Legal Marijuana

I live in Washington State, one of two states (the other is Colorado) that recently legalized Marijuana at the state level.  The process has been and will continue to be "very interesting".

I was a teenager in the '60s when Pot, as it is colloquially known, first became popular.  Before then a few beatniks (fringe musicians) were known to smoke Pot.  Rumor had it that it was fairly popular in what is now referred to as the "black community".  But at that time blacks were ghettoized in places like Harlem.  Unlike today, the rest of society had little overlap and contact with black culture.  So whatever was going on there was generally invisible to the culture at large.  Today blacks are trend setters in many areas of culture and trends that are incubating in the black community quickly break out into mainstream consciousness.

Anyhow, at the time there was a lot of turmoil as a result of the Civil Rights movement and later the Vietnam Antiwar movement.  Youth were feeling rebellious to an extent unimaginable today.  That led to a lot of experimentation and one of the things that got experimented on was Pot.

As part of a reaction to this unrest politicians like Richard Nixon came to prominence.  One of his themes was that the country was going to Hell and "law and order" needed to be restored.  Part of the law and order agenda was to crack down on drugs.  Pot was certainly one of the high profile drugs that Nixon and other like minded politicians went after but it was not the only one.  The other two drugs whose popularity rapidly increased were Cocaine and LSD.  Cocaine is still with us but LSD has largely faded from the scene.  So let me talk about it a little.

LSD was the first big psychoactive drug.  If you "dropped" LSD, also commonly referred to as Acid, it did strange things to your perceptions.  For some people the otherworldly experience was very enjoyable.  But for others it was very scary and horrible.  It took several years for LSD to become popular enough that a lot of people had taken it.  Once this had happened large numbers of people concluded that for enough people the bad far outweighed the good and its popularity declined, again over several years.

The LSD experience is informative.  In effect, a large scientific experiment was run.  It answered the question: is the typical experience with this drug a good one or a bad one.  This experiment was run with a large "sample size" (all the people who tried LSD) and the consensus was that the bad far outweighed the good.  And for this to be true there had to be a lot of bad.

In the last decade or so we have run a similar experiment.  In this case the drug is Methamphetamine, or "Meth" for short.  The popular form is now referred to as "Crystal Meth".  Again, one way or the other a lot of people have now taken Meth.  And the results have been similar to that of LSD.  Most people agree that on balance Meth is a bad thing.  The problem with Meth is that it appears to be very addictive.  So it appears that for whatever reason, a lot of people try Meth.  They quickly figure out it is a bad thing but it is too late.  They are addicted.  Fortunately for that previous generation, LSD was not addictive.  So when people decided it was a bad thing it disappeared pretty completely.

We have been running a much larger experiment with Pot.  Far more people have taken it.  If it was going to turn out to be another LSD, or worse yet, another Meth, we would long since all be aware of that.  But there are no large populations of Pot users suffering severe problems in our mental hospitals.  There are no "Pot heads" with severe physical problems in our regular hospitals.  There are lots of Pot smokers in our criminal justice system but few if any in our health system.  Pot is just not in a class with LSD or Meth.

Does that mean that Pot has no negative effects.  No!  But where people get into trouble is with making absolute comparisons rather than relative comparisons.  Compared to some hypothetical standard of physical, mental, and emotional health, are there negative effects associated with Pot?  Yes!  But that's the wrong comparison.  A more appropriate comparison is with tobacco and alcohol.  The process of smoking Pot is very similar to the process of smoking a tobacco cigarette.  Cigarettes are addictive because one of their main ingredients is addictive.  By some measures Nicotine is more addictive than Meth.  And the tars and other ingredients in cigarettes smoke causes lung cancer.  So cigarettes have very bad effects.  And these bad effects are well known.  Yet cigarettes are legal.

Alcohol also has many well known negative effects.  It impairs your ability to drive well.  It causes personality changes that may be very destructive.  The cost of purchasing alcohol can have a bad economic effect on a family directly through the cost of the alcoholic beverages and indirectly due to the personality changes and physical changes that may result in reduced employment or complete unemployment.

This country experimented with a legal ban on alcohol.  The many negative effects formed the basis for the case for it being outlawed.  But the result was disastrous.  Lawlessness became rampant.  Availability became even more widespread even though it was now illegal.  In this environment, the negative effects became even more pronounced compared to the old days when it was legal.  After about a decade Federal efforts to make Alcohol consumption illegal were abandoned.

The country has gone down the same path with Pot and other drugs as with alcohol.  In the late '60s a crackdown was initiated on Pot, Cocaine, and other "recreational drugs".  Part of this program involved classifying Pot as a "Schedule 1" drug.  Schedule 1 drugs are the most dangerous.  They are drugs like Meth which are both addictive and destructive.  But 50 years into our Pot science experiment it is obvious to everyone that Pot is not a Schedule 1 drug.  It is not addictive to any extent and it is not destructive either physically or mentally in the way Meth is.  It is not possible to characterize putting Pot on the Schedule 1 list or, as time has passed, keeping it on the Schedule 1 list as anything but stupid.  Based on the actual characteristics of Pot it should be in the Schedule 5 list along with cough syrups that contain small amounts of Codeine.  If you smoke Pot once a month it will have no long term effects.  But you probably shouldn't drive until the effect wears off.  If you smoke Pot frequently the negative effects will likely be similar in intensity to taking a cough syrup that contains small amounts of Codeine frequently.

Frankly, only a tiny minority of people, experts or otherwise, believe that Pot is highly dangerous, e.g. that its negative effects are on a par with Meth.  There are a large group of people, frequently heavy Pot smokers who believe that Pot is all good.  There is a very large group that believes that occasional Pot smoking is either a good thing or that the harm is small.  Many people think that even heavy Pot smoking has, at worst a small amount of negative effect.  The anti-Pot people have expended a large amount of effort ensuring that little or no large scale scientific research is done on Pot.  It turns out there is a very good reason for this.

As I said, a lot of people have smoked a lot of Pot over the years.  If there was a large negative effect associated with Pot this effect would be noticeable enough to be generally known.  But the argument I am now making is unscientific.  The conclusion is not based on properly done scientific experiments so it is suspect.  This leaves intact the argument that "there is no scientific basis for saying that Pot is reasonably safe".  More importantly, this active hostility to any scientific efforts to study Pot have meant that there is no well founded scientific research that Pot has beneficial effects.  But if we remove the phrase "well founded" from the previous statement things change drastically.  There are a number of small scientific studies that indicate that Pot makes a very good anti-nausea drug.  This is also supported by a large amount of unscientific experimentation by the general public.  Lots of people claim that Pot is a much better anti-nausea drug than anything available legally.

We have gotten ourselves into a spiral.  As a society we have invested a tremendous effort in the idea that Pot should be illegal.  We have spent fantastic amounts of money.  We have put vast numbers of people in jail solely because they smoked Pot or sold small amounts of it.  This incarceration and criminal record activity has ruined the lives of many people.  The U.S. incarcerates more people as a percentage of its population than any other country in the world.  And most of these inmates are behind bars directly or indirectly because recreational drugs are illegal.  The largest subgroup of these drug criminals are only criminals because Pot is illegal.

The U.S. had a bad experience with making alcohol illegal.  Beyond the direct effects it had a toxic effect on the criminal justice system.  There was lots of money in the booze business.  A lot of that money was deployed paying off cops, judges, lawyers, politicians, and otherwise doing harm directly to the criminal justice enterprise.  But it also harmed it indirectly.  Citizens lost trust in its operation.  And "law abiding" citizens broke the law in large numbers over and over.  The law was thrown into disrepute.

All this has happened as a result of the enforcement of the anti-Pot laws.  Drug cartels have lots of money.  It has been spent in part on bribery.  We have large numbers of "law abiding" citizens breaking the law, in many cases over and over.  And, as in the case of liquor, the effort to suppress Pot has been a complete failure.  Pot is more broadly available, at higher quality, and at lower cost, than it ever was.  The whole idea has looked stupid for a long time.

This has resulted in a novel work around.  With some evidence to support the beneficial effects of Pot we have seen a "Medical Marijuana" movement.  Washington has been one of the many states who have passed some kind of Medical Marijuana legislation.  At the state level, it is more or less legal to consume Pot "for medical purposes".  The specific rules and regulations vary considerably from state to state.  But Pot consumption, even for medical purposes is still illegal according to federal law.  This has led to some truly "Alice in Wonderland" situations.

For instance, the Washington State legislature decided that Medical Marijuana was getting out of control.  Pot dispensaries, police, pretty much everyone in the state agreed.  So the legislature set about crafting regulations to govern the Medical Marijuana business in the state.  Everything was going fine until the Feds, in the person of the local Federal Prosecutor stepped in and started making  threats.  Specifically the Federal Prosecutor threatened to throw various state employees in jail if they engaged in the activities (e.g. inspections, issuing licenses, collecting taxes, etc.) that the legislature was laying out as part of the comprehensive law.  As a direct result of this threat the Governor vetoed large parts of that law leaving a mess behind.  Her logic was flawless.  If she vetoed any less of the law she was asking state employees to perform duties that would result in them going to jail in Federal Prison.

