Voting Systems

The recent U.S. Presidential election shed some doubt on the voting system used.  The election results did not match the popular vote, and once again, people are calling for abolition of the Electoral College and a move to a pure popular vote system.  I have discussed this before, so I won't cover everything here, but now that the final numbers are out, I want to revisit a few things.  I also want to discuss voting systems in general, as well as how the U.S. Presidential voting system works specifically.

We all know Donald Trump won,  so I won't go into that.  Hillary Clinton got the most popular votes though.  First let's look at the numbers: Trump got 62,980,160 popular votes, while Clinton got 65,845,063 popular votes.  That put Hillary ahead by 2,864,903 votes.  That is almost 3 million.  As I mentioned before though, 3 million is hardly a relevant number in this case.  If there were 3,000,001 voters, a lead of 3 million would be a huge deal.  If there were 100 billion voters, 3 million is so small that it would likely be much smaller than the voting or counting error.  Here, proportion is the only thing that matters.  Hillary lead the popular vote by 2.2%.  Statistically, this is nothing.  This is such a small percentage that it could easily be the result of voting or counting error, or it could be the result of more nefarious schemes like vote buying.  (For the record, I am not making any accusations.  Until proven otherwise, I will assume that Hillary did indeed lead the popular vote by around a 2% margin.)  The point here is, 2.2% is easily within reasonable statistical error, and thus the popular vote should be considered a tie.  In addition, contrary to popular belief, Hillary did not win the popular vote.  Hillary did not win anything.  The Constitution requires an actual majority to count as a win.  Hillary's 2.2% or almost 3 million vote lead put her at 48%, which is 2% short of winning anything.  If a true popular vote system was used, The Constitution dictates that if a candidate does not get a majority of the votes, Congress will elect the President, and with a Republican Congress and 45.9% of the popular vote going to Trump, Congress would have elected Trump even if they did not want to.  Otherwise, they would have had riots on their hands (and worse, they would not be reelected).  What it comes down to is, no one won the popular vote, so there is nothing unfair at all about Trump being elected.

This still does not sit well with some people (admittedly, mostly liberals, who it would not have sat well with if Trump has won with 90% of the popular vote).  Why should elections be allowed to turn out like this, and why should The Constitution not let Hillary win with only 48% of the vote, if no one else got that much?  People wonder this because they don't understand the voting system.

The U.S. voting system is not one where you vote for who you want to be President.  It is one where you select who you don't want.  A vote for Hillary does not say that you support Hillary.  It says that you don't support everyone else.   The popular vote in the recent election does not suggest that a majority, or even more people, want Hillary to be President.  It suggests that 52% of people are against Hillary being President and 54.1% are against Donald Trump being President.  If anything, the popular vote indicates that neither Hillary nor Trump should be President, because a majority voted against them.

There is currently a misguided movement for states to select their electoral college based on the national popular vote, instead of the popular vote for that state.  The reason I say this is misguided is that it explicitly violates the intention of the voting system setup in the Constitution.  This new system would give whoever got the most popular votes the Presidency, whether or not that person had an actual majority.  While it is unlikely, it is entirely possible that a candidate could win with only a tiny percentage of the popular vote.  For example, given 20 candidates, one could win with barely over 5% of the popular vote.  With the more typical 5 candidates, it would only require barely over 20% of the popular vote to win.  20% of the popular vote means that 80% of the voters voted against you.  Under no circumstances should a person with only 20% of the popular vote become President, because a supermajority voted against that person!  This is the reason The Constitution requires an actual majority at the national level for Presidential elections.

Is there a way to fix this?  Not with a one-vote-per-person system.  One vote per person will always be votes where people select against all but one candidate, instead of voting for who they want.  This system also has other flaws.  For example, third party candidates pretty much never win elections.  This one-vote-per-person system, combined with the requirement for a solid majority is what forces the U.S. into a two party system.  As I have already demonstrated, eliminating the majority requirement is a horribly poor decision.  So, maybe we can do something about the one-vote-per-person part.

There are definitely options here, but none of them are perfect, and none of them are simple.  Additionally, the best ones are expensive.  One option is a multiple vote option, where each person votes for everyone that he or she is not opposed to.  In this election, that could have made a significant difference, as many potential Trump voters instead voted for 3rd parties, while most potential Hillary voters actually voted for Hillary.  It is likely, though not proven, that Trump would have gotten a majority of the popular vote, had 3rd parties not diverted votes.  This diversion of votes by 3rd parties is always a concern during Presidental elections.  The 1996 election saw enough Republicans voting for Ross Perot to hand the election to Clinton, instead of Dole.  Had we used a "who can we tolerate" system, Dole (or even Perot) would have stood a very good chance of winning that one, but a bunch of people who did not want Clinton wasted their votes on Perot instead, and the mere fact that votes can be wasted is a travesty.  The Founders of our nation devised the best voting system they could come up with at the time, but they were far more limited by their technology than we are now.  There is no reason we cannot improve the situation today.

