Never been one to let the carrier drop

Bernie does a very good job of underlining one of the basic problems with a two party system with a third party attempting to break in.

Those of you who are students of history will remember that Clinton won his first term partially because of a man named Perot, who was also a independent with some interesting ideas. Of course, Clinton was running against Bush – and, insane as this sounds, lately we’ve had cause to feel nostalgia towards Bush. Bush was maybe not the president I would elect, but he wasn’t much of a heel (in the faces and heels speak of WWF) – he was a moderate, and is repeatedly on record as saying things which are mostly pretty reasonable.

In the meantime, this year, our election is between moderate capitolist conservitive Clinton, insane reality TV star Trump, and democratic socialist Sanders. So, another three way race. However, unlike our last three way race, in this one, the split is between Clinton (who, much as we don’t want to admit it, we can mostly live with) and Sanders (who many of us would love to have as he represents real tangible progress on a number of fronts). Meaning, if half of us vote for Clinton and half for Sanders, Trump wins.

Now, if you’re a Trump fan, I don’t really know what to say other than, why exactly do you want WWIII? But, let’s leave them out of the discussion for the moment and talk about those of us who aren’t fans of building walls and evicting people because we don’t like their religion.

If Bernie gets on the ticket somehow – either as a independent or on the Green Party or, really, any way other than by getting the Democratic nomination, we’ve got a real problem.

The problem is remarkably similar to the Prisoner’s Dilemma. I think most of us could agree that either Bernie or Clinton would be better than Trump, but we have to find some way to agree, en masse, who we’re going to vote for.

We also have to find some way to verify that we really voted for this person. In essence, I do not think the US voting network is secure or trustworthy or believable, so I want to go out on a limb here. I am suggesting we perform something not usually done. I am suggesting *every one of us* photograph our ballots and upload them all to a central repository. We’re going to have to put together something that can handle this, ideally in some decentralized (blockchains? peer to peer) manner. We are going to have to build a reliable voting network as a system for verifying that the current voting network is reliable

I also am suggesting that one way or another, if both Bernie and Hil are on the ticket, we need to all agree which direction we’re going beforehand. The very last thing we want is a 50/50 split between Hil and Bernie winning the election for Trump. At the same time, we don’t want Bernie to step down, because the things he’s saying are the things that need to be said.

More on this later.

Side note – It’s easy to see one feature we *really* should have built into the voting network – the ability to list candidates in order of preference. This would facilitate indicating that you both like Hil and Bernie better than Trump, while indicating which you would rather have elected. However, my hunch is that the whole thing is a bit of a show – just like WWF – and that in fact the powers that be run the place using entirely different methods, while keeping us distracted with the faces and heels.

Reading about Donald Trump makes me think my friend Steve is right.. I should buy some land as far away from everyone as possible.. Okay, I’m joking, but only somewhat. I read the polling numbers, and there’s more than 40% of my fellow citizens who would vote for this guy? I wonder if the people talking about ‘kicking the illegals out’ realize that the illegals are the people who are adding the most value in a lot of places – a lot of them are really hardworking folk! If you forget the bullshit money politics and look at where that strawberry actually came from, you realize that if you kicked them out, our economy would fail in large and impressive ways. Now, I’d really like it if robots were picking the strawberry and the illegals were A: legal because we’d adopted a open border policy and B: taking a siesta, but I recognize that’s still a few years out, so for the moment, please don’t kick out the people who are actually doing the work.

Trump does, however, bring up a interesting ethical question. What is your ethical responsibility if Hitler gets elected? Suppose Trump does get elected, and he starts putting Muslims in concentration camps, a la the Japanese in WWII? What form should my resistance take? Writing blog articles is probably not enough at that point.

Of course, if that does happen, I assume I’ll also be placed in a concentration camp, shortly after the secret police discover this blog on the wayback machine.

By the way, if Bernie doesn’t get elected, I will take it as a sign that it’s too soon for socialism – at some point, at some level of automation and computer science, socialism is going to become the only sane answer. At that point more than 50% of the US will, I really hope, be able to figure that out. We aren’t quite there yet – we *need* a bunch of people to work their asses off for a few more years. One thing I do love about things like Minecraft – and the web – is that it has taught millions of people to program, and millions of people to understand automation and building automated systems. Guys, there is still some work left to do before we can truly live in a socialist paradise where the only people working are the ones who want to..

http://ecowatch.com/2016/02/15/nasa-water-scarcity-drought/

Who didn’t know this was coming?

This is fixable. There are a number of steps we need to take, however.

