learn to let them be different, we ought to be able to find a way to let them get out of their desperate circumstances. (Let them out, not force them out.)

I had no preferred candidate in this election. I have had no preferred candidate in any of the last several presidential elections. (No, not even Romney was that close to what I would consider an ideal president. Maybe Reagan? It's been too long, but I think he represented our country pretty well as we navigated the world conditions that resulted in the breakup of the old Soviet Union. But still not my ideal.) It doesn't matter. I've continued to do the things I think are most important for me to do.

Society is made up of a lot of individuals. Society cannot exist without the individuals. 

Society cannot function if each individual does not do what that individual understands to be the best thing for that individual to do.

I can't do what you think is best for me to do, because your idea of what is best for me is, at best-formed, only a collection of "NO! NOT THAT!" and "YOU GOTTA DO THIS!" opinions -- uninformed opinions, since you have at best only a superficial view of what I'm up against.

If I were wasting time worrying about what is best for you to do, it would be the same. 

None of us really has any time to get more than a superficial view of the struggles others are having. You have to make your choices. I have to make mine.

To the extent we fight each other over the choices we make as individuals, we interfere with the functioning of society.

Sure, there are some choices which themselves interfere with a functional society. Taking bread from the poor man and giving it to the rich man is a wrong choice. And trying to persuade the rich man to share his bread with the poor is a far more functional choice than trying to force him to do so. (And, as individuals, choosing to fight each other instead of looking for places and ways we can work together -- can't we see how destructive that quickly becomes?)

Gender confusion? Yes, that's another place both (all) sides try to force others to conform to their own ideals. I think I could, if we could sit down and discuss it rationally, convince you that most gender confusion is derived from society's imposition on the individual of Machiavelli's false ideals. But we would argue about what that means. It's more functional for me to let you figure out what it means to you, if you will let me figure out what it means to me.

Insurance. Borders. Etc. There are lots of things we could fight about, if we choose to fight. But we don't all have to be thinking, doing, and saying the same things. 

Lasers are useful, but if laser light were all we had, we would have no colors, no warm spread of sunlight, just a bunch of idealistic monochrome beams randomly scanning the darkness, interfering with each other.

Everything we fight about, we can find ways to let each other be what we are -- different. 

And that is how we achieve unity, because it takes a lot of different wavelengths to light up the world, a lot of different people to make the world go 'round.

The Problem of Electronics Waste and Health

First, you may be hiding your eyes from the problem.

Here are some links to articles on it:

• https://greencitizen.com/learn-more/harmful-effects/
  

 This is kind of an overview of the problem.

 

• https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/magazine/e-waste-offers-an-economic-opportunity-as-well-as-toxicity.html

(NYTimes is likely to hit you up for a subscription.) This is a bit more in-depth:

Lots of "recycling" is cover for shipping to countries in Africa, east Asia, South America, and other countries with poor economies, where really poor people are paid dirt wages to poison themselves, shorten their lifespans, and mess up their children's genes.

And that is in spite of the fact that the materials in electronics waste are rather valuable.

• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412014002116

This talks about why it's a hard problem. Even in a developed country like Sweden, even with more advanced recycling methods, workers are exposed to the poisons.

Continually keeping your electronics hardware modern has a huge cost. The purchase price is the tip of the iceberg.

Even just learning how to separate your data from the OS and the applications so you can periodically back it all up, wipe the disks, and do a clean re-install will allow you to keep using your hardware at least twice as long. If we could all do that, we could easily cut the electronics waste in half.

If you are willing to give Microsoft the boot, there are many operating systems based on the Linux kernel or one of the BSDs, which can give you efficient and effective use of computers too old to run MSWindows at all -- five, ten years, or more.

Up until last year, China accepted a lot of our electronics waste.

I can no longer find the references, but the initial reports I read about where the most recent Corona virus came from indicated that it had crossed the species gap from animal to human in the kinds of towns in China where electronics and other poisonous waste was regularly being processed, and was first recognized in the Wuhan district of China, where a lot of those who would have contact with the impoverished workers would be concentrated for logistics and management purposes.

This would be no surprise. Overwork, crowded conditions, lack of hygiene, shortfalls of nutrition, immune systems already taking damage from other causes create a ripe field for the jump.

China has since banned imports of electronics waste, and has been stonewalling on the topic of the virus, so much that their total mortality numbers are impossible to believe, and the source of the initial outbreak of record has moved to the Wuhan capital itself.

Yeah, this sounds like a conspiracy theory. And? Have we some reason to believe the Chinese government has become less willing to alter the flow of information to serve their purposes? I don't think so.

Statistically, if you are healthy, you are less likely to catch it. If you do, you are less likely to become seriously ill. There are statistical outliers, of course. There always are. But, statistically speaking, being healthy is your best defense, a defense not really available in impoverished communities.

It's easy to think you can't afford to do what's necessary to keep your electronics around. Competition won't allow it. The bottom line won't allow it. If you take time for these kinds of things, you won't be able to keep yourself in the billionaire club.

 But it comes back to you. This pandemic is not going away until we can learn to slow down and take care of these kinds of things.

Magical Solution to Debate Lack of Quality

(That this is repeat of a four year-old blogpost needs to be posted again is quite a disappointment. Trump has been a much better president than the country deserved, and he stepped up to the responsibilities quite a bit, but it's still pretty much a game of king-of-the-hill to him.)

Invite the top three third party candidates to the next one.

If they'll come.

(They might prefer to avoid the noise fight.)

If they would join the debate, the Donald couldn't just focus on Biden's perceived weaknesses.

Frankly, that the debate organizers have failed to go out of their way to invite the third party candidates again this year says something to me about the debate organizers' motivations and goals.

I said this last time, as well, but I'll say it again, also: a vote for third party candidate you can support is not a throwaway vote. Every vote for someone else tells them they're messing up. The major political parties need to get the message that they have long since ceased to represent any real constituency.

Sustainable Development and Sustainable Economics -- Sustainable?

I had a dream yesterday morning, jut a little before I woke up to get ready to go deliver the mail.

I was visiting a young boy in a wheelchair.

I could tell his body wanted to do something active, so I lifted him up onto my shoulders and let him use his arms to climb around on my back and shoulders and swing from my arms, helping him when his strength was insufficient.

