No point in voting

I was hoping to vote absentee for Barak Obama in the general election in the state I last lived in, Utah. I was shocked and saddened to learn from WIkipedia that all but two states have a winner-take-all system for allocating their electoral college votes.

Therefore, as Utah is a firm red state, my vote would not count.

Sometimes I don't understand the world. While I'm sitting here in my little blog space dreaming about how nice it would be to have a fair voting system for leadership elections, something like cardinal/range voting or condorcet/ranked pairs, the rest of the American people don't care about their vote enough to demand an end to winner-take-all elections, let alone the electoral college. While I dream of a congress elected by direct representation, the American people consciously pigeonhole themselves into only two categories, "Democrat" and "Republican".

They seem content with a two-party system in which neither party cares very much about reducing poverty, defending the constitution, playing fair on the world stage, or acting ethically according to a wholistic worldview. While only the Republicans are especially known for their taste for war, their focus helping the rich and their disregard for the constitution, the Democrats on the whole seem to acquiesce to such things. Many say this is because the Democrats are spineless; I don't think so. I worry they don't fight these things because they don't care that much. And the majority of Americans ever continue not to demand better. The majority is not just silent, but apathetic.

And I don't know why. After 7.5 years under George Bush, 70% (only 70%?) of the people have finally figured out that his performance is not worthy of their approval. Many even disapprove. But who is taking notice that Bush's policies require, and have historically required, the assent of Congress and a lack of critical examination from the media? How is it that so many people follow after John McCain when he has been uncritical toward Mr. Bush and wants, for the most part, to continue his policies?

Barak Obama may yet win the election. But the strength of the Republicans in the race is disheartening.

I am most of all baffled by the strong degree to which Latter-day saints support everything Republican, even Neoconservative Republicanism. As a Mormon myself I am horrified by the Republican and Neoconservative ideologies. Detaining people without charge, without trial, without rights in Guantanamo Bay? Manipulating the media and lying to the American people about weapons of mass destruction, linking Al Qaeda to Iraq, causing a war that costs 720 million dollars a day, a war that has killed more Americans than 9/11, a war that resulted in the deaths of as many as 655,000 Iraqis, a war that has harmed America's economy? Running an illegal domestic spying program whose scope is still secret, and then demanding that huge telecom companies be granted retroactive immunity from the law for helping run it? Sowing confusion among the people by habitually using spin, misrepresentation, and ignorance of fact? Failing to do anything whatsoever about genocide in Darfur?

Admittedly, the Democrats did nothing about the Rwandan genocide, so Mormons can't be expected to vote for them on that account. And admittedly Republicans are not in favor of abortion or gay marriage, so in some ways it fits with our religion. But if you took anything home from the Book of Mormon, it should have been that war is bad. That God never goes with you when you go to war in order to pillage other lands. In the Book of Mormon I see a progressive Nephite nation that was ahead of its time in recognizing the value of freedom and liberty. A nation that had a lot of defense spending only because it had to defend itself frequently, not because Halliburton and Lockheed Martin needed to maintain a large workforce and steady profits. Regarding the Republicans' low regard for the constitution and civil liberties, haven't church leaders expressed their beliefs that the constitution was inspired of God? Regarding media manipulation and yes, lying, to cause the war--I think there is something in the ten commandments about that.

By the way, if you still aren't convinced that the case for war was not made merely by stretching the truth but was, in fact, a big lie promoted with a major media campaign, then watch this program, "Buying the War", by Bill Moyers on PBS (transcript). After seeing this program, you might ask yourself how men like Bill Kristol and Richard Pearle can still be treated as men of credibility and even integrity in the press.

You cannot separate the actions of the Bush Administration from the Republican party, because Republican congresspeople have supported his policies all along, continue to do so today, and never apologize for their past actions.

Isn't this war and this assault on the constitution a greater evil than abortion, or gay marriage? Is the Republicans opposition to these things even relevant, given that the Republican congress did not ban abortion or gay marriage? On what basis should Mormons be opposed to universal access to medical care? I cannot parse Utah's continuing support for these things. The nature of people in general, I suppose, is something I will just never understand. Why do people ignore the big issues to focus on the small ones?

Time magazine invents the facts

No matter how corrupt and sloppy the establishment press becomes, they always find a way to go lower. Time Magazine has just published what it purports to be a news article by Massimo Calabresi claiming that "nobody cares" about the countless abuses of spying powers by the Bush administration; that "Americans are ready to trade diminished privacy, and protection from search and seizure, in exchange for the promise of increased protection of their physical security"; and that the case against unchecked government surveillance powers "hasn't convinced the people." Not a single fact -- not one -- is cited to support these sweeping, false opinions.

Click the title to read more.

