Taxes and government

It continues to amaze me how poorly so many people understand economics and government.

Where I live, as with very nearly every other state, we have budget problems. We have things that need money spent on them, and the state doesn't have the money to do so.

Services cost money. Plain and simple. We need road work. We need police. We need fire/emergency help. We want good schools. We want a working court system. These things cost money.

There are groups which advocate more government-run activities, and groups which oppose such.

I am in neither. Government should do some things, and not others. Government should do things where all citizens need exactly the same thing at all times, or as close as is feasible to provide. (By "do" here, I could mean "regulate", as well, where the actuality is performed by some other organization, like your electricity supplier).

If you want, for example, snow removal service during the winter...that costs money. That could be commercially provided, but how would that get done? I want all the roads I am likely to use to be plowed right away. And my driveway. I don't care about other people's driveways, nor do I care about roads I don't use...Except that maybe I need for others to be able to use those roads in order to make deliveries I will need access to, like the grocery store. "Stock up in advance" you might say...and that certainly works to an extent, given that where I live snow generally doesn't last too long (although it has been known for one single snowfall--a blizzard--to last a couple of weeks). But there was a time when I lived in Massachusetts, in 1994, and there was 9 (yes, nine) feet of snow that winter (two years later it was ten). That snow didn't all melt away for four months. Not really feasible for me to "stock up" (although the Pilgrims must have done so somehow). I can't get to work without plowed streets, so that blizzard here in 1996, which the county did not deal with effectively, kept me stuck at home for a week.

So I am willing to have some tax dollars go to providing this service. Lacking a county-funded provider of snow removal, I'd have to get all my neighborhood together, and we'd have to pool to hire someone, or buy the plows ourselves to fit the pickup trucks of those who live in the neighborhood. The question then is what do you do about the people who live in your neighborhood who don't want to pay for this? The government has some measure of coercion it can apply, but you do not. Do you just pile up the snow in front of their driveway? Suppose they need an ambulance?

So this is a thing that government should do, or regulate. It will work best if there's a single provider, for uniform results.

In contrast, trash collection is done differently. There are county-gov sanctioned providers of collection service, I pay the provider directly, there is competition, it's not too expensive, and I could change providers if I wished. What I can't really do is let trash pile up, if I wished to not pay for it at all, although that's mostly because I don't *want* it to pile up. I recycle a lot of stuff, but that's the same service provider there. I could take recyclables to the center, for free, and if I could keep my packaging-materials limited to paper, I could probably go without the trash service; paper I could burn, or compost to an extent. Could snow removal work the same way? Maybe...it's an expensive business to be in, you only need it a few times/year, whereas trash service is every week. I'd be willing to do some plowing of the neighborhood, and maybe bit beyond, but no way I'm plowing the highways. I think that could work, except for those folks who would want it done but not pay for it.

Government needs to do other things, too, but plenty of folks don't want to pay for those things.

So what I'd like to see...recall how we keep hearing that the "states are little experimental test areas where ideas can be tried out" ?

Let's try out the idea of zero government.

No taxes. No laws. No police. No courts. No water/sewer service (unless you dig well, septic). No electricity (except self generated). No roads except those you create yourself. No trash collection, no snow removal. No regulated businesses. What would that really look like? Who would live there?

Partly it would look a lot like "the wild west": the guy with the biggest gun and greatest willingness to do grievous harm to others will be in control. Most people would get along with each other ok, I expect, but they'd also become victims.

But it'd be an interesting experiment. Could it work?

This idea was triggered by a couple of things: one was some interviews with protesters in DC a week ago, and there was this one woman who said she wanted government out of her life completely. The guy with the mike/camera didn't pursue that far enough, but I suspect she doesn't *really* want government entirely out of her life, because she does want water, sewer, trash, snow, electricity, police, etc. She might want her taxes to be zero (who doesn't?) but she probably doesn't understand what all those taxes actually pay for. My impression is that most folks don't.

And of course going along with the "pay for it" issue, you also hear "waste, fraud and abuse". I really think that's a euphemism for "fire people", but since we can't seem to figure out who to fire, let's just fire them all.

Java 3D software

Was trying to do the 3D thing again a few weeks ago. It's got to be possible.

I was trying to get my wireframe globe working (actually, someone else's code).

So it turns out not to be too hard, but there are a couple of subtle parts, and I did not find the right explanation on-line anywhere.

There are four parts involved:

1. Your code
2. JOGL.jar
3. libjobl.jnilib
4. the O/S libraries

The online help doesn't mention those .jnilib files, despite their presence in the library downloads. Your java command-line has to mention the jar files, of course, but NOT the jnilib files, but the jnilib files have to be in $CWD, or the same folder as jogl.jar

So it's really not very hard, but I spent a lot of time not getting that figured out.

On windows/linux, there are also some .dll or .so files that appear relevant.

