Fall Town Meeting : done in two!

We bravely forged ahead Wednesday night, and finished Fall Town Meeting in two nights.

I did something I usually don't do at Town Meeting-- I voted for a symbolic, advisory, "we the people of the Town" national-policy-interfering warrant article.

Yup, I voted to "Bring our War Dollars Home."   The rational side of me says I should have done what I usually do-- abstain, because I don't think national political issues belong at Town Meeting.

But I'm really pissed off at how much money the United States spends on the military in general and wars, and troops, overseas in particular.  If you look at polls of unpopular government spending, "foreign aid" is always near the top of the list.  And if you think about it, most of the military budget is really foreign aid, "defending" countries that are perfectly capable of defending themselves.

So, since I'm really pissed off, and since the warrant article specifically related national military spending to the Town's budget... I voted with my heart.

The only other controversial article this time around was Article 8, which tried to make some concrete changes to our zoning laws so developers are given incentives to do what the new Master Plan says people in Amherst want (and disincentives if they don't).

I hated it when I first saw it.  16 pages of new zoning regulations... bleuch!

But then I read it, and couldn't find a single thing in it that seems like a bad idea.  And the general approach is exactly the right idea-- encourage more of what we want (affordable housing, infill development, environmentally and historically sensitive development, etc) and discourage what we don't (McMansion subdivisions sprawling into open space).

Most of Town Meeting also thought it was a good idea, too... but it failed to get the required two-thirds by ten votes.  The BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone) minority defeated it.

I hope a modified version comes back before Town Meeting.  It would be tragic if the current Master Plan suffers the same fate as our last master plan (the Select Committe on Goals, which I wrote about a couple of years ago), and we continue with "business as usual" for another 40 years.

Licensed to Burn!

I was hoping for something wallet-size.  And I guess they overestimated the demand for these when they had them printed back in 19-something... but I am glad they're saving trees and money by using up the old forms and just crossing out the nineteens.

This is Why Amherst has a Reputation...

We're having a wood stove installed in our house, and because I'm a Good Gumby, I'm jumping through the Official Rules and Regulations that Keep Us Safe.

So I read up on wood stoves on the Town website, and find out I need to pass a "Woodburning Device Operator Examination" from the Amherst Board of Health.

I have an embarrassing confession: several years ago I operated a woodburning device without being properly licensed (our house on Butterfield Terrace had a wonderful German ceramic woodstove). I should've been fined $50 the first time I did it and $200 every other time.

That'll teach me. I've read the Town Bylaws (well, except the Zoning Bylaws, I'm not that big a masochist). I guess I was supposed to read all the Health Board Regulations, too ("ignorance of the law is no excuse", after all).

Anyway, the Woodburning Device Operator Examination is open-book multiple choice, and I expect I'll be properly licensed soon.

What really prompts me to write this is my experience trying to get a permit for the woodstove from the inspections department. Two weeks ago I sent them an email asking what I needed to do... no reply ("we're switching email systems and haven't fully converted everything yet...").

So on Friday I walk in and ask what I need to do. I'm given a form with the sections I need to fill out helpfully highlighted and am told to fill it out and come back with a check for $30.

Which I do on Tuesday. Which is when I'm told that the form isn't enough, they need to know all the manufacturer clearances and dimensions and how tall the stovepipe and what the heat-shields on the wall will be made out of and so on. And I shouldn't really be filling out the permit application, my contractor should be. But I can if I really want to and am willing to be a daredevil risk-taker.

I have an idea: lets get rid of Town inspections. My insurance company has the right incentives-- it doesn't want my house to burn down, but it also wants to keep me as a happy customer. Let insurance companies inspect wood stove installations. If they don't answer their email and then give me the runaround I can fire them and hire their competition.

And maybe they'd offer a discount on my insurance for taking their version of the Woodburning Operators Examination.

S.A.F.E. statistics

So I get this letter sent home in Robin's backpack:

TO: Parents and/or Custodians of Fourth Grade STudents

The Amherst Fire Department, ... blah blah blah... will be presenting a fire safety awareness program to your child. This program is funded through a state grant knows as S.A.F.E. (Student Awareness of Fire Education).

OK... cool, I suppose. I don't like the cutesy government acronym, but that's just me being cynical. I would kind of like to know how much school time was going to be spent (hours? days?) on Fire Education and the letter doesn't tell me that, but OK.

Then they push several of my pet peeve buttons:

Please consider the following tragic statistics:

1. Nearly 10% of the 52 fire deaths in Massachusetts in 2005 were children unde r the age of 18.
2. 75% of fire victims died in the so-called safety of their own homes.
3. Nearly one-quarter of these deaths occurred in homes with no working smoke detectors.
4. Unsafe disposal of smoking materials was the leading cause of residential fire fatalities in 2005, just as it is every year

"Nearly 10% of 52?" Why not just say "5 kids were killed in fires in 2005"? Even better, how about telling me how many kids were killed last year, or maybe the average number of kids killed over the last 5 years? Was 2005 a really bad year for fires?

I guess these statistics are supposed to make me appreciate the importance of Fire Awareness Education, but I'd summarize them as: A handful of kids die in fires in Massachusetts every year, mostly because some parents are careless with their cigarettes.

We don't smoke and our house has working, hard-wired smoke detectors on every floor. Phew, looks like there's approximately a 0% chance we'll have a house fire.

