Comment by Kirby Urner on 1st mo. 5, 2017 at 1:27pm

When I'm talking to Forrest, I shall remember that for him 'politics' includes tcp / ip, chmod, router tables and all that.  That's another business rule for the database ('how Forrest uses the word "politics"') that doesn't apply to everybody.  Of course Al Gore invented the Internet right?  That's why we call them "al gore ithms".

"Voting machines" would include pencil and paper as technically everything is a machine (the way I talk -- put that in your rule book if you would please). An "election" is something scholars should be able to download and rerun forever after, without knowing who voted how. Everyone gets a receipt. Lots of cross-checks.

We have an interesting prototype used within Python.org to vote for our electors.  You can bet geeks get suspicious, so there's lots of kibitzing. In a recent election, it came down to whether it had closed at the right time in all time zones. Admittedly it's small time, used by a nonprofit corporation incorporated in the state of Delaware.

However lets think about money and the potential for fraud more directly, in the form of bitcoin, Etherium, all that.  Yes, there've been bank heists of bitcoin already.  That proves it's getting closer to being real money. 

Again, it's not built on trusting people, it's built on mathematics, encryption. 

I hope I'm not too impolitic in saying Forrest is not an authority or teacher for me, about most machinery. He knows stuff about Quakerism I don't know, and the Bible, but not about machines, voting or otherwise.  So I'm neither worried nor deterred by the comments above.

Comment by Kirby Urner on 1st mo. 5, 2017 at 1:46pm

In this followup comment I will add that the computer world has seen huge political shifts thanks to one of the great prophets of our age, Richard Stallman, and his GNU project, which led to Linux and tools being open source.  The commitment to openness, transparency etc., is an eternal flame to keep alive that I hope Quakers continue to embrace and protect. 

A civics-minded people would insist their tax-funded schools exercise voting and polling technology often, with students free to explore the software and encouraged to test its security and corruptibility. Every high school should have voting machines. This is what DemocracyLab.org was about for me. We had a booth at OSCON. 

Voting apps on one's phone will become commonplace eventually. I've been encouraging the PSF (Python Software Foundation) to look at Puerto Rico, which was supposed to vote on statehood last year, but the Lower48 mainlanders were too self-absorbed (per usual) to care.  Only Zika virus outbreaks in Florida or Texas were reported with real concern. US citizens in the territories are a poster child for why the US is by now a failed state (or should I say USSA in light of recent storytelling?).  We made good progress in Cuba at least, with a SciPy conference scheduled for 2017. USers are not cutting edge when it comes to democracy. They live in an oligarchy now, spineless cowards that they be (bullies mostly, attacking the defenseless, nuke heads = puke heads).

Am I being political yet?

Also, correction, "vote for our electors" (above) should have been "for our directors".  Python Nation (some don't call it that) is technically a dictatorship, like True Korea, but Guido only cares about Python-the-language and its integrity so he leaves the politics to others. A main focus has been to jettison the stereotype that computer world is a man's world.  Given historical figures such as Ada Byron and Grace Hopper, we're looking at computer science as more of a females' discipline these days.

Comment by Forrest Curo on 1st mo. 5, 2017 at 6:18pm

Is there a category of human activity, rightly called "politics", that covers decisions -- and the occasional tacit denial that decisions have been made, and are in effect being made-by-inaction -- as to how human beings organize and apply their efforts, resources, and technologies towards generating certain kinds of results, not generating other kinds of results?

If there isn't, then the word is meaningless and you can do what you like with it.

But all the material and most of the social conditions of our lives have been set by such decisions; exemplified by the ancient Chinese decision that gunpowder is for noisy fireworks and the Medieval European decision that it ought to be put to work demolishing buildings for people who don't know yet they need to have their buildings demolished so we can come in & hack them up... a change in technological application whose effects are still much with us, yes?

The decision to leave that decision in the hands of military leaders is an example of politics. Trying to take it out of military hands might have been exceedingly difficult to implement, given the advantages gunpowder offered to soldiers. The fact that the technology could be improved, offering even stronger advantages to nations that undertook such improvement -- made the whole issue harder to resolve politically -- but human willingness to let arguments be settled by force (provided we and our friends have the force) was what made that advantage decisive, not the technology itself.

In the case of automobiles replacing street cars for urban transportation, it was GM support for city councilmen who'd favor projects to  tear out trolley tracks and use buses.

But most of us never knew we'd made that decision. And that, friend, is politics.

Comment by Kirby Urner on 1st mo. 5, 2017 at 7:24pm

I get this push back, as a geek, that what I do might be nefarious, and it's called "social engineering" (say I work for Facebook, which I don't, just have a profile and play a Hexagons-based game).

I'm fine with what politicians do being "social engineering" the way they do it, with their technology, tips and tricks. I'll even say they're pretty good at it. 

However, they don't wanna play, and keep excluding me as an "engineer" (some kind of Morlock by the sound of it -- H.G. Wells).

OK, so if I'm the bad guy social engineer then maybe me and my friends can go off and social engineer together, would that be OK?  Do we have your permission?  Did we need to ask for it? 

As soon as we start to take our marbles and go home, then what we do is "politics" and now they're mad, as they're the politicians and we're not supposed to play their game.

Ya can't win for losing.

As for that Roger Rabbit stuff about the street cars and Detroit, yes, that's interesting history.  At great expense, some cities have gone back to trollies and light rail, Portland one of them.  Detroit is in a pickle now, having paved over everything and now no budget for potholes. I'm sure the president-elect will think of something, as apparently no one else has.

