Traffic Cameras to Scan For Insurance

There is a reason I put up so many posts about traffic cameras, they are the front lines of the coming privacy apocalypse. Moore’s Law dictates that processing power of computers doubles every year and a half on average. They do this by becoming smaller, more interconnected, and lower in energy consumption. This is in contrast with government, which gets bigger, more intrusive, and less efficient over time. In traffic cameras, the two meet. Government has found a source of revenue in crime, and a way to automate the process through private industry. The cameras pay for themselves fast enough to create their own explosive growth, and government expands to consume the new source of revenue. If crime drops off, government will seek to find or create more crimes in order to avoid revenue starvation. This started with red light cameras, and now according to the Chicago Sun Times, Chicago is considering trying to pay for their budget deficit by having traffic cameras scan every car on the road for current insurance and automatically send the owner of each a $500 ticket, regardless of whether they were driving.

This isn’t about cars or insurance, and it isn’t about my desire to get away with breaking traffic laws; I haven’t driven an automobile for over a decade. As Moore’s law kicks in, we will see surveillance become extremely cheap, and integrated into everything. Imagine you had your own personal thundercloud over your head that followed you around all day and zapped money out of your pocket every time you did anything not government approved. This isn’t some hypothetical slippery slope, this is the nearly inevitable path we are on. We can’t, and shouldn’t, stop the tech. If we don’t make it, someone else will. If we don’t make it, we don’t progress to the good it can bring. The Amish strategy of hiding their heads in the sand is a recipe for being conquered by those willing to use buttons. What we can do is make sure the government isn’t allowed to profit from its use.

There are several things people are doing to try and circumvent the cameras, from polarized licence plate covers that can only be viewed straight on, to clear reflective spray paint to blind the camera with the flash reflection, to GPS based traffic camera detectors.

I’m guessing the next step is LCD signs complete with advertising while you wait for your light to turn green.

Repeat After Me: I am Free

There is an old saying that In expanding the field of knowledge we but increase the horizon of ignorance. I would add a corollary to this: In increasing the scope of education, we but expand the ranks of the undereducated.

There was a disturbing study released recently, which in a comparison of eight European and North American countries, showed Britain and the United States as having the lowest social mobility. This means that contrary to all the talk of achieving the American dream, much of your likelihood of success is set at birth. Why the change? As usual it is a fundamental flaw in our assessment of cause and effect.

We only have so many days to walk this earth. Those of us who run the maze set in front of us may on average do better, but is it the maze or the mouse that makes the destiny? It may be the very education system that freezes social mobility. By increasing the scale of the public education system, we increase the resume requirements for employment. It becomes less of an issue of whether we have the drive and the potential, and more of an issue of whether we sacrificed enough years to the system. These are years the poor can scarcely afford when they are born into debt and have to claw their own way to success.

When you hear a Libertarian talking about getting rid of the Department of Education, they aren’t trying to rid the world of public schooling, they are just advocating more local control by the states and districts. This will reduce homogenization of education, but if the net increase is positive, isn’t it worth it? Our education system is fundamentally flawed. It seeks the lowest common denominator in all things. Teachers are forced to follow a set, preapproved plan, rather than teaching their own interests which they are passionate about. It is not the knowledge we need to teach, but the desire to attain it. For example, people speak loftily about the need to teach history so that we will not be doomed to repeat it, yet the history we teach to children too young to understand the nuanced adult concepts like religion, geography, and greed that lead to war, and too young to have reference for time to understand the dates, is a history so dumbed down and manipulated that it is counterproductive.  Remove this history from the first ten years of education, and you only need eight. Think of how much additional potential a child can attain with two more of those formative years to focus on what matters. Their desire to understand will lead them to history later in life.  Especially in the digital age, the responsibility of education should be to grant literacy and the desire to learn. Once you ignite that spark, you can let people find their own way, and most of them will find a better one. Modern computerized teaching tools use instructions, reading, and video to teach a subject to an individual student. They occasionally interject quizzes, and based on the results, determine which teaching styles are most effective for the student, and which concepts they have grasped and are still lacking. The next lesson will be tailored accordingly.