Cut it out, David Plouffe

I like Barack Obama and I plan to vote for him in the general election. And because I donated to his campaign, I get mass mails from Barack and his campaign manager, David Plouffe, designed to convince me to give more and do more for the campaign. The language of emails signed by Obama, for the most part, tend to sound similar to his public statements. But sometimes Plouffe's emails use questionable statements to rile up supporters. A March 20 email stated:

Senator Clinton and Senator McCain are reading from the same political playbook as they attack Barack on foreign policy.

They have both criticized Barack's commitment to act against top al Qaeda terrorists if others can't or won't act.

And they have both dismissed his call for renewed diplomacy as naïve while mistakenly standing behind George Bush's policy of non-engagement that just isn't working.

Actually, both of them have a tendency to rephrase the other candidates' statements in their own words, without proving enough information for me to look up what they actually said. But surely McCain and Clinton didn't really criticize "Barack's commitment to act against top al Qaeda terrorists"?

And consider this email of March 25:

In February alone, more than 94% of our donors gave in amounts of $200 or less. Meanwhile, campaign finance reports show that donations of $200 or less make up just 13% of Senator McCain's total campaign funds, and only 26% of Senator Clinton's.

Wow, it looks like Obama has 7 times as much grassroots support as McCain! That's what Mr. Plouffe would have supporters believe. But if you read closely, he's comparing two very different statistics: the McCain statistic does not measure the percent of donations $200 or less. It measures the percent of total campain funds from such donations, which is a totally different story.

Since I don't know where to find the complete statistics, let us assume for the sake of argument that the average over-$200 donation to Barack's campaign is $1000, and that the average under-$200 donation is $100. Let us assume the same thing for McCain's campaign. Now, with some algebra, we can figure out the missing statistics:

• On average, although 94% of Barack's supporters gave $100, 6% gave $1000. So donations under $200 make up 61% of his total campaign funds.
• On average, although only 13% of McCain's funds come from $100 donations, 60% of donators gave $100.

If these assumptions are anywhere near correct, then it seems safe to conclude Obama is ahead in grassroots support: 61% of Barack's funds versus 26% of Hillary's and 13% of McCain's come from relatively small donations. And getting well over a million separate donations during the primaries is unprecedented.

But let's try reversing Plouffe's statistics trick. Maybe the McCain camp could say this:

In February, more than 60% of our donors gave in amounts of $200 or less. In comparison, campaign finance reports show that donations of $200 or less make up 61% of Senator Obama's total campaign funds, and only 26% of Senator Clinton's. Yet the democrats claim to be ahead in grassroots support! What the hell are they smoking?

Look, I have no doubt that the other candidates use similar techniques. This sort of thing is precisely what I expect from politics. But Barack promised to be different. Barack promised a positive campaign that focuses on the issues.

In many ways he has delivered on these promises; for example, Barack's speech "A more perfect union" not only proved his excellence as a speechwriter, but it proved that he could respond to a guilt-by-association smear campaign without crucifying his former pastor Reverend Wright. Had other candidates been attacked in a similar manner, no one would expect them to respond as Barack did.

While we're on the topic of Reverend Wright, it should be noted that he makes a lot more sense when you hear him in context. See: video 1; video 2. He may be wrong, but if he sounds nutty, it's only because news outlets only show ten seconds of his sermon out-of-context. It's also interesting to hear (former Republican candidate) Mike Huckabee's take on this controversy.

It was fun to read the Obama campaign's analysis of a Clinton press release, an email containing nonsense like this:

But the Obama campaign has just announced that it is turning its attention away from Pennsylvania. This is not a strategy that can beat John McCain in November.
...
Why are so many voters turning away from Barack Obama in state after state?

My point is this. Just because Barack's opponents talk smack and twist the truth into falsehood, doesn't make it okay for Obama's campaign to do the same. David Plouffe needs to speak the truth, be fair, and take the moral high ground. Every time he doesn't, I am disappointed. Every time he doesn't, I wonder whether this campaign is really so different from Washington's status quo.

• See what else I'm digging
  

Daylight Saving Time: Stupid

I had thought it was pretty stupid of Congress to move the boundaries of Daylight Savings Time based on projected (not proven, just estimated) energy savings that were measured in only millions of dollars. It was stupid because

• the change would be an inconvenience for a lot of people whose computers were programmed for the old time
• it would mess up peoples' habits
• it would require an unknown amount of money to be spent reprogramming computers (estimated here at up to $1 billion) and updating documents
• it may annoy the cows--but seriously, Congress should have known that unknown factors might negate any positive impacts
• it annoys us Canadians, who are forced to change our time zones too (granted, you can't expect Congress to care)
  
• the estimated savings were so small. I was not able to find a figure online, but I recall mere eight-figure sums were quoted by the media. Shouldn't Congress be thinking a little bigger?
  

