Bailouts

Federal bailouts can seem very unfair when you look at it from the perspective of a single family. We provide disaster assistance for large groups of people who have been affected, but not for individuals who have been similarly affected in isolation. So if 500 families lose their homes to a fire or flood, we offer each of those 500 families relief that we don’t offer to 1 family who loses their home. Yet if you’ve lost your home, you have the same needs as anyone else who has lost their home. Why do we only help some people in that situation and not everyone?

The reason is that as a society, we don’t really care about any of those families at all. We only care about the effect of the disaster on the rest of us. What if too many people are suddenly made homeless, or lose their jobs, or lose their investments? That can cause ripples of disruptions as economic effects spread. If a city block burns, the regional economy can absorb the effects. If a city burns, that’s a much larger problem for the regional economy, so we look to stop the effects from spreading by providing disaster assistance.

With disasters, we’ve decided that the way to stop those effects from spreading is to provide assistance to large groups of people. With the drug trade, we’ve decided that the way to stop those effects from spreading is to incarcerate large groups of people. These different approaches both have the common purpose of trying to maintain economic stability in the rest of society.

The current attempts to stop the foreclosure rate from accelerating beyond control are generating a lot of self-righteous complaints from people who are not facing rate resets and want to know why they aren’t being rewarded for having chosen a fixed-rate mortgage. They see some people benefiting from this attempt at disaster control and feel that it’s unfair. It is unfair, as are all federal bailouts. The surprising part of this bailout is that in the process of trying to maintain economic stability, we may actually help poor and minority populations since they are the ones who are most likely to face foreclosure otherwise. That would be a good outcome, and an unusual one. It also rouses two suspicions in my mind: first, that the mortgage bailout details will be arranged in such a way as to increase long-term debt for these poor and minority populations; second, that the reason some people are so willing to complain about the unfairness of this bailout is because of who may be helped.

Life in the lava field

Photo by Michael

Christmas means seeing: comments

This is a comment thread for the current poll. Whether or not you celebrate Christmas, most people have some break in their routine because of the day. For me, Christmas used to mean going out to see a movie matinee. Now it means visiting Lisa’s family in Maine and maybe a trip to L.L. Bean.

Stay out of my way, Green Line!

When I moved to Boston, I learned that the MBTA bus drivers regularly won national bus driving competitions. These competitions involved slalom and obstacle courses, but nothing about actually stopping for passengers or learning a route. The power-mad dream of driving an MBTA bus around Boston pales in comparison to driving a snowplow around Boston, however. It would be better if there were pedestrians and cars as well in this little on-line game, though crashing your snowplow into Boston landmarks and the Green Line trolleys is pretty good.

8 miles from Hilo

Photo by Michael

My favorite sign in Hawaii

Photo by Michael

Surfing in circles

I’m clearly misunderstanding how to use various web tools at my disposal. I use Google Reader for a number of news sites and blogs, and I mark interesting posts by clicking the star. I’m gradually creating a fun personal library that I can rummage through, but I don’t know how to add other random web pages to it.

How do I keep track of the odd web site One Cold Hand? Or the occasional bit of moving writing about writing on a political blog that I don’t subscribe to? I want to put them in my personal library, without doing all of my web surfing through Google Reader. I suppose I could mention them in my blog, and subscribe to my blog, but that seems rather roundabout.

Lead in the duck

A local public library offered lead testing today with an X-ray fluorescence (XRF) meter. Much more accurate than the swab kits that they sell in the stores. All of the “Made in China” toys that we brought tested fine, but the “Made in Taiwan” rubber ducky has a lot of lead in it. I should probably stop chewing on it.

A current Ikea playset of little metal pots and pans (Duktig) that someone else brought also tested high for lead. It’s really a charming set, beautifully executed, and apparently quite popular with little kids. Ikea is still selling that one, so I figured I’d call them. It took about an hour total, three phone calls and hold time and several transfers, to finally leave them a message saying that they should test that product because the XRF meter said the lead level was high.

We need a wiki-style database with photos and tags and descriptions of products along with test results for all of these little testing sessions that are going on around the country. I’d like to type in some keywords or attributes and see whether someone’s already gotten hard numbers on the product. I can tell you that the white Polar soda polar bear that they were handing out two summers ago in Copley Square doesn’t have any lead in it, but I’d rather tell the database. And I’d rather someone else deal with Ikea’s phone tree next time.

Death on the deck

The sparrow’s life was simple. Fly around, eat, drink, sleep, fly around some more. She had learned to avoid the occasional appearance of the greyhound, figured out which air conditioner to sleep under, and had found all the great dryer vents in the neighborhood (a marvelous source of heat and humidity in this suddenly-frigid weather). The chain link fences were built for sparrows, clear views from a set of perches set at regular intervals. Fly, eat, drink, sleep. Maybe chirp a little. It was a good enough life. The sparrow’s mother had explained all about blue jays, and hawks, and that greyhound. What she hadn’t been warned of was the Giant Flying Mum.

We don’t know exactly what happened. The mum used to be 20 feet away, around a corner, secure on a hook. Now it’s lying on the deck outside our dining room doors, with the poor sparrow an apparent casualty of the mum’s sudden aerial journey. And I keep imagining the fleeting final surprise in the sparrow’s head: I didn’t know that thing could fly!

