And people still have this freak perception that most college kids are puffed-up and dumb.
We just have to acknowledge that the majority of the IT industry was in it because it was, well, the "it" industry of the '90s, with huge salaries and cool toys.
Besides, it's the low-level support/code monkey jobs that freshmeat grads usually get hired for -- except these days those kids are hired in India, so people of my generation recognize that we'll never even get a toehold.
By "it's starting to work" would you mean "job creation is still not keeping up with population increase, let alone the persistently rosy predictions of the current administration?" Because that'd be a bit more accurate.
You're right, he has increased spending -- though this is a matter of necessity, spending on "homeland defense" and on expeditionary foreign wars, not as an economic stimulus package. We should take this into account, but if you look at the stated economic policy, it has been to stimulate through tax cuts and avoid increasing other forms of spending. And other spending cuts have been made -- in federal aid to local governments, for instance.
Meanwhile, if you want to talk about elementary macroeconomics, keep two things in mind: #1 supply drives demand. (This is not an argument in favor of "supply-side economics" as it is normally understood to mean cutting business taxes and taxes on the wealthy). #2. If you want to increase the effective demand, you have to give the money to people who will actually spend it, instead of to people who will invest it. Thus, when the average American family gets something like $50 worth of tax rebate, you can't expect a whole lot of demand-side activity to take place. None of which helps the unemployed, regardless, which is the major drag on the economy at present -- too many people unwillingly excluded from it.
I realize I may be wrong and I own any faulty logic in the preceding. But I would advise you to check out the Krugman article I linked in my reply to the previous poster -- you may be assured that his reasoning is much more robust than my own. He (unlike all of us) is a professional...
1. I would invite you to reference eg. Paul Krugman's opinion on the subject of Keynesian economics and supply-side's ineffectiveness. If you are going to refer to him as another person who "obviously has no grasp of macro-scale economics," please direct me to which of your economics editorials have been picked up by the New York Times.
2.
Kensian economics has been on the decline for decades. The truth is massive government hurts the economy. This is because the excessive government spending perverts the free market and prevents investment in new ideas. It does this by taking money away from would-be investors and dedicating it to bone headed, woefully inadequate social programs.
I'm interested to know where you receive this truth from. Nevertheless: government spending does not necessarily have to consist of spending on social programs. In fact, in the case of space exploration, it would manifestly not be spent on social programs, but on manufacturing, as well as research and development. As to the larger economic point, while taxation and spending hurts the amount of capital available for investment, keep in mind that capital will only be invested where it is profitable to do so, which may not be in the domestic market or in industries where it is needed. Offshoring is financed by investment capital, not just R&D or production development. American dollars funding plants overseas don't do much to help the American economy -- supply can drive demand/consumption only if there is a link back to fund the consumption of the majority of Americans, and with widespread underemployment and unemployment, that isn't happening the way it needs to.
Moreover, money spent by recipients of welfare programs is still money spent into the economy, just by a different group of people. It then trickles up. The net effect is to raise the effective demand. This is significant in recessed times, like our times, in which job creation is not keeping up with population growth and thus most unemployment is "involuntary."
Ugh, fine, #3. George Soros is heavily invested in the Democratic candidate. Do you really think that one of the most prominent investors would side against Bush's economics in favor of rolling back tax cuts if he thought it'd be bad for American investors and economic growth?
If this initiative were actually funded, it would be a tremendous boon to the US economy -- we've been suffering from at best blind-sighted and at worst disingenuous supply-side economics policies (ie major tax cuts) at a time when what we really needed was large-scale government spending to provide real economic stimulus.
A space program would also be specially targeted towards the underemployed.
However, this administration has a history of mendacity (this is undeniable) and of putting forth poorly-thought-out "bold, visionary" plans that wind up making things worse by being unfunded (eg No Child Left Behind). That's strikes one and two.
But it could still be a home run, without the real kicker, strke three -- the plan proposes to make the cuts in other research now, but actually getting somewhere with the other research much much later. That's the part about this that I don't trust -- no one will be around to see this plan through to completion, so it will probably get scrapped when the government is completely starved. The sacrifices are immediate but the rewards distant and uncertain? --> bogus.
