Why Computer Programmers Would Make Good Legislators

By Alan Burkhart

No clue why this occurred to me, except that I stopped working on a programming project (my hobby) to read the news, which these days is almost all political. I read yet again about the sheer size (2000+ pages) and cost (who knows? Probably trillions) of the so-called health care reform. And as I read I began to wonder just how much of the final bill will be legitimate legislation and how much will be end-runs, workarounds, patches, what-ifs, and so on.

Every time a new law is created, whatever problem they were trying to solve usually gets worse (and more expensive). But, rather than repealing or rewriting the buggy law, they just keep piling on more legalese and spending more money until the original problem finally goes away. But as we all know, in the process of writing all this massive, mindless legislation, they invariably create a brand new mess of problems.

And of course, they now feel the need to write yet more laws to solve the new problems (that they caused), and the vicious circle continues. The bank failures, courtesy of The Community Reinvestment Act, come to mind.

Imagine if a programmer behaved in such a way...

You write a block of code to access a certain file, but in the process you create a bug in another part of the program (a common occurrence). What do you do? You remove the offending code to eliminate the problem,  then you think it through, and then you write new code that accomplishes your purpose of the moment without creating the problem.

But what if instead you simply applied some sort of cheap workaround instead of properly fixing the code? In all likelihood, you'll have broken another part of the project without even knowing it. You don't find out until a week later, and by then you've forgotten the aforementioned workaround and have no clue why the program is behaving so badly. So you write a workaround for this, too. You end up with twice as much code as you should have and the  program is a house of cards – subject to falling apart at any moment.

Am I stretching my often-questionable logic too far here? Maybe. But imagine for a moment if legislators wrote legal code like most of us nerds write computer code. When (not if) a new law totally screws an unrelated sector of society, you go back and remove the block of legal code that caused the problem. And then you figure out how to rewrite the law without causing collateral damage. You don't just pile on hundreds of lines of lawyer-speak until the problem goes away. Imagine – sensible, constructive legislation that pays Paul without robbing Peter.

The health care legislation currently being debated in the Senate is in excess of two thousand pages. That's a lot of legal code. I wonder how many "bugs" that'll cause? I daresay a system-wide crash will be just around the corner if it passes.

Perhaps before passing a new law to solve a problem, our legislators should consider instead repealing the law that caused it.

Discussion at Free Republic: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2392407/posts

Discussion at The Code Project: Click here

(Pocket) Change You Can Believe In

By Alan Burkhart

Times are tough right now. Few and far between are those who haven’t felt the economic crunch. I don’t mind admitting that times are pretty darn tough here at Burkhart’s house.

Those of you who’ve been comfy all your lives might not know what a CoinStar machine is. It’s a kiosk found in grocery stores and big box department stores like Wal-Mart that allows you to dump all the coins from your piggy bank in a chute. It counts your money then spits out a voucher that you cash in at the check out. A small and reasonable fee is attached.

People like me who hate rolling coins love the CoinStar machine. My bank won’t take unrolled coins, and there’s a CoinStar machine at Kroger near my home.  In the past, I’d hit the CoinStar about three times a year with a small fortune in pocket change in a big cookie tin. Walk out of Kroger with an “extra” $100 in my pocket. Smiling all the way to the car.

But now?

You can end up standing in line for a half-hour waiting to get to the kiosk. Or you show up and it’s full, so you can’t use it. In my town there are three CoinStar kiosks. I was seriously broke last week and had a little change in a coffee can. So off I go to Kroger. It was full. So I head down the block to Wal-Mart. Not only was it full, but there were several people at the Customer Service Desk inquiring as to how long it’d be before the guy showed up to service it. I drove across town to the local SaveRite store, and thankfully that one was still working.

And this wasn’t the first time lately I’ve seen the kiosk at Kroger shut down because it was full. And I’ve been subject to standing in lines to get to it, too. Never had to do that until about a year ago when things began really tightening up around here.

So why the run on the CoinStar machines? Answer: Those piggy banks (or coffee cans or cookie tins or whatever) are no longer just fun little ways of saving back a few bucks. They’re grocery money, or school supplies, or maybe the electric bill. People are being weighed down with bills they can’t pay and the load is getting heavier. I took my big $22.68 and bought food. It was either that or draw money against my next paycheck.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out this is a bad sign. People are running out of money. And what money we have has nowhere near the buying power of years past. How long has it been since milk was under $2 a gallon? Not all that long. Now it’s $3 here, and I’ve seen it higher. Try to buy a loaf of bread for under $2.50. Try to buy a decent used automobile for under $15,000. And gasoline is again crawling upwards toward $3 a gallon. Maybe it’s already there where you live.

I’m not an economist, and I don’t know the answer. You can blame Bush or Obama or your neighbor’s grandmother. It doesn’t really matter. What I do know is that the root of this mess goes all the way back to the 70’s and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. That was the beginning of the days in which government and “community organizers” began pushing financial institutions to make home loans to people who had no chance of ever paying them off.

In later years, politicians like Barney Frank would chortle and tell us that the economy was strong, the banks were sound, and there was nothing to worry over. They ridiculed people like Ron Paul, GW Bush, John McCain and others who tried to sound the warning that we were headed for tough times. And now we’re in those times, and guess who’s in charge of fixing it?

Answer: The same idiots who got us into this mess to begin with. And Barney Frank is right in the  middle of it, telling us how Obama and Congress will hold financial institutions accountable for their misdeeds. Well Barney, maybe you should look back at your own record. You helped put the financial institutions in the very mess you’re blaming them for being in.

Oh, and those evil, excessive corporate bonuses the Left was screaming about? Try to remember that those executives were under contract, and contracts must be honored. And, many of them only got the so-called “bonus.” That was their only income. All the screaming about bonuses was smoke and mirrors to keep Americans from figuring out who the real culprits are.

And don’t give the Republicans too much credit, either. They had more than a decade of being in the majority and did little if anything to fix it. Paul, McCain and Bush were part of only a handful with the gumption to try, and they weren’t enough. And Bush once even boasted about how minority home ownership had soared during his presidency. I guess he momentarily forgot that the main reason for those numbers was a lot of dirt-poor African-Americans who jumped at the chance to leave “poor town” and live in a nice neighborhood. Who could blame them? And guess who’s losing their homes nowadays? If you guessed, “those dirt-poor African-Americans” give yourself an A. It’s what happens when you live beyond your means.

Now the country is in a gigantic mess, and the only people who won’t get blamed for it are the main ones who caused it. We have the option next year to vote out the ones who caused it, and vote back in the ones who did nothing about it. Ah, yes. Opportunity knocks.

But that’s politics. I don’t expect accountability or honesty from the Left or the Right. And they always meet my expectations. What the hell. My change is all gone, but the pawn shop is open. Funny… I used to go to the pawn shop to buy stuff. Times change.

See y’all on the road

Alan