Could iTunes please not suck? Please?

I spent DAYS making a Christmas playlist for a party last year. iTunes has eaten it. The data is sort of maybe still there, but there's no actually making it point to the songs. If I try, it loses the link forever. Screw iTunes.

November 2014 Election: State Legislature

Again, I'm copying and pasting some information from my posts on the primary elections. Unfortunately, there's not much thinking to be done on most of these.

The following four elections are uncontested, and there is no reason to support any of these candidates based on their stands on issues that matter. I suggest writing in a name in protest of the very concept of uncontested elections. If you want a name to write, feel free to use mine.

52nd Representative District
Mike Stewart (D)

55th Representative District
John Ray Clemmons (D)

58th Representative District
Harold M. Love (D)

59th Representative District
Sherry Jones (D)

The following elections are only between the two major parties. I never heard anything on the big issues from most of the candidates, and only the usual partisan stuff is on their websites. Since the Republican party has gone so far off the rails lately, I suggest voting Democrat. If you can't do that, I suggest writing in a name for those elections, if only out of protest. Again, feel free to use mine, if you like.

21st Senate District
Diana Cuellar (R)
Jeff Yarbro (D) 

50th Representative District 
Troy Brewer (R)
Bo Mitchell (D, incumbent)

51st Representative District
Brian L. Mason (R)
Bill Beck (D)

56th Representative District
Beth Harwell (R , incumbent)
Chris Moth (D)
Unlike any of the others on this list, this candidate responded to me, and described himself as "deeply concerned about the influence of money in politics". It's not a commitment to the Wolf-PAC amendment or anything else, but it's something. On a personal level, I can strongly recommend him. He's a computer, science, technically-oritented kind of guy. I really enjoyed speaking with him, and I think he'd do very well in the House.

60th Representative District 
Jim Gotto (R)
Darren Jernigan (D)

The following three races have a third-party candidate, so I'll go slightly more in depth on them.

19th Senate District
Sterlina Inez Brady (R)
Still no information, at all. No webpage, no Facebook page, no Twitter feed, no contact information.

Thelma M. Harper (D)
The incumbent in this district. She did not respond to my requests for positions. She has no website or position statements that I could find. Regardless of what she actually wants to do or has done, a Senator who's not interested in participating in democracy leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

George Thomas (I)
He has position statements! And they're actually mostly sane! (Sadly, that's how low my standards have to be in this election.) From his statements he's closer to being a Democrat than anything else, but since we can't tell a darned thing about Harper, I'm going to say, vote for Thomas!

53rd Representative District
John Wang (R)
Generic Republican candidate, no position statements of interest.

Jason Powell (D)
Generic Democrat candidate, no position statements of interest.

Tonya Miller (L)
Generic Libertarian candidate, no position statements of interest.

Much like the two-candidate elections, there's not much to say here. Republicans are doing horrible things lately, so pick the Democrat if you see a difference between those two parties, or the Libertarian if you don't. 

54th Representative District
Brenda Gilmore (D) 
The incumbent in this district. She did not respond to my requests for positions. She has no website or position statements that I could find. Regardless of what she actually wants to do or has done, a representative who's not interested in participating in democracy leaves a bad taste in my mouth. 

Martin Holsinger (G)
Well-spoken, communicative with the voters, and doesn't seem to be particularly crazy. I'd vote for Holsinger in this election.

November 2014 Election: US House TN-5

There are three candidates for US House this fall, and very little chance that the incumbent will lose. I already described two of them in my posts on the primary, but I'll repeat what I said before here.

Bob Ries (Republican)
I'm not analyzing Bob Ries's website this time. See, I met Bob Ries in 2010, when we were both running for US House TN-5. (He lost the primary to David Hall, so we weren't directly opposed.) We spoke for some time about one thing and another, and I came to the definite conclusion that he was not someone I would want in Congress. I won't go into more details; it was four years ago, and there's just no need to pick on the man. But I can't recommend voting for Bob Ries.

Jim Cooper (Democrat, incumbent)
He's got a good list of issue statements, including intellectual property, wonder of wonders. (I'm not 100% convinced he's got a good policy, but at least he's aware of the issue, and claims to strive for balance.) And I appreciate the fact that he has links scattered throughout his text; a familiar style! Cooper has a 65% match rating with me on POPVOX, which is twice what either of our Senators get. If Cooper wins, I won't be terribly disappointed.

Paul Deakin (Independent)
This candidate seems to be almost entirely concerned with animals. He has no policy statements at all besides that.

My recommendation: if you feel a need to cast a protest vote against both parties, vote Deakin. Otherwise, vote Cooper.

November 4 2014 Election: Wine Referendum

Right now it is not legal for grocery stores in Tennessee to sell wine. Beer, yes, but not wine. I suspect this is a hold-over from prohibition. Judging by the signs and employees asking me to sign petitions, grocery stores would apparently like this to change. I'm sure the liquor stores would prefer it to not.

I do not oppose others' right to drink. I have no desire to make it legally difficult for adults to obtain alcohol, nor is it against my religious beliefs to drink. Dependency on alcohol, drinking to the point of losing control, drinking so that you put others in danger, those I would hold to be immoral. But not drinking in itself.

That said, I don't drink. I have had various alcohol at different times, but have liked almost none of it. I prefer having full command of my senses, and I've seen a ruined life or two that included a lot of alcohol. There's apparently nothing in it for me. So if I'm being asked to vote, "Should grocery stores carry wine?" I find there to be no moral dimension to this question; it becomes a matter of practicality.

Now, I know market theory. This is talking about undoing a pointless government intervention in the market. But I don't hold that an unregulated market is necessarily better than a regulated one. I judge policy based on its observed impact, not on presumptions and theory, unless there's genuinely no data.

What happens if grocery stores carry wine? That means some business that was going to liquor stores will now go to grocery stores instead. We're basically moving money from one group to another, when it was artificially shunted to the first group in the first place. More competition, which will theoretically result in a more efficient allocation of resources, maximization of profit, invisible hand, yadda. None of that has any direct impact on me or mine, positive or negative.

You know what will impact me? Finite shelf space. If grocery stores start carrying wine, they have to stop carrying something else. What will they give up? Obviously the things they make the least money on. I have no idea what those things are. Do any of my (three) readers? My bet is that they'll stop carrying the exact things I buy the most of. Just because the universe is perverse like that.

What else will impact me? We'll be rid of all those irritating "RED WHITE AND FOOD" signs everywhere. I'd like that. I prefer my grocers to not try to suck me into their politicking.

So I'll probably be voting against this resolution, but not for any grand reasons that will make the world a better place for anyone else. Just for my own tiny selfish purposes.

November 4 2014 Election: Amendments

There are four amendments to the Constitution of Tennessee on the ballot this election. For each amendment to be passed, it must earn both a majority of the votes cast for/against the amendment itself, and a majority of the votes cast in the gubernatorial race.

Amendment 1
This amendment would clarify that the state legislature has power to regulate and restrict abortions beyond the present limits, as interpreted by the state Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood v. Sunquist. Essentially, right now both the Tennessee and US Constitutions protect a woman's right to an abortion. This would remove the state-level protections.

This is one small step in an ideological battle, the end goal of which is for the US Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade. Frankly, it's an ideological battle that's been set up to manipulate and divide this country. Those who set up that battle, those who divide us, do it cynically for their own ends, not out of the moral superiority of their position, and I'm sick of it. It's time for rational people to take over the discussion.

If abortion is legal, many unborn children will die. This is tragic.

If abortion is illegal, many pregnant women will die. They will die from complications of pregnancy, or from seeking an unsafe illegal abortion. This is also tragic.

Regardless of which way the law lands, the government is deciding who lives and who dies. But let's be clear: both options are terrible. Sometimes the world just sucks. If you find yourself feeling particularly great, that you picked the right thousands to condemn, maybe you should reconsider just how comfortable you are. Supporting the lesser evil is something you should mourn, not celebrate.

That said, I will be voting against this amendment. Not because of the effects on actual abortion, which I believe will be minimal either way this referendum ends. But because I oppose the hijacking of my religion and my country for cynical political ends. It offends me to see good Christian people ignore every teaching of Christ, supporting those who hurt the poor and the downtrodden, based on an argument of questionable scriptural validity. It offends me to see intelligent people refuse to consider all the implications of an election, instead choosing candidates based on a single criterion that that candidate can not affect.