Well, it turns out that a study of actual energy use (rather than an estimate based on some mathematical model) showed that DST uses more energy in Indiana.

• Think daylight saving time saves energy? Think again. Or not.

Why not Hillary?

I used to dislike Hillary, and temporarily joined a Facebook group labelled something like "Join this group if you are AGAINST Hillary for president", until somebody asked me why I was against Hillary.

Hmm. It's a funny thing. I actually began to like like Bill Clinton a lot more after so much time under George Bush, but for some reason I didn't like Hillary even though I had not followed her in the media and really didn't know much about her. So what wasn't to like? I think somehow that the feelings of others had rubbed off on me. I had heard her described several times as a "divisive" figure and I had never heard any particular reasons to like her, and apparently this was enough to give me the same negative feeling. But it really is not good enough.

I checked her Wikipedia entry and it was pretty benign. She doesn't seem concerned with things like Net Neutrality, copyright/patent law, or other things I consider important. And she voted for the Iraq war, which I cannot be happy about, but I guess it was the popular thing to do at the time. On the other hand she had a universal health care plan, maybe not a perfect plan, but at least we can agree in principle.

So I quit the anti-Hillary group. Over time I've become more and more sure that I'd really rather have Barak Obama as president (or Dennis Kucinich or Mike Gravel or Ralph Nader), but it is a little disconcerting to have made up my mind without really considering Hillary at all.

Anyway, I was reminded of my misstep by this slashdot post, directed at someone who was against Hillary:

Why do you dislike Hillary so strongly? I'm genuinely curious. I know there's a lot of folks who hate her, but I don't ever hear it logically explained. I imagine there has to be a pretty strong argument for why you'd support Obama over McCain but McCain over Clinton when Obama and Clinton's policies are so closely aligned and so dramatically different than McCain's.

Good question. I could not have answered it two months ago. The response from "JudgeFurious":

You know, I spent a lot of time pondering that as well. Why does this candidate rub me the wrong way so badly? I didn't mind her husband as President and so I naturally started wondering if it was because of her gender. Was I being sexist without recognizing it? Ultimately I concluded that my biggest problem with Hillary Clinton was her personality and the almost palpable ambition she seems to give off. It's like the woman is just starving for power and will step over just about anybody or anything to get it. I haven't had this kind of negative feeling about a candidate or President since Nixon. Despite his actions I don't much get it from GWB. I do get a sense of it from Cheney however.

She goes into a series of primaries with agreeing to certain terms (like Florida and Michigan not counting for instance) and then when it seems like she might not get her way she starts making noises about changing those terms. She enters a primary in Texas fully aware of how the primary works in Texas (and any protests otherwise she might make border on being insulting in my opinion) and then again you start to hear rumblings from her campaign about the possibility of filing suit to have this changed because it does not favor her. She goes into debates talking about being "co-President" and trying to leverage her husbands coat tails (which I do not fault her for doing mind you) but then denies any real involvment when failures or negatives from his administration are brought up. I see this and think "You were either the co-President or you weren't so what's it gonna be?"

This is the kind of behavior that makes me just cringe at the thought of her being President of the United States.

Another interesting response from "inca34":

The Republican playbook is a general turn-off for me. Character assassination and fear mongering instead of forging plans for the future tends to be the dead giveaway. When Obama had more free reign over his campaign with all the candidates involved, he spoke of plans for the future that he was passionate about and which made sense to me in terms of feasibility. Hillary, for what little she's actually done, has little personality except for what she thinks will get her ahead.

She wants to garnish my wages if I can't afford medical insurance, eh? She wants to fight the war (any war) in XXXX (wherever) because she has vested interested in defense spending? She wants me to feel comforted in her experience by the fact that she's been cherry picked by her husband to be in positions of power for a shorter period of time that Obama has been doing public service-oriented work?

I'm sorry, her story just does not check out. I want nothing to do with her platform or her reforms. Her rhetoric reeks of a lack of substance and a motive for her own personal advancement.

Check the exit polls. The more educated, the more likely the vote was for Obama. This statement is not elitist and does not assume a college degree could trump reality or a good common sense, but the averages should speak for themselves. With a college education one ought to be able to seek truth more effectively. I've researched my candidates come to my own conclusions, and I wish everyone could do that, but that's just not realistic for 300 million people to do. So we rely on the media and the game and hope it all works out in the end.

If politics were about qualifications, I'd suspect we'd have heard more about Chris Dodd and Dennis Kucinich and a few others. I personally would prefer their going to the Whitehouse based off of solid records, good experience, and most important character trait a politician could have: they can't be bought. Obama has yet to be seen, though his discipline with his investments give me a good feeling. Hillary has been bought before, I'm sure it can and will happen again (keywords: walmart board labor union).

