Laws Should Make Sense, not Cents

The American Civil Liberties Union blog’s Ezekiel Edwards & Rebecca McCray posted an interesting article on a petition signed by 300 economists, including three Nobel Laureates, pleading for the American government to change the laws regarding marijuana.

The clues are all there as to WHY marijuana is still an illegal substance.

• It’s bulky, therefore easier to find in economically viable quantities. I mean, it looks better on television.
• It has been culturally associated with loose, lazy, darker coloured groups, making it easier to create the “them” needed to demonize the activity.
• The cost of catching and managing perpretrators for marijuana use/possession/trafficking will be significantly lower… intellectually outwitting the typical pot-head isn’t as hard as a drunk or a lunatic.
• You can feed pot-heads any old crap, as long as it’s got fat and salt or sugar in it.
• Sure, there would be a budget surplus for all states that stopped throwing money over a logical cliff. But that surplus would mean CHANGE, which also includes a guaranteed Reduction-in-Force on the now over War on Drugs. Where exactly are these people going to go, or do? There are only so many parking attendants and commissionaires needed, especially if everyone’s high all the time. Less fights, less unreasonableness all around. People will be able to sort their own problems out! Of course, they’d forget to do a few things, but if it’s important, it will happen, mañana.
• Jails filled with pot-heads, instead of thieves, rapists, defrocked priest child molesters or embezzlers? Much easier to manage, much safer. For every ten pot-heads you add to a patrol, the risk of assault should drop by 15%.
• Politicians beholden to very rich people who have controlling interests in the industries that profit from all of the above.

That’s why the laws will never reflect what seems eminently, economically, philosophically and socially logical, from any perspective but that of the people who run things.

Hundreds of Economists: Marijuana Prohibition Costs Billions, Legalization Would Earn Billions

A Postmark for Our Times

At dinner tonight I was asked if I could choose topics that were upbeat. The news tends to make me talk about what impending horror show we need to watch out for, like the recent Lawful Access Bill that was recently removed from discussion in Parliament. Or Facebook’s current revision, and the Zuckerbeast’s plans to gather every known scrap of information about every single person on the planet and assemble digital simulacrums of us all, in order to pitch exactly the right advertising to each of us, all the time. And of course, to make sure that every government/corporate interest can easily connect any and all dots they want to about us. So, yeah, maybe I need to try a positive spin on current events.

I just have a hard time hearing good news stories like new inventions, product launches, discoveries, and approaches to old problems without moving onto a bit of cynicism. After all, if it’s in the news, it’s probably being spun. And if the good news is about technology, as soon as I finish thinking about the wonderfullness said tech news brings, I begin to think about all of the nefarious uses that it may be put to, or what entrenched powerbases are threatened by the news, and what they may do about it to pervert, delay or assimilate the news.

We’re lucky to have had as long as we have with a relatively open internet, learning and experimenting with information feeds, distributing data through multiple sources, and generally spreading things as widely and as evenly as possible. Sure, there is a lot of garbage being spouted on blogs, websites, corporate feeds into social media and video channels. And the confusion grows with “grass roots” astro-turfed organizations popping up everywhere. The goal isn’t even to persuade; it’s just to confuse.

Critical thinking skills have never been more important, and never been more discouraged. Grass-roots work at education for critical thinking, real education and mentoring of people who need to be able to see the full feedback loops of things that are or will affect them, their families, friends, neighbours, etc. Thinking out of the box, building solutions that last longer than the next financial reporting period. If we’re not doing that, we’re just sheep, being led from pasture to pasture, fleeced every season.

The Homer: what UX SHOULDN’T be

“I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.”

That’s probably the most recalled and least offensive of the big three lies classically discussed. I have a new one to add to the list. “The latest version of SlappHappy Software will bring about world peace.”

Replace the SlapHappy with whatever piece of bloatware you are currently struggling with. For me, it’s Microsoft’s Office 2011, specifically, Word.

I’ve been using Word since it first came out, for the Macintosh, in 1984. The application fit on a single floppy disc. It was a significant improvement on Apple’s own MacWrite application. You could use more typefaces, and the paragraph formatting capabilities seemed revolutionary. WYSIWYG word processing was MODERN, so much more sophisticated than the embedded code style of text-processing applications I had access to prior to the Mac. ScriptVS on a dumb terminal accessing an IBM mainframe, anyone?

Word has been part of my toolkit for over 25 years. I have fought for it, defended it, and probably trained hundreds of people to use it. Unfortunately, the sad news is that Word has become a frankenstein app, bloated and green, with parts stuck on wherever the mad scientist in charge has decided to bolt-on some cast-off function that has no place being attached to a tool for wrangling words. Writers do not need to use many of the things Microsoft has added to Word over the last 10 years. Even more, users can’t FIND the things that Microsoft has added to Word over the years, because it appears that no-one involved in the Word product development team knows anything at all about usability.

All of that is what gets in the way of the hundreds of millions of people with access to Word from producing documents that actually make use of the tools available. Sure, there are issues regarding the average user being unaware of the benefits that could be realized, but it doesn’t help that features and lessons are hidden deep within the user interface of an application.

Humans are typically resistant to learning anything unless remaining ignorant prevents them from doing something. At the risk of giving credibility to a fascist warmonger, unknowable unknowables are pretty hard to quantify.

My only conclusion can be that the goal of the people tending these things is not to make the things more usable, better at what they are supposed to do. The goal is to make as much money as possible from the manipulation of a perceived need for the thing, rather than the thing itself.