I had had fun driving around there in a rental car, even with all the pot-holes. We went to Henry Ford Museum (my daughter and I), while my mom plotted with her WILPF lady friends at Wayne State. 

Great city, for all the dents to its reputation. Like the bumper sticker says: Say Nice Things About Detroit.

Comment by Forrest Curo on 1st mo. 5, 2017 at 11:36pm

Kirby, as I've said, politics is a necessary human activity, whether carried out openly or in some sort of prissy denial that it's happening.

Technocratic boosterism is certainly one political position; it just leaves out a lot -- particularly the need for people to take a critical look at technical advances, much as the Amish traditionally do -- considering not just "Is this useful?" but also questions like "How will it affect our way of life, our unity and devotion to God, if our people start using this?"

Politics can be engaged in for ethical purposes; it can be engaged in for spiritual purposes (although the two are not the same).

Mostly the way people use our technology of politics is exemplified by one of Jane Goodall's chimpanzee observations:

Our hero, a young chimp of middling rank, wanders into a clearing right behind a group of his friends, who have found a stash of bananas the humans have left. There aren't enough bananas for everyone; and his rank doesn't give him priority.

What he does seem to have is an understanding of his group's protocol. They will follow a chimp who's sat with them, if he then stands up and walks away. He does so, and they follow.

When he returns to the clearing, he is now first at the scene; and takes first pick of the bananas there.

But that is not the politics of Christ.

Comment by Kirby Urner on 1st mo. 6, 2017 at 12:01am

Hey that chimp sounds up and coming, he should send me his resume. We have affirmative action for non-humans, seriously.

Merely mid-level skills is fine, upper management techniques ala Jesus might come later. Not everyone can pull off loaves and fishes on their first day.

Technocratic boosterism is what wins us an audience with our potential trackers and backers in a Silicon Valley economy, my Silicon Forest not that different, so forgive me my ethnicity? 

I think the Cult of GNU ala Stallman (may blessings be upon him) will have a positive influence on Quakerism, with Quakers becoming to information technology what Mormons already are to ancestry research (yes there's overlap, in graph databases especially).

Some Meetings will be state of the art when it comes to JavaScript or whatever (lots of moving parts), coded in Prague maybe. CEOs will attend Meeting, serve on Social Committee, to learn a thing or too about the state of the art, when it comes to running a thriving business.

The Amish are free to reach decisions and live them out. I'm not promulgating some lifestyle for everyone.

Seems like everyone makes that same mistake:  their great ideas should be globally adopted. On the contrary, I'm more like Club Med, jealous of my trademarks and unlikely to acknowledge many Quakers of my ilk as truly bona fide. Imitators I expect.

Anyway, time will tell. I'll post pictures from some 47th floor Friends Meeting in Singapore, lots of LCDs showing global data, geometric reveries, in the library. 

That Quaker Sharia bank in Turkey I write science fiction about, might help sponsor, provided we can get the right companies to share bananas.  I used to write science fiction about search engines and a database of video clips, so it's not surprising to me when my science fiction turns real.  I'm thinking of changing it to "speculative fiction" which makes me sound more like an investment banker of sorts.

Comment by Forrest Curo on 1st mo. 6, 2017 at 1:31am

Those chimps form a small, cohesive group where everybody knows everybody. Next time that fast-talking chimp offers to lead them off to something tasty & interesting, they may stick with the bananas they've got. They certainly won't make him President of the Chimps, not even Mayor.

We live in larger groups, where we don't know the environment so well -- and when we unthinkingly try something that works just fine on chimp scale, the result can be mass suffering and death.

You don't live all by yourself on Planet Kirby. You don't get to poop in the reservoir and say, "Hey, if you don't want poop in your water go off & live elsewhere." Technological decisions affect everyone; and involving everyone in them isn't just a nice option, not if you care how they'll affect people.

Comment by Kirby Urner on 1st mo. 6, 2017 at 1:58am

In my experience the Holy Ghost doesn't wait for the very last laggard to say "OK" before everyone else gets a cell phone. It doesn't have to be "Planet Kirby" for some high schools somewhere to take voting machine theory seriously.  Sidwell Friends?

I read Future Shock as a kid and realized "stop the world I want to get off" would not be viable, it would only speed up.  When I say "thank you God, for technology" the people around me may think I'm to blame for God's greatness.  They're mistaken.

Comment by Forrest Curo on 1st mo. 6, 2017 at 9:49am

God has given us

nuclear weapons,

air pollution,

factory farms capable of generating flu epidemics bigger than WW I,

antibiotics which made us safe from traditional bacterial diseases for about a century -- but have become near useless against future outbreaks, as factory farming dangerously crowds animals dangerously close, a situation which favors the spread and increasing virulence of pathogens among them, hence requires overuse of antibiotics -- and the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria to their customers,

a vast uncontrolled experiment to see how many previously nonexistant compounds our bodies can absorb before their combined subtle effects on human metabolism render us unviable in some drastic way

another vast uncontrolled experiment in how much we can destablize the climate systems of the Earth before large chunks of our habitat become long-term uninhabitable

and maybe we really shouldn't have played with all the toys available, not without some prayerful consideration.

-----------

"Voting machine theory"? Practical usage of voting machines is that he who provides the machines determines what they will do, which is so far unlikely to be a simple, honest count.

Comment by James C Schultz on 1st mo. 6, 2017 at 3:56pm

Years ago when I taught Business Law I explained to my students that God has a very poor public relations firm handling his affairs as He gets blamed for every disaster.  Meanwhile Flip Wilson was the only one who had it right.

To get back to the original thought:  If not politics what "Master", if not "politics", do you have to avoid to follow Jesus?

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