The Price of Stupidity

The city council in New Bedford, MA is pushing the state legislature to ban anything that looks like a gun unless it is made in bright colors and clearly a fake. Pellet guns, BB guns, toys, water pistols, gun-shaped lighters, replica guns – a red plastic tip on the end is no longer enough, the entire fake gun has to be brightly colored so the police know at a glance that it isn’t real.

This is the result of a fatal police shooting some time ago – a New Bedford police officer shot and killed a man who drew a pellet gun. Does anyone but me think that the city council is trying to solve the wrong problem?

A police officer is in a peculiar position. He may interact with dozens or hundreds of citizens every day – traffic stops, routine patrols, investigations of minor crimes – and never have to draw his pistol throughout his entire career. But any one of them, no matter how routine, could instantly turn into a life-and-death situation because he happened upon a hardened criminal, a psychotic, or an armed fool. Is it any wonder that they tend to develop a paranoid streak?

The public needs to keep that in mind. If I get pulled over, I try to get all my documents out before the officer comes up to the window. Once he’s there, I keep my hands visible, move slowly, and avoid grabbing anything that might be mistaken for a firearm. If I had to get out and be frisked, and I had anything in my pockets I thought might make him nervous, I’d say so – especially if it was shaped like a gun. And by the way, if I felt my rights were being violated, I’d still stay as polite and calm as I could manage – the time to complain is later, during the lawsuit, not right away, when a nervous armed man is ready to react to any hint of resistance.

The late idiot in New Bedford not only pulled out something shaped like a gun, it was in fact a weapon, capable of causing permanent damage or even death to the officer. Admittedly, that’s unlikely – you’d have to use a pellet gun at very short range and get a lucky hit in the eye or the temple to do any serious harm. He drew the weapon when threatened with arrest after being found in a crack house. I suspect the mandatory investigation on the officers came back with a verdict of “justified” – and it probably didn’t take very long.

Banning fake guns is not going to fix the problem. In the heat of the moment, almost anything can be mistaken for a gun or other weapon – a pipe, a pen, a pair of scissors. It won’t make the cops any less nervous when somebody hurriedly grabs something out of their pocket. And spotting bright colors won’t make much difference, either – how many criminals will paint their pistols bright orange or yellow to try to get the police to hesitate? And how many officers will get shot that way before the rest of the nation’s police start reacting to those bright colors as evidence of a REAL weapon instead of a fake? One, maybe two?

Let’s not write another law to fix the wrong problem. Instead, let’s allow all those fake guns – but stop sympathizing with idiots who pull them on police officers. Stupidity SHOULD be a capital crime – and pulling a water pistol or a lighter on a cop is stupid.

Home Sapiens Assinus

How many man-hours are wasted every year by that worst sub-species of Homo Sapiens, the Common Two-legged Jackass?

Consider the gas station. Have you ever had to go in and leave your license or something before getting a fill-up, then go back in to pay afterwards? That extra trip to get them to turn on the pump is because the station had too many “customers” drive off without paying. Only an extra 30 seconds or a minute – but multiply that by every customer, every time, day after day.

Consider the grocery store. The idiot who brings 23 items to the 15-items-or-less line. She’s actually saving the time of the one or two customers in the regular line…but costing that same amount of time to the four or five customers behind her in the express lane. Net change, two or three people times the extra five minutes or so for her full transaction.

Consider a traffic jam on the interstate. The jerk who pulls out into the offramp or onramp to get around a dozen stopped cars, then forces his way in front of them. Not much of a cost, a few seconds – times the dozen cars he passed. Times the four or five people who seem to do this EVERY time I’m caught in traffic at the Fort Belvoir exit off of I-95. Plus all the idiots who do the same thing when I’m not there to see it. Plus all the other exits in busy areas where the same thing occurs.