When he was played out, I turned my back to his wheelchair and let him slide back down to sit.

He wanted me to come back the next day, and so did his physical trainer and his parents. The trainer pointed out that it seemed to be a good alternative approach to helping him develop the muscles that were not developing.

I had to explain that I could not visit every day due to other obligations, and there was some discussion of how often I could visit.

There were several limits to my ability to visit every day. One was that I had other obligations. Another was financial limits, in that making a regular commitment would require me to refrain to commit to other activities -- activities that would bring in pay.

A third limit was that making the visits regular would quickly relieve the visit of its novelty, equalizing it in effect with other, more normal methods.

In other words, making it a planned regular activity would rob it of its effect.

I don't remember if I explained clearly to them that I was sure that they would end up making my visits part of his "new training schedule plans", where I knew such plans were not appropriate. If such visits ("sessions") did lead to progress, progress would be in fits and starts and reversions. And the boy would need freedom to not play some days.

It was about this point that my eyes opened and I checked the alarm clock.

Most of the jobs I have had in my varied and spotted career have been the sort that do not result in sustainable family economics. 

Many of my jobs just haven't paid enough.

In many of my software and computer related jobs, the company was looking for a superman, but what they needed was for everyone in the company to buckle down and learn what they were actually selling, what they were actually producing, and devote time and resources to closing the gap. And to learn what computers cannot, in principle, do, so that the sales group would quit trying to sell things that were impossible.

They thought I could be their superman.

People don't want troubleshooters. They want magicians. 

-- and that's not a sustainable economic model for anyone.

In my private tutoring in English in Japan, some of the parents and students understood what I was doing and approved. But most could not let the bait of improving test scores alone long enough to let their children or themselves really relax and learn to communicate in English. 

Side-track on test scores -- If you design a test to display what one group of students has learned, there are other groups of students who were progressing in different but equally important areas, and the test fails to show their progress. The test rewards the two groups unequally. And there is much more to be said on the limits of tests which will have to be discussed elsewhere.

The English lessons themselves are a case in point. The best way to help a child who has not been progressing in school is to let that child explore the subject on his or her own. The student knows where he or she is getting stuck, and it may be in a blind alley or it may not, but the gaps can't be bridged if the student is continually being forced to study for the test instead of being allowed to fill in the lacks. 

You can't plan lessons in advance for the kind of teaching that is needed.

But without a plan, you can't have a sustainable activity.

Without a sustainable activity, in the current economic environment, you can't have sustainable development or sustainable economics.

Which brings me to my point, but does not bring you to the same point, I suppose. Let's try another tack.

A common complaint about popular songs is that (at any particular point in time) so much of it sounds the same. And well it should. The captains of the industry are devoted to that great principle of sustainable economics -- if it sells, make more of it.

Every now and then, some artist breaks out of the mold in just the right way to catch a wave of interest, and you get another big hit, and then everybody works on figuring out ways to copy it without infringing on the laws on intellectual property.

In case you aren't aware of how those breaks (hit songs, boom cycles) happen, here is how it happens: there will be groups of artists who are willing to set aside the principles of sustainable economics and forego immediate profit. (Willing to, as a technology teacher warned his students, "eat dirt and go naked".) The new hits come out of a few of those groups. 

But the profits are rewarded (somewhat randomly) to individuals from those groups (who are then dragged away from those groups by management). The profits do not return to the groups where the hits came from.

Maybe that brings you closer to the point.

Is sustainable sustainable?

Yet a different tack on the concept -- 

Ideals are good, right? But every ideal humans have developed in all our recorded history sooner or later leads to a dead or violent end. 

${White_supremacy} was an ideal that many found perplexingly reasonable -- mostly many ${whites}. But, surprisingly, many non-${whites} who preferred, perversely, to let someone else take the burdens of being socially superior. 

That preference may have been fear of retribution against contrary opinions in many cases, but in others was something else -- Leading is hard, and even most individual ${white_supremacists} perversely want someone else to lead the movement.

And basically, every political movement and ideal can be substituted in the place of ${white_supremacy} in the above paragraphs and it comes out the same.

Ideals adopted by the crowd quickly turn divisive and violent.

Should we get rid of ideals, then? 

Apparently, they are necessary. Otherwise people can't seem to see which way to head. But they are also necessary to abandon when the time comes. It is necessary to be ready to discard previously held ideals in favor of better ones, one at a time, when each ideal is no longer beneficial to the individual who has been holding it.

And society works much better when we don't all have to have the same ideals at once.

Sustainable development and sustainable economics seem like really good ideas. Okay, they are really good ideas. But in the end they are just another ideal.

The terms themselves contain an internal contradiction (just like all ideals, really). 

You cannot plan real progress, and without progress there is neither development nor economics.

Now, someone will point out that what is currently being called sustainable development in the international community is making use of our ecological resources in renewable ways.

Renewable?

How many people understand that all energy in our world comes, ultimately, from a very radioactive nuclear reactor in the center of the solar system? We are protected from it by distance, by atmosphere, and by a convenient magnetosphere. But without that huge source of (ultimately, non-renewable in a universe subject to entropy, but that's a long time away) energy, none of our economic activities are renewable.

Nuclear energy.

We have a lot of radioactive materials spread out all over the world. This was true well before such as the Curies, Einstein, Dalton, et. al. helped us understand the atomic nature of matter -- even well before Leucippus and Democritus. In some places they are naturally concentrated in ways that are dangerous to our safety there.

We also have a lot of nuclear reactor waste that has been concentrated by human means. And it's not going away anytime soon, either. 

Leaving it all there to slowly radiate away into the darkness is actually a waste of a good resource, a waste demanded by those who fear what happens when we mishandle it.

We are mishandling it now. 

We should be researching ways to use it safely, instead of sweeping it under the metaphorical rug of some mountain or desert in some remote part of the world we think we're safe from.

Most of the waste of our current economic activities is not radioactive. But it is still quite poisonous, quite dangerous to our health, and quite wasteful. 

Consider our old computers and portable phones. At least subliminally, you have to be aware that most of that ends up in highly toxic industrial dumps somewhere.

And the irony of it is that some of the very resources we are running short of are hiding in those dumps.