I want Christians to behave like Christ. I want rational people to weigh actual, measurable outcomes of their actions. Based on those standards, the people behind this amendment oppose what I stand for, and so I stand to oppose them as well.

Amendment 2
Right now, appellate judges are elected directly by the people of Tennessee. This amendment would have them appointed by the governor, confirmed by the legislature, and then after one term the people could vote whether or not to retain them. Direct election of judges is a questionable process, as it damages the political independence of the judiciary. It's a lot harder (though by no means impossible) to buy a judge if he doesn't have to worry about being elected. I will be voting for this amendment.

Amendment 3
This would prevent the state from ever enacting an income tax. As a structural matter, it's a bad idea to constitutionally limit options that the legislature may one day want. As a political matter, I find it to be extremely distasteful to encode one party's political preferences into the constitution of the state. Income taxes are not some inherent evil; if your goal is to have a functional society without a huge wealth disparity, progressive taxes like income are vastly better than regressive taxes like sales. Just because that's not Tennessee's priority today doesn't mean it will never be. I will be voting against this amendment.

Amendment 4
The intent of this amendment is not obvious from the wording, but the primary effect appears to be to allow veterans organizations to hold lotteries, like all other non-profit organizations are presently allowed to do. This is essentially a minor procedural alteration. I'll probably vote for this amendment.

As pointed out in a previous post, voting for governor makes it harder for all these amendments to pass, and this is the largest effect your vote for governor is likely to have. Based on the strength of my preferences against amendments 1 and 3, compared against the strength of my preferences for amendments 2 and 4, I will be voting for governor.

November 4 2014 Election: Governor

Given the field, I consider it a foregone conclusion that Haslam will win a second term as Governor of Tennessee. Voting to affect the outcome of the election is therefore meaningless. One should thus vote (or not vote) based on other factors. It's sad when your vote is basically a confidence poll or protest vote, but that's what we have today.

It's important to remember that there are four constitutional amendments on the ballot as well, and the the number of votes cast for Governor has direct effect on the threshold for passing those amendments. That adds a strategic element to whether you should vote for governor at all! If you support the amendments on the ballot, voting for anyone in the governor's race actually hurts you; it raises the bar for passing an amendment.

So if you're in favor of all amendments, don't vote for governor at all; there's no point. If you're opposed to all amendments, vote for someone. And if you're split among the amendments, well, that makes life more complicated. 

Bill Haslam (Republican)
Essentially seems to be running on the platform "I am Bill Haslam". As I've said before, the state hasn't disintegrated, but neither has it accepted billions of dollars that would help many people in this state have affordable medical care. I wouldn't be excited to vote for him.

Charles V "Charlie" Brown (Democratic)
He's got a better picture than before, but he still has no website or obvious campaign statements of any kind I maintain he won his primary because a lot of Democrats voted for the first name on the ballot. The only reason I can think of to vote for this candidate is if you're a really big fan of the Democratic party, and even then, I'm not sure that's a good reason.

Shaun Crowell (Constitution)
Opposes Common Core, spreading a fraction of the usual misinformation about it. (Not that you can't reasonably oppose common core. Just that you shouldn't believe convoluted math problems are part of it, because they're not.) He'd shut down Haslam's free tuition program for community colleges. He's in favor of the Bundy family. Surprisingly, he's in favor of unions if the workers want to have them, so this guy is not a Republican. But he's not in favor of accepting ACA money to pay for Tennesseans' health care.

Now, since he's not going to win, Crowell's specific positions may not be as important to you as those of his party. If you're not familiar with the Constitution Party, you can find out more about them here and here. They're on the right side of a number of important issues that the major parties ignore, like asset forfeiture. But they also want to move to a "debt-free interest-free money system" which I'm pretty sure is impossible. They want to phase out social security. They want to make abortion illegal in cases of rape. They want to outlaw pornography to protect free speech. And they oppose the idea of a constitutional convention, which is kind of funny since they think the founders were brilliant beyond criticism on every other issue...

This guy might be okay. But the party he represents is a little nuts. 

Isa Infante (Green)
This candidate has zero detailed policy positions, so all you can evaluate is the Green Party itself. I'm not going to tell you I sorted through the entire national platform, it's crazy long, but I'm a fan of many of their positions. They have a detailed plank on election reform, which almost sounds like I wrote it, except that they're still supporting IRV instead of the far-superior approval voting. And they're still inscrutably opposed to nuclear power, letting perfect be the enemy of good. But in general, I'm a bigger and bigger fan of the Green Party. Unless, of course, there's some insanity buried in that platform that I'm missing.

Steven Damon Coburn (Independent)
He wants to "teach Biblical values in schools", judge and pay teachers entirely by their students' grades, and a number of other things that don't seem realistic or likely to actually improve the situation. He's a rambling sort (yeah, yeah, I'm one to criticize), and I don't see him being a good governor at all.

John Jay Hooker (Independent (but really a Democrat))
John Jay Hooker is a placeholder candidate. Voting for someone, as noted above, raises the bar for passing amendments. Hooker is on the ballot only to give Democrats someone to vote for besides Charlie Brown, so they won't just stay home. So I'd say vote for him if it makes you feel warm and fuzzy to vote Democrat, but you don't want to vote for Brown.

Daniel T. Lewis (Libertarian)
Typical Libertarian, nothing particularly striking here. (Though he does mention artificial wombs as a solution to the abortion rights impasse. I'm going to claim credit for that one; it was part of my platform as a Libertarian candidate in 2010.) Remember that the position of the Libertarian party is to reduce the size of government on every issue, in every way, whether it makes functional sense or not.

Summary
Your vote will have no impact on the outcome of this election, but turnout does help set the bar for amendments to pass. If you're in favor of the amendments passing, don't vote for governor at all. Otherwise, I'd recommend voting for Infante, the Green candidate, simply because the Greens seem to be the party of sanity.

Infrastructure Megaprojects: Mosquito Eradication

Mosquito-borne diseases kill a million people every year. Admittedly, most of those aren't in the United States, which is what this post series is focused on, but some are. And even ignoring the disease aspect, the buggers are just hugely irritating.

We have a safe and simple way to wipe out the entire species. No chemicals, no engineered diseases, no possibility of spreading mutations into the gene pool. And mosquitoes have few known environmental niches.

I suggest the United States implement sterile insect technique in a significant but controlled area, and look very closely for environmental damage. If the species actually does turn out to be necessary, they can be (shudder) reintroduced. (Or preferably, some substitute species found.) And if there are no problems, we've just made the world a slightly better place.

There are two benefits. One, our own comfort and safety. And two, to demonstrate the ecological effects if such a policy is implemented worldwide.

Oh, and three: screw mosquitoes.

Now if we could just get rid of the bagworms...

Infrastructure Megaprojects: Jobs

Over the last fifteen years the American middle class has been gutted. Unemployment, while dropping slowly, is still high. Underemployment is worse; maybe more people have full-time jobs, but at reduced wages. This is the fundamental economic problem we face. It directly affects the lives of millions of Americans, and is the cause of much of our budget deficit. (Government tax receipts dropped like a stone when all those people lost their jobs, not to mention all the welfare they suddenly needed.)

I think the government could do more to help people find work. We've talked about building huge things, like power grids and aqueducts, which provide direct employment. But what about helping people find existing jobs? Or incentivizing the creation of better ones?

As an added bonus for the deficit hawks out there, or perhaps those who think government should be run like a business, consider this: if the government spends $1k helping me get a better job, how long before the government gets that $1k back in the taxes I pay and the welfare I no longer need? From a strictly financial perspective, spending money helping people get jobs is one of the best investments our government can make.

So suppose you're looking for a job, and can't find one. What can stop you?

Information 
You can't get a job you don't know exists. The government could create a central jobs bank, a single location where employers across the country could post job openings. And when I say employers across the country, I mean all of them. Pay employers to post job openings, and you'll have a database of every job everywhere quite rapidly. Figure there are ten million job openings in the country at any time. At $100 per opening posted, that's $1b. Chump change on the scale of the projects we're talking about.

Naturally, no matter what system you set up, someone will try to game it. We'd need to pay employers, not just for submitting an opening, but only if the job is filled by someone, and you can confirm who that someone is. That should take care of most cases of fraud. You'd also need to put limits on how often you could hire for the same position, or the same person, and promotions from within couldn't count. There will still be flaws, but for the most part it's workable. You don't shut down a functional project because of 1% waste.

