Category Archives: Politics

Education Politics

The Cornerstone of Democracy

August 7, 2010 – 7:36 am

Most towns have some sort of “school board,” which is tasked with deciding which subjects need to have Biblically-influenced syllabi, taking kickbacks from textbook publishers, and not firing incompetent and/or criminally negligent teachers.

They run for election every few years, filling our medians with campaign signs festooned with grade-school-evocative clip-art like apples and rulers and dunce hats. Their voter’s guide blurbs affirm their commitments to teacher-unionism, to social promotion, to eco-awareness, and to our children.

In Denver, it turns out, they have an additional responsibility: entering into financially catastrophic $750 million derivatives contracts with JPMorgan Chase in order to shore up massively overpromised pension funds:

To members of the Denver Board of Education, it sounded ideal. It was complex, involving several different financial institutions and transactions. But Michael F. Bennet, now a United States senator from Colorado who was superintendent of the school system at the time, and Thomas Boasberg, then the system’s chief operating officer, persuaded the seven-person board of the deal’s advantages, according to interviews with its members.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see how a bunch of educators and schoolparents got taken for a ride by some Wall Street salesguys with slick PowerPoint presentations whose area of expertise is taking people for a ride with slick PowerPoint presentations. Luckily, it’s not actually their money at stake, and the people of Denver (some of whom likely have kids in the school system) ought to be happy to pony up for the difference.

After all, half-billion-dollar loans to pay pensions to former employees of the public school system are the cornerstone of democracy.

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Politics

Republican Tea Party Contract on America

July 28, 2010 – 5:07 pm

The Democrats seem to have decided that their strategy for this fall will be to conflate the Tea Party with the Republican Party. Toward this end, they’ve crafted a ten-point “Republican Tea Party [sic] Contract on America.”

This “Contract on America” is interesting for a couple of reasons. The first is that most of the bullet points sound pretty damn appealing, and the worst of the bunch — “cap liabilities for the oil spill” — is something that I’ve never heard “Tea Party” types advocate (and even the “evidence” the Democrats cite for that bullet point seem to have nothing to do with “capping liabilities,” but rather consist of skepticism over the President’s authority to dictate the terms of the liability). Taken as a whole, it’s much better than what either the real Republican party or the Democrats themselves are offering to do, and a candidate who actually offered the “Contract on America” would — even with its flaws — be my preferred candidate.

The second reason it’s interesting is that it departs from the usual narrative about how the Tea Party is just a bunch of racists whose primary motivation is hatred of Black people and Brown people. (Sometimes Red people too.) Curiously, none of the ten “Contract on America” items have the slightest to do with Black people or Brown people or Red people. Reading the list, you’d be tempted to conclude that Tea Partiers were motivated by beliefs about things like “the proper role of government” and “economics” and “political economy” and “tax policy.” If you didn’t already “know” that Tea-Partyism was an offshoot of racism, you might never figure it out from their list!

And, of course, the third reason it’s interesting is that it somehow manages not once to use the juvenile slur “teabaggers.” I bet someone gets fired for that.

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Law Politics

Equal Protection, Sex with Teachers, and Student-Athletes

July 23, 2010 – 8:48 am

Call me an old softie, but it always bugs me when different laws apply to different people. For instance, during the most recent student-teacher-sex-scandal I learned the following:

While the age of consent for a sexual relationship in Washington state is 16, it is criminal for a teacher or anyone else in a position of power to have sexual relations with anyone under the age of 18.

Now, despite some titillating … um … videos I might have seen, I can understand the arguments why you don’t want teachers having sex with students. For instance, it’s a big distraction from the school’s goals, like not teaching math, not teaching reading, and planning periods. It’s also a big distraction from the students’ goals, like trying to have sex.

Nonetheless, if the students are otherwise old enough to consent, this is an argument for firing said teachers, or possibly even for not hiring them in the first place. It’s not a particularly compelling argument for making them subject to a different age of consent than everyone else, which (if you think about it) means that a teacher could conceivably go to prison for the same actions that her non-teaching neighbor could perform quite legally.

Admittedly, as injustices go, this is a pretty small one, and anyway I’m sure if I thought about it I could find some way to blame it on the teachers’ unions, who I imagine would be reluctant to endorse my “fire teachers who break the rules” program.

I was thinking about all this when I read an article about the “problem” of sports agents trying to influence college athletes:

In January, Illinois will become the 39th state to adopt the Uniform Athlete Agents Act, which calls for stiff penalties for anyone who passes himself off as a representative without a state license or for anyone who pays a college athlete with eligibility remaining. Since California, Michigan and Ohio already have their own non-UAAA laws, that leaves only eight states (Alaska, Maine, Massachusetts, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Vermont and Virginia) that don’t regulate agents

The penalties for “sports-agenting without a license” I at least understand, being familiar with analogues in the taxi industry, the hairbraiding industry, the eyebrow-threading industry, the florist industry, the interior-design industry, the moving industry, and the healthcare industry.

