What's better than public transportation?

I'm a big fan of public transportation. The ability to survive without owning a car would lead to a tremendous reduction in cost-of-living. Reduction in traffic is in everyone's best interest. And not having to drive every day would let me get a lot more reading done. (Or more realistically, sleep.)

But here in Nashville, the bus system is more or less a joke for much of the city. I live in the city limits, and I could get to work by bus, but I'd have to spend ninety minutes instead of twenty, I'd get there late, and I'd spend more money. The many thousands in the exurbs are pretty much hosed except for the Music City Star, and even then your options once you reach Nashville are limited.

The more I think about it, the more I think the emphasis on trains and buses may be misplaced. Mass transit as a concept has one inherent limitation: each rider wants to stop at only two places, and no others. The more riders there are wanting different stops, the less convenient it gets for everyone involved. But the fewer stops the bus (or train or whatever) makes, the fewer people the bus is convenient for. You want a very high person-to-stop ratio. This only works for high-density end-to-end traffic paths, like an express from a park-and-ride, a commuter train, or a small local circuit in a high-density area.

But what about those of us (and I'd guess we're the majority) who neither live nor work in high-density areas? By definition, we collectively have more stops to make. To keep a high person-to-stop ratio, you have to reduce the number of people per vehicle. Perhaps to, say, five.

I argue that mass carpooling could have more effect getting cars off the road than any imaginable public transportation system. Say we're comparing three options: 60-person buses, 5-person carpools, and the default single-occupant car. If there are six thousand people commuting from Clarksville (to pick a random number and exurb), that's six thousand cars, twelve hundred carpools, or one hundred buses. Obviously both carpools and buses are vast improvements to traffic. And if everyone would ride the busses, they win over carpools. But not everyone will bus, because of the lack of flexibility.

So the next question is, how many people are willing to bus? How many are willing to carpool? And at what point does realistic carpooling get more vehicles off the road than busing? I won't bore you with my algebraic prowess (maybe later), but in our case the answer works out to be pretty interesting: regardless of the number of people involved, if just 25% more people are willing to carpool than are willing to bus, mass carpooling gets more vehicles off the road. This even though a bus holds twelve times more people! Since a carpool is far more convenient than a bus, I'd expect far more than 25% greater ridership.

Now let's consider cost. If you've got 100 busses, that's at least $30,000,000 in capital expenditure. Probably more. Each bus costs around $100/hr to run. Even if you assume they only run four hours a day (two round trips), that's $40,000/day, or $10,000,000 a year in operating costs. Assuming each bus lasts ten years, that's $13,000,000/year to get 5,900 vehicles off the road. This seems like a lot, but consider that adding a lane of interstate between Nashville and Clarksville would cost something like $150,000,000 and take several years.

How about gasoline? A hundred mile round trip at 25 mpg costs $15 a day. That's $22 million a year in gasoline saved by getting those 5900 cars off the road! That's a number so big I almost want to cry.

Further, consider that traffic can add half an hour to your commute each way. One hour a day saved, times six thousand drivers, is 1.5 million man-hours per year. Figure an average wage of $12/hr, and $13,000,000/year starts to sound cheap.  If we come up with a solution that makes a significant reduction in traffic that only costs, say, a million dollars a year, we collectively are coming out way ahead.

So here's the idea: we should pay people to carpool. But not at a flat rate. Put a million dollars in a pot, and declare that that pot will be distributed evenly among everyone who carpools that year, weighted by how many days they do it. Imagine how people would respond to an incentive like that! If only five people carpool all year, boom, easy $200k each. Pay it out more often than once a year, too. Say every two weeks. Within a few months you should reach an equilibrium point where exactly the right number of people are carpooling for the money being offered. After that you can see just how good the system is and how much it's worth.

As an added bonus, you could let people without cars sign up for the system, and basically turn every driver in the city into a government-provided taxi for the carless. The driver gets paid by the number of passengers, so its a win for them. And the car-free individual gets better service than busses.

