Telecommunication immunity

I have to say that I can't find anything other than a completely cynical explanation for why congress would even consider granting immunity to the telephone companies who cooperated with the NSA on warrantless wiretaps (for which they are getting sued).

To me, it is really quite simple. What the cooperating companies did was either illegal or it wasn't. I'm not a lawyer so I don't know for sure which side of the line what they did fell on. But it doesn't matter. If it wasn't illegal, then they don't need immunity. If it was illegal, then they shouldn't be granted immunity.

I suppose there's also a middle ground, whereby what they did wasn't illegal but was a violation of their policies with their customers (i.e., not a criminal offense but a potential civil liability). Even here, if they promise something and then break that promise - even if its for good reasons - they should not have immunity; those reasons - if in fact "good" - can and should mitigate any penalties, but they shouldn't prevent any attempt to claim damage.

I'm unfortunately left to conclude that there are only cynical explanations for the attempt to grant immunity here. For shame.

Death penalty

The death penalty has been in the news again lately, focused largely around the question of whether or not lethal injection is unconstitutionally "cruel and unusual" punishment.

On that particular question, I'd say "hardly." Folks get shots every day, it's not that big a deal. It has a bit of pain, sure, and I suppose there's certainly some mental anguish on the part of the condemned that the moment or two from injection to death are one's last. If either of these, though, meet the "cruel and unusual punishment" bar, then I can't imagine of any sort of punishment that doesn't.

Of course, this sideshow discussion ignores the larger moral/constitutional question of whether the death penalty itself meets that bar. I'd have to say that no, I don't think it does, when correctly applied. (Ahh, but there's the rub.) Mass murderer who has confessed? Seems perfectly reasonable. Parking violator? Seems a tad excessive. Good, so that's clean, but what about the 98.3% of all other criminals on death row fall somewhere in between those two extremes? That's, of course, a judgment call and what juries/judges are for.

Even though I have no a-priori opposition to the death penalty from a moral point of view, I've found that it's problematic from a pragmatic point of view. It all boils down to the basic question of whether or not the death penalty is doing what it is supposed to do, which is to (a) deter the most abhorrent crimes, (b) punish those who commit them, and (c) never ever punish an innocent person. The evidence for (b) is pretty strong; the evidence for (a) is weaker, and (c) is getting weaker every day. And given other claims that it's more expensive (due to appeals and so forth) to execute someone than to lock them up forever, the pragmatic qualities of the death penalty as applied today (a key qualifier!) look weaker.

A common argument in favor of the death penalty is that nobody has ever been proved to have been incorrectly executed. I think that's a bit of a false argument: once someone is dead, few people have the means or the standing to pursue post-mortem appeals, useful evidence is rare, and survivors generally want to move on.

But over the past few years, we have seen quite a few death-row inmates freed using DNA evidence, something that wasn't even available 20 years ago. If a measurable percentage of all current death-row inmates today are guilty-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt until DNA proves otherwise, then one must assume that similar convicts 20+ years ago would have been executed. And there's no reason to think that the percentage of convicts who are actually innocent would vary much over time. Therefore, the overwhelming likelihood is that we have, in fact, executed innocent people.

I think the proscription against executing the innocent is so strong that we should certainly halt any execution where there is a possibility that DNA or other new techniques have a possibility of proving innocence.

But other than beefing up safeguards to ensure that the guilty truly are guilty - not just beyond a reasonable doubt, but beyond a shadow of a doubt - I don't have a moral issue with the death penalty. If we can fix the system to where there is no risk of innocents being executed, then the decision of whether or not to keep the death penalty really should be dictated by whether it is cost effective (vs. life in prison) and actually achieves its deterrent goals.

Is a hate crime a distinct crime?

News today that congress is trying to tie hate crime legislation to the must-pass defense spending bill. Bush is threatening an unprecedented veto, it will be interesting to see if he actually does it.

What intrigued me about this story was not the surface story about the relevance of hate-crime legislation in a defense bill, or the political fight or model for passing this. Rather, it was this nugget in the story:

But Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas maintained the measure has nothing to do with the defense authorization bill. He argued that crimes should not be considered more or less despicable because of the victim's identity.

"All crimes of violence are crimes of hate," said Cornyn, a strong ally of the White House. "All ought to be judged according to the same criteria. All ought to be subject to the same range of punishments, given to juries able to convict people based on evidence produced in court (and) not based on (the) politically correct notion that some crimes are more heinous than others."

What is interesting about this statement is that it essentially argues that there is no such thing as "terrorism," that Sept. 11 was nothing more or less than a mass murder, a sort of Green River Killer on steroids.

