Pangloss

Well there's no reason to get frustrated -- people were a bit set off by my subject line. I thought this thread could use a bit of a pot-stirrer, but in hindsight it was probably more interesting from a middle ground perspective. I think the comparison is good evidence of the value of fiscal conservatism, not so much regarding the party-line ideologies. I miss "Give 'em Hell" Zell.

Well okay "proprietary formats", then. It's not really standards I'm trying to get at here, so much as economic ideologies. The thing I felt that Berners-Lee might be overlooking is the motivational nature of private enterprise. He's not arguing against it, of course, he's pointing out the benefits of open standards, which is all fine and good. I just wondered if it's really the combination of the two that makes the Web so powerful. His perspective is understandable because it was the openness of the HTTP standard that made the Web grow so rapidly. But a lot of what's great about the Web today is commercial in nature. It's often paid for with advertising instead of subscription or usage fees, but the money motivation is still there. If memory serves, Google makes over $16 billion per year on advertisements on its search results pages. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is worth almost $7 billion. But "free" innovation isn't dead either. Many of my favorite places on the Web are non-profit forums like this one. The Wikipedia wasn't launched until 2001, and took a few years to really take off and catch people's attention; now we can't imagine a world without it. And nary a profit motive in sight -- a Wikipedia with pop-up ads is inconceivable. I guess what I'm wondering is if the Web is kind of a microcosm of hybrid economic ideologies -- socialist and capitalist. It wouldn't work without both of them present and contributing. Kinda like Western civilization as a whole.

Well whether they asked for an exception or not, they clearly don't want it to apply to them because of their faith. Which supports the conjecture of desiring a parallel society with its own rules. Here's another Muslim group upset on religious grounds: http://www.fiqhcouncil.org/ ------------------ It's not about fundamentalists, it's about mainstream Muslims living in the West. Conflating objections to mainstream Muslims and their requests for exceptions to Western law with objections to terrorism is a way of dismissing those objections without arguing their merits. Saying that people who object are "constantly mentioning the problems" and making things worse is another way of dismissing those objections without arguing their merits. If Christian fundamentalists were asking for exceptions to laws, or even just broadly hinting that it would like to have such exceptions, most of you who are objecting to this thread would be up in arms and screaming from the rafters about the imminent doom of society as we know it.

It's not about Dems being bad, it's about whether they're in the tank with special interests groups and labor unions that don't care about the budget. Whether a state's managers are Democrats or Republicans, if you let them fall too much under the thumb of special interests, bad things can happen. In the case of California that has meant pandering to labor unions and the unholy special interest trifecta of entitlement, the environment, and public safety. Like all special interests, these groups need to show their contributors "progress" toward some important concern each year -- needed or not -- in order to justify their own budgets. Regarding the point about having a Republican governor much of that time, I can't really imagine anyone calling Reagan progressive, but even San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome once famously called Schwarzenegger a center-left liberal. Ahnold went along with countless expensive plans even though this situation with the budget has been going on since before he came into office (a big part of why he got elected in the first place). For example, the state's 2006 Global Warming law was cited by an independent study paid for by the state as costing almost $100 billion dollars and a per-cepital loss of income for residents of up to 1% (source). Maybe he is a fiscal conservative trapped by a progressive legislature -- I've read that he was dealing with regular gridlock, and was constantly opposed by -- you guessed it -- labor unions. (Gee.) So maybe he did the best he could. What I really would have to see is more data on what is out of whack with their budget. One of the sources I mentioned said it's 58% over revenue, so what leaps to mind is -- is 58% of the budget spent on entitlements, safety and the environment? If not then it may not really be fair to say that they're out of whack due to progressivism being out of balance with fiscal conservatism. I'd also like to see how much it's grown over the last ten years, and the ten years before that, and where the growth specifically came from. In what way would it be "right" to say that a state's deficit doesn't matter? 2/3rds of the citizens of California have to approve the state's annual budget?