The problem is making the matches. If you could get our hypothetical six thousand people to put their schedules in a system, a relatively simple computer program could make matches between them and make a huge dent in traffic. There are already such systems, but there's relatively little data in them. Paying people to participate will fix that. And with smart phones becoming ubiquitous, hitching a ride without advance planning becomes easy.

Now, how does this apply to the Amp? To be clear, I’m not presently taking sides in the debate over the Amp. Traffic on West End is abysmal, and something needs to be done. The Amp is, indeed, something. But what alternatives are there? I think this alternative is better from almost every perspective. Let's run the numbers.

Amp is projected to cost $4 million a year to operate, plus the $174 million startup costs. Add some for inevitable overruns, divide that over 20 years, and you get about $14 million annually. A comparable BRT system in Cleveland has ridership of around 14,000 daily. Each rider represents at most one car off the road, but maybe not even that. Depends on whether they count the same person going both directions as one rider or two. So being generous, we’re spending at least a thousand dollars per year to get each individual car off the road.

How about instead, we just pay people to carpool? If someone paid me a thousand dollars a year for my trouble, you can bet I’d be carpooling! Set up a good smartphone-based system to make ride matches, and I guarantee you you’ll get more cars off the road for less money. The result helps all of Nashville, not just one dense strip. And there’s zero construction disruption.

Obviously there’s a lot of variation possible. Who gets paid? The driver? The rider? Both? How do you keep track and minimize gaming the system? I don’t have all the answers. I can tell you that the system has to be set up well from the start; I've seen far too many systems like this half-complete with clearly zero ease-of-use consideration. The problem isn't trivial. But it is solvable, and I think this is what we should be looking at as an alternative to ripping up West End for a few years.

Footnote:

Suppose you have two forms of transit available to people. Cars, which hold 5 people, and busses, which hold 60. Suppose your goal is to get as many vehicles off the road as possible. For cars to get more people off the road than busses, more people have to be willing to use cars than are willing to use busses. How many more?

Define DB to be the number of people held by a bus, and DC to be the number of people held by a car. The ratio of people willing to carpool vs. number willing to bus must be at least (1-1/DB)/(1-1/DC)

If this criterion is met, more vehicles will be off the road by carpooling, even though each vehicle holds fewer people.

Attempted murder? Early retirement!

Knox County Sheriff's deputy Frank Phillips was fired last month after he was caught on camera choking a handcuffed and unresisting UT student until he passed out.

Let me say that again: the student was handcuffed, was not resisting, and this officer choked him unconscious.

It's just been announced that the Knox County DA will not file criminal charges against Phillips. This is a travesty. The message could not be clearer: a crime that would result in a normal person being tried for attempted murder, results in far less for a police officer. Every event like this helps break down the public trust in the police. We need that trust, or society will eventually fail.

Of course, given the history of police abuse in this country, I'm surprised Phillips even lost his job. Praise to Knox County sheriff Jones for doing the right thing. If he runs for anything anywhere near me, he has my vote. DA Randall Nichols, however, should never hold office again. Perhaps he'd like to explain himself?

Unfortunately, as I understand things no other entity in Tennessee has the authority to press charges against Phillips for his abysmal crime, possibly excepting the US attorney for East Tennessee. The state legislature should consider fixing that. A DA that's asleep at the wheel should not have the power to do that much damage to public trust.

Review: Dallas

This is a review of the new revival of Dallas, particularly as compared to the original show. I'm probably one of the few people of my generation to have seen every episode of Dallas. Seventeen seasons, three hundred and eighty episodes.

Obviously I find the show to have some appeal.

I'm not obsessive about it, by any means. Dallas is not the best thing ever. The plot developments are sometimes contrived, and sometimes it's just outright cheesy. But the old show did a pretty good job of holding my attention with its well-developed and well-acted characters. With moments like "Who Shot JR?" and the amazingly ballsy dream season, Dallas deserves its place in television history.

The occasional moment of eighties anachronism is pretty enjoyable, as well. The Ewings have car-phones as a sign of their incredible richness. One industrialist brags that when his computer chips are complete, each one will hold over ten thousand pieces of information. And, for a darker turn, Sue Ellen drinks like a fish her entire pregnancy and nobody says a word about the health of her baby.