I have to agree, Obama's tactics are much more tasteful, his speeches are better, and some elements of his campaign (anti-war, pro-net-neutrality) definitely make me like him more. I don't know if he's going to deal with the corruption of the military-industrial complex, but there's certainly no reason to believe Hillary will.

And Hillary's claims that she's so much more experienced? Well, Obama's senate record is pretty impressive for a first timer, as "Grassroots Mom" explains.

I bought Obama's book "Audacity of Hope". Hopefully it'll convince me that he's as good a candidate as my brother (who campaigns for him) believes. Of course, the real test will come after he's voted into office. But a man committed to change is more likely to clean house than a woman who is not.

As an aside, I am finding McCain to be a suprisingly likable guy. It's a suprise because lately I have expected nothing but evil behavior from Republicans. I say that as a Mormon, which may seem ironic given that Utah is as Red as a rose. But McCain is not against the Iraq war and he is not promising change in Washington. I'm sticking with Barak, but suppose I ought to give McCain a closer look anyway.

Why newspapers suck

This quote-of-the-day sums it up:

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.
- Ben Hecht (1893 - 1964)

Dose is the best daily newspaper I've seen, and the only free daily I had ever encountered when it appeared in Calgary two or three years ago. Sadly, they quit publishing here after just more than a year. A few months ago, my eyes bugged out upon noticing not one but three new free daily newspapers had appeared on our sidewalks: "24 Hours", "Metro" and "Rush Hour". Guess what, they all suck. Besides having much less content than Dose (you can read all their "real" news in 10 minutes, leaving you only with entertainment/celebrity crap), they don't have the personality of Dose and, like the paid-for papers, they follow the Ben Hecht model above.

I think the best thing about Dose was that they didn't follow that mold. They didn't tell you just the latest tiny piece of data about an ongoing story, but summarized the whole thing. They would have one or two full pages on a single topic (with no ads, and not huge pages, but not small either). It wouldn't be one article, but several on related issues, typically with one article giving a concise, useful overview of the topic dating way, way back. Traditional newspapers will tell you, day after day after day, how many people of what race were killed in Israel that day, and even their mode of death (gunfire? rocket attack? suicide bomb!!), but only Dose would tell you that Israel invaded and occupied Sinai and Gaza in 1967. Traditional newspapers will tell you that the homicide yesterday was the 14th of the year; Dose would give you long-term crime trends.

Yeah, Dose had their celebrity gossip too. They had "sex advice from strangers". But they had enough interesting material to keep me reading for a good half hour.

It's remarkable how little I learn from the news I read, because the media doesn't tie things together. It's also remarkable how useless newspapers are for forming an opinion, not just because they give facts without context, but because, in their obsession with seeming impartial they make no judgements or evaluations. Regarding their chosen topic, the paper tells you what officials X and Y say, what witnesses and experts (selected by the newspaper) say, and if you're lucky you may get an report from an unidentified source. But in case of conflicting reports, they do not attempt to determine who is telling the truth--at least until you get to the opinion section, if the paper has one, in which highly partisan pundits try to tell you what to believe, backed up only by some speculation and emotion-soaked logic.

Dose couldn't fit all pertinent details into their one-page reports, but it's remarkable that I could learn more from one page of Dose than from years of traditional news reports. Come back, Dose. I'll even pay for you.

Tasers

I've been hearing about a lot of taser-related deaths lately, as well as various stories of police officers using tasers when victims are already on the ground or when they simply have no need to. Which may not sound like a big deal compared to Iraq, but it's hard not to be horrified by some of these stories. Why do you need to give people a 50,000-volt shock when they are on the ground? Why would they even consider using it when four or five officers are trying to arrest a single individual? Why would they use it repeatedly?

Like the story of mentally handicapped woman in a wheelchair who, suffering from schizophrenia, called 911 claiming to be in danger. Soon after police arrived, she was tasered ten times for two minutes and forty seconds, and died as a result. Good heavens, doesn't the battery ever run out on these things?

Let's see, what else...

• Police kill man by taser. His last words, "don't kill me". This is raw footage. You see the police yelling at him to "RELAX!!" and "STOP RESISTING!!"; perhaps it didn't occur to them that when one's life is threatened, one can't help but resist.
• Cop(s) taser unarmed mentally handicapped woman three times when she is frightened by the arrest of her mother.
• Woman Tasered Numerous Times by Police, even after she's handcuffed
• Officer tasers man apparently because he took too many seconds looking for his license and registration
• It starts out as a routine traffic stop for speeding, but it soon becomes clear that this cop is really eager for an excuse to use his taser. By the way, notice how the taser causes the man to fall onto the road. Think: what if he had fallen in the direction of traffic? Later he tries to convince the cop to tell him how fast he was going, but the cop refuses to say. It is reported that he thought the policeman pointed a real gun at him (maybe tasers should be colored differently so it doesn't seem that way?)
  
