Shut Up and Give Me Your Money (How We Make Government More User-friendly)

[Back from hiatus – celebrating with a double-length post…hopefully not TLDR]

With journalistically appropriate hyperbole, Chrystia Freeland ponders the problem the modern world is having with government. She starts off with the political baiting that is typical of Reuters, but settles eventually into a more compelling thesis – what if what is wrong with government is that it isn’t modern? While everything else becomes ever more user-friendly, from airport check-ins to streaming music to buying insurance, government stagnates. Freeland meanders a bit in order to work in a quote about the private sector historically innovating from platforms developed by government and ultimately doesn’t make much of a point at all. But I can work with that…

It seems fair to say that the American government’s interactions with the electorate are antiquated, so I immediately got to wondering what part of government did modern interaction best. Political parties immediately sprung to mind, such as Ron Paul and Obama’s famous use of social media. Politicians are, out of necessity, quickly picking up on how to effectively reach Americans. So too has the military. Remember those “awesome” 90’s CGI effects in early Marines ads in theatres? That campaign has become a multimedia onslaught that includes recruitment movies starring Rihanna, social media campaigns, and websites that at least belong in web 2.0 (or 3.0 or whatever web we’re on today). The IRS has even upgraded in its own bureaucratic way – not the prettiest site in the world, but it works pretty well. Forms are easy to find, law is easy to research, and there’s large, friendly links that click-through to the popular 1040-EZ and free tax preparation options.

Conversely, the CBO is a wealth of information that is dry at best and clunky to use – the disparity in expected user effort relative to the IRS is noticeable. The patent office? Not terrible, but reminiscent of the late 90s as soon as you leave the splash page. The EPA website is drab, especially compared to allied political action groups. Somewhat better, the FDA. Heck, I think most of these even use the same production suite to design their pages. Even the SSA sucks, and it should try hardest since it necessarily caters to the over-65 crowd.

Well, cynical as ever, I started to look for a common thread here. What splits the difference? Almost immediately it dawned on me – it’s whether the government is providing something (information or services) or taking something (your money or votes). Wondering if this was unfair I took a look at a couple more sites, or tried to anyway. Medicare’s websites are only a step up from the SSA. But the USPS is crazy professional nice. Then again, the USPS does only provide its service in exchange for fees, so it has an interest in being as user-friendly as possible (it’s a business). So there goes that. Trying one more, I went to NASA, which has a pretty cool website, even just looking at usability and ignoring all the awesome content. But I think NASA gets a special pass because it’s populated exclusively by various species of space-nerd, so its website had better be awesome. To contrast, NOAA, which could be almost as cool as NASA in terms of content, has a truly miserable website that is outdone by cable-favorite the Weather Channel. So it looks like that’s it, then. Desire to acquire money or influence leads to good websites. Funny, that’s an awful lot like how the free market works. Next time, I’ll look at whether we can fix that problem by creating incentives for government to make its processes and services more user-friendly. I’m not hopeful, though.

The Quandry of Vocabulary (Shouldn’t Ideas Matter More Than Words?)

Language is maybe the most important thing about us. The ability to have ideas of our own, then put them into other people’s heads, is remarkable. I have one big problem with it though. Being a native speaker of English, which happens to be among the more prolific word-creating (and stealing) languages, I am appalled at how much vocabulary I need all the time.

One of the worst feelings is listening to a conversation and feeling “lost”, the subconscious recognition that too many words are not familiar. The conversation could be a lecture on an unfamiliar topic, or gossip about people you don’t know, or maybe discussion a sport with which you aren’t familiar. A good trick for sounding smart is to pick up on vocabulary quickly; it lets one sound knowledgeable, even without really understanding what’s being said. Conversely, using vocabulary incorrectly is sure to sound poseur-ish to insiders. So we end up listening silently to (or walking away from) situations where pesky new words keep getting in the way.

So important is vocabulary, that courses, beginning in middle school, focus heavily on teaching it. Whether in art or chemistry or political science, one can be sure their first years of study will be intensively dedicated to learning vocabulary. The problem is, learning vocabulary sucks, especially when one would otherwise be excited about the subject itself. I think many people get turned off of “hard” areas of study because they don’t want to invest in so many new words. That should not be a problem. Educators should learn from the Sagans and Dubners of the world, saving specialized vocabulary for advanced classes, while working in as little as necessary early on. Let vocabulary build naturally through exposure, and value ideas over the words describing them.