The result of all this was that a group of people got together and created an Initiative.  The pro-Pot community was divided on the result.  They felt there were too many restrictions.  For instance, you had to be over 21, you could get a "drunk driving" type ticket if you failed a test for how much Pot you had in your system. etc.  But in the end the measure passed anyhow.  It passed largely because of the support of people like me.  I don't smoke Pot.  I'm sure I know people who smoke Pot but I don't know who they are.  But I think we need to end the insanity.  And voting to legalize Pot was something I could do.

I don't know what is going to happen next.  The Federal government has not said anything.  They haven't told the state it is OK to proceed.  They haven't told the state they will oppose implementation.  They haven't said anything.  And, trust me, a number of state officials have asked a number of Federal officials what they should expect.  So far all of the Federal officials have provided absolutely no guidance.  I think this is because no one at the Federal level has any idea how to deal with this.

In its first term, the Obama Administration has been very pro law and order.  They aggressively enforced the immigration laws until Obama issued his executive order on the "Dream" people.  The Obama Administration has not proposed any laws tightening gun laws.  In fact, they have loosened gun laws in a couple of small areas.  Threatening the Governor of our state is not the only action the Obama Administration has made on the drug front.  Generally these actions have been in the direction of more enforcement of existing drug laws.  They have gone after Medical Marijuana dispensaries and Washington State and in California that I know of.  They have not tried to move Pot from the Schedule 1 list to one of the lower schedules.

So I don't know how this is going to play out.  I know it is a good thing that two states made this move at the same time.  It removed the "it's only one nutty state" argument from the table.  Lots of states are going to be watching to see what happens.  Oregon defeated a "legalize Pot" law.  If Washington and Colorado end up having a positive experience as all this shakes down I expect Oregon to come back with a law closely modeled on the Washington or Colorado model.  And I expect it to pass.  That is likely to open the floodgates.

We need to move to making Pot legal and regulated.  Frankly, I don't know what to do with Cocaine.  It seems more dangerous and less popular to me than Pot.  But ultimately drug cartels make almost all their profits from Pot and Cocaine.  They now make a significant amount of money off of Meth.  But imagine a world where all the law enforcement effort is taken away from the current targets of Pot and Cocaine?  Vast amounts of money and, more importantly, cover will be removed from these organizations.  There is general agreement that Meth is bad stuff.  Only bad people would involve themselves in the Meth business.  So the political cover is gone.  The resources available to the cartels are vastly diminished.  And, even if we cut way back on the law enforcement resources dedicated to going after Meth, the amount of resource focused on Meth will be greater than it is now.  In that environment it might even be possible to have some success.  Once the liquor money was taken away from the mobs they became a much smaller and much more manageable problem.  And government stopped putting out a lot of money trying to stop the liquor trade and was able to bring in a lot of money in the form of taxes and fees.  There isn't enough drug money out there to single handedly close the current Federal deficit.  But a little "Pot tax" revenue wouldn't hurt. 

James Bond Martini

The new James Bond film "Skyfall" just came out.  I saw it yesterday and liked it.  The imminent release of a new James Bond film got me into a Bond frame of mind so I recently reread the first James Bond book, "Casino Royale".  This book introduced the subject of the Martini into the Bond cannon.  As the books and movies rolled on we all became familiar with the James Bond take on the Cocktail Lounge classic.  It is a standard Martini but made with Vodka instead of Gin, and "shaken not stirred".  But the original "Bond Martini" specified an entirely different recipe.  I haven't reread the rest of the books that Ian Fleming wrote so I don't know where or when the above recipe came to dominate.  And the change might be traceable to the movies.  But when Bond tells a bartender early in the book he wants "a dry Martini" here is the recipe he specifies:

• In a deep Champagne goblet
• Three measures of Gordon's (a Gin)
• One measure of Vodka
• 1/2 measure of Kina Lillet
• Shake until very cold then pour into the glass
• Add a slice of lemon peel
• Finally, he advises the use of "grain" Vodka, not "potato" Vodka

My question is:  Is this really a Martini?  In support of the idea that this is NOT a Martini, Bond opines later in the book that perhaps the drink should be called a "Vesper" after the name of the girl in the book.

"Casino Royale" was originally published in 1953.  Then and now the design of a "Martini Glass" has remained the same.  But in 1953 Champagne glasses looked very different than they do today.  Then they were had a very shallow bowl.  Think of a Martini glass.  But instead of a funnel shaped bowl think of a bowl of about the same depth but with a rounded bottom.  That was the long accepted proper shape for a Champagne glass.  You can see it in "Fred and Ginger" movies from the '30s.  In fact, my mother had some Champagne glasses from the '40s that differed only in that they had a hollow stem.  The stem was of a fairly narrow diameter but the very center was hollow.  This created a narrow tube of a couple of inches in length.  The tube facilitated the creation of a stream of bubbles that rose in a nearly straight line up the center of the glass.  But the bowl shape was the long accepted one.

Champagne glasses are now much taller and considerably narrower.  Why?  Nose.  The best glass for a drink that has an aromatic component is one that requires you to put your nose into a semi-enclosed space above the surface of the liquid while you are taking a sip.  The classic example is Brandy.  Some components of Brandy start evaporating as soon as it is exposed to the open air.  If you pour Brandy into a balloon glass then the volume above the surface of the Brandy is ideal for collecting these aromatic components.  Then you put your nose into this volume when you are sipping the drink.  This makes it easy for your nose to get a nice strong dose of these aromatic components.  As a result, the Brandy "tastes" wonderful.

Gin has little or no aromatic component.  So putting Gin, the principal component of a Martini, into a glass that does not have a semi-enclosed volume above the surface of the liquid works fine.  Apparently, people used to put Champagne into this same non-aromatic category.  So the proper glass was one that did not have the semi-enclosed volume.  Somewhere, well after the 1950's, someone wised up.  So we saw a shift in design to a glass that had a semi-enclosed volume.  A modern Champagne glass is not as well designed for this purpose as a Brandy snifter but it's not bad.  So, if you are drinking Champagne and you don't have access to a modern Champagne glass, go for a Brandy snifter rather than a martini glass or a classic Champagne glass.

And this brings to the end a long digression whose bottom line is that I don't know exactly what the shape of the glass Bond was recommending but it is definitely not a classic Martini glass.  That's one difference.  To see what other differences there might be let's look at the recipe for a standard classic Martini:

• Into a small pitcher pour Gin and Dry Vermouth in appropriate proportions.
• A small amount of ice may be present in the pitcher to keep everything cool.
• Stir the ingredients together.
• Decant into a cold Martini glass leaving all the ice behind.
• Add a Green Olive on a toothpick as a garnish.

Historically, a Martini was referred to as a "Dry Martini" because it used Dry Vermouth rather than Sweet Vermouth.  But over time the use of Sweet Vermouth was discontinued in favor of Dry Vermouth and "Dry" came to mean a high proportion of Gin and a low proportion of Vermouth.  By the usual definitions of what now constitutes "Dry", Bond's recipe qualifies.  The ratio of Gin+Vodka to Vermouth is 8 to 1.  So to that extent Bond's recipe is in line with a standard Martini.  But:

1. As noted above Bond specifies a non-standard glass.
2. He specifies a mixture of Gin and Vodka.  A standard Martini contains only Gin.
3. He specifies Kina Lillet, a very unusual and uncommon Vermouth.
4. He specifies "shaken not stirred".
5. He specifies a Lemon Slice rather than the traditional Green Olive.

This is a lot of deviation from the standard recipe.  I don't think what you end up with can properly be called a Martini.  But wait.  It gets worse.  I have given Fleming the benefit of the doubt by calling Kina Lillet a Vermouth.  But there is some controversy about that.  The original formula for Kina Lillet contained a lot of Quinine, which made it quite bitter (think Gin and Tonic).  Also, the Lillet company had been using the name "Lillet Dry" to refer to their Vermouth-like product well before the time the book came out.  And shortly thereafter, they reformulated the product to make it less bitter.  So you couldn't find "Kina Lillet" at the time Fleming wrote the book and you can't even find its modern equivalent under any name now.

Then and now, the most popular brand of Vermouth is Martini & Rossi.  And we now have lots of super premium brands of Gin.  My mother is partial to Diamond Sapphire, for instance.  And there is a whole cult around Vodka now.  The most well known super premium brand now is Stolichnaya.  I don't know if Bond would have been down with trading with the enemy.  But if he had specified "Stoli", as it is popularly referred to now, and especially if he had asked for "Stoli Elit", he would been happy to know that it is a grain Vodka (wheat and rye) and not a lowly potato Vodka.

