41˚F And Treacherous

41˚F sounds pretty reasonable for an Anchorage January evening.   But freezing rain on already cold streets is nasty.

A sheet of ice on the street.

Senate Majority Poll Finds 48% Of Survey Takers Support A State Income Tax at 25% Of Federal Income Tax

When I got the email survey last week from the Senate Majority, my eyebrows went up a bit when I saw that their income tax question pegged the tax at 25% of the federal income tax.  I'd just heard the governor's state of the state address where he proposed a 1% level.

Surely, this was meant to suppress the income tax support, I thought.  And today's ADN had a commentary by Dermot Cole making that same point.

And now I got an email with the results of the poll.  I checked the question on income tax first.  Even at 25% of the federal tax, 49% responded positively!  That must be a surprise to the Senate majority.

Click to focus 

There are several full blog posts to write about here.

1.  About the governor's state of the state address - which I thought was a refreshingly clear, straightforward, and honest outlining of the situation.  He laid it all out.  This much is our gap.  We can:

• Cut
• Use Permanent Fund and Other Reserves
• Raise New Revenue

He pointed out that cutting all state employees wouldn't put much of a dent into the deficit.  For some people, shutting down government is the only way they will start to see all the things they depend on the state government for.  Immediate impacts will be no state troopers, no snow plowing or other road maintenance, prisoners would all starve in their cells or have to be released.  You think you'd have trouble flying because Alaska hasn't adopted real ID drivers' licenses, wait until we have no licenses at all, or license plates.  What will the Canadian border folks do with all our out of date plates trying to go through?  The airports would shut down.  Then there are things that will take longer to happen - people will start getting sick from things like bad water.  But that's another post.

The governor offered some options - what he wanted from the Permanent Fund (no limits, but the dividend would come off oil royalties, not investment earnings as I understood the speech), what size income tax (1% of Federal), and no sales tax.  He explained why he made the choices he did - income tax would capture those who were not residents of Alaska but worked here and sales tax is local government's way to raise money and he didn't want to add a state sales tax on top of the local taxes.

And then he said he wasn't set on the specific options, but he was set on the outcome.  He got the biggest applause when he said, "I will always put Alaska’s future above my own.  I didn’t run for gov to keep the job, but to do the job."

2.  About the different revenue options and who wins and loses from each.

Since corporations don't get Permanent Fund Dividends but they do pay income taxes, you can guess what they want.  More money from the Permanent Fund and no income taxes.  We should tap into the Permanent Fund, because that's what it was set up for in the long run - to be an endowment for Alaska.  The non-renewable oil could be turned into renewable capital, and a portion of the state's budget could be funded from the interest.  They key is how big a hit the Permanent Fund should take now and whether income taxes should also be added in.

Poorer folks get a bigger benefit from the PFD than the wealthy.  They would pay less in income taxes.  And they would pay a bigger percent of their income on a sales tax than the wealthy.

And who has the money to sway the public?  The poor and middle income or the wealthy and the corporations?  You can see where this is leading.

GCI has already started a coalition to push for big hits for the Permanent Fund.

But 48,2% in support of an income tax that's 25% of the federal tax is huge!

But the legislative majority hasn't been too good about paying attention to what people think if it's not what they think.  They're still suing the governor over medicaid expansion, despite overwhelming public support.


I'd also note that the * with the explanation for the 25% figure (that's what Oregon has) was NOT on the survey itself.

Here's a link to all the poll responses.

What's Jamie Love Doing These Days?

When we got to Anchorage in 1977, Jamie Love, as the founder and director of the Alaska Public Interest Group (AKPIRG) was reviled daily in the Anchorage Times for raising questions about equity, about the environment, about anything that challenged those with power.  I don't have the constitution to take that kind of regular abuse and I was in awe of him.

Stephen Cysewski posted a FB link to a Guardian article about Jamie today, fighting big pharmaceutical companies whose patents often mean people die because they can't afford the jacked up price of drugs.  It's worth reading.  One more person who cut his teeth in Alaska and went on to make a big difference in the world.  Way to go Jamie.

