$4 at peak.

For a ride that’s something like 4 miles long. They claim that in the scenarios they studied, people won’t divert to the surface streets in most cases during peak hours because the tunnel will be the least congested option. But I don’t know, $4 is a lot. I grew up right next to the Dulles Access Road (now the Greenway) and the alternative always had terrible traffic but we still never took the toll road.

They better be sure about those diversion numbers because we’re not going to have the money to provide improved transit or surface road improvements. Everything that’s left after the 520 bridge is getting sunk into this tunnel, down into the mudflats. Whatever people are saying they’re willing to fund besides these projects is going to disappear when the cost overruns start. That’s my prediction.

 A mere shift of power from Republicans to Democrats would not, in itself, be enough to give us sensible health care reform. While Democrats would have written a less perverse drug bill, it’s not clear that they are ready to embrace a single-payer system. Even liberal economists and scholars at progressive think tanks tend to shy away from proposing a straightforward system of national health insurance. Instead, they propose fairly complex compromise plans. Typically, such plans try to achieve universal coverage by requiring everyone to buy health insurance, the way everyone is forced to buy car insurance, and deal with those who can’t afford to purchase insurance through a system of subsidies

Amazing right? I didn’t see it coming but apparently it was easy to do so.

As an engineer, what we’re ending up with in this health care reform movement is offensive. It doesn’t make much of an effort to attack the root causes of our problems, preferring to just apply hacks and patches around the edges and it’s horribly complex.

The article does a good job of laying out the advantages of single payer health insurance. The problems that have led us to where we are today are inherent in private health care like we have. Economically there are too many incentives for people not to buy insurance and too many incentives for the insurance companies to deny care whenever they can. Plus the price of health care overall gets driven up because of the inefficiencies caused by splitting the country into thousands of insurance pools.

Single payer solves these economic issues neatly. The government provides the health insurance, you pay for it through your taxes.

It’s not like you don’t already pay for it anyway. If you have insurance privately you’re paying 4-500 bucks a month if you’re my age. If you get it through your work, it’s part of your salary. If you don’t have insurance you’re currently not paying in money but you’re biting your nails hoping you don’t get hurt (or you should be). We’re paying with our communities when our current health system puts people on the street. Under Obamacare you’re going to be paying in tax dollars for subsidies. Why don’t we just pay for it all through our taxes? You go the doctor, you walk out without owing anything. It’ll be simpler, it should be cheaper and everyone is covered.

It drives me nuts that no one in congress is pushing this as a serious proposal. Too big an idea? Too much change? Our problems are huge aren’t they? Does anyone really think that lame half measures are going to do anything to make our basic situation any better? I don’t think it’s even going to be enough to keep the Democrats in power. American political memory is too short for the Democrats to ride the fact that they’re not Republicans for very long at all. They’re going to have to actually accomplish something here.

Anyway, this article regarding the inanity of TSA screening procedures caught my eye this last week. It came out before all the Christmas excitement, which only helps to underline its message. I think Patrick is spot on that we’re pointlessly obsessed with the tactics that worked in September 2001, which were never going to work again after that morning and are generally showing little common sense in our quest for airline security.

Some jackasses hijack three planes with box cutters and now we’re not allowed to have butter knives on planes. Some jackass lights his explosive filled shoe during a flight and now we all have to take our shoes off. Some jackass lights his leg on fire and now what do we get?  Under clothes body scanning (Click through to the picture, the machines now are higher resolution than that). Thanks to what happened over the holidays we’re going to start seeing these machines in a lot more airports. My expectation is that there’s going to be very little fuss about it either. People give up their privacy so easily. Who gets to man the underclothes scanning machine? What kind of qualifications is that job going to entail? And what’s next? I think I’ll just take the train.

To my software engineer way of seeing the world,  it feels like we’re just putting patch after patch on symptoms without making much of an effort to address root causes. We’re taking aspirin to treat a brain tumor. The Christmas bombers dad was alarmed enough by his behavior that he notified US officials, and he was already in a federal terrorist suspect database, and yet this guy managed to get on a plane with a bomb strapped to his leg flying under his own name. And the problem here is that we’re not strip searching every passenger?

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have airport security. What I’m saying is that we should have meaningful airport security.

Here’s another great article by Christopher Hitchens in this same vein.

Update: I just found another good article on this subject from Bruce Schneier who is a heavy hitter in the computer security realm.  As Mr Schneier writes, “Our current response to terrorism is a form of “magical thinking.” It relies on the idea that we can somehow make ourselves safer by protecting against what the terrorists happened to do last time.”

Several nights ago I heard a report on the BBC world service about the plight of Yemenis imprisoned in Guantanemo. Yemen has apparently been pushing for the release of its citizens for several years now. The BBC was reporting that there were concerns (don’t remember who they were attributed to) that many of the prisoners would go directly into the ranks of Al Queda. Further, the concern was that even though many of the prisoners had done nothing wrong, they had been radicalized by their years in military prison and would now be willing to fight against the United States. Was it a good idea, the report wondered, for the US to release these prisoners, knowing that there was a good chance they’ll end up taking up arms against us?

Well? So what? Can these men be charged with a crime? Have they been given a fair trial and sentenced to be held? No? Well, are they prisoners of war per the Geneva Conventions? No? Then how are we legally or morally justified in keeping these men imprisoned? The only morally defensible position is that these men must be released.

Say these were American citizens, not caught up in the Global War on Terror, being held in a cell somewhere in the states, without trial, for nearly a decade. Is that justifiable? What if you kept them there so long that they grew to resent the police officers that had locked them up, so much so that they seemed to be a threat to those officers. Could you keep them locked up then? The answer is no, you couldn’t. No matter what kind of threat you consider them they can’t be held without trial. Those are the standards of justice that have been passed down to us by our forefathers. These rules are an essential part of our freedom, no one can be denied their freedoms without the fair application of rules that are designed to ensure, as best as we can humanly ensure, that we´re not locking up an innocent.

Like Abe said, we are dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Endowed by their creator and not the American government, with inalienable rights. Not all Americans, all men. To apply different standards of justice to non-American citizens is to trade short lasting security for our essential freedoms, our essential character. Applying different justice to non-Americans is the same as applying different standards of justice to blacks and whites, or rich and poor.

Why are we dedicated to this proposition? Because we were conceived in liberty. Among our founding fathers were men whose thinking was steeped in the best of enlightenment political thought, men who gave serious rational thought to what it meant to be free and how to structure society so that all men, regardless of who they were or where they came from could be free. Yes, that´s very romanticized but that idea is what, in my opinion, makes America exceptional. Not a kickass military and not our gold, all of which can and will pass. What makes us special is that we´re the great social experiment, the child of the height of western culture.

I’m encouraged that Obama appears to want to set these prisoners free but I really want him to articulate to us and to the world why we have to do it. I want him to make a clear break from our behavior of the past. The country needs a history lesson and a reality check. It’s not enough to tell the world that we value freedom, peace and justice. We have to show them.