Finally, I am not a Martini drinker but that hasn't stopped me from collecting a couple of recipes for how to make a really dry "Dry Martini".  Try them and see what you think:

Forbin Martini - This comes from the book and movie of the same name, "The Forbin Project":

• Fill a funnel with ice.
• Hold the Ice filled funnel over a pitcher and drizzle Vermouth over the ice.
• Hold the funnel over a chilled Martini glass and pour Gin through the ice and into the glass.
• Add the traditional Olive garnish.
• Serve.
• (Discard the Vermouth in the pitcher and the ice in the funnel).

The only Vermouth in the final product is what stuck to the ice between the Vermouth and the Gin steps.

Tugboat Martini - I got this from an old family friend:

•  A week or more before the Martini will be served drain all the liquid out of the bottle containing the Green Olives.  Discard the liquid.
• Fill the bottle with Vermouth instead.
• Refrigerate the bottle with the Olive and Vermouth combination for at least a week.
• Remove a chilled Martini glass from the Freezer.
• Pour the Gin (hopefully also chilled) straight into the glass filling it most of the way to the top.
• Using a toothpick skewer one or more Olives from the jar in the refrigerator and add as a garnish.
• Serve.

Here the only Vermouth in the final drink is what sticks to the Olives.

Both of these drinks are easy to prepare.  Enjoy.

Update (08/30/2015) -

I have now reread the Bond cannon through "Dr. No" (#6 - published March 31, 1958).  At this point Bond is specifying a Martini that conforms to pretty much what we now expect.  It consists of Vodka (Polish or Russian - no more talk of potato versus grain), Vermouth, "shaken - not stirred", and the "twist of Lemon".  The proportion of the ingredients is no longer specified (apparently left to the discression of the bartender) and he has apparently left behind the Gin and the Kina Lillet of the original recipe.  If one is an aficionado of modern bar culture when it comes to Martinis it is now routine to specify Vodka instead of Gin and various twists ,including but not restricted to Lemon, are ok as a substitute for the olive.  So Bond is now main stream (except that pretty much nobody thinks the "shaken - not stirred" specification is a good idea).

And at this point in his evolution Bond's choice of other potables is now also pretty middle of the road.  The brands he specifies are a step up from bottom of the line "bar" brands but they are not anything special.  A modern Bond should be drinking some kind of super-premium single malt scotch.  The same would be true of his Vodka preference.  There are now lots of quite fancy Vodkas.  If you want to avoid Eastern Europe, for instance, you can go with Grey Goose, a French brand.  The basic version is several steps above a "bar" Vodka.  But Grey Goose also has a "VX" super-premium version that goes for about three times the price of the regular version.  If super-premium booze existed at the time, Bond (or more likely Fleming) was not familiar with it.

And, thanks to work by my brother Mike, I can also report some results on what Martini drinkers think of the Tugboat recipe reproduced above.  Neither he nor I are Martini drinkers but he has friends who are.  He prepared some Tugboat Martinis and had them do a taste test.  The results were not good for the Tugboat concept.  No one was a fan.  From this I conclude that Martini drinkers are not just looking for an excuse to drink straight Gin.  Both the Tugboat and the Forbin recipe result in a super-dry drink that is only a tiny step away from straight Gin.  For most Martini drinkers the step is not far enough.  Apparently there is such a thing as a Martini that is too dry.  Dry is good.  Super-dry is bad.

Off the Cliff

Now that the election is over there is now a lot of talk about the "Fiscal Cliff".  Discussion of this general subject actually goes back to at least to the "lame duck" congressional session that happened between the midterm elections of early November of 2010 and the new congress being seated in early 2011.  There has been some talk among politics junkies in the run up to the election that just took place on November 6, 2012.  But with the election out of the way this subject has moved to center stage.

So what is the Fiscal Cliff all about?  Well, the "scare" version of the story is that on January 1, 2013 all kinds of bad things will immediately happen causing the economy to crash causing the immediate end of all we hold dear. As you might imagine this is not an accurate characterization of the situation.  A more accurate characterization of the situation is that if no laws are changed between now and January 1 then federal taxes will go up somewhat and federal spending will go down somewhat.  So why is this the end of life as we know it?  Because the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) estimate is that this will stall the current anemic rate growth that the U.S. economy is now experiencing and throw us into a very mild recession.  Do we know for sure this is going to happen?  No!  It's just a best guess by a usually reliable source.

So, assuming politics in our nation's capital continues to gridlock, what actually happens?  Several things:

• The Bush tax cuts expire.  This will cause tax rates to be raised on pretty much everybody.  If you currently pay income taxes, those taxes will likely be higher.
• The Obama Social Security withholding rates go back up to the rates they were a few years ago.  This means that an additional two percent of most people's salary will be withheld.
• The "sequester" will kick in.  The Defense Department budget will be cut by $55 billion per year.  Funding for "non-defense discretionary spending" will be cut by $55 billion per year.  These are characterized as "draconian" by the people who passed the bill that causes these cuts.

These are the major provisions.  There are also a whole bunch of provisions that have less impact or apply only to small groups of people.  It is also important to realize that the Fiscal Cliff is not a single event.  Provisions of several bills expire at the end of 2012.  Several other bills have provisions that take effect in 2013.  They all get lumped together because they all affect either taxes or spending and they all take effect within a day or two of each other.

Finally, there is a theoretically unrelated event that will affect the federal budget that will happen at roughly the same time and often gets lumped in with everything else.  The U.S. has a "debt ceiling" law.  The federal debt is only allowed to raise to a certain level.  We are near that level.  There are various tricks and gimmicks that can be used to keep things going once the limit is reached.  But this trickery will only work for a short period of time, a few months.  The best current estimate is that the debt ceiling needs to be raised by February 2013.  There was a big fight the last time the debt ceiling needed to be raised.  There is no reason to think that this time around will be any different.  Many people have suggested that a debt ceiling increase be rolled into the same legislative package that would address the fiscal cliff.

So how did we get here?  It actually goes back to the early part of the Bush '43 Administration.  They wanted to do a big tax cut.  But whenever a tax cut is under serious consideration the CBO does an analysis of the impact over a 20 year time horizon.  Had the CBO done this the number would have been truly scary and it would have been harder for the bill to pass.  So the Bush tax cut was made "temporary".  It would expire in 2010.  Since taxes and, therefore, revenues would revert to the old amounts, the cost of the tax cut was way less scary and the bill was passed and was signed into law.  This worked so well that the Bush Administration pulled the same trick with s second tax cut they put through a couple of years later.  They also made it expire in 2010.  Now notice that 2010 is after the end of a two term Bush Administration.  It becomes someone else's problem.  And the cynical calculation was that the tax cut would never actually get repealed so the Administration got to have their cake and eat it too.  So far the prediction is working out.  A deal was done in the 2010 "lame duck" session to extend all provisions of both tax cuts for two more years.  So now they expire at the end of 2012.

When the Obama Administration came in they were faced with an economy that was truly a disaster.  Their first response was to pass a "stimulus" bill.  One of the provisions of this bill was a "temporary" reduction in Social Security withholding.  Normally 6.2% of an employee's salary is withheld for Social Security.  This is matched by the employer, except that self employed people have to pay the "employer" part too.  The "stim" reduced the employee amount to 4.2%.  This saved an individual making $50,000 per year $1,000.   As part of the deal that was made in the 2010 lame duck this provision was extended for 2 years so it expires in 2012 now too.

As a result of a political deal made a couple of years ago a "super committee" consisting of equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans and equal numbers of Senators and Representatives was formed.  To encourage them to come to a bipartisan deficit reduction deal a provision in the enabling legislation was included that said if they failed then starting in 2013 "draconian" (that was the design objective) cuts would be automatically mandated.  To spur on Republicans one of the cuts was $55 billion per year to the Defense budget.  To spur on Democrats the other cut was $55 Billion per year to "non-defense discretionary" programs.  What is in and out of this latter category is spelled out but it is complicated.  It's things like the NASA, Education, etc.  Social Security and Medicare were specifically exempted.  Needless to say, the super committee failed so the cuts are scheduled to go into effect if something is not done right away.

I have left out a lot of detail and I'm sure I have put most of you to sleep anyhow.  So let's just move on to what should be done.  We are now living in a political world at the federal level where everything is pushed to the limit so what should be minor or routine actions are blocked or delayed to the last minute and beyond.  If we had a functioning political system many of the components of the fiscal cliff would have long since been taken care of.  I lay almost 100% of the blame for this brinkmanship on the doorstep of the Republicans.

As a simple example, they forced a confrontation the last time the debt ceiling need to be raised.  This has historically been a routine activity.  There is usually some posturing but neither side does anything to stop the ceiling from being raised in a timely and predictable manner.  The last time around the Republicans brought the entire country to within hours of a total default of the government.  And that was after the Treasury pulled every trick and gimmick that anyone could think of to stave off what would normally have been the default date.  I could cite several other examples of Republican brinkmanship.  But if you don't want to agree with my characterization of the "debt debacle" then you aren't going to buy my analysis of the other events.  And, if you agree with my "debt debacle" analysis, then you can take my word for it that the other events are there and happened too.

