Truck and Barter Where Sympathy and Hedonism Collide
Friday, May 07, 2004
Truck and Barter Moves to Movable Type
BY
Kevin
This is the last post for T&B on Blogger; we've moved to Movable Type, but can still be found at http://www.truckandbarter.com.
If you're reading this, you're in the blogger archives...
Considering the relatively brief careers of professional athletes, teenagers who are good enough to play at the highest level should be able to exploit that market. The N.F.L.'s rule on underclassmen should be abolished, and the N.B.A. should be discouraged from adding an age limit.
Consider me surprised when I hear a sound economic argument from the pages of the NYT.
That said, there's only this to say: Advantage, K@T&B!
Innovation is all fine and dandy. The problem comes at the intersection of innovation and government provision, when the innovation is costly and serves no purpose the taxpayers demanded or really needed. In the case of electronic voting machines, people aren't really given a choice between the types of machines to use. And the new machines that governments are putting in place might be shiny and new, but weren't really designed to solve the biggest problems: clear indication of voting intent. Sure, they save time and some paper costs, but when was the last election process held up because a government couldn't afford the ballots themselves? The conflation of "newer" with better leads to problems such as the ones people in Washington are voicing:
Passions ran high Wednesday at the first public hearing of the Election Assistance Commission, where activists and manufacturers of electronic voting machines clashed over whether new e-voting systems should include a voter-verifiable paper trail that auditors could use to recount votes if necessary.
While the people, rightly in my view, clamor for accountability in the system and documentation to allow for recounting should there be even a hint of a corrupted process, the Diebold folks are humming along like the engineers of the Mag-Lev train.
Mark Radke, director of marketing at Diebold Election Systems, said Diebold's touch-screen voting systems experienced "zero security problems" during the November 2002 elections, pointing out that its "voice guidance" audio feature allowed blind voters "to vote in private for the very first time." (With paper-only systems, blind voters historically have needed to recite their ballot choices to a poll worker or friend, who would then mark the ballot for them.)
Radke also said Diebold's machines outperformed other systems during the California recall elections in October. He claimed that under-counted votes were the lowest on Diebold touch screens, at 0.73 percent, compared with 2.86 percent for optical-scan systems, 4.6 percent for other electronic systems and 6.32 percent for paper-only systems.
Ahhh...ok, then. But how does that help if we need to recount the votes by hand?
Alfie Charles, spokesman for Sequoia Voting Systems, said the "sensationalized concerns" of paper-trail advocates aren't grounded in reality.
"The evidence is pretty clear," he said. "Electronic systems help prevent disenfranchisement."
Not to quibble, Alfie, but disenfranchisement is actually the rescinding of the right to vote. People still have the right, they just have to pursue alternate means or incur higher costs to do so. (Especially grating to my ears were the cries of "disenfranchisement" of the people in Florida who might not have their votes counted because of filling out the form wrong or not punching the ballot the right way. Just because you used your chance badly doesn't mean someone's taken it away from you.) And, again, this doesn't explain what might happen if we need to count the ballots again by hand.
Several panelists also pointed out that the pool of people able to hack into an e-voting system is far smaller than those able to steal ballots, stuff the ballot box or punch holes in voting cards to change or nullify votes. Under that theory, electronic systems would increase security.
"We would reduce the number of people capable of committing fraud," Charles said.
I suppose I can't fault the guy for blowing smoke when so much money rides on the outcome. But, to be clear, the process has redundancies and cross-checking built in to make sure that doesn't happen. Ballot counting has numerous people involved who rarely have the time or opportunity to start punching holes in things. Even if they did, they'd have to know which ones to ruin if they were trying to invalidate votes for a candidate. Then, in the process of counting, it would become fairly clear that there were irregularities if the mischevious person ruined enough to throw an election. The rates of invalid votes would skyrocket in a particular precinct or neighborhood, throwing the whole area into question. Either that, or there would have to be concerted effort across regions to coordinate people who can start ruining ballots in numerous places. (And since I feel the urge to mention these things wherever I can, the problems inherent in this could be described as a coordination game, factoring in the potential costs of getting caught. Then again, we might consider it a version of the Stag Hunt where one potential mischief maker isn't sure the other is going to actually go through with it, making potential losses to the lone cheater very high.)
