It is that time of year when google starts taking applications for GSoC. The Google Summer of Code is a neat idea, really: pay a bunch of students enough to live on for the summer in exchange for them contributing to open source software. While the aim is very different, GSoC remindes me of how REUs work. This got me thinking...

Consider how science and technology work. Some talented person(s) is passionate enough about his science to pursue it at great costs. I'd even venture that most of us would do it "for free" as long as we had some way to get by. Secondly, companies realize that advances in science can turn into profits and so they fund research. Finally, the government also appreciates -- well maybe not as much as it should -- the value that science holds for the general public and for the government itself and thus funds research through agencies. The role of the agencies is to determine what is the overall direction that science should be taking and to administer the funds. Researches write proposals and get grants. People go to work.

Open source software isn't much different. Some talented hacker(s) is passionate enough about her hacking to pursue it at great costs and in her spare time. I'd venture most hackers would do it "for free" as long as they had some way to get by. Companies realize the value of this and they fund open source development (GSoC, IBM and eclipse, MySQL, etc). Finally, the government -- oh no, wait, the government is largely missing from the picture.

If google finds it worthwhile to fund REUs, why is it that the government does not find it worthwhile to fund open source at a larger scale? The general public -- whether they realize it or not -- benefits from the existence of open source projects. The internet exists because of open source. Secondly, the government itself will sooner or later wake up and adopt open source technologies for its own needs like those of Germany, The Netherlands, and Brazil which have already begun doing this. The potential agency should work much the same way the NSF does: determine overall direction and administer funds. Hackers write proposals and get grants. People go to work. The agency does not even need to be separate from the NSF. It just seems that there needs to be a way to make a proposal to build something and get the government to finance your efforts so long they are for "the greater good". Just like science. Only that hackers, unlike most scientists, don't need any expensive equipment other than a laptop.

Just watched yet another documentary on Iraq. The most astounding fact revealed by it was that there have been 93 journalists killed during the conflict. To give perspective, about (sources vary) 70 journalists died during Vietnam (1955-75). The refreshing bit is that the internet seems to be having an impact on this. The documentary finishes by talking about bloggers from Iraq whom by virtue of fitting in are not targeted like western journalists and manage to get first-hand accounts out via the internet. This makes me wonder about the status of internet availability, though. And even if it is available, I wonder if there is government/US control of it and how much. Furthermore, it seems that it is a matter of time until whomever is targeting western journalists starts targeting the bloggers.

Interesting read from the NYT.

Several highlights:

Mr. Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the numerator was how much they paid in federal income tax and in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and the denominator was their taxable income. The people in his office were mostly secretaries and clerks, though not all.

It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn't use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. "How can this be fair?" he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. "How can this be right?"

It is no mystery that 10% of ten thousand is not the same as 10% of a hundred thousand or a million. However, I was under the impression that usually the case was that people with higher income paid a higher percentage in taxes. Mr. Buffett's counterexample doesn't prove that this isn't the case, but I can't imagine it is too far from being representative. If anyone has hard figures on this I'd be interested to see them.

By this time, we Republicans had added a mere $2.7 trillion to the national debt. So much for tax cuts adding to revenue. To be fair, corporate profits taxes have increased greatly, as corporate profits have increased stupendously. This may be because of the cut in corporate tax rates. Anything is possible.

Another big(er) moral dilemma, but this one is widely known.

The third argument that kind, well-meaning people made in response to the idea of rolling back the tax cuts was this: "Don't raise taxes. Cut spending."

I think it is also widely known that this simply does not happen. The article gives some more evidence supporting this. Certainly it does not happen by fighting unnecessary wars while giving cost-inefficient (at best) contracts in silver plates to big contractors.

While waiting for Nathan to come over I stumbled upon this blog. Very interesting stuff. In particular, this interview with Economics Nobel Laureate Prof. Gary Becker caught my eye. The whole thing is a worthwhile read, however this is most remarkable:

What's your proposal exactly?

I think you have to legalize drugs. That will eliminate most of these costs, the incarceration costs, the judiciary costs, the police costs. You'll be able to reallocate the police to better activities, reduce the effects on neighborhoods, and so on. Critics would say you'll get a big increase in drug consumption. We estimate the effects, it may be pretty large, but you can always handle that in the way we attack cigarette consumption and alcohol consumption: namely, it's legalized and we impose a tax and we can then concentrate on reducing the amount of underground activities, which is much easier to do than reducing all activities.

I've been of this view since I have use of reason. There are at least two Nobel Prize winners supporting it, Milton Friedman spoke out against the war on drugs when it first started back in the Nixon days and continued to propose that drugs should be legal. He has written extensively about it and you can get small samples of his views here and in this article.

It seems rather obvious to me that most of the problems involved in drug production would largely be done away with by simply legalizing the drugs. The one possible caveat, that the drugs being legally available would increase consumption is a weak argument: people who want to do a drug will want to whether it is legal or illegal just the same. Furthermore, availability is hardly affected by the illegality. Just like with alcohol prohibition, the illegality simply serves as a mean to increase profitability at great social cost. Finally, I'll say that this social cost is largely paid outside US borders despite being a result of US domestic and foreign policy.

There are days left until the midterm election and what's everyone talking about? Former presidential candidates making bad jokes, pastors buying meth from gay escorts, presidents making bad jokes and inept talk show hosts bashing people with Parkinson disease. Are all these matters of national policy?

It has always amazed me how much people care about little or irrelevant things when it comes to their politicians' and how little they care about the policies those politicians pursue. Somehow it is more important to us to belabor the point about Kerry's bad joke being ok because it was intended as criticism of Bush than it is to wonder what each elected official has in mind about Iraq. And that is one complicated issue, I might add, I don't think it is a matter of 'we should stay' vs 'we should leave'. The issue requires a lot of political discourse. How would we leave? What's the exit strategy? What would we do different if we stayed? But I see no articles on front pages about potential congressmen discussing any of this.

Same story about the inept and ludicrous comments Rush Limbaugh made about Michael J. Fox. Sure, they are outrageous. But why is that the front page story as opposed to interviews with candidates about their views on stem cell research?

Why is nobody talking about the national debt, the budget deficit or about the way government spends its money? How about the Diebold voting machine not-scandal? All of those are plenty alarming real political issues that seem more relevant than jokes or talk show hosts.

Anti gay-marriage pastor caught buying meth from gay escort? Oh the hypocrisy! Do you think that next year the millions of gay people whose lives are affected by the inability to get legally married will have it any easier because we read that story today? Wouldn't it be more relevant to figure out where the candidates stand? Heaven forbid us talk about the issues that are relevant to gay-marriage. No! It is a matter of moral vs. immoral. Period. It is as easy as that. Nobody needs to ask no congressmen what she thinks about it.

Why is nobody asking candidates what they think about the possibility of impeaching the president and other members of his administration? I guess we'd rather watch him making jokes about not being able to find the WMDs.