It begins like this:

"On a hot August afternoon in 2000, four Americans arrived for a secret meeting at the central London penthouse flat of an Indian billionaire drug manufacturer named Yusuf Hamied. A sixth person would join them there, a French employee of the World Health Organisation, who was flying in from Geneva, having told his colleagues he was taking leave. 

Hamied took his guests into the dining room on the seventh floor. The room featured a view of the private gardens of Gloucester Square, Bayswater, for which only the residents possess a key. The six men sat round a glass dining table overlooked by a painting of galloping horses by a Mumbai artist (Hamied has racehorses stabled in three cities). The discussion, which went on all afternoon and through dinner that evening at the Bombay Palace restaurant nearby, would help change the course of medical history.
The number of people living with HIV/Aids worldwide had topped 34 million, many of them in the developing world. Hamied and his guests were looking for a way to break the monopoly held by pharmaceutical companies on Aids drugs, in order to make the costly life-saving medicines available to those who could not pay.
 Hamied was the boss of Cipla, a Mumbai-based company founded by his father to make cheap generic copies of out-of-patent drugs. He had met only one of the men before – Jamie Love, head of the Consumer Project on Technology, a not-for-profit organisation funded by the US political activist, Ralph Nader. Love specialised in challenging intellectual property and patent rules. For five years, he had been leading high-profile campaigners from organisations such as Médecins Sans Frontières in a battle to demolish patent protection."

Here's the whole article. 

I Don't Believe In Contests, But . . .

Today was supposed to be the deadline for submitting material to the Alaska Press Club Annual Contest.  These are awards the organization gives out to its members every year.  There are lots and lots of categories and not too much about how they are judged.  My understanding is that the submissions are sent out to judges out of state - a different judge for each category - and they decide.

Each submission costs $15 to send in by the early deadline and $20 by the late deadline.  Today was the early deadline, but I got an email saying it was extended until tomorrow.  The fees, from what I can tell, help pay for the Press Club, which puts on an annual conference that has pretty interesting speakers from around the country and beyond.  I've done a few posts from the conferences over the last couple of years.

I'm leary, though of these kinds of contests.  Do they really mean anything?  I submitted stuff for a couple of categories a few years ago in the hopes that there weren't many bloggers who would submit and if I won, I could then point to my Press Club award as some sort of independent evaluation that the blog was not just one of the thousands of Alaska blogs.  I even won a couple of awards which served my purpose.  The next year all my submissions were lost.  I got a refund eventually.  Last year I got a couple more awards - in the best news and current events blog category and in the best commentary blog category.  I even got an award in the arts reporting, which wasn't restricted to blogs.

I have continued to participate in the contest because I find it useful to go through a year's worth of posts and assess how well I did.  Are there posts I'm proud enough to submit?  Reviewing them makes me proud sometimes and often makes me cringe.

So I'm hoping to have a list of posts to send in tomorrow for the best news and current events blogs category again.  And also maybe a couple of other categories.  Looking through the list of categories, it appears they've combined the news blog and commentary blog and added a 'best feature blog' category.  I've been trying to review the year's worth of posts, and I have some long lists of potential ones to submit, but I'm glad for the extra day.  But winnowing them down to about ten to package together is hard.

I was trying to get posts that I thought were good and important.  But as I made a last sweep through Blogspot's back pages that shows number of hits and comments, I was surprised by which posts had the most hits.

Comments about computer problems score high.   I don't get that many hits.  It's hard to say because the two different measures I use differ wildly.  Statcounter says I average about 9000 page views a month or 300 a day.  GoogleAnalytics gives me about 1500 - 2000 page views a day.  That's a big gap.  Of course, those hits aren't all for the current day's post.  There are over 5000 posts in the archives and google send people into those older posts.

