Mimsy Were the Borogoves

Your new, government-approved laptop from the state computer exchange, complete with all required features—and no more. (Image courtesy Johann H. Addicks, CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0)

The first step, when you walk into quicksand, is to walk back out. You’ll find it a lot easier to build a bridge over the mire when you’re not sinking into it

We have a huge problem with health care costs in this country, problems caused by our strange system, mostly set up through tax breaks to employers but not individuals, that disconnects the people who need health care from the people who provide it. Rather than having people who need care purchase from the people who provide care, we set up a system that requires “insurance” even for routine, predictable costs. But the person who needs the insurance in order to get the care doesn’t buy the insurance either. They look for a job that pays for the insurance that pays the people who provide the care.

The doctor gets paid by the insurance company. The insurance company gets paid by the employer. The patient… also gets paid by the employer. The patient is completely disconnected from their own health care. It’s a system that obviously can’t work in the long run. Yet, when it fails, we set up a system—ObamaCare—that adds yet another layer, so that in order to get health care we’ll need to look for a job that pays for insurance that’s micro-managed by government that pays the people who provide the care amounts approved by government for approved care.

Either form is a recipe for higher prices and poorer care. And the reason we moved to the worse system that is going to make for even higher prices and even poorer care is that the original system raised prices and reduced care.

We need to back out of the quicksand before we can build the bridge.

While reading Priming the Pump, I started thinking about the advances that happened just because of computer-makers trying to cut costs to meet buyer needs. And then I thought, what if we bought computers like we do our health care? We wouldn’t buy computers ourselves. We’d get them through our employers. But our employers wouldn’t buy them for us either. They’d buy us a plan that guarantees us a computer when we need one. What can the plan buy us? The federal government and our state government both have strict rules on that.

This weekend I enabled the new comments system for all of Mimsy. Over the next several days you’ll see the JSKit/Echo code disappearing in favor of the new local code. The code is very light: only a tiny, unnecessary JavaScript snippet and a handful of cookies. Both JavaScript and cookies are optional.

I’ve been using it for several months on the much-lower-traffic The Biblyon Broadsheet. As I wrote there, it’s a simple system: no logins. If you have cookies turned on it will remember your most recent name, URL, location, and email (all of which, except for name, are optional). See The Ten Commandments for the rules. This much simpler system is based on my experience using something similar at the Ace of Spades HQ.

Emails are private; they’re so that I can contact you if I decide I need to. But you can leave it blank if you don’t want me to be able to. This is better than JSKit/Echo, where the only way to contact you that I could find was to leave another comment on my blog.¹

The only somewhat unique requirement is that you take some time between writing and posting to preview. It will tell you how many seconds to wait before posting, and if you have JavaScript turned on it will count them down for you.

I have been planning on switching to a custom comments system ever since I started using JSKit; it was always a temporary solution. I don’t like using web tracking services, which is what JSKit/Echo really is: it’s a way for Echo to track people’s movements across different sites. That’s why you don’t currently see Google Analytics on my pages either: because the code is loaded from Google’s/Echo’s servers, Google (in the case of analytics) and Echo (in the case of comments) can track your movement across any page that uses that code. I’m just enough of a privacy nut that that bothers me.

Because I have access to the database, I’ve got it set to tentatively approve new posts rather than wait for moderation as I did with JSKit. If something looks like spam, or if the system sees something else odd going on (for example, multiple posts from the same IP over a short period of time) it can tentatively disapprove new posts. In each case, I have a simple database backend (in Django) to give me an overview and confirm or revoke the decisions made by the automated system.

My hope is that this will make it easier for me, because I’ll be able to detect the most egregious spammers. Knock on wood, much of that hasn’t been necessary during the test run on The Biblyon Broadsheet, I suspect because the built-in delay confuses most (but not all) comment spammers.

What lies beyond the far craters, as the Earth rises in the lunar dawn?

Presidential aspirant Newt Gingrich wants NASA to offer prizes to encourage private industry to put men back on the moon. It’s not a bad idea except insofar as it’s likely to be counterproductive: getting to the moon is expensive; anyone who wants the prize will be in the race for the price, and not for the moon. They’ll do the minimum necessary to meet the rules necessary to win, and that is not likely to be in the spirit of the competition.

Prizes will only encourage private development up to and including the worth of the prize. If the money is set to be, say, $10,000,000, then no solutions costing more than ten million will be seriously looked at.

And then once they win the prize, they’re done. What is the incentive for them to go further? This is the kind of half-step that I’d expect from a politician. Businesses often offer prizes, but they do so to solve a particular problem, not a general one. They want assurances that when someone wins the prize the results of that win are useful and the effort was a serious effort at solving a problem that allows the business or consortium to move to a next step.

If we want businesses to start taking lunar colonies or lunar exploration seriously, we need to be just as serious when it comes to the rewards. If our goal is to find out what’s on the moon, and to find out how the moon’s resources can improve our life here on Earth, the best way to encourage lunar exploration is by updating homesteading to the space age: if you can get there, and land there, and stay there, you own it. You own your 160 acres or 320 acres or whatever on the moon, and you have rights to all minerals and other resources on or under your little section of the moon.

Under lunar homesteading, the resources used to get to the moon will match the benefits to be derived from getting there. If there are great rewards to be gained by establishing bases on the moon, businesses will make sure they get there.