This was clearly a show of its time.

The reason Dallas worked was because the characters had clear motivations, and the conflicts developed from their relationships. The Ewings are all family, they all love each other, but they all have different ideas about how to proceed. Same for the Barnes family, though of course it was much smaller. Almost every strange plot twist was either a response to real-world concerns (actors dying or leaving) or a means to give the characters something new to respond to.

The new Dallas ignores all that. When Pam left Bobby, he was months or years before he was ready to move on. But Christopher has gone through two serious relationships that ended badly in the last, what, less than a year of show-time? Plus finding out his mother died, which nobody has reacted to. Yet Christopher is ready to jump right in with yet another new girl. It would be okay if they were presenting it as the action of a hurt person who's reacting to terrible events in his life, but they're not. Heather is just someone for Christopher to bang for drummed-up conflict.

What does Christopher want, exactly? Family? Business success? I have no idea. How about John Ross? Emma? Pamela? Eleana? As far as I can tell, they all want money and revenge. There's nothing holding these people together, no bonds of family that force them into conflict. It would have been much simpler for John Ross to simply leave Southfork. I have no reason to think he cares about it as a place or a piece of his legacy, or about the people living there. JR cared. Why does John Ross?

Now, some characters aren't like that. Bobby and Sue Ellen, they're better, but that's because they were defined characters when the show started. JR was pretty well-done before he died, as well. Cliff, though, is a totally one-note character, which is a disservice to him. Cliff was often deeper than they're portraying him now.

And some of the plot points are just toally unbelievable.

• Christopher supposedly grew up with Drew and Eleana Ramos. But if that's so, how does nobody know who Joaquin is? He was raised as their sibling!
• At the end of the most recent episode, Drew has apparently set fire to Southfork, despite heightened security.
• The entire family has left alcoholic Sue Ellen home alone in a house full of unlocked liquor. After having done the same thing, repeatedly, in the eighties.
• Many people want revenge on the entire Ewing family for something JR did. As if they aren't all individuals who have taken their own actions over time. Most of the bad blood was against JR (or Jock, if you go back far enough), and they're both dead. I could see Bobby or Sue Ellen having enemies of old, and John Ross is clearly a schemer in his own right. But nobody seems to be blaming them for their own actions. It's all about what JR did to Papa Ramos, which is a straight-up copy of what Jock supposedly did to Digger Barnes.
• And these plotters feel a need to repeat their plans and motivations to each other every episode, just so we viewers aren't left behind... "How is it going?" "Wonderful! Soon we will have our revenge against the Ewing family for stealing our father's property and driving him to his death!" "Oh, right, I'd forgotten why we were doing all this..."
• Drew is instantly totally over his guilt at killing two unborn babies, and now back on a revenge kick.
• All these people involved in shady dealings seem totally unaware that everything they do could be recorded at any time.

I'm afraid I'm almost done with Dallas. It's been fun seeing a few old friends, but I'm not making any new ones. That's what it was going to take to make this revival work.

Spying on Feinstein

Senator Feinstein just found out that the CIA has been spying on her, personally. She's outraged. Spying on us little people, that's just fine by her, she's all for it. But spying on her!? UNACCEPTABLE! Don't they understand that elected officials have different rules!? The CIA exists to protect Senators from people like us! (Reading editorial pages, that's some subversive activity, there...)

I mean, really, what was she expecting? That our spy agencies would suddenly start behaving ethically and recognizing some boundaries, when she's been encouraging them to do the exact opposite? She's a hypocrite, and a stupid one at that.

When an authoritarian moron like her (or, you know, pick your hypocrite) can get re-elected over and over, our election system is totally broken. We need a way to permanently break incumbent advantage, giving new candidates a way to overcome the entrenched, entitled political class. Preferably a way that isn't limited to millionaires and their friends, too. And it has to start from local and state governments; DC is never going to limit its own power.

So if you needed a reason to support approval voting, here's a new one: it would help defeat Senator Feinstein.

Oh, and my capcha for submitting this letter? 4nsa. Ha.

