Category: crazy ideas

The path not travelled by Barack Hussein Obama

The story of Barack Hussein Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is well known.
He got the prize without having accomplished much before winning it.

Few days ago I faced a similar (but in much smaller scale) situation.
I sometimes volunteer to help in area A.  There is a nonprofit B, whose mission is to support volunteers in area A.

Among other things, each year, nonprofit B selects few finalists and the Volunteer of the Year and gives them prizes.  Members of the nonprofit may nominate anyone they believe to deserve the Volunteer of the Year prize.

What happened was that to my surprise, I found myself among those who were nominated for the Volunteer of Year 2010 prize.  I did volunteer to some tasks, requiring only few hours each.  However I felt very uncomfortable being in a situation in which I could get this year’s prize or being one of the finalists.

On the other hand, my getting the prize would have signalled empowerment of people with disabilities.

After some thought, I withdrew my candidacy for the 2010 prize.  When questioned by a member of the committee in charge of selecting the winners, I explained that I did very little to deserve the prize.  On the other hand, I recently started a bigger project, and if it gets accomplished, I’ll feel comfortable getting the 2011 prize.

I am not particularly modest, neither am I in desperate search for honors or recognition.  Why, then, did I avoid this year’s prize?

The reason was that if I were in position to get the prize this year, it would have chaepened the prize in my eyes, and possibly also in others’ eyes.  Next year, if I accomplish that project, my getting the prize would honor both me and the prize.

On the other hand, one could argue that the Nobel Peace Prize was already irreversibly cheapened by having it granted to Yasser Arafat, who proved to be utterly incapable to steer his people toward peacefully building their territory and getting persperous, and away from terror against civilians.  So it didn’t matter anymore that Obama got it for essentially nothing

Legal outlet for one’s desires

In the wake of the Rav Moti Alon scandal, I reach the conclusion that homosexual Jewish rabbis and Moslem religious leaders are in the same risk category as Catholic priests.  The common difficulty, which all of them encounter is the lack of a legal (from their religion’s perspective) means to satisfy their desires.

How to respond to anti-Israel comments about aid to Haiti

In today’s world, no act of legitimate self-defense or good deed by Israel goes unpunished. The story of the woman from Gaza, who tried to smuggle a bomb in her person when entering Israel for medical treatment, is known. Israel is accused of committing war crimes during the Cast Iron operation, nevermind the years of war crimes committed by the other side – the Palestinians in Gaza especially after the Israeli pull out from the Gaza Strip at 2005.

The most recent twist is the accusations that Israel utilizes the medical aid to Haiti as a pretext to steal organs for transplanting.

The best response to this accusation and others related to Israeli aid to Haiti, which I saw so far, is in  http://www.rantrave.com/Rave/Israeli-Aid-to-Haiti.aspx. The writer challenges the accusers to compete with Israel and overshadow its aid efforts by efforts of their own.

Appeal to all good people who donate meals to people in need in Israel

Whenever you feed people, who could not feed themselves, please do not only shed tears on their bad fortunes.  Please do not stop at providing them with a meal.
Please ask them about the circumstances, which prevented them from being self-sufficient.

Then do something to ameliorate those circumstances.  Sometimes you can do a lot for the price of a single meal for a group of people.

I suspect that several responses will go along the following lines.

  • People past retirement age – why couldn’t they save in their retirement funds?  Probably they saved and lost the money to crooks or bad investments.
  • People with disabilities – what inaccessible places and circumstances prevented them from exercising their full earning potential?
  • Unemployed – probably need vocational training to train for an occupation with higher demand.  The expense consists of both tuition, free time for study, and stipend to live on while studying.

Some people will turn out to be lazy bums with feeble excuses – they should NOT be fed.

If you have a lot of money to donate, usually the best way to use it to help those non self-supporting people – is to make it easier for them to train for a better paying occupation.

Unequivocal Palestinian Victory

The following is an adaptation of the English translation of a talkback, which I wrote in response to an article in Ira Abramov’s blog (written in Hebrew), which commented on the results of the elections held in Israel at 2009 February 10, whose results showed the decline of the Israeli Left.

I do not think that the Israeli Left lost the elections due to leadership failures, divisiveness or other nonsense.

I think that it was a victory of the Palestinians in their war against the Israeli Left, pure and simple.

  • After Rabin’s murder at November 1995, there was widespread support for Shimon Peres (who advocated the same pro-Palestinian policy, which caused Yigal Amir to murder Rabin). Until the elections were at last held at 1996, the support passed to Bibi Netanyahu and he won landslide victory in the elctions. Who helped him? All those Palestinian terrorists, who exploded busses during the months between murder and elections.
  • One of the consequences of the Al-Aqsa intifada, which started at 2000, and which included terror attacks committed by suicide bombers almost every day, was that several people from the Israeli Left felt that they no longer have a partner in the other side, and withdrew support for policy of appeasement toward the Palestinians.
  • The third round of the war between the Palestinians and the Israeli Left was held during the years from the Disengagement until now. The By continuing to launch missiles from Gaza Strip into Israel, the Palestinians provided ammunition to those forces in the Israeli Right, who opposed the Disengagement and demonstrated and blocked roads in an attempt to stop the Disengagement.

After such battles, which ended with unequivocal victory of the Palestinians, why does anyone still wonder that the Israeli Left lost its influence over Israeli politics?