In too many of the ways it is used today, "sustainable" means "doing what we are already doing". That means continuing to call dumping waste "renewable", as long as we can find another place to dump most of it after a little processing to remove something currently of value.

And that isn't sustainable. Not in the long run.

So what is the answer?

Is sustainable not sustainable?

Or is it only temporarily sustainable and then you have to do it again?

Laws don't work. People always find loopholes so they can keep doing what they know how to do.

Right now, the answer is this: 

Those who have amassed great wealth by promoting the economic activities that generated the waste must learn to invest in their children's future by supporting the currently unprofitable activities of finding and developing safe ways to recover our waste -- preferably ways that don't entail seriously underpaid people working in slave conditions in distant countries poisoning themselves to got it done.

What if they insist on keeping their wealth instead?

What good will their wealth do if the next pandemic comes before we have proper vaccines for the current? 

Or if the slowly degrading plastics building up somewhere in the confluence of ocean currents in the Pacific Ocean ends up poisoning all the food-grade fish in the world? 

Or if the radioactive waste dumps in the deserts and mountains start leaking into the very place where rainwater for the continent is absorbed back into clouds to rain on the rest of the continent?

I don't see very many of our multi-billionaires jumping on this.

Popular movements, popular charities, popular areas of technological development -- things everyone is already doing, mostly activities that indirectly support the companies where they have their fortunes salted away, sure, they jump on those. 

But not on the unsustainable activities that will lead us back to a new round of sustainability.

We can't be sustainable with short-term views of sustainability, and five and ten years is way too short-term.

WEAR THE MASK, FOR *** SAKE, YOU FOOL!!!! (a Response)

More people are getting sick for several reasons. 

The changing of the seasons is only part of the equation. 

Use of masks is also only part of the equation.

Masks never could be more than a low wall, and if they are not kept clean they quickly (three days or less) begin to defeat their own purpose. A dirty mask helps neither the wearer nor the people he is around.

The materials masks are made of become allergenic after long term use.

And I could go on about masks, but they are only part of the equation.

If you believe in God, may I ask you to consider that God may be trying to get us to slow our collective pursuit of the rat race down.

If not, let me tell you about how excessive and inappropriate competition is weakening all the foundations of our society, including our bases for maintaining health.

As best we can understand it, and much to the Chinese government's dismay and embarrassment, the virus made the jump from animals to the human population in slave-labor populations in China, where it is impossible for people to maintain nutrition, hygiene or other necessary conditions for health.

From there, it traveled first among populations in poverty, and communicated to the upper middle class where those populations touch -- ergo, from the slave-labor conditions where it jumped to the relatives and friends in slightly better conditions who work in sweatshops making our high-tech gadgets and such, and from there to their managers. 

Their managers have the means to go traveling, and it was a large group of vacationers who first brought it from China to Japan, to places like the snow festivals in Sapporo and Hokkaidō. 

In the developed world, it was the people with compromised immune systems who picked it up first (and whom it hit worst). This is not a surprise, really, since it is the immune systems' job to defend us. 

We were surprised when the methods of kicking certain parts of our immune systems into high-gear backfired, and excessive immune system reactions began to turn deadly.

Think about this carefully. These are partially immuno-compromised individuals who have adopted the habit of taking various drugs to help them keep working in spite of having really bad colds. In times past, a cold that bad could be deadly, but we have drugs to deal with the cold symptoms now.

Well, it turned out that those drugs had side effects that turned against us in this version of the cold virus. (Corona viruses are cold viruses, remember?) This should also be no surprise. 

When you push your body too hard with those drugs (including antihistamines and excessively high doses of vitamin C, and such), you go down, and the doc has to take you off those crutch medicines and convince you to get rest and nutrition. Even if the doctor can't convince you to go off the drugs, he or she really tries to convince you to get some rest. 

(Take notice of this: It's the rest and nutrition that heals you.)

A virus that kicks up a high-level response in the body combining with drugs that kick up a high-level response is going to result in a violent reaction, and the violent reaction can result in death and debilitating disease.

Now, a rudimentary understanding of epidemiology tells us that these kinds of pandemic continue until we develop herd immunity. 

We develop herd immunity in several ways. 

One is die-off. Horrible as that is, it is reality.

Another is by letting our bodies develop natural immunity by exposure. The low walls like masks slow the contagion down, which gives individuals more time to develop immunity. But if we then fail to strengthen our general health, to be ready for increased exposure, we lose the benefit of the low walls. 

Pre-exposure through vaccines is similar to the low-walls in this -- if we fail to keep our health up, vaccines have limits.

In modern society, we have often been able to dodge die-off by hygienic practices, by improving our overall health, and by the pre/faux-exposure of vaccines. But all of that also slows down the development of herd immunity, which means the viruses mutate and come back.

They don't go away until we develop herd immunity, both by exposure and by giving up the behaviors which enabled the virus to make the mutation jump in the first place.

The virus jumped in slave-labor conditions where it is impossible for people to maintain health.

We pick it up and pass it on when our behavior causes us to have dropped immunities.

Those behaviors include bad nutrition, lack of sleep, high levels of inappropriate stress, use of mood-altering substances, poor social hygiene, etc. 

How sick we get is also in no small part determined by our overall health, including whether our immune systems are within appropriate functional parameters -- we have seen clearly this time that kicking (some of) our immune systems into overdrive is another bad habit of modern society, and can cause a virus infection to turn fatal or debilitating when it otherwise wouldn't.

Even if you don't believe in God, you have to understand that nature itself is effectively telling us as a civilization, and me and you as individuals, to slow down.

-- to give up the bad habit of excessive competition, and the bad habit of trying to force everyone around you to compete in the games that you think you can win.

This is why this post is in my political blog. The causes of the pandemic, and the cure, happen to coincide with the causes and cure of our current social, political, and economic distress.

If we don't change what caused the pandemic, hanging on to your mask will be no better than trying to hang on to a clump of grass when you're dangling over the edge of a cliff. 

Sure, wear the mask sensibly, but fix the other problems. 

Slow down. Learn to give others a chance to live.

Cap in Hand

The Atlantic ran what I assume was an opinion piece, showing a picture of Donald Trump walking cap in hand in the dark with his top button unbuttoned, his tie hanging loose, captioned with the label "loser".