The system I just suggested still has some serious flaws.  What if I really wanted to see Perot elected in 1996, but I was willing to put up with Bob Dole, if it came to that?  The system I just described does not give priority to anyone.  So, maybe Perot gets 51% of the popular vote with this system, but Dole gets 52%.  If those who really wanted Perot had not also voted for Dole, then Perot would have won (but then they would be risking Clinton, their least favor candidate, winning).  Of course, we don't even know how many people favored which candidate, so Dole wins.  Admittedly, this is still better than the current system, and it is way better than the popular vote system that is currently being pushed.  At least Dole was acceptable to a majority of people in this scenario, even if he might not have been the first pick.  Can we improve this?

This system is good, and it does not significantly increase the cost of elections.  We can do better though, also without increasing costs much.  We could let people vote using priority values.  Each person can vote for some number of candidates, but they have to number them by priority, and no two can have equal priorities.  In the 1996 scenario, I could vote #1 priority for Perot and #2 priority for Dole, to indicate that I can tolerate Perot or Dole, but I would prefer Perot.  Now, Dole can get 52% and Perot can get 51%, but if Perot is #1 priority for more people than Dole, Perot still wins.  In another case, we might see 3 candidates, where 35% of the people want one, 35% of the people want the other, but nearly everyone would prefer the third over the major candidate they don't want.  Using our current system, the third party would not get many votes, while the 30% that prefer the 3rd party candidate would vote for one of the two major candidates, just to prevent the other from getting elected.  This is a horrible situation, as it guarantees that someone that a majority does not want will get elected, even with a national popular vote system.  Using this priority system, people could confidently vote for their major candidate at the same time as expressing their rejection specifically of the other major candidate.  In this case, the third party would win, and while no one would be 100% satisfied, everyone would be content with the final outcome.  This system essentially allows voters to compromise, which is not only great for improving election outcomes, but it is also extremely good for reducing the current polarization of our major political parties.

There is a better way still.  This system will almost certainly make elections cost several times what they currently cost, because it requires multiple elections.  This is an elimination system.  The first election would be a candidate selection election, occurring shortly after the party primaries.  This election would include all candidates just like our current elections, and it would allow people to vote for as many candidates as they want (with the one stipulation that votes for all candidates will be discarded and ignored).  The top scoring candidates would then be the only candidates in the next selection.  The number of candidates selected is flexible, but fewer than 4 would probably be too few, and more than 6 would probably be too many.  The exception here is, candidates with less than 50% approval should never continue to the next round, even if fewer than 4 candidates move on.  This will eliminate candidates that most people specifically don't want, as well as unpopular candidates.  It will keep candidates that significant numbers of people would be happy with.  If there are more than 2 candidates in the second election, voters can vote for as many candidates as they want again, with the same stipulation that votes for all candidates are not counted.  Again, candidates with less than 50% are discarded, then the top few remaining candidates go on to the next round.  At this point, the selection criteria should depend on the number of remaining candidates.  If there are more than 3, then the top 3 are selected, otherwise the top 2 are selected.  In a top 3 election, everyone gets 2 votes, and if more than 1 candidate remains after eliminating those without a majority, a top 2 election is held (if, at any point, only 1 candidate remains, that candidate wins).  In a top 2 election, everyone gets 1 vote, and the winner wins the election.

This system is expensive, because it requires multiple elections.  It is, however, about the most accurate system possible.  The maximum number of elections depends largely on how many candidates can be selected from the first election.  If only 5 candidates are selected, and then 1 candidate is eliminated at each other election, 5 elections could take place.  Of course, this could be reduced.  My suggestion is that a maximum of 5 candidates are selected from the first election (fewer can always be selected, if less than 5 get a majority approval).  This gives the people the option to select from among some of the most popular 3rd party candidates.   The second election should select a maximum of 3.  In this case, 3 is sort of a magic number.  If only 2 are selected, it will almost certainly give an unfair advantage to the major parties, encouraging people not to vote for 3rd party candidates they like, in case it would result in a situation where it was a low probability 3rd party vs a major candidate they don't want.  The final election should be one-vs-one, and voters get only 1 vote each.  This is only 4 elections, and that is only the worst case.  If the first election only has 3 candidates with more than 50% votes, then it goes straight to the 2 selection vote, reducing it to 3 elections.  Of course, in theory, in the initial election, one very popular candidate might be the only candidate to get a majority of votes, in which case the election would be decided (due to a technicality in The Constitution, allowing Congress to pick the day of the final election, a second one would probably still have to be held on a date picked by Congress, as a formality).

