Are We Ready for Post Scarcity? Part 2

It's easy to romanticize scarcity when looking to address the problems that arise as it fades from the eyes of humankind.  Recent bouts in popular culture of "paleo-nostalgia" show us just how absurd our longing for "the good old days" can get.  But the good old days were never as good as we pretend they were.  The fifties had Jim Crow laws.  Pre-industrial society was awash in the filth of both the horses that pulled carriages and the humans that rode in them.  Why I should have to point out the scourges of humanity in medieval, bronze age, or stone age days is beyond me, but I'll mention crusades and inquisitions, the slavery that built the pyramids, and war among rival tribes of cave men just to be safe.

I bring this up because it's important to note that I'm not advocating we avoid creating a post scarcity world.  Precisely the opposite, I want to acknowledge that we're in the middle of doing so, and embrace the change.  To do that though, we need to be wary and accepting of the consequences.  Some of those may be unimaginable and have to be addressed as they come.  Others are more predictable, especially when we consider history.

I mentioned the abundance of food in part one.  Now consider farming, the production of that food.  Farming is remarkably different in the modern world, and it's so efficient that we can produce so much food that our primary concerns don't regard abundance.  We take abundance of food for granted, instead seeking better quality and solutions for what to do with the excess.  This has come at a price, though.

The great depression featured, "Farming communities and rural areas suffer[ing] as crop prices fell by approximately 60%." (wikipedia, citing three other sources)  The abundance and efficiency of farming is so staggering that only through heavy subsidies is agriculture profitable today.  These subsidies are so severe that Lawrence Lessig in his book Republic, Lost titles his chapter on government farming subsidies, "Why don't we have free markets?"  We recoil at the realization that government is deciding what food gets grown, and yet this might be important and beneficial to society, since we all like to eat.  Surely subsidizing agriculture is better than milk being spilled into gutters while thousands only a few hundred miles away starved, a characteristic image of the depression?

Food is one thing, it's physical and tangible.  We're all familiar with it and easily understand what it means.  Information is quite another, yet it's the next thing whose scarcity is being obliterated.  Personal computing and the internet have done a pretty good job already, once again changing the problems from availability to find-ability of information of high enough quality and relevance.

What have humans done with this?  We haven't become a society of well read polyglots that understand the conflicts between relativity and quantum mechanics as we might hope.  We're very well entertained, though.  Entertainment is just a form of information, after all.  A textbook has roughly the same form as a storybook.  With Netflix, Hulu, & Youtube,  for videos alone we can spend our entire day being entertained for probably not quite $100 a month.

This doesn't (necessarily) mean we're stupid or shallow, though.  Many of the most popular shows are sharply written character and political dramas like House of Cards, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones.  The recent revival of Carl Sagan's Cosmos series did well.  It could be argued more people are writing than ever before thanks to blogging sites like what you're reading now and maybe even social media.

OK, I'll admit I might not be buying the idea that the lack of scarcity in entertainment is improving us as a people either, but on the other hand I'm not going to dismiss it outright.  A stronger example might be video games.  The juggernaut game Minecraft is almost exclusively a creative tool rather than a traditional game.  Gaming has a strong community of "modding," or learning some basic (or in some cases extremely complex) programming tools used in a game to create a variant of that game. These variants span anything between the original game with a failure message changed from, "You died." to "Thanks, Obama!" to entirely new games built on the same graphics and gameplay engine.

In both food and entertainment we do see demand for quality now that availability is so high.  People grow from just being happy to have something to eat to wanting something that is organic, gluten-free, or maybe even something actually important.  People start paying attention to what their food is over whether or not it's there.  Likewise in entertainment we are demanding quality more and more.  We are seeking entertainment that we can, as Kevin Spacey says, "engage with...with a passion and an intimacy that a blockbuster movie could only dream of."

Bertrand Russell writes in his essay In Praise of Idleness about the odd disconnect that exists between our valuation of production and consumption.  While we admire productivity we don't highly value consumption.  Those who earn money have prestige, but not those eager to spend it.  He points out the oddity of this, particularly when we only earn money is by others' spending of it.  "We think too much of production, and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer."