Maybe those examples are too insignificant for you. Consider safety seals. Not just the extra few seconds it takes to peel off the extra plastic seals on any over-the-counter medicine bottle, but also the extra time and resources it took to PUT that plastic there. You can calculate it based on the time it took to wrap it on the bottle, to make the plastic, to crack the petroleum, to drill for the oil – or you can calculate it based on the extra cost to the consumer, in terms of his hourly wage. It’ll probably work out about the same, and it IS significant. All from one very successful jackass, the 1982 Tylenol Killer, and a few copycats.

Consider locks. If we didn’t have people who can’t be trusted to leave our possessions alone, we wouldn’t need them. Calculate the extra time we all spend locking and unlocking our houses, cars, offices, etc. Add in the extra time and resources to make the locks, alarm systems, security cameras. Add in the time and resources of police who have to investigate burglaries. The time of the courts and the lawyers. The extra prison space and resources we need to hold the crooks. Even the time of the thieves, themselves – if they weren’t committing crimes and/or sitting in prison, they could theoretically be doing something useful.

Heinlein said that time is the total capital of our lives – you can spend it, waste it, lose it, or have it taken from you, but you can never get it back. Ayn Rand suggests that every product or service is beneficial based on how much time it saves the consumer through increased efficiency. If we had some way to prevent all that sort of wasteful behavior by jackasses, big and small – how much more could we accomplish?

Figures Don't Lie...

My son apparently developed an interest in the world around him, and has started watching CNN Headline News in the morning before school. That’s certainly not something I want to discourage…but it has the unfortunate side effect of forcing me to face the world before I’m fully awake. Ah, well, we all make sacrifices for our children, right?

Today, CNN was telling us about Congress’ recent approval to continue the Bush tax cuts, as they were modified last year. They posted a graphic showing the average savings for the cuts in various income brackets – taxpayers making $1,000,000 a year and up will save an average of over $42,000, while taxpayers making less than $25,000 a year will save only $9. There were two other brackets shown, but I was unable to locate them on CNN.com – at any rate, they clearly indicated that the rich would be getting richer, while the poor gained almost nothing.

On further reflection, though, I’m pretty sure that’s misleading. After all, how much taxes are those poor people paying? Looking at the 2005 Form 1040A, I see that for a married couple with two kids making $25,000 a year, $22,800 of that is exempt from taxes. That’s the standard exemption plus the deduction for four dependents. The tax bill on that $2,200 remaining is $279. Then, of course, they get the Child Tax Credit of $2,000 to apply against that $279 – that credit doesn’t allow for negative numbers to be paid to the taxpayer, but it does kill that $279. In fact, for our family of four to actually come up with a positive tax bill, they have to make at least $41,000 – and then they’ll have to pay $4.00. Yes, that’s four dollars. Anything less than that, and they get back every penny that was withheld from them. And that’s not with any fancy tax strategies… that’s just the basics.

Note that I didn’t include Earned Income Credit or the Additional Child Credit – those programs actually pay the taxpayer above and beyond what they put into withholding, so any changes in the tax plan that let them keep more of that money count, for me, as a savings. But as far as I know, this plan didn't make changes to those programs.

Of course, not everyone is in a family of four. For a family of three, you have to make $29,600 (for a married couple with one child) or $33,700 (for a single parent with two children) to pay a single penny in taxes. Even a single parent with one child has to make $23,700 to pay any taxes at all. No wonder the average savings for incomes under $25,000 is so low…you can’t cut the price below zero!

I don’t want to play around with the other end of the spectrum, the folks pulling down a million or more a year. The top bracket is 35%, so they should be paying somewhere near $350,000 on that million (a little less – they get deductions and exemptions, too)…but we all know that various stupid tax tricks can reduce that number considerably, and I’m not familiar enough with tax law to make a reasonable guess on those numbers. But when you start looking at averages at the top of the scale, you run into the skewing that results from people at the extremes. The average savings in that bracket is $42,000 a year…but if nine multi-millionaires are saving $1000 a year (that’s a third of a percent of their tax bill), while one Bill Gates is saving $411,000 a year (on his billion dollar tax bill, so that’s one-twentieth of a percent), then that works out to that average of $42,000 a year, while still being an insignificant savings for all of them! (Yes, I made up the numbers for Bill Gates – I couldn’t find any numbers on what he makes from investments and capital gains, and I couldn’t properly account for his incredibly huge charitable donations. Replace his name with the multi-billionaire of your choice. Or do your own math, and tell me what you came up with.)

