Political alignment, as told by OkCupid

Stupid test.

I did a political alignment quiz and came out as 70% permissive social liberal, and 81% permissive economic conservative. And that apparently libertarian. I’m sort of okay with that, but I would have rather been placed dead on the capitalist/liberal line.

As always though, some of the questions were dumb and I answered them wrongly. By that I mean one of the questions was:

Being poor and black is an advantage in getting into college.

And I chose “agree”. I realise now that the question was asking “do you think black people get life easier because they’re black?” Which I would have answered “disagree” to. Other questions like that had meanings which weren’t clear, so I answered the question “wrong”.

Anyway, go do the test.

You are all mindless sheep. Yes, even you.

In Ender’s Game there’s a subplot wherein Ender’s older brother and sister decide that there’s something wrong with the world, and they’re too smart to sit by and watch humanity edge its way to another world war. They jump onto the Internet and start talking on message boards using the  pseudonyms Demosthenes and Locke, just passing their views around. Both children — who’re barely into their teens at this point — start to amass followers, slowly at first, but then they’re invited to write for professional, upstanding establishments. By then, Demosthenes and Locke have built up their own cult groups, with polar opposite politics, and either one could say something no matter how outrageous and their followers would accept it unquestioningly.

(Please go and read the books.)

I wondered if that was possible today. Could two single people take to the Internet and split the entire populous of the globe into two separate groups. No, was my initial reaction, surely people can’t be that dumb, and sheeplike, that they can’t make their own minds up.

I mentally retracted that thought immediately. Manipulating people to your point of view isn’t that hard.

I’m a fairly intelligent person so figured I wouldn’t be bought around to someone thinking blindly, but I guess I over estimated myself. If you’ve been following my blog you’ll know that I’ve been playing with objectivism, and it actually fits into my political philosophy and general ethos really well. And then the whole health care thing kicked off in America and I felt like I had to pick a side. Yaron Brook – head of the Ayn Rand Institute – has so far been the guy I turn to for arguments and ideas which have always nicely fitted into how I feel.

So, this time I just decided to assume his stance without doing much research. National health care would enslave doctors, give substandard care, make patients spend years in queues just to be refused care because the government doesn’t think they’re worth saving. All things I agreed with (and some still do) and just accepted because Brook has always been a good source for me before.

But because it’s been such a large issue over at reddit, I’ve heard hundreds of arguments most of which I could just wave away. But some really hit home, and I couldn’t justify the capitalist system much longer. Only after a few days research into stuff (and a huge push from watching Sicko), I reluctantly started to realise that maybe universal health care isn’t that bad.

But most people won’t bother, or aren’t smart enough, to go and research how I did. They’d have just followed their mentor’s lead unquestioningly, like I almost did.

“I’m voting Labour because my parents voted Labour, and I’m working class, so there’s no one else I can vote for,” is something that I hear all the time. Regardless of their policies, people will stick with the party that’s gained their trust with catchy motos that sound cheery enough. Labour could unleash Three Waters, admit to it after most the population has been killed, and they’d still get votes from those loyalists.

You can get the general principle for this from watching The Real Hustle, or any heist film. You do something that makes your mark trust you, something honest, or even just something they want to hear. Your mark can be one person, or an entire country. Demosthenes did this by reminding the country of the imminent threat from Russia. Using fear to make them trust him. “You have to follow my ideas, because they’re the only way we’re going to avoid another world war in which you’ll probably die.” Locke did the same by being logical, calm, and rational. People ended up trusting both of them.

Shortly afterwards either of the pair could have said literally anything, and their followers would follow.

Today, I don’t think it would work out the way it would in the book. Once someone is hailed as a celebrity, they quickly generate circles in which they’re infamous, where people hate them just because they’re well known. My Chemical Romance aren’t  bad band, but when they blasted to success out of no where people started hating on them. Twilight isn’t an awful book, but it’s hated by people who have never read it for similar reasons.