The other downside is that this could completely destroy every other online jobs site. Who could survive against a negative-profit competitor? But consider, the government has a terrible track record lately with building complex websites. So perhaps a better idea is to contract the service out to existing job sites. Have a central database, but give easy hooks for Monster and Dice and whoever else to mine the data and list the results. Leverage the market, instead of trying to replace it.

Education
So now we have a giant list of every job in the country. For many, that means you can now be absolutely certain that you'll never make more than you're making now unless you retrain. So we link the jobs listings with data on training programs; each listing says "here are the qualifications, and here's how you get the qualifications if you don't have them." Link directly to a list of relevant educational programs, and all available financial assistance for each. As a bonus, this gives the government more data to target educational assistance.

Experience
Now you've found a job, and you have the paper qualifications. But you can't get any of them; they all say 3-5 years experience required! (Particularly funny when they want ten years experience programming in a language that hasn't existed that long...) How do you get experience when all the job openings require you to have experience? Chicken, egg.

Decades ago, companies had apprenticeship programs. They would actively train replacements for older employees, taking someone with no experience and turning them into whatever they needed. These programs are mostly gone. Companies don't plan decades in advance now; they're focused entirely on maximizing immediate profit. This is leading many industries into a disaster: as older employees retire, there's literally nobody with their skillset to replace them!

The government could incentivize apprenticeship programs. For a rough estimate, say the program is two years long, and that the government paid the entire compensation of the apprentice. For $10b, we could easily fund a hundred thousand apprenticeships, and probably more. We end up with a more skilled, more employable workforce, and those more skilled employees will almost certainly pay for themselves: the more money they make, the more taxes the government receives. Again, if you're the sort to say that government should be run like a business, I'd call that a good investment.

Competition
American companies often complain that they can't find skilled workers in the United States, and push for H-1B visas. We need to import workers, they say, to fill this skills gap. But there is no skills gap! There are plenty of American workers able to do the jobs in question. The inability to hire a $25/hr worker at $10/hr is not a skills gap. I'm all for immigration, but we don't need to be purposefully importing low-cost workers to compete with Americans for jobs.

Also, failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part. If these companies hadn't dismantled their apprenticeship programs, they'd be in a better position. I'm not inclined to screw American worker to make up for a corporate lack of foresight.

Location
Okay, say you've found a job you're qualified for, but it's too far away. You need to move, but you need a moving truck, and gas, and a place to live, and a deposit, at a minimum, not to mention lost wages in between jobs. You may also need temporary housing while you look for a permanent place. Moving's expensive, especially over a long distance. For people barely making ends meet, it may just not be an option.

Let's take the naive approach first and throw money at the problem, just to get a sense of the scale of things. Assume we have a million people moving across the country every year for work. If you just handed each one $5000 in moving assistance, that's $5b a year. Easily affordable, especially when you consider that putting someone to work in a better job gets the government tax income it didn't have before. That $5000 should come back easily within two years in most cases.

One specific expense the government could subsidize is real-estate agents. Many people moving a long distance for work wouldn't spend the extra money for a professional to help them find a place to live. But that kind of local professional is exactly what you need in that situation: you need someone who knows the local market and can find you what you're looking for quickly and efficiently.

Transportation
You've found a job, you're qualified for it, and it's in your city. But you can't afford a car, and you can't afford to move close enough to the job for walking or biking to be viable. What do you do?

Obviously, someone's going to have to drive you. If there are bus routes or trains already, great! But if you live or work outside a high-density area, that's not going to help you. You're going to need something more point-to-point. The government paying to facilitate that transportation could make all the difference between employment and unemployment.

Assume a 20-mile commute, which is pretty common these days. We could pay for a taxi, but that could cost $450/wk. We could rent a car for under $200/wk, plus $35 in gas, which sounds better. Assuming the standard 56 cents per mile, we're not going to do any better than $115/wk for a single-passenger vehicle; if that vehicle comes with a driver, they'll probably make enough per week for their time that we're back up to rental car levels. For single-passenger, a rental car may be the best we can reasonably do. So that comes to over $10k/year, which most people aren't going to pay in taxes with a better job. If you're getting someone off other forms of welfare, though, it may pay for itself.

Now, if neither home nor work is completely isolated from other travelers, we can reduce cost further with multiple passengers. So we're back to what I've proposed before: incentiveized carpooling. Pay people to carpool, set up a system to make it easy (or leverage an existing system like Uber or Lyft with modifications for multiple riders). The cost of helping this one carless person get to work could easily be cut in half, or better. Plus there will be fewer cars on the road, which is good for everyone.

Unpredictability
So you've found a job, you can get there, but they keep changing your hours. You work two hours this week, fourteen next week, you have no regular schedule, and you'd better be available 24-7 in case they call you in. And if you show up for a scheduled shift, you might be sent straight home. Don't like it? Too bad, you're replaceable.

This is what's wrong with a completely unregulated labor market: there are vastly more suppliers (workers) than there are consumers (employers). Without regulation, market forces dictate exactly what we see: wages go to nothing, and quality of life for the workers drops to nothing. Remember, the market is a tool for telling us what will happen. Like all science, it says nothing about what should happen, any more than observing nature tells us we should be eaten by predators because we can't fight back.

This means some form of government regulations are the only solution; by nature, market forces don't result in the outcomes we as a society prefer. We want people to have decent lives, and to be able to make a living working. So we're working counter to market forces, and that's okay, so long as we do it well.

If you're scheduled to work a shift 48 hours before shift start, you should be paid for that shift, even if the manager screwed up and scheduled too many people. If you're on-call, you should be paid like you're on-call. If you have a work schedule that works for you, you should be able to keep that schedule without arbitrary changes. In other words, you should be able to have a job.

Infrastructure Megaprojects: Education

Once everyone in the country has broadband access, education is utterly revolutionized. It's just a question of structure at that point.

One common complaint about society compares teachers to football players. "What's wrong with our society," they ask, "when someone playing a game gets paid a thousand times more than a teacher?" I'll tell you what's wrong with society: teaching is inefficient. It's not about cultural priorities, it's about scale. One football player can entertain a million people at a time. One teacher can only teach maybe thirty. In fact, per audience member contact hour, a teacher (teaching 25 students seven hours a day, 180 days a year) makes 500 times what a football player (playing maybe 22 three-hour games a year) does! If you want teachers to be paid better, if you want education to improve, we need to model professional sports: find the absolute best teachers out there, and give them a way to teach millions at the same time. Education as we know it will change forever.

We're almost there. If you haven't looked at Khan Academy, I suggest you do so. It's become one of the top e-learning platforms out there, with thousands of simple videos explaining almost any subject you can name. The math section has just been expanded further to be fully interactive. There are several other similar sites. MIT has opened access to almost all it's classes!

As impressive as all these initiatives are, one thing stands out to me about them all: they are all unfinished. We stand at the terminator. We've all seen children operating tablets as soon as they have the motor skills. When those children get to school as school is today, they will be bored out of their minds! If information is presented well, most children can absorb it at an unbelievable rate. That's the revolution we're looking at.

Here's what the government can do to help the process. Some of it is large infusions of cash, some is fixing the existing brokenness of the educational system, and some is just getting out of the way.

Hold competitions for the best online teaching programs.
Define standards, then offer prizes to the best ones in each subject. And I mean serious prizes, in the millions or tens of millions of dollars. Make the contest run over a few years, with a randomly selected group of students assigned to each program. Test each group regularly on the selected subject, in a thorough and rigorous manner. Give intermediate prizes each year or semester to the programs that show good progress. Ultimately, this project could cost the government well under a billion dollars, and jumpstart the new wave of education by a decade! But that's only useful if schools can handle the advanced students, which leads us to...

Make the school curriculum more adaptable.
If a student comes into first grade already competent in some of the requisite skills, advance that student to a class where they might actually learn. Schedule each student individually in each subject, at their appropriate skill level. Forget no child left behind. Better no child held down. Every child should be pushed to the limit of their skills, without regard to age. I was, and it shaped my entire life in very positive ways. If a student can finish school at sixteen, let them! Declare them a provisional adult, with additional privileges like voting. (The Constitution says that all citizens eighteen or older can vote. It doesn't say those younger can't.)

Don't ever compromise advancement standards.
No more of this "oh, you showed up, have a gold star" or "you turned in an assignment, have a 50". I'm all for giving multiple opportunities to demonstrate mastery, but you can not compromise standards. If a student doesn't understand the material, they do not advance. Period. Anything else turns your educational system into a babysitting system, which is where we are now.

