Updated at least 3x/week. Pseudo-intellectual rants. Ecology – Ecosophy – Food Science – Linguistics – Computer Science
Today, I had to see what all the buzz was about. Me and my wife saw Avatar in 3D before she had to go to work. The 3D was a nice effect, but after over two hours of that, I had pretty bad motion sickness getting out of the theater. I think I’d enjoy the movie more minus the nausea.
spoiler alert ** do not continue if you don’t want the plot revealed (this is really intended reading for people who watched the movie anyway, not a proper review; I don’t do movie reviews)
There is a deep, serious flaw in our tax system – it is too damn complicated. Which is to say, administrative costs dig in to what revenue it brings in and it is spurious (which means it is unfair). Whatever incentives and breaks might be won for the sake of the lower classes, there is an inherent bias in favor of those who can afford good accountants. Also, the process of having a governmental cash-ectomy would at least be less painful if it was quick.
There are a number of tax reforms, mostly proposed by the Right, to make things “fair” (same law applies to everyone) and simple. Some of them are quite ingenious and appealing, but I’ll explain why they all suck and mine is better (even though I’m not an economist… I hope a real economist gets a hold of the idea and fills in the cracks). I for one am not a right-winger (quite the opposite) but rather I think like a programmer. Where I see spaghetti code, I want to untie it and I see more spaghetti in our legal system than in an Italian restaurant (zing!)
This taxes products at the end of the value chain – when purchased by the end-user. This replaces all the complicated mess of even paying taxes with a tax on final goods sold. The beautiful part is ordinary people don’t have to fill out paperwork. If you own a business, you simply have to pay the sales tax on what you sell. Genius. One problem with this is that, naturally, as you get richer, the proportion of your money you use to buy things decreases (the likes of MC Hammer and Steve Martin’s character in The Jerk notwithstanding). In this way, it disproportionately taxes the poor. FairTax partially gets around this through (p)rebates to families based on income.
On the Wikipedia article, you’ll see this picture. Yeah, that’s what I mean by untying spaghetti code. All those books are our current tax code, and that man is holding FairTax. Awesome.
I believe this was Milton Friedman’s brainchild or at least he’s commonly associated with it. I think it sort of fell out of fashion among Libertarians in to FairTax, but it is also a good system. You pay the government a fixed percentage of your income, minus a fixed amount, the percentage and amount being the same for _everyone_. If it happens to be a negative amount (which happens if your income divided by the percentage is less than the fixed amount), the government pays you. Your tax is a linear equation. If you took math in middle school you are halfway to being a CPA. Awesome.
The system is, however, likely to be a lightning rod for fraud. Tax evasion now is simply a loss of income for the government (and therefor taxpayers), but if you could convince the government you make nothing, you automatically receive welfare. This also still has the disadvantage of making every citizen go through the trouble of filling their taxes. Okay, next.
Now to my proposal, EcoTax. Turn FairTax on its head. Instead of only taxing things at the end-product level, we only tax raw materials as they are taken out of the Earth. We’re not talking about any tariffs right now, since that’s complicated and really another subject. As far as product created within America is concerned, the tax is at the beginning and it’s up to these primary producers (homotrophes, to use an analogy to ecology) to increase their prices to offset their costs. In this way, the costs of things to a greater degree reflect their true ecological costs. This would naturally mean no subsidies for farmers (rather, they would be taxed for the water and soil they use).
The way EcoTax would work is this: the EPA would be given a new job assess the degrees to which various natural resources are renewable, the degree to which various activities are harmful to human health, etc. They will make no fiscal decision, but rather calculate a schedule of ratios. The income needed by the government to meet its operations and economic predictions will be factored in to create a multiplier. The taxes for the different activities will simply be the ratio in question times the grand multiplier. It’s so simple. The only thing an accountant needs is the latest copy of this (which the government should supply as a free PDF, too). Perhaps the government could supply free software with source code for this purpose to make it even simpler. The important thing is for the ratios to not be politically determined or for other concerns to be taken into account (that’s the job of politicians setting fiscal policy on how to use revenue and what to set the multiplier to).
