If I Were King

In her post “Florida, Michigan Democrats: Half a vote” made to The Swamp today, Christi Parsons included this gem: “Meanwhile, backers of Hillary Clinton took the ruling hard because it doesn’t fully restore the voting rights of states whose primaries she technically won.” I’m sure Mrs Clinton thinks this is true, but Ms Parsons should know better. It would make a lot more sense to say “it doesn’t fully grant voting rights to states which held primaries that didn’t technically happen, but which Mrs Clinton clearly won”. The DNC can’t possibly “restore” those votes; because the elections in question took place outside the rules, those votes never existed. There’s no point in saying that Mrs Clinton “technically” won those primaries, she flat out won them. The elections in those two states were held, and they were called primaries by the state parties, but they were not part of the process created by the national party. Some might say they weren’t “technically” part of that process, but the truth of the matter is that they simply weren’t part of it at all.

I know the DNC doesn’t much care about the opinions of monarchs, but I would have recommended giving visitor passes to the “delegates” from those two states. Well, most of them. I would have barred those who were in positions of authority in the state parties, those who scheduled the non-events, from even that.

It’s over. Period. Obama’s vote totals in both North Carolina and Indiana came in better than polls predicted even the day before the election. Unless some truly bizarre revelation surfaces in the next month, something on the order of confirmed accounts of recent pederasty, the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination is in the bag.

Over the last couple of months Obama has faced real challenges, with Jeremiah Wright  demonstrating his absolute lack of sense and Clinton going for the jugular, but last night’s results show he has the legs to get past that. Both these elements put Obama on the defensive, and distorted the message that put him in the lead. That cost him significant momentum, momentum that will be needed later in the year. It’s time to get back on track.

It doesn’t matter how far out of contention Hillary is, she’s a pit bull and isn’t going to drop out until the last primary is over, if then. But it takes two to tangle, and I recommend that Obama consider the nomination his and get on with the real campaign, defeating John McCain. I see no reason for Obama to spend ten more seconds dealing with the Clintons.

If invited to a debate, he should accept only if McCain will be present. If Clinton attacks, he should simply ignore her. Yes he should continue campaigning in the remaining primary states, but only with his core message. His staff should start mapping out his national strategy, logging time in the big states he didn’t win, such as California, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, because he’s going to need them in the election a lot more than he’s going to need any of the remaining primary states. Wisconsin and Florida have a lot of voters, and he hasn’t campaigned there yet.

Mr Obama, you have an election to win. It’s up to you to set your priorities, and now that you have beat Hillary, she isn’t be one of them.

There are creative people, and then there are exploiters. On behalf of two senators, and presumably their corporate sponsors, the Copyright Office has drafted what’s known as the Orphan Works Bill so that when someone wants to publish something that includes a piece of art that he did not create he can proceed without fear of being sued for damages. I believe that the duration of copyrights, as dramatically expanded by our congresscritters at the behest of the likes of Disney in the last century, is a travesty, but I don’t think eliminating all protection for individual artists is the way to address the problem.

There are bills in both the Senate and House, currently in the Committee on the Judiciary at this point. None of the Washington delegation is on the committees currently considering the bills, but I wanted my views known before a bill is reported out. In past years, most of the creative community was opposed to the bills, now at least one photographic trade group is willing to accept the House version. It is better than the Senate version, but that is to damn with faint praise. (Imagine, if you will, a law that allowed murder by firearms compared to one that allowed it unless the gun was of small caliber and very high rate of fire.) Specifically, the House version does not exempt infringement in the case of purloined creations involving “infringements resulting from fixation of a work in or on a useful article”. That is, you couldn’t take advantage of the new rules to put the stolen art on a coffee mug. Therefore, one section of my broadside needs to be changed depending on whether it is going to my representative or one of my senators.

The two bills, with links to the full text on Thomas:
Senate: Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008, S.2913
House: Ophan Works Act of 2008, H.R.5889

Feel free to adopt as much or as little of the text below to communicate with your congresscritters, particularly if they are not the same as mine. (Rick Larsen, Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell)

I am writing today to urge you to vote against (insert name of bill), and to communicate your opposition to the Judiciary Committee through personal contact or your staff as seems appropriate.