So it is important to recognize that we have not only a "fiscal cliff" problem but we also have a Republican intransigence problem.  If we don't do something about both of them we don't make any real progress.  So what should be done?

Option 1 is to do what the Republicans say they want.  That would be to continue all the tax cuts (the Bush tax cuts, the Obama tax cuts, and the other tax provisions I haven't gone into).  They would also repeal and replace the "sequester".  They would make no cuts to the Defense budget.  Instead they would make very large cuts to "non-defense discretionary" and additional cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.  That is what they would do as best I can make it out.  They have not been very specific.

Option 2 is to do what President Obama wants to do.  He too has been pretty vague.  He would increase taxes on people making more than $250,000 per year.  He would preserve all the tax cuts for people making less.  As far as I can tell, he would leave the sequester in place.  This is good as far as it goes.  I am all in favor of the increase in taxes on rich people.  The problem is that it does not raise enough money.  I think we should raise taxes on the wealthy anyhow on fairness grounds.

Option 3 is to go off the cliff.  Let everything expire or go into effect.

Before continuing, let me state the obvious.  All of these pure positions are seriously flawed.  It is a bad idea to do any of them in their purest simplest form.  But they give us a starting point for discussion.  So let's discuss.

Option 1 is the most ridiculous.  The oratorical way the Republicans square the circle on this proposal is they offer to close loopholes in the tax code.  I am all in favor of this as a general principle but the devil is in the details.  And so far the Republicans have provided no details.  Well that's not completely true.  One Republican or another has taken pretty much all the big loopholes off the table.  My idea of "low hanging fruit" is various loopholes that favor the Oil industry.  Democrats have put together bills that close one or more of these loopholes.  None of these efforts has garnered a single Republican vote.  Two big loopholes that affect individuals are deductions for education expenses and mortgage expenses.  Various Republicans have taken both of these off the table.  There is the "carried interest" loophole.  This allows Hedge Fund managers to treat their multimillion dollar bonuses as Capital Gaines taxed at 15% rather than as ordinary income taxed at 35%.  Republicans have shot down the idea of closing the carried interest loophole.

In fact, you can find various Republicans taking all the big loopholes, corporate and individual, off the table at one time or other.  And no Republican has publicly supported eliminating a single specific loophole.  I am absolutely convinced that had Mitt Romney won the election and succeeded in getting his tax and budget programs enacted into law then no loopholes would have been closed, defense spending would have gone up, tax rates might have been cut, discretionary spending and entitlements would have been cut, and the deficit would have grown enormously.  That's what history says Republicans do when they get into the White House.

Option 2 is better but not by a lot.  The President has been short on detail in public.  As I have indicated above, raising rates on high income people is a good idea but it only solves a small part of the problem.  Apparently the President tentatively agreed to a package that included entitlement cuts (styled as "reforms") and cuts to discretionary programs.  But we don't know the details.  If the Republicans actually came up with some loopholes to close, and they were reasonable loopholes, I'm sure the President would go along with them.  Besides the ones listed above, there is another loophole I would like to see closed.  I would like for mortgage interest to be only deductible on a singe primary residence, as in you would have to live in the house for it to be deductible.  This would not bring in a lot of money but I still think its a good idea.

Now lets talk about options 3.  Actually, I want to talk about two variants.  Option 3a is the "limited" version.  We let everything go into effect.  That defines a new base case.  Then, after the new congress goes into session in early January, we enact legislation reversing or modifying the components we don't like.  This is the version advocated by Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC, for instance.  Why would we want to do this?  In a word (actually two) Grover Norquist.  Norquist put together a "no tax increases, ever" pledge and got almost all Republicans to sign it.  Increasing the tax rate on rich people counts as a violation of the pledge and would result in bad things happening to the Republican in question, if the past is any guide.  Enacting tax increases on rich people (i.e. the Obama plan) violates the pledge if it is done before January 1.  But after January 1 all those higher rates have already gone into effect.  So leaving the rate high on rich people is not a violation of the pledge.  And cutting the rates on non-rich people is fine and dandy.  Finally, if the new laws are passed and put into effect in the first month or two of 2013 the damage to the economy is tiny.  And many provisions can be made retroactive to January 1, causing even less harm to the economy.

The other version, option 3b, is to let the various provisions expire or go into effect and then do nothing.  This is supposed to be very bad for the economy.  But it might not be.  I cite the example of the first couple of years of the Reagan Administration.  Reagan fired the Air Traffic Controllers in a labor dispute.  The Fed drove up interest rates.  These, combined with some other actions, drove the economy into recession.  But it was a short sharp recession.  The economic problem at the time was a wage/price spiral that resulted in high inflation.  The recession cured the inflation and within two years the economy started growing robustly.

The Republican view is that the economy is doing poorly for two reasons.  First, the deficit is too high.  Second, there is a lot of economic uncertainty.  Option 3b attacks both of these issues.  It would cut the deficit  by more than in half in the short run and put us on track toward a balanced budget in the long run.  That's what the Republicans say they want.  Since this plan requires no new legislation is it definitely feasible in this "gridlock" political environment.  So uncertainty is removed.  People may be unhappy with the higher taxes but they know what the future looks like and can plan accordingly.

Large U.S. corporations are literally sitting on more than a Trillion dollars of cash.  If, due to the certainty of the budget and tax situation, they start spending this pile of cash then the economy could take off and quickly.  The CBO analysis of this option assumes there will be no change in corporate behavior and that individuals will cut back on their spending because they will have less disposable income.  But if the economy picks up due to higher corporate investment then this will put money directly into the pockets of people hired by these corporations.  Their income will go up so their spending will go up.  If the economy picks up in general then the income of the employees that are not directly involved in this increased corporate spending may well see their income go up more than enough to compensate for their higher tax load.  So we could easily see spending rise rather than dip and the economy growing rather than shrinking.

So option 3b may not be as bad as the CBO estimates.  But let's say the CBO is right.  Everyone will adjust.  So I predict a short mild recession.  After we exit from the recession we have a federal government that is on a sound and sustainable course.  So growth should be robust and sustained.  So even the bad version of options 3b is not so bad.

I find it very unlikely that either options 1 or 2 will happen.  It is possible that some blend of options 1 and 2 will come out of a genuine effort by the Republicans to compromise.  But it is very hard to imagine such a deal coming together quickly enough to be implemented before the end of the year.  So I see option 3 as what we will see.  And I don't see it as all that scary an option.  So what will we actually see, option 3a or option 3b?  I actually favor some version that is much closer to 3b than 3a.  I have skipped over a bunch of details when outlining the situation.  And, while I am comfortable about all of the major provisions that I outlined above, there are several minor provisions that I think need addressing.

One is the AMT, Alternative Minimum Tax.  This was a good idea when it was first enacted.  It was designed to close some loopholes used only by the rich.  But the provisions were not indexed.  As inflation has worked its magic more and more middle class people, people not intended as targets of the AMT provisions are effected.  Congress had dealt with this by enacting a series of annual AMT "patch" laws.  But the AMT needs to be fixed or repealed.  The problem is a political one.  A permanent AMT fix is scored by the CBO as a big tax cut as the CBO is forced every year to assume AMT is part of the baseline and, since it hits a lot of people, it theoretically raises a lot of revenue.  So the political problem is getting beat up about the high theoretical cost of fixing it.

Another problem is the "doc fix" to Medicare.  A few years ago it became obvious that doctors wouldn't take Medicare patients because the compensation rate was too low.  So the rate was raised, again temporarily, by 27%.  It needs to be permanently raised.  Again, on one has wanted to take the political hit for "blowing up the medicare budget" that a permanent fix would entail.

I have mentioned the debt limit above.  It needs to be raised.

The implementation of the "sequester" is a robotic "cut everything by the same amount".  I think it would be healthy to cut the Defense budget by $55 Billion a year.  But I would like a more intelligent approach to how the money is cut.  Barney Frank has suggested we can scale back our overseas commitments, especially troops in Europe and Japan, by a lot safely.  I agree.  This also cuts the money shipped over seas, where it doesn't help our domestic economy much.  There are weapons systems (e.g. tanks) that can be cut and bases that can be closed.  The money is there.

