I was thinking today that most political affiliation to parties and left/right wing, can be concisely encapsulated by looking at the top Fiscal Priority of an individual. This seems to be able to identify parties and lables that otherwise elude simple description, since they contain a variety of various other views. For example, the US Democratic Party favors government spending maximized towards social programs. The US Republican Party favors--at least since Reagan--government spending maximized towards defense. The US Libertarian Party favors decreased fiscal spending in all categories, and the US Green Party of course favors maximal environmental spending. I'm not quite up to date on the Israeli party zeitgeist, but this same methodology can be applied to them as they were when I left in 2000. People often complain of the blurring of distinction between parties and labels, as do I. Usually such an affiliation tells you little about the person identifying as something or other except who they will likely vote for. Now, however, you will be able to understand their fiscal priorities. Anecdotally (that is, as far as I can stretch this thought exercise without actual data and polls), this is the only policy preference that is tightly-coupled to labels. Bypass the screen of parties and cumbursome ideology: just ask people for what the top spending priority should be for the gov't, realistically*. * This means that although a Republican may want to spend the most on, say, Education, their prefered foreign policy would require heavy military spending, thus in reality, they would maximize defense spending. People are not always honest with themselves about these things, so you have to present this caveat explicitely to attempt to ellicit accurate replies.

I have been thinking about taking some programming language and making some sort graphical interface akin to StarLogo TNG but I may be approaching it too a posteriori. That is, I'm assuming a graphigal, i.e. spatial, representation of it would be necessarily good. But I think that follows from the principles of UI design: user interfaces are all about metaphors and similes, and the closer they are to experiences humans have evolved to handle well (like manipulating physical objects) the easier it is for humans to grok. I thought long and hard about using Python but its syntax and semantics just don't respond to spatialization very well. That's when I thought of using Haskell and it might be just perfect for it. When I was trying to model Python spatially I ended up with perverting it into some sort of data structure oriented language. That is, the graphical objects combine into bigger objects which represented data structures. Haskell on the other hand would let me turn just about every user defined function into a physical object, and most built-in functions into a physical idiom. Rather than mere construction of playing blocks, I will translate operators (such as cons) into actions the user performs in the design environment. More on this soon.

A moment of fancy on IRC led me to concoct the following:

((len([i for i in __globals__ if i is not god and type(i) is type(god)]) == 0) and (god.prophet == muhammad))) == True

This is the Shahadah represented in Python. Programming Language Wars are frequently religious, I thought why not take it a step further.

I've been using Brightkite for several weeks now, and I rather enjoy it. What is it? Well, it's a GPS-less location tracking service, of sorts. In its actual usage it is much like Twitter. You register your cellphone , and whenever you arrive at a new location  you can "check in". You just SMS your current address to the service, and it registers that. You can also search for businesses and pick the correct one. It levereges the Google Maps API for location degection based on the address you provide. Once you're checked in to a location, you can post notes, little messages in the same vein as twitter, which will be listed both globally, and within the location's stream. You can also send in pictures to a location. Of course, you can keep track of where your friends are and their various posts. There is some rudimentary permissions control. There are three groups: Public, Friends, Trusted Friends; and you can decide which can see your exact location, or only the city you checked in, and which can see the notes you post. The system notifies you of people checked in nearby, if you so wish, within a radius you specify. My favourite feature of the whole thing is its replication to Twitter. That is, any post you make to Brightkite also appear in twitter, with a little http://bkite.com/xxxx URL appended, which when clicked shows your location on a map. As I was checking in at my work place I had an idea. So I took a screenshot of their check-in button (I hope they will forgive me that transgression). Now I can display it on some site, and garnish it with a check-in link to whatever location is related to that site. For example, on a conference page, you can just click that button to indicate you have arrived, and everyone at the conference on Brightkite will be notified. Here's an example of it checking you in at MIT (requires Brightkite account): Cool, eh? Brightkite brings location-aware augmented reality one step closer for those without convenient GPS. Want an invite? I've got some left. Leave a comment somehow containing your email (if I don't know it), and if I like you enough, I'll send you one!

Taxes levied always lead to a deadweight loss. That is, unless you are taxing an inelastic good or activity. Otherwise, there can be no revenue. So far so good. However, one should consider why some goods and activities are inelastic. This category tends to includes necessities; things that are relatively important to your survival and quality of life. So, disregarding other arguments on taxes, the more effective a tax is the more coercive action is applied against an individual's survival needs. This doesn't strike me as an ethically justifiable action. Of course, one might take the position that the revenue gained will be redistributed in such a way as to maximize good. Nevertheless, there remains the ethical issue of providing services funded by revenue derived from attacking an individual's unrelated survival needs—a government can't tax healthcare if it provides it. Services provided by governments are unarguably needed. But there must be more morally defensible ways of funding them.