Make the in-building education focus more on things that can't be learned online.
Critical thinking, clear communication, discussion, respect, personal interaction, field trips! Despite how we do things now, an education is not about learning facts, it's about learning new ways to think! Facts can be learned anywhere. Students should be exposed to multiple instructors, constantly, preferably with utterly different viewpoints about subjects. It's all too easy to turn your brain off when you're never presented with contradictory information. Clear communication in text should also be emphasized. Far too often I've seen college students write like seventh graders talk. This will take the longest time; it will take over a generation for there to be enough teachers trained this way.

Make students feel safe.
All too often, crimes like assault and theft are committed in schools without anything done about it. Constantly bullied students are ignored, then punished when they fight back. Students need a system of justice that can be trusted, no different than adults do. There should be no problem with having students two or three years apart in the same classes if their skill level allows it. Right now if we tried that it would be a disaster, because disrespectful and threatening behavior to other students is ignored. That has to change.

This requires some viable ability to punish students, possibly outside school hours, and possibly even without parental cooperation. But it also requires a system to ensure that students aren't punished unjustly, because that happens regularly too. In short, we need a court system for very young children. Yes, that's ridiculous. But what else makes sense?

Make school optionally year-round.
Many poorer families rely on school to double as child care. School being offered (if not required) year-round would help the students advance faster, and would help the parents work more, save money, and improve the child's quality of life. The only downside is that we have to pay more teachers, but spending huge amounts of money to accomplish good things is what these posts are all about!

Make students work.
Students should be expected to participate in low-level "internships" later in school. A few hours a week, for limited pay, the students learn how to work. Ideally, this would evolve into full-on vocational training, integrated with local community colleges and technical schools.

Don't forget adult education for everyday life.
Education isn't just what you learn in school. There are all sorts of things that could be taught through interactive online materials that would be useful for adults. Good nutrition, for example. Many people subsist on junk food because they honestly don't know they could be healthier and saving money!

And how about language? There are huge numbers of immigrants and refugees in the United States, particularly in Tennessee and nearby states, that don't speak English. That language barrier makes it very difficult for those islanded cultures to assimilate into our larger community. No good comes of that. With the kind of online program we were talking about above, we could make it tremendously easier for those adults to learn English.

The census bureau found that about 4.2 million people speak English "not at all", and 9.3 million speak English "not well". For a rough cost estimate, let's just assume we're buying all those people Rosetta Stone at the list price. That comes to about $5 billion. Now, consider how much the US spends on translators in a year for all those people. I found one number (not sourced) indicating it's about $375 million a year federally, and I'd bet states and cities spend much more. And how about the indirect costs of poor communication? For $5 billion, I'd say this is a bargain.

Infrastructure Megaprojects: Communication

Think about what your life would be like without a phone, without television, without internet access, without books, without music. Really sit and consider that for a minute. I'm betting that if you're reading this, you can't even imagine what you'd do with most of your time. Now imagine your life to date without those things.

Will anyone dispute that information is a necessity in this world?

The US information infrastructure is pathetic compared to most of the developed world. But it's fixable! Estimates have Google Fiber costing about $1,500/home to install. Figure 100 million homes in the US, and to wire the country with high-speed fiber would cost something like $150 billion. Even if it's double that, it's trivial on the scale of projects we're talking about. And following the Google Fiber model, it should be possible to supply most households with free high-speed internet access, only charging for higher bandwidth connections.

But it shouldn't stop there. Wired communication is only part of our information consumption. Right now there are a large number of incompatible cellular networks in the country. How much could we save by standardizing those networks on a single interoperable technology? Think about that. With appropriate leasing agreements in place, you could use anyone's tower, and just let the providers haggle over who pays whom on the back end. And once there's a single universal standard, expanding coverage and service becomes much easier and more efficient.

How much would it cost to pay everyone to switch their towers over to a shared technology? Figure there are 200,000 towers in the US, and we want to change out 90% of them to match the rest. At $150,000 per tower, the entire network would cost $30 billion to build from scratch. Assuming the electronics involved are only a tenth the cost of the tower, we're talking about three billion dollars. Chump change. Once a standard was in place, the government would probably spend more than that building additional towers just to improve coverage.

Unfortunately, we're now beyond my technical knowledge. Are there actual technical advantages to Verizon's approach over, say, Sprint's? Is one objectively better? Is there some technical reason what I've proposed is unworkable? I can't say. But anyone who's ever considered switching cell providers knows what I mean when I say that anything to reduce vender lock-in is a good thing.

Oh, and while we're at it, let's get rid of bundling the cost of a phone into my monthly bill. If it's a $600 phone, don't tell me it's a $200 phone with an early termination penalty if I leave before 2029. Just tell me it's a $600 phone. Finance it, pay cash, whatever, but vender lock-in needs to die.

No, that's not a megaproject. But let's do it anyway.

Why the votes for Charlie Brown must have been random

I wrote previously, suggesting that Charlie Brown won his primary due to people who voted for the first name on the ballot. Another writer responded in the Tennessean, suggesting that he instead won due to informed voters. I would like to explain how I concluded this was unlikely.

94,000 people voted for Brown. If 94,000 informed voters chose him, there have to be a number of similarly informed people who either didn't vote, or voted for someone else. We can reasonably say that at least 200,000 people have to have been informed about Brown's positions before the election.

So how did these people get that information? Remember, I'm not the only one wondering who this man is; he's a cypher to the newspapers too! He has no internet presence, nor any other mass media campaign. Perhaps he mailed fliers? But if he had a massive snail-mail campaign that reached a couple hundred thousand voters, he'd need to spend at least $20k. His campaign reports having no money at all.

Perhaps Brown has a couple dozen volunteers going door to door twelve hours a day for six months. But other than that, I'm just not seeing a way that most votes for Brown could possibly be informed votes. Perhaps someone who knew Brown's positions before the election, and chose to vote for him based on them, can write and tell us how? And also why out of his 94,000 informed supporters, only a hundred have joined his facebook group?

Infrastructure Megaprojects: Arable Land

So now we have energy and fresh water. The next obvious human need is food. Food production comes down to three things: water, land, and fertilizer. We have a solution to get arbitrary amounts of fresh water, and we can develop fertilizer from the leftover potassium from the desalination plants. That leaves land.

Large sections of the United States are desert, and much of the rest is trending that way. Deserts may not all be dead and barren, but they're not particularly useful by human standards. The growth of deserts is a huge problem.

So let's fix them. It's possible to reverse desertification by planting trees. It's counter-intuitive, but think about it this way: plants don't just absorb water, they also release it through their leaves. That means that whatever rain that's fallen, the trees hold it temporarily, then release it back to the environment to rain out again. That means that whatever rain falls in the area stays in the area longer, cycling through the local ecosystem, rather than just evaporating and leaving.

There are about a quarter million square miles of desert in the continental US, and about as much semi-arid land. Figure fifty trees per acre, and that's sixteen billion trees. Sixteen billion trees to increase our useful arable land area by 20% sounds like a pretty good deal!

If you think that number sounds totally unreasonable, think again. During the great depression we planted three billion trees. More recently, seven billion trees have been planted in less than a decade. Moreover, this requires almost totally unskilled labor, so it's a great jobs project.

Of course, once the forests are established, we wouldn't just leave them untouched. Forests are great, and they have all sorts of positive effects on air quality, improving the health of those nearby. But forests aren't the only end goal. Over time we'd need to make some reclaimed areas into farms, taking advantage of the rebuilt soil. But we'd do that in a planned and controlled fashion. We need to make sure that we don't reclaim the deserts, only to recreate them later.

What does "close the border" actually mean?

I had this conversation on the Tennessean comments page, wherein Larry Tanner was saying we should "close the border". I asked for clarification, tried to provide some of my own, and everything got honest in a surprising direction. It was refreshing, when most people just spit out talking points and call each other names.

The original topic was Obama's requested appropriations to execute the law relating to the present refugee crisis. Keep in mind, I am not with the below advocating any course of action, nor am I condoning any of Larry's positions. I am simply saying we all need to be clear about what we're suggesting should be done.

---

Larry: I wouldn't be against this if a portion, probably a large portion, was used to close the border to illegal immigration. Without the border being closed, this would only be a Band-Aid requiring more billions to care for the next wave of "children" which are sure to come.