I am less happy about the "non-defense discretionary" cuts.  But if they are the price for the rest of the package I can live with them.  But again the "cut everything by the same amount" rule needs to be replaced with cuts that total to the same amount but are applied more intelligently.  Personally, I would like to take a big whack out of farm subsidies.  Almost all of the money goes to large corporate farms.  And, at the other end, I see no reason to subsidize small hobby farms.  Most farms that are small enough to look like a traditional family farm are actually hobby farms.  The group in the middle, relatively small farms that do support the rural lifestyle, are too hard a target to hit.  And a lot of them are already in some commodity that is not part of the farm subsidy program.  The only parts of the system that look like they might be a good investment to me are the extension service and research programs at "ag" colleges.  I don't know where the Department of Homeland Security fits in all this.  But I think there is more "waste, fraud, and inefficiency" in this department than in the Department of Defense, normally the "waste, fraud, and inefficiency" poster child.  I think a big whack can be taken out of the Homeland Security budget and, if done intelligently, would result in an increase in the security of the homeland.

There are numerous fixes that should be made to other items affected by the fiscal cliff.  But you have to ask yourself:  Are these fixes more or less likely to happen if we avoid going off the cliff?  I find it extremely hard to believe that they will be approached in an intelligent way if some grand bargain is made and going off the cliff is avoided.

So let's all go off the cliff.  It should be a hell of a ride. 

FCC Robocall Challenge

The FCC is running a contest called "FCC Robocall Challenge".  Details can be found at the following location:  http://robocall.challenge.gov/.  I have blogged about robocalls before.  See:  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2012/02/rachel-from-cardholder-services.html for details.  So this subject is near and dear to my heart.  I think the FCC is slightly misguided.  They think the winner should come up with a solution, presumably a gadget, that "should block robocalls".  I think a proper solution consists of a number of components.  Some of these components would be hardware.  But other components would be processes or procedures.  Here's my solution:
 
Telco component

All telcos (anyone providing dial tone and access to the international telephone network) must provide the following service, implemented by a code, to their customers.  Someone on the contest web site suggested using “*111”.  I will leave it to the experts to decide what actual code would be used.  But when a customer receives an inappropriate call (e.g. a robocall) the customer will enter the code on his telephone keypad while the call is in progress.  This will cause the telco to record and retain certain information about the call.  Entering the code will also cause the call to be flagged as a “logged” call.  The customer will also be able to enter the code up to five minutes after the call ends in normal circumstances.  The window will expire immediately if the customer has not logged the call before making an outgoing call.  Also, if a new call comes in within less than five minutes, the window will expire immediately if the customer does not enter the code to flag the old call as a "logged" call before connecting to receive the new call.

Telcos will maintain the information on logged calls for a minimum of a week (7 days).  Then, if the customer “registers” the call within the one week period, the information will be retained for whatever period is appropriate.  Once the information is transferred to e.g. an FCC database it can be deleted from the telco system.

The telco will collect and retain the following information when the call is logged:
- Nominal caller ID of the source.
- True source of the call.
- Nominal caller ID of the destination (customer).
- True destination of the call.
- Call start date/time.
- Call end date/time or call duration (Experts can decide which).

Note:  A telephone call is a two way process.  To work both the true source and the true destination must be known to the telephone system.  This is the information that will be collected as the “true source” and “true destination”.

Note:  Crime TV shows make reference to “LUDs”.  If “LUDs” are a standard part of telephone infrastructure and the information in a LUD is equivalent to the information listed above then collecting a LUD for the call meets my requirements and no new special record type will be needed.

Customer component

This component is optional.  But, if provided, it must operate as described.

First let’s consider a standard “land line”.  For the moment let’s also assume that the line has a customer provided answering machine.  The new component can be thought of as an “enhanced” answering machine that would replace the standard answering machine.  The enhanced answering machine would require an Internet connection (e.g. Ethernet or WiFi connection with an IP address assigned to the device).

The enhanced answering machine would process calls that “go over to the answering machine” in the usual manner.  But the enhanced answering machine would also speculatively record the first five minutes of all “live” incoming calls too.  The telephone system started going digital in the 1960s.  At that time a standard was established that converted the audio component of a conversation to a digital format.  The digital data consisted of 56,000 bits of data per second of conversation.  This is equivalent to 7,000 bytes of data.  The enhanced answering machine will record the data in a standard format specified by experts that has a fidelity equivalent to the old 56,000 bits per second standard.  Assuming no compression, a five minute recording would consume 2.1 million bytes of storage.  This is well within the capability of inexpensive computer technology available today.  Multi-Gigabyte thumb drives are readily available for about $10.  If the standard included compression or other techniques, or the call lasted less than five minutes, the file could end up being much smaller.  And the file should be encrypted using standard techniques for privacy reasons.

So the enhanced answering machine would speculatively record all incoming calls.  If the call was not logged (see the above rules) then the recording would be silently discarded.  Logged calls would be retained and a standard technique would be specified by the experts for transferring the recording to an Internet capable device (e.g. a computer).  Vendors would be required to provide a minimum capability to record and retain one logged call at a time.  The recording could be silently discarded after a week at the discretion of the device maker.  The device maker could optionally provide the capability to retain more than one recording or retain it for longer than a week.  The device maker would just have to spell out the actual capabilities over and above the minimum in the documentation for the device.

What is important here is the capability, not the specific hardware implementation.  An enhanced answering machine is certainly an easy way to understand the required capability and feasible way to implement the capability in the case of a standard land line.  But a lot of people now use smart phones.  All the required capability can be implemented in a high end smart phone using software without requiring an external box or other supplemental hardware.  Many people have an “answering machine” service provided by their telco using equipment not located on the customer premises.  The telco could enhance their ”answering machine” service offering to provide equivalent capabilities.  Or they could choose to not provide the additional capability.  The only thing I require is that they be clear with their customers as to whether their “answering machine” service provides the described enhanced capability or not.  If their offering did not provide the enhanced capability then customers would be free to decide whether they wanted to continue the telco provided service knowing that message recording would not be available to them or to instead go ahead and acquire an enhanced answering machine device to replace the telco offered service.

The registration process

We now have much more information available than before.  We will now always have the logged information for all flagged calls.  Where the additional capability exists (e.g. the customer has installed an enhanced answering machine) we also have a recording of the first five minutes of the incoming call.

A change would be made to the current process for registering a complaint with the FCC.  Currently this is done through the FCC web site.  The new process would be done through a telco web site or through a free down loadable app for smart phones or free app provided by telcos to their customers that would run on an Internet attached customer PC.

The telco would validate the identity of the customer e.g. by a log in process to their web site.  In the case of a smart phone app, validation is automatic because the app runs on the customer smart phone and would only use data available on that smart phone.  The registration/validation process should be simple in the case of a web site.  And customers could log complaints to the FCC about their telco’s process if they did not like it.

Using the telco web site, smart phone app, etc. the customer would be able to see his recent logged calls.  He would then be able to select one or more to “register” as a complaint with the FCC.  The complaint information would be passed through to the FCC from the telco web site, app, etc.  The detailed specifications I leave to experts.  But I envision an implementation where the telco web site "front ends" for the FCC web site.  The telco web site would be responsible for a "pass through" capability to pass the logged data and, if present, recording file, along to the FCC web site.  The FCC would incorporate the logged data and, where it exists, the recording into the complaint.  This is why the smart answering machine would need Internet access.  The "Internet access" for this device could be restricted to the customer’s local LAN.  The PC could pull the file from the smart answering machine and upload it into the complaint package.  In the case of a smart phone or telco provided enhanced answering machine service the appropriate procedure would be used to include the recording in the complaint package.  Timestamps would be used to match the correct recording to a logged call record.

FCC process

The FCC would now have much more information and much more reliable information for evaluating complaints.  The FCC project is designed only to address inappropriate robocalls.  So let me proceed along that path for a while.  It is probably impossible to automatically identify robocalls.  My recommendation is to not try to do it automatically.  Use volunteers instead.  The same registration process for the telco web site would be use to register volunteers with the FCC.  The volunteers would listen to the recordings and evaluate manually whether the complaint was valid.  They would not know the identity of any of the parties involved.  All they would know was the type(s) of complaint alleged by the customer.  Multiple volunteers would evaluate each recording and a super majority would be required to validate the complaint.  The FCC would act accordingly in the case of a validated complaint.

Certainly this is a good process for dealing with robocalls but it is easily extended to handle other cases.  This is done by giving the customer some options for characterizing the problem when a complaint is registered.  One would be “robocall”.  But another big problem is with live operators making illegal marketing calls (i.e. violating the “do not call” list).

I suggest that a rule be implemented that required all robocalls to include the name and a "contact" phone number for the organization making the robocall.  The information must come in the first minute of the call.  Customers could complain that the caller was not doing this or that he was providing bogus information.  (It should be a serious crime to omit the information or provide bogus information).  The same information would be required for “live operator” calls if the customer requests it.  This permits a number of complaint categories:

- Company name omitted or bogus
- Contact phone number omitted or bogus.
- Contact number does not work (not answered or calls are not returned).
- Inappropriate contact (i.e. call not permitted by “do not call” exceptions).
- Illegal Robocall (marketing call rather than a e.g. "snow closure" informational call).
- Etc.

