Children Aren't Important?

I keep seeing this come up, and I do not understand why there is not more public outcry over it.  It started with Trump's tax reform.  Now, Trump's tax reform helped a lot of people.  It increased refunds for a lot of lower income working Americans.  Unfortunately, however, it also neglected children.  In a sense, it counted adults as worth more, reducing the total amount of refund for lower income working families with more children than average.  (We saw more than a 10% decrease in our refunds, despite getting a little more back from the EITC.)  After Trump it was Yang, with a Freedom Dividend plan that would have given adults a basic income worth around half of a living wage but just plain did not even count children as people.  Now we have plans for an economic stimulus package with a relief element for individuals, and yet again, children are being treated as unimportant.

Trump suggested an initial relief check for all American adults, with some kind of cutoff to avoid giving a lot of money to people who do not need it.  This is not a bad idea, except for the fact that children are rapidly increasing in value in the U.S. (as fertility rate decreases), and this plan straight up neglects children.  Of course, others immediately pointed this out, and Trump agreed with plans that provide smaller amounts for children.  Now, I am not complaining about the fact that the amount for children is smaller in some of these plans.  Household dynamics work fine this way, as the biggest cost for most families is rent or mortgage payments, and this scales much slower with family size than other necessities.  But now Mitt Romney has proposed a plan to the Senate that has reverted back to this adults-only thing.  Is it just Republicans or wealthy politicians, or do Americans in general consider children to be unimportant?  This is ironic, given how much resources state and Federal governments put into oppressing parents for even the most trivial things that might be disadvantageous for their children.

There are a number of potential excuses for denying children disaster relief when it is being provided to adults, but they are all wrong.  The first is that the relief given to parents will help their children.  This is not untrue, but unless everyone has the same number of children, it is overly simplistic and punishes larger families while rewarding single people and couples without children.  Punishing larger families right now is a really bad idea, and it happens to be the next topic of discussion.

The second excuse is that counting children will reward larger families for having more children.  I have two responses to this.  The first is, that is straight up false.  I heard the same argument when I lived in Alaska.  I once overheard some of my coworkers complaining that certain Russian families had large numbers of children, so they would get more money from the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend.  The largest payout I have ever seen from that is around $2,000 per person, and it pays out once a year.  (It has hovered around $1,600 the last two years.)  No offense to my coworkers, but anyone who thinks children cost less than $2,000 a year to provide for either has not had to provide for children or is in serious need of remedial math.  Even at the maximum payout, children do not turn a profit from the Alaska PFD.  (Note that I was one of 7 children, in my teens, living there.  My parents made enough to live comfortably but nothing more, and the PFD definitely did not cover all of the costs of 7 children, let alone turn a profit.)  The $500 per child suggested by some is only a quarter of that.  It would take more than $500 a month for most Americans to profit off of children*.  My second response is, is it wrong to reward parents for having more children?  Raising children is expensive, and it takes a lot of work.  If we wanted to be completely fair (especially to women), we would be paying at least $30k a year to stay-at-home moms with one child.  That is the long term babysitter average wage though, which only covers 40 hours a week.  Moms are more like nannies than babysitters, doing household chores, teaching children basic skills, and so on, on top of supervising and caring for children.  If we assume 14 hour days (children are recommended to sleep from 10 to 14 hours a day, depending on age), that comes out to $125k a year (average pay is $19/hr in the U.S.), if we do time and a half for overtime, with overtime being only anything over 40 hours a week.  (No, you can't pay babysitters or nannies salary.  They are non-exempt employees and thus must be paid hourly wages that comply with overtime laws.)  A nanny might be expected to care for one to three children at that pay.  $500 a kid, as a one or two time payment, is not actually a reward.  It is not even fair wages for services rendered!  And even if it somehow was profitable, encouraging people to have more children is not a bad thing right now.  The U.S. fertility rate is currently lower than 1.8 (average children per woman, in a lifetime).  The replacement rate is 2.1.  That means Americans are not having children at a high enough rate to sustain our own population.  Those panicked about overpopulation might see this as a good thing, but people who understand the economic impact of a declining population do not.  To maintain a healthy economy in the long term, it is important to maintain at least the replacement rate, and while immigration can help make up the difference, it is not a good long term solution, especially when Americans want stricter immigration regulation.  Not only is rewarding people for having more children not a bad thing, it is actually something we are going to have to do anyway, if we want to avoid long term economic decline.  The fact is, parents with large families should be treated as heroes for doing their part to slow the long term decline of the U.S. economy.  We should be happy to make children profitable for them, and they at least deserve some help with the costs of raising children, if not fair wages for the work.

(* I say most, because it might work in the lowest cost-of-living regions, for parents who are already covering a lot of needs through government welfare programs.  In this case though, it is not the $500 a month that is turning a profit but the $500 a month combined with the other welfare.  The $500 a month will never cover more than 100% of the costs of a child on its own.)

Now, I have never heard anyone argue that children are not as important as adults, as an excuse for only providing a basic income or disaster relief for adults and not children, but actions speak louder than words.  Clearly, Mitt Romney considers children to be worthless in comparison to adults.  The current House bill being crafted for relief does include children, but it also puts a cap on larger families.  A maximum of four children can be counted.  Families with more than four children, the true heroes, are out of luck.  Their children are counted at a value of four fifths or less of an adult each.  My value, as a teen with six siblings, would have been only 57% that of an adult.  Even a Democratic House somehow cannot manage to consider children as important as adults.  Yes, the House bill does pay out equal amounts for adults and children, but with a maximum family limit, it is still treating children as lower value, second class citizens.  It would be better to give children half the payout of adults, without a family cap.  (And yes, this would actually result in a smaller payout for my own family.  But at least it would treat children as equal, instead of devaluing children in larger families.)

The fact is, children are not just important.  They are critical.  We often hear the cliche that children are our future, a rather blatant statement of the obvious, but we do not seem to understand the extent of it.  Number are important.  Shrinking populations are populations in economic decline.  And immigration is not a long term solution, because they do not contribute significantly to an increase in the percentage of children.  The fact is, children need relief too.  If we cannot value our children enough to ensure their well being during this crisis, perhaps we deserve mass death and economic collapse.

Code of Ethics for Elected Officials

A lot of elected officials, especially at the Federal level, have started using social media, some fairly heavily.  This has been met with mixed feelings.  Some people see this as increased government transparency, while others have seen this as political propaganda.  Either way, participation in social media presents a serious conflict of interest for elected officials.  While it definitely can and probably should be used to increase government transparency, it can also be used to influence people and to spread propaganda, misinformation, and even downright lies, and it has actually been used this way.

As such, we need a code of ethics for elected officials, that includes but is not limited to the use of social media.  I would like to suggest a set of ethical rules for elected officials.

1. Elected officials should always specify whether a social media post, video, recording, or other publication is being produced in an official capacity.  Ideally, elected officials should always use separate accounts for official and personal communications, and the personal accounts should not reference the elected office of the official in any way.
2. Social media content published in an official capacity should stick to facts.  It should not contain propaganda, personal opinions, campaign advertisements, promotion of political or personal agendas, or anything else not directly related to the job the person has been elected to.  Statements of intent to vote on a particular bill in a particular way are appropriate but should avoid any explanation except, "This is what my constituents want".  (And even that explanation might come back to bite you, if it turns out they don't want that.)
3. Official publications that contain information later discovered to be incorrect should be amended whenever possible, noting the error and resolution, and if it is not possible, an official retraction should be published as soon as the mistake is discovered, and reasonable effort shall be made to direct all past, present, and future consumers of the original publication to the retraction.
4. Official publications should generally be reviewed by advisors and/or peers before being published.
5. Official publications should adhere to any standards, regulations, and policies set by the government body the elected official is a member of.
6. Unofficial publications should avoid any and all implication that they might be official in nature or otherwise represent anything other than the personal views of the official, including but not limited to using a separate account for that does not mention the office of the user in the username, profile, or any other publicly accessible information associated with the account.
7. Unofficial publications should avoid accidentally or intentionally using the public profile, fame, wealth, or any other benefit afforded by the public office to endorse or promote any particular political agendas, and indeed, elected officials should generally limit unofficial publications to sharing facts and personal opinion in neutral ways that do not promote or otherwise argue in support of any particular position or platform, even if adherence to this rule feels like it hampers freedom of speech and freedom of expression.
8. Unofficial publications should not be produced or published during time an elected official may reasonably be expected to be working, including any time the body the official is a member of is in session, for bodies that are not active constantly.  For bodies that are constantly active (including the Executive Branch), officials should not produce or publish unofficial publications at any time where doing so would interfere with the work or take time away from the work that would cause even minor negative effects, and ideally any such personal projects should be worked on only during specifically scheduled time off (for example, vacations).
9. Elected officials should surrender access to any and all social media accounts used for official publications upon retirement (whether voluntary or through the loss of an election or expiration of a term limit) from the position.  Ideally, the account should transferred to the ownership of the government body the official was a member of, which will act as caretaker to preserve the account and its contents for consumption by the public.  If the official is later elected to office again, ownership may be returned for the duration of service.
10. Retired elected officials should continue to abide by the terms of this code of ethics with regards to their private social media accounts, with the exception that they may engage more fully in the endorsement of personal political opinions, so long as they continue to avoid using the fame and other benefits associated with having held public office to gain an unfair advantage over other figures who have not had the benefit of holding public office.
11. Retired and current elected officials should never take advantage of the benefits of holding or having held public office for profit or personal benefit of any kind, including the use of official publications for gaining advertisement revenue, the use of official publications in campaign advertisements, the use of official publications for endorsing or advancing personal political agendas (or personal agendas of any kind), the leverage of experience in elected office to claim any manner of authority or special expertise on any matter (including paid speaking engagements), or the engagement in any kind of compensated work for any entity that the official has accepted any form of lobbying from.