Stephen: Define what the border being "closed" would look like. I mean, it's not like these children are crossing undetected or unimpeded. They cross the border and turn themselves in. What do you want, a giant two-thousand mile impenetrable wall?

Larry: Impede them. I know the feds won't do this but the Texans can and are doing this as we type. The gist of the letter was money. Take care of the ones that are here until we can send them back and stop completely any more from getting their grubby little toes in the Rio Grande.

Stephen: How?

Larry: Threaten the Mexicans with sanctions or tell them to stem the tide or we'll come to the south side of the border and do it for them. Might take out a few drug cartels while we're at it. You're the engineer, how would you do it? Excuse the question, I already know your answer.

Stephen: I'm not necessarily disagreeing with that solution. But I do think it's important to say that's what we're talking about, because I don't think many people have thought about it in those terms. We are talking here about invading and occupying a part of Mexico. That's not a trivial thing.

Invading Mexico has consequences. We need UN approval, or we risk a huge amount of goodwill from the international community. And we actually need that goodwill, believe it or not. We burned a huge amount invading Iraq illegally, and I don't think we could get away with that again.

Now, that said, Mexico is in large part a failed state, and I think we need new international legal structures for handling failed states. If we're threatened from Mexican territory, and the Mexican state can't control their territory well enough to eliminate that threat, we should have some legal means of recourse. I wrote about that here.

In a lot of ways, what we're contemplating is worse than the Iraq invasion, because there is no end game! It's not like we'll eventually leave. We're basically permanently annexing a piece of Mexico to create this hypothetical border zone. In so doing, American soldiers WILL die, and the financial costs will be enormous. The political will may simply not be here internally to sustain an occupation.

Now, compare the cost of your proposed invasion and occupation of part of Mexico to the cost of the uncontrolled border. Which costs more? I really don't know, but I'm betting it's not as easy a decision as it looked before we started talking about it in these terms.

Larry: Nothing is easy these days. I read your link and a lot of thought was put into it and I agree with you on a lot of things. I think you put more importance in the UN than most. Too much in fact. It isn't the organization it once was. If we don't address the southern border and secure it we may very well find ourselves in a position the Israelis are in today with Hamas.

Stephen: The UN as an organization isn't so bad, as long as you don't expect it to be more than it is. If the world is going to get together and say "this kind of thing is not okay", the UN is the place those kinds of statements happen. It has no actual power, nor was it ever intended to. So if we were going to occupy part of Mexico, for any reason, the UN would be where the world discussion about whether that was okay or not would take place.

What I'm really interested in is that we don't act unilaterally on something like this, which violates agreements we've made to not do that. We don't need to look like the bad guy any more than absolutely necessary, because that hurts us in the long run. And we need to make sure we don't set precedent that can be used against us. The UN is the forum for that kind of thing.

---

Open Letter: Tennessee Democratic Party

Right now Tennessee is a single-party state. Republicans hold both US Senate seats, the Governorship, seven of nine US House seats, and over 70% of the General Assembly. This election looks unlikely to change any of that. The Democratic party is completely shut out of power, making it almost impossible for them to get donations. Who would donate to a party who can't do anything for them in return?

So what's your party to do? You keep running joke candidates, because you can't get any viable ones to take you seriously. Candidates can't get money without the hope of winning, and in our system you can't get political power without money. You have to break that cycle. You have to appeal to someone with lots of money, and appeal to the voters in a new way as well.

There's one issue that can do that: getting money out of politics.

There are two major PACs right now dedicated to ending the influence of money in politics. Mayday PAC is raising money to unseat incumbents opposing campaign finance reform. I think there are plenty of those in our state! This PAC has eight million dollars in its pocket, plus matching donations. Clearly this is an issue that there's (ironically) some money behind. If the Democratic Party wants to regain seats in the US House, this is a great place to start.

Second, Wolf PAC is pushing for states to call a constitutional convention, to propose an amendment outlawing campaign donations. If your state-level candidates were advocating this issue, Wolf PAC could make a significant difference in whether they win or lose.

If the Democratic party wants to come back in this state, you're going to have to focus on this one issue. It's the one thing that will set you apart from Republicans, there's a lot of money behind it, and it puts you on the side the huge majority of the nation agrees with.

Oh, and it's the right thing to do.

Ballot Order

The democratic party has selected their candidate for governor. He has no public policy statements, website, or twitter feed. He has an inactive Facebook group, a picture of himself with some fish, and his own name misspelled. From all appearances, this is the entirety of his campaign. Yet he won by a 2:1 margin.

How? He was first on the ballot. This isn't the first time.

There are two groups that should learn from this.

First, voters. If you don't know who you prefer in an election, don't just pick someone on the spot! All you do is water down the opinions of the informed voters, the ones that should be making the decision. If you don't have an opinion on one office, just don't vote for that office! Your votes for all the other offices will still count!

Casting a vote, any vote, is something you should take very seriously. If you're not prepared to do that, don't vote.

Second, legislators. Ballot order is fixed, by law, in alphabetical order by last name. Ballot order clearly has a significant effect on outcome, giving some candidates advantage over others. Laws should never, ever help particular candidates. That's undemocratic and unamerican.

Each voter should be presented with the candidates in a different, randomly chosen order. The uninformed voters who just pick the first candidate on the list would cancel each other out. If we're doomed to use these stupid electronic voting machines with no paper records, we should at least use them in a way that makes elections work.

And if anyone tells you that these machines can't be made to put candidates in random order, give the machine to me. I'll fix it for you. I won't even charge. This is not a technical problem. It's a legal problem, and it has a legal solution.

Infrastructure Megaprojects: Water

Water stress is the resource challenge of this decade, and probably a few more to come. Much of the US has been in drought for the last five years, driving up food prices. Some estimates are that this drought has cost the US economy $150 billion dollars each year! Water tables are being drained faster than they can refill, and polluted beyond use. Some bodies of water are being diverted so much that they've become poisonous, or ceased to exist. We need new sources of water, and we need them now.

Unfortunately you can't just create water unless you have a lot of hydrogen lying around. But we're not lacking for water; we're lacking for potable water. We have all the water we need, if we can just clean it up a bit.

We need to build desalination plants to make the seawater drinkable. There are already several in the United States, and quite a few more around the world. This is not a new thing, it's just a question of scale.

How much water are we talking about? Looking at a couple sources, we can estimate that the US uses around 400 billion gallons per day, most of which goes to run power plants and irrigate crops. An average desalination plant (based on Australian installations) could do 60 million gallons per day, consume about 24 MW, and cost $1.8 billion. So to replace every source of fresh water in the US, we're talking about 6,700 desal plants, consuming 160 GW and costing $12 trillion.

Now, that's just an upper limit. There's no need to desalinate every last drop of water we use. Let's scale back a bit, and target 10%, which should be more than enough to relieve the water stress we're seeing. Now we're talking about 670 plants, 16 GW, and $1.2 trillion. That's eminently doable. And the system scales wonderfully. You can build it gradually over time. If you need more water later, you can build more plants.

Figure 3.5% salinity as a general average, so we're talking about having to find a home for 6 million tons of salt every year. That's enough to cause an environmental catastrophe if it's all in one place, so we need to plan for that. Luckily, the US presently produces 7-8 times that much salt in a year, so our economy could obviously absorb it.

Other resources are present in seawater. We'd be extracting 220,000 tons of potassium a year, about 1/5 our present production of potash. This has great possibility for fertilizers, though I can't speak as to the chemistry involved. We'd also get a comparable amount of magnesium, making us the world's fifth largest producer.

The total value of all those extracted solids comes several hundred million dollars a year. Trivial by comparison to the cost of the construction, but still, a nice offset to operating expenditures.

Of course, it's not just the coasts we're worried about; we also need a way to move the desalinated water from the sea to the midlands. We're talking about a huge aqueduct network. We already have quite a bit of experience building such things, but the scale would be unheard-of. Figure a trillion dollars to build the aqueduct network alone.

Now, we could do closed pipes, but I'm not sure that's what we want to do. Perhaps instead we should have open aqueducts, and let the water evaporate as it will. It will condense back out somewhere as rain, giving us the most efficient possible distribution method. Some combination of covered and uncovered aqueducts would probably be best.

Ultimately, the oceans will provide us with the only sustainable source of fresh water on the planet. We'll eventually have to start tapping it, and we're getting to that point.

