Alex Jacobson

Amazing Basketball Fight: A Pack not a Mob/Gang/Herd

I saw the big amazing basketball fight on TV last night at Godzilla Sushi in SF. If you can't see a full big screen version, at very least, see the online video. Then read this commentary. Truly Amazing stuff.

Fan discipline is incredibly poor. Emotions running very high. Once a player is in a fight his teammates HAVE to come help (they are team). So the teams both get up off the benches when each one has a member in that initial fight. But the teams know the fight is stupid and calm down and sit down. Artest goes and lies down to calm down at which point BANG a fan throws a bottle at him. Artest gets up goes after him. At this point the frans decide to side with their own and attack Artest. Artests team mates now need to pull him out and it all keeps escalating.

Glenn Reynolds is fond of saying "A pack not a herd". But this situation illustrates exactly the complexity of his cause.

Herds fail when the allow their members to be preyed upon e.g the Europeans who stand by while allowing a lone gunman to kill people in Sweden, the Germans handing the Jews over to the Nazi authorities, the European states attemtping appeasement of Hitler and Mussolini, and the international community for failing to stop genocides all over the world.

But, in fairness to the pacfists all over the world, World War I and the Cuban Missile Crisis both appear like examples of the risks of the alternative. The death and devastation of World War I was the result of a dynamic very similar to the basketball game. The failing Austro-Hungarian empire needed to assert its authority over the Serbians. A network of alliances then forced the Germans to preemptively attack France and WWI began. The Cuban Missile crisis had a similar quality as the logic of warfare and alliances trumped systemic common sense to put the world at risk of nuclear war.

So we have this apparently conflict between the risks of herding pacifism and the risks of predatory alliances and teams. But this conflict is only apparent and actually a result of failing alliance/team discipline. The solution is for the members of the pack/alliance/team to have enough sense of their systemic health so that they punish members who put them at risk of being drawn in to unhealthy confrontations and conflagurations. The real risk is cultural failure.

If the Piston fan who threw the bottle at Artest really and viscerally understood that the rest of Detroit would hate him for his unsportsmanlike conduct. Then it probably wouldn't have occured to him to do what he did. If the fans around him also shared that understanding then the man would have been viewed more like a lone gunman who needed to be taken out and less as a representative of the Piston fans whose honor needed protection.

In the case of WWI, the Congress of Vienna balance of power system set up by Metternich after the Napoleonic wars lacked the fluidity to prevent allies from doing stupid things. But more importantly, it lacked any framework for parties rapidly to communicate their power intentions and to communicate with each other what any given anticipated action would force others to do. In short, the Congress of Vienna did not leave its members with a way to understand what system health was and it also lacked a way for parties to simulate before acting. Today we have a United Nations and modern media environment that for all their faults allows parties to play out the results of their actions in theory before they put them into practice. For example, these institutions allowed the US to telegraph its intention to invade Iraq long before it actually did so and gave everyone else the opportunity to articulate how they would handle it if the US went through with the plan. The lack of surprise and the testing of ideas dramatically increased the safety of everyone.

What would you do with the blogosphere on your desktop?

Via Mary Hoder , it appears that the entire blogosphere encompasses 6.5M blogs and that there are about 600,000 posts per day.

If you assume each post is 1k and that it all started in a flash 3 years ago, the entire blogosphere archive is only 540GB. Given that text compresses 80%, we are probably talking about storing the entire archive in ~100GB. (A 100GB HD today costs around $100). But, lets follow Mary's logic in advocating PubSub's business model and assume we only want 30 days (older stuff has probably reached google). Then you only need 20GB uncompressed and 5GB compressed. Downloading 600Mb on a 1Mbps link will take you 1.5 hours. Some people will object that the blogosphere is growing. I would respond that it is unlikely that the blogosphere is growing as fast as hard drives and bandwidth costs are shrinking.

What would you do with the entire blogosphere downloaded?
* blog surf faster!
* personalized searches e.g. find me this word in all blogs reachable from the set you read regularly
* ideology searches: find me this word in the right-wing blogosphere

You tell me?

Thinking about a better open source license

The GPL and the MPL combine with Moore's law and the Internet to allow people to take source private by operating it as a service. I am planning to release an app server open source and want to remedy this problem. Here are the key terms. I'm looking for comments:

Simple Source License, Version 0.1
Copyright (c) 2004 HAppS.org. All rights reserved.