This elimination system would provide a number of benefits.  The obvious benefit is that narrowing the options in steps would give the best possible representation of the will of the people.  It would put 3rd party candidates on close to equal ground with major party candidates, allowing the people to feel more confident voting for the candidates they actually want, instead of just voting for the one they feel they have to, so the one they don't want does not get elected.  In addition, it would help people to gauge what everyone else wants, which is very conducive to effective compromise.  For example, maybe you notice, in the first election, that your favored candidate only barely made it to the next round, while the other candidates easily made it.  Now you can choose to either keep pushing for your favored candidate, even though it is clear that the majority is favoring others and like yours as the worst option they can tolerate, or you can choose to move your support to your second favorite, who has significantly more support.  For you, your second best may be almost as good, which would make a good compromise.  In our current system, or any other one election system, you won't even know what compromise might be an option until it is too late.  This ability to compromise is not only useful in more accurately representing the will of the people in elections, it may also foster compromise in other places, reducing some of the toxic political polarization we are currently seeing.

The problem with our current voting system and the national popular vote alternative is that very few people recognize that these systems are all based on the idea of voting for one person to exclude those you don't want.  This necessarily produces voting strategies that dramatically favor a two party system and rarely result in outcomes that are entirely satisfactory to a majority.  A popular vote system that could allow a candidate to be elected without a majority vote by a wide margin is even worse than our electoral college system, which tends to only be off by a few percent of the popular vote and only rarely.  (For evidence, see how elections work in other countries, where a strict majority is not required.)  We need a system that allows people to express more than just who they don't want to win.

There is no reason that U.S. Presidential elections should have to rely on such a poor system as what we currently have, nor is there any reason we should tolerate a popular vote system that could allow a candidate to be elected without a majority of the popular vote.  A one-vote-per-person system is far too limited to really understand what the people want, and with modern technology it would be trivial to implement an improved system.

Theophobia

Theophobia seems to gripping a significant portion of our nation, but we are doing nothing about it.  In fact, it is hardly recognized as a problem at all.  Theophobia is the fear of God or religion.  Compared to homophobia, which is extremely rare, despite the fact that accusations of it are rampant in many political forums, theophobia is fairly common among some groups, and frankly it is much more subversive and dangerous.  Instead, it is being summarily ignored and marginalized, as more vocal gay rights activist groups that are plagued with it preemptively accuse nearly anyone citing religion or religious freedom for anything of being homophobic.

Homophobia is a marginal problem for a few reasons.  One is that only a tiny percentage of the population is actually homosexual or of any non-traditional sexual orientation.  This certainly does not justify treating them poorly, but it does make the problem lower priority than problems that affect more of the population.  In addition, homophobia is fairly rare.  A vast majority of people who are accused of homophobia are not actually homophobic.  They merely adhere to religious beliefs that a homosexual lifestyle is sinful (a very small portion actually believe that experiencing same sex attraction is also sinful).  Yes, there are some bigots out there, and calling out bigotry, where it actually exists is totally appropriate.  Technically calling these people homophobic is incorrect, because phobia is actually a mental illness, and bigotry is a conscious choice.

Theophobia is the the fear of God or religion.  It is not marginal, for related reasons.  It is not marginal, first, because at least 60% of the U.S. is religious.  This means a majority of the population is targeted.  In addition, theophobia seems to be significantly more common than homosexual or other non-traditional sexual orientation (this is based on the fact that protests and political movements on this topic tend to have a significant number of supporters that are not homosexual, in addition to those who are).  In addition, theophobia is far more subversive, because a vast majority of people don't even realize that it exists.  Of course, there are also plenty of bigots in this camp as well.  In fact, it is entirely possible that there are more bigots against religion than there are bigots against people with alternative sexual orientations.

We need to start calling out bigotry and phobia against religion.  Right now, we have a very one-sided battle, where religion is slowly losing ground, because accusations of homophobia and bigotry against homosexuals dominates the field.  In the last decade, the U.S. has lost more religious freedom than any time in its history except, perhaps, during the mid 1800s, when it was made legal in some states to murder Mormons, and the Federal government redefined marriage for the first time, expressly to discriminate against Mormonism.

Our country is built on religious freedom.  A significant portion of the colonists that are ancestors to most of us came here to escape religious persecution.  While religion was not the only, or perhaps even the biggest reason people immigrated, it is one of the cornerstones of our nation.  It is the foundation of all of our freedoms.  It is the most important factor in equality, because if equality does not come from God, then it comes from people, and without a universal truth, the only law is that the people who are strong enough to control everyone else are the only people fit to rule.  Whether God actually exists or not, freedom of religion is valuable to everyone, and that makes theophobia far more dangerous than any fear or bigotry against tiny minorities.