Why is that? You mean in the sense of having a large economy and lots of resources to work with? Sure, I guess so. The problem of not being able to cut anything because of special interests is pretty unenviable, though. I think it's a subset of the national problem. Again, we're not discussing "wealth", we're discussing budgetary shortfalls, and whether California Democrats (and their associated special interests) have demonstrated an inability to resolve them. You raised the question earlier asking whether Texas had more resources with which to fight a deficit, but I don't see where you've made that case. California is not exactly Poorsville, USA. Let me pose the question another way: If California can't balance a budget with THAT economy, what hope does the rest of the country have, and why do people feel that Democrats should be in charge? If it's just a matter of "better than Republicans", I can understand that, but my purpose in offering Texas as an example was not to show that Republicans are a better choice, but rather that fiscal conservatism is good policy. I'm sure if we look hard enough we can find a state with Democrats in charge that have done a better job. And I suspect that when we do, we will find that those Democrats have pursued a policy of fiscal conservatism, at least with regard to influences on their state budget.

Interesting opinion piece by Web creator Tim Berners-Lee in the new Scientific American. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-web He goes on at great length about the importance of Net Neutrality and the dangers of commercial Web sites like Facebook that don't use open standards. He makes a number of excellent points, but I think he ignores one that I thought might be interesting to discuss: Is it possible that the existence of BOTH open standards AND proprietary standards enables more ingenuity and development than would be possible with either of those ideological methods alone? I am all for most of what he's saying -- Net Neutrality, and the concept of regulation in general, are perfectly fine subjects for consideration and, where appropriate and after fair and open debate, implementation. What I'm wondering about is this underlying argument that "open is better". In a sense it's become a kind of second-tier competition between open and proprietary, with each having its own motivations and rationales. Maybe that's what we want. We'll take the benefits of both, and we shouldn't be afraid to step in when necessary and take some of the proprietary stuff away when it's best. By the time the people step in the entrepreneur has already made a fortune anyway, so you aren't killing that motivation. And in some cases we might even shy away from promoting an open standard because the need isn't quite there yet, allowing the proprietary types to create the need. What do you all think?

And the sheer size of Texas might have something to do with it as well. I'm not sure how directly personal income would relate to a budgetary shortfall. Texas is one of 7 states that does not have a personal income tax. Also, California isn't exactly Rhode Island. It's the veritable land o' plenty. Four of the top five agricultural counties in the United States are in California's central valley (source). Per capita GDP in California is 11th in the nation, and the state has more millionaires than any other state in the union. It has the largest economy in the nation. It exported $144 billion worth of goods in 2008. It has a progressive personal income tax that rises as high as 9.3%, from which it collects a whopping $40 billion per year, and that's only forty percent of the state's total revenue! (source) And yet it cannot balance its budget. According to the above source, it has a budget shortfall of $26.3 billion this year. According to this source it's actually $53.8 billion (58% of its budget!). Texas has a shortfall too, but nothing like California's (notice Texas' absence from the ABC News article). Why can't California balance its budget, with all of those advantages? There must be a reason.

I assume it took them a while to build up that deficit. If not the contrast is highlighted even further.

Fair enough, Skye, I think that could be reasonably said to counter the question I posed (which you quoted). But for the thread as a whole, we're not really talking about static situations, we're talking about dynamics ones. I'm not sure how 2008 income addresses the subject (and if it did, I'd want to see cost of living factored in). Same thing with the historical data on presidential administrations -- we've had that discussion in the past and I agree with that assessment in general. But Democratic (see? I said it!) Presidents have not generally been as progressive as Californian governments -- I think I can safely say that based on the general truism that California has passed so much progressive legislation that has failed to pass in the rest of the country over the years (though I harbor no illusions about California being some sort of socialist state -- I'm not saying that). What we're looking at here is the suggestion that California has been badly mismanaged under decades of progressive control. Texas seems to be an interesting study in contrast. Where is that reasoning wrong?