Preamble

The copyright holder of the covered work has released it without charge to the developer community in the hopes that it will be of value and in the hopes that other developers will in turn make and distribute improvements back and in turn get the same value.

This license reflects these hopes by permitting anyone to use, modify, bundle, or provide a service derived from covered work in whatever manner they choose and for whatever they wish to charge as long as they make the associated source freely available as well.

Terms and Conditions
1. Scope of License
This license covers any work that contains notice placed by the copyright holder stating that fact.

2. Covered Works
You may reproduce, modify, display, and/or distribute verbatim copies of covered works.

3. Modified Versions Of Covered Works
You may reproduce, modify, display, and/or distribute modified versions of covered works or patches to original or modified versions of covered works
a. only if they retain the original's copyright, license, disclaimer, and all notices, if any, thereof,
b. only if they include prominent notice that they derive directly or indirectly from covered work and are NOT verbatim copies thereof, and
c. only if they include some way to identify the covered work from which they directly or indirectly derive.

4. Derived Works and Derived Services
A derived work is any work that results from modification or transformation of derived or covered works. A derived service is any service that depends in part or whole on the operation of derived work. Associated source is any
source used to create a derived work or provide a derived service. You may distribute derived works and/or provide derived services and/or permit others to do the same only if for the following year you make all associated source
available to the recipients of such works and/or users of such services
a. at no charge,
b. at a URL displayed prominently and designated as such in the acknowledgment section of the associated end-user documentation, and
c. under terms conformant with Open Source Definition 1.9 or later as available from the Open Source Initiative or under this license,
d. and only if the license or terms of use conspicuously advises the recipient and/or end user of their rights to the source under the terms of this license.

5. Acknowledgement
Any derived work or service must have end-user documentation with anacknowledgment section containing the following text:
"This product includes software developed by [copyright holder's name] ([copyright holder's URL])." (replacing bracketed text with its value).

Zack Rosen building systems for online religious devotion

I am flippantly describing the plan by the author of DeanSpace, the software tool that allowed Dean supporters to avoid talking to anyone but themselves. He wants to institutionalize this behavior for a "progressive movement" that, thanks to people like Zack and Michael Moore, has its head so far up its ass that it already resembles a Klein bottle.

Rather than testing their ideas in the market, these foks get together and reassure themselves that they are obviously right. It is emotionally incredibly reaffirming and works well for a Democratic party that markets itself to a population of urban voters that moved to cities because they were unable to cope with justifying their choices in smaller towns where they were more visible and where their behavior was more unique, to "intellectuals" who were losers in high school, and to racial/ethnic minorities in search of critical mass and social support.

Having done so, the Democrats then exhbited the pathologies identified by Clay Shirky in "A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy," villifying those not in the group as well as (and especially) those seeking to leave the group via greater participation in civic society (e.g. higher taxes on the "rich" with a low threshold for qualifying as "rich", opposition to school choice, affirmative action, etc...) . The result is a classic Clayton Christiansen style pursuit of purity/quality at the expense of market. The dominance of the liberal media provides some protection for the right from falling into this trap. But projects like DeanSpace/CivicSpace make it worse.

If the Democrats really want to win elections, they need to get out of their pure virtual worlds (see prior post) and engage the real world. Rather than setting up systems to help them talk amongst themselves, Zach should be providing them with more effective systems for arguing with Republicans. Alternative/New media like talk radio and the blogs were built on attacking the liberal mainstream media. The Republicans there practiced dealing with and countering Democratic claims and arguments and distributing those memes quickly. The Democrats in contrast simply denigrated these disreputable non-institutional sources and became shockingly ignorant of and facts and arguments that would put their views into question when presented to an open minded potential voter.

JustOneMinute proposed a survey to test the ignorance of Democrats on substantial issues. I'l excerpt here

suppose we designed a survey loaded with "democratic myths". My (untested) hunch is that the reality-based community would do pretty badly. [...]

(1) Bush lied in his 2003 State of the Union Address when he said that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa".

(2) Ambassador Joseph Wilson exposed Bush's lie about Niger.

(3) We went to war with Iraq because George Bush said that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the US.

(4) It was George Bush who authorized the departure of the Bin Laden family from the US after 9/11.

(5) George Bush plans to re-instate the draft after his election.
[...]
(11) George Bush refused to authorize the release of his Texas Air National Guard records.

(12) John Kerry released all of his military records, with the exception of some items related to his personal medical history.