Russell also alludes to the caste and class scaffolds that these attitudes seem to stem from.  He even goes so far to argue that the traditional work ethic arose largely as a tool of slave-owners and autocrats to keep their populations  content with their tyrannical rule.  If this is starting to sound like Marxist thinking to you then you're actually very clever.  A serious point of departure I must take to this essay is his praise given to the (only ten years old at the time of writing) Russian revolution and newly formed USSR.

We all know how that experiment turned out, so how can I possibly be suggesting that going at it again is a going to be a good thing?  The short answer is that I'm not.  I am arguing that an economy with abundance for humanity requiring very little input of labor from humanity is on the horizon, or even just finishing its arrival and is starting to settle in.  One of my great concerns is the way this could create a dictatorship masquerading as efforts to provide equally for all men like existed in communist Russia.  I'll delve into this a little more in part 3.

Are We Ready for Post Scarcity? Part 1

The abundance of the modern day is staggering.  Food alone is now requiring few man hours and producing vast amounts of product.  In about 25 years the personal computer has gone from a relatively cutting edge office device to a ubiquitous handheld one.  The amazing advances in technology will only cascade into more, and these will bring amazing blessings, conveniences, and boons to humankind.  These are gifts we should be prepared to freely receive, but like a gift of chocolate that will make us sick if eaten to quickly or heavy book that will require much reading and concentration we need to be receive these with caution and adroitness.

Let's go back to food.  One of the interesting points of contention between my brothers, me, and our grandmother is our approach and mentalities surrounding food.  Our grandma, growing up in a family that suffered through and being born shortly after the great depression, views food as a precious and scarce resource.  She often views food in terms of availability, enjoying buffets and inexpensive diners and being anxious over throwing away uneaten scraps or spoiling produce.  My brothers, and even my parents, live in the modern age and see food as abundant.  We don't like to waste food, but recognize that when the bread gets moldy it should be thrown out because it only costs a dollar or two (ten minutes of work at minimum wage) to get another loaf.  We live devoid of the "clean your plate" ethic so common in past generations.

Thank heavens for that too, as obesity and overeating are a greater health risk to us than malnutrition (though I am skeptical of the magnitude of this risk).  It's actually odd to think about health risks arising because nourishment is so easy to obtain.  Taking anatomy and physiology I've learned hundreds of ways in which a deficiency of calcium, iodine, glucose, iron, or any other number of dietary intakes cause problems.  It's bizarre to think of problems coming about simply because we have so much of those things we need and love that we run out places to put it and spend so much time and energy to keeping it all together.

Food is only the beginning of this, though.  Technology is more and more in in the reach of anyone who'd like it.  Entertainment and education is more available than ever with the internet.  And these are just the commodities being made abundant with modern technology.  Go even slightly futuristic and we have productive capabilities exploding via robotics, precious metals or gems having their scarcity destroyed by advanced chemical and materials engineering techniques, and even thought or creativity flooding the market in ways never before seen thanks to better distribution systems, or even AI and other futuristic computing creating new art.

The challenges presented by this can be staggering though.  The central one is likely motivation.  Survival and status have been the principle motivators of a person in the past.  That might have meant being the mightiest hunter in the tribe that's always well fed or the most influential business magnate on wall street who always had some opportunity waiting, but the principles been the same.  Many of us have said something like, "I really don't want to go to work today but they won't pay me if I don't so I guess I had better," and we've probably even said that with some frequency.  If we reach post scarcity we theoretically won't ever need to get paid, so what will keep us getting out of bed in the morning and off the streets?  I'll be investigating this and other ideas of a post-scarcity society and economy in part 2.

Sadly, the porn must flow Part 3: Regulatory and Governmental Concerns

I've now addressed concerns with a mandatory pornography filtering system based on conceptual considerations on the nature of pornography and technical ones about how the system might work.  Now I will focus on a critique of the plan based on the governmental and regulatory considerations, as stated in the title.  A main point in my last part could be summed up as, "Don't trust your ISP to keep you safe, you're better off ensuring that on your own."  If we replace ISP with government that same idea will be found here.

