Thin Blue Line of corruption

If you happen to combine driving your car with paying attention, you may have noticed the proliferation of cars with "Blue Line" bumper stickers. They are small, they are simple, they don't say what they are at all. Except, everybody knows blue means police.

There are claims like that of Sgt.John Delaney of the Springfield Police Department, who was quoted as saying:

"This thin blue line basically represents the fraternal order of police officers throughout the country, the thin blue line represents the brotherhood of police being connected through the thin blue line."

Of course, you can find these quite easily for purchase online. In fact, many people have put them on their cars in the simple hope of avoiding a ticket. The police claim this will not get you out of a ticket, but the original site (www.thin-blue-line.com according to some articles) appears to be offline now, and apparently originally required a person to prove employment as a police officer to get the sticker.

So we have an attempt to create a marker which can allow an off duty police officer to identify himself (or his family) to other police. Are we actually excpeted to believe this was simply an attempt to "show support for the police", if only police were intended to buy it?

This, my friends, may not hold up in court, but is evidence prima facie of an attempt at corruption. There is really no reason for a police officer who is off duty, or his family, to be treated any differently than anyone else on the road. The citizens who have followed suit have it dead on: The original point WAS to avoid tickets. There is simply no other conclusion that makes any sense.

This sticker is no less than corruption. It is no different than the old practice that police in Boston used to have of leaving an M&Ms packet on their dashboard as a signal to the meter maids that they were police and shouldn't be ticketed. This is corruption, pure and simple.

So much for the police as role models or paragons of virtue.

At least the citizens have the right idea, put those stickers up so they can't tell who is who. The way it is supposed to be.

Scam Alert: NSC Defensive Driving Course

Apparently this scam has been running for a while now. In MA, this scam has even infiltrated the State government and is actually mandatory for anyone who has "5 or more surchargeable offenses in a 3 year period". While it is impressive that this apparent sham organization with very suspect generic name "National Safety Council" has actually received a state mandate, it is still a scam.

Let's delve into the details of this scam.

This scam is in the form of a class. The class costs $100 for 8 hours of "instruction". Anyone can take the class, but it is mandated for "problem drivers". This is the first place where we can see the scam nature of the class: "Problem Drivers" includes people who have:

• Not renewed their license on time (how often do you check yours?)
• Not renewed their Registration on time (ditto?)
• Failed to have registration in the car (an outdated requirement from before the police could look it up from their cruiser... which they have to do anyway to see if it was revoked)
• Had a single incident with multiple offenses (as each counts as one, even for a single incident)

The course content is laughable at best. Not once was SIPDE (Scan Identify Predict Decide Execute... a mnemonic taught by real driving safety courses) or anything like it mentioned. Instead we were treated to a mandated "8 hour" course, that was about 3 hours of course material packed between breaks, and various attempts that the instructor made to slow his teaching down and not finish too early.

The class features a mumbo-jumbo "personality profile" (a favorite of scammers everywhere), based on a short quiz. It then went on to describe, without any talk of studies being done or pointing to a bibliography, the features and pitfalls of their imaginary personality profiles.

After this, we watched a few ridiculous videos to show examples of "Effective, Short Term, and Ineffective" thinking. This asks the "student" to use the skill of watching small actions (like people changing lanes, or going through stops signs), and then asks them to jump to wild conclusions about what the driver must be thinking, and then to rate their assessment of their wild assumptions about what the other person is thinking.

The entire video bit was an exercise in ineffective thinking: namely jumping to wild conclusions about other peoples thought processes based on the minutia of how they drive their car. This is exactly the sort of thinking that people use when they get mad about being cut off, because they KNOW the other person saw them, all they have done is replace "asshole" with "ineffective thinker!".

All in all, this is an ineffective program, that wastes time, and doesn't teach anything useful. It is a scam, and I recommend avoiding this one. If you are looking to voluntarily take a driving course, take one that actually teaches driving. I highly recommend the Motorcycle Safety Foundation courses (which actually teach SIPDE and evasive maneuvering, and actual effective thinking).

If you have received a letter from the RMV, then I would say just grin and bear it.... and write your Representatives about canceling this horrible program.

Good Intentions and Paving the Road To Hell

In recent blog comments, I made some comments about how the public sector works, and why it makes bad decisions. I was reading an essay on the TSA Secure Flight by Bruce Schneier, one of the members of the actual working group. This was the most telling comment:

Unfortunately, Congress has mandated that Secure Flight be implemented, so it is unlikely that the program will be killed. And analyzing the effectiveness of the program in general, potential mission creep, and whether the general idea is a worthwhile one, is beyond the scope of the working group. In other words, my first conclusion is basically all that they're interested in hearing.(Bruce Shneier, CryptoGram #502 Article 1)

This, I think, is the core problem of government. We have a legislative body, which is tasked with making decisions on everything. They are not security experts. They are not experts in anything except law. So they write their laws, they pass their budgets, and then, assign implementation to someone else.

As a technical engineer, I can tell you something: There is a huge flaw in that design. That is, there is nothing to mandate a review of the program. There is no check to be sure that it can accomplish what it intends to. There is no check to be sure it doesn't have unintended consequences. There is just "this is the project, here are the funds, make it happen".