One of the most important questions for us to ask ourselves is: what are the goals of education? Is it to teach general knowledge? I see that as a path to failure. Pushing knowledge on those without drive is torturous. Is it to give students the skills they need in the field employment that will be most profitable to them and the country? If so, then we are failing. What they really need is literacy, questions, and the tools to find their own answers.

These same problems that plague education also plague most other bureaucratic institutions, employers, and traditions. If you are in a position to do so, give someone their autonomy back, and while you are at it, take back your own. Remember, you are free.

I posted a TED talk the other day that is somewhat relevant on the ethical nature of autonomy.

The Rule of Rules

In this TED Talk, Barry Schwartz speaks on a society gone over the edge with regulations, and the ethical nature of autonomy.

It is easy to fall into the habit of seeing the populace as a conglomerate of ignorant sheep, and there is some truth to it. As a group we consistently make poor decisions, but the group is made up of individuals. They have their failings, but most of them get up every morning and go to work. When faced with decisions in their daily lives, they tend to make good ones.  They share your outrage over the state of the system. It isn’t until they are corralled and herded through all the little reverberating insurance policies against litigation that most of their decisions tend to be bad ones. We haven’t added rules over the years because people have become less upstanding, people have become less upstanding because society has increasingly suppressed their spirit of ingenuity and  drive with devices designed to take all of the rewards in order to ensure that no risks are taken. We now reap what we have sown. Fear of innovation. Bloated government, a litigious populace, listless children, high taxes, and low-flow toilets.

A Little Perspective on Bailouts

Grab Your Tinfoil Hats, Conspiracy Theory Coming Up!

What would you do if you had seen the future? If you knew, for a fact, who was going to win the next Superbowl? I think most people would start taking out loans. A lot of them.

The president of the United States is in an interesting position. To some extent they can see the future, not because they know what will happen, but because they hold the playbook and call the shots. Unlike the time travelling gambler, the president is both under a lot of scrutiny, and has a lot of responsibilities to the nation. To some extent their power transcends the petty desire for the big payout. Put yourself in their shoes. You see the economic failings. You see the coming crash and subsequent long path back to national solvency. What do you do?

You plan. With a team of economic advisers and more information at your request than any other individual in the world.

There is a science based religion out there that exists on the premise that we strive to create increasingly realistic computer simulations of the world around us, therefore, it stands to reason that the world we live in is likely such a simulation. I would propose a similar theory. Our leaders believe that by tampering with the free market, they can make it do their bidding, therefore it is quite possible that most of the economic drama that has unfolded in recent years was not by the natural course of economic chaos, but by design. The availability of credit, the housing bubble, the crash, and the bailout, all part of a bigger plan. Think back:

We had begun losing agriculture and manufacturing to countries who were able to work with lower standards and cheaper labor. This led to a trade imbalance as it became cheaper to buy foreign goods than domestic.

So the question arises, how do we devalue our currency enough to stem the bleeding of outsourcing?

The banks don’t want inflation, it devalues their holdings. If we try to create inflation, the banks will fail as inflation goes higher than their interest. Investors, manufacturers, and rich people in general will lose money and blame the government.

How do you create inflation while looking like the hero rather than the villain? Debt. Those in debt will welcome it.

Make them think they see the future, give them their credit, and when they are overstretched?

Cut off the credit. People will stop buying, sellers will drop prices in desperation. Now what?

Threats of deflation. When deflation and debt come together you have defaults.

Defaults crash the banking system. The government gets to arrive as the hero and print money to give to the banking industry and whoever else it wants, all in the name of saving us from deflation. Those who saw the future, made the future, profit.

As we snap out of the illusion of deflation into hyperinflation, the bailouts save the banks, our debts get relatively smaller, industry returns under a weaker dollar, and those who made the future profit again.

President Bush made it a priority to get people into homes. He lowered the interest rates and made sure everyone could get loans. His administration later cracked down on subprime lending. He printed the money and bailed out the banks, and then the Harvard MBA handed over the reins and sold his phony cowboy ranch in Texas. How much of the stupid was an act?

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