America has a unique approach to government in that a fundamental value we hold is liberty, and are sensitive to the power of government to curtail this among individuals or groups.  The conflict between this and the need for law forms a basis to our society.  Whether pornographic filtering should be mandatory is another manifestation for this conflict, and I will be falling on the side of liberty as opposed to security.

The concept of safety curtailing our liberties is one hotly contested in the media with the government's efforts in the last ten years to crack down on and protect against terrorism.  This even has a more direct parallel in the field of communications with recent Snowden leaks on NSA data and metadata collection efforts that, in my own personal opinion and that of at least one court of law, violates American citizens' rights granted by the first (including and perhaps primarily the right of association) and fourth amendments.  With these already in peril, why would we want to introduce a new government mandate and increase their ability to curtail citizens' rights online?

Yes, yes, I know, "No one's rights are being curtailed, anyone can still opt in and get the content they want."  In the short view this may be true, though many of the points in my previous two essays on the subject should demonstrate ways it may also not be.  Though I'd rather not delve too deeply into the 'slippery slope' argument as it necessarily relies on speculation and unverifiable prediction, it would be prudent to mention that any law or regulation would set a precedent that our personal communication methods are something the government has every right to manage.

The proposal would grant new regulatory powers over our methods of communication.  It would be handed off to either ISPs or/and government committees and reduce choice for the individual.  While it's only a default setting that would change right now, the shame often involved in the complex issue of obscenity could easily cause this to be the societal norm, and forcing those who either held liberal views about sexuality or possibly a desire to protect their privacy and security online to be forced into an 'internet ghetto.'  Eventually these people might be lumped in with criminals and subject to greater invasion of their rights because they 'chose to use the internet in a manner recognized to reflect dangerous and deviant behavior.'

Let me explain by way of analogy.  How would you feel if car dealerships were now required to sell cars that would automatically avoid driving you anywhere where obscene or illegal activities were known to occur?  They would naturally have to standardize and define what obscene behavior was, and so a federal committee would now decide what parts of town you were allowed to drive to.  If you wanted to have full control over where you could go in the car you bought you would need to ask the dealer, and maybe they would have a special license plate for your car so that everyone else wouldn't accidentally follow you or wonder why they were having trouble getting to a place that you went to without problems.  Does that sound OK to you, or does it seem like a massive intrusion of government control in your life?

The internet is indeed a radically new method of communication.  Earlier methods often fell naturally into a pattern of self-regulation when it came to pornography.  Movies created a rating system, magazines went under the counter, TV shows had a set of standards to follow until after the watershed.  Phone lines were pretty much just as available to youngsters as much as anyone else but you needed to know what number to call and the commercials didn't go on until after the watershed, so their exposure wasn't really significant and in any event parents would get the bill later.  The internet, on the other hand, is hugely interconnected and once you're online you have access to most resources with nothing more than a name, or if you're not sure of that a search term will probably work just as well.  The industry doesn't lend itself well to self regulationas it is a personal service, the connection is to your home, connected to a vast public network.

It does lend itself easily to personal regulation, though.  In my last post I mentioned a few good and fairly easy solutions to filter pornography.  I explained my feelings that those who were unwilling to gain the technical skills to implement these shouldn't be foisting their responsibility to protect themselves on the country at large as well, but there's another aspect to this naivete I'd like to address: that pornography is a problem that technology or regulation can only slow, not stop.  It plays to the most basic human drives and desires.  This is what makes it so tempting, and destructive.

The way to fight pornography is to teach the right values, habits, and behaviors.  I admit the prevalence of pornography can make this difficult, but teaching our children and selves the truth of what pornography is is the most effective way to fight it.  We shouldn't pretend that we can shut off any exposure to it, and instead prepare ourselves and develop the mental and spiritual discipline to be strong against it when we do.  This may include a personal decision to install some sort of filter on our own networks.  Others might not even see a need for this.