Web 2.0 Best Practices

Suppose you have been contacted by someone with a great Web 2.0 idea and he wants you to join his startup.
You need to know whether he knows what he is talking about.
The following checklist may help you tell the clueful apart from clueless.
I hope people will be able to contribute advice concerning each item in the checklist as well as more items I missed.

  1. Dealing with bad content:
    • Spam
    • Trolling
    • Off-topic user-contributed content
  2. Vandalism (and in general, content backup/restore).
  3. Legal:
    • Acceptable use guidelines
    • Copyright violations and other issues
  4. Content ownership/lockdown policies – will a contributor be able to export his contributions into file/s in his own PC?
  5. How will the network effect be overcome (if another Web 2.0 site already exists serving the same need, how to get people to use your Web site instead of the other site, if they already have stuff).
  6. Business model (i.e. how to actually get people to pay for the stuff).
  7. Scaling with demand (nowadays, thanks to cloud computing services availability, the required scaling is not that of servers but that of customer service personnel and maybe other critical resources).
  8. Are there standards (such as XML schema) relevant to the kind of content to be served by the site?

The hospital which demands that its surgeons operate in non-sterile theaters, with inadequate equipment and without enough help

If what Alan Carter says in his The Programmers’ Stone blog is right, then the way our society treats software developers is like requiring surgeons to operate in non-sterile theaters, with inadequate equipment and without enough help from other doctors and nurses.

Resolution of Yair Lapid’s “The Real Crisis” of nonprofits in Israel

In the 28.11.2008 issue of “7 Days”, the Saturday supplement of Yediot Aharonot, Yair Lapid wrote about “The Real Crisis”.  It is about the financial crisis facing several nonprofits, which live on donations from well to do people, and which perform various services in behalf of people at need. Eventually, this financial crisis could adversely affect several vulnerable people.

The crisis is due to the drying up of the donations due to the financial/economic crisis happening now. Yair Lapid’s conclusion is that the Government should provide for those services rather than relying upon nonprofits.

I would like to offer another solution to the problem.

At times of economic depression, traditional economic doctrine calls upon governments to pump money into the economy.  Usually this is done by make work projects, infrastructure investments, etc.

I suggest that in addition to the above measures, the Government hand out stimulus money also to the above nonprofits, in proportion to the amount they got from donations in previous years.  Only nonprofits, which meet the criteria for proper management practices, would qualify for this.

My reasoning is that such monetary infusion will help keep employed people with special skills, so eloquently listed by Yair Lapid.  Also, since it can be assumed that people vet on nonprofits before making donations, the Government money will be almost well-spent as the monies of the private donors during previous years.

How to get capitalism to regulate itself?

In This is not the end of capitalism, Mark Shuttleworth (of Ubuntu fame) points out the need for capitalism with regulation. The regulators – those people who would regulate businesses – would need to have extraordinary personal qualities of resourcefulness, wisdom and incorruptibility. In other words, they need to have caliber like E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen (the qualities required by Lensmen include intelligence, utter incorruptibility, a high drive to succeed, and the highest drive to fight evil).

However, like Santa Claus, such people exist only in fiction. Therefore another solution is needed. A practical solution would, by necessity, be based upon a system, in which imperfect and corruptible people would nevertheless do almost as good job as incorruptible ones.

Fortunately, there is a precedent for systems obviating the need for supermen. The 18th century political philosophers faced a similar problem. They were faced with the problem of designing a regime, in which people will enjoy freedom, even though they are governed by other imperfect people. The solution was to devise a system of checks and balances. It was embodied in the constitution of USA and worked well for several years.

Therefore, a possible solution to the problem of regulating capitalism is likely to come from a system of checks and balances. In the following I’ll try to sketch a possible design for such a system.

A business operating in an industry, which needs to be regulated, has to answer to the following stakeholders:

  • Shareholders
  • Employees
  • Business partners (customers and suppliers)
  • Environment

Regulation, when it is enforced, aims at restoration of balance of the interests of all those stakeholders. Regulation has to be enacted when money fails to work as a means to motivate the business to serve its stakeholders in a balanced way.

Let’s try to set up a feedback loop, in which bad regulation translates into loss of profits. This can be accomplished by nominating people, who act like the historical kings or modern Benevolent Dictators For Life (BDFLs). Each BDFL will be responsible for regulating all businesses in a particular geographical area. Every business in the region will pay the BDFL 1% of its profits. On the other hand, the BDFL will be subjected to lawsuits from any stakeholder, who believes to have been wronged by a business under the BDFL’s responsibility.

Thus, the BDFL will have an interest at ensuring that the businesses in his area will prosper in a balanced way. Since small businesses have larger growth potential than big businesses, the BDFL will tend to favor small businesses. The BDFL will balance the interests of businesses with those of the other stakeholders when formulating regulations, so that the business will thrive and the BDFL won’t lose too much money to lawsuits.

This proposal is incomplete, and leaves out answers to several questions such as:

  1. What happens if a business operating in a geographical area gets to be so large that the BDFL of that area will profit more from favoring it than from nurturing other businesses?
  2. Is the BDFL only to regulate businesses, or also develop infrastructure (like kings)?
  3. How to select BDFLs from among candidates?
  4. When and how to replace BDFLs, who do not do good work?
  5. How to preserve the sovereignity of the people in a BDFL-controlled area?