If the call contains misleading or bogus information the caller would first be gone after on this basis.  If the contact name and phone number is correct then complaints would be aggregated by who is making them and the “use many separate numbers to originate the call from” trick would no longer work.  This system would also catch spoofed “caller ID” numbers, which should be illegal, if it is not already.

Beyond the FCC

The FCC process for dealing with robocalls has been a failure from a customer perspective.  It is possible that the FCC, even with this new capability, would not do an adequate job.  So I recommend that individuals (or a class of individuals in a class action suit) be allowed to file a lawsuit in the situation where the FCC declines to prosecute.  I believe that robocallers do not want to find themselves in a court room where they will be judged by a jury of citizens.  This implied threat should allow the FCC to be much more effective than they currently are.  Violators know that they are pretty toothless now.

This system can also be expanded to cover situations beyond robocall and “do not call” problems.  An obvious example is harassing phone calls.  Here the information would not go to the FCC but to law enforcement or the court system.  In the worst case, the basic call information would be available.  In the best case, a recording of the first five minutes of the call would also be available.

Basic threats e.g. “husband threatening to beat wife” situations could be dealt with directly.  But other problems (e.g. “heavy breathing with caller not identified”) could also be addressed.  The same third party validation system would be employed.  This would filter out reverse harassment situations where the recipient is alleging harassment when none is actually present, at least not in the first five minutes of the call.

Analysis

Every indication is that the vast majority of robocalls originate from a small number of abusers.  The above system seems slow and cumbersome but it will yield results that will actually solve the problem.  It will take some time for the telcos to implement the logging process.  It will be some time before customers have enhanced answering machine capability in large numbers.  But it will get us to where we want to be in the end.

If the FCC contest yields what they say they are looking for (e.g. an inexpensive robocall filter device) it will be some time (years) before most customers have one.  Likely the device will cost more than the enhanced answering machine device that is part of my proposal.  So the aggregate cost of the FCC approach will be the same as or higher than the cost of my proposal and will probably take the same amount of time or longer to implement.

I see only one long term problem to my proposal.  If my proposal is successful then robocalls and other similar telephone related problems will plummet.  At that point the number of volunteer listeners will probably also plummet.  But the need for listeners will plummet too.  At that point it may be necessary to pay listeners to attract and maintain a sufficient number of them.  If we get to this point perhaps some fine or fee will be needed to provide the money to pay the volunteers.

Finally, there are some areas I have not addressed.  For instance:
- How is the volunteer pool managed (e.g. weeding out bad performers)?
- A lot can be done with just the registered complaints data, e.g. statistical analysis.
- Should the complaint database be published? (Of course!)  How?
- How to deal with legitimate but unpopular callers (e.g. ethical collection agencies).

Written Communication

I'm an old fart.  When I was a kid the standard and pretty much only form of written communication was a hand written letter.  Typewriters existed.  But most of them were manual (hit a key and a series of levers would cause a letter to thwap into the paper).  Electric typewriters existed.  Here it was like power brakes on a car.  You hit the key and electricity assisted the levers to thwap on the paper so you didn't have to hit the key so hard for the typewriter to work.  But typewriters were for the office.  Few homes had them.  My home didn't have one.

So people like me were expected to occasionally hand write a letter to grandma or whoever.  I was really bad at this for two reasons.  The first one was practical.  My handwriting was and still is horrible.  I was taught "Palmer" penmanship in school but it didn't take.  At some point I switched to printing rather than writing.  But my printing, while better, was also pretty unreadable.  The second problem was I was always stumped as to what to write.  I now know that banal is just fine.  Just natter on and everyone would be happy.  But I was not a good natterer and I just never even figured out that that was what you did.  So I was a bad boy.  I can't remember writing even one letter as a kid.  And just to give you an idea of how different that time was, a first class postage stamp was three cents.

In high school my mother insisted that I take typing.  This was an improvement in that at least what I wrote would be legible.  But I was also a terrible typist.  A typical person can learn to type 30 - 80 words per minute.  My top speed was about 15.  And I was very inaccurate.  If I tried to type even 15 words per minute I would make lots of mistakes.  I remember that in one speed test lasting 15 seconds I made 12 mistakes.  In spite of this my mother sent me off to college with a small typewriter, which was a good idea.

In terms of coming up with what to say, things got a little better.  I had to take a series of English classes as a Freshman.  After a couple of failed attempts to do something sensible I found that what worked for me was procrastination.  If I waited until I barely had time to finish the composition then batted out whatever came to mind, I could complete the assignment.  Surprisingly I got fairly good grades for these efforts.

Computers and I first met in college.  And I found that I finally was in an environment that worked for me.  I found I could quickly compose computer programs.  And the "keypunch" machines of the time were like typewriters.  Except there were tricks that allowed you to correct mistakes.  And 15 words per minute was no impediment.  While I was relatively quick, I wasn't quick enough to compose computer programs faster than I could type them in.  So I was in hog heaven.

For many years I assumed that my compositional efforts would be restricted to computer software and I was OK with that.  But technology marched on.  First the CRT came along.  CRT stands for Cathode Ray Tube.  It is actually just the picture tube part of an old fashioned TV.  But it came to be the nickname for a device consisting of a keyboard, CRT, and associated electronics.  You typed on the keyboard and characters appeared on the screen.  But now all you had to do was hit the "backspace" key to go back and correct errors.  This was an improvement but initially it was only practical for using with computer software.  So it became much easier for me to compose and update computer software but it was still impractical to apply these techniques to regular letters to regular people.

But an interesting thing happened as technology continued marching.  I could pretend to write a program but then instead of putting it into the computer I could just print it out.  Using this trick I could compose something like a letter.  And I did so.  I composed and printed a number of letters about some practice or project having to do with work and passed them along to the computer center manager.  He told me he liked them and found the information in them useful.  He encouraged me to write more of them.  This was the first time it occurred to me that I might have something to say.

Technology marched on and E-Mail evolved.  This was clearly a potential substitute for the hand written letter.  Initially it as only a little better than the "write a computer program that is really a letter and then print it out" system I had been using.  And E-Mail systems only allowed you to send a letter to someone who had a CRT that was hooked up to the same computer as your CRT.  So it was only good for sending E-Mail to other people who worked in the same building or perhaps the same company.  But eventually E-Mail systems started connecting to each other and finally through the Internet to anyone who had a computer.  And by this time lots of people had a computer.

I had finally arrived.  I could communicate via E-Mail.  I could type rather than write.  So the result was legible.  I had decided by this time that I had something to say.  Mostly it was about work or technical stuff but that beat having nothing to say at all.  I am still not that good at nattering but I am better than I used to be.  And E-Mail systems came with spell check. I have always been a bad speller.  Being a bad speller then adding a lot of typing mistakes on top makes for a pretty bad situation.  But it was as good as it was going to get for me.

But technology continued to march on.  E-Mail is now "so last year" or "last decade" or whatever.  (See, there is an entirely legitimate use for the much maligned "whatever").  The currently popular methods of communication are Facebook and Twitter.  I have neither a Facebook account nor a Twitter account.  To be a proper Facebook user you are supposed to post pictures and do all kinds of other stuff I am bad at.  Twitter is all about the famous "140 character limit".  A lot of people have found a lot of very good things to say in 140 characters.  And Twitter allows you to link to something like a picture, a blog post, or something else that doesn't fit into 140 characters.  But I am a long form kind of guy.  Most of the time I want to say something that will take a lot more than 140 characters to say.  Facebook is a great picture sharing service.  And Twitter is a great way to broadcast headlines.  But I am not very good at either of those things.  So I have been passed by.

But wait, it's worse.  Most people still have one or more E-Mail accounts.  So I can pretty much communicate to anyone I want by sending an E-Mail.  But I have noticed something.  A lot of people manage their E-Mail accounts using a smart phone.  Smart phones have sucky keyboards.  So people keep their responses short.  And I find that sometimes they don't scroll down or whatever (because it's hard to do on that small screen) and they miss part of what's in my message.  So I find that E-Mail is becoming more and more Twitterized.  It is becoming just another home for "headline" messages.

"What a world.  What a world."

BTW, that's what The Wicked Witch of the West said while she was melting in the 1939 MGM version of "The Wizard of Oz".

Education Reform

This post is about Kindergarten through High School education, generally referred to as K-12.  The U.S. has a reputation for providing more elite post-secondary (e.g. college and grad school) institutions than any other country in the world.  It also has a very good reputation for its non-elite schools in this category.  So the general consensus is that this category doesn't need fixing.  K-12, however, is a different matter.  This category has been argued over for generations and has been a political punching bag for at least a generation.  I have no special expertise in this area.  But that's not going to stop me from pitching my two cents in anyhow.

I am, of course, a consumer of this product.  I received my K-12 education in the U.S.  There are probably few people whose trajectory through this system is exactly typical.  Mine isn't completely typical but it's not very different and it is a common trajectory.  I was educated in a Parochial School run by the Roman Catholic parish where my parents attended church for my first 8 years.  Then I attended public schools for the last four years.  In my opinion I got a good education.  And I am in a position to personally compare the Parochial School experience with the Public School experience.  The comparison is very enlightening.