(13) All of the charges made by the Swift Boat Veterans were shown to be false.

[...]
I would expect an obvious left-right divide amongst respondents. And for most of these, the obvious lefty answer is wrong

I doubt that Zack's system would fix these sorts of problems. Today I got a link to this "funny" CraigsList post:

Reply to: anon-47785163@craigslist.org
Date: Wed Nov 03 19:11:50 2004

I would like to fight a Bush supporter to vent my anger. If you are one, have a fiery streek, please contact me so we can meet and physically fight. I would like to beat the shit out of you.

As a Republican who lives at the core of blue state society and in the context of all the violence directed at Republican campaign offices both before and after the election, I don't find it so funny. I find it scary.

Peter Thiel's Virtualization Talk

At ACC, Peter Thiel, ex-CEO of PayPal, talked about the trend towards virtual value. The content was largely anti-foundational, with him noting that you can view everything in terms of bits or atoms. That the atoms of a human are cycled out every 6 months but we still interpret each other as the same person. He also discussed the possibility for the virtual sphere to escape the control of existing temporal powers (e.g. government). He noted that more than 40% of the worlds wealth is now stored in tax havens like the Switzerland or the Caymen Islands. He was hopeful that the financial system could achieve complete independence and that perhaps other virtual systems would follow, and begged three really important questions:

1. What exactly does virtualization mean?


2. Is it really possible?


3. Do we want it (for some definition of "we")?

On the definitional front, it is seems really hard to differentiate it from religion. At the extreme, it is really hard to tell the difference between Transhumanist claims that one's "mind" persists after uploading to some network based virtual reality haven even as the body is left to die. And Christian claims about a soul going to heaven after the body dies.
A Transhumanist might respond by claiming that they can communicate with the uploaded entity and that uploaded entity is responding. Pre-Christian animists used to make these sorts of claims as well.

But, if we were to stipulate nonetheless that the difference really is about some way in which participation in a virtual world actually does have an effect on real world behavior, then the question is simply how vulnerable those participants are to temporal power. For example, if one spends all of one's time in virtual estate in Second Life, then perhaps one cares little about one's real (world) estate. If one really enjoys virtual sex, perhaps one has less need to fetishize the physical version. If one spends all of one's time zoned out on heroin (or lotus eating!).... And perhaps suicide bombing becomes completely reasonable to those not concerned about death.

But, let us exclude real-world ascetisism as a model for temporal invulnerability for the moment and assume that virtual world participants have real world desires that can be in conflict with those of others... Now we have the premise of traditional economics, unlimited wants and FINITE means.

So, here, virtualization means simply some form of collaboration in order to achieve real world gains. What is appealing here is that no participant is harmed by these gains. An economist would refer to these gains as Pareto improvements. So now it looks like virtualization is simply communication infrastructure for various forms of social arrangements to achieve real world ends!

On the possibility front, there is no question that the world is non-zero-sum so virtualization in that sense is possible, but the original question was whether it is possible to have a financial system that operates outside the grip of temporal power. Let's talk about desirability and then return to this possibility question...

It is obviously the case that "we" for any definition of "we" want highly efficient communication infrastructure. The open question is whether we want it for "them" when "their" interests are in conflict with ours. For example urban existence is already very virtual. We participate in a virtual world called "money and contracts" to get off the farm and maximize one's options for physical intercourse. On the other hand, we want to prevent terrorists from using these same networks to destroy this urban existence we hold dear. The result is another virtual world called "government" that interferes in the "money and contracts" world to protect "us" from "them."

From running PayPal, Peter knows better than most that, as another PayPal founder puts it "Fraud is not a percentage!" Economists may recognize this as a modern restatement of Gresham's Law: "Bad money drives good money out of circulation." In the case of PayPal, this means all sorts of fraud protection measures that added substantial friction to PayPal's ideal virtual economy. Notably these fraud protection measures included resort to the use of real world enforcement mechanisms to protect the interest of PayPal's virtual customers. But this property is not unique to PayPal. The existence of any virtual world depends on real world institutions to which they will therefore inevitably pay dues/taxes/etc and around which they will need to organize. Note, this fact is a consequence of the finite means issue above it is not particular to any given virtual structure and to use a very different sort of example, it why the terrorists are forced to defend Fallujah (follow this link it is really good on this issue!).

To put it all really simply, a virtual world can be independent of the real world if and only if is a quasi-religion. If it is not a quasi-religion, it will necessarily be subject to real world constraints and be dependent on real world insitiutions for continued operation.