The fact is that we do distinguish motive (pre-meditated crimes are considered more serious than heat-of-the-moment crimes) and, yes, victim as well. Fortunately, nobody is arguing that genocide is somehow distinct from - and more evil than - simply killing random people.

I've seen the argument before that "hate crimes" are problematic because, by weighing the intent/motivation, or the identity of the victim, they essentially criminalize thought. This is a pretty strong and compelling argument, but it doesn't quite pass muster for me for a pretty simple reason. Terrorism or hate crimes are distinct from the crime of the underlying act precisely because they carry a chilling message beyond the basic act. Burning a shed in a random person's yard is arson; burning a cross is clearly something more menacing to society, yet by Cornyn's argument, it is also simply arson.

Maybe I'm actually making Cornyn's point. Burning the cross is actually two distinct crimes: it's the underlying crime of arson, with an additional crime of harassment/intimidation (or whatever is the technical legal issue). But Cornyn seems to ignore the latter point.

When Matthew Shepard was beaten to death in Wyoming 9 years ago (the inspiration for the bill), it wasn't a random petty crime; it sent an intimidating message of fear among a population of people simply for being who they were. Whether you treat it as a distinct crime or as an attribute of the crime - is to miss the big picture entirely.

Good commentary on piracy and digital media

Good blog today on CNet about NBC/Universal's recent cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face move in cutting off their contract with Apple's iTunes. If people want your product and you're not making it available to them in a way that they can use and at a reasonable price, you shouldn't be surprised that you suffer piracy. That's not a justification for piracy at all - merely an explanation. Big media wants high prices and stringent controls; the market says "nope, not gonna happen." Big media needs to become much more customer-centric.

The Elephant and the Dragon

Late blog post, but a few weeks back I read The Elephant and The Dragon, a book about the rise of China and India and their differences by Robyn Meredith. I had seen her speak in Los Angeles in April; she plugged her book and it sounded quite interesting. Indeed it was - if you like Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat" then this book is definitely in the same vein, providing more historical/cultural context for Friedman's thesis with a little less focus on the "what's happening now."

The book is a quick read and perhaps a bit superficial (especially if you've read Friedman's works), but - partly due to its currency - nevertheless an enlightening comparison and contrasting of the quite different tracks that these two Asian Giants have taken.

Bush is finally comparing Iraq to Vietnam

But I think he's missing the point. He frames Vietnam as a war that we abandoned too early - and points to a lot of badness that happened subsequently (Khmer Rouge, re-education camps, etc.) as the result of our withdrawal.

What this misses is the exact same lesson that I believe he is missing in Iraq today: that you can have all the military success in the world, but having great success on a military mission that is fundamentally a political/social problem is like trying to keep your house dry by building the most incredible concrete foundation while ignoring the leaky roof above. You need the dry foundation for sure, but without the roof you're kinda wasting your time.

As far as I can tell, our military is doing a very good job of providing security, given the job we're asking them to do. The problem, however, is that our floundering on healing of ethnic divisions is counterproductive to the job we're asking the military to do. Every day that the divisions are not addressed leads to more people growing frustrated and taking up extremist roles. This is not "blaming America", but merely pointing out that we haven't fixed the leaky roof so we should hardly be surprised that the watertight basement is nevertheless filling with water.

Scary potential overreaching power grab

I've posted here a number of times about how the recording industry just doesn't get it with regard to DRM (Digital Rights Management) and copyright. While in no way condoning copyright violation or abuse, I feel quite strongly that the industry is usually its own worst enemy.

Today I saw news that the industry may consider sharing of music on one's home network to be a violation of their rights. Fortunately, this is still in the "novel theory" category, but it is a chilling point of view to advocate.

I personally have a rather large (5000+) collection of songs ripped from CDs (perfectly legal - for now, at least!) to my hard drives throughout my house. How often do I listen to a CD? Never anymore. How often do I listen to music from whichever hard drive is closest to me? Quite frequently. It's not worth the inconvenience of searching for the disc and moving it to the nearest player in order to play it.

Yet somehow, the (potential) argument being made by copyright holders is that somehow it is perfectly legal for me to listen to music in any room of my house if I go through a bunch of hassle-inducing steps to move the CD from room to room. But if I don't go through the physical motions, somehow that provides the basis for a copyright violation. How does the physical medium possibly change the copyright status of my listening to music? I've legally purchased the CD, which means I've legally purchased the right to listen to the music therein. I could certainly run speakers throughout my house, so why is playing it through arbitrary speakers in my house OK while playing it through a network to another computer which then puts it on speakers in my house somehow crossing the line? (To clarify above: I play from one of two sources; I keep two sources so that one is a backup of the other).

