lines in the sand

Bringing Home the Bacon

From the Heritage Foundation:

Some of the Pork Projects in the Remaining FY 2007 Appropriations Bills

Chamber	Approps Bill	Amount	Project
House	TTHUD	$500,000	Renovate the Public Pool in Banning, California
House	Labor-HHS	$175,000	Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy
Senate	Agriculture	$1,000,000	Mormon Cricket & Grasshopper Activities in Utah
Senate	TTHUD	$800,000	National Women's Hall of Fame, Seneca Falls, New York
House	TTHUD	$500,000	Traffic Calming, Windermere, Florida

Windermere, Florida is a small town near Orlando where the taxpayers have names like Shaq, Tiger and Tyra.

You're welcome, guys.  Glad we could help out in a pinch.

Stephen Hawking's Space Medal

His physical limitations will probably keep him out of space but Stephen Hawking's mind has probably spent more time there than anybody's.

Tomorrow, the Brithish Royal Society will give him its Copley Medal and it will have been there aboard Discovery last July.

I guess that puts him one up on previous recipients like Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin and Benjamin Franklin.

Update: I could be wrong.

A Dilemma

Coyote faces a hard choice:

Now I can go to jail both for employing folks without a valid social security number and for not employing folks without a valid social security number.

His post makes me think of two things:

In the sixties my dad complained that he was required to report a breakdown of employees by race and prohibited from keeping any record of employees' race.

In the seventeen-seventies, the complaint in an obscure colonial separatist document that the "King... has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance."

Ah'm a Crackuh and This Proves It

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The South That's a Southern accent you've got there. You may love it, you may hate it, you may swear you don't have it, but whatever the case, we can hear it.
The Midland
Philadelphia
The Inland North
The Northeast
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

HT: Asymmetrical Information

Suspected Word Peeve

suspect:

Main Entry: sus·pect Pronunciation: 's&s-"pekt Function: noun : a person suspected of a crime; also : a person apprehended for but not yet charged with an offense.

Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law, © 1996 Merriam-Webster, Inc.

I see and hear a lot of news stories, especially on my favorite talk radio station, WDBO, that include something like "The suspect, described as a green martian about four feet tall, grabbed the money and ran.  If anyone has information about such a person, please contact the police."

The guy who grabbed the money is not a suspect - he is a perpetrator, or "perp" in crime story parlance.  The perp is not suspected of anything.  We know he grabbed the money but we don't know who he is.

There is no suspect yet and the police are trying to find one.  When they have identified someone who resembles the description, then they can say he is a suspect. 

It still doesn't mean that Uncle Martin is the one who made off with the money, only that he is under suspicion.  Meanwhile, the actual perp, having removed the kneepads, washed off the green greasepaint, and made a clean getaway, is not a suspect and may never be one.

The Marketplace at Work

Here's how competition helps consumers.

Electronic Voting

Network World's Mark Gibbs  posted a question about voting machines

As we have just had an election and the whole voting machine brouhaha has repeated itself I have to throw in my $0.02: How come automated teller machines can function reliably and banks can get the account details right for millions of customers performing billions of transactions every day but for no obvious reason accurately counting something like a paltry 160 million votes is apparently next to impossible.

Can someone tell me why we aren't more outraged at the willful incompetence involved? Anyone?

Well, Mark, there may be incompetence but it probably breeds more fear than outrage and I doubt it is willful.

As you say, banks get to process billions of transactions for millions of people every day. Most voting
jurisdictions handle at most a few hundred thousand transactions every couple of years. Practice may not always make perfect but it certainly develops skills.

Banks have pretty basic controls that aren't to be found in voting systems. For example, when you make a deposit, the bank makes sure that all the checks and cash in that deposit add up to the total you say it does.  Applying that principle to voting could improve the counting situation dramatically.  One way to do that  would be for every question or race to include a choice labeled something like 'Not Voting' or 'None of the above'. Your ballot is not accepted until you have marked something for each. The number of votes will always equal the number of people who showed up. That eliminates questions of intent, identifies missing machines, etc., and works for any electronic voting method - touchscreen, scanner, punch card or otherwise.

Another control that banks have is customer feedback. The trail isn't always paper any more, but you can review your transactions and correct any errors. But if you suspect your vote was counted incorrectly, what is your recourse?

Of course, we could centralize voting authorities, say, in each state capital and put VTMs in all the precincts. My libertarian attitudes don't like that much, though. Since we can't try new things every day like the banks, local voting at least lets us try a variety of things in each election.  Then we can adopt what works better the next time.

The system is messy but not broken. Since the few dozen employees of my county's election commission don't have the skill set found at Bank of America I am wary of changes but still encourage them.

How much does free cost?

A few minutes ago I heard a radio commercial for a local Cadillac dealer that bragged "We'll throw in navigation for free or you can drop the sticker price another $2,145..."

If that's working, maybe we do need a Department of Nannies in the government.