• Cop beats man, tasers him, then shoots him twice in the back (mind you, this is not so much a taser story as a murder story)
• Man tasered in the eye
  
• Police taser man sleeping in his own home
  
• Woman "handcuffed, leg shackled, hog-tied, blindfolded and tasered numerous times" by "a group of law enforcement officers"

Now comes the most disgusting taser death story yet, not so much because of the excessive taser use (it was used just twice, reportedly) but because of bad behavior from all officials involved.

I wanted to quote a helpful summary of what happened to Robert Dziekanski, but I couldn't find a news article that told the entire story. Most news stories start when the RCMP (Canadian federal police) arrived, but one should really start at least 11 hours earlier, when Mr. Dziekanski got off the plane at the Vancouver Airport. I let this post gather dust for over two months, thinking I would write it when I got a more detailed news article, but I never found one.

In short, when Mr. Dziekanski (how can you pronounce that?), who spoke only Polish, came to Canada, he had agreed with his mother to meet her in the baggage claim area. The problem: the baggage claim area is a secure area that his mother was not allowed to enter. His plane touched down at 3:12 P.M., and 11 hours later, at 2 A.M., he was dead. During that time his mother made numerous attempts to get help from airport staff, which fail.

There's this timeline but it doesn't explain all the things that I've heard. It says "he would not have been able to leave the secure zone", but not why (the Calgary baggage claim area is also secure, but of course passengers can leave--I've done so myself). It says that a customer service agent pages Mr. Dziekanski, without telling his mother that the announcements don't reach the secure area--but not whether his parents mentioned that she thought her son was there, which to me seems like an important point. It says that Ms. Cisowski and her husband leave the airport and return home to Kamloops (355 kilometres away), but not that they left because they were told that their son wasn't there. Finally, though observers thought he spoke Russian and the RCMP were told that he speaks only Russian, a translator who spoke Russian and Polish wonders why he wasn't notified (and may have been fired for talking to the press).

Meanwhile, the rest of us wonder why the airport's official translators weren't summoned and why these RCMP would use a taser on him for failing to obey their English instructions. I think it's for the same reason this Utah Highway Patrolman tasers a guy after he takes more than a few seconds to find his license and registration: they were just really eager to use their toys. Paul Pritchard, a passenger who took a video of the incident, say the RCMP mentioned taser use to one another before meeting him; I guess when they arrived, their groupthink stupor led them to carry out their unjustified idea.

You can see the whole damn thing on youtube if you like. By my stopwatch, it was just 25 seconds from the time that the first two (of four) RCMP officers reached Mr. Dziekanski, to when (judging by the convulsions) they zapped him with a taser. And why the hell is that RCMP officer ramming his baton into the ground? It is the ground, and not Mr. Dziekanski, right? No wonder the mounties took away the memory card with Pritchard's video on it, and refused to give it back until he went to court.

And all I can do is stand by and blog about it.

It's such a sad story because it seems like there were so many opportunities for officials and airport staff to help, and they didn't. A little compassion is that was needed! Although Mr. Dziekanski was acting badly near the end, throwing two large objects to the ground, I would keep in mind that this man had been cooped up in there for ten hours after a flight halfway around the world. He can't communicate a single word to anyone and he can't even get anything to eat. He must have been exhausted, otherwise two taser zaps wouldn't have been enough to kill him. Perhaps he thought by breaking something he would finally get some helpful attention.

• Transcript with translation from Polish

In the aftermath of the incident, my home province of Alberta issued new taser use guidelines. Did they tighten them up to discourage unnecessary zappage? Hell no! Police in Alberta can taser people just for threatening to resist arrest! Hello? Tasers are clearly more dangerous than traditional methods of arrest. Why would it ever be the first choice? It seems like an emergency measure to me, something a policeman should use only if he or she is alone, and lacks any other means to arrest someone. And once the suspect is on the ground, you don't just continue to zap them until they lose consciousness. If the suspect is on the ground, the cop should be too! Put on those handcuffs, don't just stand there squeezing your trigger. If they continue to resist arrest after you zap them, well, duh! You just gave them a blast of searing pain... of course they want to get away from you. Gah.

655,000 Dead

A new study, based on a survey of 1849 Iraqi households, estimates the death toll at 655,000. I knew it was over a hundred thousand but not how many hundreds.

Impeaching Bush and Cheney is the least we can do.

Qwertie.net is down indefinitely

It was running on my home computer and we switched to a new internet service provider (from Shaw to Telus). Telus blocks home web servers, hence qwertie.net is inaccessible. Oh well, there were only a few files on it and my blog's not very popular...