Each element of this code of ethics is designed to avoid specific problems that are common today, as outlined below.

1.  Many elected officials, especially those in Congress, are currently using their position to gain fame, for future personal benefit and for the purpose of advancing personal political agendas.  This is not the purpose of elected office, and it is a misuse of taxpayer money that pays the wages of these officials.  Separating official communications from personal communications will help regular citizens separate legitimate concerns related to the job from the personal politics and agendas of the officials.  Public office was never intended to be used as a stage from which to endorse a political platform or other personal agenda.  Public officials are elected to represent the will of the people, not to preach or impose upon the people their own wills.
2. As with 1, the separation of the job from personal opinions is important, and without that separation, elected officials can and do abuse their positions to promote their own platforms, instead of doing their job, which is to represent the will of the people.  The only valid reasoning for voting in a particular way on a bill is that it is what one's constituents want or is otherwise more consistent with the will of those who the official represents than the alternative.
3. Accuracy is critical to transparency.  The people cannot make informed choices when voting, if the information they have is not accurate and up to date.
4. Oversight is wise and necessary in ensuring this code of conduct is adhered to.  It is clear that not all elected officials understand the difference between personal opinion and their job.  Oversight may help them to learn that difference, and if it doesn't, at least it may prevent more egregious violations of this code of conduct.  Oversight will also help to catch factual errors before publication, avoiding the need for excessive retractions.
5. Again, oversight is wise and necessary.  This provides governing bodies with the ability to more narrowly define what is and is not appropriate in an official publication.  This includes censorship of sensitive material that could pose a security threat if published, as well as general rules of civility and propriety in official publications.  Official publications will reflect on the quality of the governing institutions, thus they have a right to regulate the nature of those publications.  (For example, a Representative angrily swearing in a statement about the President reflects very poorly on the House in general, as well as on her constituents and on the U.S. as a nation.)
6. The use of elected office to promote personal political agendas is a serious abuse of power that needs to be stopped.  Again, the purpose of elected office is to represent the will of the people, not to promote one's own political agendas.  Using the benefits of public office to help promote personal agendas is an abuse of power and a theft of taxpayer money.  No elected position should be used to gain an unfair advantage in promotion of personal agendas over those who do not hold any elected position.  To do so is unethical and undemocratic.
7. Merely seeing the title of an elected official in the username or profile text of an account could imply that the publication is official in nature, and it will definitely provide an unfair advantage based on the elected office of the person.  Those seeing an unofficial account for the first time, who do not already know the name of the official, should not be able to tell from the account that the account is owned by an elected official.  It is impossible to enforce complete fairness, as it is unreasonable to require elected officials to use pseudonyms for their personal accounts, but as much as possible, fair practices should be observed, which is why it is suggested that elected officials should generally avoid active promotion of personal agendas on their private accounts, even if doing so seems like it gives up certain rights.  (Note that it is also traditional for the President to release his or her tax records, despite the fact that the privacy of such personal records are generally regarded as protected by the Constitution, so this is not an unprecedented ethical rule.)
8. The time an elected official is being paid to work should never be used for personal activities.  Elected office is a job, and the wages payed to elected officials are payment for labor rendered.  An elected official who is working on personal projects during work time should rightly be fired, just like any other employee who did the same thing would.  It is completely and entirely inappropriate for any elected official to be spending paid work time on personal projects, and accepting full payment for work time partially spent on personal projects is theft against one's employer, in this case the American people.
9. Official publications of elected officials legally belong to the employer of the officials, which is the American people, and thus should be preserved for the use of the people as desired.  In addition, allowing retired officials to retain control of official accounts would allow them to abuse those accounts.  Thus, all official accounts that are not currently in active use should be preserved by the body those accounts are accountable to, both to minimize opportunity for abuse and to ensure the preservation and public availability of the contents of those accounts.  A government cannot remain transparent when ex-officials retain the power to destroy official publications.
10. Retiring does not absolve an official of ethical responsibilities.  Retired officials should not be restricted in public participation in political discourse and promotion of personal agendas, as they are no longer bound to the job of representing the will of the people, but they still should not be allowed to abuse or otherwise leverage their status as retired public officials to gain an unfair advantage over those who have not served in elected office.
11. Abuse of power of this nature is rampant in our government currently, and it interferes seriously with the democratic process.  It is common practice for elected officials to cultivate special relationships with for-profit businesses and other profitable organizations to create future opportunity for themselves once they leave public office.  This results in the drafting and passage of laws and policies designed specifically to benefit special interests, often at significant cost to the general public, purely for the personal benefit of the elected officials.  This is an abominable and wicked practice that undermines democracy, violates the will of the people, and causes significant harm to the people.  This should be regarded as blatant bribery, and all elected officials guilty of this practice should be impeached and thrown out of office, then tried for the high crime of bribery (and/or solicitation of bribery) and sentenced to long prison sentences, without options for house arrest, intermittent imprisonment (like nights or weekends only), or parole.  (And maybe if high profile, wealthy people actually had to pay the same price for their crimes as poor people, our prisons would be less cruel and abusive to prisoners.)  Elected officials should be legally and permanently barred from working for any company or organization they have ever been lobbied by, and they should also be barred from taking any sort of payment or compensation for any work they do that they would not have had without serving in an elected office.  In addition, any official content produced while in office was paid for and thus belongs to the people, making it a violation of copyright law to use it for personal profit or benefit without the express permission of the people.

The fact is, a significant amount of the corruption in our government could be quelled, merely by enforcing a code of conduct addressing these elements.  This does not exhaustively cover all possible forms of corruption (for instance, the practice of earmarking funds for states as a tacit bribe for the passage of some unpopular bill), but it covers some of the most destructive and most common types of and motivations for corrupt behavior.  Hopefully by restricting elected office from being an engine for politicians to promote their personal political platforms and build relationships with special interests for future profit, the motivation for corrupt people with ill intent to seek elected office will be significantly reduced, and the tendency toward corruption for those who originally had purer motives will be decreased significantly, giving us a more democratic government that is more concerned with the will of the people than with their own personal profit.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

A landlord sues a tenant for not paying rent four months in a row.  The tenant says the rent was paid on time each of those months.  The landlord's lawyer asks the tenant for some proof that the rent was paid.  The tenant, who is representing herself, says she was not given receipts when she paid the rent, and it was paid in cash, so there are no bank records of the transaction aside from withdrawals for amounts that represent rent as well as some bills.  Because there is no proof the rent was paid, the judge rules that the tenant has to pay the landlord the value of four months rent.

An employee blows the whistle on an OSHA violation where he works.  A week later, he is fired without cause.  He knows that there are anti-retribution laws specifically intended to protect whistle blowers, but he cannot afford a lawyer, so he walks away.  He ends up unemployed for over 6 months, because his previous employer lies about his character when called for references.  He knows he could sue for slander, but again, he cannot afford legal representation, so he just deals with it.

A small video game company comes up with an awesome new game idea.  Partway through public beta testing, a major game company files a lawsuit against them for patent infringement.  The lead designer knows the element in question has been used before, and that it was in a game much older than the large company's patent, but he cannot recall what that game was.  Settling out of court would destroy the company, essentially turning it into a slave of the larger company, so they opt to hire a lawyer.  When the lead designer still cannot remember the name of the game that used the element in question, the judge rules that the small company infringed on the larger company's patent.  Ultimately, the legal costs cause the small company to go bankrupt.