Maturity comes with responsibility, taking on accountability for the way we live and the decisions we make.  I see this petition as immature, trying to abdicate the responsibility for avoiding pornography by passing it along to organizations believed to be more capable of doing so.  We must take this responsibility upon ourselves though, immense as it may seem, because immaturity and liberty cannot coexist.  The more we decide that something is too hard for us and should be handled by the government, the greater the state will become as the citizen becomes smaller and smaller.

Sadly, The Porn Must Flow

There's been a white house petition going around lately that I've been saddened to see many friends of mine supporting.  The petition is promoting a measure similar to one that was proposed a while back in the UK, that internet service providers be required to block pornography by default.  I remember hearing this news back then and thinking of it as an oddity of British politics, and feeling thankful that we weren't foolish enough and that the American spirit had principles of liberty well enough ingrained that we wouldn't support something similar here in the US.  Sadly, it seems I'm being proven wrong.

I'm no lover of pornography.  Well, I mean, I'm a normal red-blooded heterosexual male so there's the obvious vulgar desire to check it out, but I do avoid it and would counsel anyone to do the same.  I actually block pornography on my home network using OpenDNS, which has proved to be a fantastic solution.  Make no mistake, my objection is not pro-porn, I object on the grounds that what we'll lose if we try this will be greater than any gains.

So what do we have to lose, except our pornography?  The fact that this question needs to be asked is part of what saddens me.  It bespeaks a naivete in our society that borders on, if not diving all the way into, a dangerous area.  Pornography is very hard to define.  Any reasonable person will admit that not all nudity is pornographic.  Once this is acknowledged the waters immediately muddle quite a bit.  Some might try to avoid this difficulty by saying that our efforts only need to filter out 'the worst kinds of porn' or 'extreme and hardcore pornography' but that only pushes that very hazy line back in hopes that it will reach an area where enough people feel shameful about being on the wrong side of it that they avoid being anywhere near it.

That approach doesn't help when we're talking about electronic content filtering.  Our computers, networking routers, or servers aren't like our parents that can look at us and tell when we think something might not be right and ask us in a stern voice if we're really making the correct decision right now.  The petition states as one of its concerns that, "Parents and individuals have to go to great lengths to install Internet filters that often don't weed out all porn."  I'll get to the first part (oh believe you me I'll get to it), but let's look at the worry that they "don't weed out all porn."  Short answer, that's because they can't.  Let's get into the two ways to filter pornography (or really anything, the same methods can and are used for your computer's anti-virus): blacklisting, whitelisting and heuristics.

Blacklists are a list that's been built of sites known to be pornographic that are blocked.  The obvious flaw with this is that new pornographic sites arise everyday, and there's a delay before these would be added to the blacklist.  The less obvious flaw is that it will inevitably be based on the opinions of people making decisions about whether a site is pornographic or not, and your opinion may not agree with the blacklist makers.  I'll go into this more after explaining the counterpart to the blacklist, the whitelist.

 Whitelists are the inverse of blacklists, building a list of known safe and OK sites that don't contain objectionable material and only allowing a user to visit those sites.  It should be fairly apparent that this essentially reduces the internet to barely useful, but then again in certain contexts may be a good solution.  Parents installing a whitelisting program on their home computer or network for their children, requiring them to get parental approval before visiting a site, or non-technical users that only use a relatively small amount of web applications (i.e. only visiting facebook, youtube, amazon, and one or two other web applications related to their job).  That's not what this petition is about though, and whitelisting would be far too restrictive for an ISP to ever implement for a solution to their customers.