August 7 2014 Election: Judicial Retention and Local Offices

So I've covered the legislative races, but there are others. Right now there's a heavily-politicized retention election for judges. A bi-partisan commission says all the judges are doing a good job. I plan to vote for retention on all judges, to avoid politicizing the judiciary.

There are also elections for several local positions, a few of which are even competitive! Frankly, I don't know enough about any of those elections, so I plan to abstain. If you have opinions on any of these races, please share!

Now, there's one thing I will comment on. Frankly, I think this school board has done a terrible job by allowing standards to fall as low as they have. When students can't be given a grade less than 50, we're not teaching any more, we're babysitting. My gut response is to thrown out the entire board and try again. But anyone with even the slightest bit of information should ignore that and act on actual data. And please share that data!

Oh, and Bob Schwartz is running for Republican Executive Committee, Senate District 20. When I met him during the 2010 campaign, he was a reasonable and thoughtful individual, not one of the usual Fox News crowd. I plan to vote for him.

August 7 2014 Elections: State Legislature

TL;DR
Puttbrese, Aljabbary, Mancini, Rawlings are the only candidates in competitive primaries that I can say seem better than their opponents. I'd recommend voting for any of them who appear on your ballot.

Long version
There are only a few competitive races in the state legislature, at least in Davidson county, which is really unfortunate. I hate people running unopposed; it makes the election meaningless. Decisions are made by the people that show up, so if you feel like you could do well holding elected office, I encourage you to consider it. If you're thinking about it, talk to me, and I'll help you think!

I'm going to list links to each of the candidates on the Davidson County sample ballot, and add whatever information I can to each one. There are few details for most of their position statements, and usually the only one that's really specific is whether they would or would not accept all the free money the federal government is trying to hand Tennesseans. But you can probably tell that by the (R) or (D) anyway.

I contacted all of them I could, to ask their position on Wolf PAC and approval voting, and their responses are noted below. Most did not respond at all, which makes then an automatic "no" in my book. If you're not willing to tell people where you stand on the issues, you shouldn't be asking to represent those people.

Also, this isn't necessarily a complete listing of candidates for the general election in November. I fully expect more candidates to show up there. This is just the primaries for the two major parties.

19th Senate District
Sterlina Inez Brady (R)
No information, at all. No webpage, no Facebook page, no Twitter feed, no contact information.

Thelma M. Harper (D)
The incumbent in this district. She did not respond to my requests for positions.

Brandon J. Puttbrese (D)
He responded to my tweet about money in politics. That alone makes me support him.

@swcollings I would push for a constitutional convention to reverse #citizensunited. Big money in politics is a huge problem. #tnsd19
— Brandon Puttbrese (@bjputtbrese) July 14, 2014

So if you're voting in the Republican primary in this district, you may as well not. And if you're voting Democrat, I recommend Puttbrese.

21st Senate District
A race with no incumbent!

Mwafaq Aljabbary (R)
I spoke to Mwafaq on the phone for a long time. He was interested in the issues I asked about, but didn't have a defined position, which is reasonable. Can't expect people to make up their minds immediately. He's very busy, very involved, and has been for years. He works with anyone, regardless of party or religion, and has the history to back that up. Very interested in integrating immigrant communities. Very opposed to corruption and regulatory capture, which is unusual for a Republican. He also has a masters degree in city planning (or something close to that, I didn't get the exact degree written down), so he's very interested in public transportation. Overall, I liked this candidate quite a bit.

Diana Cuellar (R)
She responded to my emails, and said she'd look into the issues. I never heard anything past that.

Quincy McKnight (R) 
I never heard anything from this candidate at all.

Mary Mancini (D)
Another candidate I spoke to on the phone. She was amenable to Wolf PAC. She's been around the political scene for a while, and previously wrote a law requiring Tennessee to use paper ballots! She's still in favor of that, and eliminating gerrymandering is also one of her issues. Another candidate I like.

Jeff Yarbro (D)
Again, no communication, at all.

If you're voting in the Republican primary in this district, I'd strongly recommend Aljabbary. If you're voting Democrat, I recommend Mancini.

50th Representative District
I never heard anything from either of these candidates, and they're both running unopposed in their primaries.

Troy Brewer (R)
Bo Mitchell (D)

51st Representative District
The only one of these candidates I heard from was Rawlings, who is on board with Wolf PAC. I can't even tell the difference among any of the Democrats from their websites.
Brian L. Mason (R)
Joshua Rawlings (R)

Bill Beck (D)
Stephen Fotopulos (D)
Jennifer Buck Wallace (D)

52nd Representative District
I never heard anything from this candidate, who is running unopposed except possibly by an independent/third party.

Mike Stewart (D)

53rd Representative District
I never heard anything from either of these candidates, and they're both running unopposed in their primaries. 

John Wang (R)
Jason Powell (D)

54th Representative District
I never heard anything from this candidate, who is running unopposed except possibly by an independent/third party.
Brenda Gilmore (D)


55th Representative District
I haven't heard anything from either of these candidates. That makes me tend to vote against the incumbent, Odom, though that's pretty shaky ground.
John Ray Clemmons (D)
Gary Odom (D)


56th Representative District
Again, both candidates running unopposed.

Beth Harwell (R)
The incumbent in this district. She did not respond to my requests for positions, despite repeated requests. Very disappointed in my representative.

Chris Moth (D)
This candidate responded to me, and described himself as "deeply concerned about the influence of money in politics". Not a commitment to do anything, but it's something. He's unopposed in the primary, but I hope to have more information about his positions before the general election.


58th Representative District
I never heard anything from this candidate, who is running unopposed except possibly by an independent/third party.
Harold M. Love (D)

59th Representative District
I never heard anything from this candidate, who is running unopposed except possibly by an independent/third party.
Sherry Jones (D)

60th Representative District
I never heard anything from either of these candidates, and they're both running unopposed in their primaries.
Jim Gotto (R)
Darren Jernigan (D)

August 7 2014 Election: US House TN-7 Candidate Impressions

TN-7 has been redistricted out of Davidson County, but enough of greater Nashville is in TN-7 that I want to comment on this race as well.

Marsha Blackburn (R)
We all know what I think of Blackburn. She opposes network neutrality, opposes municipal broadband, and spends a huge amount of time trying to repeal the ACA without proposing a viable alternative. Buying insurance across state lines, while it may be a not-terrible idea, doesn't help people with pre-existing conditions, and the cost impact will probably be minimal. It also requires a single set of federal regulations for insurance companies, overriding state regulations. It's really interesting to me that she's all for states being able to trample on municipalities when it comes to broadband, but her idea of healthcare reform is nothing but the federal government trampling on states.

By her measure, all our problems are caused by government. Yet she describes herself as a "staunch supporter of the PATRIOT act," one of the biggest expansions of government power in history. She blames Obama for failing to deport refugee children, but refuses to fund the deportation. Oh yes, and she helped cause the government shutdown last year, and otherwise contributed to this utterly dysfunctional Congress. She's the worst kind of Republican: the kind that says anything it takes to get you angry at Democrats, whether it makes sense or not. She's not a Palin, or a Bachmann. Blackburn's worse; she's informed and smart, she just doesn't work for Tennesseans. She's a hypocrite. Anything that gets her out of office is probably a win.

Jacob Brimm (R)
Brimm's policy statements are somewhat vague, but not the usual anger-fueled talking points that we usually get from Republicans. I don't see anything I can deeply object to. Unlike most candidates, he responded to my request for comment on Wolf PAC! With a thoughtful answer no less! Same for approval voting. Even without those things, though, it would be hard for him to be worse than the alternative. I'd strongly recommend voting for Brimm in this primary.

Credo Amouzouvik (D)
Credo (as he goes by for obvious reasons) has a decent list of policy statements. None are particularly surprising or detailed, but nothing objectionable catches my attention. And he also replied to my questions, saying he wants to take money out of politics, and opposes the NSA spying on citizens without probable cause.

Daniel Cramer (D)
Cramer's position on the Keystone Pipeline: "I don’t see the risks being worth the benefits but I am willing to listen to detailed arguments for or against as they are provided." That says a lot about the man. It says that he's capable of deferring judgement until more information is obtained. It says he's capable of changing his mind. It says he's willing to talk in public about things he doesn't fully understand. I love that in a candidate.

He's one of the few candidates I've seen that makes a point of saying he opposes the NSA's domestic spying abuse! He mentions H1-B visas, which is another issue that's often ignored. And he strongly opposes Citizens United.