Google Fiber in Nashville

Nashville is now on the short list of potential Google Fiber expansion sites. Here's what that would mean: 

• Faster internet speeds for all, making every information-based company in Nashville more competitive
• Free internet connections for thousands of poor families, making job searching and education vastly easier, and relieving considerable burden from our libraries
• Better service offerings from AT&T and Comcast, as they're finally forced to compete and improve their dismal services.

I am not given to hyperbole, so please take it literally when I say that Google Fiber coming to Nashville would be one of the most cost-effective infrastructure improvements that could ever happen in this city. We need to do everything possible to make this happen.

Like all things, you're going to see some opposition. You can bet that that opposition will be supported by Comcast and AT&T. Even in Kansas City, where Google Fiber has changed everything for the better, some bought legislators are trying to keep Google Fiber from spreading to the rest of the state. They claim it's in the name of free markets, but how does preventing competition ever lead to free markets? Free markets are all about having as many competitors as possible!

If you see any such bills proposed here, look past the spin and recognize them for what they are: legalized monopoly for AT&T and Comcast, at the expense of all of us.

Quote-itis

Seriously, what is with this? Quotation marks indicate that something is not to be taken literally! They do not emphasize things! Signs I've seen lately, with my translations:

• "Look twice" for motorcycles (hahaha nope, just run them over)
• Flu shots given "daily" (wink-wink, nudge-nudge)
• "Select" Valentine's Day decor 50% off

That last one doesn't even make sense as emphasis! Who's typing these things? And "why"?

Guyana as a US state?

Guyana is a small country in the northern part of South America. It was a Dutch colony, then an English one. They became independent in 1966. Its 760,000 people speak English.

And some of them want to join the United States.

According to that group, half the population of Guyana has left in the last few decades. And half of those emigres came to the United States, and most of the remaining population is trying to get here! Relations between the countries are close.

It's an interesting concept.

TN consumer tax form fail

Anyone tried to fill out a Tennessee consumer use tax return lately? Probably not, since it’s entirely voluntary. That might explain why it’s so horribly designed.

First, it has to be done online; there’s no paper version. That’s OK, but only if you do online stuff right. Second, there’s no way to save your work; you type in a huge amount of information, lose your browser session and have to start over. Third, all the data has to be formatted to an absurd degree. Cents have to be in a separate field from dollars, entered as a two-digit amount. Years have to be two-two-four digits. Miss one, and it won't accept your form, but also won't point out your mistake! Fourth, you have to enter a separate line item for every purchase. If you want to add a number of purchases all at one time, too bad; you have to do that one by one.

Oh, and they don’t take Visa, of all things. Say what you want about whether this kind of tax should or should not exist. But speaking as an engineer, if you’re going to do something, it should be done well.

Amendments: Summary

I've put together all my proposed amendments in one list, with some slight modifications and improvements. EDIT 2017.12.3: New amendment added.

1) Should 3/4 of states ratify identical amendments to the Constitution, and at least 1/2 of the total number of states containing at least 1/2 the total population of the US ratify that amendment by popular vote, that amendment shall be adopted, regardless of whether or not that amendment has been proposed by Congress or an Article V convention.

I understand 2 and 3 work in other countries, but the details of implementation are very problematic. Until those can be worked out, I'm going to leave them as-is for the record (and so my numbering doesn't get messed up).

2) Persons arrested or charged with crimes have the right to privacy until convicted. No person accused of a crime shall have their name publicly released until and unless they are convicted. Purposeful violation of the privacy of the accused without their written consent, filed with the court, shall be punishable by law.

3) No person convicted of a crime shall be punished until all judicial appeals are exhausted. Appeals shall be conducted without undue delay.

4 needs expansion to ensure necessary funding.

4) Every jurisdiction shall have sufficient judges and public defenders to ensure swift justice for all in that jurisdiction, including appeals. These positions shall be funded as necessary by the relevant jurisdiction, with a dedicated funding source. If such funding is unavailable, the state or federal government shall supply such funding.

5) No fees shall be charged for access to the courts.