So neither are a good solution for a government mandated ISP pornography filter as they either 'don't weed out all porn' or throw the baby out with the bathwater and cause huge gaps in service in an effort to do so.  Again, though, the issue of what porn is comes up.  One pornography filter I installed, K9 web protection, was absurdly restrictive for me and blocked sites like facebook and youtube (though admittedly I think this might have been for reasons other than porn).  I had to disable these filters while leaving the rest in place.  There is some pretty saucy content on these sites, though, and some parents might not want their kids exposed to that.  Would you want your ISP to block youtube, since after all you can see videos of girls in bikinis and lingerie or lesbians kissing (albeit that media is often behind youtube's own adult content protections) and then if you wanted to watch a youtube video be forced to tell you ISP to 'turn off their porn blocking' for you?  Are you OK with never using facebook since, after all, if an attractive woman who is 'friends' with you posts a picture of her in a bikini or otherwise scantily clad it might as well be porn?

Maybe our final method, heuristics, can help us out.  Heuristics will inspect data and websites for specific behaviors, content, or properties and then block it if they meet certain qualifications.  Heuristics can easily get false positives, a popular example being filters that scan images for exposed skin or genitals blocking medical journals for having instructional images when examining a disorder.  This leads to similar problems as before, either too much is blocked because it might be porn, or not all porn is weeded out.  Heuristics also have the problem of requiring much more processing power and access to your information.

The first concern means a huge investment in equipment for ISPs, which will effectively pass on the cost of porn filtering to customers that may not want it.  Is it really fair to force people to pay for a service they don't want?  The second means it's tricky to impossible for connections that are properly secured to be filtered. It's entirely accurate to say that for an ISP to comply with any law created from this petition they might be within their rights to say, "This traffic is encrypted and has been blocked as possible pornography," when you're accessing your bank or other financial institution's website.  Lest you consider this an extreme example of hyperbole to make my point there is precedent for this; the NSA in its data collection efforts collect all encrypted communications they come across despite the fact that they're prohibited from collecting communications from American citizens saying that encrypted communications are essentially by definition unable to be verifiable as between Americans.  If you allow the ISP to allow encrypted connections you've approved to connect normally you've short circuited the system, and disabling heuristic filtering for certain approved sites with secure, encrypted connections increases the overhead requiring even more costly processing power.

What can the government and ISPs do to block pornography, then?  Well, here's the thing, we still haven't defined what pornography is.  The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints actually provides what I believe is a very accurate definition in their manual True to the Faith, "Pornography is any material depicting or describing the human body or sexual conduct in a way that arouses sexual feelings."  The question here is, how do we know what arouses sexual feelings?  To some a painting such as the Venus de Milo might seem sexual, while to others it might not.  Pornography, like so much involved with sexuality, is a deeply personal thing, and as such is hard to define, let alone regulate, effectively.  Regarding pornography Justice Potter Stewart famously couldn't give a definition other than "I know it when I see it." (and, interestingly, the film referred to in the case where he said that was not, according to him, obscene).  We may know indecent content when we see it, but computers don't so any hope of creating a computer system that will block all that out for us is doomed to fail.

The Fourth Amendment in the Information Age

In my last post I mused on the nature of data and how the information about us defines who we are.  I was spurned to write this and finished off the post presenting disappoint with Verizon, my cell carrier, and their failure to protect users' privacy and respect their charge in holding data about us.  Lately Verizon has been in the news for handing over call records to the NSA, so the wound has had salt thrown in it rather than had time to heal, so to speak.  In my investigations into jumping ship from a company so cavalier about it's responsibility to protect who I am in the form my data I've had some interesting experiences.

I sent an email to Sprint asking if their company does anything to protect users' data and privacy.  Their response was,

Sprint as a company is not commenting on this report. We do not have 

any information to share, and that Sprint will not be commenting on the 

subject. 

which I found alarmingly curt and evasive.  Don't get me wrong, I wasn't expecting anything terribly profound or telling, I was expecting a sorta non-committal PR department generated canned response along the lines of, "Sprint is committed to protecting customers' data and ensuring their privacy, however we still must comply with any lawful U.S. Government agency request."  There's no real way to peer behind the curtain and discern why they responded with the air of, "Oh geez I don't want to talk about this please don't make me say anything why are you doing this to me?"  My speculation on the subject, which I feel such a curious response deserves, would be that either Sprint is just as uncaring when it comes to customers' data and privacy and can provide no unembarrassing response to a customer asking these type of questions, or that they are actually fearful of what might happen should they take a stand.

