inconsequence

The problems of the United States are entirely self-inflicted. Fixing them is a huge political problem, even though solutions are easy to see. Here are ten ideas (that are probably politically untenable) that would address major problems in the US.

1. End the War on Drugs. Triage recreational drugs based on whether they’re harmless, mostly harmless, or harmful and regulate them accordingly (available over-the-counter, like aspirin; available with restrictions, like booze and cigarettes; available with some kind of precaution (e.g. sign a risk waiver)). This will have a huge positive impact on inner city decay, deny organized crime, our enemies in Afghanistan, and various insane guerilla groups in South America their funding, reduce prison overcrowding, and free up the police, FBI, and judiciary to deal with stuff that actually matters. By all means allocate some of the wasted money to rehab, public education, and so forth. But let’s stop pretending that (a) this war is worth fighting, (b) it’s winnable, or (c) illegal drugs are categorically worse than legal ones.
2. End the War on Terror. Let’s rename and rethink it. Terrorism can’t be beaten by fighting wars (indeed, wars tend to create terrorism).
3. Pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Get out with indecent haste. Call it defeat. Call it victory. Call it “peace with honor”. It doesn’t matter. In the long run we will lose in both.
4. Nationalize Health Care. Probably the best way to do this is go 100% public, then rebuild private insurance so that it doesn’t suck. Public health care can unsnarl the bizarre and evil relationships between insurance companies, hospitals, and other parts of the healthcare clusterfrack that costs the United States more per person than anywhere else on Earth and delivers third world results.
5. Make Preventative Health Care a Priority. E.g. if you don’t get an annual checkup, all your co-pays go up by $25.
6. Reduce US Military Spending to Sane Levels. No less a publication than the Scientific American once said the US could reduce military spending to 1/3 of current levels and still be more powerful than the next two most powerful countries put together.
7. Tax Gasoline More. It only took a month of cheap gas to restore pickup sales to former levels.
8. Slowly Ramp Up Energy Prices (via Taxation). The best alternative energy is energy conservation. Get people to cut power consumption or use alternatives by increasing the cost of energy, especially fossil fuel energy.
9. Tax Speculative Money Market Transactions. George Soros recommended this after the Asian market meltdowns of the 90s. It’s still a good idea.
10. Break the ISP Monopolies. I don’t care how you do it, but eliminate local ISP monopolies. In my neighborhood I have two choices — DSL or Cable, each with one possible provider. This isn’t competition (as evinced by the fact that the prices are indistinguishable). Nationalize it or break it up. Or do a bit of both.
11. Break the TV Monopolies. Why do I have to buy channels bundled? TV as we know it is dying. Kick it in the head so that it evolves into something less retarded.
12. Eliminate Local School Boards. Teach biology in science classes. Teach religion in religion classes. Having a national or even just state standardized syllabus would allow economies of scale in education that simply can’t exist in the current mess.
13. Use the Internet to Fix Assessment. Use national testing schemes or have educational institutions assess students from other educational institutions. Professors should be graded on how well they are able to impart knowledge to students, not on how easy their courses are. Students should get grades based on what they know and can do. Eliminating the assessment feedback loops (where students grade professors and professors grade students) will help fix the US college system. If your professor isn’t grading you, then suddenly you want the professor to teach you.
14. Use the Internet to Fix Teaching. This is already happening. You can download lectures from Harvard and UC Berkeley from iTunes. Why listen to your professor if another professor covers the same material better? What century is this?
15. Force Retailers to Display Actual Prices. Pretty much everything in Economic theory involves actors having good information. In the US you generally need to perform mental gymnastics to figure out how much the simplest things cost. Fix it. The benefits will be incredibly huge.

If you haven’t read the transcript of his victory speech, you should. If not for pro-forma requirements (thanking Joe Biden, etc.) and gratuitous insertion of campaign slogans (“Yes we can”) this is a speech — at least in written form (I’ve only heard clips) for the ages, Gettysburg Address quality (and of course, pretty much no-one heard the Gettysburg Address).

But, of course. the Gettysburg Address is nothing without context. Had it not been uttered at that time and place it would not be significant. If Obama’s speech is merely the prelude to epic failure, it will not be well-remembered, or remembered at all.

Still, it’s a great speech. It’s not terribly long, and manages to draw together threads of societal and technological change (the way he uses the changes in the life of a 106 year old voter is brilliant), put our current situation in an historical context, transcend political divisions, begin the all important task of expectations management, and even manages to be pretty humble.

Perhaps even more remarkable, Obama appears to draw his oratorical rhythm from the secular 19th century rather than the increasingly liturgical 20th century. Unlike Clinton or Martin Luther King (two excellent speakers of recent memory) he doesn’t sound like a Southern Baptist preacher (of course, MLK actually was one).

In this country, we rise or fall as one nation, as one people. Let’s resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.

Let’s remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House, a party founded on the values of self-reliance and individual liberty and national unity.

Those are values that we all share. And while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress.

As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, we are not enemies but friends. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.