I believe that a thriving society depends to a great extent on its creative community: authors, artists, and inventors. The framers certainly were of like mind, and were clearly aware of the contract between society and its creative members when they wrote Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”.

This contract exists to encourage as much creative effort as possible to be exerted, with the results entering the public domain for all to use after allowing the creative person the right to first commercial rewards. Although I think the current copyright terms have been stretched far beyond any reasonable interpretation of “limited Times”, the Orphan Works Bill would go too far in the other direction, eliminating all copyright protection for many artists.

The Berne Convention, by establishing copyright at the moment of creation without requiring the individual artist to take specific legal action, extended this protection to myriad individuals without the legal savvy, or legal budget, to go through the expensive and time-consuming steps of registration and eventual renewal. For commercial ventures, and for established artists, these steps are trivial. For those starting out, those who might hope to sell a photo for $25, a sketch for $100, or a small art quilt or oil painting for $300, the requirement of registering every piece was onerous and the terms of the Berne Convention welcome when the US became a signatory thereto in 1989.

Under the terms of the draft bill, artists would once again be required to register every creation with a central registry. The details of this registry are not clear, as none currently exists and the bill does not create one. Rather, the bill would leave that function to the private sector, which obviously means that the artists would be required to register their works and presumably pay a fee. Moreover, by not designating a single registry, this opens up the possibility that the artist would have to register each new work with multiple registrars for full protection. Even then, the technology of image recognition that would allow searches of these registries simply doesn’t exist today, although some vendors assert progress.

=======

Use one of these, not both:

House version:

Given the current quality of digital cameras, a firm that wanted to include in their product an artist’s work can simply walk up to the work, snap a picture, perhaps obscure the artist’s signature, and submit it to the image registry. If there is no match, they are free to go to market with the misappropriated art without fear of penalty. I fail to understand how this could be seen as a significant benefit to our society.

Senate version:

Given the current quality of digital cameras, a firm that wanted to sell coffee mugs or T-shirts featuring an artist’s work can simply walk up to the work, snap a picture, perhaps obscure the artist’s signature, and submit it to the image registry. If there is no match, they are free to go to market with the misappropriated art without fear of penalty. I fail to understand how this could be seen as a significant benefit to our society.

=======

If an artist discovers an infringement, the limit of compensation is set at the amount a reasonable buyer and seller would have agreed to before the infringement occurred. Eliminating any penalty for innocent infringement may be an appealing feature, but the expense of discovering the infringement and the legal costs in securing relief are likely to be far greater than the actual value that would have been negotiated in advance. Thus the infringer has the a dramatic advantage over the individual artist. At least some infingers would become very casual about their “qualifying searches”, knowing that most artists would simply lack the resources to even attempt to claim their rightful compensation and none would be able to recover legal fees or damages.

It is my considered opinion that the benefits of the Orphan Works Bill, specifically the immediate release into the public domain of works that are truly abandoned by their creators, do not come close to equaling the costs that would be borne by the artistic community, and most specifically those that are young or otherwise new in their careers, or those not yet willing to step out and take up art as a full-time occupation.

Far better that those artists put the same money into promoting their work, filling their gas tanks, or buying a bag of groceries while they are protected by the current law.

(A signature to rival John Hancock’s will be affixed here, but without all that “your obedient servant” nonsense. I’m sending it to those who are pledged to be my public servants, after all.)

Last month, while I wasn’t posting anything, Larkin went to the Democratic caucus for our precinct to declare her preference for Obama over the ice-bitch from New York. When I was much younger I played the political game and was Precinct Committeeman several times. (Political correctness requires the gender-neutral Precinct Committee Chair these days, which works nicely as these things go.) The caucuses were held in the PCC’s living room, and a half dozen neighbors came over and sent someone, probably the PCC, off to the county convention. I probably put on some coffee. It was a bit mystical to those who only knew the election process rather than the nominating process, but it was comfortable and manageable. Not any more!