These three stories have several things in common.  The first is that the rich prey on the poor.  In the first story, the landlord uses the legal system to rob the tenant.  In the second, the employer sends a message to its employees, that retribution will be served for reporting labor law violations.  In the third, the big company destroys potential competition using a patent that is not technically valid.  The second thing they have in common is that none of the defending parties have adequate legal representation.  The first two have no representation, and the third does not have sufficient legal representation to do the necessary research to find the prior art that would invalidate the patent.  The third thing they have in common is that the defending parties are all assumed to be guilty unless they can prove their own innocence.  In short, justice is not met, fair legal representation is not available, and the principle of innocence until guilt is proven is violated.

In criminal trials, the U.S. Constitution mandates a legal right to legal council for the defendant.  U.S. criminal courts provide court appointed lawyers for defendants that cannot afford to pay for their own.  This is protected as a legal right.  This right is not extended to civil law though.  This is a problem.  In the above three situations, sufficient legal council was a necessary part of a just outcome, and without that, justice was not served.  In the first, a lawyer might have been able to gain access to the landlords financial records to search for evidence that the rent was paid.  In the second, the lack of legal council was the pivotal factor that ultimately prevented the victim from even pursuing the issue.  In the third, better legal council might have been able to find the prior art that the lead designer could not.  Even in civil cases, fair legal representation is necessary to ensure justice, but in the U.S., only criminal defendants are provided with legal representation.

U.S. law does not actually mandate the idea of innocence until guilt is proven.  Taken together, several Constitutional amendments are interpreted to mean that this principle should be followed, but this really comes down to ambiguous phrases like "fair trial."  Further, these amendments apply only to criminal cases, not to civil cases.  This is also a problem.  Many civil cases place the burden of proof on the defendant.  In other words, the defendant is assumed guilty unless she can prove innocence.  Typically this is a matter of convenience, and it has nothing to do with justice.  It is more convenient for a defendant to produce proof of payment than it is for a prosecutor to prove that payment was not rendered.  It is more convenient to ask the defendant to provide proof of prior art or proof that an idea is common knowledge or otherwise not novel or unique than it is for the prosecutor to prove that no one has ever had the idea before or that the idea is particularly ingenious.  The fact, however, is that doing these things places the burden of proof on the defendant, making the defendant legally guilty unless she can provide proof that she is not.  Not only is this common in civil cases, it is a problem in a majority of civil cases involving wealthy prosecutors suing poor defendants, who cannot afford legal representation.

In the recent past, these two things have been established all over the world as fundamental human rights.  It is widely recognized that trying someone without adequate representation is unfair and morally wrong.  Likewise, it is also widely recognized that the accuser bears the burden of proof, not the accused.  In fact, this was well understood even in some ancient cultures, where an accuser could be put to death, if proof of the accusation could not be established.


The fact is that there is little difference between criminal and civil law.  Both are intended to prevent or mitigate harm.  The only difference is classification and penalty.  In criminal law, the state acts against the suspect.  The suspect is judged by a jury based on codified legal standards.  If the suspect is found guilty, a penalty is selected based on a set of codified standards.  The punishments all restrict the freedom of the convict.  In civil law, an individual or organization acts against the suspect.  The suspect is judged by a judge based on personal opinion and legal precedent.  If the suspect is found guilty, the judge determines a penalty based on the request of the prosecutor and the cost of the damage.  The penalties typically take the form of fines paid to the state and remunerations given to the prosecutor.  The actions prompting a lawsuit can be nearly identical in many cases, with only minor differences.  For example, if you accuse me of stealing money from your pocket, I will go to criminal court.  If I live in your apartment building, and you accuse me of not paying my rent, I will go to civil court, despite the fact that the harm caused may be identical.  Both cases amount to theft.  The circumstances of the theft are different, and this is used as justification to provide counsel for one and not the other and to assume initial innocence in one and initial guilt in the other.  The differences between criminal and civil cases do not justify refusing to provide fair counsel or assuming initial guilt.

Civil law needs two things desperately: Fair representation and innocence until guilt is proven.  These two things are essential parts of a fair justice system, and without them, justice cannot be served, regardless of whether it is criminal or civil court.

Mass Destruction

Long ago, there was a small country consisting primarily of a few large islands.  It sometimes had wars with nearby countries.  During some periods of time, it owned small parts of a large nearby continent.  During other periods, it was limited entirely to its islands.  As time passed and the world changed, larger countries started to assert authority over smaller ones.  Several countries began to work together to maintain the status quo.  These countries eventually decided that this small country of the large islands should not have any territory outside of the islands.  Even when this country did manage to regain territory outside of the islands, the other countries intervened and gave that land to its enemies.  This small country began to feel mistreated.  On the world stage, it was marginalized.  It was treated as a vassal, not as a sovereign nation.  Its leaders began to feel frustrated.

Eventually, an opportunity arose for this small country to assert dominance over its neighbors.  Too long had the land that once belonged to it been controlled by others.  A war of epic proportions was brewing.  There were other countries that had grown tired of the iron fist of the alliance that was attempting to rule the world.  The small country recognized that the timing was perfect for it to show the world that it was a sovereign nation, not some submissive vassal.  While the war proceeded on other fronts, it could retake the lands it had lost so many times before.  The leaders of this country made one fatal mistake though.  They decided that a show of force against their most prominent oppressor would be appropriate.

A devastating attack was planned and carried out against an important military establishment.  The attack had two intents.  The first was revenge for decades of oppression.  The second was the strategic destruction of forces that might be used to intervene in the recapture of their territory.  Unfortunately, they underestimated the power, determination, and brutality of their oppressor.  Full scale war was launched against them.  The naval fleets of the oppressor far outmatched those of the small country.  Because the war did not have strong support from the civilians of the small country, and even its soldiers were beginning to loose morale, the government felt it necessary to force many of its soldiers to fight.  The only way they could successfully destroy the enemy ships was by flying air planes directly into them.  In desperation, pilots were welded into the cockpits of planes and ordered to crash into enemy ships or be executed.  In reaction to this, the oppressor used advanced weapons to destroy two major cities.  Over 100,000 civilians were brutally killed in these attacks.  Only around 20,000 military personnel died in the attacks.  The small country was ultimately not allowed to retain any recaptured territory.  The oppressor maintained a military presence in the country for many years afterwards.

Before or after this time, there has never been a country so brutal as the oppressor.  When the Romans attacked their enemies, they gave civilians the opportunity to swear allegiance to Rome, instead of killing them.  There have been countries that have murdered their own civilians for various reasons, but no other country has caused so much death and destruction, so callously, in such a short amount of time.  Even the oppressor in this story has condemned the wanton murder of civilians in wartime.

Now, the oppressor lives in fear of others who have developed the advanced technology used to cause this mass murder of innocent civilians.  Other countries have discovered and developed this technology, many out of fear of the oppressor.  The oppressor, more than ever, still believes that it has the right to dictate how other countries should use this technology.  It has persuaded or manipulated other countries into destroying their technology for this weapon.  Those countries that refuse are punished with embargoes and other economic sanctions.  And, this is all despite the fact that the only country that has ever used this technology to cause harm is the oppressor.  Many have developed it, but only one has ever been brutal enough to actually use it.


In case it is not obvious, the oppressor is the United States, and the small country is Japan.  The advanced technology is nuclear explosives.  To be clear, I am not trying to justify anyone here, and I am not trying to demonize anyone.  I am trying to provide some perspective to what happened between the US and Japan during World War II.  Most Americans do not fully understand the situation.  They believe that Japan attacked without provocation, and they do not understand the massive civilian toll of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  These were not attacks against military targets.  The US deliberately killed over 100,000 innocent civilians as a show of force.  Support for the war among the Japanese civilian population was weak enough that the government felt it necessary to spread propaganda to its own people to increase support.  Killing the civilians had no strategic military value.  It was entirely a show of force.

Japan did not attack us unprovoked.   Bad feelings had been building between our countries for a long time, and it was almost exclusively our fault.  Russia, China, Korea, and Japan had been fighting over land for centuries.  Japan had, at multiple times in the past, held territory currently owned by all of these countries.  Starting in the early 1900s (maybe earlier), the US and European nations began to intervene in disputes over these territories, consistently awarding control to everyone except Japan.  Japan was treated as an invader, despite the fact that they had a legitimate, though not exclusive, claim to these territories.  Japan's sovereignty was regularly subsumed by US mandate.  They were our enemy before the war started, because we treated them like a vassal.  We made Japan our enemy, and that is why they chose to attack us.