On my mac, just things in the list above. Works great, and instantly.


I also found this, http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/, which is like google earth (except older)... Except that there's a java version, with Swing and AWT versions of an embeddable panel that you can pop into your app. Works great!

So now I have NASA World Wind in an app. This is the other reason why I needed to figure out the 3D library files. It does, of course, use NASA's servers, but hey--NASA owns a lot of imagery n stuff, like the Blue Marble pix...have a look at the demos page. Lovely stuff.

That said, I don't like how part of it works...the part about making my own layer. I ought to be able to create a layer, populate with the items I want drawn, and it should draw them. That seems not to even be part of the concept. GAK! It appears that you have to serve results from a Web Feature Service, and connect a layer to that. NOT what I want, at all.

I have some other things I want to do in 3D, so I need to go back to the wireframe globe and start there...the first thing I have discovered is that OpenGL *still* can't draw a general filled polygon properly. This is fargin' horrifying. That is a solved problem, people. Use it!

recent reading, again

Guns of the South, by Harry Turtledove.

It's one of those alternate history things. Actually this is "MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE" redux. This is pretty detailed on the historical accuracy...imagine what might have happened if someone had time-traveled from 2010 back to 1864 and given Gen Robert E Lee 100 thousand AK-47s and unlimited ammo. Would the south have won?

Damn right. Those guns, while not 2010 state of the art, were 100 years in advance of the standard single-shot manual-load rifles of the 1860s.

So I found this book offensive...not the part about the south winning...given the AK-47 premise, that was inevitable. This seemed overmuch like "how to write a book in 1992 in which you get to use all those words and ideas from 1864 that are clearly offensive now, like the infamous 'N-word'".

It of course opens with some history, although not enough of the history that you remember what the fight was really about, from both sides. This is more just about the battles (quite lopsided with the arrival of AK-47, which was superior to hand-loaded single-shot Enfields/etc in every way you can think of, and not manufacturable anywhere in the world at that time (the south had insufficient manufacturing to make weapons/etc as it was, so there really was no way they were going to win). The suppliers of these guns are some unhappy white folks from South Africa, who are so resentful of the black takeover there, that they think altering history will help them. They pay in gold, which has serious value, as opposed to Confederate money, which, as the saying goes, "wasn't worth the paper it was printed on".

The author clearly doesn't understand time-travel paradox well enough to explain that part. He also misses the relevant background history (Missouri compromise [1820], Dred Scott[1857], etc); it's not like that info is hard to come by.

He also mostly bypasses the "why" of confederate secession. It was, from the southern side, presented as "those people can't tell us what to do", and "the federal government cannot tell the states what [not] to do"...the one thing the federal government was trying to do was tell the southern states they couldn't allow/continue/expand slavery.

(look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_events_leading_to_the_American_Civil_War, for the Wikipedia pages on this whole thing)

So: the south: "it's all about states' rights", the north: "it's all about slavery"

Really: it was both, of course. It was all about the right of southern states to sanction (and tax) the ownership of one human being by another.

Don't kid yourself, blacks weren't liked up north. They just weren't slaves.

So at the end of the book, the confederate government, now with Robert E Lee as president, learns how they have been manipulated by the South Africans, and learns a good bit about the future, decides that slavery must be eliminated. (That seems unlikely, to me, given that the elimination of slavery occurred because the South lost the fight. Dramatic military superiority would change the equation quite a bit--the military's strength is more or less untouchable.)

Like this is really somehow different from what the north had been arguing for some decades? "It's ok to eliminate slavery if WE decide to do it, not if THEY tell us to do it". So what happens when one of the southern states decides to secede from the confederacy? All the same arguments could be made over again ("we don't want some other states telling us what we can/can't do"). The southern states were not terribly unified amongst themselves; if you're willing to secede once, you're willing to do it again.

Author does cleverly manage to work in a variation of the infamous "battle of the crater" near the end. That was amusing...it's a little different, of course, because in the story the "civil war" is over by this time, so this battle is against the South Africans. Who, despite the radically superior technology (i.e., things more advanced than an AK-47), are numerically too small to win a war with any attrition. I actually thought this the best part of the book.

'twere better all around had no slaves ever been brought here. The real problem is that a lot of people are lazy enough want others to do their work.

Of course, the situation in the Confederacy wasn't nearly as simple as you were taught it in school. There were plenty of "Unionists" in the south who opposed the secession, and some actually fought against the South while living there.

And apparently there was something known as the "Twenty Negro Law" whereby one military-age male was exempted from serving in the Confederate Army for every twenty slaves owned on a plantation. Of course it was only the wealthier who owned slaves, and they tended to be those in state legislatures, too, and therefore could vote themselves these kinds of exemptions...resulting in the actual conscription being the poor, fighting for the rich, to preserve the rich folks' way of life of owning slaves. (see HERE, and HERE for the exact wording, which is a bit obtuse)