6a) In all lawsuits, money contributed to legal representation shall be divided evenly among all parties. Money submitted for legal representation that goes unused by any party shall be used to fund attorneys for the public defense.

Update: I'm adding 6b, as what may be a more practical and desirable alternate.

6b) All persons shall have the right to no-cost legal representation in all cases, both civil and criminal, without regard to financial means.

It's been pointed out that the wording of 7 may be used to eliminate liability waivers, and not just binding arbitration clauses. I'm updating the wording to try and correct this.

7) All persons in the US shall have full access to the US justice system at all times, including class-action suits, regardless of prior contractual obligations. Any clause of a contract which denies either party access to a court of law for redress of grievance, is hereby invalid. This shall not be construed to obviate clauses addressing liability of various parties.

The wording of 8 was pulled straight from the Montana constitution, but it's very unclear. I'm going to change this to the Minnesota version.

8) No law shall embrace more than one subject, which shall be expressed in its title.

9) If Congress passes a law authorizing spending, that law shall also be construed to authorize any borrowing necessary to execute such spending.
 
For 10, the clause punishing the President if his veto gets overridden probably isn't necessary or helpful. I'm removing that for simplicity. Also, it should be clear that snap elections do not "count" towards term limits, nor do they alter the next scheduled election for that office. If a senator has a year left in his term, and wins a snap-election, he still has one year left. If that senator loses, his replacement still only has a year left. Also, three weeks is not practical; twelve is more sane.

10) In the event of a failure of the Congress to pass a bill funding ongoing government operations, all congresspersons shall be immediately subject to election, to be held within twelve weeks of the end of the previous spending law. If the Congress passes a bill funding government operations, and the President fails to sign said bill, the President shall also be subject to election.

Unscheduled elections held under this amendment do not affect the scheduling of the next periodic election for any office, nor do they contribute to any term limits that may be applicable.
 
In any interim between laws authorizing spending, the funding levels from the previous spending law shall continue to apply. 

11) Any other rules of order notwithstanding, in the event that a majority the members of either chamber of Congress officially declares their approval of a bill, by sponsorship or other means, that bill shall be deemed to have been passed by that chamber.

12) Neither chamber of Congress shall conduct business without a majority of its members participating.

The way 13 was originally worded could be construed to disallow collection of evidence during a criminal investigation. I've added the word "permanently" to clarify this.

13) Property shall only be permanently taken from its owner without consent if that owner is convicted of a crime, or if just compensation is given. No other takings are permitted.

14) In cases where private property is taken for public use, what qualifies as just compensation for that property shall be determined by a judge.
 
15) Weapons which convey the ability to kill large numbers of people rapidly are subject to regulation or ban by federal or state governments.

16) Weapons which are useful for purposes including (but not limited to) sport and self-defense, but are not useful for killing large numbers of people quickly, are subject to regulation by state and federal governments. However, their ownership shall not be barred to any adult person except for conviction of a felony or declaration of mental incompetence by a court of law. Regulation may include limits on the manner and locations allowable for carrying and storing such weapons, so long as such regulations do not interfere with the right of ownership and legitimate use.        

17) When executing warrants, arrests, or otherwise issuing legally binding instructions, law enforcement officers shall in all cases clearly identify themselves, their intent, and their duties, before execution of same.

18) All votes cast in elections for offices federal, state, or local, shall be recorded in a written, durable form readable by a healthy human without mechanical assistance. This record shall be presented to the voter for verification before the vote is cast, whereupon that voter shall have the option to recast their vote. The federal government shall define standards for this process, and fund the acquisition of necessary equipment.

19) Ballots shall not indicate the party affiliation of any candidate.

20) In the event that voters are presented with a ballot listing the names of candidates, the order of those names shall be randomized on each ballot.

For 21, 100 may be an unreasonably low requirement. Changing to 1000.

21) In no case shall the signatures of more than 1000 registered voters be required for a candidate to be listed on the ballot for any election, nor shall fees be charged for such listing.

22a) The President shall be elected by popular vote. The electoral college is nullified.

22b) The electoral votes of each state shall be distributed proportionally to each candidate according to the popular vote within that state.