This sort of project needs periods of review and re-review. It needs to have its issues looked at, and there needs to be some way that the call can be made that "Maybe this wasn't such a good idea" or "Maybe this can't feasibly be implemented" or even "Oh, this doesn't do what we want".

I don't think the TSA or working group are incompetent, or evil. I don't think congress has bad intentions. I would say that they have a very broken process. A process that sends out mandates before making sure that their mandate will actually have its intended effect.

It is pretty clear, from both my own cursory reading, and from the opinions of experts in the field, that this "Secure Flight" program is a waste of money, a waste of time, and just a bad idea.

The problem is that it looks good to people who don't understand security. That means congress and the public. Since it looks good to them, it gets the mandate. Since it has the mandate, it gets implemented. Opinions of experts and naysayers be damned.

Even though everybody has the best of intentions, broken process leads us to pave the road to hell. Wasted resources are a double waste. They are wasted because they bring back nothing valuable, and prevent those resources from being used where they would help.

This is just one project, in one area. It doesn't take much digging to find others. This is just a common problem with any and all organizations that are organized in this way. Its true of the government, its true of Universities, its true of an nonprofit that use grant money.

The Bottom line: Politics and non-technical committee are bad ways to make technical decisions. Letting technical decisions come down from "on high" without review and proper vetting leads us down this path.

The China Advantage

I was thinking recently about the public policy here in the US and all the talk about the "Up and coming China". It may just be my limited exposure but it seems to me that their advantage is simple: They are less ideological than we are.

Yes, less ideological. Notice that you don't hear much from them about "little red books" or revolutionary communism? In fact, they have been experimenting with capitalism for years, and even implementing it now!

The advantage of China is simple. They do socialism well, and capitalism, well, kinda ok. They are still new at it, but hey, they are getting the best of both worlds now.

The US, well, we do Capitalism pretty well. However, whenever it comes to needing to do anything the least bit "socialist" we argue, we hem, we haw. We CAN'T do anything socialist. So when we have to, when capitalism is really failing, we try so hard not to be socialist that we screw it up... usually badly.

Take health care here in MA. Its become pretty obvious that Single Payer healtcare is the only real solution. Health care just effects every member of every household.

However, Mitt couldn't do that. We couldn't have... socialism! So instead we implemented this horrid debacle. Mandate everyone buy insurance, mandate the state come up with some way to get low income people insurance. Then he cut and run.

It is unclear how this benefits us. We could have done something socialist. We could have done it well and solved a real problem that just does not seem to have any other good solutions. Instead we did everything we could to avoid "being socialist", and made absolute hash of it.

Could it be that the real problem isn't socialism? Is it ideology?

The Dim light of Hope

I was making my rounds on the TSA blog today and someone posted a link to this: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.2027:

I have to say, everyone should contact their Representative and let them know that this is a bill that we need to become law, and the sooner the better. Currently the TSA is absolutely run amok with their cowardly security theater. They will just keep implementing whatever they want, and using it however they want. The foxes are entrusted with the safety of the hen house.

A few points from the bill:

(2) PROHIBITION ON USE FOR ROUTINE SCREENING- Whole-body imaging technology may not be used as the sole or primary method of screening a passenger under this section. Whole-body imaging technology may not be used to screen a passenger under this section unless another method of screening, such as metal detection, demonstrates cause for preventing such passenger from boarding an aircraft.

(5) PROHIBITION ON USE OF IMAGES- An image of a passenger generated by whole-body imaging technology may not be stored, transferred, shared, or copied in any form after the boarding determination with respect to such passenger is made.

However....

`Whoever, being an officer or employee of the United States, knowingly stores, transfers, shares, or copies an image in violation of section 44901(l)(5) of title 49, United States Code, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.'.

In a country that has mandatory minimum sentences for victimless crimes like drugs, this seems like a slap on the wrist. I would bet that nobody does a day of jail time for this unless their victim is a celebrity. This should be at LEAST a $10,000 fine and 1 year minimum. It should also be considered a felony.

MA Safe Driver Program: Failing to renew makes you an Unsafe Driver?

I recently received a note in the mail from the MA RMV. The note informed me that I had 5 "Surchargable events" on my license, and I MUST complete driver re-education if I want to keep my driver's license. I am apparently a danger on the road.

This being the case, as I am guilty, I may as well admit my horrible safety offences...are you ready?

1. Expired Registration (taken care of the next day)
2. Expired License (ditto)
3. Failure to have the registration IN THE VEHICLE (never mind that they can easily look it up, and look it up anyway, even if you have it...)
4. At fault accident (tapped another car at 2 MPH in stop and go traffic)
5. Ticket for "following to close" (from the same accident as #4)

So I would like to ask the MA RMV and particularly the safe driver program.... does the course cover paperwork? How do clerical errors make one a bad driver? Is a single minor "fender bender" (more of a denter than a bender) really deserve to be two events?

Is it any wonder people see state workers as incompetent? Is this really just one more attempt to squeeze us for some cash? Be ware people.... the state of MA is out for your money.... and thats apparently ALL they care about.