It’s important to tie the incentive to ownership because we don’t really know what the worth is of the resources on the moon. A prize doesn’t provide any incentive to find out. Ownership does. Even if nobody goes to the moon we’ll still see innovations in finding out what resources the moon holds. That alone will be worth a lot in unrelated industries: remote sensing technologies will be developed to find out what’s on the moon before sending any people or equipment there.

“[American businesses] clearly haven’t gotten lazy because the iPhone is an American idea. What’s happened is that these regulations have gotten so ridiculous that no one can actually act on brilliant ideas in this country… regulations so pervasive and so restrictive and so abhorrent that businesses just can’t get anything done…”

A little more on what I talked about in The Parable of the Mexican Farmer. “These are self-inflicted wounds.”

Over at The Other McCain, Smitty comes out, while responding to Walter Russell Mead, in favor of taxing the states:

If we can put a moon on the man, why cannot we devise a system whereby every state is billed by DC annually, and let the states compete for citizens to pay the taxes? Pardon my rampant capitalism, but there it is… tax reform should be simplified, and the information about who lives where, for tax purposes, should be opaque to DC. The federal government has no business operating below the multi-state and international level.

Smitty also thinks government revenue would “crater” under such a system. I disagree, at least to the extent that “crater” implies a drastic, unwanted loss of taxation and services. People want services and are willing to pay for them. The only difference between a state-based system and a federal system is that some people would vote with their feet when the cost of services exceeds the value of those services.

I expect that a person’s state taxes would increase by about 60% to 90% of what they had been giving to the federal government; that federal bureaucrats would suddenly discover that they can, in fact, provide the same services at a much reduced cost; and that the vastly improved jobs climate would make up the difference. Because while the taxes would still be paid, just to the state instead of the feds, the regulations would be halved. And perhaps even more importantly, the need to maintain national lobbyists would almost disappear. Most businesses could live without them if the federal government wasn’t making new tax loopholes every day.

Is Apple sending jobs overseas just to be spiteful?

“Corporations ship jobs overseas just to shave a couple of cents off of the price of their widgets. But that’s a false dichotomy, because these corporations have so much money that they could afford to just shave the price off anyway and keep those jobs in America.”

Sound familiar? It’s pretty much what Betsey Stevenson, former chief economist at the Labor Department, says in the New York Times today:

“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”

It’s a bit contradictory when you put both of those thoughts together in the same paragraph—that companies ship overseas to cut costs, but that they could afford to cut costs anyway. And yet there’s a sense that it’s true. Let’s bring it a little closer to you or me to see why. Pretend, for the moment, that you have so much money you almost don’t know what to do with it.¹ But, you still need to eat. You need vegetables. You could buy your vegetables from local farmers; or you could fly to Mexico and buy your vegetables there. They’re cheap enough in Mexico that it pays for the immediate cost of flying there: your total dollars paid is less.

Would you do it?

Most likely not. The money doesn’t matter to you, but the trouble does, and it’s a lot more trouble and time-consuming to go to Mexico whenever you need more vegetables than it is to pay a higher price for vegetables in your home town.

Now, let’s add a couple of wrinkles that businesses face: whenever you buy vegetables in your home town, you have to spend more time filling out forms than it would take to fly to Mexico and back. Further, once you buy from any particular farmer, you have a relationship with that farmer that you cannot break. The law requires you to buy from that farmer. Even if you find a farmer who grows better-tasting vegetables, you are still required to buy vegetables from the first farmer. You are required by law to visit him, to negotiate with him, and to pay him, for vegetables that you no longer want. And if you don’t use them, you have to find a way to dispose of them—which will require even more paperwork.

This is not a book about a bunch of cool events tied together to form a history—though it certainly has its cool anecdotes. Priming the Pump is about the gestalt of its time, a time when programmers were designers, and writers and artists moved into programming as equals. When people selling software out of their trunk weren’t selling knock-offs, they were selling their own original programming. And a time when the powers-that-be didn’t recognize what was happening.

The New York Times, like most other general news vehicles of the day, did not see anything newsworthy about the entry of a completely off-the-shelf affordable microcomputer.

It’s difficult to hold it against the Times, however. When Don French, one of the two Tandy employees behind the TRS-80, suggested they produce an initial run of 50,000, “I was almost laughed out of the room”. Management suggested 1,000 units, which they eventually increased to 3,500 but only because that was the only way to get a good deal on parts. They justified the increase by saying that each of Radio Shack’s 3,500 stores could have one, and even if they didn’t sell, perhaps the stores could find a use for them.

Radio Shack upper management didn’t seem to have any idea how revolutionary their computer at their price was. Stan Veit, who had a New York computer store at that time–when computers were mostly still things that you built, or programmed by switch, or both, was shown the TRS-80 before its introduction, and echoed French’s recommendation:

Charles Tandy asked Veit how much he thought the computer should sell for. Veit says “I really had no basis for comparison except possibly for the SOL¹ and it sold for $1400 with a video monitor. Well, this machine is a lot simpler, so I figure about $1000. But this is Radio Shack, so it must be cheaper. I’ll say $900.” When Veit was told the price would be $600, he reports telling Charles Tandy “you better build a hell of a lot of them.”

Even after the computer was displayed to the public, at a Boston computer show, customers recognized the potential of the new computer before Radio Shack did.

“A satirical short film taking a look at the national debt and how it applies to just one family.”

Remember my analogy in More debt is a concession? This puts it into a brilliant three minutes. With an even more brilliant ending. Two of them, in fact. Listen closely under the credits.