To date, the US is the only country in the world to actually use a full scale nuclear weapon against an enemy target.  Further, these were not tests.  We had already extensively tested them, and we were fully aware of the damage they would cause.  The reason Pakistan, China, India, Korea, Iran, and many other countries want nuclear weapon technology is because they fear that we will use it again.  Of all of these, only Iran's motives are significantly suspect.  Pakistan, China, India, and Korea have all had nuclear weapon technology for some time, and if they had wanted to use it against us, they could have already done so.  There is some fear that terrorists in Pakistan will manage to steal or capture the country's nuclear weapons, but that fear seems to be subsiding, as we are making progress against the terrorists.

The point here is that outside of the US and the European Union, the world has good reason to fear the US.  We go around telling sovereign nations what to do, and if they seek reprisal, we murder their civilians in massive numbers (from their perspective).  We try to control sovereign nations by imposing economic sanctions against them when they don't obey our commands.  We try to keep them weak by preventing them from developing weapons as powerful as our own.  From our perspective, we just think we are protecting ourselves.  We justify murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians by pointing out that we might have lost a few thousand more soldiers if we had not done it.  From their perspective, we brutally murdered many of their peaceful and innocent civilians to prove a point that could have been proven better by destroying a military base or two.  We used a weapon on their civilian living spaces that left fallout that is worse than even salting the earth to prevent crops from growing (admittedly, we did not know the full effects of this when we did it).  We did billions of dollars worth of damage to non-military structures.  To them, what we did amounts to mass murder and mass vandalism.  When other countries develop nuclear weapons, they are not doing it so they can nuke us.  They are doing it so that we know that they are powerful enough to do equal damage to anything we do to them.  They are setting up a mutually assured destruction, because they know that if we value our own lives and they have nukes, then we won't nuke them.  The only defense against nuclear weapons is to have your own, and since we have them, they know that they must have them as well, if they want to be able to defend themselves against us.  And, they cannot trust us, because we have used them before.

Again, the point here is to provide perspective.  It is easy to say that what we did was an absolutely horrible war crime, and by today's standards, that is totally true.  We also need to keep in mind, however, that most of the people who made that decision are no longer alive, and it is easy to make bad decisions when you feel desperate.  Further, I was not there, so I cannot judge the thought processes that went into the decision.  I personally think targeting military establishments would have been a much better decision, but I am not going to condemn those that thought otherwise.  I still think that those who do condemn us are not being unreasonable though.  Regardless of the justification, what we did was abominable.

Hobby Lobby and Mandatory Benefits

The Hobby Lobby case was an extravagant law suit.  Of course religious freedom should have won.  There should never have been any question.  The problem was not with Hobby Lobby, and it was certainly not about human rights.  The problem is with who carries the obligation to enforce those rights.

Consider how this would play out: The government decides to enforce the right to own property by putting businesses in charge of it.  Now, businesses are legally required to handle things like evictions and property deeds for their employees.  If an employee is robbed, the employer is required to investigate and bring the thief to justice.  Oh yeah, and this only applies to full time employees.

Now, considering the following: The government and the majority of Americans establish that adequate medical care is a fundamental human right.  The government comes up with a list of medical care related things that every person should have free access to.  Now, to enforce this the government does two things.  First, it puts enforcement in the charge of for-profit businesses.  Businesses are now required to provide their employees with the list of things that every person should have free access to.  Now, we cannot forget though, this only applies to full time employees.  The second thing the government does is to mandate that anyone who is not a full time employee must pay, out of their own pockets, for insurance.  This is great.  Now, the government says that adequate medical care is a fundamental human right, so we are forced to enforce this right ourselves on an individual basis.  That makes perfect sense.  Imagine if this was applied to freedom of speech.  If the government tries to shut us up, our only recourse is to fight the government as an individual.  Appealing to the law would not be an option, because it is our own problem, not the government's.  This applies equally to medical care.  The government is pretending to provide what has been established as a fundamental human right by saying that for-profit businesses and individuals have to enforce this right.

The Hobby Lobby case should not have been about religious freedom.  That should have been a given.  The Hobby Lobby case should have been about responsibility.  If the government is not responsible for enforcing human rights, then no one is.  Enforcing rights is the purpose of the government.  The reason health care has become a problem in the first place is that the existing system, including mandatory benefits and health insurance, is entirely inadequate.  Forcing people to subscribe to the current system can hardly be considered enforcing a fundamental human right to adequate medical care.  In fact, it is little more than another way for the government to control us and subject us.

The big problem with requiring businesses to enforce human rights is that it forces people to work for them.  This is a rather foul case of discrimination against freelancers and business owners.  Human rights do not just apply to those who work for someone else.  If something is a right, then, by definition, it applies to everybody.  Further, allowing businesses to get out of this obligation for part time employees is even worse discrimination against the poor.  Clearly, the American lower class does not have the right to adequate health care, based on the precedents set by the law.  This also gives businesses far too much power.  A business can decide who has the right to adequate medical care merely by setting schedules and employee classification.  If my employer does not like my religion, my political ideology, my race, or even my hair color, a simple reduction in hours can change my classification to part time, exempting me from the right to adequate medical care.  Even worse, now I am legally required to go buy insurance (which, just for the record, does not provide adequate medical care), even though my pay check just got substantially reduced.  Choosing who human rights apply to is not the responsibility of for-profit businesses.  In fact, even governments have no business discriminating in this area. 

Enforcement of human rights is the job of the government.  It is not the job of businesses, and it certainly is not the job of the individual.  If individuals have to enforce their own fundamental rights, then the government is obsolete.  A government that puts the burden of enforcing human rights on businesses and individuals is lazy and corrupt.  If adequate health care is truly a fundamental human right, the government needs to get off of its lazy butt and take care of the problem.  This is the government's job.  It is not the job of businesses or individuals.  Further, if adequate heath care is a human right, it should apply to everyone, not just those who work full time and not just those who are willing and can afford to buy into the system.

Hobby Lobby should never have needed to defend its religious rights.  The government never had any business placing the burden of providing a fundamental human right on the business in the first place.  There are certainly cases where religious freedom must be balanced with other human rights, but it was entirely wrong of the government to place Hobby Lobby, or any other business, in this position in the first place.  Not only could this pitting of religious freedom against the right to adequate health care have easily been avoided, it should have.  If the government had done the right thing in the first place, this issue would never have arisen.

Pulling Your Own Weight

The idea of pulling your own weight is based on the idea that each person incurs costs for upkeep, including food, water, clothing, and shelter.  In the U.S., we might add things like internet and electricity to this, but really it comes down to the fact that every person has an upkeep cost, and someone has to pay it.  The idea of pulling your own weight is a very old idea, but also a conditional one.  Each person in a society that is capable of doing so is expected to pull their own weight.  Of course, there have been some deviations from this, but it is largely the most common way of running an economy.

There are some occasional historical exceptions to this, but there are also some chronic exceptions.  Historical exceptions almost always involve slavery.  Greek philosophy and math were built by people who did not pull their own weight.  In fact, if they had not had slaves to pull their weight for them, we would probably not have modern technology and science as we know them.  Slavery has been common off and on throughout history.  In the U.S. and most of Western civilization, slavery (overt slavery, anyhow) has been abandoned and replaced with an economic philosophy very common to cultures that reject slavery.  This philosophy is the idea that every person must pull their own weight.  Chronic exceptions to this are very common and will never go away.  Babies, young children, elderly people, and disabled people are not expected to pull their own weight, because they cannot.  Stay-at-home mothers are treated as not pulling their own weight in many parts of modern society, however this is a filthy lie.  They may not be producing goods, but stay-at-home mothers are doing work that is far more important than most of the work done outside the home.  Now, the slavery exception is becoming an unusual one that is likely to overturn how we view economy, probably within the next half century.

In older economies, the pull-your-own-weight ideology was a fairly sound one.  While it is possible for a small number of people to provide for a large number, the work involved has been excessive.  One slave working 16 hours a day might be able to provide the needs of ten or twenty other people, but that slave cannot have any freedom because there is just no time for it.  Modern technology has changed this though.  Besides finding more efficient ways of producing, it has also provided ways of replacing human labor with mechanical slaves.  Mechanical slavery is completely ethical.  The machines can work 24 hours a day, and they never need time off or personal time.  The only down time is time spent on repairs and maybe upgrades.  Experts estimate that this ethical form of slavery will replace about 50% of the human workforce by 2050.  This presents a very serious ideological problem.

Here is the problem: The U.S. economy is based on this pull-your-own-weight ideology.  We are in the process of rapidly replacing human workers with mechanical slaves.  These two things are completely incompatible.  If we replace half of the human labor force with slaves and then still expect the humans to pull their own weight, we are expecting the impossible.  Actually, we are perhaps doing something worse.  We are missing something important. What is the actual weight of a human?