Every precinct on south Whidbey caucused at the South Whidbey High School. This might work fine some years, but it sure doesn’t work when the blood is flowing! As inspiration crushed experience (67% to 31% statewide), hundreds turned out, most of whom had never been to a caucus before. People were parking a half mile from the school. Once inside, there were tables for each precinct where participants were to sign up. Little signs were on the tables like place cards to direct participants to the appropriate sign-in. It was a system that may have looked good to the organizers at ten in the morning, but was absolutely useless when the room was filled and you couldn’t see the tables, much less the place cards.

According to a story by Aimee Curl in the current issue of Seattle Weekly, Your Delegate May Not Be Registered to Vote, the nonsense Larkin experienced here was repeated across the state. Some are estimating that as many as 10% of the delegates chosen to represent their precincts were either elected form a precinct they don’t live in, or weren’t even registered to vote. Both of these are cause for disqualification, and around the state there are party regulars burning the midnight oil with their precinct maps, getting ready to compare the lists against the voter roll, and wholesale challenges are bound to be the primary agenda of the next round, where delegates to the district conventions will be chosen.

The Marines have a name for such events: Cl*ster F*ck. One more reason to look forward to my coronation, If I Were King, there would be no state parties.

I’ll admit that I seem to carp a lot here. That’s the nature of the beast, the things that make us angry are the things that are most likely to send us to our keyboards. So it’s great to see, and note, when one of the good guys makes the news. Friendly, mild-mannered, incredibly-famous Rick Steves showed up in the lead of Timothy Egan’s Fresh Ideas for a Tired Crusade in todays New York Times. Apparently, Rick is almost as opposed to the incredibly-misguided US War on Some Drugs as I am. Larkin and I used to go to Trinity Lutheran Church at Lynnwood, Washington. (We almost always go to a church with that name, it’s just that the city changes from time to time.) Rick and Anne and family were also active members, and I believe they still are. When it came time to sell my piano when we moved out of Lynnwood and didn’t have room for it, Rick’s dad handled the sale. So we have a personal connection, and I can tell you that what you see in all of his travel guides on PBS is the real thing. The quiet, cheerful, reasonable man you see on camera is exactly the same man you would be delighted to run into week after week in church, or probably anywhere else. And now he’s taking a stand on the decriminalization of marijuana. No, nice guys like Rick Steves aren’t likely to take the kind of radical position that you would see If I Were King, but it’s a step.

In today’s New York Times, this article by Sam Dillon reports that US Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings will soon introduce regulations that require a consistent formula for calculating dropout rates across all states. Wow! What a concept! Apparently, there are a lot of kids dropping out of school, and the states have been lying about the problem. Big time. When North Carolina revised their formula, their dropout rate soared from 5% to 32%.

But wait! There seems to be a fly in the ointment. Apparently, a large number of states don’t have systems capable of calculating the accurate number. Here’s the tricky formula: The number of high school graduates in the current class divided by the number of ninth-grade students enrolled four years prior.  (This gives the graduation rate as a decimal, multiply by 100 and subtract from 100 to get the dropout rate as a percentage.)

Excuse me? There are state departments of education that don’t have the numerical or statistical expertise to handle this? These are large organizations that somehow manage to write paychecks to thousands of teachers, administrators, and non-certificated staff every month. They manage billions of dollars in pension plans for those employees. They may choose to mask their appalling results, but if they claim they can’t calculate those results they are lying.

If I Were King, they’d have until Friday to get it done or lose their jobs. And their pensions.

Everybody’s talking about foreclosure. I’ve been through it myself. The castle was foreclosed in 2003, at least partially as a result of a stroke I suffered the year before. I’m not proud of it, but you should know. The question seems to be, should the public till be tapped to provide relief for homeowners who can’t currently make their mortgage payments. Obama and Clinton are both quick to say yes, McCain is somewhat more reticent. They’re in the business of fishing for votes, I’m not.