Great stuff. I just never like it when a speaker tells me he’s being humble. It’s ok to say we “must be humble” but it’s simply not humble to say you “are being humble”.

Anyhow, having run the best election campaign in living memory, the easy part is done.

Anyone with any amount of political radar knows that Letterman leans Democrat and Leno leans Republican, so it shouldn’t be surprising that Letterman is a little more critical of McCain than another talk show host might be but it’s not like Letterman doesn’t get along with McCain or give him a lot of slack when he’s on the show. (After all, McCain announced his run on Letterman.)

McCain has screwed the pooch so many ways here it’s not funny. First, as Letterman points out in no uncertain terms, he doesn’t even trust Palin to run an election campaign, let alone anything of consequence. Second, he isn’t rushing to Washington to save the country, but to Katie Couric for a sympathetic interview. Third, if you’re going to ditch a talk show to “save the country”, don’t go do another interview on the same network so that the talk show host has live footage of you getting makeup applied while you’re “rushing to save the country”.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.

You’ve probably already seen this video but in case you haven’t, well there it is.

Paris Hilton’s energy policy is actually better than McCain’s. It’s probably not intended to be taken seriously, but it’s worth noting that the two things it adds to Obama’s policy comprise an environmentally friendly version of McCain’s offshore drilling proposal which, itself, will not yield significant results in the short term, and an electorally attractive but pointless and perhaps expensive proposal to give US automakers tax incentives to do what they should have been doing all along, and are now scrambling to do without incentives — i.e. build fuel efficient cars.

US car makers spent the last twenty years bribing congress to block improvements to the CAFE fuel economy standards which would have helped make them ready for the current crunch and possibly averted it in the first place, and bailing them out of the mess they’ve gotten themselves into is just a waste of time and money since all they’ve achieved in this period is to become almost economically irrelevant.

There’s been discussion lately of removing GM from the Dow Jones index since it is by far the lowest market cap member (5.8B as of writing; compare this to Caterpillar (makers of tracked earth moving equipment, among other things) with a market cap of 42.7B) and — some argue — technically insolvent. It might be replaced by Toyota (131.6B) and/or Honda (57.4B), both of which are solvent, profitable, and currently manufacture and sell reliable, fuel efficient cars in the US without special tax incentives or subsidies.

So, Paris’s energy policy is better than McCain’s since it’s essentially McCain’s existing policy (which achieves almost nothing in the short term) tempered by environmental considerations (which will prevent it from achieving much good or damage in the long term) plus Obama’s policy (which is what we should have been doing all along) plus an electorally attractive, but vague, bad idea (giving more money to failed US automakers). If she were a real candidate, I’d read this as (a) triangulating McCain’s offshore drilling proposal by saying “sure we’ll do it, but in an eco-friendly way” either turning it into a non-issue or forcing McCain to differentiate himself by saying he’d do it in an eco-hostile way, (b) co-opting Obama’s policies which are basically good, and (c) proposing a vague, but probably popular, “US worker-friendly” policy that can be disposed of after the election because it’s “no longer necessary”. I’d actually say this is better packaging than Obama’s campaign has managed for, essentially, identical policies, but Obama can’t afford to pull stunts like (c) because he’s taken more seriously than Paris Hilton (or McCain) and he’s likely to be required to put dollar amounts on it. Still, not bad for a bimbo.

In her article, The Myth of the Media Myth, Brenda Braithwaite describes her circle of acquaintances as having a very negative attitude towards “video games” and wonders how a generation that blew its allowance on Pac Man and Donkey Kong has become convinced that the pastime they enjoyed causes bouts of violence and social alienation.

Perhaps my circle of acquaintances is less representative of typical Americans (OK it’s mainly software developers and college professors) but I don’t find this overwhelming negativity. However, I would point out that most people of my generation (aged in their late 30s and early 40s right now) did not blow their allowances on Pac Man and Donkey Kong. Not even most of my crowd who — at the time — consisted almost entirely of I-wish-I-had-Aspbergers-so-my-total-lack-of-social-skills-would-be-excusable math geeks. Plenty of us did, but the majority looked askance at us even then. I suppose that almost every Gen-Xer has played a video game or two, but the ones who obsessed, e.g. played video games in their heads while walking around, who knew the different pathing behaviors of the Pac Man ghosts based on their colors (not me, but I have friends…), could “clock” Time Pilot multiple times (yup, that’s me), could play Q*Bert until they were bored (cough, me again), finished Ghosts’n'Goblins both times (…). Yeah, we were considered a bit weird even then.

Braithwaite points out that none of this hate is pointed at ordinary “games”. It’s only when the word “video” gets placed in front of the word “games” that all the negativity comes out. I’d have to say that I wince at the term “video games” in much the same way that I do “sci fi” because it’s an outsider term, somewhere between a dismissive catch-all phrase and a put-down. (For those of you not in my geek demographic, it’s the equivalent of calling San Francisco “Frisco”.) To my mind, video games are dumb button-mashing arcade games, and computer games are where it’s at. (Not that I don’t like dumb button-mashing games.)