My hypothesis about the relatively low number of comments is that my writing is usually not confrontative or inflammatory.  It's more calm and reasoned.  People don't feel compelled to disagree or correct errors.  Another possible explanation is that many posts are so long and complicated that people never get to the comment button.  But I get enough feedback from folks that the people who matter in particular issues do read what I write about those issues.

So, this list is much longer than I can offer the Press Club, and these aren't necessarily my favorite posts, though some are.  They're just the posts with the greatest number of hits (from Blogspot.)  I'm putting the number of hits and comments next to them.  If there's only one number, it's the number of hits and there were no comments.

Here are posts that the most readers saw.

Sitemeter Out of Control  -  2374 hits  24 comments
http://whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/2015/06/sitemeter-out-of-control.html

Happy Thanksgiving Political Correctness  1648    I do think this is an important post.  I was very surprised to see it had gotten so many hits.

Selma's Garbage Bag Problem  -  1156  6   Again, surprised about this.  This is not a very important post, though it does fit the 'how do you know what you know?' theme of the blog.

Famous People Born In 1915 - It Was A Very Good Year  -  1117   -  This is an interesting post and it makes sense that lots of people got here.  There was a follow-up post or two.

The Impact of Modern Day Shaming - 784  14   - Not a bad post, it looks at how people judging others on the internet can really disrupt others' lives.  A little herd mentality.  Another ways of knowing post.

Hello Statcounter Goodbye Sitementer - 567  -  This is a followup to Sitemeter Out of Control.

Why I Live Here - Quill Bailey and Rachel Barton Pine, and Eduard Zilberkant Play Down The Street - 507 4   I really like that this one did well.

Would More Women Police Officers Reduce Police Violence?    - 496  A solid post.  One I'm considering for my list for the Press Club.

Soon I'll do the posts that I liked the post.

Serendipity? Coincidence? Or Is Everything Just Connected?

We tend to see coincidences all the time, that there's a million to one chance of these things happening.  But I'm convinced it's just that most people are bad at math and worse at statistics and probability.  I did a post in 2014 on a chance meeting I had once where it turned out the odds were not really as great as they first seemed.

That's all introduction to two connections that came from reading last week.  Amazing how reading books fills in holes in one's knowledge.  I'd picked up two books from my daughter and son-in-law's bookshelves while waiting for things to get moving.  One fairly deep, one more a sensational "action packed thrill ride" as the back cover described it.

1.  Here's a headline from last week:

"Putin's agents accused of killing Litvinenko left polonium radiation in British embassy"

Normally, I'd have just read the polonium part and it wouldn't have meant anything.  It would have been just another word.  Even though I didn't understand it, I got the context, and probably wouldn't have looked it up.  Though blogging has gotten me to look up things a lot more so I don't miss something before I post.

But I've been reading a biography of Marie Curie - Obsessive Genius  by Barbara Goldsmith.  As part of Curie's discovery of radioactivity and of radium, she and her husband Pierre also discovered another radioactive element which she called polonium after her native country Poland. (Her maiden name was Sklodowski.)  The discussion of the process of discovering polonium suggests the difficulty of separating it from other substances and of measuring it, but also of its power:

"Pierre scrawled in their workbook that Marie had produced a substance accompanying bismuth that was 17 times more radioactive than pure uranium alone, then two weeks later 150 times as radioactive, then 300, then 330.  The radioactivity of this last substance was so great that Marie was convinced she had discovered a new element.  But how to confirm it?  A sure way was by a fetid now as spectroscopy and the EPCI was fortunate in having a resident expert in this field, Eugéne Demarçay.  Spectroscopy involved the heating of an element until it became a glowing gas and then refracting the light it emitted through a prism.  This resulted in a rainbow pattern of light, or spectra.  No two elements produced the same pattern of light.  .  .  Demarçay tested Marie's substance but said it was not sufficiently pure to produce a spectrum.  Though bitterly disappointed, she marched back to the laboratory.  Within ten days she had, in her words, "obtained a substance 400 times as active as uranium alone."  Demarçay tested this substance, but once again could not produce a clear spectral line." [p. 86]

But given other researchers racing to publish, they published their results, with appropriate qualifications, and eventually, the existence of a new element, polonium, was established.