The answer is, “No way in Hell!” Now before you lambaste me for insensitivity (I really am a caring monarch), let me point out that the lenders are going to be far more unhappy with my response than the borrowers. In a nutshell, what I want to say to the lenders is that they need to grow up and remember that mortgages are long-term instruments, routinely drawn for thirty years. If the market is such that lenders can’t resell the paper right this minute, they need to suck it up and smile.

If I were king, here’s what the deal would be: No lender may impose penalties of any kind or any amount due to late payments on mortgages for  a period of five years, or half of the remaining term of the mortgage, whichever is less. Interest will continue to accrue, and that’s the reward that lenders supposedly were after when they made the loans in the first place. But the current rush to charge a host of fees and penalties are incompatible with the very nature of a long-term financial instrument. Boys, it’s the time value of money we’re talking about here.

Yes, if a borrower loses his job and can’t make the payments for a year or two, that’s the way the world is right now. If he never gets back on his feet, you can go ahead and take the house back. If the property is abandoned, go ahead and foreclose, our neighborhoods do not benefit from empty houses. But if the borrower is in the house, reasonably taking care of the property, then damn it, you can let the clock run.

That thirty-year mortgage might turn into a thirty-five year mortgage as a result, but you’ll get your precious interest in the end. If I Were King, that’s the only recourse you would have. Remember, you’re the one that wanted to be a lender; the nature of being a lender is to hand out money and wait for it to come back with interest. So wait.

In Professor’s little helper in the 20 December 2007 issue of Nature, Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir raise the question of whether “cognitive-enhancing” drugs like the methylphenidate I depend on (see previous) should be more readily available. Although they argue the positive side, they are still coming from the perspective that, well, of course any access to such drugs will be under the supervision of healthcare professionals. I don’t think we need “kindler gentler” gatekeepers.

If I Were King, adults would be able to choose their own advisors, do their own research, and make their own decisions.

The cost of health care continues to surge, even if the recent changes in real estate markets has pushed it off the front pages. I’m sure you’ve seen the stats. But have you seen anybody actually talking about the reasons? I haven’t either, at least not often.

I’m not an accountant, but I have some experience with cost accounting, both from my own businesses and a stint in the finance department at Boeing headquarters. Alas, I don’t have a couple of years to dig into the numbers and analyze the whole healthcare system, all I can do is look at some of the pieces. One factor, although I have no idea how large it is in the total picture, is the cost the gatekeepers add to medications.

For example, I’m muddling through life, but I’m coming a lot closer to making a go of things when I take 30-40mg of methylphenidate a day. Ciba patented the drug as Ritalin in 1954, so we’re not talking about anything terribly sophisticated to manufacture. There’s no way in hell that there’s a valid cost reason that I pay about 35 cents for a 10mg tablet of methylphenidate and less than two cents for a 325mg tablet of acetylsalicylic acid. That’s just the dollar cost, it doesn’t factor in the time-consuming hoops I have to go through to buy the stuff at all.

Uncle Sam is so certain that somebody will crush my tablets and snort them, which some apparently think is a good time, that they’ve classified it as a Schedule II Controlled Substance. That means that my prescription cannot be renewed, it’s a one-time deal, and my doctor can’t call it in or even fax it, he has to write a paper original which has to be hand-carried to the pharmacy. And the rules prevent the pharmacist from keeping a decent supply on hand. To get a bottle of 300 tablets (roughly a three-month supply), I first call the pharmacist the week before I run out so they can order it, then call the doctor to get the prescription issued, then I drive to Langley to pickup the prescription, then drive to Clinton to get it filled, and wait for half an hour so I don’t have to drive back the next day. So 300 tablets not only cost $105.58 in cash, it takes an hour of my time and involves driving over twenty miles, which almost doubles the total.

I also take HCTZ (hydrochlorothiazide) for hypertension, 25mg once a day. The more you buy the lower the unit cost, but the law allows pharmacists to dispense only a 90 days supply no matter what the drug is. Ninety tablets of HCTZ costs $7.69, but the prescription can be issued by phone and renewed up to three times.