Providing for the needs of the citizens should be the responsibility of the states. It makes perfect sense to do things the way they are defined in the Constitution, because accountability tends to vary inversely with the size of the constituency.
I am all for local governance and increased accountability. However, taking care of those needs requires a lot more money than the Founding Fathers anticipated (no highways and no educational access for the majority of citizens, to name two salient examples). However, it's impossible for a local/state community to provide for all of its needs through taxation, because of the restrictions on interstate commerce and the ease with which people can evade jurisdiction (and it shows in, for example, the tremendous difference in quality between well-funded public schools in rich areas and poorly-funded public schools in poor areas, because those schools are each funded by taxing the local community's population). So you need the federal government to provide the taxation authority to fund the states' expenditure of resources in providing for that well-being. Most people don't realize that a lot of federal spending funds states' discretionary spending. This was maybe the biggest problem with the Bush tax cuts; to the extent that the government cut spending to match them, it cut it from aid to local governments, which dramatically worsened the impact of the bad economy and just generally rendered everything FUBAR.
Any community that creates such an unbelieveable fu#&ed up generation does not deserve to be treated as nicely as they are right now.
It wasn't the Palestinians alone who created that generation, you know. Living under an occupation will do that to you.
This is the result of ongoing and persistant brainwashing of kids who will have no purpose to their lives except for getting themselves killed as soon as they can.
And why do you suppose they might see no other possible hope in their lives than to become suicide bombers? Could it be that all other avenues of worldly success have been systematically denied to them?
Incidentally, the last time I checked the average daily water consumption for a Palestinian living in the Occupied Territories was four toilet flushes' worth per day. You tell me how to farm on that, and I'll be impressed. If you want to find out more, do a google search for "average daily water consumption palestine" or, if you want more 'mainstream' sources throw in a limiter like UN or WHO or Red Cross.
People are far too ready to believe the "irrational hatred" theory when there's plenty of evidence for the "rational hatred" theories...
Today, Taiwanese businesses are some of the largest producers of computer electronics, including crucial parts like motherboards and monitors, and of course less crucial parts like keyboards and mice.
Less crucial?
Uhh... have you ever tried to use a computer without a keyboard or a mouse? (besides a server that you can ssh into or whatever...)
The question isn't whether more money for the USPTO will result in better engineers being hired, the question is whether it will remove the income incentive for approving as many patents as possible. Well, that and whether that change will shift the balance of interests enough to influence PTO behaviour. Will there still be pressure from large corporations to get lots of patents approved? We've seen patent disputes cut both ways, so that may be a wash.
Anyway, don't hold your breath for this little change to result in massive review of the bad patents already issued. Patent law won't be in order until it's been thoroughly scoured by Congress with the express purpose of fixing it, and changing the status quo is the hardest thing for a legislative body of wealthy elites to decide to do...
I might add that those CBO figures are required to assume that the Bush tax cuts are not made permanent. The budget shortfall will be even more severe, and much much more the fault of the Bush tax cuts, if they are made permanent.
Spend money for a possibilty of return? Are you saying that space exploration is a lottery?
No, he's saying it's an investment. Whether or not you find what you're looking for is a crap shoot, but if you give smart people (the kind who love to think) money to sit around and think, they usually come up with something, and some other smart and more avaricious people come up with a way to use that for economic gain.
The flaw in his argument is that our economy is dependent upon the existence of the poor. They consume goods, thereby driving the economy, and they provide slack in the labor market to permit our corporate owners to work us harder than they pay us. A small tithe to keep them around is a lesser evil than seeing the majority of employed Americans able to demand full-value wages. (Plus full employment leads to inflation.)
Actually, there's a lie above -- consumption does not drive the economy, production does. Thus, as our production moves overseas, we become more and more superfluous. I'm sort of idly wondering what's going to happen when the corporate powers realize they no longer really need the American population any more, when everything has been outsourced. Look for precipitous declines in standard of living over the next couple decades, folks. But I ramble.
Party affiliation doesn't matter. Neither party rates science higher than pandering to its respective constituencies (large corporate interests plus the incredibly wealthy for the Republicans, different large corporate interests plus social programs for the Democrats).
Science will be funded if it serves the interests of either of those two groups, or if there's some money left over.