This is the age of celebrity, where people are fickle. And so a two-party system will never work. There are far too many demographics that need to be heard and, yes, manipulated. So maybe not just Demosthenes and Locke, but throw in a Galiani, and a Lysias and I think it would work.

The moral here is that you need to actively disagree with everything you hear. It’s your moral obligation to question and judge things (there’s a little Rand for you). Find your own views and don’t just sit in labels like “socialist New Labour”, or “Christian”, or “Republican”. When our Shadow Work Secretary says, “Worklessness has become a generational problem” don’t just agree with her and then immediately go out and vote for the Conservatives. Go and research if she’s telling the truth (she obviously is in this quote), and then go and check their other policies.

Gosh, dammit people, think.

Why can’t schools (even partially) fund themselves?

The tl;dr of this Guardian on Labour cutting spending on schools article is that we have literally no money, so schools are going to have to start “tightening their belts” (a phrase used at least four times in that article), and a lot of small schools will have to close, or partner with others and share resources. Despite that, they still plan on opening at least 167 new Academies in the next year, albeit with them all having reduced budgets.

That’s analogous to building hundreds of level one pellet towers and hoping you can get to level fifty. It’s quantity over quality and that’s not how I want England’s education to be heading. I don’t care if people have to get up at seven o’clock in the morning to get a fifty minutes bus to school (I had to do that for college and it didn’t harm me, and I had to go up hill both ways). It’s freaking free. They should be happy to be getting it.

I’d rather people be getting a good, well funded education a bus ride away than being taught the difference between meiosis and mitosis from a browning leaflet from a museum, in some shack at the bottom of their street.

But I also think that schools don’t make the most out of their possible revenue avenues. For instance, my old school is a sports college so we had a pretty decent sports suite. I thought they rented it out during the evenings, but every time I pass there there’s clearly no one parked outside. People would pay good money to use the massive field, three good sized sports halls, and a fitness centre.

The school also has hundreds of computers just lying around at night. It’s a computing school too, so their equipment is nothing to sniff at. Why not rent those out during the evening to people doing night courses on how to use Word and whatever?

My school also has compulsory uniform. Why can’t some company has their logo on there? For instance, Adidas could have their logo on the pupils uniform; they’re generating brand loyalty from the kids, making uniform more fashionable (I guess), and hundreds of people will see the kids walking from and to home each day with the logo. It’s pretty good advertising. So long as the advertisers knew that they could have no control over what was being taught in the school, I don’t see a problem in that. The school could earn a hefty sum from that.

Schools need to quit looking for money from the government and start looking for ways they can make money for themselves.

Competition in services and employment

Although I usually talk myself back into objectivism by the end of it (and I’m sure that’s how this post will turn out), I do always think about the consequences of various things. A truly free market, for instance. An article about Google Maps being sued in France because they’re offering their service for free, so competing services can’t charge.

I think this small company has a point. The two offer pretty much exactly the same services to businesses, only Google does it for free. Google’s able to do it for free because they’re okay with making a loss, even massive losses if necessary. Bottin Cartographes, the guys suing, say that Google just wants to kick everyone else out of the market and then maybe they’ll start charging once there are no alternatives. Which’ll give them a monopoly.

Much like if Asda decided to give away all their products for free, paying for it out of their past profits and reserves, until every other supermarket decides they just can’t compete and go under. Then Asda could start charging £100 for a can of beans to start making their money back. You’d pay it because there’d be no where else.

Of course, they’d never do that because they’d just lose too much money far too quickly. But for Google giving away their data in an API only costs them a bit of bandwidth. For a company that makes billions of pounds a year from advertising, Google could probably go forever before they’d run out of money and have to start charging for their services.

That’s not a possibility though. There are other companies that too can give away their maps and data for free. Yahoo, although faltering, can still offer the same service. Bing maps, Maps.com, Mapquest. I’d say there’s enough competition in these waters. All of them giving the same service and all of them embracing revolutionary business models.

