Category Archives: Politics

Voting on Science

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The Youcut Citizen Review of Government

We are launching an experiment – the first YouCut Citizen Review of a government agency. Together, we will identify wasteful spending that should be cut and begin to hold agencies accountable for how they are spending your money.

A really horrible idea: have lay people suggest research to cut by looking for “questionable” grants. Based on what? The scientific illiteracy possessed and cherished by a large fraction of the populace? Given the kind of ridicule that politicians themselves display toward science (in particular, anything remotely related to evolution or genetics), I would expect a parade of suggestions based solely on ideology, cutting anything related not only to evolution, but also global warming and any behavioral studies that want to look at conduct that doesn’t mirror that of the Cunninghams from Happy Days.

The site uses as an example “$750,000 to develop computer models to analyze the on-field contributions of soccer players.” Of course, it turns out that it’s more than that. There is no reference to the grant (or grants), but someone has already tracked this down. The project was an effort to objectively measure individuals’ performance, and soccer was used in the preliminary work, but an application was for workers in a business setting. As far as I can tell, the soccer model was only part of the work funded by the grant. You can’t build a complex model from scratch, so you work your way up using a system that’s more easily investigated. This isn’t really all that subtle a notion, in the scheme of things scientific, but it’s lost here.

If these politicians can’t grasp that, there isn’t much hope that they would grasp the concept of funding a lot of basic research, because most of it ends up not panning out. It’s research. It means investigating the unknown, where there can be no guarantee of success. But as our representatives in government, it really is their job to know this. Pandering like this is just an example of abandoning their responsibilities. It’s sickening.

More TSA Nonsense

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Security and Terrorism Expert Bruce Schneier: TSA Scans “Won’t Catch Anybody”

And why would they? Zero bombers made it through (or were caught by) the old system.

Errata Security: I was just detained by the TSA

Today, I was detained by the TSA for about 30 minutes for taking pictures while going through security. Taking pictures is perfectly legal.
…
TSA: How would you like it if somebody came to your work and disrupted your procedures? How would you like it if people took pictures of you at your work?
Me: I don’t work for the government. Government agencies need to be accountable to the public, and therefore suffer disruptions like this.
TSA: Not all parts of the government are accountable to the public, especially the TSA.
Me: Wow. No, ALL parts of the government are accountable to the people, especially the TSA. I’m not sure what type of country you think we live in.

The TSA and America’s Turning Point

If America has a single founding principle, it is this: no government has any authority to take any action without the consent of the governed. Our Founding Fathers did not object to the principle of paying taxes per se; they objected strongly to the idea of being forced to pay taxes to a government where they had no input. Freedom’s cry was not “No taxation” then, and it isn’t now; it was “No taxation without representation.” The same goes for any other intrusive regulation.

George Will takes another tactic: The T.S. of A takes control

What the TSA is doing is mostly security theater, a pageant to reassure passengers that flying is safe. Reassurance is necessary if commerce is going to flourish and if we are going to get to grandma’s house on Thursday to give thanks for the Pilgrims and for freedom. If grandma is coming to our house, she may be wanded while barefoot at the airport because democracy – or the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment; anyway, something – requires the amiable nonsense of pretending that no one has the foggiest idea what an actual potential terrorist might look like.

I have to disagree here, because I don’t think that it’s amiable nonsense at all. Here he falls into the trap that the TSA has: implementing a protocol to stop a specific threat. It’s inefficient and ignores the thousands of other ways a successful attack could be carried out. If you start profiling, then all it would take is someone who doesn’t fit the profile. People, Juan Williams being a prominent example, have expressed the feeling that they are nervous about flyers who are “in Muslim garb.” All a terrorist has to do, then, is dress to blend in, to allay that fear. But it doesn’t get rid of the threat. People in Boston famously freaked out over some flashing LEDs (twice) in recent memory, because “that’s what bombs look like.” Which is nonsense. Bombs “look like” pretty much whatever you want them to. The same goes for terrorists. At the very least they could wear a mask.

More commentary and links at Uncertain Principles: Invasive Searches and Underage Drinking in which Chad makes the comparison to other situations which seem to fall under the rubric of “We must be seen as doing something about the situation. This is something.” Which is nothing but a CYA move. “Don’t blame me, I did something!”

The bottom line is that in all things there is always, and will always be, risk. 100% safety is unattainable, and it’s dishonest to imply otherwise. It’s dishonest to manufacture fear in order to justify actions restricting our freedoms.

Update (11/26): Roger “Carlos the Jackal” Ebert: Where I draw the line

Trust Me

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Bruce Schneier has an extensive collection of links regarding the TSA and current screening procedures.

One thing that seems to get overlooked in all of the stories I’ve read, in which some government official insists that the ever-more-invasive security protocols are needed, in order to prevent attacks like the shoe bomber and Christmas-day bomber, is this: these protocols never would have stopped either of those attempts, because neither passenger boarded a flight originating in the US. They are being used as excuses.

The government says, “Trust us. We need to do this for your safety.” The problem is that the government has no credibility. There’s no incident of a bombing which could have been prevented by these scanners to which they can point, and no statistic of risk they can cite which they could improve upon. They promise that the scanner images aren’t retained, but then we discover that’s false. How could it be true, anyways? The government isn’t going to hang on to potential evidence in case a passenger needs a followup pat-down, or there’s a subsequent problem on a flight? All they have is a manufactured fear they keep promoting.