Both could of course be true, in fact the latter may be the cause and the former the effect.  I find the latter more interesting, though.  It's easy to dismiss concern with how a company protects (or more often fails to protect) our information as unfounded worry about "government conspiracies" (in fact, that's exactly who a T-Mobile salesperson ended up characterizing my concern when asking about it at a store location).  While the fact that most citizens probably won't be much affected is true and the majority of people (including myself with all my seditious comments coming out on this blog) aren't interesting, influential, or dangerous enough for the government to take the effort to spy on, the issue is far from unimportant for everyone save a few security advocates, legal scholars, and tech enthusiasts.

As I pointed out in my last post we're seeing the importance of the physical diminish.  The things that are important to us are increasingly in the form of data accessed in a number of different ways?  As these changes in the way we communicate, work, and create emerge so the laws which will govern these new methods of living.  And they are being changed.

"The Fourth Amendment (Amendment IV) to the United States Constitution is the part of the Bill of Rights which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures, along with requiring any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause."  This worked well for many years when communication took place between two people in the form of physical letters that they could keep on their property and evidence showed up as physical items that, again, could be held on someone's property. These laws are essentially being re-written as more and more of what's important to us has a digital presence.

The fourth amendment seems to grow out of the presumption of innocence.  We aren't to be observed, investigated, or seized until some degree of proof of guilt can be obtained.  This is what's being eroded by modern electronic surveillance.  It echos the complaints by so many in gaming when considering many invasive digital rights management (DRM) systems, "I'm being treated like a criminal when I haven't done anything wrong.  They're just assuming I'm going to steal things."

Privacy and the internet is always, and may always be, a thorny issue.  There's many conflicting theories, ranging from the internet being a surveillance state, to the assumption of privacy which is continually being shown to be unsupported, to complex privacy policies written by lawyers and mostly ignored by users, to understanding that privacy is only there when one takes the steps to encrypt their data and secure their connections.  The internet is increasingly how we live our lives-in both private and public contexts-and after fighting for our rights and freedoms in the physical world we need to take up the fight once more for cyberspace, whether that means holding elected officials accountable, suffering the inconvenience of using security software, or considering privacy and data security when selecting service providers.

Our Data is Who We Are

 The physical is becoming less and less important in the modern world.  Sure, there will always be a need for physical mediums (after all "There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter"), but information is what reigns supreme in importance.  This has always been true, in many ways.  As Carl Sagan said, "The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, it's the way those atoms are put together."  In another way, humanity has been marching toward this for ages; Since the invention of writing a stone could be transformed into the law of the land or God, a history of a people, or an agreement between two parties.  The invention and standardization of money intensified this.

The idiom that you can find out a lot about a person by going through their trash may still be true, but it's been found that with a handful of data readily made available people can know exactly who we are (in this study 4 locational data points were enough to identify 95% of participants).  While it's (probably) true that you wouldn't be you without your physical body, too often we forget that we wouldn't be who we are without our memories, habits, and interpersonal connections-all of which computers are increasingly involved in and therefore archiving.

As a Verizon wireless customer I was devastated to see this report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation surveying different companies and what measures they were taking to protect users' privacy.  I've known for a while that Verizon was kind of a scumbag company, managing to continue living only because they've acquired a great deal of infrastructure.  When (also scumbag, when it comes to users' data) companies like Comcast and Facebook (I'm not including Google even though many might have worries about the amount of data they collect because they did manage to collect 5 out of 6 stars in this survey, and I genuinely appreciate the company) as well as the two lower end Apple and AT&T still manage to find some way in which they can protect users' data rights are still beating out my carrier, I worry.

