2016 May

2016 May 1

Historic ivory burn covers the sky in smoke and ash

This ivory should not be burned, but should be sold by the government, preferably by the agency responsible for enforcing this ban on tusk harvesting, or if corruption would be too big a problem, then these sales should be undertaken by some other, higher environmental protection organization of the environment.

2016 May 2

Gary Tyler: Louisiana Prisoner Walks Free After 41 Years of ‘Unconstitutional Life Sentence’

This person should have received a payment equivalent to the minimum wage for every hour of every day that he spent in custody, from the time of his arrest to the time of his release. Everyone who participated in this injustice should be prosecuted, with no statute of limitations.

2016 May 3

Honduras: 6th Arrest in Killing of Environmental Activist Berta Caceres

Everyone found guilty of this murder should be given the death penalty, but first should be required to compensate for all actual losses to any dependents for the next several years until these dependents have reached the age of majority, plus a fine for the murder itself, as well as a significant punitive multiple for killing a significant member of the community.

2016 May 4

Medical errors now 3rd leading cause of death in U.S., study suggests

Medical malpractice needs to be documented and punished effectively so that both the incentives to perform better and troubleshooting problem trends can be identified earlier.

2016 May 5

U.S. Army Captain Is Suing Obama Over Legality Of The War Against ISIS

Anyone should be allowed to sue anyone. However, the loser would need to pay the defendants bills, up to a certain amount.

2016 May 6

Canada Wildfires are ‘Like An Apocalyptic Horror,’ Says One Evacuee

Building in fire danger zones should be required to fireproof their structures or face far higher insurance premiums.

2016 May 7

When A Young Child Accidentally Shoots Herself, Who’s Responsible?

The owners of guns need to keep them locked and out of reach of children. So, yes, the person who owns the gun should be responsible for any illegal use of that gun.

2016 May 8

Afghanistan fuel tanker crash kills 73 in Ghazni province

So many things need to be fixed in order to make accidents like this less likely, but the most important thing, as it is with almost everything, is to have a better educated public. People who take the time to learn about how the world works and who are taught to care about other people would be far better stewards of both people and property.

2016 May 9

‘El Chapo’ transferred to prison in Juarez, near U.S.

It’s frustrating to have individual people live long enough without being captured to rack up a lot of crimes that it becomes impractical or even impossible to have them pay for such crimes within their lifetimes. We need to develop and maintain sufficiently efficient surveillance systems everywhere so that criminals can be captured far sooner during their careers. The single best way to accomplish this may be to institute a system of public crowd-sourced policing and public informant practices.

2016 May 10

As Philippines’ likely president, Duterte vows to be ‘dictator’ against evil

The evolution of a degradation of social stability and justice naturally leads to counter reactions that are usually disproportional to the problem. Also, such changes in leadership and policy is usually associated with very large negative spillover effects due directly to the bluntness of the instruments and policies used to impose such changes. This is why everybody needs a society governed by basic policy principles. These are some of the more important principles by which societies should be governed.

2016 May 11

Barack Obama to visit Hiroshima on Japan and Vietnam trip

The US should never apologize for the dropping of the bombs on Japan, but we should obviously be very sorry for the pain and suffering it has caused, as we should be very sorry for the pain and suffering for all acts of war. These nuclear weapons were not significantly more destructive or indiscriminate than other more conventional acts of war at the time. Yes, one device was able to cause a lot more destruction than before, but it was not a fundamental change in the level of destruction compared to a conventional campaign.

2016 May 12

Office Depot and Staples Call Off Merger After Judge Blocks It

The government should not get involved in deciding whether or not any two companies should or should not merge. The government should only be responsible for designing the proper rules and regulations to adequately guide and manage all economic activities. Basically, the most significant of these policies for the purpose of managing mergers is the construction of a tax based on the market share of a company. The larger the market share, the larger the tax. So when two companies want to merge, they will naturally consider the ramification of the tax rate they will be exposed to as a combined company.