I didn’t check out the Fox News version of the tax story. Somehow, I suspect that they focused on the percentage savings for various tax brackets, showing how much greater a savings it was for lower- and middle-income people…while still being just as misleading. I think all news organizations that display statistics of any sort should be required to provide a full disclosure of where they got their numbers and how they did their calculations – they could post it on their web site, or whatever. I expect we’d see a lot less statistics. But since most people can't or won't do simple math anymore, the press can get away with whatever spin they want to put on the numbers.

Galileo Died In Vain

My 16-year old son came home today and told me his History teacher asked a science question – if you drop a pen and a history book at the same time, which will hit the floor first? (It was a reasonable outgrowth of the topic at hand, but that’s not important right now.) Frighteningly enough, about half of this 11^th grade class agreed that the book would hit first.

That’s just so sad that I cannot find words to comment. I don’t suppose it really needs any. It’s nice to know that my son was as appalled as I am, though!

Why Can't PVT Johnny Write?

In my current employment, I receive e-mails from a large number of young soldiers. Under current recruiting rules, they either graduated from high school or successfully completed a GED program. They were then screened for aptitude for a highly technical field. They have completed intensive training for that technical specialty to a level that would probably rate at least three separate industry certifications and around 10 semester hours of college credit. These are not stupid people. Why can’t they write?

It is rare for me to go an entire day without receiving an e-mail that completely lacks punctuation, capitalization, spelling and other grammatical rules. I’m not referring to a missing comma and a few misspelled words – I mean no punctuation whatsoever. I mean more than half of the words longer than five letters spelled wrong. They cannot correctly spell the abbreviation for my rank, even though it is shown on the web page where they get my e-mail address. In some cases, they cannot correctly abbreviate their own rank! Lesser examples of such ignorance are even more common, and are not exclusive to the younger soldiers.

We now call it Elementary School, but the first few grades were once called Grammar School. You were expected to learn basic grammar by the time you left the sixth grade. That, in fact, should have been enough to get by and avoid embarrassment throughout adult life. The next six years were supposed to extend the depth and expand the breadth of your knowledge of the English language. So how did these people complete that last six years without being competent? And if they could not manage at least some level of competence in English, what are we to assume about all the other subjects they were supposedly taught?

In the book Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein postulates a society in which the vote is given only to veterans of national service. The theory is that people who have voluntarily risked their lives to support their county will, on average, vote for what is best for the country, rather than what is best for them personally. It worked well in the book. I even agree with the theory behind it. If we tried it in real life, though, there would be a very dangerous transition period, because the people we have in national service right now are not up to the intellectual challenge.

There are three points, though, that make it even more frightening. One, in Starship Troopers, you had to complete your service to earn the vote – these soldiers already have it, and are already affecting our elections. Two, the soldiers are a reflection of our society at large, so you can assume there are other people out there equally ignorant. They still have the vote. Three, there are people out there that were turned down because they fell below our enlistment standards. And they still have the vote.

Intelligent Design Through The Ages

2400 B.C. - The way the sun travels across the sky is beyond our understanding. It must be carried in a golden chariot by an intelligent entity. We will call this entity Ra, and worship Him.

900 A.D. - The power and fury of thunder and lightning are beyond our understanding. They must come from the hammer carried by an intelligent entity. We will call this entity Thor, and worship Him.

1450 A.D. - The movement of the planets and stars around the Earth, with their cycles and epicycles, are beyond our understanding. They must be ordained by an intelligent entity. We will call this entity God, and worship Him.

2005 A.D. - The development of the millions of living species on the planet is beyond our understanding. They must have been designed by an intelligent entity. We will...not name this entity, so that the Godless nonbelievers will not recognize our references to Him.