My Note from Home
Dear Mr. Blog: Please excuse Little Jimmy’s absence today. He had a big day at work followed by a lovely four-mile run along the C&O Canal out of Georgetown at dusk, and then a fundraiser for the Commonwealth Coalition at Brooke and Gene’s house. This was a very good excuse for missing Blog because it destroyed the theocracy, and there were meatballs. Mr. Little Jimmy Senior and I realize that in the meantime the IFW has migrated to Obsidian Wings and Unfogged, but kids who didn’t destroy the theocracy today just have more time for that kind of thing.
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Comment by Bruce Baugh —
October 6, 2006 @ 6:03 am
That sounds great, Jim. Insert envy here.
Comment by Species 8 —
October 6, 2006 @ 7:58 am
mmmmm…more govt intrusive meatballs please
Comment by Bill —
October 6, 2006 @ 8:30 am
Were the meatballs good? I had just come back from eating at Jandara and didn’t have any.
Comment by Barry —
October 6, 2006 @ 8:37 am
Libertarian and liberal meatballs, in a spicy philisophical sauce – the dish that keeps fighting *hours* after it’s in your stomach.
Comment by Nell —
October 6, 2006 @ 9:01 am
What’s IFW?
I read it as the ‘Intire F***ing World’…. (because that’s how we pronounce ‘entire’ around here).
Good on little Jimmy for doing his theocracy-destroyin’ bit. Maybe those $$ will mean the CC will provide nice printed signs we can put out among the candidate signs near the polling places. In case not, we’re making our own…
Comment by Leonard —
October 6, 2006 @ 9:09 am
Nell: Internet Forever War
Comment by Eric the .5b —
October 6, 2006 @ 9:48 am
And little Jimmy reminds me that I need to find a way to do my part…
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
October 6, 2006 @ 11:57 am
Nell: It strikes me that before the furball about campaign finance started, I never did give you a positive answer about what types of good-government initiatives would float my boat.
So, at the very top of the list is keeping Diebold far, far away from election booths in particular, and making our voting systems work well in general. Electronic voting machines have the potential to be much more fraud-resistant than what we have now, and it would be a disaster to adopt these awful, non-transparent, easily hijacked pieces of junk.
Next up is districting reform. The sorts of shenanigans the Republicans pulled in Texas differ only in degree from the situation in most of the country — our country is in the perverse situation where Senate races are generally more competitive than House races, only because you can’t gerrymander state borders. I’d like to see the Iowa model adopted nationwide.
Then, come a bunch of relatively boring technocratic repairs. For example: abolishing no-bid contracts. For another, improving public access to our laws. A lot of bills work by defining small diffs to existing laws, and it would be great if the THOMAS website could also show you what the modified law would look like. This would make finding sweetheart deals and pork insertions much easier. In the same vein, improving the accounting standards the government uses to meet GAAP standards would be great, especially if line-by-line budget information were made more readily available. Another: a lot of federal agencies are in a shambles right now (eg, FEMA). Extending civil-service requirements so that the President is required to appoint a professionally-qualified head would be a good reform.
Then there’s a whole bunch of impossible dreams — eliminating farm subsidies, corporate welfare, killing the DHS, cutting our military budget by a few hundred billion, etc etc.
Comment by Species 8 —
October 6, 2006 @ 12:53 pm
Neel: From the meatball link above; scrolling to the bottom of the article, that once again, BushCo will ignore qualified people. What a surprise.
Comment by Leonard —
October 6, 2006 @ 1:15 pm
Neel, I’d add to your list abolishing the franking privilege. It served a purpose back in the day when snail was the only mail, though even then I think it was abused as much as used. But now the internet would serve fine both for purposes of cheap mail with constituents as well as progress reporting.
Of course, having the Congress vote to abolish franking is about as likely as them abolishing farm subsidies. But we can dream.
Comment by anodyne —
October 6, 2006 @ 6:05 pm
“So, at the very top of the list is keeping Diebold far, far away from election booths in particular, and making our voting systems work well in general. Electronic voting machines have the potential to be much more fraud-resistant than what we have now, and it would be a disaster to adopt these awful, non-transparent, easily hijacked pieces of junk.”
Amen.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
October 6, 2006 @ 9:07 pm
Neel, that’s a great list. I like it, and it’s good to reminded that fair, reviewable means can serve a bunch of ends at once – good tools are welcome.
Hey, I have a question about an issue I’ve genuinely not formed a strong opinion about. If you’d like to sway my mind about requiring or favoring open source code in government software projects, this would be a fine time for it.
Comment by Phillip J. Birmingham —
October 6, 2006 @ 10:17 pm
“Let’s see, Mr. Henley. Jan 12, meatballs. Feb 3, destroyed theocracy. May 9, destroyed theocracy. July 22, destroyed theocracy, meatballs. August 28, destroyed theocracy. September 30, meatballs.”
Comment by Keir —
October 7, 2006 @ 4:26 am
Pros for Free Software:
It is Free.
It tends to be more reliable.
It tends to be less designed for selling, and more designed for using.
Cons:
It tends to be designed for use by people whose idea of top UI is Emacs. Or Vi. Or Ed.
It is my opinion that the Freeness of a package should be considered, but it shouldn’t be required.
However, in terms of standards, free and open standards should always, always, bar none, be used.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
October 7, 2006 @ 9:00 am
Keir, I wasn’t thinking of the purchase cost but of the open-source aspect – the opportunity to verify being the thing I’m concerned with. Good phrasing about the UI problem, though.
Comment by Jim Henley —
October 7, 2006 @ 9:37 am
Bill, meatballs were yummy!
Philip: I have a lot of theocracies!
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
October 8, 2006 @ 11:06 am
For voting machines, the source code and full plans right down to the circuit board diagrams should be publically available. Anyone who says this will make the system more difficult to secure is either confused or lying.
More generally, I’m a zealot when it comes to free software. A decade ago, I thought Richard Stallman was a crank, but the past ten years have shown his predictions about how copyright law would evolve proven entirely correct. I think that the government should use free software whenever possible, as a particular instance of the general idea that everyone should use free software whenever possible.