The main page was a user-editable interdictionary I made in 2006 that I hoped Esperanto speakers would use to improve an existing Esperanto-English dictionary. It was like Wiktionary, but much more useful for language learners because it was designed for inter-language definitions specifically, and you could click on any word to look it up in both directions (e.g. if a definition contains the word jam, the user could click on it, and the dictionary would spit out the definition for the English word "jam" and the Esperanto word "jam" (pronounced "yahm") at the same time. Anyway, I posted a link to it on lernu.net and tried to start a discussion, but evidently no one was interested. Only one other person ever added definitions, and now it's probably gone forever.

My best friend is learning Esperanto and recently got a Pocket PC, so I used the .NET Compact Framework (a Microsoft thing, don't worry if you don't know what it is) to quickly make a little user-editable Pocket PC Esperanto-English dictionary. It's got a convenient user interface but it's only in alpha state right now (main problem: it takes at least 30 seconds to start). I'm too ashamed of it to post it online, and I'm not improving it because I'm too worried that no one will use it...

Anyway, I placed a couple of files that were on qwertie.net somewhere else: my research paper about why we still use the Qwertie keyboard layout (and what's better?), and the ever-unread paper on electoral reform in Canada. Speaking of which, the coolest democratic system I know of is Direct Representation.

Note to self: learn more about Barak Omama.

New Amazon MP3 Store Sucks...

If you live in Canada. Or anyplace alse that isn't America. Actually, I've heard great things about the new Amazon MP3 store. I hoped I could finally clear my conscience by buying all those songs I've downloaded over the years...

But I live in Canada so I can't. It feels ironic that I started by trying to buy a song from a Canadian band, Barenaked Ladies, only to get this message:

We could not process your order because of geographical restrictions on the product which you were attempting to purchase. Please refer to the terms of use for this product to determine the geographical restrictions.

Despite this, Amazon continues to taunt me about its MP3 store. I click on their central banner ad and get a popup window explaining how "Amazon MP3 offers music lovers these great benefits". It tells me, "Hello, David. We have MP3 Downloads Recommendations  for you." But I click the link and it says "Sorry, we have no recommendations for you in this category today."

How dare they make me keep my money like this.

Money is Debt

I've just seen the most fascinating video called "Money As Debt", in which it is explained that banks create money by lending it. I had no idea it worked this way; in fact the video's content is so amazing I have to wonder if it is actually true. I can usually tell when something is made by a conspiracy nut, extremist or somebody with a self-serving agenda, yet this video doesn't set off my bulls*** detector very strongly, except that its history of the monetary system is extremely vague, real-world details are minimal, and some things said in the video really need more explanation. Although the YouTube poster called the video "Corrupt Banking System", the video itself does not say the system is corrupt; it only points out that power is overly concentrated in the hands of bankers, and that the system need not work the way it does.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the video is the quotes by prominent men--U.S. presidents, bank heads, economists--quotes which not only suggest that the monetary system works just how the video says it does, but which openly admit a degree of corruption in the system.

I have never yet had anyone who could, through the use of logic and reason, justify the Federal Government borrowing the use of its own money....I believe the time will come when people will demand that this be changed. I believe the time will come in this country when they will actually blame you and me and everyone else connected with the Congress for sitting idly by and permitting such an idiotic system to continue. - late Congressman Wright Patman, Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency

"The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in iniquity and born in sin. Bankers own the Earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough money to buy it back again…Take this great power away from them and all great fortunes like mine will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for then this would be a better and happier world to live in. But if you want to continue to be slaves of the banks and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit." - Sir Josiah Stamp, director of the Bank of England 1928-1941

"The inability of the colonists to get power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George III and the International Bankers was the Prime reason for the Revolutionary War" - Benjamin Franklin

"We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected the promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world-government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the National auto-determination practiced in past centuries." - David Rockefeller, In an address to a Trilateral Commission meeting in June of 1991

And the most fascinating thing about the issue is the silence about the subject in the media and in our education system. Speaking of the education system, they don't teach us (me, anyway) anything about managing money, let alone how the monetary system works.

I'm certainly left wondering about certain issues.

• It says that if there is no debt in the economy, then there is no money. But of course governments can print money, so there will always be money. Right?
  
• In an example in the video, a hypothetical person deposits $10,000, but with no explanation from the narrator, on the screen that number becomes $9,000 before it is divided by the reserve ratio 9:1 for a result of $1,000.
• At the end it postulates an improved money systems in which loans are interest-free. But if loans are interest free, then what is the incentive for people to pay off their loans? Clearly people will not pay off debts without some incentive to do so, and since they get real resources by spending the loan money, it's obviously not sustainable if they don't give anything back to society by working to pay off the debt.
• The video claims "P/(P+I) will fulfill their loan contract" and "I/(P+I)" will be foreclosed, formulas that seem impossibly simple. What do they mean exactly?
  

Nevertheless, it's so interesting that I'm tempted to buy it from moneyasdebt.net. If only it were cheaper. Anyway, I hear there's another good video out there called "The Money Masters". I shall have to see it.