1) The bible is not the word of God, and ‘be fruitful and multiply’ is also known as a fork bomb. Encourage people to not have children, encourage them to use birth control, encourage them to recognize the planet has a maximum carrying capacity and we are above it.

2) Take all the money away from the army, and use it to fix what’s about to come unglued. Otherwise, we can all use our armies to fight over the last drop of water, and we can all die together. Please tell me we’re not this stupid?

3) Stop being so afraid of nuclear power. Look at the number of people killed per kwh for coal, and then tell me how dangerous nukes are? The fastest desal we can throw together is cogeneration with nuclear. We can build nuclear plants that don’t melt down when they lose cooling – there’s a very long list of very promising technologies for this. Let go of the paranoia fuel and do what makes sense.

4) In areas where it’s a option, solar desalinization. It’s *insane* that SoCal doesn’t have many many megawatts of solar desal up and running.

5) Start selling synthetic meat as a option in all restaurants. ‘Natural’ meat takes many, many more resources to create, and frankly I like the synthetic stuff just as much.

6) Start planting forests, and stop cutting them down. Forests are a important part of the water cycle – they emit moisture over a very large area, helping to build the clouds that produce freshwater rain.

7) Only bottle water in places where it’s naturally plentiful

8) Ban fracking outright. In fact, ban *anything* that removes fresh water from the cycle.

9) Bump the priority on the singularity. A trillion-neuron mind might be able to see things that we, as hundred-billion-neuron-minds, can’t.

10) Learn more about moving water around. My intuition says pumping water from the middle of the country to the coasts is a bad idea – we should be pumping it the other direction until we’ve returned the system to it’s previous balance. The issue is when people in Orange County, CA water their lawns, the resulting moisture ends up blowing out to sea.

Yes, Earth is a fairly stable system that’s hard to break. But it’s not *impossible* to break, and we’d really like to run it so well that life is idyllic for most of the people here. We can learn to do this.

So, for the most part, I write this blog for myself. There are times when I hope other people will read it and respond to the ideas within it, and lately I have seen a number of the ideas that I espouse elsewhere, which I find encouraging but doesn’t necessarily mean anyone is reading and reacting to it since after all good ideas should appear spontaneously in a number of places – when it’s time to railroad, you railroad – but mostly it’s for me to look back over my thoughts and ideas.

There are times, though, when I’m a bit sad that millions of people will read books by the major pundits, but my blog is likely to never cause much in the way of server load. This month, so far, if you remove search engines, 115 megabytes of text have been pulled from my blog. That is not a lot. 70-something people have read the ‘head’ of it (I can tell because of the image I posted when I was banned by facebook), which is also not a lot. On the other paw, I guess it does mean I am free to express myself without ever worrying about whether someone is going to misinterpret what I say or it’s going to have some negative unintended consequence on the world.

While I would like it if millions of people wanted to listen to my music – especially if they wanted to pay me for the privilege – I’m not at all convinced that I want to be a political pundit.

It’s a challenge sometimes. When I think about the fact that almost certainly the last three presidents all used drugs, but none of them issued a block pardon to all drug offenders arrested for no crimes other than possession / nonviolent distribution.

I do feel a bit like we live in, increasingly, a police state. There are way too many laws, they’re way too complex and poorly written, it seems lately it’s acceptable for a cop to shoot you just because he doesn’t like the way you looked at him and he will not lose his job nor his right to carry and continue shooting innocents.

Trump feels to me like a page right out of Hitler. The same sort of hate. Why can’t we make our government stop, have a constitutional convention, make a prioritized list of everything that sucks, and figure out closed-loop results-oriented ways to make it not suck?

Part of why is politics involves some sort of insanity in humans. I swear neither party wants to hear from me. They want my money, but I am the last guy they want to talk to. I’ve sent Bernie many emails asking to just have a staffer talk to me about my ideas concerning resource allocation – even a 21 year old intern – just because I think I could convince one guy enough that I’d have a dog in the fight – and no response. In the case of Hillary and Trump I didn’t even bother because, yes, what’s the point? They both have huge things to gain from a better resource allocation system but I am guessing neither one of them knows that or is willing to find that out. I’d love to be proved wrong. I really want things to improve *massively* for people here. I just .. don’t see it. I want to see it. I’m ready to see it. But so far..

