[Political] Personal Minimums

2017-01-30T00:00:00-06:00

In aviation, we have a concept called “Personal Minimums.” These are very important, life or death even. The idea is that you have minimum requirements to make a safe go / no-go decision about a flight. If the various conditions surrounding a proposed flight don’t meet your personal minimums as a pilot, the risk is too great and the decision to cancel the flight and make that no-go decision is very easy.

In the past year or so I’ve been working on being more involved with Politics. I’ve always avoided politics in the past, at least discussing it, because it is so confrontational most of the time. Similar to waffling on weather conditions are safe to fly, and eliminating those with pre-decided minimums, why can’t I also have minimum expectations for politics? So that is my goal today.

This is coming from a US Citizen on the topic of US Politics. I hope to have a more worldly view at some point, but as a voting citizen the US political scene is the one I am physically involved in; my thought processes will be focused on the US.

As with any personal minimums, they should start conservative, and become more specific and expansive with experience and currency.

What is the role of the government?

The role of government is to govern the people of the US by the rules set forth in the Constitution and to legisilate new laws and adapt our current laws as times and technologies change. The preamble to the constitution spells out it’s aims pretty clearly:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

While the preamble doesn’t assign powers or limitations to the government, it does serve as the stated goals for the following text that does. I find it a worthy summary to frame my ideas around. Wikipedia actually as a pretty good article on the preamble alone that’s worth a quick read. There are many different interpretations of the words of the preamble, and it’s interesting to read some of the various court cases and differing views.

What does this mean about the “issues?”

Well, as far as the laws of our land are concerned, the issues are pretty much listed right there in the preamble, but I’ll go through what I think are the hot topics that I care about. To put things in more modern day terms, here are the things I think our government should ensure are provided to it’s citizens:

Health Care

I’m a fan of universal health care. I don’t think health care should be a for profit industry. A lucrative one? Sure. It takes lots of years of study to be a good doctor, you should be adequately rewarded. But for profit industry? No. America is one of the few modern countries that doesn’t have some kind of government provided health care. We are one of the richest countries in the world, why can we not provided proper health care to ALL of our citizens?

In Japan, even if you’re visiting, your health insurance through the government as a visa holder costs just a couple hundred dollars per year. You might pay at most 50 dollars if you break your arm and need a cast, and they will apologize to you that it cost so much. If you have a common cold, people will ask if you’ve gone to the doctor, because visits are typically free.

In the UK, Canada, Sweeden, Denmark, Finland, and many other countries, health care is so much cheaper due to a national option for it. Because you have one body providing all the payments for health care, prices can be regulated and kept to a minimum. There’s no reason a medicine that costs $4 to make should cost $1,500 per pill. Why can I buy a bottle of Aspirin at the store for $8, but a dose at the hospital costs me $20?

The whole industry, including the insurance side of things, just boggles my mind. We are letting capitalist ideals get in the way of people getting the basic care they need. And that saddens me. I’d like to see medical insurance untied from your job. You shouldn’t have to keep a terrible job just because you can’t afford to lose insurance. That’s a ton of stress, causing you to perform poorly at that job, and shorten your lifespan. Denmark, for example, does this, and people’s job happiness is very much higher than in the US.

Personal Minimum: Anything that takes away from the ability for citizens to get quality health care at fair prices should be scrutinized. Personal Minimum: Anything that hands insurance companies and the industry more money for no increase in care quality or coverage should be questioned.

Education

Without a strong educational foundation, we cannot advance as a society. There are some major hurdles to overcome; namely, income disparity, quality of education, access to education, stigma to not going to college. We have a major skills gap. There’s plenty of jobs that don’t require college that are not getting filled. We need to encourage these jobs as well as college. Not everyone needs a 4 year degree. We also need to fix the inequality in accountability between all parties: parent, student, and teacher.