2.  Jack Reacher, the hero of Lee Child's Bad Luck And Trouble, finds himself in Seattle (as I do right now.)  He had to immediately get to LA.

"[He] bought a one-way ticket on United to LAX.  He used his passport for ID and his ATM card as a debit card.  The one-way walk-up fare was outrageous.  Alaska Airlines would have been cheaper, but Reacher hated Alaska Airlines.  They put a scripture card on their meal trays.  Ruined his appetite."

I did have to smile.   I fly on Alaska Airlines a lot.   I also had to look at when the book was published. Copyright was 2007.  I remember those prayer cards.  They were religiously fairly bland, but still irksome to have a corporation that had me locked in to flying tube for several hours telling me that I needed to pray.  But the cards are gone now.   Alaska Airlines didn't stop using the prayer cards until 2012.  Of course, the free meal trays on flights are also gone.  I wonder how long it took Alaska Airlines folks to find out they'd been slammed in a "#1 New York Times Bestselling author" as the book jacket proclaims.  I guess that means that at least one of his books had been number one, but not this one.


Coincidences?  That I read about polonium in the news and in the book at just about the same time?  No.  Many books I read connect directly to something else that's going on while I'm reading the book. If you read a lot, you're going to know more.  If you know enough stuff, you're going to find connections to what you know everywhere.  And as you know more, words like polonium take on deeper meanings, ideas grow from slogans to complex relationships.  You start seeing patterns.  Things start to make sense. The complexity part was one of the reasons I posted the cartoon the other day.

What If Media Audio For Black and White Street Violence Were Switched?

We took our granddaughter to a music class.  You know, sit in a circle, move your arms and legs to the music, dance around, keep time with sticks, and other toddler appropriate rhythm activities.  The teacher singing songs to children and making them all feel comfortable and getting them involved.

But there was more to this talented woman that playing with toddlers.  We got to talking before the class and she said she was really interested in how things seem versus how they really are, about how people know things.  As we talked more she suggested this video, which is a pretty good followup to yesterday's post.

It looks at media coverage of street violence - black lives matter demonstrations and white students after a sports loss.  Amazing the different rhetoric - thugs vs. students,  riot vs. party gone awry, criminals v. young people.  Coverage of black demonstrations questions "where's the leadership" but when white students turning over cars and burning the campus there are no question about where their parents are.

Then they replay the shots of white violence, but use the audio from coverage of black protests.

A great way to get people to see how the media subtly projects racist views that see blacks as bad guys and whites as just getting a bit out of hand.




This comes from a group called Brave New Films.


[Yet another Feedburner problem.  This seems to be getting all too common. I add these notices for two reasons. 1.  For those who found this post another way, I'm sorry if you were fooled into coming back. And 2.   I'm also keeping track of how many times Feedburner takes more than an hour or two to kick in.]

"They stomp on our neck, , ,"

This is the kind of rhetoric that gets conservatives telling black protestors to stop whining.

Except this wasn't black lives matter folks who said this.  No, this was my former governor when she endorsed Donald Trump the other day.

From New York Times (Palin's Trump endorsement speech):

“They stomp on our neck, and then they tell us, ‘Just chill, O.K., just relax.’ Well, look, we are mad, and we’ve been had. They need to get used to it.”

It's amazing how people can feel their own pain and get outraged about it, but have no patience for the pain of others.  And that goes for liberals who can't get into the heads of poor white males who see their position in the world declining rapidly.  I'm not saying these folks are right, but at least I can imagine why they're mad.


And here's another Palin bit I picked up at Immoral Minority that he got from ABC.

"My family is no different than other families that are dealing with some of the ramifications of war. And just really appreciate people who will support our troops and make sure that they are treated better than illegal immigrants for one."