Windows Is Free

This guy's got a pretty good point about why people pick Windows over Linux, even if they've heard of Linux:

One time, a friend called me with an offer. He would pay me 50 bucks to get his laptop working again. Specifically, what he wanted was to back up all his data, reformat his disk, re-install Windows, and then restore his data. I asked if he still had the original install disks for Windows. He stammered a bit, and asked if I might not simply have some on hand I could use. He didn't mind if it was a different version of Windows - subtle code for hoping for a more recent version. The fifty dollars was for my labor. He didn't see getting a copy of Windows as a cost-associated item. It was no big deal, either he had a copy of Windows or I did, or he figured I knew a friend who did.

I felt kind of uncomfortable about the proposition, so I said no. If he had asked me this more recently, I would have offered to put Linux on his computer. But he probably would have said no, because it would seem like a more expensive offer to him. He would have compared free, unfamiliar Linux to free, comfortable Windows. The cost of getting used to the new environment, as easy as it might be, is probably more tangible to him than the money he technically should be spending but won't.

A few years back I tried to install Linux several times but was stopped cold by hardware compatibility issues. Such problems have been getting better now, but now I'm stuck on Windows because I like to use Visual Studio and SharpDevelop for my programming work, neither of which work on Linux.

The different interface of Linux and the potential hardware issues are definitely problems. I never know how to install software on Linux if it's not available in the standard repository; I wouldn't know how to set up file sharing (it's hard enough getting it working on Windows!); Last time I used Linux, Firefox's interface looked ugly and different from all the other windows; my old webcam almost certainly wouldn't work; and even if my 3-in-1 laser printer has a Linux driver, there's no way it has all the features of the Windows version.

I can't stand that rift between the two Linux desktops, Gnome and KDE. Call me a conformist, but I hate to have programs that look and act differently running on the same computer, and as a programmer I don't want to have to pick which GUI libraries to target: that should be the end-user's choice. It's about time they put aside their differences and merged. Or for a meteor to hit one of the camps, leaving victory to the other guys by default.

What's with the U.S. government lately?

Obviously I haven't been blogging much lately, even though there's lots to blog about. Especially when it comes to U.S. government behavior. Those warrantless wiretapping programs, and the new spying powers given by bill S. 1927, which was somehow passed by a Democratic congress; the misplaced 190,000 guns in Iraq that were given to Iraq security forces without accounting or accountability (more guns than the record-high 162,000 soldier deployment there); the Mahar Arar case (background) which demonstrates not only a disregard for human rights, but the remarkable fact that the U.S. can, without laying charges, detain and deport a person who is only stopping in the U.S. to catch a connecting flight. Does it make sense to "deport" somebody who was just about to leave the country? Since all indications are that Arar is innocent, this could easily happen to others, and probably has: after all, the public didn't know about Arar until after he was released from Syria, and we might not know about the case if Arar hadn't fought to make it a public affair. And of course there's Guantanamo...

Meanwhile, lots of ordinary people like me are being affected by the dumb new U.S.-Canada border laws. Passports are required for travelling by air but not by car--because of course, terrorists don't bother to get passports, and they only come by air. Unfortunately I can't get my Canadian passport because I have to get a new copy of my citizenship card first, which they still haven't sent after over six months. I can't get my American passport without a full (non-learner's) driver's license, so I took driving lessons and passed my test, but I'm still waiting for the official license in the mail. I want to go to my brother's wedding in Milwaukee, but it looks very likely that I'll have to send 4 days driving there and back with some extended family, which means I'll lose almost $500 by taking three extra days off work. Thanks again, Bush and pals. You idiots.

Anyway, my blog may be empty, but I do digg stories occasionally. Click here to check out some of the stories I consider interesting or worthwhile.

Loyc: Language of your choice

I am a programmer, but this is not a programming blog. Naturally I want to write about programming topics sometimes, but I prefer to keep the general public as my audience here. So I've been putting my technical posts in my scribblings blog, which I really intended for notes-to-self and other nonsense. So now I've created Loyc, etc., a blog for serious programming posts, and, of course, for Loyc.

I'll try to explain in layman's terms.

I've become increasingly frustrated with the primitive tools programmers use to write programs. Programmers write code in programming languages, and I want to increase the power of those languages. So in my free time I work on a "compiler architecture" called Loyc.

See, there are literally thousands of programming languages in the world. And each of them has an "interpreter" or "compiler". A compiler is a program that understands a programming language. It translates code written by a human into binary code which a computer understands. There are also "interpreters" which are the same but different (get it?).

It seems that most programmers who aren't happy with the programming languages they've got just make another one. Hence we end up with about a zillion of them. Each language has certain features and lacks others.

