Christopher Merle (ENTP)

In February of 2007 I attended my second Pycon, a conference devoted to the open source programming language Python. One of the coolest system of presentations I saw were the lightning talks. Each presenter gets only 5 minutes to give his spiel. The one that made the biggest impression on me was by Ka-Ping Yee. He demonstrated how using less than 300 lines of code could make electronic voting much more secure. Consider this. A voting machine made by Diebold (now Premier Election Solutions) has over 31,000 lines of code. Some machines have over 100,000 lines of code. Which do you think would be easier to audit and certify?

As we get closer to the election, voting security becomes more important. Ka-Ping Yee is getting some news coverage. Since that talk his pvote code has ballooned to just under 500 lines of code, still somewhat under that 100K mark.

No matter what system is used, transparency and the ability to audit the system and the votes is of paramount importance. No one should trust any system to work. Proper checks and balances need to be in place, so that should questions arise, people can see what happened.

Yee was interviewed during Pycon 2008 in Chicago: In Voting Software We Trust?

Ira Flatow also interviews Ka-Ping Yee in this recent segment of Science Friday. Comes in at 13:30.
E-Voting Update (broadcast Friday, October 24th, 2008)

One thing to note about the electronic voting systems mentioned in the podcast was calibration. They use touch screens. If they are not calibrated properly, voters thinking they selected their candidate of choice may show they’ve selected a different candidate. The co-ordinates of the selections you see on the screen should be synced up with the co-ordinates of the touch display. This is a separate issue that needs to be addressed, but as long as it can be calibrated visually and on the spot this should not be a serious technical issue. The only downside is that voters may not be paying attention to their choices or summary.

Yee didn’t mention anything about a paper audit, but it would be trivial to add a few lines of code to print out the cast ballot. Not only does this make it possible to vote more securely—by an order of magnitude—his system makes it easier for the voter to cast a vote, including those requiring accessibility.

You can also view his Pycon slide show. It will walk you through the steps, and you’ll see how it is possible to make electronic voting far more secure than it is now. With the proper checks and balances people can be sure their vote is counted. These checks are sadly lacking in Diebold’s and others voting machine technology.

After reading the website Media Matters, which takes the mainstream media to task, I can come to only one conclusion: brain parasites. Yes, brain parasites have completely taken over pundits like Bill Kristol, Mike Savage, and Neal Boortz. Nothing else comes close to explaining the the insanely hateful things they utter. I suppose it’s possible they are actually living in some sort of alternate reality that manifests in ours. But I doubt it.

Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite that can alter animal behavior in such a way that is detrimental to the animal but not the parasite. This is most often seen in rats and cats. Rats allow themselves to be eaten by cats and this allows the life cycle of the parasite to continue. I think what we have here is a variant which I have dubbed Toxoplasma neoconi. It’s primary symptom it makes you an inflexible asshole whose decisions are incredibly destructive for those around them.

I like vending machines and I wish they’d take dollar coins. They take dollar bills and that’s good, but have you ever tried to put a crumpled dollar bill into a vending machine. You have to go through all sorts of contortions to flatten it out and feed it in. And then it’ll spit it back out. You’ll try this five or six times until it takes it or not. Sometimes even a new dollar bill won’t feed properly. Or you don’t look at the illustration on which way to feed it until after say the third try. And sometimes they put the wrong illustration. How much easier it would be if they took dollar coins. Plunk, push, kerplunk.

I’ve seen different dollar coins growing up. My mom had a collection of silver liberty dollars. There was a Eisenhower dollar and a JFK half-dollar in circulation. Then there was the Susan B. Anthony and now the Sacajawa dollar. Neither the Susan nor the Sacajewa took off. Was it because we Americans are sexist and racist and wouldn’t use them? Or was it because they didn’t withdraw the paper dollar from circulation. Partly both. Coins can last thirty years in circulation before needing to be withdrawn. Paper doesn’t last so long.

I’ve seen the coins used in the UK, Switzerland and Europe (France, Holland, and Ireland) and they have 1 unit coins, pound, swiss franc, and euro. They even have 2 unit coins. Speaking of which I really miss the 2 dollar bill. It would be nice to have a 2 dollar coin.