2016 May 13

NASA Finds 1,284 Alien Planets, Biggest Haul Yet, with Kepler Space Telescope

The seemingly irrational interest in finding locations in space capable of supporting life is leading too much to overly optimistic discussions of the possibility of finding advanced life on some foreign planets. This reflects the cumulative ignorance of the public (and many researchers) who seem not to be able to synthesize data across the various scientific disciplines. The number of characteristics for a physical planet (or other location) to have in order to support any kind of life is so small that anyone could say with a fair amount of certainly, that such a place does not exist. However, the number of characteristics required for the support of advanced life is orders of magnitude greater. In other words, only people ignorant of the physics are the ones who think that there is a reasonable chance of finding life, but especially advanced life outside of Earth.

2016 May 14

Gun research faces roadblocks and a dearth of data

There needs to be a comprehensive collection and organization of statistical data information for virtually every significant data point that is generated anywhere. This way, data can be mined to seek correlations between any variables to find possibly significant relationships and better guide policy making.

2016 May 15

‘Break Free’ Climate Change Protests Across the US Result in Arrests

It is important to allow protesters to protest in an effective way, namely to allow them to disrupt normal activities to make their point. They should not be allowed to damage property, of course, but merely occupying roads or buildings, should not constitute any severe legal charge. Of course, the courts would be the final arbiter of what constitutes an activity that crosses the line into a more severe legal infraction.

2016 May 16

Shell oil flow line leaks nearly 90,000 gallons into Gulf of Mexico

Shell should be required to pay for to both clean up this oil leak and a fine for every barrel estimated to have leaked, perhaps somewhere around $100 per barrel. So this fine would amount to nearly $9 million.

2016 May 17

Supreme Court rules against Obama in contraception case

If employers would just pay directly only with wages and not provide any benefits this case would not have risen to the Supreme Court, and all this time would not have been wasted. This case was brought to the court by two companies who objected to being required to provide health insurance which included contraceptive coverage to its employees.

2016 May 18

Millions more Americans to be eligible for overtime pay

These illogical rules in which overtime is required for some but others are exempt is very frustrating. These rules should be simplified so that illogical occurrences like these are not possible. The best way to simplify these rules is to just require these overtime regulations to apply to everyone. So much time could be saved if policies are designed correctly from the beginning.

2016 May 19

Donald Trump meets Republican foreign policy guru Henry Kissinger

The development of our society is suffering a setback when a leading political candidate is consulting a previous political figure who has so blatantly engaged in covert political operations that caused so much deception and pain and suffering around the world. Some of the ways I propose to simplify and streamline policymaking may also make it harder for the ignorance of policymakers to be hidden by emphasizing their support for the more popular parts of various bills.

2016 May 20

France to extend state of emergency for six months

The irrational reaction that many governments have regarding terrorist attack by declaring state of emergencies and taking other actions that severely curtail civil liberties, highlight the idea that the perception of risk can be severely skewed to the point of provable misdirection of resources away from higher risk activities, like common crime.

2016 May 21

Islamic State Calls for Intensified Attacks Against West, Doesn’t Claim EgyptAir Crash

The best, long term way to fight the scourge of terrorism is to educate people, empower women, and create fair economic environments to all people, worldwide.

2016 May 22

Should Cellphones Have Warning Labels?

A high resolution health statistic database combined with an even larger standardized statistical database of virtually all kinds of measurable data would make possible the mining of all this data to find correlations between several variables and find answers to so many questions that so many people have today.

2016 May 23

“March Against Monsanto” Brings Protesters to Streets in 400 Cities

The idea of a huge multinational company making a product (glyphosate) that is used worldwide and causes so much environmental change and damage, is just too much for a significantly large portion of the population. This protest (and many others) could have been avoided (or at least minimized) by having a market share tax and an environmental pollution tax.

2016 May 24

Obama praises ‘strengthening ties’ between US and Vietnam during landmark visit

Strengthened ties are very important for the maintenance of peace because trade creates a degree of dependence with each other. However, trade needs to be fair, and charging a tariff of 10% on everything crossing an international border is a good start. Of course, countries that are really poor should be entitled to a decades-long one-way beneficial trade of free trade for products exiting the poor country, while keeping tariffs for things entering the poor country.