The "weight" of a human is the amount of labor required to meet that human's needs.  Slavery with human slaves does not change the weight of a human; it just displaces the labor.  Some human still has to pull the weight.  Slavery with machines slaves, however, does change the weight of humans.  Replacing human labor with machine labor directly reduces the human labor required to meet the needs of humans.  This is what we are missing: As we automate more processes, we are reducing the weight of humans.  The problem is that we are not accounting for this.  We have high unemployment largely because we have reduced the weight of humans, and those humans that are still doing the same amount of work are now pulling more than their own weight.  The result is that there is not enough work left for everyone else, because their weight is already being pulled.  Unfortunately, because we have not noticed this problem, we are not distributing the results of the work appropriately.  The consequence is that some people are pulling more than their own weight, and they are getting the proceeds of that.  The people that are not able to pull their own weight are stuck without enough to survive, because their portion is being given to the people that are pulling their weight for them.

This is complicated, and it is not obvious that this is what is happening.  Further, there is a very important reason that this is happening: We have reached a point where it is actually substantially less efficient for each person to pull their own weight.  When each person's weight costs 2 to 4 hours of work per day (and, when that burden is centralized to one or two people per family), it is fairly efficient for businesses.  Each employee spends enough time working to easily keep up with overhead.  Now, however, each person's weight comes out to around 1 or 2 hour per day, or even less.  When centralized, this comes out between 10 to 20 hours a week.  Having every employee work half time doubles the overhead, because the number of employees are doubled (reducing hours does not reduce overhead).  In addition to that, higher end jobs often have warm up and cool down time that results in unproductive hours on each end of a shift.  This means, in an 8 hour shift, if an hour at each end is unproductive, 75% of the work time is productive.  In 4 hour shifts, productivity is reduced to only 50%.  In lower end jobs this effect is dramatically lower, but in high end jobs (especially in problem solving work like engineering and science), this is a major obstacle to reducing hours (note that in these jobs, longer time between shifts tends to increase the unproductive warm up time, so 8 hours three days a week is not an efficient solution either).  This is an efficiency problem that is never going to go away.  It is just not efficient at current human "weight" for each person to pull his or her own weight.

Is there a solution to this?  Yes, but it is not a very popular one.  It is incredibly unpopular among conservatives, and it is at least mildly unpopular among liberals.  The solution is abandoning the pull-your-own-weight ideology.  We are quickly becoming a slave state, just like Greece was, except that we are doing it ethically.  If we do not abandon this pull-your-own-weight ideology, we are going to either let the majority of Americans starve as their jobs are replaced by machines, or we are going to have millions of Americans working workweeks so short that they are costing more overhead than the value they are generating.  Neither of these is a good long term economic plan.  One short term solution might be long vacation time, where each employee works "normal" hours, but only for 1/4 of the year, and the rest of the year is vacation time, however, that only partially mitigates overhead costs.  The most efficient solution is for some people to work 20 to 40 hour weeks at least 50% to 75% of the year, while everyone else lives off of the proceeds of that work.  Some kind of motivation would be necessary for those who work, and this would probably be complicated and difficult to do without resulting in an overprivileged working class and an underprivileged non-working class (ironic, given that historically the opposite happens).  Ultimately though, it is going to eventually become necessary, or we are going to have an epic economic crash when so many consumers starve to death that consumption drops below an economically sustainable level.

Things are changing rapidly.  Technology continues to advance faster than we can keep up with.  In the past, the impact of this has been primarily limited to the tech industry itself.  In the near future, however, this is going to have a massive economic impact.  If we are not prepared, we are going to suffer.  In some degree, the consequences are not predictable, but there is one thing that is predictable: If a large portion of human labor is replaced with machine labor, we cannot have a sustainable economy that is based in the pull-your-own-weight ideology. 

Upper Class Blindness

In America, we do not like to see poor people.  We do not want to see homeless people.  We do not want to see people living in poorly maintained low income housing.  We would prefer not to see the hungry.  So, what do we do about it?  Evidently, we try to hide it.  Within the last year, at least 21 U.S. cities have passed laws forbidding the feeding of homeless people in public.  Some cities have replaced park benches with new models that include separators designed to prevent homeless people from sleeping on them.  Businesses have placed obstacles on sidewalks to make sitting on them painful, to deter the homeless from loitering near their stores.  In many cities, construction projects have been approved that destroy or renovate low income apartments to become classy higher income housing.  In some cases, low income housing has been replaced in response to higher income residents that live nearby, who feel that the nearby low income housing damages their property values and forces them to see things they would rather not.  In the U.S., our solution to our discomfort at seeing poor people is to create laws to drive them away.

This is a major ethical problem.  We have plenty of poor in the U.S., and the number is only increasing.  Hiding the problem is not fixing it.  All of these laws and other solutions are actually making the problem worse.  Now, hungry homeless people are being forced to starve, because they cannot be fed where they are, and they have nowhere else to go.  Tearing down low income housing is putting more people on the streets.  Perhaps the worst part, though, is that all of these efforts to hide the problem are making it less obvious, which makes it easier to ignore the suffering.

There is a solution.  It is a painful one, and the upper class will certainly be opposed to it.  It needs to be done though.  The problem has been ignored for so long that there seems to be no other reasonable way.  First, I think we need an amendment to the Constitution offering Federal protection for the poor.  No law should be allowed to persist which is designed specifically to discriminate against the poor.  When a city tries to enact a law designed to hide the fact that the city is tolerating the pain and suffering of its poor, Federal courts should have the legal backing to come down hard on that city.  Building projects designed specifically to relieve the rich from the burden of seeing the suffering of the poor should also be shut down.  In fact, the truly ethical city would deliberately zone such that every large, expensive house looked out at cheap low income housing.  The homeless shelter should be right next to the highest income mansion.  The soup kitchens should be right across from the country clubs.  Not only should it be legal to feed the homeless right out on the streets where they live, it should be encouraged to feed them in prominent locations where the rich can observe, and the right to feed them in those places should be legally protected.  The point of all of this is that the people with the greatest capacity to improve the situation should be the people who have the greatest exposure to the problem.  Yes, this will be very emotionally painful.  It should be.  Imagine the pain and suffering of those poor people.  If we think we cannot bear to feel at least a part of their suffering, we deserve to feel the full impact of their fate for ourselves.

Upper class blindness needs to be cured.  If this requires the poor to be shoved in the faces of the rich, then this is what needs to be done.  Perhaps if the rich were forced to realize what their money games are doing to our nation's poor, they would think twice about how their business deals and profit strategies might be causing harm to others.

The Little Red Hen

There was once a little red hen.  She owned a wheat field.  When duck came asking for a job working on the farm, the little red hen told him that she did not need any help, because she had an automatic system for planting, watering, harvesting, and separating the wheat.  The little red hen also owned a flour mill, but when pig asked if there was anything he could do to help, the little red hen told him that she had an automatic delivery system from the farm to the mill, and the processes for milling the wheat and bagging the flour were automated as well.  The little red hen had a bread factory, but when cow asked if there was something she could do to help, the little red hen told cow that the factory was so well automated that she did not even need someone for quality control.  The little red hen had a bakery as well.  When horse asked if he could help sell the bread, the little red hen showed him rows of completely automated bread vending machines, and she told him she already had it covered.

When it came time to harvest the wheat, the automatic harvester harvested all the wheat, it dumped it into a thresher, which separated the grain from the chaff.  The wheat was then pour into buckets on a conveyor belt, which carried the wheat to the mill next door.  Machines at the mill dumped the buckets into the milling machine, and the flour cascaded down a funnel into bags.  Another conveyor carried the flour next door to the bread factory, where they were dumped into huge mixers along with water and other ingredients, then divided into loaves, cooked, bagged, and sent to the bakery on yet another conveyor.  A complex mechanical system hidden behind the vending machines filled each one with bagged loaves of bread.  The little red hen then waited for customers to buy her bread.

After a few hours with no business, the little red hen looked out the front window.  Standing outside, across the street, stood duck, pig, cow, and horse, looking longingly at the bakery.  The little red hen walked outside and called across the street, asking why they were looking but not buying any bread.  One by one, each of them explained that they had been unable to find any jobs, so they had no money.  They just could not afford the bread.  The little red hen stuck up her beak and went back inside.  She did not need friends who were poor, when she had so much.  If they did not have any money, then they would not have any bread.

Duck, pig, cow, and horse lived on the streets until they starved to death.  Only the little red hen was left in the town, but she was content.  She had plenty of bread.  Her lack of friends did not bother her.  She was rich, so she did not need any friends.  Her money and her property could be her friends.  At least, this is what she told herself when she started feeling lonely.