Here I am, playing by the industry's rules (i.e., actually BUYING the CDs!), and now they're saying they'd like to criminalize my behavior. If that isn't hating one's customers, I don't know what is.

Heck, now I'm seeing news stories of ASCAP demanding that restaurants and others pay royalties for playing copyrighted songs. This makes sense to me when the restaurant plays a CD (that's a public performance, not a personal use) or hires a band that plays covers (although in that case, shouldn't the musicians pay?), but they're also going after restaurants that have a TV or Radio playing. Maybe I'm missing something, but didn't the TV/Radio station already pay for the right to broadcast to an unlimited # of people? And if so, isn't making the restaurant pay "double dipping"?

Executive Privilege out of control

Congress wants Harriet Miers and others to testify about the firings last year of US attorneys that may have been politically motivated. Bush has claimed executive privilege and directed Ms. Miers not to testify, and she herself has declined to so much as show up for the hearings. And if Congress holds her in criminal contempt for doing so, they can only enforce that by going through the US attorneys, who work for Bush, who clearly will not pursue the matter. Check-mate.

Wow.

A few things have become painfully clear to me here:

• Ms. Miers should indeed be held in contempt. The claim of executive privilege may or may not apply here, but either way that's no excuse for ignoring a congressional subpoena. If you get a subpoena, you show up, even if all you do is repeat "I'm sorry, I cannot answer that due to (fifth amendment, executive privilege, I'm washing my hair, etc.)" all day. If your claim of executive privilege is valid, then you've fulfilled your duty.
• As for the application of executive privilege: I am too much of an amateur to judge that, but if there is a suspicion of illegal activity (and political considerations in hiring/firing of career attorneys or political pressure that has the effect of interfering with day-to-day duties of attorneys would be illegal if true), my understanding is that privilege does not in fact apply.
  
• If she is held in contempt and Bush sits on the contempt charge, then he should be impeached for obstruction of justice. This is a serious statement I'm making, but he's doing an end-run around the careful system of checks and balances. At this point, it is not about executive privilege, it's about responding to congressional subpoenas, and nobody should be above the law on this point, even if they are a friend of the president.
• President Bush is clearly making a strong statement that he believes that executive privilege applies to anything to which he declares that it applies, and that such declarations are not subject to any sort of challenge or review by anyone but himself. This a remarkable statement - privilege may or may not be as broad as he claims, but the notion that it is essentially unquestionable is quite disturbing and I have a strong hunch that the judiciary might take a different view of this. Normally, I'd think that such an accusation against the president is overly harsh and cynical, but after the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity and the commutation of Lewis Libby's sentence, there is a pretty strong pattern of not accepting oversight within this White House.
  

I am going to be writing a bigger check to the ACLU than I wrote last year.

UAW/Detroit labor negotiations

So it seems that the UAW is beginning its bargaining with the Big 3, hoping to walk the fine line between acknowledging that they have to help a troubled industry, and avoiding the face-loss of giving up any benefits.

Seems to me that this is rooted in an unfortunately too-typical short-sighted/self-defeating tactic of winning the battle at the expense of losing the war. If the unions preserve benefits packages that are uncompetitive, they may keep benefits or jobs in the short term, but they will ultimately find themselves with fewer members overall as the industry downsizes.

I suppose I should be up-front here about my general anti-union bias: while I support unionization and the right to collective bargaining, I feel that the vast majority of unions are net-negatives for their workers and for the unionized industries. They all-to-frequently foster an us-vs-them attitude within a company (as opposed to "our company vs. our competitors", which it should be), or a highly inefficient and unhealthy bureaucracy (the NEA and UAW are classic cases of this), or general impediments to innovation and nimbleness.

This time the UAW professes to understand the trouble that the Big-3 are facing. I would propose that the negotiators try to call this bluff. If in fact the union recognizes this, then they should be part of the solution. Instead of negotiating a contract that enshrines certain benefits or jobs, they should negotiate a performance-based contract. If the union improves productivity, provides more flexibility/nimbleness/innovation/quality, and otherwise meets lower costs-per-car or increase efficiency targets, then the automakers should actually promise them a net INCREASE in benefits than they currently receive. But if things remain the same or net efficiency decreases, then the union should see their benefits shrink accordingly.