Not to beat a dead horse, but... Ford and Bush Sr. = 2, Johnson, Clinton x 2, + Gore = 4... total trials = 6, trials to Republicans = 2, Republicans won 2 of 6 times (= 1/3)?
Now, what do we learn from this, kids? That California is just as likely to vote for a Republican as a Democrat. To state otherwise is foolish.
Don't forget to correct for the fact that Reagan and Nixon were Californians. If you look at the elections for which neither candidate had a significant California connection, then CA went R 1/3 of the time, and one of those was Gerald Ford. (Why the devil anybody voted for Ford, I don't know, but eh, that was sort of before my time.)
The record is what the record is, but I think you'd find a nationwide correlation between the way a state votes and whether the candidates have a major connection/popular political career in that state.
I bet though that thousands of others had their lives saved by big and little electronic gadgets (radar, rescue beacons, GPS,
DVD players, two-way radio)
It's a serious topic, even more so since the over-radiation shit in Panama happened so recently.
It's no news whatsoever. Technology has been going wrong and hurting people since the first bloke who happened to drop a "Rabbit-Killer 1000"-brand throwing rock on his foot instead of securing for himself a tasty dinner. Likewise unfortunate is the fact that a system's vast seriousness and importance makes it no easier to hunt down every single possible bug. People are not omniscient, and telling them "This is really serious software! Don't put any bugs in this one, now!" doesn't make a whit of difference to their fallibility.
Software, like hardware, like all technology, will malfunction, and human existence is fragile and short. The intersection of these facts means that people will be killed, and the only answer is to force our psychology to accept the reality of human mortality.
What we really should focus on is not the possibility that software can go wrong, but on the kind of management and business practices that result in poor design and bad code. How many medical corporations release known-buggy or poorly-tested software due to an insane release schedule? Hopefully not as many in that industry as in the gaming industry, but you know there are some out there. I can think of at least one government agency that let management ego and power games result in insufficient project engineering and runtime troubleshooting, so that a group of astronauts and a valuable spacecraft are all destroyed... And so forth.
Software bugs are not a solvable problem. Inadequate caution due to egotistical/incompetent management and a lack of corporate ethics -- these are good things to write articles about.
There should be no question in anyone's mind that electronic voting is the future. It is impossible to argue that moving to an electronic system is not inevitable, any more than it is possible to argue in favour of abandoning cell phones and reverting to tin cans and string, or abandoning email in favour of carrier pigeons.
Restating your premise doesn't count as a supporting argument. Anyway, I personally would not send privileged and powerful information, such as my vote, via a medium like email that could easily be intercepted or forged.
The benefits of electronic voting are obvious and numerous: real-time tallying, greater security (a staffer couriering a box of ballots could theoretically manipulate them, but a staffer transmitting an encrypted database is powerless to alter it), elimination of ambiguous selections (eg., "Hanging/Pregnant Chads"), less time required per voter, fewer staff required to manage an election, and less paper waste.
Real-time tallying doesn't seem that important -- but perhaps it could be used as an election-protection measure, if every voter got a tally of the total votes after they'd voted. Tallies could be compared to ensure election integrity. As to your other points: there are other ways to eliminate ambiguous selections; staff requirements do not strike me as particularly significant; and paper waste isn't reduced by as much as you'd think. As to time spent voting, most of that time is spent reading the ballot and making a final decision, not physically coding the choices -- at least in my experience. I'll grant the rest. Mmm, skipping good points...
The complete widespread adoption of electronic voting is inevitable.
It is not a question of "if," but rather "when."
To me the question is not "when," it is "how." Perhaps electronic voting is inevitable -- I don't see it having tremendous advantages over other systems, but given our fondness for gizmos it probably is inevitable. I have no real objection to electronics being used in voting -- provided they are used in a way that is secure and verifiably honest. I think we share this concern.
I agree. People are concerned, however, that if a manual recount is necessary, it would either be wide-open to scamming (attacker prints up lots of phony receipts) or you'd need to cut the anonymity.
However, there are possible solutions to this. One would be giving a unique number to every vote, along with some kind of hashed value of the election location and time of day that the vote was cast, and maintaining records of a match between that hash and the vote ID. Of course, the vote-ID-to-hash book would be a weak link in the chain, but if the recount were handled by a different source, or by a publicly scrutinized body, this might still work.