Let's look at that second sentence.

"support our troops and make sure they are treated better than illegal immigrants for one."

First, let's look at the term 'illegal immigrants.'   What makes an immigrant 'illegal'? I think what people actually mean by this term is something like 'immigrant who broke the law coming into the US"?   Cause if that's the case, shouldn't we call US citizens who break the law while living here "illegal citizens."?  Like people who drive over the speed limit?  Or drive while legally drunk?  Or who punch out their girlfriends?

Second, what about our troops who ARE illegal immigrants?  What do you do then?  Distinguish between our troops who are fully documented US citizens or residents and those troops who are not?  We could come up with a catchy slogan, "Support our troops, but only if they are legal US residents."

Yes, for those scratching their heads about 'illegal' troops, the military has a program to take in undocumented immigrants.  A couple of 2014 bills, for example, to expand this practice were sponsored by Republicans: Reps. Mike Coffman, R-Colo., and Jeff Denham, R-Calif.

Why, you might ask, do I even bother looking at what Palin says?  Mostly I don't, but these quotes were in my face online (another good reason to be online less) and I like to have tidbits like this ready in case I run into a Palin/Trump believer.  Unfortunately, most of them seem to be so busy being righteously indignant about their loss of privilege with the erosion of racial and gender discrimination that facts and rational arguments don't make an impact.

A Bit of Exercise

The sun's been finding big holes in the clouds that dumped a couple of inches of rain yesterday here on Bainbridge Island, so I grabbed my daughter's bike and moved my legs.  I stopped at Manitou Beach, a tiny stretch of rocks and shells and driftwood with a mirage of downtown Seattle floating out in the distance.

Looking closer to in.

A driftwood shellf.

A stray rain cloud blew by while I was stopped at the beach so I decided to head back.  But the sun was out again on the way home.  It's setting now, still light, but the temp has dropped about 20 degrees since earlier this afternoon.  

Bittersweet Humor - Science v. Everything Else And Delta's Breakup Letter To Juneau

This certainly is relevant to this blog's theme of how we know things.

Click to enlarge and focus - Found in LA Times Jan 20, 2015

My immediate reaction was a bittersweet smile.  So true.  So sad.  But this really depends on how one defines science.

Full blown rigorous western science with quantification and experimenting doesn't answer every question, but not everything can be broken down and measured.  Particularly social behaviors.

And there are less rigorous (in a pure science sense) ways of knowing.  Scientists in Alaska have learned to pay attention to traditional Native Alaskan knowledge on things like weather, animal behavior, ice conditions, medicinal herbs etc.  There's just a long accumulation of knowledge over generations.

Even the divide between simple, quick, superficial answers versus more complex ones can be questioned.  Many biblical justifications we hear are long and complex.  They can also be just wrong. And there is also a lot of wisdom in the bible, but like with the Constitution, it has to be interpreted in the context of what science has since revealed.  For instance the requirements to rotate crops, to leave the leftover harvests on the ground for the hungry, the ideas about jubilee years when debts are forgiven, are all good for social animals to heed.

I'll leave it at that.  It's a heavy, grey, rainy day on Bainbridge Island, makes Anchorage inviting, especially with the reports I'm seeing on great auroras.   I've got a short time here before I'm playing grandpa again..

So let me offer you, for another bittersweet smile,  this link to Delta's breakup letter to Juneau posted on One Hot Mess Alaska.  

Why Our Factory School System Fails Many Students

I'm reading a biography of Marie Curie and I was struck by the description of two key players - Curie's husband Pierre and New Zealand born scientist Ernest Rutherford.  Both were very slow in learning to read and write, but their minds were already working overtime on science. Consider what would happen to these kids in your local school district.