The same should go for executive pay, frankly: although their performance is, in theory, already tied to performance by being so heavily weighted towards stock/stock-options, it is far too common for them to preserve compensation through other means even when the stock does poorly. If they're going to ask the UAW to have more skin in the game, then the executives should do likewise and truly and unambiguously tie their compensation to specific performance targets.

It's funny what can happen when people's interests become aligned.

Ahh, justice.

In case it got overshadowed by the Paris Hilton circus, I thought I'd highlight an example of our judicial system showing common sense, albeit far too late. Trouser guy lost.

The bad news: how did this ever make it to a trial?
The even scarier news: this guy (the plaintiff) is a judge in our legal system? Yikes!
The scarier still news: Paris is out of jail, which I fear means she'll be even more in the news.

When religion and career collide.

I came across this story a few days ago about doctors who are unwilling to provide medical services for which they have a moral objection. This is similar to other cases in the news lately about pharmacists who are unwilling to provide RU486 or even less broadly controversial things like birth control pills, or Muslim cab drivers who refuse to carry passengers who are carrying alcohol, or checkout clerks at Target who refuse to handle pork.

The common thread, of course, is the imperative of one's religion vs. the needs of one's employer or one's customer. My view, however, is that if your religion and the duties of the job collide, you should take another job.

This position is easiest to defend in the case of employees serving customer demands. Let's use McDonald's as an analogy. You don't hear cases of kosher Jews seeking employment at McDonalds but demanding to be exempted from handling non-kosher food. And I suspect that if such a case were to arise and a lawsuit ensue, it would be laughed out of court. Employers are required to make reasonable accommodations for their employees, but changing the fundamental business that they're in cannot be considered "reasonable."

Similarly, employees who patronize McDonalds would be aghast to order a cheeseburger and be dissuaded from doing so by a kosher or vegetarian server. This is essentially no different from the Target, taxi, or even pharmacy examples above.

Of course, one might note that a vegetarian or Jew is obviously free to leave McDonalds and open a vegetarian or Kosher restaurant, but there are two key differences that differentiate this from the examples above: (a) doing so is no longer contradictory to the stated goals of their employer, and (b) customers can clearly see the focus of the new offering and make an informed judgment whether to eat at the new restaurant or elsewhere.

This is where things get a bit tricky for the MD example with which I started this post. A doctor takes an oath to do no harm, and if one's view is that abortion is murder, then this is a judgment about crossing a medical line (doing harm) and hence it seems to me perfectly appropriate for the doctor refuse treatment or to refuse to make a referral. However, just as I wouldn't want a vegetarian to lecture me when I patronize a McDonalds, I think that the decision by a doctor to exercise this conscientious objection imposes on them a responsibility to inform patients up front of this fact so that the patient can make a decision whether or not to see that doctor, in much the same way that the kosher person can discover and patronize kosher restaurants.

Heck, faith healers and witch doctors are free to offer their services to anybody that chooses to utilize them, but obviously would label their services as such (and in fact, legally must not put forth as being licensed physicians).

Here's the rub, though: fast food is a pretty efficient free-market system. Customers weigh choices according to a variety of factors and make a decision, and providers compete for their business. Medicine, however, often does not operate according to these principles - especially emergency medicine. Insurance takes cost out of the equation for many, and when one is dealing with one's health much of the normal tradeoffs go out the window: you want the best treatment you can have. In an emergency, of course, such as the rape example cited above, there's no time to make a decision, and the doctor therefore is in quite a powerful position to not only treat the patient, but to also inappropriately impose their particular world view upon them, whether wittingly or not. After all, you wouldn't want to go to an emergency room after a car crash and be refused a much needed transfusion by a physician on religious grounds if you did not in fact share that religion. As a result, I have a very hard time supporting emergency room physicians who are unwilling to provide legal services requested by their patients.

If you're not willing to make the cheeseburger, don't work at McDonalds. If you're not willing to treat your patients or fill valid prescriptions, then you should clear your moral conscience by not working in emergency situations or in a pharmacy.

New Blokus Champion?

Tonight Parker saw our Blokus game and asked me to play it with him. At first I said no, it's a grown-up game, thinking that the rules were too hard, but he persisted and I relented and taught him how. The rules are actually pretty simple: you take turns putting down your color's tiles, your tiles have to touch corner-to-corner but cannot touch side-to-side; whoever has the fewest leftover tiles at the end wins. He picked up on the rules immediately, and even though we were both basically playing random pieces (there's a fair amount of strategy that you can/should employ), he almost beat me: I had 40 pieces left over, he had 41. Wow, Not bad.