 

I won't comment on the contents of the piece. I saw it repeated all over the internet, with a unanimous, "TRUMP HAS DONE HIMSELF IN THIS TIME FOR SURE YOU CAN TELL BY HOW DEFEATED HE LOOKS!" refrain. Back in July.

Uhm, guys, if anyone is listening, I know what it's like to walk home cap-in-hand. I know what it means to loosen my tie. I know what it's like to wear myself out fighting battles when the people I want to help insist on beating me. 

I know what it's like to hear people using mockery to try to push me out of their way so they can promote their agendas. 

I also know what it's like to watch the mockers sink their own ship when they succeed in pushing me out of the way. It's not something that makes me happy. And it's not something I want to see happen to my country.

I don't agree with a lot of things Trump has said. Hey, after he shoots off at the mouth and takes some time to think about it, even he doesn't agree with a lot of the things he has said. 

I don't think it's necessary to have a president who only says and does things I agree with. In fact, considering all the other opinions necessary to keep the country running, I think it would be a very bad thing to have a president who only said and did things I agreed with.

But I consider the mockery he faces, and I definitely can't agree with that. And I think the mockery is a bad enough thing that I feel it necessary to say so in public.

When everything you say is mockery, it becomes really hard to communicate.

If you are going to criticize him, find something of substance to criticize. (But criticizing people is surely not a constructive use of your time.)

If you are going to criticize his record, find something of substance to criticize. (Better yet, quit criticizing and start trying to help find real solutions to our problems that aren't pie-in-the-sky. And quit blaming him for everything when you are at least partly to blame.)

If your continual harping on his humanness doesn't seem to be winning you anything but echos from your echo chamber, consider opening yourself up to opinions outside your echo chamber.

If the politics you promote don't seem to be winning in the polls, maybe you should reconsider your politics instead of blaming him for your lack of popularity.

Or maybe you should just state your opinions and let others state theirs, like I do. (Notice that I am not mocking you, just telling you I don't think mocking people is constructive dialog. I can see a difference.)

Real-world Mask Use

(This belongs in my Random Eikaiwa blog, but it's too political to put it there without annotation.)

Alfeo: "Why are you looking at my neck?"

Betty: "Sorry. I'm not a vampire, just wondering if you have a tracheostomy."

Alfeo: "Huh? Oh. You mean why is my mask down around my neck?"

Betty: "Not meaning to be rude or anything."

Alfeo: "Just sarcastic is all."

Betty: "No. Seriously. Masks are sometimes used to protect stomas."

Afleo: "Nothing like that. I just forgot to pull it back up over my face. There. Is that better?"

Betty "Yes. Covering both the mouth and the nose is much more effective at blocking potential vectors."

Alfeo: "True."

Betty: "So why do you pull it down?"

Alfeo: (Breathes through the mask.) "Haaahhhh."

Betty: "Oh. Your glasses get foggy."

Alfeo: "Yep. All steamed up. And that makes it hard to read the addresses on the mail I have to deliver. Which kind of defeats the purpose of the glasses."

Betty: "I see."

Alfeo: "So I pull the mask down when no one's around. And then I sometimes forget to pull it back up."

Betty; "What do you do when people are around?"

Alfeo: "Take the glasses off."

Betty: "Then how do you read the addresses?"

Alfeo: "Slowly. And when the address is in fine print like this one --"

Betty: "Wow! That's tiny! I have a hard time reading that with my contacts in."

Alfeo: "Yeah. So I lift the glasses up to read it. It takes extra time, but it allows me to keep the mask on when people are around."

Betty: "Why do people print addresses so tiny?"

Alfeo: "I don't know. Maybe the address was too long for the label? The people who write the addressing software didn't want to take the time to deal with really long addresses?"

Betty: "Why would systems engineers do that?"

Alfeo: "Deadlines. Speaking of which, I have to get back to work."

Betty: "I'd better get out of your way so you can work fast. It looks like you still have a lot of mail to deliver today."

Alfeo: "Thanks. I do."

What It Is Ain't Exactly Clear

Linking a BassHook post on the violence in Seattle. View at your own risk.

:-/



(I figured out that I could embed the original post, so I'm embedding that instead of my response post.)

(Irony included. If you can't see the pictures through either the link or the embedded frame above, I'll spoil it for you. Street art. Lots of crowds, including children. Not the kind of violence you may have been hearing about, no apparent violence at all. Stores open and in operation. No weapons in sight. Just for the record, my nephew, who lives there, confirms the lack of violence and weaponry.)

I'm going to post my additional comments from my FB post on it here, as well, unpacked just a little:

Woodstock was not a Sunday picnic for flower children, but the people who attended generally took care of themselves and each other at a certain level of consideration and morality, in spite of the fact that many were high.


(Image by Derek Redmond and Paul Campbell, used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, courtesy Wikimedia.)

(It is true that the standards of morality observed at Woodstock are not the standards that I hope everyone will someday understand and choose. There is something about people that induces many of us to choose a lesser happiness that we can see now over a greater one that we can't yet see. But there were a lot of people there, and there was very little violence. Look it up if you don't believe me.)

Altamont was intended by the promoters to be Woodstock West or something, but the results were significantly more violent. I leave it to the reader to discern the reasons.


(Image by Flickr user Paille on Flickr, used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license, via Wikimedia.)

(Well, my own take on the difference between Altamont and Woodstock, Woodstock was organic. Altamont was a deliberate attempt to recreate the organic, and that generally results in something artificial. Artificial tends to be unsatisfying.)

As a non-tangential tangent, I'll mention Kent State:




FWIW, we've been through this before.



There are people who need to say something, and they are trying to say it. Instead of trying to keep them from saying it, the least we can do is let them have their voice. And it might not hurt to try to listen to what they are saying, to try to understand.

What Is Causing the Riots?

I don't mean who, and I don't mean to raise the question of paid anti-whatever protestors allegedly coming in from out-of-town, nor of apparently whatever-supremacist police officers who allegedly disguise themselves to do what the real protesters wouldn't in pushing the violence forward.

Yes, that stuff is happening, and it shouldn't surprise anyone. If you haven't learned the lessons of history, nature abhors a vacuum, etc. There is no magic that will keep the USA safe for a free people if the people won't support their own freedom.

This is not a question of left versus right.