When will Google Leave the Search Business? Can LinkedIn survive?

Peter Norvig, director of search technology for Google gave a talk on the future of search. Much of the talk was banal discussion of the merits of having lots of documents to applying various forms of brute force search algorithms. But, he show a really interesting slide indicating that the size of the web was somewhere between 10 and 100 terabytes.

Some quick math reveals that it costs only $10k to store the bottom end of this spectrum. The hard disk and bandwidth variants of Moore's law tell us that we are rapidly approaching a time when we will be able to download the entirety of the Internet onto people's home computers. Once we are able to do that, Google will be competing as a commercial software provider against a hoard of open source software developers steadily improving home search technology and customizing for the needs of various types of users and content. I asked Norvig about this and he claimed that Google's commercial software will outcompete open source. His answer is incredibly ironic given that Google itself is built on top of linux and other open source products and Google's theme "Do no evil" is an attack on the commercial software world of Microsoft.

In any case, whether the threat is other commercial vendors or the open source world, the future of Google's search business looks iffy at best. Admittedly we are some years away from individual home users being able to download the entire Internet, but there are lots of intermediate versions of this threat including a proliferation of other web sites that can suddenly afford the costs of downloading the entire internet and whose costs are covered by e.g. being shared by the users of a particular ISP or company. This option may be particularly attractive to businesses that would prefer not to have the searches their employees do be visible to Google Inc. or anyone packet sniffing along the way. The other major form of competition may be the download of particular subsets of the web optimized for particular markets e.g. crawling only in the finance world to answer queries like "aggregate revenue of of companies with the word 'chemical' in their annual reports or crawling Friend-of-a-Friend files looking for a relationship....

Either way, if you own Google stock because you believe in its future in the search business, you might want to sell. However, you should be aware that Google's revenue base is shifting dramatically away from advertising on google owned sites to advertising on non-Google sites for which Google serves advertising ("adsense"). There is no reason not to expect this trend to continue because the network effects of such a business make it incredibly hard to dislodge. and every reason to think that Google's work in search is becoming something more akin to basic research than it is to relevant part of an active business. So the expected revenue of the business may be protected. The only doubt on this score comes from my friend L, who, when I made this observation to him, expressed dount that Google's techie anti-marketing corporate culture is going to prepared for this transition. The cold response I got from Norvig on this question is consistent with L's observation. I don't know enough about large scale corporate "change management" initiatives to know what risks this adds to the value of Google's stock. But caveat emptor.

David Brin vs. Brad Templeton: Can/Should voting be anonymous?

David Brin, author of the Transparent Society and advocate of democratic surveillance, debated Brad Templeton Chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation on the relatie merits of privacy vs transparency. They both seemed to assume that surveillance technologies were inevitably going to win out over privacy protecting technologies. The history of warfare should tell us that it is always an arms race.

What really surprised me here is that neither approached this issue from the perspective of the election we just had (perhaps because they were both in agreement on being rabidly anti-Bush). David Brin is arguing that we should be able to observe every little detail about our neighbors. Brad is arguing that we need privacy or this ability to see our neighbors will be abused by elites. But, neither addressed the question of whether we should have privacy in the voting booth. And, what technologies we can apply to protect voting booth privacy if we even should.

Perhaps Brin would argue that we will just learn "to avert our eyes." But I find this argument shockingly weak. There is a reason why virtually every democratic society has tried to protect voter privacy. I am sending Brad and David a link to this post. Lets see what they say.

Internet Freedom vs International Institutions

At the conference, Alex Lightman told me about the new politics of Internet standards committees. In the old days, the designer of Internet protocols had to make tradeoffs that were largely technical in nature, they largely designed with the interest of vaguely freedom oriented people's in mind. Today the parties to these sorts of discussions include people like Chinese Intelligence who are more interested in improving their ability to track users and do damage to the US in case of war, etc. I guess the Internet is all grown up, but this new environment is a little scary.

For example, SMTP, the protocol that governs how email is delivered on the Internet was written in an era when bandwidth was in such short supply but the time it took for a packet to round trip between two internet nodes was relatively short. SMTP is a brilliantly designed protocol for such an environment. However, today the opposite is true. Bandwidth is cheap but round trips are expensive! If John Postel, the author of SMTP, were alive and writing a mail protocol for today's Internet, I have no doubt he would make different design decisions, but that these decisions would be in the interests of the Internet's end users.