True. But whether that means "as a nation we embrace christian values of peace and love and let's all sing kumbaya!" or "as a nation you must worship god or we will destroy you" is a matter of interpretation. Suggesting that it must be the latter is fear mongering, and part of what's wrong with this country right now. In my humble opinion. Uh, okay, what's your evidence for that? I think CAIR (one of the groups asking for this) is very MUCH in the tank with the left at the moment. It's the left-leaning blogosphere that supports and defends CAIR, and the right-leaning blogosphere that attacks it (largely unfairly) on a daily basis. CAIR is also in bed with the mainstream media. From their Wikipedia article (with sources listed on that page): Not to mention the government. And the ACLU. When Barbara Boxer, one of the few Democrats who have bucked the trend here, first raised questions about CAIR, she was immediately denounced by the ACLU and many outspoken liberals. So I think the Muslims the left stands up for ARE (generally) the same Muslims who want to create a set of laws above state or federal law. I don't really think they're out to create a completely separate Sharia Law, but they want exceptions, and they're getting support from the left (in general, if not in specific to that end). Oh sure, I believe that. On the small scale that's undoubtedly true, and of the right too, not just the left (as you might agree). But we're talking about self-generated stereotypes created by large groups to chastise other large groups. It's not rational individuals we're discussing. It's irrational mass groupings -- both those who make the crass judgments, and those being crassly judged. Let me give an example to show how the stereotypes in question were created by people themselves: The View, on ABC, with Barbara Walters, Whoppi Goldberg and Joy Behar, et al -- it's very much like Fox News and MSNBC in that its dynamic is base populism, but it's much more immediate and even more superficial than those networks are. It deliberately reaches out for the clumsiest, almost deliberately sub-sentient emotional reactions possible, farming the roots of feminism, while always being OH SO CAREFUL not to define it as such, presumably because even overly reactive and emotional women don't like being told that that's what they are. I had a female friend many years ago who was a coworker, a charming young southern woman with the most outrageous southern accent you ever heard. She grew up on a farm in rural Georgia, and had many amusing anecdotes about her upbringing. One day a group of women executives was brought through our department, and they seemed like they might have hit the wine a bit hard during the luncheon they'd just gotten back from. They were so busy chatting with each other that they didn't even notice us employees in the room. They made a ton of noise, and were talking about the most inane and trivial things you could imagine. In short, they sounded like the ladies from The View. After they left my friend looked at us in relief, and said, "My my, for a minute there I thought I was going to have to throw down some feed!" That's The View in a nutshell right there. And that's why Whoppi Goldberg and Joy Behar got angry at Bill O'Reilly. He tripped a trigger word or phrase that was on their PeeWee Herman-like list for the day, and they got all high and mighty about it, and next thing you know the two of them are stumbling off the set looking like a couple of aging pigs waddling up to the trough. And every woman in the audience was going "woo! woo! woo!" like they'd just had an Oprah sighting. But I'll bet if you'd ask them to define the exact nature of their disagreement, they couldn't have really done so in a coherent fashion. In short, I thought I was going to have to throw down some feed. Point is, people stereotype themselves. And I'm more than happy to reflect their stereotypes back upon them. I understand, and you're right. Similarly, we can't even celebrate ANYTHING anymore because we're so busy making each other wrong. No accomplishment can be achieved, no goal can be reached, no project can be completed. Nothing. It's a recipe for disaster. My only complaint is when people here "Wharrgarbl" about it being the right's fault. ======= ydoaPs I think I addressed most of your questions with my reply to padren, but there are a few loose ends. Why is it okay for you to equate law-breakers with the entire conservative movement, and then challenge me for generalizing about the entire liberal movement? Most conservatives I know don't want this. I've met a few who raise the question of teaching creationism alongside evolution, but even that tentative footing is largely defunct in the mainstream conservative community at the moment. The extremists certainly keep it alive, of course, but not the moderates, at least in my experience. Well for example it's a big deal if Muslim women don't have to undergo the same security procedures that I do because of their religion. That's not fair. ----------- I posted a link earlier that CAIR and other Muslim groups were asking for an exception to airport screening on religious grounds. Hypothetical != fictitious. Hypothetical = unobserved. Or we can recognize that there are two different (if distantly related) problems under consideration, and give some time debating both of them, instead of saying that anybody who believes position X about the one debate is actually just conflating it with another debate. Put more clearly, the mainstream Muslim world is in a time of high turmoil right now internally. There's a serious schism over the degree to which the religion should bend itself in its effort to be compatible with modern western civilization. That schism has lead to conflicts with western governments that have nothing to do with the war on terror, such as the burqa ban in France, the conflicts between Muslims and the governments of France and Great Britain, and the so-called "ground zero mosque" conflict in the US (yes, much of that may be fueled by thoughtless extremist conservatives, but at least SOME of it is fueled by a reluctance within the Muslim community to take actions that might be viewed as compliance and compromise). And right now, in my opinion, in American politics, conservatives are talking about that issue (with some eggregiously inflating the issue in acts of fear mongering, while others discuss the matter rationally and with considerable intelligence), and liberals are (by and large) desperately trying to ignore the issue lest they be seen as being politically incorrect. ======= I agree with you that the left generally supports religious freedom. But let's be fair: Not everyone on the right "flips out" every time Muslims want to build a mosque, etc. It's just a vocal minority that gets a sad amount of media attention and a lot of outrage from the Rachel Maddow types. BTW, Fox News reporterd the Carolina mosque and Koran-burning stories from a NEGATIVE perspective. Not a positive one. Their conservative analysts say how bad that is, giving conservatives a bad name, etc. MSNBC analysts gloat about how it shows all conservatives to be ridiculous and evil. Fox News did report the GZM story from a positive perspective, but their angle was sensitivity to the dead, which I think is a valid point. They split a hair there, but there is common ground. (MAN you guys covered a lot of ground today. I think this may be the longest post I've ever made!)