On the other hand, computer hackers need not do their work under the eyes of others. It's remote, private, and singular; there is no need to share the secret or work with others. And, again, if it happens even once, and there is no paper trail -- the entire election should be tossed out since there is no way to inspect the ballots or figure out where the irregularity might have arisen. In this case, we'd want to be able to -- you guessed it -- recount.
Again, it's a low-probability, hight-cost event. Why make the costs that much greater with machines that could ruin an entire election (all at taxpayer expense)?
Feeling a bit stressed out? Wish someone would just still long enough for you to get out what you need to say? Well, for just under two bucks a minute, you can do just that:
BOSTON (Reuters) - Licensed mental health professionals are steamed over a Maine entrepreneur who charges angry people $1.99 a minute to listen to them rant and rave over the telephone.
Philip Doyen receives between 10 and 20 phone calls a week to "Vent-Line," a service he launched in February that allows callers to blow off steam -- at a price.
Anyone else remember the Monty Python skit where people paid to have someone argue with them? Well who knew they were so prescient?
And the reason mental health people are so steamed?
"For some people, venting is going to upset them more," Leslie Brancato of the Community Counseling Center in Portland, Maine, told the paper. "That he's charging $1.99 a minute is, in my opinion, totally exploitative."
Maybe she should give the line a call and let him have a piece of her mind...
There was the Brooklyn pizzeria with a 10-foot fake wall in its dining room to conceal its pirated wires. By tapping into the electricity before it reached the meter, the restaurateur powered air conditioning, appliances and several ovens without paying.
Then there are your everyday superintendents who wire communal laundry machines and hallway lights to the meters of tenants they dislike. Or the contractors who run entire remodeling projects, including power tools and scaffolding lighting, with electricity drawn from nearby lamp poles.
"This is a creative city," said Mr. Mormilo, seated in his office, a square room decorated with only a wooden desk, a file cabinet and a laptop computer at Con Edison's Revenue Protection Department in Astoria, Queens. "The work keeps you on your feet."
Just to make sure there's an economics bent to this, let's hear from the pioneer of an economic approach to understanding crime, Gary Becker:
The regulation of power distribution is a massively inefficient method for pricing the utility. And since this pushes prices above more competitive options, the increase in the cost of energy only means that the value of successful theft is higher, meaning more people will steal.
Clearly: more regulation, more crime!
Update: Greetings to the TechCentralStation readers. Thanks for stopping through!
A bunch of the best high school basketball players--and some international teenagers--will be entering the NBA draft this year. I'm all for this. In fact, I'd like to see more high schoolers get a chance at the NBA. Why?
I'm not convinced that most high-school basketball stars desire to challenge themselves with a rigorous liberal education. For them college is about making more money afterward, not making better men of themselves. But if it is all about the money, then entering the NBA before college makes complete sense:
"There's no way all these kids can succeed," said the assistant general manager, who requested to remain anonymous. "There's too many pitfalls. Any time you saturate a market with a product it gets harder and harder to control the quality. . . . [Evaluating talent] is speculation. This is not analysis."
But they don't have to succeed. All they have to do is earn the minimum salary (~$375K) for one season, and they will have earned 15 years worth of the income differential (~$25K) between the average high-school graduate and college graduate with a Bachelor's degree. If they make it a second season, they earn a minimum of ~$620K, blowing away any statistical college advantage in lifetime income. Plus, they will get the money upfront, and with sufficient parental and corporate guidance, they will have a fantastic retirement fund--or they can afford to send themselves to college.
On Friday, the last day of the legislative session, the Florida House of Representatives failed to pass a bill that would have postponed the enforcement of a tax levied on businesses and individuals using substitute communications such as VoIP. The law, which has been on the books since 1985, has not been widely enforced.
The statute was originally meant to tax businesses that bypassed the local telephone network by establishing their own communications network. While it was originally written with technologies such as satellite and microwave in mind, it could be applied to businesses carrying voice traffic over their IP data networks as well as individuals using VoIP services from companies like Vonage.
If I'm not mistaken, this is essentially a content-based tax. It's not the transaction that is being targeted, but the content of the network that carries the VoIP. There are already taxes on the equipment and the service provision, but since some people might use this instead of the phone, the act of talking now has to be taxed too. Think that's an extreme depiction?