The problem is that the people in charge of designing the next generation of Internet protocols are NOT optimizing for the needs of end-users. They are optimizing for state control and state interests. It is unclear whether the interests of end-users are adequately represented on the various design committees and this is dangerous. We don't want IPv6 to make it easy to track the location its users. We don't want next generation name services to make it easy for a government to shut down operation of a web site it doesn't like!

I'm not entirely sure what needs to be done here. Alex Lightman is trying to raise awareness, but I think we may need more....

Is Law Enforcement Obsolete? Is Preemption reasonable?

I spent the weekend at the Accelerating Change 2004 conference in Palo Alto. Andreas Olligschlarger gave a presentation on the inadequacy of law enforcement information technology and what they were doing to address it. What was interesting about this challenge is how "fighting the last war" it all was. I have no doubt that we can improve substantially law enforcement's ability to deal with old fashion crime... to catch criminals after the fact and incarcerate them. Certainly this helps deter crime committed for selfish reasons. But this sort of crime is largely small in scale.... There just isn't much bonus in killing large numbers of people to steal a wallet or operate an illegal gambling operation.

But, after 9/11, the crime about which we are now increasingly worried is that committed by those willing to die for their cause. These people are willing to die in order to draw attention to the cause they believe in and punish those they think are their enemies. The difficulty we face is that, until the crime is actually committed, the perpetrators of these crimes are not violating any law so they cannot be detained without violation of their civil right, the time from crime in progress to major damage is likely too short to deploy law enforcement officials and catching the crimials is not helpful because they may expect to die in the course of committing their crime. There were very limited reasons to worry about box cutters carried onto airplanes before 9/11. I don't know how we stop individuals from carrying harmless stuff onto airplanes that can be combined with stuff from others on-board to form a weapon.

We can reduce our risk of this new style crime by:

• A pack not a herd. having an alert and trained citizenry that can act locally and on their own initiative when they suspect a crime in progress. The "Lets Roll" passengers of of the 9/11 flight that fought back against the terrorists are one example. The passenger on another airplace that noticed Richard Reid trying to detonate his shoe is another. If we take this notion seriously we may want to relax subantially restrictions on concealed carry and other forms of gun control. In fact, we may want to actively promote people bringing weapons onto airplanes because it increases terrorist uncertainty further! It also increases the risk of a drunk stupid passenger with a weapon causing more limited damage.
  


• Preemptive incarceration. We allow law enforcement much more lattitude in arresting and incarcerating people who have not done anything obviously wrong (based on "probably cause"?). The large scale crime described above forces us to re-weigh the costs of false positives and false negatives in law enforcement. The notion that we are going to tolerate a much higher level of false positives makes me really unhappy, but the fault may lie with the new technology for destruction and not with law enforcement itself.
  


• Memetic warfare. We organize to find people promoting ideologies adherence to which substantially increases the likelihood of violent attack and engage in "the politics of personal destruction." However the notion of our government actively doing this to private citizens make me more than a little nervous.
  


• Expandng "Fire in a crowded theater" law. Existing law recognizes that the first ammendment does not permit someone to shout fire in a crowded theater. Perhaps we can find a way to extend this law to cover ideologous the instigate violence against other groups or against the country. Again, we have to think seriously about how to structure such a rule to limit abuse. But, again, we are reweighing the risk of false positives against the risk of false negatives.
  

But whichever rules you pick, the notion that enhanced and centralized law enforcement technology can, in and of itself protect us from another 9/11 is highly unrealistic.

Attempting to understand

I was having an email debate with a friend about the differences between Republican and Democrat economic policies. My complaint about his argument was that he was attacking strawmen rather than actual arguments. I think it is useful to reproduce some of the discussion here. The context of this discussion is his endorsement of this screed by Al Gore:

I'm convinced that most of the president's frequent departures from fact-based analysis have much more to do with right-wing political and economic ideology than with the Bible. It is love of power for its own sake that is the original sin of this presidency.

The essential cruelty of Bush's game is that he takes an astonishingly selfish and greedy collection of economic and political proposals and then cloaks them with a phony moral authority, thus misleading many Americans ... who have a deep and genuine desire to do good in the world.

Truly, President Bush has stolen the symbolism and body language of religion and used it to disguise the most radical effort in American history to take what rightfully belongs to the American people and give as much of it as possible to the already wealthy and privileged.