Note this is related to the idea of Ecotax (or Pigovian taxes in general), but it’s different (you can tell because I capitalize the T). The best way to summarize the difference is this: I propose the only tax being Ecotaxes and the rationale is slightly different. The capital in the free market is derived from two main sources – labor and natural resources. I say you own that which your labor created, but that which is derived from our common natural heritage or which clearly has a negative externality you don’t truly own. Certainly, no one owns the atmosphere, though a section of it will be on your land at any given time and a part of the water table, which you also don’t own, may happen to be under your property. I don’t want to get into the specifics of well rights, etc, but just to point out the obvious fact that, as aging hippie douche would say “you can’t own the ocean, man!”
EcoTax isn’t meant to be the panacea of environmental protection. Rather, we’re removing the artificial economic incentive to destroy that which you do not own. Protecting our species’ viability, wild places, natural habitats and so on cannot rely entirely on the government. Indeed, to the degree people value these things (which they should), they shall donate to private charities that buy up land, such as the Nature Conservancy. The government must not force people to be eco-conscious (it’s not the government’s job to make people do the right thing all the time), but to protect that which is everyone’s property from the few.
The biggest drawback I can see with this is there may be a drop in revenue unless the multiplier is set high enough to put some good companies out of business. There should be a transition period where the old scheme is slowly replaced with the new to give people a chance to switch to other industries. There could temporarily be harsher tariffs against countries that use too much farming subsidies to give our companies enough time to compensate, then the tariffs must be dropped again. This may also make things hard on small farmers, but that could be remedied by in the short term paying for Dutch farmers to teach Americans better efficient farming techniques. A purist Libertarian may scoff at the idea that government intervention is needed to counter the ill effects of government intervention, but it is a fact. “Government intervention” refers to too broad a category for that scoff to be taken at face value.
You’ve all heard the social libertarian/liberal arguments for gay marriage. Tolerance, equal rights, blah blah. They are important and I believe in them, but they are the reasons I support gay marriage being legal. There are many things I believe shall be legal but do not approve of. It is clearly wrong to cheat on one’s spouse, yet few would be so paternalistic (un-libertarian) as to say that such a thing is the government’s business, for example. However, not only do I support gay marriage being legal on basic social libertarian grounds, I approve of gay marriage and these reasons why are what I call my conservative argument for gay marriage. Of course, no one needs my approval to get married, but that’s getting back to the standard liberal arguments you’ve already heard. Continue reading ‘A [Mostly] Conservative Argument for Gay Marriage’
I was in the book store last weekend (one of my favorite places, of course!) and looking through the biology section to see if there’s something else I should read for the fun of it. As usual, the Biology section contains things that should be filed under “politics” or “fiction” – the likes of Dembsky and Behe – that have to be sifted through to find actual science books (I’m tempted by Gould’s outrageously thick “The Structure of Evolutionary Theory”… maybe after I finish another bio class or so…) One of these mis-filed political tomes was The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism... Now, I’ve seen that cover a million times and never thought much of it, other than what any rational thinking person would think, “yeah, withhold the politically,” but there’s another outrageous claim embedded in the title that occurred to me – the notion that natural selection is politically correct or in any way liberal.
Creationists and their ilk make this claim that Darwinism is a liberal conspiracy almost in the same breath as saying that it justified social Darwinism, a nebulous term except in that it refers exclusively to Right-wing ideologies. I have to ask – which is it? Liberals are all kinds of things but we’re certainly not social Darwinists. The answer is it is not a liberal conspiracy, but there were individuals who committed the naturalistic fallacy (deriving an ought from an is) and advocated modeling society after evolution – a mindless process that produces mostly extinctions and a lot of misery and pain. Take a breath. A bunch of animals throughout the world just met their bloody end to the claw. The theory of natural selection tells us how things got the way they are, but it’s certainly no model on how things ought to be – it’s the reason why Darwin’s rottweiler, Dawkins, says, “I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to the science of how life has actually evolved, but a passionate ANTI-Darwinian when it comes to the politics of how humans ought to behave.” Indeed. Remember – a fact can never be good or evil, but almost always useful. At worst, a fact is of little use. That is the underlying philosophy behind science. It would only ever break down if we were living in a Lovecraftian universe where the truth drives men mad.