Yes, it is. It's fear-mongering to imply that the law has not been followed by the religious right. Why, hiring a good lawyer and special interest group to rally your cause and attempt to find loopholes and ways around regulations is the American way, swansont! Just as NOW, the ACLU, labor unions, environmental groups, peace activists, etc. So as far as I can tell the comparison with Muslims asking for exceptions to the law is accurate. Yes, I believe that. After finding a way to make it the fault of conservatives, of course. What I think is that comparing the nation's 2.5 million Muslims with a weird political splinter group is invalid. As far as I know we haven't been attacked by any terrorists claiming affiliation with that group, nor does its presence in the politial landscape (or the ideologies behind it) cause a rift in the larger body of conservatives, the way Muslim extremists are causing a rift within the body of mainstream Muslims. True, and the secular/atheist left does the exact same thing. Beyond the logical folks who just want biology teachers left alone, there are those who want to push a secular-progressive agenda onto school children so they can win their little hearts and minds and make an end run around their knuckleheaded parents. But you're right, it's true that the Christian right does that too. And I can understand why you see that as more of a threat, since there are more of them. What I don't understand is why, in order to deal with the Christian right, we have to embrace the secular-progressive left. We're constantly fed an ideological merry-go-'round, a choice between one extreme and another. As opposed to a solution involving what used to be normal people and normal behavior.