Another great Fareed article

I've long been a fan of Fareed Zakaria's approach to world events, but I thought that this week's Newsweek cover story was exceptional.

Two quotes in particular, I think, are worth highlighting:

If one day bombs do go off, we must ensure that they cause as little disruption—economic, social, political—as possible. This would deprive the terrorist of his main objective. If we are not terrorized, then in a crucial sense we have defeated terrorism.

I've been railing for a while about the stupidity and futility of our approach to security, particularly at the TSA line at airports. Our approach is reactive and focuses on the symptoms, and in a quest for perfect safety against terrorism has imposed incredible costs for a gain in perceived rather than actual security. Banning liquids on airplanes simply does nothing serious for security - it presumes that the bad guys are not clever enough to think up ways around it, or other ways to attack. (For this reason, I've taken to declaring that I'm traveling with 6-8 pints of blood and asking if I need to drain it into 3oz bottles in a clear plastic bag.)

Such overreactions are precisely what Osama bin Laden has been hoping for. In a videotaped message in 2004, bin Laden explained his strategy with astonishing frankness. He termed it "provoke and bait": "All we have to do is send two mujahedin ... [and] raise a piece of cloth on which is written 'Al Qaeda' in order to make the generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses." His point has been well understood by ragtag terror groups across the world. With no apparent communication, collaboration or further guidance from bin Laden, small outfits from Southeast Asia to North Africa to Europe now announce that they are part of Al Qaeda, and so inflate their own importance, bring global attention to their cause and—of course—get America to come racing out to fight them.

More successful manipulation of us by the bad guys. Why can't we recognize that we're being played?

Hate crimes and terrorism

The recent sentencing of an ELF member for acts of arson that were legally found to be "terrorism" raised an interesting question in my head. Namely: how can people who frown upon laws against so-called hate crimes support laws that ban terrorism?

Many conservatives such as George Will and make a quite valid point in arguing against hate crime laws that it is a dangerous precedent to punish the same crime differently because of the motivation in someone's head. This amounts to punishing thoughts, which should make any lover of freedom shudder, even if the thoughts being punished are abhorrent. It is acceptable to pass a law that you cannot lynch black people, but it is not acceptable to pass a law that says you cannot be a bigot against black people; even the ACLU would agree with this.

And this brings me to terrorism. What distinguishes terrorism from mere destruction and mayhem? Is it not entirely about motivation and intent? Yet it would be hard to find a conservative (or liberal for that matter) who would argue that we shouldn't have laws against terrorism.

In fact, I have thought about this and have come to the conclusion that I cannot come up with a definition that distinguishes terrorism from hate crimes. It's a pornography thing - we know it when we see it. When a Sunni insurgent blows up a car in a Shiite market in Baghdad, we would call it terrorism. Yet if someone attacks a Muslim in America in (perceived) retaliation, say, for 9/11, we'd call it a "hate crime." Yet what really distinguishes these two heinous crimes? Both target innocent non-combatants for being who they are, not for anything they have done or any role that they play. I have scratched my head and I simply cannot identify any meaningful facet that distinguishes these two acts.

It seems to me, therefore, that logical consistency requires that you either support (in principle) the idea of anti-hate-crime legislation AND anti-terrorism legislation (assuming, of course, that the laws promise to actually be effective and otherwise reasonable), or that you support NEITHER of the two. I simply cannot see how one can be for anti-terrorism legislation, but opposed to the idea of hate crime laws.

So which position should one take? I think the George Will crowd is right on the one point - you cannot and should not outlaw abhorrent thoughts or points of view - but miss the critical larger point: "hate crimes" are crimes (arson, murder, etc.) that are made worse not because of the motivation or thoughts of the perpetrator, but because they are committed in order to intimidate a larger group. A mugger attacking a random person differs from a skinhead attacking a minority in that the first consists of a single crime, while the latter actually consists of two: the attack itself, and the intimidation of the minority group. Terrorism is, of course, exactly the same - the car bomb in the Baghdad market is not mere murder, but murder that intimidates a specific group beyond those actually killed.

Bush's disingenuous veto

Bush issued the second veto of his presidency yesterday, killing a war funding bill because it has a timetable for withdrawal of troops. I happen to agree with the president that arbitrary timetables are a bad idea (and hence think the veto was probably the right decision), but I think his rationale for the veto was disingenuous for two reasons.