Because the wording of the Florida statute is so broad, some experts say it could even be applied to anyone using networked computers, two-way radio systems and intercoms. Currently, only about 10 companies have voluntarily paid the tax, which brings in roughly $600,000 a year. But if the 14 percent tax were enforced using the broad definition of "substitute communication," it could bring in more than $1 billion a year in revenue for the state.
That's right -- intercoms. That such a tax really can't/won't be enforced on intercoms isn't the point. That the law was written so as to allow communication itself to be taxed (the medium is apparently malleable under this "substitute" rubric) is.
Personally, I use instant messenger software to communicate a great deal with friends. I use it to the point that I go a long period of time never calling them outright. Should I be taxed because I've found a substitute communication method?
Electronic voting bothers me because the cost of failure is so high. Sure, it seems like a great way to make the system more user-friendly, and they talk a lot about the convoluted measures taken to protect the electronic results, but as with all security (especially national), the bad guys only have to scale the wall once. And when that, or just general technological snafus creep up, the price paid is at the level of disrupting basic principles of the democratic process.
California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley ended five months of speculation and announced Friday that he was decertifying all electronic touch-screen voting machines in the state due to security concerns and lack of voter confidence.
...
"Revelations regarding touch-screen machines have shaken public confidence in this voting technology," Shelley said, referring to four computer-science reports released in the last year that showed the machines to be badly designed and vulnerable to hacking. "It is my foremost responsibility to take all steps necessary to make sure every vote cast in California will be accurately counted."
Now, I'm not the swiftest horse in the barn, but this all seems to ignore the real problem. The issue with the Florida 2000 election (and subsequent ones as well) hinged on the unreadability of certain votes. Why in the world wouldn't it be acceptable to just create a better machine for punching ballot cards? You feed it in one end, touch the screen for your choices, a little punch-press stamps through the card and then it gets spit back out to you.
The technology is trying to improve on things no one really needs. The turnaround time for ballot counting isn't denying people life-saving services, no one goes hungry because returns take all night to count, and states aren't crippled by the costs of paper ballots. If the issue is readability, do it in a way that people can trust. If the machine jams, there's always the stylus for a "system redundancy."
The bigger prize, of course, is online voting. I'm betting companies that are interested in creating electronic voting booths are just thinking of the things as loss-leaders for the big contract: putting in a voting system anyone can access from the Internet. Since turnout is the true bugaboo of those who argue for better voting mechanisms, dispersing voting ability to the home, local library, or anywhere there is internet access would be the true end goal; attempts at better experiences in the highschool gym is just a testing method to see if people trust computers enough.
Though --and this is purely to be contentious -- I am confused by both of these positions: online voting is good because more people could get to a voting station; more voters is better. For the first, you're just going to increase the voting turnout among those people with ready access to a computer. This is all well and good, but doesn't address the imbalance such people often decry: white middle- and upper-class homes are more likely to have computers than other groups.
As for the second, what benefits result from improving turnout? Statistically, 50% of the voting-age population is definitely enough to get a theoretically representative sample (the disparaties between social groups notwithstanding for now). A vote shows no intensity of preference. When it's a plurality that matters, 35% is as good as 51%, just so long as that's the largest share. Would we be more democratic if turnout went to 65%? If more people voted and a third party got enough votes to result in the winner only getting the aforementioned 35% of the vote, would that person have fewer rights and powers in office?
Why should we care if more people vote or not? (I have my own answers, but like I said, I'm feeling a bit contentious today.)
How does one make America a wine-drinking nation? Simple--lower the relative price of wine. Fred Franzia--creator of two buck chuck--thinks he can convert the US, if only restaurants will sell wine for less than $10 a bottle, and BIG retail make only pennies on the bottle. So far, the chains are resisting:
Franzia's biggest challenge in cracking both the restaurant and import segments is finding willing business partners. With Two Buck Chuck, the profit for both Franzia and Trader Joe's is only pennies a bottle. Most companies can't be bothered with so much work for so little return -- or their volume is too low for such a strategy to pay off.
And few business owners are willing to cause the kind of broad-scale upheaval Bronco did with Two Buck Chuck. Franzia didn't have much to lose in an industry where he would easily be voted Least Popular Boy...
Franzia says Gallo complained that Bronco wine is too cheap.
"People are worried about prices going down and how long of a march it will be to get them back up," says Franzia. His goal, by contrast, "is to get more consumers to drink wine."
Read the entire article--by Carol Emert of sfgate.com