After my stroke five years ago, I was told to take a “baby aspirin” every morning. Well, those things are too small and I kept dropping them on the floor, so I just take regular standard-size ASA tablets. (I honor Bayer’s trademark on Aspirin and try not to use that term for the generic product.) Both Larkin and I prefer the enteric-coated version, which prevents the drug from dissolving in the stomach, but has to add substantially to the cost of the tablets. Despite the fancy coating, a bottle of 500 Kirkland-brand enteric-coated ASA tablets is $6.49, and getting it involves adding it to the Costco list before my wife’s next trip.

So here are two tiny pills and one nice big fat one. The tiny pills are merely pressed tablets, the drug is mixed with a binder and possibly some filler and formed in a mold, then packaged. The big fat one is pressed as a tablet, coated with a material that holds up in the highely-acidic stomach and dissolves in the small intestine, then packaged. It’s pretty obvious that the big fat ones with the friendly extra coating is the expensive one.

Hah! The two tiny tablets are then sent through the prescription drug channel, where everything is controlled by professional pharmacists who can only act under orders from licensed physicians, both operating under a massive blanket of state and federal legislation. One of them is further controlled by moronic rules spawned by the complete failure known as the War on Drugs. So here’s the unit price per tablet for the methylphenidate, HCTZ, and ASA:
- $0.35193
- $0.08544
- $0.01298

Now here’s the unit price per gram:
- $35.1933
- $3.41777
- $0.03993

Is there a difference in manufacturing cost among these three compounds? Probably. But it’s clearly insignificant compared to the difference in delivery costs brought about by multiple layers of gatekeepers. Yes, there could be negative consequences of throwing the whole system wide open, but there are negative consequences to a system that drives up costs by a factor of a thousand. If I Were King, these distortions, or at least most of them, would end.

‘Tis the season for travel. I’m not going to be flying, and I don’t want to. (If you hire me to speak at your convention, real cash money plus travel expense, I’ll fly. Otherwise? Fuhgeddaboudit.) I don’t fly much, but when I do I’m appalled at the process of getting on a plane to go somewhere. Twenty years ago we showed up a half hour in advance and hardly noticed there was security. The last time I took a trip I had to take my shoes off three times in two airports. I seriously doubt that this is making me even slightly safer. (The current term for this, coined by security maven Bruce Schneier, is “Security Theater”.)

What is making us safer in the air is the knowledge that hijacking is no longer safe. Until 2001, the overwhelming majority of passengers made it safely home, although they may have had a couple of uncomfortable days in Cuba or Algeria before the plane was returned to its owner. After 9/11, now that we know there are more dangerous possibilities, passengers aren’t going to be docile and put up with a takeover. I know how we could make it even less likely.

In most states, law-abiding citizens who can demonstrate a certain measure of responsibility can get a Concealed Carry Permit, allowing them to carry a sidearm under their clothing. This is a group of people who statistically commit no crime at all. It includes a large number of retired military personnel as well as retired and off-duty law enforcement personnel. I want them armed and sitting next to me on my next flight.

I suspect everyone has seen a movie in which a bullet fired on an airplane goes through the fuselage or through a window and the side of the plane blows out. Well, it doesn’t really work that way. Planes are pressurized, but there would have to be tens of thousands of times more air inside the cabin than there actually is to cause the destruction they show in the movies. There are also bullets available that will cause even less damage.

So here’s my plan: If anyone presents himself (or herself, it would be better if this weren’t limited to middle-aged men with really short hair) at the boarding counter with his sidearm and permit, the airline would provide appropriate low-penetration cartridges as needed and issue an extra 5,000 frequent flyer miles. Given a few months to get the program off the ground, as it were, any hijacker would have to expect that two to ten passengers, maybe more, on every flight would be armed and prepared to promptly stop any action that would threaten the plane or the passengers.

This doesn’t address the risks of sabotage, of course, but those risks don’t come from the passengers as a rule, but through baggage or maintenance. We could eliminate this absurd requirement that we show up at the airport two or three hours in advance. We could eliminate thousands of pointless guards. Flying would be easier, faster, and cheaper. If I Were King, the program would start tomorrow, although God alone knows what would become of the thousands of lackwits currently wearing TSA badges in our nation’s airports.