What is it to support your own freedom?

<> Is it carrying guns?

Well, sometimes, but I think that is not the most important thing. Definitely not now.

<> Is it voicing your opinions in spite of all the people who mock or threaten?

Of course. But that is also not exactly the most important thing.

<> Is it listening to people who need a listening ear?

Now there is very important thing, even though it can be hard to distinguish one needy listening ear that you can't help from another that you can. It does work out if you try.

<> Is it volunteering to help at the local library?

How about taking time off your $100+/hour job to do it?

How much do you make an hour? According to my sources, current average USA household income is $60,000 a year. That would be $5000 a month. If it meant a 40 hour workweek for a household with only one wage earner, that wage earner would be making about $30/hour.

That's not easy to live on, but more than half of the households in the US are making less than that, with all adults working. (That's what average household income means.)

If you are making more than $200,000 a year, are you willing to scrape a bit off of that to volunteer at the library, or do some other social service that nobody wants to pay for?

Are you willing to tell your boss that his plans for world domination need to take a back seat to the needs of the people around you?

If you are the boss with the plans for world domination, do you have a net worth more than USD 4,000,000 at, say, age forty? That's enough to retire comfortably. Are you willing to forego those plans for world domination -- to retire and let someone else take your place and earn a living?

Actually, if you have that much, you could move aside and let three people make average wages.

You say it's not that simple?

Steve Jobs did it for several years to bring Apple back.

Yeah, he was working, but he forewent his wages so others could also work.

Bringing the country back is not a better purpose?

I've said it elsewhere, and I'm not the first.

Protecting your freedom means giving. Not just food, not just money, not just advice on how to make more money. 

It also means giving way, and getting out of the way, so that others can have their turn, so they can earn their place.

That's how you keep the paid protesters from having no other work than paid protest.

And that's how you keep the white supremacists from feeling like white supremacy is the only thing that will protect their right to work.

Give up those plans for world domination. (World domination never works out the way you think it will, anyway.)

Move over.

Let others have a turn working.

So What Is the Problem with Vote-by-mail and Vote-by-Internet?

I've been reflex-sharing some BassHook posts calling for opposition to the spread of vote-by-mail. Several people whose opinions I respect have called me on it. So I'm going to resort to the first solution of the pedant and try to explain.

(But I'm going to listen to myself, and see how much of the explanation makes sense.)

[JMR202005171402: I have now written a bit more succinctly on this topic in another place: https://free-is-not-free.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-inconvenience-of-voting-and.html. You might want to read that before, or instead of, this.]

Good explanations need backgrounds, so I'll give links to as much of the background in my thinking as I can. )These blogposts are about current problems in balloting systems and some suggestions I have considered for solutions to those problems):

• Some of what I think voting means:
  https://free-is-not-free.blogspot.com/2016/10/why-vote-what-does-vote-mean.html
• More of the same from a different point of view:
  https://joel-for-president.blogspot.com/2016/09/why-vote-what-does-vote-mean.html
• Still more, from yet another point of view:
  https://free-is-not-free.blogspot.com/2016/09/make-your-vote-meaningful-vote-for.html
• A different way of looking at the electoral college:
  https://joel-for-president.blogspot.com/2016/12/elector.html
• A kind of a different point of view on what constitutes vote fraud:
  https://joel-for-president.blogspot.com/2020/01/revisiting-vote-voter-fraud.html 
• Some brainstorming on possible ways to fix the electoral processes in the US:
  https://joel-for-president.blogspot.com/2016/11/an-awkward-proposal-for-amendment-to.html

For more background on my thinking, I offer this: I divide political systems called democratic into three rough classes, which nowhere near completely cover them all, but I think it is an instructive partition:

• Mob rule
• Popularity contest
• Free society

Under mob rule democracy, you generally have a small number of small groups of people who manipulate the will and actions of the people, getting them to choose and behave in ways in which they would not when they are of a sober state of mind.

Under popularity contest democracy, you generally have a small number of small, partially hidden groups of people who put figureheads out and use them to manipulate the opinions and dialogue of the people, getting them to think and talk in ways in which they would not when they are in a sober state of mind.

By contrast, a truely free society is one in which the people in general deliberately refrain from both manipulating and being manipulated.

And if I describe them as being of a sober state of mind, I do not mean that they do not know how to enjoy life or enjoy themselves. Nor do I mean that they have no compassion.

Separating oneself from any state of happiness is not a sober state of mind. Free people understand that a part of the responsibility of freedom is to find thei principle source of joy from within -- otherwise, they leave themselves too open to manipulation.

And the compassion that free people are moved by is all the more real because the compassion is not forced.

But that borders on mysticism.

In an ideal society, from our point of view, it's questionable whether voting systems are even necessary. But if they are, it would seem that any voting system at all should work. In such a society, we think that there are none who want to take people's freedoms away from them -- for whatever reason people decide to try to do that.

In this world, in the various social divisions of the various countries, there are movements to undermine the freedoms of the people. Why? Who knows why some people are dissatisfied when others behave in ways that vary from their own? But it is common self-delusion, to accept a glorious misery as a substitute for internal happiness, because the internal happiness is blocked by controvertion of conscience. And then to work to help others to enjoy the same glorious misery, by getting them to deny their own consciences, as well.

If that feels like I'm poisoning the well, no. That well is already full of poison, I'm just pointing it out.

You cannot be free if you deny your own conscience, any more than you can be free as long as you let society impose the social norm as a substitute for your conscience. Or, rather, letting society dictate what you believe your conscience should be telling you is one very common (and very destructive) way to deny your conscience.

Social norms and standards are no decent substitute for conscience.

Anyway, it is a fact that there are and shall always be, in any group larger than two, some faction that works to undermine freedom.

How do we define a free country, and a free government?

The government of a free country is not a government that is free in some sense, nor is it a government that attempts to force its people to be free.

It  is a government that operates to support the people in their freedom. In order to do so, it must be responsible to the voice of the people.

There is a certain class of political persuasion that insists the voice of the people will always go wrong. There must, in this way of thinking, be a leader to lead the people in the right direction.

History gives us plenty of empirical evidence to the contrary. In every case, when some small faction gains control, if it insists on keeping control, everything quickly goes south.

(This is in addition to the theoretical demonstration I have given above.)