Both Democrat candidates in this election hold positions I agree with, on the issues that matter to me. I'd be happy with either one in Congress. Cramer, though, has the advantage that he had public policy statements on those issues before I asked. Domestic spying, corporate money in politics, H1-B visas, those are issues that he thought important enough to put up on his site without prompting. That makes me lean towards him over Credo.

Infrastructure Megaprojects: Energy

Without energy, nothing happens. That's not a hyperbole; nothing happens if there's not energy. No water is pumped, no food is moved to market, no computers or lights turn on, and come winter we all freeze to death. It seems fitting to start our megaprojects list here.

Electricity is our most efficient means of moving energy from place to place. There are many ways of generating electricity, but most have significant downsides. Fossil fuels pollute to varying degrees, and need continuous exploration to find new sources. (The negative effects of fracking for this purpose are tremendous. But that's another post.) Wind and photovoltaic solar cells are weather-dependent, and thus unreliable for continuous demand. Hydroelectric dams can only be put in a few places.

There are only two developed means of generation which are both emission-free and weather-independent. The first is nuclear. A well-designed and well-maintained nuclear plant is one of the safest means of power generation ever conceived. Adding up all the deaths due to nuclear accidents, those numbers don't come close to the damage of coal plants. Most nuclear accidents in the world have been due to old designs that were not properly fail-safe; there are vastly better designs now. Spent fuel rods can be reprocessed, eliminating most of the waste disposal concerns. And research into thorium reactors could further enhance both safety and pollution concerns.

But there's an even better way. Solar thermal power is completely pollution-free. It has all the upsides of a large-scale photovoltaic plant, and none of the down-sides. It can run at night, doesn't require complex chemical processes to build, and has no lifetime constraint. Right now there are about 1.5 gigawatts of installed solar thermal power in the US, with another 4 GW in planning.

Average electricity consumption in the US is on the order of 500 GW, about two-thirds of which is fossil fuel based. A large solar thermal plant can generate ~300 MW, so about a thousand solar thermal plants could eliminate fossil fuel plants entirely. Cost of construction for solar thermal plants is about $5500/kW, meaning it would cost ~$2 trillion to get the grid entirely off fossil fuels. That's a lot of money, but it's only about 4x the cost of the interstate system. Divide it up over 40 years, and we're talking about $50 billion a year. That's significant, but it's only about 1.5% of federal spending. What we would gain would be far greater than what we would lose.

Ecological benefits are obvious: our particulate and carbon emissions go way down. Economic benefits are high as well, as our fossil fuels now become something we can sell on the world market, rather than something we must burn here just to keep our civilization going. We'd become a huge supplier worldwide, greatly increasing our soft power. Along with this, we should improve our infrastructure links to Canada and Mexico, allowing us to become a net exporter of electricity and helping improve those countries as well.

Now, that's just the macro picture. There would clearly need to be a robust program in place to retrain whatever workers were displaced by the shift. And there would be second-order effects as electricity prices drop, possibly shutting down other plants. There's no changing one thing without changing fifty others, and we'd want to minimize the overall damage as much as possible. But once the shift was over, having a large, distributed, clean, free source of electricity would make the United States and our neighbors far better countries to live in.

August 7 2014 Elections: Governor Candidate Impressions

The below are my impressions of each candidate in the upcoming August 7 primary elections for Governor of Tennessee. These impressions are not scientific, and are based solely on their websites and any knowledge I happen to have of them. The below should be weighted exactly as much as you weight my opinion on anything. Overall, what I'm trying to do is see which candidates I cannot vote for, and narrow the field. Please, nobody take anything I say as an attack or an indictment. I'm not trying to be mean; I simply have to make observations, some unflattering, to direct my vote correctly.

Republican Candidates
Mark Coonrippy Brown
(Warning: there's an auto-play video at this link. Bad etiquette on the part of the Tennessean, but there's no candidate site.)
Brown appears to be a guy running to make a specific point, not to win. I enjoy the video, actually. He seems to be a normal human being, I don't get the usual anger or superiority complex that you get from a lot of candidates, nor do I get the idea that he's trying to make emotional appeals. But without detailed position statements it's difficult to give him a good description. I'm not really convinced he'd make a good governor. "There are simple solutions for simple problems" is a nice phrase. Unfortunately, in my world, for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, elegant, and wrong. But it's difficult not to like him, for the two minutes you see of a video.

Bill Haslam
The incumbent is running on his record, which I'm not really going to judge right now. For objective information, I can say that he seems to have reasonable organizational skills, can communicate in English, and that the state hasn't utterly collapsed under his administration. He has, however, completely failed to come up with an alternative Medicaid expansion, which kinda screws a lot of Tennesseans. So there's that.

Basil Marceaux Sr.
I can only let this candidate speak for himself.

Donald Ray McFolin
(Warning: there's an auto-play video at this link. Bad etiquette on the part of the Tennessean, but there's no candidate site.) 
Another candidate running to make a specific point, this one about special needs education. Again, he seems like a normal person trying to make the world better with whatever platform he can get.

Democratic Candidates
Charles V. "Charlie" Brown
No website, no position statements, no comments from the candidate at all. Just a facebook page full of people asking what he stands for, and with the candidate's name misspelled.

Kennedy Spellman Johnson
Another candidate with no website and no detailed position statements. Well, you can go here, but there's nothing to see. I can't say anything about this candidate.

WM. H. "John" McKamey
An actual website! With positions! Only a few, and they're very vague. (Education is good. People making more money is good.) Nothing obviously objectionable, but it's like a bare-minimum campaign, only one step up from not having a site.

Ron Noonan
This candidate doesn't even have a facebook page, just a twitter feed. Another not particularly serious candidate.

TL;DR
Out of the four Republican candidates, Haslam is the only one with a chance of winning. If you don't support Haslam, either because he's Haslam or because you don't like incumbents, I'd probably go for McFolin.

Out of the four Democrat candidates, the only one that looks even remotely serious is McKamey. I don't know why I'd even consider voting for any of the others, and they're not doing anything to convince me I should.

Slim field.

August 7 2014 Election: US House TN-5 Candidate Impressions

Ah, TN-5. The office I ran for back in the day. I learned a lot from that experience, but that's for another post.

The below are my impressions of each candidate in the upcoming August 7 primary elections for US House of Representatives, Tennessee fifth district. These impressions are not scientific, and are based solely on their websites and any knowledge I happen to have of them. The below should be weighted exactly as much as you weight my opinion on anything. Overall, what I'm trying to do is see which candidates I cannot vote for, and narrow the field. Please, nobody take anything I say as an attack or an indictment. I'm not trying to be mean; I simply have to make observations, some unflattering, to direct my vote correctly.

Our incumbent Jim Cooper is running unopposed in the Democratic primary this year. There are four Republican candidates, a much smaller field than 2010. I'm sure there will be several "independent" (including third-party) candidates in the general election come November, but those don't show up on the August 7 ballot.

Chris Carter
Great quote: "Never before in my lifetime have I witnessed such a frightening distortion of Americanism and assault on personal liberty as I have witnessed in the creation and implementation of ObamaCare." Apparently the last two Presidents shredding the fourth amendment, and holding and executing Americans without trial, are absolutely nothing compared to the ACA.

Carter blames the ACA for all the evils of the healthcare world, but doesn't propose any workable solutions. Blames the deficit on Obama's "socialist programs" and waste. (For the record, the deficit reached its current absurd proportions under Bush, and has gone down every year under Obama. Don't believe me? Look up the raw numbers.) He favors a flat tax, even though that would make the deficit vastly worse and hurt the poor tremendously. And worst of all, he uses quotes to indicate emphasis!

Unfortunately this is the typical Republican candidate these days: utterly uninformed, and just repeating the Fox line whether it makes sense or not. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Ronnie Holden
I have zero information about this candidate. All he seems to have is a Facebook page, and on that page all he does is share the latest Fox meme. From that I think we could reasonably expect that he'd be another generic Republican candidate, possibly minus the communication skills.

"Big John" Smith
An interesting candidate. He's clearly very religious, but unlike much of the religious right, I don't get the usual overwhelming impression of self-righteousness from this man. My impression from his words is that he is truly humble. I don't see any specific indication that he wants to consciously impose his religious beliefs on others by declaring Christianity to have special legal status, though he clearly can't separate his policy statements from his religion.

He's also the only Republican candidate I've seen so far for any office that specifically opposes the influence of money in politics, and he seems to understand that the only way out of our deficit mess is to grow the economy. And hey, he references The Twilight Zone, which is big points in my book.