“Fair enough,” you might say, “well-meaning liberals are planting the seeds of social Darwinism because they’re a bunch of Godless atheists and their atheism is the reason they want to teach Darwinism.” Yes, the headwaters of this notion that there is something liberal about Darwinism must be the association with atheism. I don’t know if anyone told these guys, but most liberals (in America, anyway) are not atheists. In being an atheist, I am unusual among liberals (though that’s the least of my divergence with mainstream liberals). Don’t confuse “secular” with “atheist”. Secular is a rather broad term that includes non-religious people as well as religious people who don’t believe society should be centered around religion. Liberals don’t want to hurt people’s feelings; this is the essence of what “politically correct” means. They don’t want to tell people that their own culture’s beliefs are wrong. This leads me to my last point here – the biggest threat to students getting a good education in “sensitive” subjects, beyond the barriers that might otherwise exist for any subject, isn’t creationists, but overly careful, well-meaning, politically-correct liberal teachers.
VOA News – Japan Enters New Era in Crushing Election Rebuke of Ruling Party
Unprecedented. Will this be the end to denial of World War II atrocities (which, admittedly, is rampant in the West, where we insist we did nothing because we were the “good guys”), ama kurari, corporatism (a mix of evil mercantilism with just enough capitalism to shut up all the people who should really oppose it), environmental destruction and unequal rights? Japanese people have a love for nature that is beyond what we typically see in the West, yet the admittedly strong environmentalist movement hasn’t had enough affect on the actual political institutions.
I would love to see an opinion poll on this, but I have yet to see any, but when I went around interviewing young Japanese people, they all seemed to be for gay marriage and even ridiculed us Americans for letting religion into politics (which they don’t do, even though the Sokka Gakkai has its own party). Of course, they were stumped when I asked them why they don’t have gay marriage.. well, with an openly post-op transsexual congresswoman who has been reelected, the progressive party (relatively speaking, which unfortunately doesn’t say much… at least one of the parties under their fold are progressive) in power, and a long tradition of not being morally opposed to homosexuality, I think Japan may do what many of my Japanese friends and my wife insist are impossible any time soon and legalize gay marriage.
There is also the issue of Ama Kudari (天下り), where corrupt politicians funnel public funds into some pointless project that makes some company a lot of money, then retire from politics to have a “job” at that company where they do nothing and get the kickback for their “service” to the company. Is not this corporatism at it’s ugliest, a perfect example of the “parasitic” class? Well, this is one practice the Democratic Party promised to put an end to. Here’s hoping this puts an end to Japan’s stagnation. No political party or alliance should hold on power as long as the LDP has, its results being obvious.
It seems the likes of Urban Outfitters and Hot Topic have a pretty foolproof formula – sell things that remind people in their 20s of their childhood and they’ll think it’s “cool” and buy it up. Actually, this music video is kinda cool, but I almost feel like they didn’t come up with the idea of making music using NES’s sound chip (probably..) and representing pixels with Legos. Rather, the idea was just floating in the air already (you know, like all of my “original” ideas).
Explain how a group could be said to have rights that could in any way trump individuals’ rights.
There is a tribe of Asian pygmies called the T’rung – the only of a kind (all other pygmy groups are either Sub-Saharan African or Australoid/Oceanic). There are very few left and I don’t know the number, but let’s say for argument’s sake, there are only 10 left. Which is worse, killing all 10 of them or killing 100 Han Chinese people (who have no risk of perishing as an ethnic group from a mere 100 deaths)? It seems obvious to me, the answer is killing 100 people is worse than killing 10 people. The only thing that could differentiate between one death and another would be the circumstances (I’d rather be one of Stalin’s dead than Hitler’s death camp dead). Arne Naess, in his Ecosophy T doesn’t even hold species to hold rights, though he is of course the biggest advocate of preserving biodiversity for its own ends, not only ours.