From Obsessive Genius:  The Inner World of Marie Curie by Barbara Goldsmith:

"At an early age [Pierre Curie] was unable to read or write but had an ability to visualize mathematical concepts far beyond his years.  His father, unusually enlightened for his time (1860's France), had realized that his son's spirit would be broken in a regular school.  He had decided on home schooling Pierre, aided by his wife an Jacques  Today, one would diagnose Pierre Curie as dyslexic.  His handwriting remained that of a child and his spelling was abominable.  .   .
At fourteen, Pierre developed an attachment to an excellent tutor who taught him mathematics and latin.  By the age of sixteen he had received his science baccalaureate and  . . . taking a degree in physics at the Sorbonne and enrolling at the School of Pharmacy in Paris . . ." (p. 57)

And later he would get a Nobel Prize in physics with his wife Marie.

And then there's a similar account a little later:

". . . [in] 1883, a boy of eleven, Ernest Rutherford, stood on the porch a New Zealand farmhouse while a thunderstorm approached.  His father, awakened by he storm, went downstairs to join his son.  What was he doing?  Ernest replied that he had figured out that by counting the seconds between the lightening flash and the thunderclap and allowing one second for the sound to travel 400 years, he could tell how close they were to the storm's center.  Until then Ernest, one of twele children of a potato farmer, had like Pierre Curie been considered slow.  Home-schooled, at eleven he could read but not write.  At twelve, he was lucky enough to find the first of a series of gifted teachers who inspired him to learn.  When he received his first full scholarship he told his mother, "I'e dug my last potato." [p. 80]

Ernest Rutherford went on to get the Nobel Prize in chemistry, though this bio doesn't mention that he  was slow to reading and writing.  A shame.


Why Is This Important?

Schooling used to be reserved for those who could afford to hire tutors for the kids.  As we moved to mass production schooling, we adopted the rationale of mass production factories.  Except in factories, the raw materials are relatively the same, whereas kids aren't.

But our schools have curricula that assume a kid's ability in all subjects will be at a certain level at a certain age.  If they aren't, the kid is considered a bit dim.  I've posted on the subject before.  Kids who do not have an academic bent, often learn fairly quickly that they are not as good as the others.  Instead of seeing where each kid is and then designing a curriculum for the kid, we design a curriculum for all kids a certain age and force the kid to conform or fail.

In doing so, we waste so many brains.  We cause kids to grow up feeling inferior and marginalized.  I'm sure a lot of home schooling parents and charter school supporters are people whose own school experiences weren't positive.

And this is one of those areas where the people on the left and the right agree there's a problem, but disagree on the solution.


UPDATED 1:30pm:  I probably should have said I'm not necessarily endorsing the book or the NYTimes review of it.  The best thing about the book is that it's short and gives some insight that I wouldn't otherwise have on Curie.  But I also wonder about how Goldsmith chose what to include and what not?  I'm sure it's not an accident that she put in the two references quoted above about kids who learned to read late, but were otherwise geniuses.  But the example of the thunderstorm in Obsessive Genius leaves out a part listed in the Rutherford link.  That he'd gotten a book on science in school that had an experiment about how to figure out the distance away of a cannon.  It's still clever to transfer that experiment to the thunder, but not as original as it might seem.  It's also at odds with the quote about him being kept out of school still when he was eleven.  There's not enough detail in the notes for me to understand how she determined what was the more accurate interpretation of the paper trail on Curie and others.

I'm adding this because there's yet another Feedburner problem.  This seems to be getting all too common. I add this for two reasons. For those who found this post another way, I'm sorry if you were fooled into coming back. And I'm also keeping track of how many times Feedburner takes more than an hour or two to kick in.] UPDATED 6:30pm:  The second try didn't catch Feedburner either. I found some unnecessary html code had gotten into the post (probably from cutting and pasting the quotes). Let's see if getting rid of that helps. But this one is a little trickier because there was a comment which gets lost when I delete the previous version of this post (so it's not up on the blog twice) and so I'm including the comment here at the end of the post.

UnknownWednesday, January 20, 2016 at 2:43:00 PM AKSTRemember when they would teach children to ask questions? Now they drug the kids who ask too many questions.

This time it got picked up within a minute.