The other is pretty impressive, though, for a couple of reasons.

First, it’s a very selective law. I can legally give money to college students who aren’t athletes. I can legally give money to college athletes whose eligibility to play sports has expired. I can legally give money to college-aged athletes who aren’t college students. But the instant I give money to someone who’s a college athlete with eligibility remaining, I’m a criminal.

More disturbingly, college eligibility is determined solely by the rules of the NCAA, which is (last time I checked) a private organization. Private organizations are, of course, welcome to punish their members, although usually not with prison time. Obviously, the NCAA has no jurisdiction to punish me, seeing as how I’m not a college student. So basically they’ve convinced 39 (and counting) state legislatures to pass laws ensuring that — even though I have no association with their organization other than through the video game “NCAA Football 11″ — I can go to prison if I violate their privately-chosen rules.

Several sports-columnists seem to be applauding this state of affairs, although I’m sort of dreading the moment when all the other private organizations start realizing they can get their private rules written into law. The day when the American Mathematical Society’s proscription on Proof by Contradiction becomes a felony will be an especially bad one for me.

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Politics Technology

Why Software Testers Should Run for Congress

July 22, 2010 – 8:51 am

In my previous post “Why Software Developers Shouldn’t Run for Congress” I poked fun at the idea, proposed by a pie-in-the-sky, government-would-work-well-if-only-it-were-run-by-my-kind-of-people type, that an influx of software developers would noticeably improve the quality of our laws.

During a subsequent Facebook discussion, I came up with an additional “reason” why developers might enjoy Congress: developers hate testing their code, and Congress never tests before shipping. Of course I was being flip, but the idea has since gotten stuck in my head.

In software, when you want to make changes to code, you test them. You change small pieces and use unit tests to make sure they don’t break existing functionality. You develop a spec outlining what the code is supposed to do, and then you check that it does those things before you ship it. You have code reviews so that other coders can inspect your code looking for possible unintended consequences. You let normal users try to break the code before it ships. You try using the code yourself for a while before you inflict it on your customers. When you know that people will try to “game” your final product, you model their behavior and try to account for it in your design.

In particular, if you want to stay in business you don’t show up the night before release with thousands of pages of unreviewed, untested, hodge-podge code written by the very people hoping to hack your systems, full of hidden side effects, functionality that wasn’t in the spec, backdoors, and billion-dollar bugs. Unless you’re Congress, of course, in which case you stay in business no matter how sloppy your “coding” habits are.

So while I still don’t think Congress would be particularly improved by the addition of software developers, it sure as hell could benefit from some testers.

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Economics Politics

The Gold Standard of Health Care Reform

July 21, 2010 – 9:42 am

Back during the debate over the Obamacare bill I vehemently insisted that it wouldn’t be “real” health care reform unless it addressed the shameful practice of not requiring people who buy and sell gold coins to file IRS form 1099 for most of their transactions. Thankfully, it looks like Congress didn’t let me down:

With spot market prices for gold at nearly $1,200 an ounce, Heller estimates that he’ll be filling out between 10,000 and 20,000 tax forms per year after the new law takes effect.

“I’ll have to hire two full-time people just to track all this stuff, which cuts into my profitability,” he said.

Plus there’s two new jobs we can add to the “created or saved” list!

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Politics Technology

Why Software Developers Shouldn’t Run for Congress

July 19, 2010 – 11:33 am

Over on his blog, Clay Johnson gives five reasons why software developers ought to run for Congress:

1. They’re underrepresented. (Similarly, so are people without college degrees, so perhaps they ought to run too.)

2. Congress could use their expertise. For example, think about the more-than-1000-page Stimulus Bill. Not only does it monkey in an unintended-consequences kind of way with multi-billion-dollar swaths of the economy, it also contains a poorly written website spec for recovery.gov! If we had more developers in Congress, perhaps the bill would only do the former.

3. Software developers like solving problems, and will make the Congress more efficient at doing what it does. Like, maybe instead of just posting self-serving press releases on their websites, they can add them their Twitter feeds as well. Rather than ignoring their constituents’ letters and phone calls, they can ignore their emails and tweets. Rather than arbitrarily deciding where to allocate waste-of-taxpayer-money pork funds, they’ll write software programs that use “algorithms” to decide where to waste our money. The possibilities are endless.

4. They’d probably staff their offices with other software developers, who would not only Rails-ify House Subcommittee websites that no one cares about, they’d also be much less likely to sue the taxpayers for sexual harassment. Everyone wins.