Can races have rights? I think not, but a lot of people all over the political spectrum (united in their racialism) seem to think otherwise. Why should the Holocaust only refer to the half (or less, depending on the estimate) that were killed that happened to be Jewish? Why do racialists of every color and type cringe at the sight of miscegenation? Explain or forever hold your peace!
I have an idea. It’s probably not original and, in fact, if others have advanced it, I hope to find if there are any writings on it in case others have already had good ideas how to implement it. If my idea is original then, well, the task falls on me to do so. Here it is:
The government is the one entity in our society that is required by the law to have elections. We can brush aside for now the fact that it is only a representative democracy (or a polyarchy) and that citizens residing in possessions cannot vote because our system allows, and human nature tends to create, other entities that, while not as powerful as the government, exert control of some form or another over members or stakeholders and these entities are not required to hold any sort of election. It is true that even when freedoms are guaranteed, people enslave themselves (religion) and are enslaved by others by their own consent (large corporations, trade unions, churches, etc.) It seems to be much can be done to increase liberty given this with the minimal change in laws (it’s major, but not as major as tearing down the government, for example) and minimal disruption in the economy (again, relatively) by requiring entities that are supposed to represent people to hold elections.
What it is that should be voted on and who can vote are details that requires much thought. Different organizations are organized differently and this would have the side effect of probably requiring organizations to organize in a certain way as mandated by the law to be able to be in compliance with it. It might also have the unfortunate side-effect of organizations becoming more closed (Imagine the [valid!] fear a church might have of people swarming into it from a rival sect to install someone from their own sect into power). I am not sure what the answer is to these issues, but one “negative” consequence I like is that it would discourage larger organizations since part of the plan would have to be a lower threshold in size before the law applies to you. In a sea of laws that benefit big business and hurt small business, it would be nice to give individuals an incentive to have their own businesses and even an incentive for larger businesses to encourage employees to start their own service business and become a supplier. This phenomenon that you see a lot in the silicone valley is very positive and one I hope can happen throughout corporate America. The communist’s dream of people owning their own means of labor is best served w/ capitalism, just not statist capitalism.
I know that under many left-libertarian systems, there would of course be direct democracy in the smaller units of organization (like, anarcho-syndicalism and communism). What I would propose, however, would be a possible compromise between such a system and what we have through the addition of a law to the effect of “entities representing individuals over the size of X members shall be required to hold transparent elections over [who's in power or whatever else would be deemed necessary for the entity in question].” I also must make it clear that I don’t think voters micromanaging a company is good from an economic perspective. When something comes up to a vote or a comittee decision, the result is usually bad. My aim is to lessen the power any entity has over its constituents, be it the government or something else, and let people mostly govern themselves. Voters in a corporation will probably want to vote in a representative who will balance keeping the company afloat with maintaining woker compensation, among other things. CEOs who would want to avoid this scenario would be advised to outsource labor rather than directly hire workers. Think how Toyota makes their parts (they don’t, independent small businesses do), rather than how the assemble the actual cars. Autonomy is better than democracy, but democracy is better than nothing and, again, libertarian capitalism is the shorter route to people owning their own means of production than attempts to “bring down” the power houses of the economy – the rich.
Any thoughts on the mandatory democracy idea?
Abortion is latest controversy in health overhaul – Yahoo! News
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again until it sticks – there aren’t enough folks on the left in mainstream politics who are suspicious of big government. Obama is right in seeing the problem as Americans not being able to make ends meet and us having one of the worst systems in the first world (a healthy economy is of instrumental importance), but where money flows, money controls. No legislation should be pursued that can be used for bad in the future. I can’t help but think that a combination of government crowding out the market’s solutions and someone in a cowboy hat then controlling the government could lead to an effective reduction in women’s reproductive rights. If libs aren’t suspicious of big government, just remind them that a spotted owl puncher shall be at the helm again, eventually, and that Afro-JFK will eventually have to step down (unless this bill passes, though let’s face it, presidents get so beat up anyway that he wouldn’t get a 3rd term anyway).