This has zero to do with tech but will serve to give e-voting a bad name if one of these machines is compromised. Not good.
No no no... very good.
I'd much rather see us not have electronic voting for the next ten years, even if due to FUD, than to have such insecure voting systems in place due to over-confidence or government cronyism.
Besides, even ignoring that a lot of cracks are physical-security issues, even when dealing with real computers -- this is directly related to tech, because there's just not so many ways to screw with a good old-fashioned hole-punching ballot box, even if it isn't locked up, whereas you could do almost anything to an electronic voting terminal...
men of the times often kept women out of politics, not becuase they thought women were inferior (though some if not many obviously did) but to a large extent becuase they wanted to protect women.
That may be true. But one usually does not have the desire to protect people more powerful or more capable than oneself; the desire to protect the "domestic goddess" and keep her living in a purified sanitized world-of-the-home is patronizing at best and stifling at worst. (See Henrik Ibsen, _A_Doll's_House_ and other such works.) I might also add that "keeping women safe" wound up preserving male dominance over them, because they had no independent access to money or other means of self-sufficiency. Perhaps it was a "chivalrous" intention, but it also resulted in creating dependency, which can hardly be considered a benefit.
Of course I'm sure you know all that, I'm just pointing out that the "I want to protect you" motive isn't so pure, it's actually insulting; and that even if it was well-intentioned, it was still detrimental.
No, my solution involves spending a lot more money in poorer communities. Public housing projects with paid utilities would be one thing. Putting more social workers into embattled schools, rather than computers into wealthy ones, is another part of the solution. Student:teacher ratios have to rise. The real problem is that a lot of kids don't have any kind of parenting or home life. I don't know how to solve that any more than you do, but it's certainly not the kids' fault, and they're not going anywhere so long as it's true, and the problem is self-perpetuating.
The shorter version: it's not defeatism ("Oh, it'll never work!"), it is an acknowledgement that a purely free-market system as envisioned by an anarcho-capitalist will inevitably have holes that need patching by collective action. It's not that the problems are unsolvable; they are merely unsolvable under the framework proposed by a particular description of the situation, and we can mitigate them by making some modifications to that framework.
Anyway, given those facts, we need to view the idea that "government shouldn't be your parent!" with a grain of salt. In most cases I agree, and I have a lot of sympathy for libertarian views, but these kids effectively have no other parents, so if the government isn't going to do it, I sure don't know who will (or who else should.) We also have to recognize that a purely competition-based and freedom-of-individual-agency-based system will shut out a sizeable proportion of the population. We can't just say "well, everybody starts unequally" and assume the problem will go away (unless we're willing to say "yeah, some people get screwed, and that's tough" -- which is a position I couldn't really argue with, just not one I'm willing to take.) It's too easy to have an artificially rosy view of free-market systems; not even Adam Smith was perfectly unquestioningly sanguine about them, and he lived in a much more power-equalized world than we did. We either have to look full in the face of the systemic inequalities -- without copping out by blaming the victims -- and say "Yes, people will starve and die, but that's the price you pay, there but for the grace go I," or else roll up our sleeves and try to address systemic inequalities.
As for making your own luck through hard work -- a work ethic, the idea of making your own luck, even the idea of where to start doing so, these are all learned attitudes and behaviors. When people have no models to look at to learn them, then these messages are never going to get through. And everybody on Slashdot knows it's getting harder and harder to get a job, even one in the highly-educated tech industry; people in low-skill labor jobs have been screwed for decades. There are fewer and fewer people who come to the US and live the American Dream without some kind of advantage from outside, or at the very least uncommon business sense, and personally I don't think the example of extraordinary individuals rising above their circumstances can serve as a justification to deny the widespread existence of those circumstances. Again, that's not a moral judgment, just a personal opinion. Maybe we should write off a certain percentage of the population, but we can't smugly blame them for it; that's naive.
Well, I've gone on long enough. But I don't want people to get handouts; what I want is for them to have more access to resources that enable them to better themselves, and for children especially to have mentors and role models who can show them a way out of miserable circumstances (and to grow up in sufficient material well-being that they can take advantage of the resources provided them). It's about education, most especially in maturity and how to be a productive member of society -- it's not about handouts.
