| Thursday,
May 24, 2001 An interesting evening. Clearly the Patriarch
of Antioch has never heard of Vatican II, or more likely, heard of it and
hated every bit of it. I have pictures, but I haven't peeled them out of
the Olympus yet.
I belong to a stupid party, but we always knew that. The Republicans
have the problem that the people running it are politicians but most of
the party members hate politics and want nothing to do with it. It wasn't
always like that, but the fact remains that the people who go to
Washington are control freaks who LIKE minding other people's business,
and that' s independent of party; they get there and see that the tax
eaters are the only people they meet, and the eaters provide all the
perks, and here we go again. How you would organize a party that wants to
take power away from the people who run the party, then get people to
actually run for office on that platform and follow through is beyond
me.
The original Constitution by having the Senate appointed by state
legislators (and the Presidential Electors also for that matter) had a
certain healthy tension: the Senators had a powerful incentive not to take
things from the states and hand them to the feds. Power might not be
abolished but it was at least fragmented, which history shows is about all
you can do. Of course fragmented power means there will be local abuses of
power. There is no perfection.
Fiscal restraint, the Vermont tax eater says. Fiscal restraint: no tax
cut. If money goes to Washington, it belongs to the tax eaters, and they
WILL spend it. They will not give it back. They know better than you do
how money ought to be spent. You are too darned dumb to spend your money
properly. So we continue with tax levels sufficient to win World War II.
And it is not likely to get better that way. Fortunately we are rich and
can afford parasites, like a healthy dog can afford to succor fleas.
But for all that wisdom, somehow we have the energy crisis I wrote
about ("America's Looming Energy Crisis") in the 70's. Nothing
was easier to foresee but nothing was done.
And we delude ourselves by thinking that the taxes fall only on
"the rich" so all is well. Poppycock. The rich are smart enough
to find ways to pass along taxes to the rest of us as a cost of doing
business, and anyone who actually looks into the structure of the tax code
knows it. So we accumulate the kind of revenue with which we once faced a
major war, and use it to -- to do what?
I have often argued that to a certain level government is a bargain;
there are things you cannot do without bureaucracy, and there is an
"infrastructure" that is a true investment. Interstate Highway
System was one of those. But most infrastructure investment is best done
locally under local control, and yes, that means corruption in many cases,
but I put it to you that the cost of local corruption is smaller than the
cost of sending money to Washington and having it come back with strings
and earmarks and the inevitable wild parties they throw in the District
with your money, or did you think you were not paying for the plush life
style of The Grand 437 and the Nearly Grand 1,000 for whom the District
exists and who know nothing of life outside that District and that
lifestyle?
Enough. I am about to go write about a planet that resembles the world
of Macciavelli in technology as well as politics....
The DSL Saga goes weird.
Earthlink offers a Ricochet service. It turns out that it tops out at
128K down and 64K up, I think, but that's not the real problem. At this
point I was ready to try it just to see what would happen. So I called to
get that set up and buy their Ricochet modem.
They can't do it: not because the service isn't offered at my address
(although they don't promise very good service, and they say it is being
worked on in my neighborhood and thus might not be reliable) -- but
because, because, because I already have DSL which was activated in April.
Only of course we have been through that saga.
But until I try that DSL WHICH THEY HAVE BEEN BILLING ME FOR and can
say for certain that it does not work here, I can't sign up for the
Ricochet service.
EARTHLINK call Earth, please. PacBell says they can't do DSL for me
here.
But I will try it. Of course I loaned my DSL modem to Niven after his
got fried, and I don't have it just at the moment but I will have it Real Soon
Now and we will hook it up and the light will blink but never go locked-on
green and I will have wasted another day being jerked around. I became a
bit upset when after a half hour on the phone (with a ten minute wait) to
Earthlink I was told they can't sign me up because I already have DSL (and
I am being billed for it as of late April) I was then transferred to
Customer Service ("how may we upset you today?") -- wait fifteen
minutes after a promise of a 3 minute wait -- and got a young man who
became unhappy when I pointed out that
this had been going on for months, and I was becoming more than weary of
being jerked around, a phrase he didn't care for. Perhaps I should have
said "being told untruths by those who either should have known
better or did know better, and who wasted quite a lot of my time".
So I await the modem. If it works I will sing great praises, and
probably delete this. If it does not as I suspect it will not, then you
will see it.
And Eric has been and gone, and it doesn't work, and tomorrow I will
fight Earthlink customer "service" again to get them to cancel
my DSL account so that I can talk to Earthlink Ricochet service and sign
up for it. I sure wish there weren't monopolies. Maybe someone else offers
Ricochet? Someone who doesn't mind having a customer?
And so ends another interesting day... But see The
Ape Experiment in mail.
And there is a
SPECIAL REPORT by Dr. David Goodman on the new vies in Artificial
Intelligence. My Starswarm has a "feeling" computer. Goodman
writes about them...
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