The first reason was that he said that it substituted the judgment of politicians for that of commanders on the ground. That simply doesn't wash for me. For one thing, of course that's what it's doing; that's precisely the point of congressional oversight, of the power of the purse. Secondly, the bill doesn't dictate any tactics or strategy or anything affecting the commanders on the ground. Why? Because none of them have the authority to initiate a withdrawal. That decision lies with...the commander-in-chief, overseen by congress. As such, it is absolutely the sort of decision that we elect politicians to make.

The second reason I think Bush's rationale was disingenuous is that he stated that any funding request for our soldiers should be given and given cleanly. I don't buy this argument, though, because it is equivalent to saying that the only acceptable check is a blank one. Blank checks are obviously a bad idea for many reasons, but they are especially in appropriate when it is so clear to everyone (except Bush himself, it seems) that something needs to change.
The timetable may be a bad idea, but putting it in the bill has a very redeeming aspect: it makes it clear that things cannot continue as they have been, that Bush must be held accountable for making progress.

I've made this suggestion before, I'll make it again: Bush should get serious about wrapping up the war so that our troops can come home for the right reasons (i.e,. stability achieved in Iraq rather than a particular date arriving). This requires political and diplomatic progress, not military, and Bush has simply not shown any progress here over the past 4 years. It may have been our fault that we messed up their country, but the situation is what it is and the Iraqis need to take control of it, and Bush needs to drive that progress.

2 more education observations

I've been wondering a lot lately about parental involvement and student eduction. They have shown a slide at the Global Conference multiple times that highlights the impact of factors on student learning and achievement. Teacher quality is 43% of the impact, but parents/family was 49%. (The other 8% hardly seems to matter now, does it?) I could go into detail about how they measured it, but suffice it to say that teacher quality and home/family environment have almost all of the effect both positive and negative on student learning and achievement. It makes intuitive sense, of course - families that value education and nurture and support it tend to have kids that do better.

Yet this politically and institutionally, we seem to treat the job of educating kids as our schools' responsibility - almost as if it's their problem to deal with exclusively.

So I wonder, why can't we institute a formal contract between parents and teachers, that specifies what the teachers will do and what the expectations are of the parents? (I've heard of some schools doing this on an ad-hoc basis.) At the very least, it should include discipline expectations and food/clothing - after all, a hungry or cold student isn't likely to be ready to learn. But it should also include basic additional involvement like making quiet time available for homework/study every day, attending parent-teacher conferences, reviewing report cards and seeking remedial help when necessary.

Almost certainly this would need to be done school by school or district by district because conditions can vary so much. And I recognize that this can be hard for low income or single parents, but I think that the contract can point the parent to available programs and stipulate that they should be used if needed.

The point of doing such a contract is not to go about suing parents or anything like that, nor to assign blame when the kids don't achieve. The point is really twofold: (a) to highlight to the parent that education is a shared responsibility, and (b) to mitigate the inevitable problems and fights (and occasional lawsuits) that arise when a student is expelled for disciplinary issues, or gets a failing grade, or is held back a year. This mitigation would make it easier for teachers to choose to do the right thing rather than the easy thing.

My second observation arises from a session today that talked about play as a learning mechanism. A panelist made the observation that learning is fun, and the one place that we've done a great job of ensuring that learning isn't fun is...the classroom. I think these two points are dead-on. We are learning even when we are engaged in "mindless" play, even if it isn't intellectual pursuits. A laboratory or a kitchen are where we play to learn. I don't have a better idea for how best to learn theory and themes besides a classroom or textbook of some sort, but for "bottoms up" learning, I think that making play expose "academic" principles - whether physics, science, or social interactions - is a great way to teach and to learn. We should be more and more creative about incorporating these methods whereever they can lead to actual learning.

A few comments on education

I'm currently at the Milken Institute's Global Conference along with approximately 3000 other folks, listening to a bunch of panelist's talk about education (among other tracks). Not minor players either - Bill Bennett and Tim Pawlenty (governor of MN), heads of the state departments of education in MN, PA, MD, and OH, Sally Ride (talking about science), and others. Some interesting insights and talk (although, sadly, just talk - it is a conference after all).

Anyhow, my point is not to name drop but to make a few observations.

The first is that most teachers are underpaid. This is not particularly insightful - ask any teacher and they'll say that. This begs the question "so why do you teach?" The answer, it seems, is invariably some variation of "because I am so passionate about it." That's terrific and makes for great teachers, but at the risk of saying something offensive, I'll add this rebuttal: if you're so passionate about the profession that you're willing to work for peanuts, then you shouldn't be surprised that peanuts is what you get. In the same way that we have tons of actors who wait tables because they're passionate about acting but can't make a living with it, I wonder if we don't somehow have too many teachers in the system. If we had trouble hiring teachers, we'd probably see teacher salaries going up.