Fascinating opinion piece in Forbes this week by Joel Kotkin, a scholar on urban development who has written opinion pieces for a number of papers and magazines including the New York Times, and is a former fellow at the New America Foundation, a centrist think-tank in Washington. Kotkin's argument is that it is surprising that California has re-elected a progressive government following half a century of mismanagement and failure, and that Texas is an interesting example of the opposite result from a conservative government. His argument is far from perfect, but it's worth a look. California's unemployment rate is fourth in the nation at 12.4%, almost 3 points over the national average. Texas is only 8.1%, 32nd in the nation, almost two points below the national average. And yet while other traditionally-liberal states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Nevada have been moving toward more fiscally-conservative governments, California remains steadfastly liberal. But just look at the contrast with Texas: And although you wouldn't know it from the regular thrashing Texas gets on this forum, it's also quite the breeding ground for jobs in the technology sector. Gee. And it gets better, with Californian politicians in complete denial. Texas is even a leader in green jobs, with the largest wind energy production in the nation! Which is not to say that everything is rosy in Texas. The budget has a deficit, they have too many uninsured workers, and its infrastructure is poor. But even so, people are flocking there in droves, while people are LEAVING California (according to the article, CA's flight statistic is almost double TX's influx number!). Pretty fascinating considering that BOTH states border Mexico. What do you all think? You can check out the whole article here: http://blogs.forbes.com/joelkotkin/2010/11/15/california-suggests-suicide-texas-asks-can-i-lend-you-a-knife/

I don't understand. I agree that there would have been fewer "terrorists" in the world had we not invaded Iraq. What I'm saying is that there is a difference between well-organized, global terrorism initiatives, and the kind of cafeteria terrorists produced by a warzone, with its corresponding economic and social upheavals. Why is that a 'false comparison'?

They can vote and in enough numbers to get their way -- to change the law (not make an exception to it). Muslims can also vote but they are a very small minority and in our winner takes all system they're largely irrelevant for voting purposes. So are you saying that Muslims are dangerous too, but you say that they're not dangerous because their numbers are smaller? Did I read that right? If that's representative of liberal opinion it's pretty fascinating. It seems contrary to what the left says, which is that it's standing up for downtrodden, scapegoated western Muslims. Apparently what that really means is "until they acquire as much political power as Christians". I wonder, then, why Whoopi Goldberg walked out on Bill O'Reilly when he said we were attacked by Muslims on 9/11. I mean, if the only difference between what the left thinks of western Muslims and what the right thinks of western Muslims is a matter of relative political power, then I wonder why she was so offended.

Okay, but if it's so impossible for a religious group to obtain exceptions to the law, then why is there so much fear-mongering from the left about the religious right?

You appear to have missed the majority of my post. I'll paraphrase it: I think in looking at "producing more civilian terrorists" we have failed to distinguish between producing a long-term terrorist motivation and the kind of short-term terrorism that goes away as soon as local economics improve. We tend to lump the two together as if they're the same thing. I don't believe that they are. In Iraq we dug in our heels, put out the biggest fires, and focused a lot of resources on the infrastructure, economy and government. It's paid off (number of attacks down since the surge), though clearly the job is going to be very long term even after we leave. On the other hand, we could have pulled out in 2007 -- would that have made the terrorists go away, or would they have grown and thrived amidst the Gaza-like rubble?

Lol, I didn't even think to do the math on that. That's hilarious, I went and put it on my Facebook page. BTW, the TSA budget is about $8.1 billion. So that's $62,307,692.31 per captured bong. (snort)

There is an exception to that. Namely, if the goal of the policy is to reduce terrorism, as in fighting a "war" on it. Just saying. You're saying that if you go do something (militarily speaking) in order to reduce terrorism, and you instead increase it, then that's an error, right? That's fine, but I think in looking at the story of "producing more terrorists in Iraq", for example, we (as a society) have failed to distinguish between producing a long-term terrorist motivation (which I agree it's an error if we've produced more of this), and the kind of short-term terrorism that goes away as soon as local economics improve. The number of terrorist attacks that took place in the mid-2000s in Iraq was staggering, and it was produced in part by the US presence there. But we dug in our heels, put out the biggest fires, and focused a lot of resources on the infrastructure, economy and government. It's paid off (number of attacks down since the surge), though clearly the job is going to be very long term even after we leave. On the other hand, we could have pulled out in 2007 -- would that have made the terrorists go away, or would they have grown and thrived amidst the Gaza-like rubble? There's an even simpler justification there: If the terrorists are mad, you're probably doing something right.