I'm seriously considering leaving Verizon, and would probably side with Sprint.  The financial, coverage, and overall convenience implications makes me hesitate, but I really feel like making sure a company that isn't making any effort to protect my digital self shouldn't be supported by my money.  I'd love to leave Comcast for the same reason, and may look into campaigning within my complex to get a different service provider.  The power a service provider has in my life is unnerving, considering how important my data is to me.  After all, in a very real way the data about me is who I am.

Taxes and Taxation

I recently did my taxes and have also been reading The Federalist Papers and have been thinking a lot about taxation lately.  One thing that always strikes me at tax time is the labyrinthine extensiveness of the tax code.  I'm terrified of filing next year, trying to figure out how I'll file after getting married, having an HSA, and who knows what else is still to come.  The complexity of the tax code is always what has struck me as the most immoral thing about it.
In The Federalist Papers Alexander Hamilton said, "The genius of the people will ill brook the inquisitive and peremptory spirit of excise laws." (emphasis added)  We are living a world of privacy concerns.  We watch our internet service providers eavesdrop on their customers at the behest of the entertainment industry or for advertising profit, the web services we use constantly collect that details of how we're using them, we keep devices in our pockets which may upload our exact location throughout our day, and we're told to be careful about grocery store discount cards as they can easily lead our eating habits getting sold to an insurance company to raise our rates.  In this world of shrinking privacy our government should be working to protect what we have left, but instead we see it complacent and then at tax time bold faced enough to ask and expect us to answer a slew of questions about our investments, medical bills, work location, housing, and 'anything else you might have missed.'

An uncle of mine that prepares taxes has said that he would be unable to do so without the aid of computers.  The fact that we have created such a situation is ludicrous. I have more than one uncle who makes pretty decent money preparing people's taxes, so let me make one thing very clear: I don't think there's inherent corruption in the tax preparation industry.  There's competition, people concern themselves with following the law, and try to be honest.  That said, I don't think it should exist.  The fact that the layman cannot pay those who govern him without going through an entity that's insinuated itself through great deal of study and hard work is unnerving.  I don't want a people that separated from their government, especially regarding something affects them so directly.  This can only be done through an exceedingly simple tax code, far from what we have now where only one who devotes his life to understanding the tax code or is wealthy enough to hire someone who does will get the benefits of it.

This country was founded on many things, but one of them was "no taxation without representation."  We believed so strongly that we deserved a say in how and why governments take money from us that we fought for that right.  Has the American spirit dwindled to a point where we accept taxes as an inevitability, overseen by some arcane power that we can only glimpse through the eyes of a few initiated elite among us?

What is Marriage?

I'm getting married soon, and that could mean something different to every person I tell that too.  I recently discussed with a co-worker about how difficult it is to establish a mutual understanding of what marriage means, so in the spirit of creating a better understanding of what I'll be doing I want to express what marriage means to me, as well as putting forth some general ideas that may be useful to anyone in understanding the concept of marriage.

Often marriage is is equated with lifelong commitment, but I think there's a better way to understand marriage.  Marriage is a commitment that  goes beyond the couple.  It's when two people make a commitment not only to one another but to a third party.  The details of who or what that third party is define the greater details of what marriage means to them.

If we marry with a government, it largely means they now have an array of legal rights regarding each other, and that they cannot fully dissolve their relationship without consent returning to a representative of the government.  Often the third party will often be God or a church, which introduces a spiritual element into the relationship.  This lends important understanding about marriage because it goes beyond being committed to one another.

Yes, many people are committed and plan to spend their whole lives together without ever needing to get married.  That's one choice, people can also choose to express this through marriage.  I feel that marriage is an option we employ when we feel the need to elevate our relationship above the two (or sometimes more) people in it.  Marriage is a declaration that we are not only committing ourselves to another, but to the betterment of our society, our people, or our God.

I'm getting married because I want the benefits granted by government and God.  I want to be with my wife for this life and the next.  I want to be recognized as one who cares for her and has entwined his life with hers, in finances, health, and the search for spiritual salvation and perfection.  I want her to know I won't leave her, and have the guarantee not only of my words but a contract with greater powers to which I will have to go if I ever did.  I want to work with her to better ourselves and the world in which we live.