Parochial School was a "stick to basics", "no frills" experience.  The curriculum was completely standard except for the addition of a one hour religion class each day.  When I hit Public School I found I was well prepared.  I could read well.  My mathematics was up to snuff.  My social studies abilities and skills were up to snuff.  I can't say what kind of shape I would have been in had I attended Public School for those eight years but I see no reason to believe that it would have been much different.

But physically the experience was different from what I would have experienced in a Public School.  There were no shop classes.  There was no PE (Physical Education) classes.  There were no music classes.  I remember that one day a teacher brought in a Chemistry Set.  It was the kind a parent would buy for a child.  No particular use was made of this.  All of these types of amenities cost money.  You need a Gym and showers for PE.  My school had an auditorium but no showers.  You need musical instruments to do music.  My school had no musical instruments.  The school had no lab space suitable for biology or chemistry.  The physical plant of the school consisted of the aforementioned auditorium, class rooms, and a playground with a couple of basketball hoops and a few tether ball poles.  No other athletic equipment was provided.

But wait, there's more.  I do not remember attending a class with less than thirty other students.  One teacher was supposed to maintain discipline, teach all the classes, and provide whatever one-on-one attention students needed.  In short this school did a number of things that are supposed to be exactly the wrong way to educate students.  There were too many students in the class room.  There was little or no "enrichment" (e.g. music, shop, athletics).  But I got an excellent education anyhow.  And I was not an anomaly.  Many of my fellow students followed my same path.  They did a number of years in Parochial School, transitioned to Public School, and did just fine.  I was a typical exemplar of students turned out by Parochial School, not an outlier.

And this is generally true.  Parochial Schools have a very good reputation in the US.  It is so good that many Parochial Schools have a large percentage of their students coming from non-Catholic families.  Parochial Schools are the only alternative to a Public School option that is financially possible for many families.  Parochial Schools have a reputation for providing a high quality low cost option to the standard Public School option.  And they prove that a lot of the conventional wisdom about how to fix the public school system is bunk.

I certainly enjoyed my time in Public School and felt I got a good education there too.  But it is important to remember that this school district was in a well off suburban area.  The school system had and still has a very good reputation but it also has more money and a more stable social environment than many public school systems.

So if many of the standard nostrums for fixing the public school system are wrong then what's right?  Here I am very disappointed with what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have come up with so far.  You can read a position paper from them here:  http://www.gatesfoundation.org/postsecondaryeducation/Documents/nextgenlearning.pdf.  I didn't think much of it.  It is  mishmash of jargon almost completely devoid of clear thinking and any kind of data driven foundation for what little it contains.

One of the ideas that the Gates Foundation and others push is Charter Schools.  Charter Schools have been around long enough so that if they did a substantially better job of educating kids we should see some clear data to support this.  But what little data I have seen indicates that Charter Schools perform about on a par with Public Schools.  Another is reducing class size.  This too has been tried a lot.  I have seen no strong evidence that this works particularly well either.  Another idea is technology in the classroom.  As a computer guy I should be all for this.  But again there is no strong evidence supporting the idea that this makes a big difference.

Parochial Schools are not much different than Charter Schools.  My Parochial School experience argues against expecting much from reduced class sizes or introducing a lot of technology.  It also argues against the great benefit of a richer experience (e.g. sports, music, labs,. etc.).  Now some of you may be about to argue that I have just contradicted myself.  If Charter Schools are a lot like Parochial Schools then they should be working well.  And they should.  But the data says they don't.  And I remember seeing a "60 Minutes" (I think it was 60 Minutes) episode where they talked to a Parochial School Principal.  She said she would not be able to do even as well (her school was rated noticeably better than the surrounding Public Schools) if she had to follow the same rules and regulations as the Public School administrators did.  So what do I think works?

One of the problems with most of the analysis of what's wrong stems from looking in the wrong places.  If you are not looking in the right places the answer to your question contains a high percentage of noise and little or no pattern will emerge.  I think the wrong things are being measured to try to find the success factors.  Here's my list of success factors:

1.  The most important thing is whether a kid comes to school willing and able to learn.  Key to this is whether the kid thinks it is important to learn.  And key to this is whether the parent(s) think education is important.
2.  If we have met the first criteria, the second criteria is a good teacher who is allowed to do her job the way she thinks it should be done.
3.  The school environment must be safe from violence and from bullying and other activities that discourage a kid that wants to learn from learning.
These are the keys.  Of lesser importance are:
*  A good and safe physical plant (e.g. no pealing paint, broken windows, lights that work, etc.)
*  Smaller classes.
*  A richer experience.
And so on.

Someone somewhere has succeeded in teaching whatever "unteachable" group you can think of.  It's not the native intelligence of the kid.  In most cases parents seek out these experiences once a program attains a good reputation.  And that is important.  Because if a kid has parents (or parent) that care how well the kid does in school then they keep on top of how the kid is doing.  This results in the kid being expected to learn.  If the kid fails the parent(s) get on him or her to improve.  In this environment most kids most of the time end up willing to learn.  And almost all kids are able to learn.  These "success story" situations also usually involve good teachers and a safe environment.  I think you can find successes that lack one or more of the remaining criteria.

How about this for an idea?  As far as I know it has never been tried.  Evaluate kids and pick out the under performing ones.  Then look at the home environment.  Look for kids with parents that are uninvolved or have low expectations.  Try to educate the parents to be better at motivating and monitoring their kids.  Then there are homes where the parents would like to do the right thing educationally by their kids.  But they can't due to poverty, language skills, violence, etc.  Here it would be nice to provide help.  But except in the language situation this should be a job for social services, not schools.  As far as I can tell low or non-existent educational attainment of parents (e.g. parental illiteracy) is not a factor. Kids of illiterate parents do very well even if the parents never learn to read.

With this as a foundation it is instructive to look at efforts to improve education.  Little or no effort is devoted to my most important item.  There have been many efforts devoted to item number two but they usually involve more not less interference with the teacher doing things the way she would prefer.  In fact there is a large industry dedicated to standards, tests, evaluations, etc., all of which have the effect of telling the teacher how to teach.  Efforts to address item number three are sporadic and not up to the task.  Instead most effort is devoted to the lower priority items or to items I didn't even list.

It is also important to pay attention to what ought not to be done.  One idea usually associated with liberals is to pass students whose work does not merit it.  I think this is a mistake.  If a kid is not doing fourth grade work or eighth grade work he should be flunked until he can demonstrate the proper proficiency.  Unqualified students provide a distraction to both teachers and other students.  In the long run they don't even do the kid any good.  For a short period of time his self esteem is left undamaged.  But society and the kid eventually figure out that the kid is not a high school graduate in terms of what he is capable of and things go rapidly down hill from there.

And there is the issue of focus.  The more things you try to do the less likely you are to do a good job of all of them.  I think schools and school districts should be focused completely on education.  In the same way that they should provide an honest evaluation of how educated a student is by not passing him along, they should not be responsible for public safety or caring for the needs of people with physical or mental problems.  If a kid is misbehaving then he should be kicked out of school and turned over to the juvenile justice or police system.  Let schools teach and let public safety organizations provide for the public safety.  Similarly, I am sympathetic to the plight of people with physical or mental handicaps.  But at some point they should become social service problems not problems to be solved by our educational systems.

Years ago the standard was to keep people with physical or mental handicaps out of sight.  This was wrong, particularly for people with mild handicaps.  The standard flipped over to "mainstreaming" everyone.  I believe this is an over reaction.  I think it is good to mainstream people with mild handicaps.  It's good for the individuals themselves.  It is also good for the other students and staff.  It broadens their experience base and makes them more tolerant, which is good.  But it is not the job of school systems to deal with all of these people, particularly with those with severe problems.  This means a line needs to be drawn.  How do you decide who is mild and who is severe?  I am not confident I have the right answer.  But I do have an answer.  How much does it cost to place and maintain a particular individual in a Public School environment.

I think you set a financial threshold.  My suggestion is six times.  This is a completely arbitrary line and it may be that some other cut off would work better.  But it is the one I have come up with.  If the additional cost is six or less times the cost of a normal student then the handicapped individual should be placed in school and become the responsibility of the school district.  If the expense will be higher then the responsibility should rest with social services.  If social services can come to an agreement with the school district and pay the school district whatever the additional cost over that of a normal student then it may be a good idea to place the individual in school.

And this is the usual "bright line" rule.  This may result in the school people and the social service people (or others) trying to game the system to get the individual over or under the threshold.  Bright line rules always result in these kinds of issues.  I am perfectly willing to entertain a "sliding degree of responsibility" where there is a sliding scale of financial and other responsibility for the individual.  But I think my idea is a good place to start the discussion from.