My second observation is around national standards for education. The topic came up several times today, and the general consensus seems to be that it's really hard to achieve national standards because education is such a local issue. I can't see how one can escape the need for national standards, though. The most obvious reason is the simple fact that family - and hence student - mobility is dramatically greater than what it was, say, 30 years ago. With students moving from district to district and state to state, the lack of national standards guarantees that they will have a disjoint experience.

The second reason to have national standards is that it has become apparent to me that, by and large, each teacher works in isolation and improvises how they go about teaching to a great deal. I recognize that it's really important for talented teachers to be able to devise creative methods for teaching; I even applaud this. But it also leads to discontinuities for students. Great musicians, however, all work from the same basic musical principles, and somehow this doesn't inhibit their creative expressions. Having consistent standards upon which teachers can "riff" would really go a long way to distinguishing good teachers from poor teachers, and provide better service to their "customers" by ensuring that they receive a more consistent service across their educational path.

FAA and user fees

The current FAA funding bill runs out soon, and the FAA and Bush administration are pushing an airline-backed plan for a new funding model. OK, I'm a pilot, so let me back up and explain the background. Today, the FAA, which provides safety oversight and runs our air traffic control system (the safest and most efficient in the world, I might add), primarily out of three sources: (a) a tax on aviation fuel, (b) a tax on airline tickets, and (c) a contribution from the general fund (i.e., regular federal taxes kick some in). It's super efficient to collect, it's proportional to the usage (fly more - use more fuel or buy more tickets - pay more), and it's worked well for...ever.

The new proposal not only jacks up the tax on aviation fuel (which would make sense if the FAA were underfunded, which it isn't), but more significantly impose new "user fees" on a variety of FAA provided services, including (most notoriously) any service provided near a major metropolitan airport. Since most major population centers are near major metropolitan airports, this means that most services for most pilots would carry non-trivial itemized charges. And since many of these services are not optional, this would add considerable expense to flying for the same services that are provided with adequate funding today.

I generally don't buy lobbyist arguments without a healthy dose of qualification, but AOPA.org (the lobbying arm for the general aviation community) has a wealth of articles explaining why this proposal is an obscenely bad idea, that are pretty much on target.

Therefore, I won't go into depth here except to summarize the key arguments against it:

• The FAA funding model isn't broken now, so why change it?
  
• With a wide variety of fee-incurring events, the cost of billing pilots and collecting for services rendered becomes significant relative to the revenue collected, resulting in a far less efficient model
• It raises the cost of flying for everyone, without any offered benefit.
• It has supremely bad - and dangerous - incentives built in.

I can pretty simply explain the "dangerous incentives": if you're a pilot in the air and have a situation develop (emergency or not), I think we'd all agree that the right thing is for the pilot to worry about their safety first. At the moment, there is no incremental cost associated with diverting to an airport, requesting assistance from Air Traffic Control (ATC), or getting an in-flight weather update from flight service. But if a call to flight service would incur a $10 fee, pilots would have an incentive to avoid the call and might find themselves inside a thunderstorm. If diverting to the closest airport or practicing landings have incremental costs, then pilots will have bad incentives to make bad choices. Of course, with the current fuel-based taxes, the pilot has paid for the service before takeoff, so there's no counter-incentive to taking advantage of every safety option available.

The European model for funding aviation services is built mostly around user fees. The net result? Almost no aviation in Europe other than the airlines.

Which brings me to my point. The main lobbyists in favor of this plan have been the airlines. I spent 6 years in the travel industry, and I might not have learned much, but I can say this: the airlines are among the most irrational self-destructive self-worst-enemy businesses out there (with the possible exception of the RIAA), so if they want something it is almost certainly a bad idea. Case in point is the fact that the airlines, as a whole, have lost money since the inception of the business a century ago. (Southwest airlines is a notable exception, but I digress).

Anyhow, at the risk of venturing a bit into the world of conjecture, the airlines' primary goal is to shift some of their cost burden onto general aviation. For an industry that is notoriously bad at making money or providing customer service, this is a not unreasonable goal. And it has a nice side effect of reducing traffic from private pilots in what the airlines regard as "their" airspace.

However, it seems to me that the airlines should be wary of getting what they want. For if this proposal passes, we will surely see two changes in aviation: (a) general aviation pilots will make poor safety decisions due to goofy financial incentives, resulting in more accidents, and (b) partly due to the nickel-and-diming, the increased overall taxation, and the resultant decreased safety, fewer private pilots would fly.