And I will admit, I have a hard time seeing the point of view of my political opponents. I just can’t wrap my head around it at all. I try, but it basically feels like they just can’t make the intellectual leaps I have and so they want me to be forced to live in a country that’s stuck at the level they can understand and believe in. And I have several people I love who are republicans.. I love them, but I don’t understand them. I’m sure it’s not that these are stupid people. I’m sure there’s another reasoning chain I could have gone down that makes their views make complete and total sense. But I didn’t go down it, and un-learning what I know now would be a challenge.

So, I think most people who know me know that I hate organized education with a passion.

The part I hate most is the grades – measuring people and telling them they’re not good enough – but I also hate the curriculum (look, just let them learn about whatever they want whenever they want. You’ll be shocked at how good the results are!) and the lack of certain very obvious subject matters in the curriculum (if you must have a set list of things for them to learn, learning how to learn should be first, followed by learning cognitive distortions and tools like nonviolent communication, followed by learning about common human failings such as the milgram effect).

Another part I hate – no big surprise – is standardized testing. I do have a suggestion for something we could do instead.

Non-standardized testing.

Basically, the idea would be to come up with challenges – such as, here’s a microcontroller kit, get it to control this robot to push this ball into this goal, here’s a 3d printer, get it to print out something you like – here’s a movie camera, shoot a movie as a class – here’s some musical instruments, record a album – here’s a mcdonalds, run it for a day without losing money.. here’s a patch of dirt, can you raise a edible crop? .. one can imagine all sorts of real-world challenges that would make great ‘are you a adaptable human being?’ tests.

It would be hard to give things a numerical score, for sure, but you would undoubtedly find out if the kids were learning how to work together in teams, how to learn new things, how to tackle unexpected challenges – in other words, whether they’re learning the types of skills that really matter once you get out in the world.

Since standardized tests are supposed to be used to find out if the school is passing or failing, I think the unstandardized ones would do just as well. And they’d be a much better use of resources. You definitely get bonus points for a test that the student learns something meaningful from.

As a side note, one of the things that most makes me want to say “You all fail learning forever” is hearing about things like IEPs (for the uninitiated, that is a Individual Education Plan). Look, you will get MUCH better results if you *don’t plan*! Education isn’t something you plan. It’s something you do. Sure, you might want a sketch of a plan, and some data points would help, but a teacher planning education is forgetting that in the most effective and fun education, the student is in the driver’s seat.

When we purchase water, there’s sort of a unspoken compact that we’re part of a closed loop system. We’re not going to pollute this water grossly and then lock it up far outside the water table, we’re going to use it and return it via the sewer system to be, in essence, recycled. Earth is based on a closed water cycle, which I’m sure you all learned about in grade school. The people who are fracking are opening that water cycle up – rendering the water uncleanable by mixing it with extremely disturbing chemicals, then locking it up deep in the earth.

These people should be paying *enormously* more per gallon. Water is the most valuable liquid in the world and they are, in essence, reducing our total available fresh water. A $10/gallon tariff doesn’t sound outrageous under the circumstances.

So, despite my best intentions to stay as far away from the news as possible (on the theory that there’s very little I can do to improve the situation, and that generally the news is going to bring me down) I have lately been somewhat more immersed than usual in recent happenings.

One of the problems with the Baltemore riots is that I can so clearly see both sides. I don’t really blame the police – in fact, I feel sorry for the police. I blame the system that put them in this situation. The system that over and over protected cops who had clearly done wrong, and worse yet, the system that loves to punish, that thinks the best thing we can do to a criminal is lock them in a cold, scary box for years.

I don’t think I can adequately explain how dumb this is. Yes, take someone who’s probably already mentally ill, and give them a real legitimate reason to hate the rest of us. Then when you let him out, I’m sure he’ll be a much better citizen. Even scarier, add a profit motive to imprisoning people (I foolishly watched Cash For Kids, and now there’s a part of me that wants to rip apart the entire criminal justice system brick by brick).

Increasingly I wonder if we as a species have decided that we deserve to be in hell, and have decided to try and build it. Things like the drug war – yes, let’s criminalize wanting to feel good! That makes a lot of sense! Let’s give every cop a reason to suspect every citizen, and vice versa. Let’s lie to the population, even though we know we’re going to get caught lying to them, to make absolutely sure that the citizens don’t trust the government – and let’s make it neon sign clear that the government does not trust the citizens.

I would love a exit strategy from Earth. There are a lot of wonderful things.. like puppies and kittens and sex and love and music.. but the place has gotten so scary. There are so many rules, so many forms to fill out, and it seems like it gets more complicated every day. And, there are so many people who are either impressively stupid or impressively underinformed. When people talk about what the government can afford to do, they measure in the totally broken resource allocation system we call “money” instead of in real tangible resources like man hours, kilowatt hours, and metals and food. Our resource allocation system manages to mask the fact that we have the resources to feed, clothe, and house everyone, especially when you take into account the wonders we can do using automation.