I mentioned it in one of the blogposts linked above, but there is a verse in the Book of Mormon that is one of my favorites:

Now it is not common that the voice of the people desireth anything contrary to that which is right; but it is common for the lesser part of the people to desire that which is not right; (from Mosiah 29: 26.)

It does not say that the voice of the people will or even should always choose the perfect or best option. It only says that the voice of the people usually chooses good options over bad.

I can demonstrate theoretical basis for this proposition, by setting up an integral over the functions of conscience, but I'll leave it to you to work out for yourself whether a group of people who are free can follow their consciences and still come to a useful, positive, good consensus.

Polling systems in every country have problems.

Mechanically assisted polling systems are plagued by failure in the mechanism. One very prominent such failure is known as "hanging chads". But all mechanical systems suffer from the potential to fail.

Electronic (including digital and even internet) polling has several additional weaknesses in addition to the potential of simple failure. Failures in electronic polling systems tend to be silent and invisible. Hanging chads tend to be visible. Failed levers and pulleys tend to be noticed. Failed or breached network interfaces are often entirely unnoticed.

Unnoticed failures in systems are the ones which poison the system, and this is the danger in both internet balloting and mail-in balloting, that failures can go unnoticed long enough to undermine the system beyond repair.

These are actually specific examples of an axiom which has no known counterexample in (mortal) human society:

Every system has vulnerabilities and failure modes.

Those who study systems science are fully aware of this, even though it is often viewed as unprofitable to admit. (Microsoft and now Google are prominent among those large companies which attempt to practice systems science without recognizing the inherent vulnerability of systems, although Microsoft once was quite happy to use the exact same inherent vulnerability as its excuse for following the "80/20 rule".)

This brings us to an axiom in polling, that the must dependable polling system can be nothing but the simplest.

These are the essential characteristics of the most dependable polling systems known:

1. Written ballot -- leaves a physical, visible record, readable by the unaided eye, that can be recounted.
2. Separable ballot -- serial numbers for counting unused ballots on one half, no identifying characteristic on the other. Both halves are kept in separate boxes after use. Matching counts helps assure that ballots have not been lost or added.
3. Voting judges from at least the leading contending parties present on voting site -- in theory, at least, competition between parties will keep them from colluding to pervert the balloting processes. 

In addition to the above characteristics of the system itself, the following features of the system context are also required, to support the system:

1. Visibility of the process is necessary, to give the voter confidence in both the ballot and the results, leading to a greater willingness to vote according to conscience and a greater motivation to vote again the next time.
2. Rules for the cases of no clear winner are necessary -- both for breaking ties and for determining when the consensus is none of the provided candidates (partially explained below).
3. Exceptional voting methods must be provided for exceptional cases (also partially explained below.

Internet voting removes all three of the system characteristics and the first of the context characteristics, although, if-and-only-if there is no failure, cryptographic techniques and cryptology can be used to create electronic equivalents.

The problem with any electronic voting method is that it requires some aid to the eye to read the ballot, and the aid can be deliberately broken in such a way that it shows a false image. Yes, there have been such incidences in real-world electronic voting machines, not just as proof-of-concept, but as actual attacks on the system.

Remember, the worst cases are those in which the attacks succeed without notice.

The problem with mail-in ballots is that it keeps only the first system characteristic above, when-and-only-when the mail system itself is properly functioning.

No, the mail does not always go through. You know that as well as I do.

The ballot travels through the mails, which are known to be vulnerable. There is no way to provide voting judges when the ballot is used, although voting judges can be provided when the ballot is officially opened.

How many times the ballot is unofficially opened is a problem. Certain printing and sealing techniques exist to partially ameliorate the problem of unofficial opening, but resealing is possible. And resealing failures can simply be discarded by the attackers in the middle, the same as ballots from an area known to the middleman to be part of the competing party's stronghold.

So, what are we to do for those who are disenfranchised by the simplest system?

There are many people who, for various reasons beyond their control, are unable to make it to the polls when they are open on election/polling day.

First, employers really should be willing to support the infrastructure of the market their business exists in by releasing their employees, both to vote and to act as voting judges. This should be a no-brainer, but, in fact, it is not common -- and you end up with disenfranchising rush-hour jams just before the polls close.

Second, polls really should be open more than from 8:00 AM to 6/7/8/9:00 PM. I know it's hard to get judges for the early and late hours.

But I suspect that fines levied against employers who fail to release their employees to vote or to be voting judges would do a lot to alleviate both these problems.

I hear about mandatory voting, but I suspect that mandating votes will eventually mandate two extreme reactions -- rebellion against the system and blind conformance, neither of which lead to sober choices at the polls. Participation ultimately must be at the individual's choice, but there may be good reason to use various means to induce employers to release their employees to vote.

Third, although this is where things get a little wonky, especially for people with bipolar personalities, extraordinary voting methods should be provided for those who can't make it to the polls (as I mentioned above).

Ergo, absentee ballots and electronic voting machines for those who really need them, but only for those who really need them.

And they both should be used in the presence of voting judges from at least the leading parties.

Ergo, polls should be set up for members of the military to vote on location, and the times should be extended long enough in advance of and after the voting/polling day to allow all who have to be away on assignment to vote.

Similar polling arrangements should be made for emergency workers and others for whom the question of the employer is not sufficient.

For those for whom showing up in person is too much of a hardship, such as those living in elder-care or health-care facilities, the polls should be brought to the facility, complete with voting judges from the leading contending parties. In this particular case, electronic voting machines can be used, as a better choice than to disenfranchise those who need assistance. But the electronic voting machines still must produce a paper ballot, not an electronic ballot, separable, and anonymized.

Mail-in absentee ballots can be provided for those for whom bringing the polling place to the voter won't work. Again, they must be separable ballots, and they should be opened in the presence of judges from the leading contending parties.

How does this avoid invalidating the result?

These approaches depend on one more adjustment:

When election/polling results are not statistically significant, the election should be done over. I won't dig into details here, but, mathematically speaking, when the top ballots are within 2 to 5% of each other, the result is essentially indistinguishable from a tie, and therefore there should be a run-off.

Along with this adjustment, there also needs to be a none-of-the-above option in every ballot. A hundred years ago, holding an election was difficult enough that trying to deal with a none-of-the-above option was out of the question. In these modern times, we can communicate quickly enough to start a ballot fresh when none-of-the-above wins.