While it’s probably a bit unfair to label all “video games” violent, it would be fair to say that no commercial board, or even paper, game I’ve ever seen — and this includes games where you play a superhero, or heavily armed amoral space marine, or vampire, or werewolf, or samurai — features graphic imagery of human body parts scattered across the landscape, or cities where every third woman is a prostitute and you can run over groups of pedestrians, take their stuff, and drive away without even being spoken to harshly. Certainly, not all video games are like this, but a significant proportion of high profile titles are. The games that make gamers upgrade their computers are exactly this kind of game (DOOM, Quake, Unreal, Halo, Gears of War, Grand Theft Auto IV). The only major games platform that isn’t consciously pushed using over the top graphic violence is Nintendo’s, and they’re specifically targeting families with children.

Braithwaite points out that the image of “video games” is that they’re socially isolating, violent, addictive, sex-crazed, etc. and points out that she’s just finished working on a FaceBook game that is pro-social, involves walking dogs outdoors and meeting people. To which I reply that this is a typical “academic” game designed to be all the things video games normally aren’t to make some kind of point, and since virtually no-one (a) plays games like this, (b) thinks of them when talking about “video games”, or (c) makes serious money from them (i.e. they’re not economically significant) it’s no surprise that games like hers haven’t changed the public consciousness. I’ve seen games designed to help people understand the source of conflict in the Middle East and games designed to help kids stop smoking. These games are always intended to be everything “typical” video games are not, and all have one thing in common — no-one would play them if they had a choice.

Braithwaite would be better off talking about Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Dance Dance Revolution, Karaoke Revolution, (at last, something non-musical) Wii Sports, or The Sims Online. All of these games are designed to be played socially and are completely non-violent (well, Wii Sports features cartoon boxing). These games are economically significant, actually played by people, and if you mentioned them in a discussion of video games people wouldn’t stare at you blankly. (EscapistMagazine.com is down right now or I’d be checking carefully to see if she actually got to mentioning any of these games. I guess I’ll just correct myself later!) But relying on these games to make your case is still disingenuous.

The last reported monthly statistics showed Wii outsold XBox 360, PS3, and PS2 combined, and that Nintendo had the top two hardware platforms (Wii and DS). Attempting to spin the statistics, Microsoft tried to position the XBox 360 as being in a different category than the Wii (a different category in which they would be number two, behind the PS2, I assume). This is like Apple claiming to be the top vendor of “PCs that don’t suck”. If you look in the kinds of places where gamers hang out, Grand Theft Auto IV sold a hell of a lot of consoles (I’ve read posts by people who bought a PS3 to play GTAIV, then had to buy a new TV), and there’s no question that both Sony and Microsoft have promoted their platforms primarily with blood-drenched ultra-violent games (Resistance: Fall of Man, Gears of War, Halo 3, Grand Theft Auto IV). Braithwaite said she emailed 40 acquaintances about their thoughts on video games and got 38 negative responses. Based on Wii sales figures (9.5 million so far in the US), her circle seems to have a rather low proportion of Wii users (especially since the typical Wii user seems to have kids who will drag anyone who doesn’t struggle too hard into their games).

What’s clear from the success of the Wii is that a lot of Americans (at least 9.5 million of them) have picked a gaming platform specifically to avoid what they correctly see as video games dominated by graphic violence, casual sex, pervasive sexism, and immorality. I don’t care much for Jack Thompson and the legion of idiots and carpetbaggers who try to sell you something on the back of the concept that video games are destroying our society, but pretending that video games aren’t violent, or sexist, or immoral when, quite clearly, many of the most successful video games are exactly all three, is just stupid.

Video games are ultra-violent and graphic because they can be.

As a kid, I remember reading spy thrillers off the racks in hotel gift shops when I was bored on vacation, and these were the most spectacularly violent, sex-drenched, misogynist, immoral pieces of crap I have ever read in my life (and, at the time, I enjoyed them thoroughly and guiltily). If the publishers could have added 5.1 audio and 3d animated gobbets of human flesh bouncing across the landscape, they would have, but all they had was words. Bad spy thrillers didn’t cause the downfall of Western Civilization, and neither will video games. Indeed, if you cast your mind back a ways, Western Civilization was in large part created by a bunch of people whose idea of entertainment was public torture and executions, gladiatorial combat, and slaughtering exotic animals. (Persecution of Christians by the Romans is vastly overstated; Christians turned out to be much better at it.)

So, how can I summarize? Video games are, in large part, violent, sexist, antisocial, isolating, addictive, and a bunch of other bad words. So are spy thrillers. So are movies. So is cable TV. (Broadcast TV would be too, but there’s the stupid FCC. In most other countries you see “worse” stuff on broadcast TV than The Sopranos and their societies haven’t collapsed.) This is because we, human beings, find this kind of stuff entertaining, probably because it lets us exercise mental faculties and emotions that don’t see a lot of use in modern society, and partly because the problems posed and the available solutions are much simpler and easily and quickly dealt with than real problems we all face. It doesn’t matter how fast I am with my trigger finger, my mortgage won’t be paid off any sooner, but I sure can blow the frack out of aliens.