(In case someone thinks that this story is about the evils of automation, read my opinion on that subject: Dehumanizing.  Automation is not evil.  People who succumb to greed are what is evil.)

Taco Bell App

Taco Bell has come out with an ordering app that allows customers to use their smart phones to put in an order and pay for it.  As the customer approaches a Taco Bell location, the app asks if they want the restaurant to start preparing their food.  This process can involve almost no human contact (I suppose someone has to pass the food out the window, but ordering and paying is entirely electronic).

As this becomes more popular (Taco Bell is not the first to try this, and it most certainly will not be the last), a lot of jobs are going to be lost.  Eventually, most drive through orders will not require a cashier, because most of them will already be ordered and paid for before the customer even enters the drive through.  This will allow the drive through cashier position to be combined with another position.  It is also likely that the added convenience will reduce the need for inside cashiers.  Eventually this is going to spread to all fast food restaurants, because otherwise, they will not be able to compete.  This is going to add up to a lot of jobs that are lost.

It is about time!  Fast food restaurants severely underpay their employees.  They claim that they cannot afford to pay more.  I have argued this before, and I will repeat it again: A business that cannot pay employees enough to survive on is not worth existing.  Work that is not worth a living wage is not worth doing at all.  Pay that is below a living wage is just plain not sustainable.  A business that cannot pay a living wage is not profitable enough or valuable enough to justify its own existence.  Fast food is practically the bottom of the barrel (ok, agriculture is far worse, but also far less prominent).  Current Federal minimum wage, which most fast food places start at, generates well under the poverty level in income, even full time.  One of the most effective ways of reducing costs (so that employees can be paid fair wages) is automating processes and eliminating unnecessary employees.  Food assembly is hard to automate (though, certainly possible).  Automated order taking is now very easy to automate.  It is the low hanging fruit.  It is nice to see that fast food is finally figuring this out.

There is a catch.  The most common response to increased profits through automation is faster expansion and better shareholder payouts (or, even worse, increased CEO salary).  If Taco Bell choses to take this route, then not only is it not worth existing, it is actively worth destroying.  Why?  It is already vastly underpaying its employees.  It should take this opportunity to make its employment system more sustainable by raising wages.  Admittedly, eliminating maybe two or three employees will not save enough to pay all of the rest a living wage.  An effort, however, would be nice.  It would show that they care about paying their employees fairly.  If, instead, they spend the profits on something else, then they are showing that they could care less about their employees.  If this is the case, then the business does not deserve to exist, and additionally, it deserves to die so society no longer has to pay the costs of its freeloading on our unpaid labor (if it pays less than a living wage, then it is not paying for all of the labor it is getting).  I hope they do the right thing, but I am not holding my breath.

Discrimination Against the Poor - Part 1

I want to share a little bit of back story before I start the actual article.  We just had our 5th child.  It was a natural birth at a local hospital.  Our first birth was a water birth in a birthing center, and we went home three hours after the birth.  Our other three were all natural in-hospital births, where the hospital required us to stay for 24 hours for observation after the birth, and my wife was sick of this.  We made a birth plan specifying that we wanted to leave 12 hours after the birth, and while we forgot it at home, we made our plans very clear to the hospital staff.  Our nurse, our midwife, and the pediatrician all accepted our decision, though some of them did not agree with it.  The nurse, however, informed the billing person for the hospital, who came in and informed my wife that if we left against medical advice (the hospital's 24 hour policy required the pediatrician to write the discharge for the baby as "against medical advice" if we left before 24 hours), Medicaid would not pay for the services provided for the baby, and we would have to pay out of pocket.  The midwife had told us something different, so I went home and did some research, while my wife tried to contact Medicaid by phone.  Eventually, she reached Medicaid who told her that they had no such policy and could only find a reference stating that if we brought the baby back before the 24 hours were up, we might be charged for services for the new visit that did not qualify as medically necessary.  Before that, however, my research at home revealed a rats nests around the billing lady's claim.  First, her claim was completely and absolutely false.  Second, most hospitals tell their patients this lie (though, hospital staff rarely knows the truth to begin with) and not just those insured through Medicaid.  I found three research papers from three different studies about this problem.  None of them found any insurers in the US with such a policy.  Anyhow, we left about 13 hours after the birth, and we informed the nurse that the claims were false and asked her to forward that on to the billing lady (the baby had no issues within those last 11 hours, though, the hospital staff had already determined she was perfectly healthy and the probability of problems was extremely low).


It should be obvious that poor people in the US face regular discrimination.  It is awfully hard to get hired for a job, even a really poor job, without nice clothing to wear to the interview (in fact, at least one US charity loans suits to poor job applicants to wear to interviews).  Many Medicaid, Food Stamp, and WIC office employees treat clients as inferiors.  Often, schools in poorer areas of towns and cities get sub-par teachers, while the other schools get the more skilled ones.  Middle and upper class people often look down on poor people and treat them as inferiors, and sometimes poor people even treat each other more poorly than those with more wealth.  Many Americans assume poor people are lazy.  This problem is so prevalent that comments from the few people that really are freeloading on government welfare often reflect badly on anyone who is receiving government welfare for any reason.  There is one place where this discrimination against the poor is especially repugnant, not to mention of questionable legality.

Most hospital employees in the US will tell patients that if they leave before their treatment is complete (known as leaving "against medical advice" or AMA), their insurance will not pay for it.  Because most patients leaving AMA are Medicaid patients, and because more wealthy patients can afford the costs better, this affects poor people far more than anyone else.  At least three studies have been done on this subject in the last three years, and none of these studies have found any insurance provider in the US with such a policy (some insurers actually laughed at the researchers for even asking).  Medicaid also has no such policy.  Now, in most cases, the hospital employees are not deliberately lying (though, hospitals do stand to benefit from patients staying "for observation" longer than is strictly necessary).  This is a common misconception among hospital employees, and it is presumably perpetuated as interns are taught this lie by regular employees.  This problem is not just bad for patients, it is also bad for insurers and potentially very bad for hospitals.

Because this problem affects primarily the poor, it is a clear case of discrimination against the poor.  As such, it is rather appalling.  It is also dangerous and perhaps even illegal.  This may be one reason that medical costs in the US are so high.  The biggest reasons people leave a hospital AMA are poor treatment or lack of additional time after treatment is complete.  Often, Medicaid patients have long waits to see a doctor, when their conditions are not critical.  Eventually, they get fed up with waiting, and they sometimes leave against medical advice.  The second, and more nefarious problem is when a patient has completed treatment, but the hospital either wants to observe the patient for an extra day or more, or the patient has to wait a long time for the doctor to do a final review and sign discharge papers.  In both cases, the hospital may charge more money to Medicaid, another insurer, or the patient, for the longer stay.  In the second case, however, it is possible that the long waits are actually deliberate abuse of the system, designed to allow the hospital to charge more for the visit by keeping the patient there longer.  Either way, forcing patients to wait so long that they consider leaving without getting full treatment is dangerous to the health of the patient.  Telling the patient that insurance will not pay if they leave early, however, may be more dangerous to the hospital than the patient.

Most hospitals require patients to sign a release before leaving AMA, to reduce liability for any problems that might have been prevented had the patient received full treatment.  Patients leaving AMA is considered a big problem in the US right now, especially among Medicaid patients (males patients are also more likely to do this).  Concerned hospital workers may be tempted to lie to patients to convince them to stay and complete treatment.  This carries two very dangerous consequences.  If found out, these lies will cause patients to distrust doctors, and this is already a big enough problem in the US; we really do not need to add to it.  Lying to patients may cause them to look for alternatives to normal medical treatment that might be dangerous or at least allow serious conditions to go untreated.  This is not in the best interest of the patients, and as such, it qualifies as a violation of the oath taken by nearly all medical practitioners in the US to avoid harming patients.  The second consequence is worse, at least for the hospital.  Medical patients have legally protected rights in the US, and one of those rights is to refuse treatment.  Any medical patient in the US may choose to leave a hospital at any time, without legal penalty, and if the hospital attempts to hold them against their will, the hospital is breaking the law.  This is a very serious offense.  Lying to a patient to manipulate them into forgoing this right, when they would otherwise have chosen to exercise it is a violation of this right.  Telling a patient that there will be severe financial penalties (for people on Medicaid, nearly any hospital bill is severe) is essentially forcing the patient to make a choice under duress.  Decisions made under duress are not legally binding.  If the patient has informed a hospital employee of an intent to leave AMA, and the hospital uses this lie to convince the patient to stay, the patient's original decision is still in force (because the overriding decision was made under duress), and by keeping the patient, the hospital is both holding the patient against his or her will (this is illegal by itself) as well as violating the rights of the patient.