Not to Be Confused With Medium-Rare Earths

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US reserves of rare earth elements assessed for first time

“Rare earth” is an alternative name for the lanthanides – elements 57 to 71 – plus yttrium and scandium. The elements are integral to modern life, and are used in everything from disc drives, hybrid cars and sunglasses to lasers and aircraft used by the military.

China controls 97 per cent of the world’s supply and has been tightening its export quotas, sparking concerns that the rare earths could live up to their name.

Let the Warm Fuzzies Begin

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In case your week wasn’t bad enough:

Money for Scientific Research May Be Scarce With a Republican-Led House

In the Republican platform, Pledge to America, the party vows to cut discretionary nonmilitary spending to 2008 levels. Under that plan, research and development at nonmilitary agencies — including those that sponsor science and health research — would fall 12.3 percent, to $57.8 billion, from the Mr. Obama’s request of $65.9 billion for fiscal year 2011.

’cause what has science ever done for us? (You know, if you squint, the elephant looks like an insane clown posse mask)

This, on top of the continuing resolution that is cramping my style at work. There are only a few things that congress has to do each year, and one of them is pass the budget. Don’t let ’em leave Washington until it gets done. Wanna go on vacation? No. Wanna campaign? No. Do your effing job first.

(at the request of J)

edit to add, since it’s sort of related: Where Drugs Come From: The Numbers

You cut government research dollars and you reduce university research, which is an important source of new drug treatments, especially novel ones.

Going Green(wich)

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Oct. 13, 1884: Greenwich Resolves Subprime Meridian Crisis

Britain had first solved the problem of longitude, Britain had the world’s largest navy, and the sun indeed did not set on the far-flung British Empire. Britannia ruled the waves, so there was no need for Britain to waive its rules.

Thus, the conference established that the meridian passing through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich would be the world’s Prime Meridian, and all longitude would be calculated both east and west from it up to 180 degrees. The conference also established Greenwich Mean Time as a standard for astronomy and setting time zones.

Tunnels and Bridges and Taxes, Oh My!

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Krugman’s latest op-ed, The End of the Tunnel, reminds me a lot of a recent series of slacktivist posts, which were part of a continuing series on infrastructure: A bank run in reverse, Water, Sewers and storm drains, Offshore wind farms, The Grid, Bridges (come to think of it, I’ve never seen Krugman talk while Fred Clark is drinking a glass of water)

The American Society of Civil Engineers does a periodic assessment of the state of the infrastructure, and their 2009 report card isn’t pretty. They estimated that it would take 2.2 Trillion dollars over the following five years in order to bring our infrastructure up to “acceptable” levels (e.g. only 15% of our bridges being classified as structurally deficient or functionally obsolete). The problem is our scheduled spending was/is less than $1 Trillion.

 

Maintenance isn’t sexy, and it doesn’t tend to get you elected. Consequently, it’s been relatively safe, politically, to ignore it, as it often is in many other situations. But, as Krugman points out and is echoed in these other links, not spending money on infrastructure costs us in other ways, but that spending is in the form of taxes, and taxes are perceived as evil. Nobody in the government seem to be making the case that the money is going to be spent anyway, in the form of lost time and billions of gallons of gas wasted while we’re stuck in traffic, or in the other ways shoddy infrastructure will impede us. We’ve been sold on the idea that taxes are bad, and that we can just cut them, and everything will magically take care of itself.

And yet there’s still a popular notion that in the US we’re taxed too much, even though our income tax rates are at historical lows and are lower than most developed countries (and we lack a national VAT or sales tax, as well). The easily hidden underspending on infrastructure amplifies this illusion, since we don’t realize that our deficits would be even worse if we were properly funding our roads, bridges, dams, etc., and that we’re going to have to fix the problem sooner or later. Just that later will cost us more, since replacement tends to be more expensive, due to costs incurred while the item in question is broken and can’t be used.

NPR recently showed a receipt for a median US filer’s taxes. Of $5400 in federal and fica taxes, $64 goes to federal highways. Wow. A whole buck and a quarter a week. It’s hard to think that I’m being overcharged (even though I make more and pay more than this) when it’s put in these terms. I also look at the $1k paid into social security; one can go to the benefits calculator and see that for someone who works for 45 years and retired at 65 making that amount today (and made less and paid in less in years past) would draw of order $1k a month. IOW, in less than 4 years, they will have drawn more than they paid in. We simply aren’t paying for what we’re getting, but we’ve been sold the illusion that we’re not getting much for what we’re spending.

 

There’s also a notion that we can’t tax businesses, either. The idea that if they had more cash they’d expand and hire people has been neatly disproved in this recent economic crisis. And yet this unpaid-for, crumbling infrastructure is used by corporations to move goods around, and to allow customers to go shopping, but nobody wants to pay for it. In good old-fashioned capitalism the private sector would take care of this, but we went down the path of letting the government do it. Gosh, that sounds like … socialism. Since that’s bad, maybe we should send them a bill for services rendered, since that’s how capitalism works, and show them an EULA that tells them that by using the roads they agreed to pay, since that’s how they tend to do business these days.

We are no longer the nation that used to amaze the world with its visionary projects. We have become, instead, a nation whose politicians seem to compete over who can show the least vision, the least concern about the future and the greatest willingness to pander to short-term, narrow-minded selfishness.