The number of exceptional cases where voters need to send absentee ballots in by mail should never exceed 1% of the number of voters, so perverting the absentee ballot process really should never have substantial effect on the total outcome.

If we handle the rest of it right, we can handle the exceptions.

And now it's time for me to go to bed, so I'll have to finish later (about how all systems fail, and how electronic voting machines must not communicate or track their results, etc.). Have a good night.

2 Can Live as Cheaply as 1, But Not If They Won't Share

My dad used to tell me, two can live as cheaply as one.

I took his word for it, because I saw the principle operate around me every day. Our family was willing to share, and we were willing to make compromises with each other to make it possible to share.

One of the big compromises was rules and habits. By sharing rules and habits, we were able to eliminate a lot of waste. Eight people were able to live on an untenured professor's meager salary by handing clothes down, by sharing cleaning and cooking duties, by sharing space, by sharing from the common pot.

I have since had occasion to see many couples who can't seem to even live as cheaply as if they were two people living alone. For them, two can't even live as cheaply as two.

Why?

Not only will they not share clothes, each insists on having more clothes than the others.

Not only do they not share cleaning duties, but they insist on making more of a mess for the others to clean up.

Not only do they not share cooking duties, but each insists on using all the pots, all the burners on the stove, the oven and the microwave, etc., then leaving their cooking on the stove and in the oven, not just to cool, but because they haven't got the time to put it all away and get it out again for the next meal.

Not only do the not share space, but they insist on setting up no-man's land between their own space and everyone else's.
And not only do they not share what food they have, but they take food that others have cooked, put it on their plates, and then, instead of eating it, complain that it is not to their own liking.

I think it all boils down to their wanting to get attention, but not being willing to give attention.

Gumballs and Open Borders

A FaceBook friend of mine pointed to the video Immigration, World Poverty, and Gumballs.

Looking for it later by search engine, I see I am not the only one who saw holes in the reasoning. I'm going to ignore what everyone else has to say and just talk about it from my perspective as a US citizen expatriate (not ex-patriot) married to a Japanese citizen, with children who are effected by the Japanese no-dual-citizenship policies.

The borders of the US have been effectively closed since before I got married. I had to prove that the woman I intended to marry would not become a dependent on the state with all sorts of financial info and family affidavits, etc., just to get her into the states for our marriage and my last year of college.

(What finances? I was a struggling student trying to do what Linus Torvalds was doing at about the same time. I had no finances.)

She got her green card, but it cost me time spent at the local immigrations office that could have been better spent on my studies, at bare minimum. And it didn't exactly give her an image of a country willing to accept her, which was no small part of her motivation to return to her country.

In order to even consider having the family move back to the states where there is much more profitable work available for someone like me, I would have to prove things I can't prove about my own financial stability.

Or we would have to go in for some other purpose than staying, then stay anyway and apply from there.

No, just because the kids would have been free to come and go until they were twenty does not mean that their mother would have been free to come and go.

The borders aren't tight closed against me, but they are effectively closed.
This is not a new situation. The borders have been closed for over twenty years.

Okay. Back to the gumballs.

People are not gumballs. Representing even a million people with one gumball robs the argument of significant meaning.

That said, I will acknowledge that Roy Beck's conclusive proposal to help the impoverished people of the world where they are has some merit -- conditionally. I'll mention some of the conditions a few paragraphs down.

The question of open borders is not strictly an immigration question.

Many of the gumballs people coming into the country do not simply move to the US and stay. They send money back home, which helps their relatives and friends where they are.

Yeah. Where they are.

And not a few get training and experience in living in (relative) freedom in the US and take that training, and a lot of basic technical expertise, back with them when they return to their homelands.

Which helps them where they are.

And this is not largess given from above. This is people using their freedom to find creative solutions to the problems back home. This is the best way to help people where they are, in the same way teaching a man to fish is more help than giving him a fish.

If you want people to be dependent on you, give them fish. If you want them to be friends, but independent, take them fishing, show them how you do it, have fun with them. Give them feel-good experiences that will lead them away from trying to overfish the rivers, away from the tendency to try to take control of the market in fish.

People are not gumballs.

With that introduction, here is what I see has to happen if we really want to help people where they are.

We have to first recognize that the things we do in the States are not all appropriate things to teach other people to do. We export a lot of our cultural baggage, and that just weighs the people in poverty down even further.

I want to be specific about that, to give concrete examples, but many of the examples are hot-button topics in the current US.

Let's just admit that young children under ten feeding themselves by selling their bodies may not be what we intended to export, but that's how our indiscriminate use of money and our sexual revolution is hitting the dirt over there.

(There is nothing unusual about this. Japan also saw some of the same things happening, in the early 1900s. You can see it when you read the works of some of the prominent Japanese novelists of that period, for instance, in a novel called Sound of the Mountain -- 山の音、 Yama no Oto -- by Yasunari Kawabata, the main character talks about seeing a young Japanese boy on the train traveling in the company of an older foreign gentleman, and about his feelings when he assumes the worst.)

Helping people where they are means such things as going over there yourself, living for years as they live. Sharing things you know, sure, but also learning from them.

It does not mean giving them money with expectations. If you want to invest or give them grants, find out what they want to do. Get people who know the country and the culture to help you figure out if it's something you want to support them in. If it is, some conditions about the purpose of the money may be in order, but trying to tell them how to accomplish their plans is questionable help at best. Expectations such as making a certain amount of profit by a certain time are definitely out of order.

Then, after you have invested, keep your hands off, but keep in touch. If they tell you they are having problems, ask how what kind of help they need. Always avoid imposing your solutions on them, even when they think they want you to. Get them to tell you what they need.

And always be ready and willing to learn from them what you can. Letting them tell you what they are doing helps them understand what they are doing. Letting them tell you what their problems are helps them understand those problems. Letting them tell you the solutions they've considered helps them understand the solutions well enough to pick the ones that will work.

Sometimes, it requires bringing them to the States for a few months or years to experience a different way of doing things. If you are really going to help them where they are, you need this option, and it doesn't work if you have to wait six months or two years from the time you decide it's a good idea until the time you can bring them to the States to do the work that they need the experience with. Well, six months may not be too bad, but two years (or more) definitely defeats the purpose.

