Well, Violent Acres has done it again. Her latest article, "Too Much Choice is Pure Hell," points out one of the most interesting phenomena about human beings. We are bad at making complex choices.

Unlike V, I will take a stab at offering a way of solving this apparently impossible problem. It is a pretty well established fact that the human forebrain, ie that part in which our inner monologue and our 'thoughts' happen, is not really capable of making complex choices between similar alternatives. On the other hand, the rest of our brain, ie most of it, is perfectly capable of doing so.

Our first job as the 'drivers' of the process of making a choice is to provide our brains with as much information about the choice as we possibly can. Our other job is to _listen_ when the smarter parts of our brain come up with the conclusion. Don't second guess it, don't bullshit yourself, just listen. The rest of your brain knows your life and knows your preferences in a way that your forebrain simply cannot process.

There are times when you may need to steer more, specifically in the process of changing a habit, but these are rare occasions. Moreover, if you free up your forebrain from the constant agony of choosing restaurants or breakfast cereal, these other specific choices that need its oversight can have its full attention.

I personally have had quite a lot of success with this technique over recent years. I can now choose restaurants on a moment's notice, and I can also reliably make deliberate changes to my life and habits. My forebrain is dedicated to these deliberate changes, rather than being bogged down in day-to-day crap.

Political Stimulus by Sheldon Richman, January 30, 2008
The government’s plan diverts resources from investment to consumption. But consumption is the effect not the cause of economic growth. You can’t consume what doesn’t exist.

This short article is an excellent demonstration of the inherent failing of any governmental action. It is presented in a way that I hope will latch with even the most lay of people.

I've long known that any large collection of data by the government, or any agency, is something to be nervous about. Here is an article that demonstrates exactly why this is. The long and short of it is that the incentive to steal data is increased by the square of the amount of data to be stolen.

This means that in order to prevent a government database containing detailed information on every citizen from being compromised, the security would need to be (essentially) exponentially better than that which a private company uses to secure their own database of customer information. We've all seen how many private companies' data is compromised, so what makes us think that the government is capable of providing this sort of security?

I work in a group responsible for securing customers' payment information and I know what kind of effort we put into keeping it safe. I can then tell you that the security practices which would be needed to secure any such national identification database would be so cumbersome as to render that data useless. We can therefor be sure that no sufficient security measures are in place on any such national databases, nor will they be on any future, larger, databases.

This is a response to a comment posted by srcastic on Who's really uninsured? that I've promoted to a post.

I don't know about you specifically, but I was raised in a family of 4, in the eighties, with a yearly total household income of $30,000 or less. We usually had health insurance, but not always. The real issue, however, has nothing to do with how many people are uninsured in the US. The numbers could be 250m, or they could be 2.5m and it wouldn't make universal health care any more or less ethical of a proposition. You are right that it is foolish of me to post about this article, considering that it bears no relevance to the core argument against universal health care, but I always feel that confounding the scare tactics used by liberals to encourage the unbounded growth of government power is a positive thing.

The fact of the matter is that the responsibility of providing health care for a household falls only upon the adult members of that household and upon nobody else. At times when my family was uninsured, it caused stress, which, along with the real cost and risk of being uninsured, incentivized the adult members of the family to get insurance again ASAP. If you provide universal health care to people, you simply remove yet another incentive for people to become hard working, productive members of society. We've already put such a broad reaching safety net under people that they know that they need never be without food and shelter no matter how little they work, are we now going to add that they can also have unlimited access to our health care system no matter how little they actually contribute to society? That is offensive and abusive toward all of the productive members of society out there, yourself included.

You, hopefully, know just as well as I do that humans respond very readily to incentives for good behavior. They also respond very negatively to coercion. Universal health care is taking (through coercion) the value created by the most productive members of society and redistributing it to those who are less productive, without creating any incentive to those less productive members to become more productive. Actually, for the unproductive, it may incentivize unproductive behavior, because the costs of being unproductive are reduced, but the benefits (leisure time, etc.) are left unchanged. The direct result of these backwards incentives is that the society as a whole will produce less and ultimately that it will collapse.

Socialism, communism and their ilk do not work for a reason. Broken incentives is that reason. I am inclined to support universal health care at this point in the history of the US government because in doing so I would be hastening its downfall. Universal health care and other government expansion programs would have little impact on my real life in the near term and potentially offer the opportunity to truly explore the ideas of freedom that I espouse within my lifetime.

Warning, this is a 46 minute video. There isn't anything important visual happening though, so you can just listen to it podcast style. It's a convincingly presented argument _against_ trying to reform the government from within the government. Probably the best presentation of these arguments that I've ever heard.

Health Care Lie: '47 Million Uninsured Americans'
Michael Moore, politicians and the media use inflated numbers of those without health insurance to promote universal coverage.

That the numbers of uninsured are grossly inflated by bleeding heart liberals is no surprise to me. That the lie is of this magnitude is startling.

So what is the true extent of the uninsured “crisis?” The Kaiser Family Foundation, a liberal non-profit frequently quoted by the media, puts the number of uninsured Americans who do not qualify for current government programs and make less than $50,000 a year between 13.9 million and 8.2 million. That is a much smaller figure than the media report.

Keep the real numbers in mind the next time you consider supporting universal healthcare proposals.

Well, this may be a bit surprising to those who know me, but I'm supporting Mike Gravel for president in 2008.



If you don't know already, I'll fill you in. I'm an anarchist. I'm not the world hating pissed off kind of anarchist though. I'm an optimistic anarchist; I think that people are capable of behaving rationally and that given sufficient information distribution they will act in their own rational self interest. Based on this, I think that government's usefulness is declining to the point where in the not-too-distant future it will be completely unnecessary.

From this political position, I've never voted in the past. It's never made sense to vote in the past because there's never been a serious candidate who had remotely the same vision and trust in people that I do. Now there is such a candidate. Mike Gravel is not some arrogant party hack, he's a thinking person, just like you or me, only he has the balls and the connections to make an earnest run for president.

His biggest 'thing' is the National Initiative, which seeks to give law making power to the people. This is one small step in the direction of both informing and empowering the people. I think that Gravel is right to think that giving this power to the people will encourage us to inform ourselves and to reach new levels of responsibility for our own lives. The end game of that progress is (in my view, of course) the elimination of many government programs and the gradual progression toward true free-market capitalism and eventually true freedom.

Gravel was recently a guest at Google and on This is America. Both of these talks are very interesting and I think go a long way to show what I'm speaking about with regard to his views. It's always refreshing to hear him talk about the president only getting one vote in the National Initiative, especially because I do strongly disagree with some of his positions (most notably national health care, man-made climate change and gun control).

This is the first time and quite possibly the last and only time that you will ever see me supporting a political candidate. Please if you aren't familiar with Mike Gravel or haven't voted in the past for one reason or another, I encourage you to look into what he has to say and offer him your support if you agree with it. This is our chance to change the country for the better and it may not happen again before it's too late.

Then and Now..."
One of the coolest guys on my motorcycling forum posted up some comparisons between his childhood and the way children are raised today. Funny/scary shit.

Tomorrow after work I'm going to bicycle down to Sea-Tac Airport to catch a plane. The Seattle Department of Transportation is nice enough to have a marked bike route from downtown to the airport, but their written and mapped directions are somewhat poor. In an effort to help both me and future cyclists get to Sea-Tac more easily, I've created a Google Map of the route. Here's hoping I can make it up the 2 mile long hill on Des Moines Memorial Drive.


View Larger Map

Watch this video from 1:15 until he's done.
Real Time with Bill Maher, September 28, 2007 part 6 of 6

Brilliant. Thank you Bill Maher.