There are several better ways to treat this kind of situation.  First, financial employees in hospitals should determine policy for specific insurance providers before any employee is allowed to suggest to a patient that penalties might exist.  Since most insurance companies have no such penalties, there is no point discussing them without asking the companies first.  Second, instead of trying to scare patients to stay by lying to them, it should be far more effective to inform them of the actual medical consequences of leaving AMA.  Even Medicaid patients are not stupid.  If they still want to leave, fully informed of the potential consequences, then it is their legal right to do so.  At that point, they have chosen to own the consequences, and nobody has any right to force them to stay.

This problem is dangerous to both patients and hospitals.  Employees need to be educated properly so that they do not inadvertently do or say things that could get the hospital in trouble.  Violations of patient rights can incur heavy fines, and multiple instances can get hospitals shut down.  Given how prevalent this problem is in the US, there have probably been enough of this kind of patient rights violations at most US hospitals to get them shut down.  Further, this kind of discrimination against the poor needs to stop.  Most poor people may not have the research skills to ever discover the lie they have been fed, but this does not absolve hospital employees of their responsibility to treat patients well and honestly.  If nothing else, more care should be taken to treat the poor fairly and legally, because they have a disadvantage.


Following are the studies on this problem:

The University of Chicago Medicine
http://www.uchospitals.edu/news/2012/20120203-billing.html

PubMed.gov, Journal of General Internal Medicine
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22331399

Annals of Emergency Medicine, An International Journal
http://www.annemergmed.com/article/S0196-0644%2809%2901798-3/fulltext

Data Cap for Monopoly?

I just read two articles on Comcast.  The first is about its proposed acquisition of Time Warner.  Evidently, the FCC has received some opposition to allowing the acquisition, because Comcast uses some rather monopolistic practices.  More or less, Comcast and Time Warner are using their size and market share to manipulate content providers into paying for services that most ISPs gladly provide for free.  Notably, one of the complaints comes from Netflix, because Comcast and Time Warner refuse to provide direct connections for free.

Direct connections to major content providers dramatically reduce internet congestion and improve the ability of ISPs to provide good quality media streaming.  As such, ISPs that provide direct connections to major content providers benefit themselves and their customers dramatically.  Very large ISPs, like Comcast, however, use their size to force content providers to pay for these connections.  Ultimately, the content providers feel forced to comply, because without the direct connections, their services will perform poorly for customers of those ISPs.  Sadly, the customers blame the content providers, even though the fault lies entirely with their ISPs.

The second problem with Comcast is its attempt to redefine language.  According to Comcast, charging extra when a subscriber goes over a data limit is not technically a data cap.  The FCC definition of "data cap" actually includes this kind of subscription model, with a clause explicitly exempting Comcast from this definition (the FCC working group that drafted this definition includes a Comcast VP, who presumably is responsible for this clause).  Evidently Comcast's size and market share gives it the power to define language in its own terms.  Note that the term "data cap" is commonly used by ISPs and individuals to mean any data limit, whether it be a hard limit or a sort of uptier limit where extra charges are applied when the limit is exceeded.  It is clear that Comcast believes itself to have power to alter the meaning of language.

The second problem is worse than the first, but they come down to the same thing.  Comcast's motive for using data caps* is exclusively financial.  Most data caps imposed by smaller ISPs exist to combat network congestion.  Comcast is large enough that it does not have congestion problems, but they would rather charge data caps to pay for upgrades than use a portion of their already very high profits to pay for them.  There is another, more nefarious and legally questionable reason for Comcast's data caps though.  Comcast does not count data transfers to and from its own services against the caps.  This means that customers using data heavy services may feel compelled to use Comcast's services instead.  Now, I do not know exactly what services Comcast offers, but I could easily imagine some examples.  Note that even if Comcast does not offer a specific service, it could easily add it at a future date.  The first service that Comcast could offer is a video streaming service.  Video streaming from services like Hulu or Netflix are certainly data intensive, and regular use of those services could easily hit a fairly large data cap.  If Comcast offered its own video streaming service, many customers might feel like they have to use Comcast's services instead of Netflix or Hulu, to avoid paying fees for exceeding the data limit.  This applies equally to digital media sales services, like those provided by Amazon.  Digital video files are large, and can be consumed faster than streaming video (because you can download many at a time, at a faster rate than you can view them).  If Comcast offered this sort of service, a data cap would definitely give it an advantage in the market of its subscribers.

The thing that all of these problems boil down to is monopoly.  Comcast is leveraging its huge market share to force content providers to pay for services that other ISPs provide for free, because they benefit both sides equally.  This is a monopolistic practice.  Comcast uses a data cap to increase its revenue, and gets away with it because of its huge market share.  Again, this is a monopolistic practice.  Lastly, and the worst of them all, Comcast uses its market share in its ISP service to gain an unfair advantage in its other services.  This is an extremely  monopolistic practice.  In fact, large companies have frequently been punished by the government for this last practice.  The MS lawsuit over its inclusion of Internet Explorer in the US (and Windows Media Player in the EU and now in China as well) was based on the fact that MS was using its Windows market share to give it an unfair advantage over other browser (and media player, outside the US) makers. This is monopolistic because it is using the popularity of one product to sell another unrelated product (internet connectivity vs internet based service, very similarly to operating system vs application).  Further, it is not just abusing the market share of one product to sell another unrelated product (IE and Windows Media Player might seem free, but the price is included in the cost of Windows); it is actually putting customers in a position where they are effectively being fined or otherwise charged extra for using someone else's product too much.

Very few ISPs do the oppressive and monopolistic things that Comcast does.  Most ISPs now offer unlimited data in all of their non-business packages.  Most ISPs provide direct connections to content providers at no cost, because they benefit just as much or more.  Most ISPs do not have enough market share to leverage things like data caps and direct connections to rip off customers and compete unfairly with content providers.  Most ISPs do not make anywhere near the profits Comcast does.  Comcast is not doing any of this because it is necessary to remain profitable.  It is doing all of this because it wants more money and it has the power to get it.  If it acquires Time Warner, it will control even more of the internet.  We should be seriously worried about one company having this kind of power over our largest communications system (especially when that company thinks that it can just redefine language to avoid looking bad).  Comcast is already acting in ways that have been established as monopolistic and illegal in the US and most of the rest of the world.  While we should be worried, it is the government's job to protect us from this.  Not only should Comcast not be allowed to increase its monopoly by acquiring Time Warner, it should be the subject of a serious government investigation for monopolistic practices.



Here is the article on data caps definition: http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/08/comcast-tells-government-that-its-data-caps-arent-actually-data-caps/

* If some Comcast executive reads this and suddenly feels compelled to demand that I use a different term, let it be known that I will not.  Bullying large publications might work, but I am not going to redefine language based on the delusions of grandeur of some company.

Vaccine and Vitamin K Refusal

I just read this article from Scientific American.  While I have great respect for the magazine, I find the author somewhat lacking.  In fact, I have found a great deal lacking in nearly every author promoting the medical industry and attacking skeptics of modern medicine.  Now, I am not saying that the medical industry is wrong, but it is at fault in a large degree for the various movements opposing vaccination and other things like vitamin K shots or eye drops for newborns.

The primary problem is not the media and movements encouraging parents to avoid potentially life saving treatments for their children.  The problem is general mistrust of doctors, which has been caused by their own poor behavior.  My wife is a doula (a professional labor coach and educator).  We have chosen to forgo both the vitamin K shots and the eye drops that hospitals typically give all newborns.  Our first child was born in a birthing center, where we were educated on all of the risks involved with both sides.  Further, we did some research of our own.  We found that the risk of complications is extremely low without the treatments.  Contrary to the article, both treatments do indeed carry risks, however they are also extremely low.  Based on our knowledge, we chose not to allow the midwives to administer either of the treatments.  Similarly, we have been very selective about vaccinations.  Now, let me first assure you that we do not believe the claims (which have been proven false) that vaccines cause autism.  This is a bunch of crock spread by celebrities that have no medical education.  Our first reason to limit vaccination is that many vaccines contain small amounts of latex, and my wife and at least one of our children has shown a sensitivity to latex.  Latex allergies can quickly become life threatening with repeated exposure, so we chose to limit vaccinations to limit latex exposure.  We have had our children vaccinated for a few things.  These are diseases that either have a high probability of fatality or permanent injury or that cannot be cured once contracted.  While I have seen no empirical data on this, I have observed that people who get every single vaccine and thus rarely get sick tend to fare less well when they do get sick, while people who avoid common vaccines that are mostly just for convenience (the flu vaccine for most people) tend to get over nearly anything fairly quickly.  So, why would anyone choose to forgo even vaccines for higher risk diseases?