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And people still have this freak perception that most college kids are puffed-up and dumb.
We just have to acknowledge that the majority of the IT industry was in it because it was, well, the "it" industry of the '90s, with huge salaries and cool toys.
Besides, it's the low-level support/code monkey jobs that freshmeat grads usually get hired for -- except these days those kids are hired in India, so people of my generation recognize that we'll never even get a toehold.
By "it's starting to work" would you mean "job creation is still not keeping up with population increase, let alone the persistently rosy predictions of the current administration?" Because that'd be a bit more accurate.
You're right, he has increased spending -- though this is a matter of necessity, spending on "homeland defense" and on expeditionary foreign wars, not as an economic stimulus package. We should take this into account, but if you look at the stated economic policy, it has been to stimulate through tax cuts and avoid increasing other forms of spending. And other spending cuts have been made -- in federal aid to local governments, for instance.
Meanwhile, if you want to talk about elementary macroeconomics, keep two things in mind: #1 supply drives demand. (This is not an argument in favor of "supply-side economics" as it is normally understood to mean cutting business taxes and taxes on the wealthy). #2. If you want to increase the effective demand, you have to give the money to people who will actually spend it, instead of to people who will invest it. Thus, when the average American family gets something like $50 worth of tax rebate, you can't expect a whole lot of demand-side activity to take place. None of which helps the unemployed, regardless, which is the major drag on the economy at present -- too many people unwillingly excluded from it.
I realize I may be wrong and I own any faulty logic in the preceding. But I would advise you to check out the Krugman article I linked in my reply to the previous poster -- you may be assured that his reasoning is much more robust than my own. He (unlike all of us) is a professional...
2.
I'm interested to know where you receive this truth from. Nevertheless:
government spending does not necessarily have to consist of spending on social programs. In fact, in the case of space exploration, it would manifestly not be spent on social programs, but on manufacturing, as well as research and development.
As to the larger economic point, while taxation and spending hurts the amount of capital available for investment, keep in mind that capital will only be invested where it is profitable to do so, which may not be in the domestic market or in industries where it is needed. Offshoring is financed by investment capital, not just R&D or production development. American dollars funding plants overseas don't do much to help the American economy -- supply can drive demand/consumption only if there is a link back to fund the consumption of the majority of Americans, and with widespread underemployment and unemployment, that isn't happening the way it needs to.
Moreover, money spent by recipients of welfare programs is still money spent into the economy, just by a different group of people. It then trickles up. The net effect is to raise the effective demand. This is significant in recessed times, like our times, in which job creation is not keeping up with population growth and thus most unemployment is "involuntary."
Ugh, fine, #3. George Soros is heavily invested in the Democratic candidate. Do you really think that one of the most prominent investors would side against Bush's economics in favor of rolling back tax cuts if he thought it'd be bad for American investors and economic growth?
If this initiative were actually funded, it would be a tremendous boon to the US economy -- we've been suffering from at best blind-sighted and at worst disingenuous supply-side economics policies (ie major tax cuts) at a time when what we really needed was large-scale government spending to provide real economic stimulus.
A space program would also be specially targeted towards the underemployed.
However, this administration has a history of mendacity (this is undeniable) and of putting forth poorly-thought-out "bold, visionary" plans that wind up making things worse by being unfunded (eg No Child Left Behind). That's strikes one and two.
But it could still be a home run, without the real kicker, strke three -- the plan proposes to make the cuts in other research now, but actually getting somewhere with the other research much much later. That's the part about this that I don't trust -- no one will be around to see this plan through to completion, so it will probably get scrapped when the government is completely starved. The sacrifices are immediate but the rewards distant and uncertain? --> bogus.
Most people don't realize that a lot of federal spending funds states' discretionary spending. This was maybe the biggest problem with the Bush tax cuts; to the extent that the government cut spending to match them, it cut it from aid to local governments, which dramatically worsened the impact of the bad economy and just generally rendered everything FUBAR.
And why do you suppose they might see no other possible hope in their lives than to become suicide bombers? Could it be that all other avenues of worldly success have been systematically denied to them?