But, instead.. how am I not supposed to be afraid of the police when I see them on the news killing innocent people, and a cop doesn’t even lose his right to carry if he shoots a innocent civilian – often, he gets a paid vacation! How am I not supposed to be afraid of a government that thinks it needs to *UPGRADE* it’s ICBMs? That thought that fission weapons weren’t enough, we need *fusion* weapons. That appears to have no concept in what a sensible government would be doing to prepare for the future – instead of pouring money into space, and energy research, and automation of food production, and desalinization – is convinced the winning strategy is to maintain the biggest army in the world so it can fight for the last drop of oil (and, increasingly I suspect, the last drop of water).

Our government does a *grave* disservice to our guardians. They are supposed to be *OUR* guardians, and we are supposed to live in *our* town, on *our* planet. We are supposed to feel pride when we see them standing in the street, knowing they keep *our* laws and *our* systems working. But instead – the government makes so many laws, and so many of them are boneheaded, that I can’t honestly tell you if I committed a crime today or not. I don’t *think* I did.. but with hundreds of thousands of pages of rules, who can tell?

Have the people who write our laws never heard of KISS? Or, as I mentioned above, are they actively *trying* to build hell? That’s not even getting into the mess that is relationships in the modern world, or family in the modern world. Why is everything so broken?

Part of what I don’t understand is how the cops don’t understand humanity at last has a central nervous system that they don’t and can’t control. If they kill innocents, word is going to get out, because we have the internet and everyone is carrying a video camera. The only way the current situation can end is either de-escalation or civil war. De-escalation is going to have to involve freeing a lot of prisoners, as well, and figuring out how we’re going to afford to build real mental hospitals that actually fix people to run all of them through. Not to mention, it’s going to take the government getting down on it’s knees to the citizens and saying “We’re sorry.”

I could gesture you to all sorts of forms of brokenness.. from the idea that it’s okay to force children into a “learn what we tell you to” system and then *grade them* and tell most of them they’re not good enough – to the idea that there’s a God of Entrapment, who’s just setting you up to be tortured for all eternity if you do things that feel good. (I’m looking at you, Mormons and certain brands of Christians!). The idea that we’re all so awful that anyone would have to “die for our sins” – that’s a incredibly unhealthy, not to mention insane, thing to believe.

But I don’t *want* to see a civil war between the cops and the citizens.. there are moments when I’m so angry that I can understand why people would take up arms against the government, but most of the time I remember that 9 out of every 10 cops I have met have been good, hardworking people trying to hold it together, and that someone doesn’t stop being human, with feelings and needs, when they put on a uniform and strap on a gun.

And the truth of the matter is, I *want* *GOOD* guardians. I want to be able to say with pride “I don’t need a gun, because these people carry them and they do a good job of keeping the peace”. I want to feel like it’s not true that jails are meant to punish, and run for profit. I want to feel like it’s not true that the only way you have a chance to not go to jail if you are mentally ill is if you have a good job and a lot of money for lawyers.

I *know* we have it within us to make earth far more utopian than dystopian. I have seen the work of our hands and the work of our minds. But we need to throw out religion, and we need to throw out money in favor of a better and more functional resource allocation system, and we need to start making this a place that we would *want* to come to. We need to start remembering that everyone here is, at least in some sense, our friend and fellow traveler.

I have often been tempted to write Speedycop (a police officer who drives at Lemons) a letter asking what he thinks about all this. I am convinced, perhaps without rational reason, that he is a good guardian. Most of my logic here is that he has demonstrated excellent craftsmanship and a great sense of humor, and it’s hard for me to believe that he could be such a good person on the track and be a bad person on his day job. I just don’t see him shooting innocents or beating them. I wonder, do the bad cops scare the good cops? I also suspect that maybe the cops protect their own because they *know* the criminal justice system is fucked and as a result sending people to jail breaks them worse. I have to wonder why, in that case, they arrest anyone – the Milgram effect maybe?

I’m going to leave you all with a sketch of a track I’m working on.. ultimately I hope to make this a song about the cold war, and about the prisoner’s dilemma and two tribes meeting in a forest, as more of a rock song, but this is more a orchestral, movie soundtrack kind of cut. And I’d like to dedicate it to the idea that maybe we could stop making Earth hell-like.

Two Sides