I'm doing something different. I'm not making a new programming language. Instead, my compiler will (...someday...) understand two languages that already exist, "C#" and "boo". Loyc, which stands for "Language of your choice", will be an "extensible" compiler. This means that other programmers can come along and add features to the C# language and the boo language. They can even add whole new languages!

The idea is that I myself will not be The Great Innovator. I'm not gonna be the one to make a new language with new features. Instead, I will provide a way for programmers to add new features to languages that already exist.

See, usually there's some committee or even a single person that gets to decide what features will be in a language. In contrast, my design is democratic. Any skilled programmer can add a feature, and then the other programmers in the world can choose whether they will use the feature or not. Loyc should thus evolve as some sort of utopian democratic meritocracy, or this is my hope :)

Anyway, if you are a programmer, don't get too excited. Loyc doesn't really exist yet. Mostly it's just ideas in my head, but I'm working on it.

Rush Hour

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.
- H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

It was true a hundred years ago and still true today: people think "democracy" is a choice between only two parties.

On an unrelated note: rules are not like Mount Everest. You need not follow a rule "just because it's there". And you certainly shouldn't enforce a rule "just because it's there". Rules should only be enforced when they serve a purpose. I'm talking about cops handing out tickets for jaywalking when there are no cars in sight, or for mild speeding on a wide flat straight highway when road conditions are perfect and there is almost no traffic. I'm talking about this crazy rule on the Calgary C-Train that "no bikes are allowed during rush hour". I read that Calgary Transit is "happy" to have people with bikes on the train, just not during rush hour. I can only surmise this is due to the overcrowding that happens on some routes during that time. Here's the thing though: rush hour means people going into downtown in the morning and out of downtown in the evening.

There is no rush into downtown in the evening and (with the possible exception of the northwest train taking students to the university or SAIT) no rush out of downtown in the morning. Everyone knows this. Certainly the train drivers know this. This rule is a problem for me because I take my bike to work every day: leaving downtown in the morning and coming back in the evening. Every single day the trains are almost empty; there is a seat for everyone willing to sit down. In fact, it's quite possible that the trains are more empty during so-called rush hour than any other time of day. Why? Because the trains come 2-3 times as often, greatly reducing the passenger load per train. But some drivers still enforce the rule.

You might say rush hour is a time of day, but I say it is a state of affairs. There is no such thing as rush hour on Sunday. There is no such thing as rush hour out in the country. And there is no such thing as rush hour during an evening trip into downtown. On the other hand, during the two-week Calgary Stampede rodeo, rush hour comes at midnight.

The two nudist streakers that fall in love over the internet

As a nudist I was very pleased when I saw this video on a random website:

• Warning: contains frontal nudity
  
• Censored version available here

The end of the video gives a link to the site believeindestiny.com, and only then did I start to get the feeling it was fake. I mean, it doesn't say directly, but it says

We gave people the chance to vote about what they thought should happen with stories like these: Should companies make stories and websites like these, or should they stick to normal ads? We asked whether they thought they’d been lied to or whether they enjoyed the story? Where does entertaining advertising stop and invasive manipulation begin?

So I look at the vote results...

Are stories like scott and emma's okay?
54.3% yes, advertisers of the world, go nuts and entertain me
22% yes, but only if at the end I am told it was a story
16% no, you should tell me from the start that it's fiction
7.7% no, keep ads in ad breaks and entirely separate from entertainment

I find it hard to believe that, in general, the majority of people don't care whether a story that is presented as the truth is actually false. If that's so, my faith in humanity is all but lost. If viewers don't mind in this case, I think it's probably because either

1. They do not identify with nudists or streakers
   (note: I think nudists and streakers are rarely the same people)
   and don't care about the truth because it doesn't affect them on an emotional level, or
   
2. They suspected it was fake already

Oh, and it could also be the biased phrasing of the poll question.

But I was affected on an emotional level--I thought it was an awesome and sweet story--and I didn't suspect it was fake because it looked convincing. If it were fake, it probably would have required a significant budget to put together. So why would it start and end with defects that look like playing and pausing a VHS tape? Why the low video quality? It was an effective psychological trick. Which brings us to motive: why make up a story like this? The website considers it advertising, but advertising for what? They weren't selling anything, so it just didn't look like an advertisement.

I conclude their motive was the value of market research. It's an experiment in viral marketing and an experiment in how much BS consumers are willing to tolerate. Their poll seems to show that consumers don't mind being lied to, which reminds me of the Iraq war and Bush administration's success in obtaining a second term. But I think reality is more complex. I suspect the poll result can be explained by human selfishness, by apathy. I think their tolerance has more to do with the fact that the story didn't affect them. If they were nudists, less of them would mind the lie. Same goes if they were in the military, or in Iraq.

Wait, wait, I'm connecting viral marketing with the war in Iraq? Good heavens, what's wrong with me?