Thus the airlines would almost certainly get their side effect (greatly reduced general aviation), but they are ignoring classic price elasticity economics: if the price of flying goes up, fewer pilots will fly, therefore the contribution from those pilots will decrease. What will be the net effect? The FAA will want to maintain its funding level, so it will raise its fees. This will squeeze yet more general aviation pilots out of the system. Yet the airlines don't have any choice about availing themselves of FAA services, so they will end up picking up the tab. And it will be even more expensive for them than it is today, because they will have greatly reduced the contribution to the FAA from general aviation, requiring them to pick up the slack. Ahhh...unintended consequences. Nope, that's never bitten the airlines before.

Ronald Reagan is quoted as saying that the scariest words in the English language are "Hello, I'm from the government and I'm here to help." I think that the proposed user fees are a case where we could adapt this aphorism as "I'm from the airlines, and I have a good idea." In either case, the best response is to run away.

Bus vs. driving

One of the things I really miss about Boston is the great public transportation. When I lived there, I would take the T everywhere. Always the subway, though - I've never been a bus person.

Lately, though, I've been riding the bus to work on days when I can (namely, if I don't need to drive somewhere mid-day, or if I can leave work in time to catch the last bus home). It's actually quite nice to do - there's a park-and-ride near my house, and an express bus that goes from the P&R to a stop that is one block away from work with only a single stop in between and no transfers.

When I take the bus, I leave the house at 7:30am, get to the P&R at 7:36, catch the bus at 7:39, and am at my office by approximately 8:08, 38 minutes door to door. Since the bus travels in the carpool lane, there is very little variability day-to-day in drive-time.

When I drive, I leave the house at the same time but go a more direct route. Inevitably, as a single-occupancy car, I get caught at the metered on-ramp to the highway and in traffic once I'm on the highway, but even with that, I am generally in the garage at work by 8, and in my office shortly thereafter. There is, of course, more variability in my drive time, but surprisingly driving is actually almost always about 5 minutes faster door-to-door, even accounting for typical mid-week traffic. (Of course, on some days the traffic is really bad, and it can take me close to an hour to drive home.)

I pay $3 for the round trip on the bus. I probably burn a gallon and a half of gas for the round trip in the car, so call it $4.50 to drive, so on days that I take the bus I'm saving a bit of pocket change and save the planet a little bit from the gas I don't burn.

I also pay $100/month for parking in my building because I need to drive 40-60% of days for one reason or another. That works out to about $5/workday, or about $10 on average for my driving days. Since parking for the day a-la-carte would be about $10/day, I break even on parking if I drive about half the days, which I do. Of course, since I can't ride the bus every day, I have to pay this regardless of whether I drive or ride the bus.

So economically, if I drive half of my workdays, I'm effectively paying $4.50 of marginal costs for my commute, vs. $3 for days when I ride the bus. (Yeah, yeah, there are lots of fixed costs associated with driving, but I'd be paying them regardless of whether or not I drive or take the bus, so it's not appropriate to include them in the comparison.)

So all in all, it's a pretty good deal for the bus: I save ~$1.50/day that I ride, I remove a car from the road for the day, and (most importantly) I can read or catch up on work while someone else drives. Obviously, if I ride the bus more, then my per day parking rate goes way up, if I ride the bus less, my per-day parking goes down.

The downsides? Only two, really: it's obviously way less flexible than driving (I can't ride the bus if I can't leave work promptly at 5ish or else I'll have a long commute with transfers to get home, I can't stop to pick up dinner or groceries, etc.), and it's a bit slower door-to-door than driving, even with traffic.

Of course, the fact that this is almost point-to-point for me helps a lot; for many people, taking the bus involves transfers and a significant walk. That, I think, is the key problem with public transportation: people won't use it without a critical mass of saturation/density is important.

So I'm a convert. Now I just wish they'd build a subway system out here, or something that would make it much easier and faster to get from where I live into and out of Seattle.

And yet more evidence that the recording industry doesn't get it

And that they hate their customers. Now they want the right to commit fraud in the name of protecting their rights. Excuse me, but what exactly is it about pursuing copyright infringers that requires you to pretend that you're someone you're not? They're justification? "We're not talking about trying to go in and get customer information. In no case have we ever tried to do that." So essentially, it is "trust us", something that they are absolutely unwilling to do with their customers in the first place.

I've said it before: the recording industry hates its customers. If their business is shrinking, they need only look in the mirror to see why.