Religious freedom should trump most other civil rights.  Of course, there do need to be some reasonable limitations on that.  For example, a religion might believe in ritual human sacrifice, but that does not mean that murder by adherents of the religion should be tolerated.  Likewise, slander of homosexuals, denying them essential services like food and shelter, and such should also not be tolerated.  It is going too far, however, to legally require people to affirm homosexuality, in word or in action.  For example, forcing a preacher, priest, or bishop to perform a same sex wedding is equivalent to forcing them to affirm the relationship as well as activities that are implicit in the relationship.  This is a violation of freedom of conscience, which is the foundation of freedom of religion.  Selling a wedding dress or other wedding services to a same sex couple may be less intimate than actually performing the wedding, but it still comes with a tacit affirmation of homosexual relationships, if the person providing the services is made aware of the situation.  Even adoption is a very intimate service, and while I hold the opinion that same sex parents are better than an orphanage, forcing an adoption agency to place children with same sex couples is forcing them to affirm the moral validity of the relationship.  When we start forcing people to act as if they believe something, we are expressly violating the word and spirit of religious freedom.

In my opinion, we should start with necessities and slowly advance from there.  Discriminating against anyone when it comes to food, shelter, utilities, transportation, and communication should definitely be illegal, because these are all absolute necessities in our culture.  Purchase of clothing should be protected, with an exception for garments with religious significance, including wedding dresses.  Employment should also be protected, with exceptions for positions of religious significance.  Emergency, home maintenance, and transportation maintenance services, as well as other services related to maintaining or obtaining necessities, should also be legally available to everyone.  Anything beyond this is luxury.  Luxury goods and services are not necessities.  While discrimination in these may affect quality of life in some degree, it does not affect ability to survive, and it only affects convenience marginally.

The principle here is, "If it is not broken, don't fix it."  A microwave is a luxury good (if you have an oven already), but it is one that is fairly important to most people.  Should we legislate that it is illegal to discriminate against some group when selling a microwave?  No, because there is no reason to clutter up our laws with things that are not a problem.  Yeah, you might get discriminated against by some guy on Craig's List, but there are plenty of other options.  Even in the worst case, you can buy pretty much anything online, even in very remote locations.  Items that straddle the line between luxury and necessity might eventually need some legal anti-discrimination protections, but if they are readily available, there is no reason everyone should be forced to sell them to anyone that asks.  If we let people who want to discriminate in these things do as they please, they will eventually run themselves out of business if it really makes a difference.

So, what about Hobby Lobby?  The problem with Hobby Lobby is not religious freedom.  If it was purely religious freedom, the service Hobby Lobby refused to provide is not a necessity (it may straddle the line though), and it is readily available elsewhere, which makes the Supreme Court ruling entirely justified.  The fact, however, is that this is not even about a service or good offered by Hobby Lobby.  It is about a failed attempt at universal healthcare, requiring businesses to offer services to their employees that are far outside the scope of the those businesses.  The government has no business requiring for-profit companies to provide healthcare as part of their compensation.  The best solution to universal healthcare is universal healthcare!  Healthcare as mandatory compensation is just as bad as Obamacare and equally ineffective.  The Hobby Lobby case should never have happened in the first place, and frankly, the government should have seen long ago that mandatory healthcare as compensation is prone to freedom of conscience and religion issues.  The fact is, the Hobby Lobby case is not about discrimination at all.  It is the consequence of the government trying to cut corners and force businesses to do things that are outside the scope of business.

What this all comes down to is, we need to treat the problems of theophobia and homophobia according to their impact.  One problem is about treating a very small percentage of the population well, while the other is about maintaining the foundation of our most fundamental rights.  Both problems are about rights, but one covers the rights of every single person in the country, while the other only covers the rights of a very small portion of the population.  The priority here should be clear.  I am not suggesting we should ignore discrimination based on sexual orientation, but when it comes to clashes between sexual orientation and religion, religion should always have the benefit of the doubt.

The Labor Pool

I realized something the other day, while playing a video game.  It is surprising what we can learn from games.  In this case, what I learned was about economics.  In the game, I can build houses for people.  Each house I build increases the population of my city.  Each time I improve a house, it increases the population it provides.  Unlike traditional city sim games, this game just assumes that every space is taken.  If a house can hold 8 people, then it does hold 8 people.  I can put my population to work by building industrial buildings.  At the top of the screen, there is an indicator showing my "available" population.  This is the population of my city that are not currently working but can work.  This is useful, because I can compare my available population to how much population will be employed by a building I want to build.  This allows me to make sure I always have enough available population to build what I need to.

From a real world perspective, this is about unemployment.  My houses provide living space for people, and every space is always filled.  This provides me with a predictable labor pool.  My industrial buildings use some amount of my labor pool.  The remaining available population represents the people in my city who are unemployed.  By definition, an unemployed person is a person who is not currently employed, but who is available for employment and desires employment.  This describes my free population in this game perfectly.