There are plans to strike a compromise, but money has an amazing ability to steer peoples’ decisions. It’s good that the government doesn’t pay for abortions. Those who don’t support abortion should only have to live with it being legal, not endorsing it with dollars, but when such a democratically controlled entity that must stick to these politically mandated restrictions wishes to crowd out a private sector that doesn’t, the result is likely the opposite of what we who value civil liberties want.
</short rant>
…and, for that matter, that of following the ass in front of you.
Every evening, when I’m driving home from my job in Baldwin Park, there is a long line to get onto the 210E from the 605. The on-ramp is metered, so it takes forever and the line is very, very long. I need to go the same way, but I find that by simply getting on the next exit off the other direction and then heading East, I can avoid the congestion and get ahead of all those suckers. But the thing is, the next exit is no secret. In fact, you can see it from the 210 on-ramp and, pretty far into the line, still move one lane over to get in! So, why do people stay in the line? Because they’ve been in the line for 10 minutes by the time they realize how very long the line is, and at that point they’re “committed”. Ah, but what does that mean? There is still an opportunity to cut your losses and take the time-saving long-cut, yet people don’t because they are more loss-averse than anything else. This irrational behavior can be seen in the stock market, in management, and in Moby Dick (disclaimer: I’ve never read the book, but I think I get the gist of it).
Ah, there’s some more irrationality – that of following the ass in front of you. Since everyone else is staying in the line at all costs, it seems like an okay choice to do so yourself, but that would be a bad choice – you are instead wasting your time! When the 15 going up to the Cajon Pass is slow, you’ll notice that no one takes the exits to take the surface streets unless people are already doing so, in which case nearly everyone is doing it. In either case, going against the flow is to your advantage, but yet strongly against human nature.
You’ve probably heard all the post-mortems.. so far, most of the ones I have seen have missed some obvious and important points. We know that the No on 8 campaign waged an unsophisticated war, talking only to the cerebrum in typical liberal fashion and not fully answering the more outrageous claims made by the opposition. But what really was the head-water to a campaign failing to stop something that appeared sure to fail from passing? They played it too safe, that’s what.
It’s well-known that gays give most people the heebie-geebies. That’s the true cause of most opposition to same-sex marriage (the theological excuse is created ex-post-facto). Knowing this, the campaign decided not to mention or ever even show anything about gays or same-sex couples. Big mistake. The opposition showed children (sleazy, sleazy, sleazy) and raised fears that children would be hurt. Only by showing actual humans whose lives will be affected negatively could the anti-8 people have won. Showing gays would have been risky, but the alternative, relying only on logically sound but emotionally uninspired arguments (“no one’s rights should be taken away”), could not possibly have succeeded. If you want to see how an emotional campaign could have worked, please see letcaliforniaring.org. Yes, it was in magazines, but did the official campaign put anything like that on TV? no. Do the gays and lesbians in those ads repulse you? I don’t think so. And even if they do, I’m certain you feel for them and see why the word “marriage” just might be important to them.
The other way they played it too safe is by not answering the claims made by the yes on 8 camp fully. Doing so would raise other issues and possibly alienate some people. But yet again, not making the risk was a mistake. The only faction that matters is people in the middle. Alienating extreme religious conservatives with arguments like “religion should not rule” should be considered a non-issue. Indeed, Americans’ fear of religious extremism could’ve been played, had they not played it safe… The yes on 8 campaign raised fear that gay marriage would be taught in school. You know, school is there to teach tolerance and naturally is not going to teach sex (gay marriage is no more an adult subject than straight marriage…children do understand attraction!) The no on 8 camp could not say any of these obvious rebuttals. Why? Because they naïvely thought they could get the votes of people who believe schools should not teach tolerance. Foolish!
The safe path was “no matter how you feel about marriage…”, which is logical. However, it is clear that people who feel gay marriage is immoral will vote against it. The populous, sadly, doesn’t grasp basic libertarian principles. So, the only way is to shoot the moon and try to change people’s hearts, not just their minds. Here’s hoping that gay rights becomes the rare civil rights issue that can be won at the polls (next time), rather than relying on judges to slap the people’s wrist and say “no, that’s a bad American people. stop taking your own rights away.”