Should We Seek Armistice in the Class War? (Marx was half right)

With movements like OWS, along with its inevitable counterpoint, cropping up across the world, I’ve been given pause in my generally rabid pro-capitalist stance. Not that I don’t love capitalism, or upward mobility, or being rewarded for sacrificing my principles hard work. I do love these things, and I intend to exploit them for the benefit of myself and my favorite people. But it’s heading in a weird direction

Marx believed the capitalist system led to an unsustainable cycle of booms and busts, with each subsequent iteration consolidating power, while robbing the proletariat of wealth – sound familiar? Eventually, the proletariat realize that the bourgeoisie are getting rich off their labor, and collectively seize the productive channels to extract that which their overlords have taken. It’s all very steampunk and makes for good movies.

However, Marx didn’t guess that the capitalist engine of progress would innovate so rapidly that excess productivity from technology would devalue human capital. But it did. So we end up where we are now, with a system that cannot be seized by the proletariat, because the proletariat is next to useless, having been outsourced to the third world (that’s a different rant), or replaced by technology. So what happens? Apparently not a r3volution. Instead, these jokers use democratic channels to vote themselves ever-increasing benefits. Brilliant. Problem is, rich folks don’t like to pay taxes, hence political class warfare.

This serves one purpose – to prop up politicians (Left and Right) and their donors. That’s it. The noble proletariat doesn’t come out ahead at all. They end up selling their liberty in exchange for a free ride. They become second-class citizens while the rich get richer, and uncle Karl weeps in his London tomb. But at least they end up getting a “fair shake”, right?

Our Species-Wide Delusion of Grandeur (Fart Jokes Are Hilarious)

There’s a sort of communal soul-suck that happens around seven in the evening after a long work day, a wearied sigh of social resignation that ripples through the population. Sitting on a subway train, headed home on a drizzly Thursday, it’s easy to see through the pilots’ uniforms and business clothes to the mostly hairless apes underneath. Some people lounge, toying sleepily with phones, whilst others chatter dizzily about their days. I imagine a lurking camera crew nearby filming a documentary on the urban ape.

At such times, my inner anthropologist is particularly perturbed by the popular notion humans are somehow divorced from the “natural world”. It’s a petty idea from a darker time, propped-up by religious bias and Victorian mores, and carried into the present by a combination of self-delusion and cognitive dissonance.

Others long before me have noticed we’re all animals, but it’s something that gets forgotten too easily. We wrap ourselves in our cloaks of technology, wear clothes and eat with tools. It’s all very, well, civilized. Thank Queen V and her era’s insistence that anything to remind us of our hominid roots be quashed from the social consciousness. But this isn’t just about how technology, developed by people, is natural by extension. Nor is it about how the persistence of scatological humor points to our own embarrassment at the animals we really are.

This is really about how, if you practice, you will start seeing everyone as animals all the time. If you fear this somehow devalues others, pause to consider whether you’re not being just a bit anthropocentric. Maybe it’s my inner autist, but I’ve found that when you stop thinking about humans as people, and start thinking about them as clever, social animals – everything they do suddenly makes a lot more sense.

Deciding I’m Against Capital Punishment on Strictly Economic Grounds (Who Needs Morals, Anyway?)

With things like this going on in my own back yard, and this sort of story cropping up in the news with ever-increasing frequency, I guess it makes sense to kick off this blog with a look at state-sanctioned murder. Fifteen minutes with Google told me everything I needed to make a well-informed opinion. Seriously.

This indicates 3,254 people at the state, federal, and military levels on death row. At a generous estimate of about $130/day to house an inmate, that puts us at $423,000/day for the entire death row population, about $154,400,000/year.

If we estimate about 15 years spent on death row, our current death row population would cost us a measly 2.3 billion over those fifteen years, presuming they are all eventually executed.

Even if we increased the price tag by a factor of seven, to allow for legal and administrative costs in attempting to prove the innocence of each person, we’d barely break a billion dollars a year to keep our death row inmates alive instead of offing them. This is a very very small number when we’re talking about government spending.

How about on an individual level: The US Dept of Transportation in the year 2000 set the value of a human life around $3 million, while some economists have set the value around $130,000/year. That says something about the US government’s concern for us, perhaps, but anyway. Even by the conservative estimate of $3 million/life, we could keep an inmate alive in prison for about 63 years before we hit that dollar amount.

So I guess I don’t believe in the death penalty, it doesn’t make economic sense. Not that we can’t kill the worst of the worst, since a penny saved is a penny earned, we just had better first have incontrovertible evidence of guilt.