Now, there are a few interesting things about my unemployed population (which is about 25% of my total population as I am writing this).  The first is that I am strongly motivated to maintain a moderate level of unemployment.  My unemployed population is an extremely valuable asset.  Let's say I want my city to produce more wood or more steel.  I might expand an existing facility or build a new one.  In either case, I will need additional people to work at the new or improved facility to maintain an increased production.  If I don't have sufficient free population, then I will first have to build a new residence or increase the size of an existing one.  Now, consider this from a real world perspective.  In the real world, there are a few more factors.  For one city, those factors are sufficient housing, quality of living, cost of living, and a number of smaller factors.  One big one is availability of work.  Now we have a problem though.  Before we can successfully increase the potential productivity of a city, we need more people, but before more people will come, we need to increase the potential productivity.  Generally, in real life, there is enough flexibility that this is not a major problem, but the U.S. (especially the Eastern U.S. to the central states) is dotted with cities that were once industrial centers but ultimately failed, and this phenomenon seems to have played a significant role in their failure.

Back to the game now; the other interesting thing is that my unemployed citizens don't get kicked out of their houses; they don't starve to death; they don't even move out of my city.  In fact, they are still paying rent to me for living in my houses.  Now, I'll admit, there is a point where this starts to get unrealistic.  The fact, however, is that my unemployed population is not suffering from their unemployment.  They have shelter.  They obviously have sufficient food to get by.  They clearly have everything they need to survive.  And, this is a really good thing.  Economically, it means that I can maintain a big enough pool of unemployed laborers that if I suddenly need to expand my industries rapidly, I can do it without having to worry about whether or not enough people will immigrate to do the additional work that is necessary.  If my citizens had to deal with the same consequences of unemployment that real live Americans do, the economy of my city would be much more weak and frail.

There are certainly some things about this game that are unrealistic.  For example, the cost of living for my unemployed population is magically taken care of so that I never even have to think about it.  That said though, there are some extremely valuable lessons to be learned despite that.  The first is, unemployment is not necessarily a bad thing.  Perhaps 25% is a bit extreme, at least, in the current state of our industries and economy, but 10% to 15% is not as bad as we often make it out to be.  The reason unemployment is a target of criticism is that unemployed people in the U.S. cannot survive.  This is not entirely true, but survival is a significant struggle for unemployed Americans.  It does not have to be that way though.  It is that way because we are too lazy, stubborn, greedy, or egotistical to let it be any other way.  Unemployment would be a lot less bad if we made sure that the free portion of our labor pool was taken care of.  This does not even have to be inefficient.  Unemployed people just need enough to survive and maintain good health.  The second valuable lesson is that low unemployment makes the economy more fragile and unstable, because it does not provide enough margin for sudden growth.  Economic fluctuations are occurring constantly, but low unemployment limits potential increases.  In short, low unemployment is actually bad for the economy.  Of course, high unemployment comes with its own problems, but having a reasonable pool of available labor is good, because it allows for rapid expansion.  Unfortunately, if we don't take care of our unemployed, they lose their labor value, either by immigrating or due to the negative health effects of poverty.

There is a business strategy very much like how this game works, that is successful.  Utilities always maintain more capacity than their customers actually use.  Power plants rarely run at full capacity, but they still carefully maintain all of their generators.  Most power plants are only close to peak capacity during a few times each day.  They might have peaks during meal times, as well as right when it starts getting dark, and nearly all of their customers are turning lights and maybe heaters on.  During the rest of the day, they run well below capacity, and during the late night, they run at extremely low capacity.  There are cities in the world with power plants that don't have enough generators to handle peak demand.  Those cities tend to have brown outs in the early evening and some other times during the day, because more power is needed than the power plants are capable of producing.  This is, of course, problematic, especially for businesses in those cities.  In the U.S. and most of the more developed world though, power companies pay to maintain more generators than they need, so that they can handle sudden, unexpected spikes in demand.  These companies are still in business, because despite the cost of maintaining "unemployed" generators, they are still profitable, and having a pool of available generators that are not being used allows them to consistently provide good service, even when unexpected situations arise.

Perhaps someday, I will make a city builder video game, where the microeconomics are a bit more realistic.  I think this could be an excellent method of gathering data on the economics of unemployment.  For now though, there are two things that I have learned: We need to make sure we maintain high enough unemployment to allow for economic growth, and to do this, we need to soften the penalties inherent in being unemployed.

Preferably Organic

Several times a month I come across some article explaining how to make something, and one or more ingredients on the list says something like "preferably organic" or "organic, I am sure you know why."  I am pretty sure I have shared my opinion about "organic" foods before, but just in case, I'll briefly go over it again.