Incidentally, the last time I checked the average daily water consumption for a Palestinian living in the Occupied Territories was four toilet flushes' worth per day. You tell me how to farm on that, and I'll be impressed. If you want to find out more, do a google search for "average daily water consumption palestine" or, if you want more 'mainstream' sources throw in a limiter like UN or WHO or Red Cross.
People are far too ready to believe the "irrational hatred" theory when there's plenty of evidence for the "rational hatred" theories...
Uhh... have you ever tried to use a computer without a keyboard or a mouse? (besides a server that you can ssh into or whatever...)
Yeah, and I'm a pedantic drone. Sorry to jump down your throat there ^^
Of course, technically speaking the FLOATER was needed in FFI, whereas the parent links to a pic that's obviously from FFJ4/FFUS2.
At the very least, Bearded FFJ4 Cid wouldn't have spelled it in all caps.
The question isn't whether more money for the USPTO will result in better engineers being hired, the question is whether it will remove the income incentive for approving as many patents as possible. Well, that and whether that change will shift the balance of interests enough to influence PTO behaviour.
Will there still be pressure from large corporations to get lots of patents approved? We've seen patent disputes cut both ways, so that may be a wash.
Anyway, don't hold your breath for this little change to result in massive review of the bad patents already issued. Patent law won't be in order until it's been thoroughly scoured by Congress with the express purpose of fixing it, and changing the status quo is the hardest thing for a legislative body of wealthy elites to decide to do...
I might add that those CBO figures are required to assume that the Bush tax cuts are not made permanent. The budget shortfall will be even more severe, and much much more the fault of the Bush tax cuts, if they are made permanent.
The flaw in his argument is that our economy is dependent upon the existence of the poor. They consume goods, thereby driving the economy, and they provide slack in the labor market to permit our corporate owners to work us harder than they pay us. A small tithe to keep them around is a lesser evil than seeing the majority of employed Americans able to demand full-value wages. (Plus full employment leads to inflation.)
Actually, there's a lie above -- consumption does not drive the economy, production does. Thus, as our production moves overseas, we become more and more superfluous. I'm sort of idly wondering what's going to happen when the corporate powers realize they no longer really need the American population any more, when everything has been outsourced. Look for precipitous declines in standard of living over the next couple decades, folks. But I ramble.
Party affiliation doesn't matter. Neither party rates science higher than pandering to its respective constituencies (large corporate interests plus the incredibly wealthy for the Republicans, different large corporate interests plus social programs for the Democrats).
Science will be funded if it serves the interests of either of those two groups, or if there's some money left over.
Not to beat a dead horse, but... Ford and Bush Sr. = 2, Johnson, Clinton x 2, + Gore = 4... total trials = 6, trials to Republicans = 2, Republicans won 2 of 6 times (= 1/3)?
The record is what the record is, but I think you'd find a nationwide correlation between the way a state votes and whether the candidates have a major connection/popular political career in that state.
Software, like hardware, like all technology, will malfunction, and human existence is fragile and short. The intersection of these facts means that people will be killed, and the only answer is to force our psychology to accept the reality of human mortality.
What we really should focus on is not the possibility that software can go wrong, but on the kind of management and business practices that result in poor design and bad code. How many medical corporations release known-buggy or poorly-tested software due to an insane release schedule? Hopefully not as many in that industry as in the gaming industry, but you know there are some out there. I can think of at least one government agency that let management ego and power games result in insufficient project engineering and runtime troubleshooting, so that a group of astronauts and a valuable spacecraft are all destroyed... And so forth.
Software bugs are not a solvable problem. Inadequate caution due to egotistical/incompetent management and a lack of corporate ethics -- these are good things to write articles about.
Real-time tallying doesn't seem that important -- but perhaps it could be used as an election-protection measure, if every voter got a tally of the total votes after they'd voted. Tallies could be compared to ensure election integrity. As to your other points: there are other ways to eliminate ambiguous selections; staff requirements do not strike me as particularly significant; and paper waste isn't reduced by as much as you'd think. As to time spent voting, most of that time is spent reading the ballot and making a final decision, not physically coding the choices -- at least in my experience. I'll grant the rest. Mmm, skipping good points...