Here goes my response
-----
You say:

You can disagree with Gore over whether this is a good idea or just. But it shouldn't be a sticking point that this is what he's asking for.

But the issue on the table isn't whether it is good or just, it is whether reasonable people can differ on that question. Perhaps you are not recognizing Suskind et all argument as a combination of the ad hominem fallacy with the
strawman argument.

The standard Ad Hominem argument is:
AH1 Person A makes claim X.
AH2 Person A is someone who would make this claim
AH3 Person A is evil/stupid
AH4 Therefore A's claim is evil/false.

Suskin, Gore, et al drop AH1 entirely (strawman)
and go as follows:
AH1' Claim X is evil/false.
AH2' Person A is someone who would make this claim
AH3' Therefore Person A is evil/stupid
AH4' Therefore AH1'

This circular logic is useful for working a crowd into a heated anger, but not so good for shedding light on the subject matter. Have you seen the front page of the village voice this week?

[He has invoked Kevin Phillips book on the differences in economic policy between the parties]

Phillips does not attack the rich per se. He attacks an ideology, prevalent among American conservatives, that promotes the concentration of private wealth.

Really? Does this ideology represent a claim that concentration of private wealth is a good in and of itself? Or, is the concentration of private wealth merely a side effect of achieving otherpolicy aims e.g. the production of new wealth?

He also argues that this concentration of wealth is a threat to democracy. There's nothing wrong with any one family being rich. It's the aggregate numbers that are a problem.

How does this threat compare with the loss of aggregate wealth that results from not growing the economy (or even simply of growing more slowly)?

Do these newly rich people all agree on the major political issues? I do notice that the billionaires (Heinz, Soros, Buffett, et al) seem to be backing Kerry. Is that good or bad for the political system?

Personally, I believe that a growing economy seems to reduce rather than expand the marginal value of money in politics. The farther people are from starving, the more they can vote their convictions and the more they can refuse monetary inducements in political life.

The left generally argues that we should have a progressive tax. The right generally prefers a flat tax.

Strawman. The left generally prefers higher taxes. The right generally prefers lower taxes. Flat taxes are secondary.

The left aims for equality in wealth, and the right aims for equality in taxation.

Here we have a failure even to attempt to understand the other sides arguments.

It would be more balanced to say that the left cares more about equality of result. The right cares more about equality of opportunity.

It would be much more accurate to say that the left is willing to sacrifice new wealth creation for equality of net income, whilte the right tolerates inequality of income in that new wealth creation benefits everyone.

I'll grant you this much, a progressive tax is essentially the soaking of the rich.

Actually its not. It is not wealth that is being taxed, it is income. The people punished by high income taxes are the people who are producing wealth, not the people who already have it.

Perhaps that is why all those billionaires are supporting Kerry....

Why I'm hopeful about Bush's victory: Choice Choice Choice

I was asked by a Kerry supporting friend who is deeply worried about what Bush's victory portends to share as a Republican who is pro-choice my reasons for hope and optimism about his victory and perhaps to allay some of the concerns she expressed. So, here goes:

FDA and Tort Reform. Giving people access to life saving treatments. Treament Choice.

Currently all drugs and treatments are illegal in the US except those explicitly permitted by the FDA. The only drugs and treatments that make it to market are those that can earn enough money to cover both the costs of FDA approval and the risks of being sued by the trial lawyers. Millions of people die every year because the drugs they need don't make it to market or don't even get developed in the first place. The fault lies squarely with an FDA and a tort system that is more concerned about protecting people from doctors, drugs, and treatments than it is with protecting people from the diseases that afflict them!

I look forwad to Bush making tort and FDA reform a high priority. Millions of lives are at stake.

Aside: I believe the correct set of reforms will put the pharmaceutical industry on a path to open source drug development similar to what has been achieved in the software world by Linux and Apache. This could mean, for example, a cure for malaria, a disease that kills millions every year!

Aside: This issue illustrates the moral unseriousness of recreational drug rights and abortion rights activists. Both claim to believe in some sort of privacy right of the body against intrusion by the government. The former are upset that the government is depriving them of their fun. The later are upset that the government might concern itself with the protection of unborn life (even when the health of the mother is not at stake!). Neither have gotten particularly exercised about the FDA *depriving people of LIFE SAVING TREATMENTS* nor about the courts punishing people for attempting to do so. Both sets of movement activists should be ashamed!