Organic foods are, by definition, foods that are grown using outdated techniques.  This is not entirely true, as there have been some recent advances unique to organic farming, but very few organic farmers actually use them.  Organic farming contrasts with industrial farming in its refusal to use modern products or techniques that supposedly reduce the quality of the food.  So far, I have seen no evidence that organic farming does actually improve the quality of crops.  There are some potential benefits in the realm of sustainability when it comes to organic farming, but in practice, they are paid for by using much larger areas of land to grow the same amount of food.  The only really compelling argument for buying "organic" foods is in who your money supports.  If you buy industrially farmed foods, your money supports large food corporations that are using irresponsible farming techniques to increase yields and use less land.  If you buy organically farmed foods you are giving significantly more money to smaller growers (but more and more large corporations are adding organic food product lines) who use outdated farming techniques that do less damage over much larger areas for the same amount of production.  The fact is, there is no evidence suggesting that the food itself is any different, and in either case you are supporting what amounts to irresponsible growers.  (Of course, techniques could be combined, if industrial farmers were not so resistant to change or if organic farmers were not such religious purists about their outdated farming techniques.)  This is my opinion on organic foods, and it is based solidly in the science, research, and evidence behind different farming techniques.

Now, what this is really about: When I read someone's food recipe, and it says an ingredient should be organic, how does that reflect on the writer?  Well, I'll tell you: My opinion drops.  For food recipes, I might still use the recipe, but I will ignore the nonsensical suggestion that using organic ingredients is magically better.  And when the writer adds something like, "I am sure you know why," when suggesting the use of organic ingredients, my mind says something like, "Yeah, because you are a superstitious, gullible person who believes whatever you hear, instead of actually doing research to make sure you are right, before risking looking like an idiot."  No offense intended, but come on!  If you are going to start publishing your opinion on the internet, at least make sure there is not solid evidence proving it wrong!

Of course, today, I came across a recipe for a sugar scrub.  Supposedly it makes your skin feel smooth, but more importantly, it is supposed to reduce skin irritation caused by shaving.  I read the claims at the beginning of the article.  Sugar is cheap, so I had no reservations in just trying it.  Then I got to the recipe, and it says "preferably organic" on the sugar, which is the very first ingredient.  This was a red flag.  My response is, "Wait a minute.  Here I am looking at a recipe for a health care product.  The claims sound good, but then the author says, 'preferably' organic, indicating that the author does not actually know anything about a common health claim.  Should I really be trusting someone that so blatantly has no clue what she is talking about?"  If you post recipes for stuff on the internet, read that last part again.  Perhaps some of your readers see "preferably organic" and think, "go girl!"  (Or perhaps "go guy!")  But keep in mind that for every few readers that revel in your affirmation of their unsupported superstitious hocus pocus, you are losing someone who just came upon your article who now thinks you are some kind of quack witch doctor.  Don't get me wrong, you might know exactly what you are doing when it comes to the product, but when you publish one totally wrong thing, it brings everything else you claim into question.  I cannot gauge your qualifications based on anything but what you publish, and if you publish one thing that I know is total crock, I cannot trust any of the other things you say that I don't know about.  So, am I going to try making the sugar scrub?  Perhaps I will, as I know none of the ingredients are harmful, and the risk is very low.  Will I ever visit that site again?  Probably not.  The sugar scrub might work, but even quacks get lucky some times, and I don't want to be the guinea pig that discovers some other recipe is dangerous.

I am not saying that people should not share their opinions online.  Sharing opinions is an essential part of constructive dialog.  Do your research though.  The problem with common sense is that it is hardly ever actually sense.  That organic foods are superior to "normal" foods seems like common knowledge on the internet.  Everyone just knows it is true, and because everyone knows that it is true, everyone assumes it is true.  The fact however is that it is not true.  Just like milk and meat produced by cows with or without hormones, there is no difference!  Organically farmed, industrially farmed, and GMO foods are all the same when it comes to health and nutrition.  The only difference is price and sustainability, and currently, GMOs have the most promise when it comes to that.  Please do share your opinions, but first, make sure you have the facts right.  Look up research on the subjects you are going to discuss, especially when it comes to the health of your readers.  Make sure the research you are reading is written by qualified authors.  (I once had a conversation in the YouTube comments on GMOs.  I asked one guy for scientific sources supporting his claims.  He gave me the titles of two books, one written by a lawyer and another written my an economist and historian.  Neither of these authors had any education in genetic engineering or even agriculture!  These are not valid sources by any stretch of the imagination.)

Agreeing with your readers about things may help them to identify with you better, but if you are wrong, you will end up driving off a lot of people you might have been able to help.  Think about this: Are you posting these things to get friends, or are you trying to legitimately help people?  If you are trying to legitimately help people, being wrong will not only drive off people who need your help, you could end up actually harming people.  And even if you are not willing to do the research so you can be right, would it be so bad to leave your unsupported personal opinions out of your recipes?  Are your existing readers really so dumb that you have to explicitly say that they should use organic products in places where you would expect them to use them?  Do you really think that specifying that a product should be organic will cause people who don't agree with you to do it?  The fact is, the only value in saying an ingredient should be organic is in deliberately alienating people who have a different opinion from your own.  Be a witch doctor if you want, but please don't pretend to be anything more.  If your products really do work, and if your goal is legitimately to help people, please leave silly superstitions out of it, and stick to verified facts.  Otherwise, there are a lot of us out there that are having a really hard time telling whether you are just superstitious about one small thing or a total quack that cannot be trusted to be right about anything.