23a) No person shall hold the office of Senator more than twice, or of Representative more than six times.

23b requires some modification, to prevent state legislatures from gaming the term limits to eliminate sitting congressmen from an opposing party.

23b) States shall have the right to set term limits for their Representatives or Senators. However, if the state passes a law shortening the maximum number of terms allowed to be served, that law shall only apply to persons not serving when the law is passed.

23c) No person shall hold the office of Senator, Representative, or President twice in succession, but may otherwise serve as many times as elected.


24) All electoral districts shall be drawn by a politically-neutral group of at least five people, none of whom are elected officials. This body shall be politically neutral. The states shall have the power to define the selection process for this group.

25) States shall have the right to determine whether to use single-member or multi-member House districts, so long as each voter's weight is approximately equal. 

26) States shall have the right to hold recall elections for their Representatives or Senators, and to determine processes to fill vacancies between elections. 

27a) Congress shall have the power to regulate donations and spending on federal election campaigns. The states shall have such power over election campaigns for all other offices.

27b) All elections shall be publicly funded; spending private money on an election, unless that money is equally shared among all candidates for that office, shall be forbidden by law.  

28) All public elections at any level of government shall be held using approval voting. 

29) The courts may rule on the constitutionality of bills before Congress prior to their adoption as law, or on any new bill passed into law.

30) A US citizen has the right to challenge the constitutionality of any law in court. Fees may be charged to file a constitutional challenge, but these fees shall not exceed the median weekly wage of the United States.

31) The right of individuals to be secure in their person, things, and effects, as well as the right of individuals to be secure against unwarranted search and seizure, shall extend to items and information held for that individual by a third party. These rights shall also extend to communication by that individual with whatever party, and information that such communication took place.

32) The right of a person to not be compelled to give self-incriminating testimony shall include the right to refuse to assist the state in accessing private possessions or information.

33) Any modification of a person's private possessions without warrant shall be interpreted as a violation of that person's right to security in said possessions, and shall be a criminal act, punishable by law.

34) All public actions taken by any law enforcement officer are subject to recording by the public. Such recordings shall be treated as the private property of the owner. Willful destruction of such records by anyone not their rightful owner shall be treated the same as destruction of any other private property.

35) No person shall be tortured, either as punishment or to elicit testimony, or for any other reason. Torture or conspiracy to commit torture by any person in the United States, or in the service thereof, shall be a criminal act, punishable by law.

36) No person shall, in any case, be imprisoned for failure to pay a debt.

37) Copyrights exist for a fixed term, defined at issuance of that copyright. In no case shall a copyright term be retroactively lengthened.

38) Statutory penalties for copyright infringement, where the party convicted of infringing did not profit, shall in no case exceed ten times the market value of the item infringed.

39) In the event a copyright-holder can not be identified or located, a court shall set appropriate license fees, applicable for a fixed time. Should the rights-holder become known before that time, they shall receive all fees paid, and have all standard rights to re-negotiate the license at the end of the fixed term. If the rights-holder does not become known before the end of the license period, the work shall enter public domain.

The original wording of 40 affected all controlled substances, including, say, plutonium. Not really the goal of that amendment.

40) Simple possession of illegal drugs shall in no case be punished by incarceration, nor considered in determining the length of incarceration for other related crimes, unless such incarceration is primarily for the purpose of treatment. This applies retroactively to all persons presently so imprisoned.

41 as originally written also eliminated mandatory maximum sentences.

41) Courts shall have full discretion over the sentencing of convicted criminals. All mandatory minimum sentencing laws are void. Presently incarcerated convicts shall have the right to have the length of their sentences appealed if those sentences were set by mandatory minimum laws.

42) The state shall not offer persons accused of a crime any inducement to plead guilty, including the option of pleading to a lesser charge.

43) The operation of prisons shall not be outsourced to any non-governmental agency.

44) Any planned or ongoing gathering of information relating to a criminal investigation, where such gathering would otherwise violate civil rights, shall be considered to be a search, and as such must be authorized by the courts before it can take place. The agency seeking such a warrant must clearly demonstrate to the court why such a warrant is necessary. The target of the information-gathering must be limited, and clearly specified in the warrant. The person who is the subject of the warrant must be promptly informed of the search.