Now I read that we are going to issue yet another dollar coin, this time with presidents. That’s great, but they need to pull dollar bills from circulation and encourage vending machines to take the coins. I’d like to see a Jefferson 2 dollar coin. That’d be cool.

The unholy trinity that affects the US are fundamentalists, oil, and debt. When you read American Theocracy by Kevin Philips, each becomes scarier than the next. Debt by far is the biggest threat facing America, public and private. I then thought of the old adage ‘follow the money’. Lo and behold I found it.

Oil is paid for by US dollars (petrodollars) on the international market. Iraq was preparing to make the switch to using euros for oil in 2002. Iran is preparing to make the switch to euros. The Iran Oil Bourse was supposed to go online in March of 2006. It’s now been pushed back to Sept. 2006. The question is will it go online at all or will World events intercede.

I really didn’t think ‘follow the money’ would turn up anything or give me a new perspective on the current Middle East crisis, but the threat of the switch to the euro seems to make some sort of sense out the madness the Middle East is descending into. And where else outside of the US can you find more fundamentalists, not to mention oil?

America has one of the best health care systems in the world. Not everyone, however, has equal access to it. It is not governed by the free market. Some want universal health care which is another name for socialized medicine. We’ve seen how well socialized medicine works in Canada and the UK. That is to say, not. Indian health care and military health care is socialized, as is Medicare and Medicaid. Health insurance sucks. The problem started many decades ago.

My ex said their were two kinds of health insurance, low cost - high crap and high cost - low crap. That is to say the more you pay for your health coverage the less bureacratic crap you have to deal with to get insurance to pay. The question is should a serious illness push a middle class family into poverty? I could say that having crappy health insurance is better than no insurance, but that’s not the solution.

After World War II, employers wanting to hire new workers could not offer higher saleries. To compensate they could offer things like health insurance and other fringe benefits. By doing that it insulated the employee from the true cost of health care. I’m working towards a proposal here. Health is a personal, a familial, and a social issue. And there is a stigma to certain illnesses, not just AIDS. People try to make sense of why some get sick. They think it’s divine retribution, that you are unclean. Leprosy and the Black Death have shown us how people react. The fear and stigma of illness is very deeply rooted in our psyche. It’s part of our survival instinct.

We have to overcome the irrational fear associated with some illnesses. There are geniune fears to deal with like “Bird Flu”. But what if someone breaks a leg. Well that’s a personal issue but a social one as well. If we treat the person’s broken leg and take care of them, we are creating a social contract. Once the person is better they will be a productive member of society again and in turn if someone else breaks a leg they will help tend to that person. Not everyone breaks a leg. So why should they participate?

There is such a thing as economies of scale. We should be able to set aside a small amount of our incoming to create a huge pool to take care of people who get sick. The problem comes when the number of sick and injured becomes greater than the pool of resources available to take care of them. That’s where triage comes in. An unpleasant fact of war is that when a large number of casualties come in the medics have to decide who is savable. Some they know are just going to die, so they devote no resources except maybe some morphine to ease their passing. And sometimes they have to save the morphine for the living those who are going to make it.

The situation is not nearly so grim for our civilian world. Can we create a pool of resources for the poor and middle class that will not push a family into abject poverty when a serious illness or injury occurs? Some type of catastrophic coverage? There are other issues to discuss as well such as prescription drugs and the over prescription of anti-biotics. Obesity, diet, and exercise all play a role here as well.

If we were going to let the free market rule, then we’d have to eliminate all health insurance, private and governmental. We’d have to get rid of medicare and medicaid payments to doctors. It’s interesting to note that specialists get paid more for the same procedure than a non-specialist. Hence we’ve had more specialists since the 60’s. Doctors, nurses, and health care providers should be allowed to make a decent living and considering how much education a doctor has to have they should be able to earn quite a bit. How would a free market system work for someone dying of cancer, AIDS, or multiple sclerosis? Not very well I think.

If someone has a stroke and are almost completely paralyzed, they could live for many, many years as long as they are cared for. They could never be a productive member of society again. They would be a burden on their family and the health care system. We shouldn’t let them die unless they wanted to. And there may be treatments developed to help them live better.  As long as we don’t have to triage and there are enough productive members of society contributing to the resource pool, they shouldn’t be a financial burden on anyone.  It does involve a redistribution of wealth, but I’m not suggesting we have socialized medicine.