Sex Ed.

Sex Education has been a controversial and politically charged subject since its inception.  The conservative Right argues that we should teach abstinence until marriage exclusively, arguing that teaching safe sexual practices will encourage teens to have sex.  The liberal Left wants to encourage safe sexual practices, while ignoring the fact that the only truly safe sex is no sex.  Both sides have good points, but they both have made a ton of mistakes.

The main reason there is a controversy with sex education is that the two major sides have different goals, and they seem to deliberately exclude the goal of the other side from their own platform.  For example, it would be trivial to include a short "but if you do have sex, use protection" in a more conservative leaning sex ed class, and it would be equally easy to include a "but all protection has a chance of failure, so the only guarantee is complete abstinence" to a liberal sex ed curriculum.  The main difference in goals is that for the Right, sex ed is all about morality.  In fact, conservative sex ed activist groups appear to care exclusively about the morality issue, without any concern at all for the goal of the other side.  For the left, the main goal is health.  This is certainly as noble a goal as morality, but in their haste to entirely exclude any conversation on morality at all, they also miss a huge section of other issues, some very closely related to health.  In their attempts to deliberately exclude the views of the other side, both sides are making our sexual education in the U.S. stink.  Ironically, teen sex rates are actually dropping, so we are doing something right.

Morality and health are both essential issues when it comes to sex education.  This is not just about whether or not it is appropriate to have sex with someone you are not marries to, and it is also not just about physical health, but this stupid argument has pushed out everything except these extremely narrow focuses.  In fact, there may be a link between some of the sex related issues we are seeing a lot today and the extremely narrow scope of our sex education classes.

Morality is an essential issue in sex education on a number of levels.  The surface issue is sex outside of marriage.  Ignoring religious issues, there are a number of scientifically supported reasons for limiting sex to committed and legally binding relationships.  Ironically, around half of these are health related.  Many of these stem from the fact that people who have sex outside of marriage are many times more likely to get divorced.  In addition, the younger a person becomes sexually active, the more likely they are to get divorced at some point.  Failure of a committed relationship almost always results in mental health issues, and mental health issues are linked to shorter lifespans.  Some people now days attempt to substitute legal marriage with non-binding verbal agreements.  These do not make a suitable alternative, and they often result in significant long term stress for one or both people (women are far more likely to be affected by this than men).  This kind of stress has been very strongly linked to significantly decreased lifespan.  These are health issues!  If the Left really cares so much about health, why do they leave this part out?  It goes further though.  The essential moral issues are not exclusively about health.  What about rape?  What about pretty much anything related to consent?  Sex ed classes don't typically bother teaching about the law.  The Right does not teach about the law, because abstinence should cover that, right?  The truth is, the Left is right that some teens will have sex even if you teach abstinence, and if you don't teach them morals, it is partially your fault when they molest or rape someone!  The Left is so caught up in avoiding anything that even looks like morals that they deliberately ignore this as well.  There is also emotional science that shows that the oxytocin release during sex causes women to become emotionally attached to their partners, and this is linked to abusive relationships.  Emotional attachment is the reason that battered women rarely leave their abusers.  This is both a moral and health issue, and both sides are completely ignoring it.  And the reason they are ignoring it is that it straddles the line between health and morality, and so neither side is willing to touch it.  The mental and emotional effects of sex have been carefully studied, but we are just giving teens condoms or telling them sex is evil, and then walking away.  Honestly, the mental and emotional effects of sex are probably more important than moral or health implications, and if we can help teens to understand them, the moral and health implications will be a lot less important.

Health is also a serious issue when it comes to sex.  There are plenty of STDs going around.  Unwanted pregnancy is, honestly, a travesty.  Teen parents are also a serious problem.  Again, there is plenty of scientific research showing that having two parents, and at the risk of being politically incorrect, two parents of different physical sex, has the best chances for raising mentally and emotionally healthy and stable children (before anyone starts throwing fruit, this is proven science, and further, the science shows that two parents of the same gender are still better than a single parent or no parents at all).  Abortion is wasteful, and it is awfully hard to argue that it is not pretty close to murder without looking like a heartless jerk.  Abstinence is the pinnacle of health, when it comes to sex (ignoring the fact that pregnancy actually increases lifespan...).  There is no other birth control plan that is 100% effective, aside from removing certain sex organs entirely, and there is no other STD prevention plan that is 100% effective.  Abstinence should be taught in every sex education class, ideally with plenty of data on failure rates of other options.  That said, the Left is right about one thing: Some teens are going to have sex regardless of what they are taught.  Look at the history of humanity.  There have been many cultures where the penalty for pre-marital sex was death, and it still happened.  History is rife with examples of young lovers having sex before they were married, with a huge variety of consequences, nearly all of which were far worse than getting an STD or getting pregnant.  If the death penalty cannot prevent teen sex, how can anyone delude themselves into thinking an "abstinence only" program will be successful?  And if the goal is to teach morality, is it really moral to think that it is better that these teens have babies or get STDs than use condoms?  Of course, when it comes to health, it is also important to consider the above mentioned health related morality issues, otherwise you are shortchanging the students, not to mention lying to them about the safety of the various forms of birth control.  If we really care about the health of our teens, we won't arbitrarily ignore issues merely because there is an element of morality in them.  We will cover every health issue, without any concern for whether it treads on the feet of the other side or not.