So, once again, I guess an unregulated market seems to stand on its feet. And it looks like Bottin Cartographes are going to go the way of every other business that refuses to innovate.

Another problem though is exactly that, how do the innovate? You need fresh blood that isn’t afraid to try quirky things. No discredit to the people at Bottin, I’m sure they’re good at what they do, but maybe they just don’t understand how things work around these parts. So they have to go job hunting for those people, and the prime place to get their from is universities.

Therein lies the problem… It’s no secret that Google and Microsoft, and more and more so Apple, try to get as many graduates as they can. Google especially, with them hiring more engineers than they actually even need, just so they have the whole ‘class of 2009′ set, I guess. Students know that when they actually get to Google they’ll probably get mundane customer service jobs, and maybe not see any code for a good few months, but who cares? It’s fucking Google! The enticement is just too much for them.

And that leaves none left for the smaller start-ups, or people like Bottin that really need a new a revitalising wave.

My first though to combat that was that maybe businesses that need the graduates could sponsor them, paying for their tuition fees on condition that when they graduate they come to work for them for a reasonable rate (considering they just paid for your schooling) for a certain number of years or something. Free tuition and a definite job at the end of the course would be something I’d snap at.

But at $38,925 a year, I doubt a start-up could afford that much for one kid, who could fail horribly and not be able to work for you or even pay the money back. It’d be a huge risk that no one but these big companies could afford – and they’re exactly the opposite of the people that should be getting these graduates.

A lesser investment could be something strongly advertising jobs around campuses. Or even just being in close contact with the university’s employment centre. I don’t imagine that a cool company like Twitter or Tumblr, even though they’re not big high rollers, would have a problem getting the right employees. But not all businesses can be that cool. There needs to be professional businesses that maybe just inherit a boring reputation. How would they entice students to work for them when they’re competing for them with Google?

Twitter and politics

John Prescott decided to write an article commenting on how politicians use social media, off the back of Cameron’s “twat” remark. He said that having to get your point across in 140 characters forces them to be concise and to have an actual opinion, not avoid the question.

One of the comments to his article was

Yeah, more empty sloganeering is exactly what the country needs.

–thaumaturge

And I can see their point. The example that Prescott gave – “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” – was a bad one. That’s not really the use of twitter.

Cameron apologises for saying offensive 4 letter word on radio – TORY? http://tinyurl.com/mtd6sj

–@johnprescott

That’s more like a twitter usage. It’s not a party policy message because there’re better places for those to go. The limited characters really isn’t enough for those. But a quick quip, off the cuff, makes the politician more human. Someone we can relate to better and get to know on a more personal level.

I want more politicians to be using the Internet like this. You can have an actual conversation with them on twitter and sometimes they even reply. People have to remember, and respect, that you’re voting for an actual person, not a party. Just because a person is a member of the Labour party, it doesn’t mean they back national ID cards, for instance. Voters need to know who the person is, not just what party they’re in.

As always where politics is concerned, people are idiots. The comments to that article could have been a nice debate about the uses of the Internet within our executive, but instead they turned mostly into people complaining about Labour. The damn article had nothing to do with Labour. STFU.

Lets irrigate Africa!

I was watching the rain today, and was wondering why places like Africa don’t get water. “Because it doesn’t rain,” was the obvious answer. So, if the water won’t come to them why not take the… water… to them… (Dammit, I’ve never been able to use that cliché).

But anyway, my idea is this. Africa is surrounded by water. Like a farmer bringing water to his land from a near by river, why not do that for the centre of the country, where they’re dying of thirst? The idea is stupidly simple, and I’m sure there’s a glaringly obvious problem with this idea, but no one has been able to point one out to me yet.

Basically, dig a huge river (I suppose that would be called a canal) ultimately from one side of Africa to the other. Right along the equator. It’ll fill with sea water. They obviously can’t drink sea water though. But I’ve thought of that too!