There is also an elephant in the room that I have not brought up yet.  That's politics.  Educational policy is a bigger political football than it has ever been before.  This is very bad for education.  It draws energy and money away from the current system.  In almost all cases more resources are better than fewer resources.  So whatever resources are eaten by the squabbling end up being taken away from where they are needed.  And if the fight gets hot enough a consensus may develop to starve the beast.  Certainly the time and effort that a good teacher spends dealing with paperwork, bureaucracy, and politics is time and efforts that can not be applied to teaching.  And good people don't like working in a politically charged atmosphere.  It's just not worth the aggravation.

Now let's look at Teach for America.  Teach for America is good intentioned.  It is designed to help solve a very real problem.  Our society depends heavily on what is generally called STEM, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.  So our educational system needs to do STEM well.  But there is a large shortage of STEM qualified teachers.  And, as I said, this is a real problem.  Teach for America attempts to address this problem by finding STEM qualified individuals, running them through a fast "teaching boot camp" and putting them into the classroom.

It is better than nothing.  But it is a "paper it over" solution rather than an effort to address the problem directly.  The direct way to address the problem is to have teachers who are STEM qualified.  How do we do this?  Money!  If we paid teachers with STEM skills more money then we would find teachers getting STEM training and we would find STEM trained people getting teaching degrees.  But that would cost too much money.  So we have Teach for America.  The way you know that Teach for America is not the right solution is by looking at retention.  Do people who get in the program stay in teaching?  No!  Large numbers of them are gone after two years or less.  And remember the job market currently sucks.

I just don't believe that finding the right solutions to the education problem is that hard a problem.  So why aren't we well on the way to solving it?  Because the fundamental problem is money.  We need to spend more money and we need to spend it more effectively.  No one wants to spend what it would take to solve the problem so it becomes a big political football.  And in a highly politicized environment what money gets spent where becomes all the more important.  And those with the most political power, not those with the best ideas, tend to win the fights.  The overall result is that more and more money and effort is invested in making and enforcing rules, and in the kind of bureaucracy that grows up in a highly politicized environment.  This leaves less and less money to actually do what works.  And so things get worse and we start another round of political fighting that eventually makes things even worse.

Let me make a final observation on unions.  There is a large group of people invested in the idea that unions are evil and wasting lots of money and standing in the way of education reform.  In the current environment what are teachers supposed to do?  They are buffeted by every "trend du jour" and generally speaking no one cares what they think about anything.  In that environment a strong union with a mission to make teachers impossible to fire makes a lot of sense.  I think teachers unions have stood in the way of a lot of educational reform.  But it is hard to get angry at them.  There are a lot of others trying to mess up the educational system and harass teachers.  Perhaps if teachers didn't feel so much like the football in a Superbowl game they would be willing to be more flexible.

One thing Bill Gates has come to believe is that you can tell if a teacher is going to be a good teacher by seeing how they do in their first three years on the job.  If this is true then all you need to do is put in a "three year probation" rule.  If the teacher makes it through the first three years (assuming the evaluation procedure is a good one - not the teacher's responsibility) then it makes no sense to worry very much about how to get rid of teachers that have more than three years on the job.  They should be good teachers in almost all cases.  It is probably cheaper to carry the few "dead wood" teachers that make it past three years than it does to put in a lot of effort into a procedure for terminating experienced teachers.  And this would have a great benefit.  The many good teachers who made it past their three year probation could relax and focus on teaching for the rest of their carrier.  The morale boost would more than compensate for whatever it cost to keep the dead wood.

50 Years of Science - part 4

This is the fourth in a series.  The first one can be found at  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2012/07/50-years-of-science-part-1.html. Taking the Isaac Asimov book "The Intelligent Man's Guide to the Physical Sciences" as my baseline for the state of science as it was when he wrote the book (1959 - 1960) I am examining what has changed since. For this post I am starting with the chapter Asimov titled "The Death of the Sun".

Again Asimov starts with a review of thought on the subject, starting with Aristotle.  He starts out with a general discussion of whether the sky as a whole is unchanging.  He notes several instances of changes in the sky that would have been visible to the naked eye and, therefore, noticeable to the ancients.  The Greeks either didn't notice them or decided to ignore the changes.  But other ancients did notice some of these changes.  This leads to a quite general discussion of several stellar phenomenon.  He then starts moving toward a discussion of our nearest star, the Sun.  As part of this discussion he introduces the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram and the concept of the "main sequence".

The reason for this is that these ideas form the basis for understanding how stars evolve.  This, in turn, allows us to predict the life history and eventual fate of stars.  In short, large stars burn brightly and don't last very long.  Small stars burn much more dimly but last a very long time.  Our Sun is in the middle.  It is in the middle in terms of how bright it is and also in terms of how long it will last.  The H-R diagram also allows us to predict how our Sun will age.

According to this analysis our Sun is middle aged and will stay that way for several more billions of years.  Then it will become a Red Giant, a very large, very cool star.  Asimov then relates recent (relative to 1960) developments.  Stars burn Hydrogen to make Helium.  But then they can burn Helium to make Carbon.  This chain can continue so that stars can create large amounts of Oxygen and Neon.  Asimov also reports that Magnesium, Silicon, and Iron can also be created in the heart of a star.  If a star explodes (e.g. in a Supernova) then these elements can be spread throughout space.  This was the start of solving the problem of where these other elements come from.  Only Hydrogen, Helium, and and a very small amount of Lithium are created in the Big Bang.  Of course it did not solve the mystery of where all the other elements came from.  It turns out this mechanism can not create any of the elements heavier than Iron.  Research that took place after Asimov's book came out suggests that the Supernova explosion itself creates the other elements.

Once most of the Hydrogen is burned the evolution of a star speeds up tremendously.  All the other stages happen very quickly compared to the billions of years the Hydrogen stage takes for a star the size of the Sun.  And once a star hits the Iron stage it quickly runs out of energy.  A star like the Sun goes from a Red Giant to a White Dwarf in the blink of an eye at that point.  Asimov then moves to the Chandrasekhar limit.  A star with the mass below the limit (1.4 times the mass of the Sun) will relatively gently settle into the role of a White Dwarf.  Those above the limit, however, explode as the Crab Nebula did.  This supernova explosion was observed in 1054.  But current estimates put the nebula between 5 and 8 thousand light years away.  That means the supernova actually occurred between 3,000 BC and 6,000 BC.  The best guess is that it exploded about 4.300 BC.

Asimov wraps the chapter up with the observation that White Dwarfs last tens of billions of years.  So the Sun will be a White Dwarf for much longer than it will look the way it currently does.

Missing from the discussion are Black Holes and Neutron Stars.  These existed at the time as theoretical speculation.  A few years after the book was published Astronomers concluded that Cygnus X-1, an X-ray source in the constellation Cygnus, was a black hole.  There still exists no direct observations of Black Holes.  But out understanding of them has continued to improve.  Many likely Black Holes are now known.  And there is a class of Black Holes whose existence was not even suspected at the time of Asimov's book.  Astronomers now believe that many galaxies, including our own Milky Way and our nearest large neighbor galaxy, Andromeda, contain supermassive Black Holes.  These Black Holes weigh in at millions to billions times the mass of our Sun.  It is early days in terms of our understanding of these entities.  But they seem closely bound up in the formation and evolution of galaxies.

And in 1967 something magical was found.  A radio beacon was flashing once every 1.33 seconds.  No natural source of such a bright and quickly changing entity occurred to the Astronomers who discovered it.  So they initially christened it LGM-1 for the first signal from what might be Little Green Men or more formally space aliens.  As other sources were detected the name was changed to Pulsars.  Pulsars are Neutron stars.  They are small enough that they can rotate 1.33 times per second without violating the laws of physics.  So if they have an energy source somewhere on their surface it can flash like the rotating beacon in a lighthouse.  What makes it possible to have a very small very energetic object is the collapse of a star.

nucleuses jammed right up against each other with no surrounding cloud of electrons to keep them far apart.  If this happens you end up with what Astronomers have come to call a Neutron Star.  Such a star would be only a few miles in diameter but it would weigh more than the Sun.  It is easy to imagine such a small object rotating in a full circle in about a second.

So why were Neutron Stars, Pulsars, and Black Holes not discovered by the time Asimov wrote his book?  The answer is that a lot of the evidence for these objects can not be gathered from the surface of the Earth.  You have to put a satellite into orbit.  From there it becomes possible to observer the many kinds of electromagnetic radiation that are blocked by the earth's atmosphere.  Much of the early evidence for the existence of these objects and for the data that resulted in insight into their structure came from satellites launched in the '60s after the book was written.  Since then we have launched more sophisticated satellites that have been able to gather more and better data.  We have also improved our ability to make ground based observations.  We have learned how to tie multiple radio telescopes together.  We have even succeeded in tying multiple optical telescopes together in some cases.