To me the question is not "when," it is "how." Perhaps electronic voting is inevitable -- I don't see it having tremendous advantages over other systems, but given our fondness for gizmos it probably is inevitable. I have no real objection to electronics being used in voting -- provided they are used in a way that is secure and verifiably honest. I think we share this concern.
I agree. People are concerned, however, that if a manual recount is necessary, it would either be wide-open to scamming (attacker prints up lots of phony receipts) or you'd need to cut the anonymity.
However, there are possible solutions to this. One would be giving a unique number to every vote, along with some kind of hashed value of the election location and time of day that the vote was cast, and maintaining records of a match between that hash and the vote ID. Of course, the vote-ID-to-hash book would be a weak link in the chain, but if the recount were handled by a different source, or by a publicly scrutinized body, this might still work.
I'd much rather see us not have electronic voting for the next ten years, even if due to FUD, than to have such insecure voting systems in place due to over-confidence or government cronyism.
Besides, even ignoring that a lot of cracks are physical-security issues, even when dealing with real computers -- this is directly related to tech, because there's just not so many ways to screw with a good old-fashioned hole-punching ballot box, even if it isn't locked up, whereas you could do almost anything to an electronic voting terminal...
Of course I'm sure you know all that, I'm just pointing out that the "I want to protect you" motive isn't so pure, it's actually insulting; and that even if it was well-intentioned, it was still detrimental.
No, my solution involves spending a lot more money in poorer communities. Public housing projects with paid utilities would be one thing. Putting more social workers into embattled schools, rather than computers into wealthy ones, is another part of the solution. Student:teacher ratios have to rise. The real problem is that a lot of kids don't have any kind of parenting or home life. I don't know how to solve that any more than you do, but it's certainly not the kids' fault, and they're not going anywhere so long as it's true, and the problem is self-perpetuating.
The shorter version: it's not defeatism ("Oh, it'll never work!"), it is an acknowledgement that a purely free-market system as envisioned by an anarcho-capitalist will inevitably have holes that need patching by collective action. It's not that the problems are unsolvable; they are merely unsolvable under the framework proposed by a particular description of the situation, and we can mitigate them by making some modifications to that framework.
Anyway, given those facts, we need to view the idea that "government shouldn't be your parent!" with a grain of salt. In most cases I agree, and I have a lot of sympathy for libertarian views, but these kids effectively have no other parents, so if the government isn't going to do it, I sure don't know who will (or who else should.) We also have to recognize that a purely competition-based and freedom-of-individual-agency-based system will shut out a sizeable proportion of the population. We can't just say "well, everybody starts unequally" and assume the problem will go away (unless we're willing to say "yeah, some people get screwed, and that's tough" -- which is a position I couldn't really argue with, just not one I'm willing to take.) It's too easy to have an artificially rosy view of free-market systems; not even Adam Smith was perfectly unquestioningly sanguine about them, and he lived in a much more power-equalized world than we did. We either have to look full in the face of the systemic inequalities -- without copping out by blaming the victims -- and say "Yes, people will starve and die, but that's the price you pay, there but for the grace go I," or else roll up our sleeves and try to address systemic inequalities.
As for making your own luck through hard work -- a work ethic, the idea of making your own luck, even the idea of where to start doing so, these are all learned attitudes and behaviors. When people have no models to look at to learn them, then these messages are never going to get through. And everybody on Slashdot knows it's getting harder and harder to get a job, even one in the highly-educated tech industry; people in low-skill labor jobs have been screwed for decades. There are fewer and fewer people who come to the US and live the American Dream without some kind of advantage from outside, or at the very least uncommon business sense, and personally I don't think the example of extraordinary individuals rising above their circumstances can serve as a justification to deny the widespread existence of those circumstances. Again, that's not a moral judgment, just a personal opinion. Maybe we should write off a certain percentage of the population, but we can't smugly blame them for it; that's naive.
Well, I've gone on long enough. But I don't want people to get handouts; what I want is for them to have more access to resources that enable them to better themselves, and for children especially to have mentors and role models who can show them a way out of miserable circumstances (and to grow up in sufficient material well-being that they can take advantage of the resources provided them). It's about education, most especially in maturity and how to be a productive member of society -- it's not about handouts.