It's not the money or the ideas or the technology that ultimately helps. It's the opportunity to use their own creativity, and the experience they gain doing so.

Now, back to the question of borders.

You can't do this kind of help when your own borders are closed.  It just doesn't work.

Help is a two-way street, one gumball person at a time, and closed borders prevent that.

Revisiting the Vote -- Voter Fraud

(This is a bit of a different way of thinking about vote fraud.)

I presented An Awkward Proposal for an Amendment to Correct Election Processes some time back.

Re-reading it now, I can find numerous holes in it. Some day I'll re-work the proposal, but today I want to think about voter fraud.

At this point in time, both the major US political parties are accusing each other of voter fraud. Dead voters, multiple voters, non-citizen voters, influencing absentee ballots, cutting voter districts to water down the opposition, ..., ..., ...

Thinking about ways to protect against voter fraud, I realize that most protections would have results worse than the fraud itself.

That is, being a computer scientist, I tend to quickly think of the vulnerabilities induced by electronic voting and by improper use of absentee ballots and such. I also tend to think about safeguarding the processes as they exist, and those tendencies are reflected in the post I link above.

But that does not really get at the source of the problem.

In order to get into the proper frame of mind to consider what to do about voter fraud, we should start with a realization of something I will point out in a few paragraphs. To get there, we should start with an understanding of what a voting process is.

Many times, it is described as a way to get a consensus of opinion from a body of people.

But what people mean by "consensus of opinion" varies widely.

For some, obtaining a consensus means getting support for their side. For them, the election process is a process of influencing opinions.

For others, obtaining a consensus means finding out whose side is supported by the majority. For them, the process is a statistical experiment, and influencing the result is the opposite of what they want to do.

For yet others, obtaining a consensus blends both of these concepts as a way for the members of the body of people to communicate with each other and come to a decision. This is not quite a middle-of-the-road approach, because it still leaves open the question of whether the winners have a responsibility to keep listening to the electorate or not.

Some ancient philosopher said, "Vox populii vox dei." And the Greek politicians tried to incorporate that concept in their government, in spite of the disagreement of many of their philosophers.

So, is the voice of the people the voice of God?

For those who consider the Book of Mormon to have some meaning, there are several salient verses. One reference is Mosiah 29:  26-27:

26 Now it is not common that the voice of the people desireth anything contrary to that which is right; but it is common for the lesser part of the people to desire that which is not right; therefore this shall ye observe and make it your law—to do your business by the voice of the people.

27 And if the time comes that the voice of the people doth choose iniquity, then is the time that the judgments of God will come upon you; yea, then is the time he will visit you with great destruction even as he has hitherto visited this land.

How is this different from vox populii vox dei?

One, it happens that the voice of the people chooses evil on occasion, especially when they are become so corrupt that there really isn't any help for them any more.

(Jonah, who had to have a whale return him to his duty, wanted Nineveh to be so corrupt, but even they weren't quite there yet.)

Two, with all the negatives, it is not common that the voice of the people desireth anything contrary to that which is right leaves a wide range of right possibilities for the people to be in favor of.

That the people usually don't choose the worst option does not mean that the people always choose the best.

You don't have to be a believer in the Book of Mormon to understand that much.

Why do I think this is important?

It demotivates the belief in the magic of winning, and the magic of winning is one of the enemies of freedom and of meaningful consensus politics.

With this emphasis on winning demotivated, perhaps it will be easier to understand the truth.

Statistics tell us that when sampling a population, a difference of a few percent is not likely to be meaningful. In general, 1 or 2% is near-equivalent to a tie.

A good statistical process will guard against biasing the result.

While that means that voter fraud should be guarded against, it would also mean that campaigning poisons the result. People change their votes based on all the argument and other exchange of rhetoric, and people are known to vote against their own opinions for a variety of reason.

Electoral processes have certain statistical natures, therefore 1 to 2% differences just are not meaningful. Ever.

But they are not, and, as long as we are dealing with humans, will never be proper statistical experiments. Therefore, even differences of 5% or more should be considered effective ties, at best.

Also, since any population should have some differences of opinion, large majority results are also indications of too much tampering with the sampling processes.

In plain English, 90% or more of the vote should be indication that something went wrong.

I'm going to stop there, and propose something really bizarre.

Our focus on who wins encourages fraud.

Can I repeat that? Heh. Well, go back and read that last one-sentence paragraph again.

If we had some way of recognizing a tie, we wouldn't be so concerned about things like the hanging chads in Florida in 2000. And if we had some way of reviewing wins by too large a margin, the majority would be demotivated in their attempts to make their majority position unassailable.

So I have a few proposals:

Any election where the difference between the top votes is less than 5% should automatically go back for a run-off. 

The first run-off should be subject to the same rule.

If, in the second run-off, the difference is less than 2%, the top vote getters should be considered to have tied. In the case of an office, the top vote-getters should share the office according to an agreement they work out together. The voters should have another ballot to approve the agreement, and if the ballot fails, the court competent to review the election should review the agreement and make recommendations.

In the case of regulations and laws, etc., the body competent to implement the regulation or law, etc., should review it, seeking a new regulation or law that will more effectively reflect the opinions of the various sides. Then the new regulation or law, etc., should be voted on again, with the same rules of effective tie. After the second effective tie, the competent court should review the question and determine whether further rewriting and election will produce useful results, and, if not, should have power to determine that the question has been rejected.

Any election where the top vote-getter gets more than 80% of the vote should be automatically reviewed for tampering by the court competent to do so. Opposition voices should be heard first and last in the review.

The court would have power to order a new election, if it determined that too much improper influence of any sort had been brought to bear during the election.

In any election where the top vote-getter gets more than 90% of the vote, the court should consider whether the top vote-getter should be disqualified from standing in the subsequent election for reconsideration. Reasons other than fraud may be considered, but the court must make its reasoning public.

In any election where the top vote-getter gets more than 95% of the vote, the top vote-getter should be automatically disqualified from standing in the subsequent election for reconsideration.

These kinds of rules would help to discourage the source of the problems that lead to voter fraud, and would also help to discourage the polarizing debates and voter hate that accompanies bad-faith electioneering.