Fewer people are killed in fires these days than ever before-- maybe because of programs like S.A.F.E. But I doubt it; I bet if I dug out the long-term trends of number-of-kids-killed-in-fires in states with programs like S.A.F.E. versus states without student fire education programs I'd see exactly the same trends.

But what's the harm? S.A.F.E. only costs about a million dollars a year, if it saves just one life every few years it is worth it.

Then again, if it distracts parents from the real risks to their kids maybe it is doing more harm than good.

I love the Internets, episode number 1,974,233

So this morning my task is to teach some C++ code how to POST information to a website. Writing the code is pretty easy, but I need a way of testing it.

I need a website that just shows information POSTed to it.

I could write a web page that did that, but it would probably take me an hour to get it all setup and debugged. But somebody must have done it before, right? I know there are "paste-bin" services where you can throw up arbitrary information that other people can get to later. I want a "POST bin".

Google: postbin

First result: www.postbin.org

Ahhh.... geeky heaven. I love the Internets.

Money, Broken

Last Friday I saw The Money Fix and heard about Valley Time Trade-- a "time bank" in Northampton. You can pay a small yearly membership fee, spend a little bit of time being interviewed and trained to use some facilitating software, and then can sell and buy "time dollars" by working for, or hiring, other time bank members.

They seem like incredibly nice, earnest, caring, enthusiastic people. So it makes me sad to say it, but I think their project is doomed.

Maybe I'm just a big cynical meanie who doesn't see that the Time Bank will foster mutual respect, increase community interaction and connect people with unmet needs to people with untapped resources.

But I think I'm a realist who has looked hard at how economics really works, and I think there are two really fundamental lessons of economics:

1. Incentives Matter
2. Productivity Matters

Valley Time Trade ignores both of those lessons.

On incentives: Valley Time Trade is a "mutual credit system." Everybody starts out with a zero balance, and if I do work for you I get credit and you get a debit that you're supposed to work off at some point in the future, for me or somebody else. The Time Trading Adminstrators keep track of everything, and talk to people to try to get them from either hoarding credits or running up huge debits.

I think that will work really well on a small scale, but will eventually fail. People leaving the system (moving to another state, perhaps) have a natural incentive to leave with a zero or negative balance. Peer pressure and a sense of social obligation will keep that from happening when everybody in the system knows and trusts each other, but eventually that trust will break down. This is the same reason communes and other utopian organizations typically fail after a few years.

On productivity: Time Trade systems assume that any hour of work is the same as any other hour of work. One of their goals is to: "Promote equality, recognizing that all services are necessary to society and equally valuable."

Bullshit. They don't really believe that. I certainly don't believe that soldiers providing me the "service" of keeping me safe from terrorism by bombing the crap out of some foreign country is necessary or valuable.

And they don't really believe that an hour's worth of open heart surgery is as necessary and valuable as an hour's worth of lawn mowing by a ten-year-old kid.

Some people are more productive than others because they're smarter or stronger or have invested a lot of time and effort to learn how to do something. Money is society's way of telling you whether or not you're doing something useful.

Take away that price signal and you'll eventually end up with people doing as little as possible to get by. North Korea is one of the poorest countries on earth because people there are not rewarded for extra effort.

Again, peer pressure and the warm fuzzies from doing nice things for your neighbors will keep Valley Time Trade going for a few years. But eventually there will be a few assholes who exploit it by getting the most valuable services that they can but giving just enough to get by. Which will make the people giving those valuable services a little bit resentful, so maybe they decide to stop giving those valuable, in-demand services and give something else, instead.

The average commune lasts about 10 years. I bet the average Time Bank will last about half that.

Money, Fixed

I'm happiest when I'm working on One Big Thing. I think I've found my next Big Thing, and I'm excited!

Bitcoin is a new kind of money that fixes a bunch of bugs in the old-fashioned money you have in your bank account and your wallet.

Getting excited about a new kind of money is kind of crazy. You're probably thinking I've been brainwashed by the loony wing of Tea Party that believes that the Federal Reserve was illegally created and that we should go back to a solid currency backed by gold stored in Fort Knox. Or that I've drunk the Rainbow Sunshine Kool-Aid of the loony wanna-be Socialists who think that local currencies are the answer to everybody's economic problems.

I'm excited because Bitcoin isn't a pie-in-the-sky theoretical idea for how to make a better currency. It is a working system that a few geeks (like me!) are already using and trying to break. It fixes these bugs in our current monetary systems:

• It doesn't require trust in any central authority; there is no central bank or company or board of directors controlling the currency.
• It is immune from long-term inflation, because it is designed so that only a limited number of Bitcoins will ever be created.
• It is a global currency and, like the Internet, national borders are pretty much irrelevant in the Bitcoin world.
• Because it is based on the best currently-known cryptography, it cannot be counterfeited.

Of course, it is possible there's some terrible, fundamental flaw in the Bitcoin system that nobody has thought of yet. I've been thinking about it really hard (and dissecting the C++ source code) for the last month or so and I can't see any flaws, but I know that time and experience are the only true test of any new system.

I'm already putting my Bitcoins where my mouth is, and have created a simple little website to get some experience with handling Bitcoins. The Bitcoin Faucet will give you 5 Bitcoins to play with.

For free.

Maybe I am crazy. What percentage of crazy people think they're sane?