Personal Minimums: Help address the skills gap and remove stigma from jobs that actually exist. Help address inequality in school quality K-12. Address poor metrics used in evaluation. Address parent, student, and teacher accountability imbalance.

Defense

I’ve always enjoyed the phrase “Speak softly but carry a big stick.” I’m very much of the opinion that having the biggest stick is important in the defense of our nation. Until world peace is a thing, we need a big stick. I wish we had smarter or better spending in this regard, as our current system seems quite inefficient. However, it is important to be recognized as having a very strong military, it makes people second guess attacking it.

Also, having strong allies is important. Having strong a strong intelligence community is very important. And nuclear use should be considered beyond last resort. The irreperable damage to society and the earth that a nuclear war of this day and age is unfathomable, and I don’t want to live there.

That’s about as much insight as I have to proper defense policy.

Personal Minimums: Make first use nuclear near impossible. Have a strong, respected, technologically advanced military.

Economy

I’m no economist. I know enough to understand that small changes can have huge effects, and big changes may mean very little in the long run. In the context of politics, I think the government’s role should be more hands off when it comes to economics. For example, job creation. The government is an employer. In my opinion, that’s as far as job creation should be concerned.

The government’s role should be to handle international trade and to provide an atmosphere where citizens can work for and create thriving businesses. Beyond this, I don’t have any specific recommendations.

Personal Minimums: Facilitate good trade agreements to help American businesses stay strong and relevant in the world market. Facilitate a healthy employee atmosphere.

Money in Politics

I made this a category of thought. You can consider it one idea I have towards forming a more perfect Union. We need to get money out of politics. Like I said in my economy section, the government’s role should provide an atmosphere where citizens can create businesses. I don’t want businesses, who have more money than citizens usually, to create the foundation we live in. The focus should be on people, and the businesses should adapt to survive without.

Our representatives are called representatives for a reason - they are supposed to represent citizens. Not businesses. Not just those with money. ALL citizens.

Personal Minimum: Money should not provide an advantage in representation. Citizens should come first, before any other entity.

Politics as a career

This is also something I feel we get wrong. Being a politician shouldn’t be a career. You can be involved in politics your whole life, but having it be your only job? This doesn’t sit well with me. If you want to grow in the political ranks, and spend 15 or 20 years in civil service in different roles, that’s fine by me. But for example, to eventually become a senator and stay one for 20 years should not be your goal.

I may be very wrong in my gut feeling here. I’d be interested to research the ways other countries handle elected officials, but I’m not sure there are ones similar enough to our system of government that I could get meaningful context. I mostly just do not want to see people live in a position of priviledge residing over what other citizens can and can’t do.

Personal Minimum: Being an elected reprensentative should be treated as a civil service, not a career.

Equal Rights

It’s sad that I need a section on this. While discrimination isn’t legal, at least not technically, it still happens regularly. Women get paid less. We legislate their health concerns. Minorities fare even worse. There’s plenty of studies and statistics out there, I need not repeat them.

Personal Minimums: All humans should have equal rights, period. Equal pay for equal work should be gauranteed. Discrimination on race, religion, or gender should be harshly punished.

Conclusions

Building out this philosophy of my personal minimums that I want to adhere to when evaluating political arguments, candidates, and the like has made me think quite a bit. I’ve personally kept my minimum’s vague, which isn’t really in the spirit of aviation minimums, but these issues are not as concrete as things like icing potential, visibility, and cloud ceilings.

I’m not going to try to provide answers on how to do these things. How you get from Chicago to New York can happen many ways in an airplane, and so can my ideals form in to policies many ways. I’m not nearly smart enough or an expert in any of these categories to have good answers, or even necessarily good ideas. But I can certainly have an opinion, and constantly reevaluate it over time as I learn new things and create a wider world view.