Some of the comments on that Bruce Schneier post are interesting. TSA chief Pistole testified before Congress yesterday, and one of the claims he made was that the TSA has detected and stopped 130 prohibited items in the last year. (article) But he did not provide specifics about those items, except to say that some of the prohibited items captured (all of them??) were drugs and related paraphernalia. Frankly, that makes me angry. He's not a prison warden, and I am not a prisoner! The fact that they stopped other passengers from carrying illegal items that are no danger to other passengers is not evidence that he's doing his job. That having been said, I understand that it's a difficult job and security in a democracy is always a tough nut to crack. They say they're open to some changes, so we'll see what they do. IMO that just underscores the point that it's all "security theater", but I've always felt that it's probably impossible for us, as a society, NOT to over-react to terrorism. It sucks but in the end it's not Pistole's fault, or Obama's, or Bush's.

I've been thinking for a while now that it might be beneficial if Computer Science and Information Technology were to embrace the field of Statistics at a more fundamental level. Currently CS/IT programs tend to treat statistics as a necessary evil. But not only is it important for our own field, but pushing the science forward benefits researchers in other fields too. Especially in the modern world of exabyte-scale "data observatories".

Airport security screening is a huge topic right now in US politics. "Passenger outrage" seems to be quite a popular topic in news and pundit reports, though I'm not real clear if there are numbers to actually support the stories. Several advocacy groups have stepped forward, but that doesn't always reflect actual numbers. But some of the stories have been amusing, such as the 3-year-old getting a pat-down in this YouTube video: I thought since we have an international membership here it might be interesting to hear how it's done in other countries. Do you have body scanners? Do you have to get a full physical pat-down if you don't pass the scanner? And if people want to talk about the US situation in this thread that's ok too. I'm really wondering how it's going to work out with the flight crews, who are really upset about radiation from the new backscatter x-ray scanners.

This has come up before, most notably in the Bob Woodward books. The Woodward books, incidentally, were frequently criticized during their tenure on the bookshelves, but many of their more controversial aspects were confirmed by the Bush memoir. My general impression from those books was the same -- that it wasn't a matter of "faulty intelligence", so much as it was a very complex question with nobody (not even Hans Blix, as that article points out) precisely sure what was going on. There was, of course, one absolute certainty: Hussein didn't comply with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441. I don't claim that that justifies the war, just that if you're the UN and you're not going to enforce a resolution like THAT one, then what resolution are you EVER going to enforce? Seems like a legitimate question to me. But of course they couldn't get it together, and that's why I opposed the war -- not the "blood and treasure" (the stupidest phrase in politics, IMO), but the sheer, realpolitik problem of going in without international agreement. You're asking me? I don't call it "illegal".

Western Islamic leaders can't even agree that they should submit to the same security standards as other Americans. The sheer gall of that is just staggering. http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2010-02-11-airport-scanners-muslims_N.htm If the Obama administration grants Muslim women a pat-down pass because CAIR asked for it, the spam is going to hit the fan. Y'all can say whatever you want about root causes and unfair generalizations, but the irony here is pretty obvious. If such a forbearance were passed it would hardly be restricted to women in burqas -- any Muslim would be able to ask for it. Any Muslim. Gonna be kinda tough to ignore the flyover states when you're falling all over them in bits and pieces.

Does the Canadian government have a motivation for "fearmongering"? I'm not entirely familiar with Canadian politics, but it's my understanding that their current PM is a conservative, which will certainly help some folks here leap to conclusions. I agree with you that the content of the report would seem to be relevant. Perhaps not, but that's not what I said. What I said was that in my opinion the Western Islamic movement seems to be struggling internally with its own compatibility with Western culture. I believe that to be the case, and it's also, by the way, the subject of this thread.