Now, it's still all Obama's fault, even though the economy collapsed two years before he became President. He totally misrepresents the Occupy movement's goals, and doesn't display much compassion for those on welfare. (No outright contempt, though, which is better than most Republican candidates.) He thinks God gave Israel all the relevant land, and opposes the existence of a Palestinian state on those grounds. And at one point he equates all of liberalism, socialism, communism, and the antichrist.

But you can't ask too much, I suppose.

Bob Ries
I'm not analyzing Bob Ries's website this time. See, I met Bob Ries in 2010, when we were both running for US House TN-5. (He lost the primary to David Hall, so we weren't directly opposed.) We spoke for some time about one thing and another, and I came to the definite conclusion that he was not someone I would want in Congress. I won't go into more details; it was four years ago, and there's just no need to pick on the man. But I can't recommend voting for Bob Ries.

Jim Cooper
If you're voting in the Democratic primary, it really doesn't matter what I say here, because you've only got one candidate! But for completeness, his website is above.

He's got a good list of issue statements, including intellectual property, wonder of wonders. (I'm not 100% convinced he's got a good policy, but at least he's aware of the issue, and claims to strive for balance.) And I appreciate the fact that he has links scattered throughout his text; a familiar style! Cooper has a 65% match rating with me on POPVOX, which is twice what either of our Senators get. If Cooper wins, I won't be terribly disappointed.

August 7 2014 Election: Senate Candidate Impressions

The below are my impressions of each candidate in the upcoming August 7 primary elections for US Senator from Tennessee. These impressions are not scientific, and are based solely on their websites and any knowledge I happen to have of them. The below should be weighted exactly as much as you weight my opinion on anything. Overall, what I'm trying to do is see which candidates I cannot vote for, and narrow the field. Please, nobody take anything I say as an attack or an indictment. I'm not trying to be mean; I simply have to make observations, some unflattering, to direct my vote correctly.

US Senate, Republican Primary
Christian Agnew
This candidate apparently believes that English should be the official language of the United States, but doesn't have very high standards about its use. Putting aside my revulsion at poor use of language, I like that he actually tries to explain that Common Core is a voluntary state-led program, not a federal mandate. Other than that, his positions are generic Republican: blame our problems on the ACA, illegal immigrants, welfare abuse, foreign aid, and deficit spending. Also, don't take his guns. Nothing particularly interesting here.

Lamar Alexander
Our incumbent has the usual disease of incumbents: they often don't state their ideas or positions, they just run on their record and how much money they've raised.. The specifics of Alexander's record he chooses to point out are wholly unremarkable: balance the budget (how?), repeal the ACA (and replace it with what?), and oppose Obama at every possible turn regardless of what he's actually doing.

Joe Carr
Again, a generic Republican candidate. He'll defend our rights to own guns, number one issue. Makes me feel better, I can't go a week without someone trying to take my guns away. Number two issue, government waste, specifically like ACA and TARP. Reasonable people can differ over whether spending $180 billion a year to provide insurance to the poor is wasteful, but TARP was a loan that was 97% paid back and certainly saved thousands of jobs, so calling it wasteful is just misinformed.

And apparently we need to both lower taxes (specifically on the rich, since he supports a flat tax) and balance the budget. Where does he plan to cut over a trillion a year out of spending? No clue, but you can not do that without gutting at least one of the military, social security, or medicare. There isn't enough spending elsewhere to do it. Carr gives the usual Republican buzzwords, with the usual complete lack of thoughtfulness or detail.

George Shea Flinn
Few stated positions, and seems to focus most of his attention on the ACA, with a little to spare for border security. To his credit, he proposes a semi-detailed alternative to the ACA, and seems to have some clue what he's talking about, unlike most Republican candidates. He does repeat some of the more bizarre talking points, though. (Where in the ACA does it give Washington control of my medical decisions, again?) I find his lack of position statements on other issues unfortunate. One of the few is a statement on Iraq and Israel which, frankly, shows very little knowledge of the history or the situation. Dr. Flinn is clearly capable of some degree of independent thought, which is better than most candidates do, but he's still pretty isolated from broader reality.

John D King
Once again, the usual three or four Republican position statements, though in this case clearly typed by the candidate himself. Quite a bit of misinformation, and there are zero details as to how he would improve the lives of Americans. Except the rich, who of course pay too much in taxes. Entitlement programs (first among which are Social Security and Medicare) are "ridiculous", and clearly to be eliminated, presumably to afford those tax cuts for the rich.

One of his more amusing claims is that a "huge portion" of our deficit spending goes to foreign aid. Try $50 billion out of a $900 billion deficit. Also, he says that much of this money goes to places where "the majority of their population would like nothing more than to destroy us and our way of life". I'd love to know where those places are; most people just want to be left alone, no matter where they are. And $3b of that aid goes to Israel every year. Does he want to cut that? Unclear, but I doubt it.

Brenda S Lenard
Lots of position statements. (The first is on the Constitution, and the text is amusingly copied straight from whitehouse.gov. Not sure what the significance of that is.) She's all about how horrible the economy is, but doesn't propose any particularly novel or useful ideas: lower taxes, reduced regulation, cut spending. (I'm totally unclear how that last one is supposed to create jobs, but it's a talking point, it doesn't have to make sense.) Her education platform says that schools must operate in transparency, but there's no indication of what that means on a practical level, or how it would help anything. On every issue, there are nice little essays, and relatively little misinformation compared to other candidates. But there are no details, and it's all based around the usual Republican talking points. No apparent original thoughts.

This is getting boring.

Erin Kent Magee
Now this guy has original thoughts! He wants to "win the war on terrorism" by "dispatching the National Guard to control crowds of dissidents", and by "designating Radical Islam as a cult (not a religion entitled to protection under the 1st Amendment)". He's all about the second amendment, but the first? Gut it. I suppose the message of this candidacy is that, yes, Republican candidates could be worse.

So there we have it, a wholly unremarkable field of candidates. I don't expect any one of them would act particularly different than any other. Out of them, I'd probably pick Lenard or Flinn. They at least have repeated fewer of the usual lies.

US Senate, Democrat Primary
Terry Adams
Well-written policy statements on a decent number of issues. Many are typical Democrat talking points. But they're real Democrat talking points, not the caricatures Republicans set up. If your only picture of what Democrats stand for is "bigger government, more taxes", look at this guy's site. It's a good example of reality. He's also got some original ideas which, on the surface, make some sense. He supports an amendment to get money out of politics, which none of the Republican candidates mentioned. I'm not jumping up and down saying he's the next Jed Bartlet, but best guess is that I'd feel good with Terry Adams as Senator from Tennessee.

Gordon Ball
This candidate also has well-written policy statements on a wide range of issues. His includes a brief and reasonable statement in favor of the Second Amendment, which is unusual for a Democrat. He both praises and criticizes the ACA, meaning he's capable of nuanced thought. This is another candidate I'd feel good about winning.

Larry Crim
Mr. Crim seems to have a lot of ideas, but his website is almost incomprehensible. I'm not going to lie to you and say I read it all. I don't see anything I strongly object to, but just the fact that his campaign website is that badly organized doesn't speak well to his organizational skills or support.

Gary Gene Davis
Again, this website is very difficult to read, and I don't see much that resembles policy statements or ideas.

The Tennessean provided a decent summary of the Democratic candidates a couple weeks ago.


TL;DR
The Republican candidates are mostly interchangeable, and often frighteningly ignorant. Which candidate you should vote for depends, of course, entirely on your priorities. Unfortunately, our broken voting system doesn't let you express honest opinions due to strategic concerns. If you want to vote for the Republican candidate who I'd be most likely to like, I'd go for probably George Flinn or Brenda Lenard. If you want to defeat the incumbent at all costs, Crim appears to be the frontrunner. And if you're afraid of Crim because he's Tea Party (not an unreasonable position), clearly you should vote for Alexander. For me, I'd probably vote Alexander in this primary.

For Democracts, it's a toss-up between Adams and Ball. I can't tell enough difference between them from their websites to decide between them. If this is your dilemma, I'm afraid you'll need to gather more data. Either seems like they would do a fine job.

I'm disappointed that there is little or no mention by anyone about the abuses of the NSA. One Republican candidate may have mentioned it briefly, but only just. Clearly both parties are completely on board with the destruction of our privacy rights.