45) In cases where unwarranted searches are reasonable and otherwise lawful, the means of such searches must be established as both necessary and effective in a court of law prior to such searches being performed. Cases may be brought before the court for the express purpose of establishing same for any proposed means of search.

46) No person shall be held indefinitely without charge or trial, either within the United States or by any agency thereof. All persons held by the United States, regardless of geographic location, shall have swift access to the courts.

47) No agency of the United States shall release a prisoner of any sort into the custody of another country or non-state agency if there is reasonable expectation that the prisoner's human rights will be violated in the recipient's custody.

48) All laws and court rulings, both federal and state, must be publicly accessible without cost or restriction 

49) The federal government shall have no authority to regulate private property that does not in any case change owners, cross state lines, or otherwise have effect outside the boundaries of a particular state.

50) No person shall be deprived of the right to vote for conviction of a crime, except for crimes of violence, treason, or electoral fraud. Removal of suffrage can only take place after all judicial appeals are exhausted. Suffrage must be immediately reinstated in the event the conviction is overturned.

Clarified 51 and 52 to make it clear that states could not rescind ratification of completed amendments.

51) Any state ratification of a proposed Constitutional amendment shall only be valid for twenty years. This shall only apply to proposed amendments, and not retroactively to amendments already part of this Constitution.

52) A state has the right to rescind its ratification of a proposed Constitutional amendment, by means each state shall determine by law. This shall only apply to proposed amendments, and not retroactively to amendments already part of this Constitution.

53) Any judicial appointments made by the President and not expressly rejected by a majority vote of the Senate within 90 days shall be deemed to be approved by the Senate.

54) Any person holding the office of President, Vice President, Senator or Representative shall be required to divest themselves of all non-cash assets in excess of five times the median income of the United States for the duration of their term.

Improving schools

To make any system improve, positive and negative feedback are required. Measure what's happening, reward the good, punish the bad. "That which is measured, improves." But that's as much a warning as a rule! Measure test scores, test scores go up. Measure graduation rates, graduation rates go up. That's exactly what we're seeing. But are those the things that matter? No! We care about long-term outcome, post-graduation, which may get worse even as graduation rates and test scores improve!

Schools should be judged by how students do after leaving (which might not mean when they graduate!). Employment rate, income, and incarceration rates are obvious measures, but there are others. Further, schools should only be judged against schools with similar demographics. A 10% incarceration rate a year after leaving might be high in one area, but low in another. And graduation shouldn't be be the only goal; if students can leave without graduating and still have a successful life, more power to them!

It's gotten to the point that graduation is all that matters, so it's been made so that everyone can do it. And if everyone can do it, it's meaningless. It's now impossible to get a grade under fifty in metro schools! School should be hard. Some people should fail. The students that fail should have a different system in place for them. We're trying to make every student fit one system, instead of making different layers of system that fit different types of student. And all we get out of it is very old, uneducated, useless children. It's a giant mandatory waste of time.

And the information taught in school needs to be completely changed. Instead of teaching to the test, schools should teach skills that will be needed in life: writing resumes, interviewing for jobs, doing taxes, signing rental contracts, avoiding debt. Primary among these is simply thinking. Classes should focus less on rote memorization, and more on evidence-based reasoning, problem-solving, and deduction. Teach those things, then measure success in life after school, and we'll have a much better system.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a teacher. I understand the value of math and history and science. But that value is not rote memorization! School isn't about learning what to think, it's about learning how to think. You learn history, not to know what happened when, but to know why things happen. You learn science, not to know about the natural world, but to be able to observe, make theories, test them, and throw out your own ideas when they're wrong. You don't learn math so you can do math, but so you can attack and solve problems in a clear and structured fashion, one step at a time, without being overwhelmed.

We need to abandon this myopic focus on test scores and graduation rates. All that's done is lower standards to the point that a high school diploma says nothing about what you're capable of. Instead, we need to make those diplomas worth something. Schools should teach skills, including thinking, instead of just teaching information.