The ideal sex education course should cover a lot more than what we currently cover.  It should discuss things like privacy.  It should discuss the concept of virtual, from the perspective of what society might think of a person who's nude image is posted all over the internet.  It should discuss what is legal, what is not, and why, even if the why requires a conversation on morality.  It should discuss birth control and STD control measures, as well as their failure rates.  It should pointedly mention that no birth control and no STD control is more effective then abstinence.  It should discuss the mental, emotional, and biological effects of sex, as well as the long term consequences and risks associated with them.  This should include some discussion of how sexual relationships without legally binding long term commitment affect people, as well as some discussion on how pre-marital sex affects divorce rates and the emotional effects of divorce on parents and children.  At least the Right and Left can agree that a sex education program like this covers things that none of them are comfortable teaching teenagers, but when it comes down to it, if we want to have informed teens who are armed with everything they should know about sex before they actually start doing it, this is what it is going to take.

This kind of sex ed course would cover a lot of inconvenient and uncomfortable truths.  Perhaps some on the Left do not want to talk about morality because they are afraid it will condemn their own behavior.  If that is the case get over it!  This stuff is supported by science.  You want to complain about global warming and anti-vax people?  Accept science or don't it's not a potluck where you get to pick and choose.  People on the Right are pretty clear that their agenda is to deliberately leave teens uninformed so that they will fear pre-marital sex (or, perhaps, just sex in general; there are actually people who have such severe anxiety about sex that even once they are married, they struggle with it, and every last one of these people is someone who was essentially taught that sex is morally wrong).  Honestly, this is stupid.  Read above and you will see that the truth is plenty scary as it is.  If the death penalty is not scary enough to stop teens from having sex, nothing is.  Get over, and recognize that the health of your children is at stake here.  Leading into the next part, if you are worried that a sex ed class in a public school is going to give your kid ideas that he or she will then act upon, perhaps the problem is that you are not confident in your parenting skills?

Now that we have discussed sex ed in public schools, we should take a look at where sex ed is most effective: The home.  Many on the Left claim that the morality of sex should be taught in the home, and they are right.  What they are wrong about is when they follow that up with, "no in schools."  This is a mistake that bit the business education field in rear end really bad a few decades ago.  We had a series of serious ethics problems pop up in enormous businesses, including Enron.  Business schools realized from this that ethics is an essential topic to cover in schools.  A few decades later, most business schools include ethics classes.  It is certainly true that parents should teach their children sexual morality at home, but the fact is it doesn't always work that way!  Parents should definitely have the first say in what kind of morality they teach their children, but when it comes to such an important topic as sex, we need more than that.  If we are going to have Sex Education classes in the first place, they should actually educate about sex, not just about a very narrow part of the topic.  In addition, the relationship between health and morality is very strong with sex.  It is literally impossible to do a good job of teaching about sexual health at the same time as avoiding all talk of morality.  If we cannot teach sexual morality in the classroom, then maybe we are better off not having sex ed classes at all, because at least then parents won't feel like the school is relieving them of any responsibility for teaching about sex.  The fact is, parents are not perfect, and when it comes to a topics as important as sex, this is a huge deal.  The fact is someone needs to do it.  For a civilized country, we have a lot of rapes and other sexual crimes happening in colleges and universities across the country.  It is clear that leaving sexual morality exclusively to the parents is a bad idea.  And worse, these problems are spreading STDs and causing unwanted pregnancies.  Morality is a sexual health problem.  You cannot educate people effectively on sexual health without bring morality into it.  It is impossible.

We need the Left and the Right to wake up and take responsibility for the problems that their shortsightedness and narrow mindedness are causing.  We need to start including real science in sexual education.  We need people to get over their personal vices and teach the truth and the full truth, no matter how condemning they might feel it is to their own life choices.  We need people to actually care about teens, instead of punishing them to excess for their indiscretions and allowing them to harm others.  If you really care about these people teach them the full truth and let God deal with their punishment, if they so deserve it.