2016 May 25

Battles on the streets and petrol pumps running dry: France plunged into chaos by protests over labour laws just weeks before the Euros

People and societies can become very spoiled and expect companies to provide all kinds of things, including, apparently, the right to work for them even if the company doesn’t want them to work for them. Of course, safeguards need to be put in place so that employers cannot unreasonable exploit employees, but allowing employers the decision of who to hire and fire is a paramount right for them, again, within reason. And reason is the gray area that people find it hard to agree on. That is why a principles-based governing policy is so important to keep everyone’s focus on the issues which can be hung and references from a solid foundation of principles.

2016 May 26

U.N. Security Council lifts sanctions, arms embargo on Liberia

If the world had a functional international military organization, no country should be allowed to sell any significant military scale arms to any other country. It would ideally be the international military organization’s function to provide security across all international country borders.

2016 May 27

Bill would expand FBI’s warrantless access to online records, senators warn

Governments should be allowed to conduct warrant-less searches on whatever medium it chooses…only if it has been proven to be a trustworthy agency. For agencies with less than a near perfect record, they would be allowed warrant-less searches for a smaller universe of potential reasons, and with more oversight/transparency.

2016 May 28

Almost every news story about exoplanets has a perspective that includes the assessment for prospects of potential life habitability. It is frustrating to continually see this wasted time, effort and hope being spent while we already know that virtually all planets will not possibly be able to sustain life (especially any form of marginally advanced life) because of the huge number of characteristics that we know for a fact that must exist to within various usually very narrow ranges in order for such life to exist. This tendency look for life and explore is naturally a human one, but at some point we need to face the reality of the facts before us. The concern of everyone should be, not to zero out funding for exoplanet searches (including possible habitable habitats), but to report such discoveries in a way that puts everyone’s expectation down to a more realistic realm. Furthermore, manned space flight programs intended to go beyond the Moon should be cut back dramatically, if not completely, because such endeavors are a waste of money. For the same amount of money, robotic missions can do about 10 times more than manned missions would be able to do.

Overall, more funding should go towards the sciences that are losing information with every second that goes by. Archaeology, history, paleontology, are just some of the sciences that are having information in their respective fields being irretrievably lost as a result of human (and to a lesser extent) human disturbances. Astronomy is one of the natural sciences whose basic store of raw data is perhaps least impacted by a human activities, thus astronomy will ultimately suffer the least as a result of delayed discoveries due to reduced funding.

2016 May 29

Vince Foster’s Sister Slams Trump for Reviving 1990s Conspiracy Theories

The appeal and persistence of conspiracy theories could at least be curbed a bit by imposing fines on any propagator of any factually false information. The way to do that would be for the government to impose a fine on anyone who can be shown to have purposely disseminated any factually false fact. The court and juries, if necessary, would be the final arbiter of whether a factually false fact was disseminated.

2016 May 30

Family of driver killed in US strike on Taliban leader file criminal case

Unfortunately, the driver was very unlucky, but his death was justified because he aided a high value target, albeit, unwittingly. Ultimately, the cause precipitating his death was the fact that his passenger misrepresented himself. So it should have been his passenger (who is now dead) and/or the people who caused him (specifically the car he was travelling in) to become a target (namely, other Taliban people who caused the US to take interest in and target their organization). Of course, things could get convoluted, and the US should strive to use more individually targeted, surgical strikes (although this one was pretty surgical, being limited to one car), but ultimately, this Taliban leader need to be killed, and this was a good opportunity to do it. Given our lack of even more individualized attack methods, this was our best instrument. Yes, there should be some incentive for the US to continue to create more individualized weapons to use in these types of situations, and without any financial or other significant penalties it is hard to see how such behavior is likely to change at an acceptable rate. But in the final analysis, the US was not liable for the taxi driver’s death, since he was carrying the leader of the Taliban. Perhaps the institution of a weapons environmental tax would be at least one small way to encourage smaller, more individualized scale actions.

2016 May 31

Death toll in Texas flooding reaches six

Although a revised dam policy could have lessened the severity of at least some of the flooding around the nation mentioned in this story, it would not be a panacea. However, many more dams located within the main streams (but also secondary streams and other tributaries) should be managed and/or built and maintained in an empty condition so that when flooding rains occur, these dams would be able to utilize their entire reservoir capacity to minimize the threat of damaging downstream flooding.