Here are my personal minimums in summary:

Anything that takes away from the ability for citizens to get quality health care at fair prices should be scrutinized.
Anything that hands insurance companies and the industry more money for no increase in care quality or coverage should be questioned.
Help address the skills gap and remove stigma from jobs that actually exist.
Help address inequality in school quality K-12.
Address poor metrics used in evaluation of schools.
Address parent, student, and teacher accountability imbalance.
Make first use nuclear near impossible.
Have a strong, respected, technologically advanced military.
Facilitate good trade agreements to help American businesses stay strong and relevant in the world market.
Facilitate a healthy employee atmosphere.
Money should not provide an advantage in representation. Citizens should come first, before any other entity.
Being an elected reprensentative should be treated as a civil service, not a career.
All humans should have equal rights, period.
Equal pay for equal work should be gauranteed.
Discrimination on race, religion, or gender should be harshly punished.

New Site Layout

2017-01-27T00:00:00-06:00

Changed from using Wordpress to something a lot more simple and secure - Pelican. Pelican is a static site generator written in Python, similar to Jekyll and others. I found Pelican a bit more confusing to learn than I did Jekyll, which I used to prototype a flying club website. However, I’m far more comfortable working in Python than Ruby, so I wanted to give it a go. I’m glad I did.

Blast from the Past – Private Pilot Checkride Debrief

2015-04-07T00:00:00-05:00

I was cleaning up some old documents I had laying around, and found my personal debrief of my Private Pilot Checkride. I wrote this right after I finished my drive home from the checkride, a few years ago on 4/27/2012. Hopefully, my notes and thoughts will help others in their quest for their PPL. I’ve edited out the examiners name to respect any privacy concerns he may have, and put it up on Google Docs for anyone who is curious. Here is the link:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iRsGejAtRN4Pp0acwHNwIH5lOKznL37SizxMRmg6jzs/edit?usp=sharing

For those that don’t know, getting a US Private Pilots License involves certain amounts and types of training to be logged, at the end of which you must pass three exams: a written, an oral exam, and a practical exam. The written is an FAA Standardized Test for the license you are applying for. The oral exam and practical exam usually happen at once with either a DPE (Designated Pilot Examiner) or an FAA Examiner, though they can happen separately if there are concerns as to the ability to perform the flight on that day such as the weather. This doc covers just the oral and practical exams.

Using SSH in scripting and understanding it’s exit code

2013-03-27T00:00:00-05:00

As a Linux Systems Administrator I do quite a bit of scripting, and oftentimes I’m doing much of this in bash especially when using Jenkins or Hudson to give a nice interface and accessibility to build and deployment for the shop I’m working with. Often times, you want these jobs to fail if there’s a problem with any step along the way, but you’re doing steps where you need to ssh to other servers and run commands, or something similar.

In a script, ssh’s exit code will be that of the last executed command. Executed is the key word there; there are times when it will continue to run other commands as well. I wrote a quick gist to illustrate the point.

https://gist.github.com/asiegman/5256589

The main thing to remember here is to use the right combination of multiple-line ssh formatting and environment settings. Also to remember, the script you’re running it from will not pick up any errors from inside the SSH connection if you’re using the “set -e” option, since the only command actually run from that script’s shell is the SSH command.

Hope that helps!

My alter ego is “famous.”

2013-03-13T00:00:00-05:00

I’m an avid gamer, and I still dable in my first MMO experience ever: EverQuest. I’ve had the fortune of attending SOE Live and participating (and winning, alongside my guild mates) in their EQ tournaments a few times.

SOE Recently did a Podcast celebrating EQ’s 14^th anniversary. Around the 30 minute mark they start going in to player memories from a Reddit thread they had started. I had commented on the glorious feeling of your first Qeynos to Freeport run back in 2000 when it was still a difficult run to do. Their community manager Piestro, who I had talked to a few times at the events, was quick to chime in with tales of my guild’s championship when they came to my comment.

Thanks Piestro! I know Alsmack has been in the EQ community for a long time, but never guessed anyone would bother to remember him =)

alexsiegman.com