I am voting for Obama. Not because he’s [half] Black, but because I think he’s intelligent, positive, energetic. In neither party do I find the right candidate from my perspective – the Democrats aren’t socially liberal enough and the Republicans aren’t “fiscally conservative” enough (I hardly call their corporate wellfare free-market capitalism anyway). But Obama’s someone who will lead are more intelligent foreign policy and just might bring back the respect we used to have around the world. As always, the practical – and moral – thing to do is ‘the right man for the right job.’ I hope you vote for who you think is the right person, too.
In any event, it’s not all that spectacular that we’ll have a Black president, because our current president is not only America’s, but the world’s, first monkey president. Now, they started letting chimpanzees become congressmen in parts of Africa (research shows that chimpanzees are, in fact, smart enough to be congressman) but monkey AND president is unprecedented. Those chimp congressman, by the way, have shown themselves to be among the lest corrupt politicians known to man.
これは日本のアイヌのことの番組である。アナウンサーは英語で調べてるけど、会見はだいたい日本語である。
日本人さん、アイヌのことどう思っていますか？
…isn’t ecocentrism. It’s just that the ecosphere is too damn strong.
Yes, anthropocentric “stewardship” type thinking can learn from ecocentrism. For example, between two species that are facing undue (anthropogenic…but why isn’t it undue if it’s aviogenic? hmmm) early extinction, we find that environmental movements go for the more charismatic species, rather than the one that is more important in its ecosystem or that can be saved with fewer resources (though it may be easier to drum up support, getting funds for more charismatic species).
This is why I’m ecocentric (at least up to a point), but believe the primary reasons for environmentalism are anthropocentric. There are very few things we could do that would severely put life as a whole on serious jeopardy. Countless terrestrial natural disasters have failed to wipe the slate completely clean and, if anything, created the opportunities needed for our species to come into existence. But it would be terrible if our population growth decreased each individual’s quality of life and robbed humanity of untouched natural habitats to heal individuals who wish to partake. It would be terrible if all the cute animals went extinct.
But more than just “it being terrible if life quality dropped and there were no more hiking trails,” call me a homo sapiens chauvinist, but I don’t want us to go extinct. We’re exactly the kind of animal that is at risk here… and that is why “we are stewards” is absolutely wrong thinking. If we’re in control, then a better analogy is we’re steering a ship and even a sense of self-preservation shall make us want to make sure we don’t hit a rock (one good thing about this analogy.. we can do better than nature! the ecosphere has failed repeatedly to prevent asteroids, but our missiles and nukes might fill in).
Open Source » Blog Archive » Dan Ariely: Confronting Irrationality
Here’s a good talk on radio open source (an island of interestingness in a vast sea of trying to make a routine election sound like an earth-shaking event – it’s not, people!!!) Ariely talks about how we should take into account limits of human rationality when deciding public policy and dealing with disputes. This is a pretty obvious idea, yet no one seems to be willing to accept it. Why? Is it creepy to think of our brains as somehow flawed? His analogy of how we make mittens for hands prone to cold to how we should adjust policy to how brains really work (not outmoded models about how they work) is quite apt.
This science of studying human irrationality (psychology, heh), combined with recent advances in game theory, represent a new frontier in bringing about positive social change. Social philosophies are no longer bounded to primitive psychology and sociology that is just-almost-right-but-not-quite. Marx’s logic was quite sound, but he missed important points about human nature. Now that we are understanding more and more where people make solid decisions and where they don’t, and we have models for how games are played rationally with competing interests, we can develop theories of history that are for once accurate! We can harness the same forces that make Americans obese and put them to positive use (like making Americans thin).
The flip side is that these sciences also represent new frontiers in controlling people. It’s no secret that businesses use consumer irrationality to derive profit (supersize for 50 cents.. you don’t really want all that extra food and yet…) and missionaries utilize the fact that a vast distance between carrot and stick convinces absolutely, even without a shred of evidence for the carrot nor the stick (there I go knocking on missionaries again. I’m on a roll!) and so on… People are pretty immune to these things once the trick is discovered, but I can’t help but fear for what will happen when the tyrannical entities of the world (like the “People’s” Republic of China) become all the more sophisticated…
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