As a doula, by wife is present when her patients give birth.  This typically occurs in a hospital.  Additionally, we have had several of our children born in hospitals.  My wife has had multiple experiences where doctors or nurses administer treatments without informing or consulting the patient.  In many cases, these treatments have not been strictly necessary and were administered either for the convenience of the patient or for the convenience of the medical professional.  I am also aware of instances where a doctor has recommended an unnecessary, high risk treatment to a patient for personal convenience.  In one case, the doctor used scare tactics to convince the patient to agree to a cesearan section because the birth was taking too long and was going to cut into a birthday party the doctor wanted to attend.  In one case where my wife was present, the doctor and nurses completely ignored a list of documented requests from the patient without any medical reason for doing so.  In this last case, the patient is now showing symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder related to pregnancy and hospitals.  This is why people refuse vaccinations and other treatments for their children.  After an experience where your human rights are blatantly violated by medical professionals, it becomes very natural to distrust the medical industry in general.

The problem is not those who spread lies about potential side effects of vaccinations or other treatments.  The problem is the doctors that mistreat patients and breed mistrust.  Sadly, the most common place this occurs is in hospitals.  Private practices and family doctors tend to be much better at informing patients about treatments, with one small exception (I'll get to this).  In hospitals, it is very common for nurses and doctors to treat patients without ever discussing the treatment with the patient.  With births, doctors will frequently tell the patient a treatment will be administered without any concern for the desires of the patient (unnecessary C-sections and inductions are a very major problem in the US, and typically the mother is never even offered a choice).  This is wrong, and to most people it is clearly a violation of human rights.  It really should come as no surprise that many parents are willing to trust unknowns over the people who have violated them and lied to them.

Now I want to look at the one exception.  Vaccinations always carry risks.  In fact, any time the skin is pierced with something, there is a risk of infection.  Modern sanitation practices have reduced this risk to almost nothing, but it does exist.  There is also a risk that any given patient is allergic to something in a vaccine.  Again, this is typically very small.  Most pre-drawn vaccines contain latex, and the rubber stopper on vaccine containers that are not pre-drawn frequently contain latex.  For those with a threshold allergy to latex (this is the kind of allergy that becomes more severe with each exposure), even this small exposure to latex can be life threatening.  Even if it is not, it can cause the next reaction to be more severe.  Overall though, for most people the risk of complications from vaccination is extremely small.  In fact, the risks are so small that beyond asking about allergies first, I do not see any reason why doctors should be forced to discuss them in detail.

On the other hand though, there is the risk of serious complications from catching the disease that the vaccination would have prevented.  For instance, the flu almost never kills.  When it does, it is almost exclusively very young children and extremely old people.  On occasion, it kills someone else who has a severely compromised immune system.  Outside of these easily identifiable groups, the flu is merely a brief and slightly painful inconvenience.  Chicken pox is even less severe than the flu (though it does carry the risk of getting shingles later in life, which rarely kills but is extremely painful).  Getting these trivial diseases does little more than cause inconvenience, but they can ultimately strengthen the immune system (something like exercise strengthens muscles).  Now, these two diseases are trivial, but fairly common.  That is not true of the rest of the diseases that we typically vaccinate against.  Most vaccines provide immunity for diseases that less than a percent of a percent of the population will ever be exposed to.  Further, many of these diseases, while they can be severe, are no longer as deadly as they were when we did not know how to treat them.  The chance of serious complications, when combined with the extremely low chance of exposure, may even start to approach the potential risk caused just by getting the vaccine in the first place.  This is what doctors do not tell you.  Most vaccinations will never even matter and may even increase the overall risk of harm.

How can we deal with this? First, I think that doctors should be required by law to discuss both potential negative and positive consequences of any treatment with the patient or guardian before administering any treatment (except in serious emergency cases where there is not time, in which case the discussion should take place after the emergency situation is over).  Until this happens though, parents and patients will have to figure out how to deal with these things on their own.  I would suggest asking you doctor a lot of questions.  You can legally refuse any treatment (the doctor may ask you to sign a wavier though).  This means that you can tell the doctor that you will not permit treatment until you are fully informed of all potential risks involved.  You can also search the internet, but make sure you find sources from both sides of any debate, otherwise you will only get half of the knowledge you need to make an informed decision (also, learn to distinguish reputable sources from random people running their mouths; in medicine, celebrities are not reputable sources).  Look for numbers.  If you find something saying that some treatment increases the chances of some horrible outcome by 50%, try to find what it is 50% of.  If the chances are 1 in 1 million, that means they are only 1.5 in one million with the treatment.  Relatively, that 50% increase seems large, but the actual probability is still extremely low.

There is one other thing doctors will rarely tell you.  Most vaccinations now are given to improve "herd immunity."  What this means is, the chance that your child will get the measles, even without the vaccination, is almost non-existent.  Your child will probably not benefit at all from it, in fact.  Many vaccines target diseases that are almost extinct (at least in the 1st world).  The goal of the vaccinations is to keep the disease isolated or even to eliminate it, not to benefit the individual getting the vaccine.  This is called herd immunity, because it benefits the group (or "herd") as a whole, but it almost never benefits the individual.  In other words, there is almost no individual risk of getting the disease to balance the negative risks associated with getting the vaccine.  Now, in case you are feeling disgust that doctors would value the well being of the abstract herd over the well being of your child, you should know that this herd immunity gained from widespread vaccination is what eliminated small pox.  It was so effective that we no longer vaccinate for small pox because the risk is almost literally zero.  Now, with that in mind, feel free to form your own opinions.

Here is our solution to the problem.  My wife and I avoid vaccinations for trivial diseases like chicken pox or the flu.  If there was an extremely severe strain of the flu going around (and a vaccine was made available quickly enough; for the flu, they usually are not), then we might consider getting our children vaccinated.  Otherwise, we do not consider the risk, though small, worth the minor convenience.  We also opted out of many of the vaccinations for extremely uncommon diseases with very low risk of permanent harm.  We did, however, get our children vaccinated for one of the hepatitis versions that is difficult or impossible to cure once contracted.  One reason is that we are occasionally exposed to people who have recently come from a country where that disease is more common; the other is that a serious disease that cannot be cured is probably worth getting vaccinated for, even if it is pretty rare in the US.  The hepatitis vaccination happens to be commonly administered in combination with a few other vaccinations, so we decided to get the combo, because the difference in risk between the single and the combo is negligible (if existent at all).

Our solution to the vitamin K and eye drops was to opt out.  Our reasoning is this: Most complications requiring vitamin K occur in the hospital.  Other complications are extremely rare (and at least one is genetic, and neither of us has any family history of it).  The eye drops are designed to more or less sanitize the eyes after birth, in case some dangerous bacteria got into the eyes.  This is also extremely rare.  At the time, the eye drops were made of some silver compound that happens to be toxic to humans as well.  There has been no research showing the silver drops to be safe for humans, so we decided the risk was higher than the benefits and opted out.  (Note that most hospitals are now using a different compound for this.  I do not know anything about the safety record of the new compound.)  Anyhow, we have opted out of these two things with all four of our children, without any issues.

Now, all of this is personal choice.  I do not want to convince you to vaccinate or to avoid vaccination.  Similarly, I am not trying to encourage or discourage trusting doctors.  Not all doctors are as negligent as those you frequently hear about.  I want two things to come out of this article.  First, I want regular people to know that they do not have to let doctors bully them.  You never have to accept treatment you do not want.  You can ask about the risks of a treatment, and you can refuse it if you are not willing to take the risk (this is even true of "mandatory" things, like the IV our local hospital requires for birthing mothers).  You also have the ability to learn for yourself and to keep yourself well informed (most hospitals offer free WiFi; bring your tablet, smart phone, or laptop, but make sure you find reputable sources of information).  Second, I really would like to see doctors be held more accountable.  An honest mistake or impossible situation can happen where the doctor may not be entirely responsible, but cases where the doctor makes a judgment call without any concern for the desire or well being of the patient should never be permitted.  No person should be practicing medicine who is willing to subject a patient to unnecessary surgery to get to a party on time, and a patient who comes away from the hospital with post traumatic stress disorder due to poor treatment from the nurses and doctors should be compensated very well for the suffering (not to mention be compensated for treatment for the PTSD).  If accountability were higher, fewer doctors would mistreat patients, people would trust doctors more, and scare tactics and lies designed to trick people into avoiding beneficial treatments would be far less effective.