Along side this new canal build a bus stop like building over the top of it. The water will evaporate and condense on the plastic of the cover and run down the sides into some sort of container or pipe, which will lead the water to a water well. It’ll now be fresh water and clean enough to drink.

The biggest barrier I guess would be funding it, but I can’t imagine that a plastic sheet and a few pipes could be that expensive. Some company could just donate them. And I’m sure the Africans would happily work for free to build the river – after all, they’re getting fresh water at the end of it.

So, tell me why this is a dumb idea?

It’s hard to see your point…

I’m leaving it a little late, but I wanna look through party policies, more specifically MEP policies. The people I have a choice of are listed for the West Midlands.

Is it wrong that I’ve mentally already ruled out Bushill-Matthews because he doesn’t have his own website? I guess it could show that he’s not exactly technically competent, and that’s really something that’s important for me to be expressed in Parliament especially at times when file sharing policy and law is being made. However, it looks like a Conservative policy to have all their MEPs on the same site, so I guess I can let them slide. Conservatives are the only people using @aol.com and @hotmail.co.uk addresses. Don’t they see the security implications of not hosting their own email servers?

Finding out what a person is standing for is working out to be really hard… Most of these pages are like CVs, or just blogs of political news, recounting the news too, not even offering their view on the matter. Assuming though that every single one of their views is the same as the party they stand for, I guess I’ll look around the party’s websites.

But they’re not much help either. Take immigration, a blatant issue at the moment, one of the hot ones that everyone needs an opinion on. Labour’s immigration page lists various facts over what’s happened whilst they’re in power, but I really fail to see why they’ve listed a few.

In 2007, we removed an immigration offender on average, every 8 minutes.

It’s nice to know that there are that many in the country. How did they get by you? We’re an island, it’s not like people can just flee across the border. And if immigrants are up to swimming an ocean to get in, I think maybe we should let them in on merit.

Other than saying they want to give ID cards to immigrants (wasn’t that happening to everyone anyway?), and increasing the number of people who work at these borders (which everyone wants to do), I don’t think they’ve mentioned anything controversial to differentiate themselves.

Oh, I suppose when you look at the Conservative page side by side with the Labour one, you see where differences are. Labour don’t have an interest in setting a limit to the number of immigrants allowed per year, which I can understand. If we have a system where we only allow people in that we need, why set a limit? Once all positions have been filled, just stop letting people in. Tory’s do want an arbitrary limit though, the point there being that too many slip through, and if we just say no to them before even letting them speak we’ll have lowered their burden on our public services. The Government has nothing to gain by allowing millions of people to come into the country, if anything it’d just make their jobs harder. I don’t see the point in setting a limit. I think we should just let in people we need, but be very strict about the guidelines for “who we need”. If there’s not a job position already available for them, leave that job for someone that’s already settled here. I’m a little bit shocked by it myself, but I guess that’s a point to Labour…

There’s these border patrol people too; Tory’s want them to be apart of the police, whilst Labour want them to have “police like powers”. Semantics really. Just something to argue about. The police are already over stretched as it is, why give them another job which requires them to get rather niche training. Have a specialist team to do that. Increases jobs and they’ll be more focused. Labour win.

Both of those points aren’t relevant to this election though, European Parliament doesn’t have the power (or the need) to touch either of those things. But it really shows that I have no other information to go on, other than the party policies. I can’t find much about what the hopeful MEPs want.

I can’t find anything the Lib Dems have said about immigration… What? I can’t say I’m surprised they don’t seem to have written up, public policies for most things. I’m not going to bother looking at UKIP. I’d never vote for a less globalised world.

Lib Dem Liz Lynne’s site has a few sections on her website listing a few things; Iraq, business, various campaigns. That’s exactly what I want to be reading! I clicked through to the business one. The links on there link to search results… completely pointless. Meh, I had such high hopes, Liz! Looks like she’s about giving business more power over themselves, and deregulating some things though.

Liz was [...] on the Vibrations Directive and the Noise Directive, negotiating a number of key amendments to make them less onerous on businesses.