Aside: I am dissapointed that Bush chose to limit government funding of embryonic stem cell research, but I believe the potential benefits of this marginal funding are DWARFED by the benefits that would accrue from general FDA and tort reform. I would even argue that FDA and tort reform would result in more private money spent on embryonic stem cell research than the government would have ever chosen to spend!

Education Reform and School Choice

Currently the education of America's children is held hostage to monopoly school systems and teacher's unions that compete in the political system to spend more money rather than in the market to educate our children better. They are averse to any reforms that hold them accountable for how well children are educated and exert enough control over the Democratic party to prevent any reform coming from that quarter.

I look forward to continued support and funding of the No Child Left Behind Act Bush got passed in his first term and the direct and active promotion of school choice. School choice means that parents may choose the school to which they send their kids without having to be rich enough to pay for a private school or to move to a rich neighborhood where the public school is a defacto private country club.

Aside: Abortion rights activists get upset about the notion that poor pregnant woman having to cross state lines get medical treatment. Yet, they fall silent on the issue of poor single mothers having to do the same to educate their children!

Social Security and Tax Reform: Rewarding Savings, Investment, and Entreprenership. Savings Choice.

Our economy depends on people investing their savings in new businesses. The current social security system takes money that people would otherwise save and invest and uses it to fund government programs. The current social security system is also bankrupt. There is no way it can payout all the benefits it has promised without bankrupting the country.

Bush has promised both to reform social security and to restructure the tax system to reward savings and investment. The result will mean a more new businesses, more new jobs, and more new products and services (and medicines!) to make all our lives better.

Aside: Many Bush opponents express concern about the deficit. What they don't recognize is that any increase in the deficit and the debt that they attribute to Bush is DWARFED by the government's $72 TRILLION unfunded Social Security and Medicate liability. If you are going to talk about the deficit without talking about Social Security reform, you are not serious!

Health and Medicaire Reform: Health Choice

People should be allowed to choose the sort of health lifestyle, health insurance, and medical care they want. The current system forces everyone to choose between overly expensive highly regulated insurance policies or punitive taxation of their pay-as-you-go health care choices. The result is a medical care system that leads many to inferior ad hoc care in local hospital emergency rooms. It is a system that rewards health care providers for providing more health procedures rather than for providing good health.

Bush has proposed Medical Savings Accounts that helps individuals save for their routine health care expenses and pay only for catastrophic care insurance. The result will be much more intelligent decisions about both various forms of defensive medicine and lifestyle choices that may substantially decrease routine healthcare costs. In other words, better health for more people at lower prices.

Democracy and Winning the war on terror: Governmental Choice

Bush has already led the liberation of millions of people in Afghanistan and Iraq from some of the worst tyrannies in human history. But if we were simply to let these countries lapse back into dictatorship that would be both sad and cruel. Afghanistan has already had its first election and Iraq will have one in January. The existence of democracies in both of these countries was basically unimaginable only four years ago. Now it is expected!

Bush has already said that Iran will not be allowed to have nuclear weapons and the Iranisn mullahs have said they will not be denied nuclear weapons. I predict this confrontation will mean an end to Iran's dictatorship and its replacement by democracy. My hope is that the result of all of this activity will be democracies from Afghanistan all the way to the Mediteranean. I believe that if we can accomplish this we will be a substanial part of the way to winning the war on terror and reducing the risk that state sponsored terrorism could take the lives of thousands or millions of American lives.

Gay Marriage

Gay marriage advocates are dissapointed that they did not win approval this year. But, it is not like they had even the possibility of approval of gay marriage rights ever before. The key here is patience. American society is obviously coming to accept homosexuality as normal and will increasingly give gay couples the rights they deserve.

The Environment

We can, in the short term, attempt to regulate the environment and I support that, but I do not think regulations are effective against abuse and subversion. The best way to protect the environment is to innovate new ideas that save energy and reduce our reliance on natural resources. As Fabio Rojas notes:

If you think that we have too many green house gases, then you have two choices: stop manufacturing or learn to manufacture without as much pollution. Too many environmentalists opt for the first choice, which is bad because so much of the world's poor look to gain from industry.

The initiatives described above are the best way I can think of get us there.

To me Bush's victory is about choice, opportunity, invention, and democracy and it is about empowering the people against elites who seek to rule them. It is about creating new life saving drugs and treatments and new life enhancing products and services rather than accepting the status quo as good enough. It is largely about hope rather than fear.