5. Software developers are great communicators! Sure, they use too many acronyms, and they tend to stare at their shoes instead of making eye contact, and they’re afraid of girls, and they prefer instant messaging to actual conversation. But they’re also much better at foursquare (“Congressman Jones is now Mayor of D.C. Madam“) and they’d probably update their blogs a lot more frequently.

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The blog post doesn’t mention it, but there are also some good reasons why software developers shouldn’t run for Congress.

1. Congressmen spend most of their time raising money, which will bring back all those bad memories of your last failed startup.

2. Not only does Congress not provide free sodas, they’re always trying to tax them!

3. (# of foosball tables in Capitol) + (# of XBOX 360s in Capitol) + (# of ball pits in Capitol) = 0

4. Terrible iPhone reception in Congressional office buildings.

5. Software developers hate bullshit; Congress non-stop bullshit.

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Economics Politics

Cars + Freedom = Taxpayer-funded Bailouts?

July 4, 2010 – 6:06 pm

Next time we take several billion dollars from taxpayers and use it to bailout a private automaker, we should probably think about attaching a condition that forbids that company from running jingoistic commercials depicting a Dukes-of-Hazzard-style revolutionary war battle with George Washington driving a black Dodge Challenger, all while the voice of a cable-TV serial killer solemnly informs the world that America “got right” a couple of things: “cars and freedom.”

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Economics Politics

Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Illinois Legislature

July 4, 2010 – 9:36 am

There are a number of somewhat incredible articles floating around about the grotesque insolvency of the state of Illinois. Many parts are appalling, but what leapt out at me most was the following:

The state’s last elected governor, Rod R. Blagojevich, is on trial for racketeering and extortion. But in 2003, he persuaded the legislature to let him float $10 billion in 30-year bonds and use the proceeds for two years of pension payments.

That gamble backfired and wound up costing the state many billions of dollars.

Based on a quick sampling of Illinois legislators, this multi-billion-dollar bet was approved by a combination of lawyers, policemen, schoolteachers, and bricklayers.

Now, lawyers are supposed to be good at suing people. Policemen are supposed to be good at punching jaywalkers. Bricklayers are supposed to be good at laying bricks. Schoolteachers are supposed to be good at … um … something, I’m sure.

But there’s no reason to expect any of them to be good at making multi-billion-dollar-bets with other people’s money. If one weren’t blinded by status quo bias, one might observe that a system that not only allows them to do so but encourages them to do so is, in some fundamental way, broken.

To his credit, even the President acknowledges this:

As you know, part of what led to this crisis was [states like Illinois] and others who were making huge and risky bets, using derivatives and other complicated financial instruments, in ways that defied accountability, or even common sense. In fact, many practices were so opaque, so confusing, so complex that the people inside the [legislatures] didn’t understand them, much less those who were charged with overseeing them. They weren’t fully aware of the massive bets that were being placed. That’s what led Warren Buffett to describe derivatives that were bought and sold with little oversight as “financial weapons of mass destruction.” That’s what he called them. And that’s why reform will rein in excess and help ensure that these kinds of transactions take place in the light of day.

What’s that? You say he was actually talking about private firms making bets with their own money? Well, in that case he ought to be even more critical of state legislatures doing the same thing. He is, isn’t he? I mean, it’s not like he was a member of the Illinois Senate when they took this multi-billion-dollar bet. He wasn’t, was he?

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Economics Politics

Seth Godin on Postal Monopolies (sort of)

June 25, 2010 – 4:22 pm

Seth Godin discovers that stamps.com is trying to scam him out of money and asks:

How is that a sleepy, conservative organization like the postal service ends up licensing its brand to a company that can’t resist every honey pot scheme and opt out technique in the book?

I probably would have guessed something the lines of “their monopoly gives them little incentive to treat their customers well” or “they’re desperate for revenue in a changing industry” or “what do you expect from the same organization that expects me to donate food to my mailman letter carrier every year?”

Godin (whom I generally adore, by the way) suggests instead that

There’s something about the mechanics and arms-length nature of the web that just begs companies that know better to treat people in a way that they’d be humiliated to try face to face.

This might even be true, although one also could make the opposite argument that the arms-length nature of the web makes it easier to treat people well, which everyone knows is plenty challenging in person (at least for me).

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Politics Technology

Cleaning Out Elena’s Inbox

June 23, 2010 – 9:10 am

The Sunlight Foundation has set up Elena’s Inbox, a site that makes it easy[er] to browse through the dump of Elena Kagan’s Clinton-era emails.

However, it looks like they’ve certainly held something back. Can it really be that she sent no emails containing “lol” or “rofl” or “omg“?

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