Just one

Photo by Michael

Voter pledges

What would you promise to do in order to be allowed to vote? Would you, for example, sign a loyalty oath to a political party? In Virginia, the government will require voters in the upcoming Republican primary to sign a statement saying “I, the undersigned, pledge that I intend to support the nominee of the Republican Party for president.” This is fundamentally wrong.

The pledge can be interpreted in many ways. It could be read as a statement of current intent with no promise of future support. It could also be read as a promise of future support. That future support could be interpreted as donations of time or money to the Republican candidate, or simply a vote in the presidential election for the Republican candidate. How strong does your intent have to be? If you change your mind after the nominees are chosen, or after you learn more about the candidates or the parties or the world, or simply after thinking more, have you broken your signed pledge? If you believe that Romney will be the Republican nominee and you intend to support him, but you would be unwilling to support Giuliani if he is the Republican nominee, can you honestly sign that pledge? Different people will understand the pledge differently, and indeed the linked article offers two different interpretations just a few sentences apart. What is certain is that the pledge will pressure at least some people toward voting for the Republican nominee in the general election, because some people will take what they are signing seriously.

Worse, that pressure will feel like it is coming from the government, rather than from a political party. While a political party is not required to follow anything resembling a democratic process for choosing a nominee, the Republican party in Virginia has chosen to use the state’s electoral process. That electoral process should clearly follow some basic principles in a consistent fashion, so that voters can be assured of the fairness and integrity of the electoral process. Coercion and bias in the state’s electoral process is incompatible with democracy. When the state requires voters in a party’s primary to sign a pledge that they will vote for the party’s nominee in the presidential election, that is coercive. When the state does that only for one party’s primary and not for the other’s, that is both coercive and biased.

The coercion can easily be reinforced after the primary by reminding primary voters of their pledge. Records of who voted in a primary are public. Sample push poll: “Earlier this year, you signed a pledge to support the Republican candidate for president. Do you intend to vote for the Republican candidate tomorrow? [Yes] Thank you for being an honest American. Please remember to encourage your friends to vote tomorrow as well. [No] Are you aware that you signed that pledge? Are you aware that perjury is a crime?” Voter intimidation 101, made even easier by the state having required voters to sign a loyalty pledge in order to vote.

Let’s assume that it’s reasonable for a party to restrict primary voting to members of that political party. (States have different policies on this.) If I am a member of the Republican party, why should I not be able to vote in the primary even if I have no intention of supporting the likeliest Republican nominees for president? Ron Paul supporters, for example, may well realize that their guy has no chance of becoming the nominee and may not want to support anyone else. Why are they not entitled to vote in the primary? Some Republican voters may want to vote in their party’s primary for other local, state, or federal offices, but intend to vote for a non-Republican presidential candidate. Why are they not entitled to vote in the primary?

These objections don’t begin to address the question of what else voters could be required to sign in order to vote. I don’t want to go in that direction, because it might suggest that this loyalty oath is somewhere near the top of a slippery slope. This country has spent many years struggling up a difficult slope towards more free, more fair, and more open access to the right to vote. Loyalty oaths as part of the electoral process are not a small slip down that slope; they are a wholehearted leap downwards.

The two major political parties are very entrenched in our political system, and are very much majority groups. Freedom of association is usually taken to protect our right to join minority groups, but should also protect our right to register as a member of one of those major political parties without agreeing to join in lockstep with every priority of that party. Instead of respecting freedom of association, instead of recognizing the benefits of including different viewpoints, instead of reaching out to independent voters, instead of any pretense of a Big Tent approach, the Republican party is now willing to actively alienate even Republican voters who do not want to subordinate their will to the will of the party. I hope that is not a winning strategy.

Visual dictionary

Visual Dictionary Online is a handy way to find the word for the thing above the part that kind of looks like a doohickey. You know, like a philtrum or a petiole.

Work holiday parties: comments

This is a comment thread for the current poll. Does your work have a holiday party? Do you wish it did? What is your vision for the perfect work holiday party?

8 miles from Boston

Photo by Michael

Thanksgiving

Kamila Shamsie has written a wonderful short essay entitled “Martin Amis’s views demand a response.” Two sentences particularly stood out as being important and broadly relevant:

The failure to express outrage cannot be easily distinguished from a lack of outrage.

and

But in worlds without censorship, the way to respond to odious views which are given space in the press is to, well, respond!

These moral requirements cannot be satisfied by any one person. There is more we should express outrage about and more we should respond to than any of us can possibly react to, even if we were to devote all our waking time to responding. Much of a well-lived life goes beyond public discourse. Within the realm of public discourse, we should spend time envisioning and describing the world we actively want, not just the world we don’t. But if each of us heeds Ms. Shamsie’s call to speak up, our collective voice could be strong enough to push back, express outrage, and respond.

We may give thanks for many things at Thanksgiving — time with family or friends, a good meal, a holiday parade, or our own good fortune. We may help others in a soup kitchen or a shelter. We may just enjoy the day off work. I know my friends are celebrating the holiday in many different ways. I’ll start my Thanksgiving here and now. I give thanks for the freedoms we still have, and I hope for the endurance to still feel outraged by those who have taken away the ones we’ve lost and who are denying freedom to others. Above all, I hope we will all keep the courage to respond to that which outrages us, so that our failure to express outrage cannot be taken for a lack of outrage. That is how the world will improve, and that is how we will have thanks to give next year.