I like this pro-business stance. I’m really all for businesses creating their own morals, even to the extent of Ayn Rand’s ideologies, and so they’re the ones that get punished for them if there’s a mistake.

All in all though, the Internet doesn’t really tell you enough to decided on who to vote with. I’m going to keep researching, but unless something changes my mind, I think it’ll be Lib Dems for me, despite it being a wasted vote here (but hey, maybe enough people will think like me).

Time to end capitalism, methinks.

Almost a hundred percent of the time our society works on the premise of being rewarded for doing something. To put that in little less vague terms; we make something, and then we sell it. People like having money to treat themselves to things, ergo people keep creating more things, to make more money. That’s capitalism.

I’ve known for sometime that’s not my thought pattern, not how I feel the world should be. People should be making money to make stuff, not making stuff to make money. That just leads to patterns and habits, which are always bad for development. Ender was brilliant because he noticed this – noticed that flying in formations is stupid, people get used to formations, but never change them, no innovation comes out of it. So lets not do formations.

To make that analogy make more sense, look at cars. People like cars, they get the job done. Consumers don’t have any problems with them, and will keep buying them. So the manufacture companies keep making them. Sure, this engine goes a little bit faster, but it’s the same technology. No innovation.

I want someone to develop a new engine, which doesn’t require petrol or diesel. Maybe we can up the game even more and say lets not have any type of fuel. But Shane! You need fuel to make the wheels move! I disagree. I’m no engineer (so maybe this was a bad example), but it looks like magnets can cause a pretty powerful motor. Oh. That’s cool. Why don’t I have this in my car? Because no one wants to risk losing money investing, and researching it, and potentially realising that in fact, magnets make a sucky engine. Why look into an engine that won’t make us money?

The liberal part of me really doesn’t want the government to interfere by forcing private companies to invest in innovation. The socialist in me (which seems to be growing more and more each day) really thinks that if they’re not helping humanity willingly, maybe they should be forced.

I don’t build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.

–Ayn Rand

Probably a woman driver. A *french* woman driver at that.

Two submarines, both likely carrying nuclear missiles, apparently nudge each other in the ocean and some people aren’t happy about it. I’m not sure what the fuss is.

HMS Vanguard being tugged back to Falsane by random civilians.

The first thing I’m annoyed about is why are we even hearing about this? No one was harmed, there’s no nuclear fall out. The subs took a bit of damage, and so I suppose that they’ll need to find some reason as to why they crashed in order to get insurance, or at least explain why they need another few million to fix it up.

I expect that’s what France was doing when they said they “hit a container of some sort”. They didn’t want to tell us they hit another nuclear ship, we don’t need to know that. Then England come up and was like “oh, btw, it wasn’t a container, it was actually us that hit you!”

The reason I think it’s dumb to admit that two ships collided is that now even a stupid person can find out where our nuclear ships hang out. We know how long it took the ship to get back to Faslane, we know the speed the ship can travel. That doesn’t help us much, but add that to us knowing where the French base is, and how long it took them to get back to base, and it’s just simple trigonometry to find out where they were (and where they’re likely to end up again).

We shouldn’t even know what ocean their in, let alone their rough location to within a few miles.

Lib Dem defence spokesman Nick Harvey has called for an immediate internal inquiry with some of the conclusions made public.

“While the British nuclear fleet has a good safety record, if there were ever to be a bang it would be a mighty big one,” he said.

–BBC article on the matter

This man is an idiot.

What does he expect an inquiry to deliver? There was nothing either party could have done to avoid this, short of handing over their route plans. There’s no way to update procedures to take accidents like this into account. The submarines can’t, and shouldn’t, see each other. They’re both “cloaked” from each other. This is just a huge accident that’s not likely to happen again, ever.

But the designers of the ships probably realised that likelihood and put precautions to stop the nucs from detonating every time someone pokes them. They’re designed to be safe at a time of war, a friendly nudge is hardly going to be enough to cause colossal problems.