A stamp tax for subversives

It seems that subversive organizations in South Carolina are now required to register with the Secretary of State. That's very forward thinking of them, we do need to keep track of our subversives in case they attempt to actually subvert the government instead of just talking about it.

Ahem.

This is a law in the same vein as laws requiring illegal pharmaceutical distributors to pay a stamp tax on the drugs they're selling. Does it raise any revenue? Some, from stamp-collectors. Does it enhance jail time for drug offenders? You betcha. And that's the point.

This case is a bit different, though. Now you can be charged with being an organizer of a 'subversive organization' and not paying the registration fee. Just the thing for police to reach for when raiding an office and not finding anything else to charge you with. What's the penalty?

Any organization or person who violates any of the provisions of this chapter shall, upon conviction thereof, be punished by a fine of not more than twenty-five thousand dollars or imprisonment for not more than ten years, or by both fine and imprisonment.

So if the police are really mad at you and haven't found anything else to throw at you, you could be subjected to a 10 year prison sentence. Wouldn't that be nice?

This is our oppression, let me show you it.

Sex-offender ghettos and community

There was a story teaser on NPR this morning that sounded a lot like some stories I've heard locally. A rooming house had ended up housing a lot of sex-offenders for the simple fact that the land-lord wasn't willing to run them out, and maybe even had some compassion for this oppressed class of citizens. This is not the first time I'd heard of such rooming establishments, or even neighborhoods.

The parallels between sex offenders and previous deviants struck me this morning. People who are sex-offenders are subject to an increasing array of laws governing where they can stand; no less than X feet from a school, Y feet from a house with children, Z feet from a child oriented business. Prior sexual deviants have included homosexuals, and laws were (are) on the books governing what they can do and where they can do it. The gay man of 1950's America and the court convicted sex-offender in 2000's America share one thing, they're both subject to an overwhelming societal shame onus.

There is an increasing amount of literature describing the gay male culture of the 1950's and how it was impacted, directed, or otherwise dictated by society's rules and the shame attached to being identified as homosexual. One common thread is that once you get several members of a shamed class living near each other, they start forming a group and that group is more resilient in the face of societal shame than the individuals are. The other thread is that such groups tend to be very inward facing, and spend quite a bit of effort devising ways to not stand out and yet be identifiable to other members.

In the modern Internet-connected era the formation of a group is a lot easier. Friends on the Internet can help you cope with the daily stressors of life, and they don't even have to live in the same state to do that. On the other hand, the economic challenges facing someone with felonies on their record and a sex-offender classification mean that Internet access is far from a given and a physically close community is therefore much more important. In the city I live in, there are several known sex-offenders living in tents in green-spaces for the simple fact that they can't live any other way. And these tents have moved closer to each other over the past couple years.

There are finally enough designated sex-offenders out there that they can start forming communities, rather than living isolated existences in a vastly disapproving populace. I believe we are seeing the beginnings of mutual-support community formation in the ranks of designated sex-offenders. What those communities look like, we can't know. And probably won't know for many years to come. Internet based communities are easier to research, but finding out what goes on between fellow members of a tent community is much harder to discern.

This tribe formation is an unintended and yet entirely predictable consequence of the measures put in place to pressure these people to not reoffend. The fact that they're entirely counter to society's goals, well, the point. It is a classic defensive mechanism, and it makes it harder to pressure such individuals. As with previous deviants, breaking up these communities once they're identified is part of the pressure society applies. But they'll just reform in a different way later on, the very fact of the pressure and the population size guarantee it.

Voting by mail

I've voted by mail the last couple of election cycles, which has been long enough to see some changes to how campaigns handle that. The 2004 presidential election was the first real push for absentee voting among certain populations. Since then, many states have opened up their absentee processes which made 2008 the top year for such voting. Then states like Oregon, which has been vote-by-mail for years, and Washington, which changed its laws to allow vote-by-mail and most counties have done so, have the entire process by mail.

Campaigns and parties like this idea. A lot. A person who casts their legally binding vote on October 15th, can't take it back (depending on laws) if their candidate gets caught, nude, in a swimming pool with nude underage girls on the 29th. This helps blunt the effects of an October Surprise. And as far as campaigns are concerned, that's nothing but a good thing.

People in absentee-ballot states frequently have the ability to cast a vote in-person that will trump their filed absentee ballot. These are voters for whom an October Surprise is still very much a real concern. Vote-by-mail states don't have this provision, so opposition candidates plotting an October Surprise have to get it out right before the ballots get mailed rather than 5 days before the election.

States like VBM as its cheaper by quite a lot. Polling places don't have to be rented. Election Volunteers don't have to be obtained for the 13+ hours each polling place is open. Ballots can be counted in a few locations rather than in many, which makes deploying new ballot technologies a lot cheaper.

The down side is the requirement to have mail service, and a $0.44 stamp. Opponents of vote-by-mail call this a poll tax. This is why Washington state law requires the presence of drop-boxes for people to drop off their ballots without a stamp.

Things are beginning to change out there. This election saw a very significant increase of direct-mail pieces timed to arrive in my mailbox the same day I got my ballot. This is absolutely needed, since there is a certain large percentage of people out there who vote as soon as the ballot arrives. Conversely, this has not yet changed the TV ad-battles leading up to today's election. Last night one ad in three was a paid political of some kind, which is right up there with car ads. This election is not a major one, so I haven't been getting any robo-calls and therefore can't judge how that's changed.

How will this change in the future? Well, we're already seeing parties and campaigns actively whipping early voters to vote, and that will only increase. I suspect that the prime-time for TV ads will continue to be the week before the election, but the emphasis on the Monday-night before election-day will wane. The consequence of the early voters voting when they do is that the 'decideds' pull themselves out of the race, leaving the undecideds as the people who haven't voted in the last days of the campaign. Voter ID will become even more important as parties track likely early voters in order to exclude them from the last week direct-mail/robo-call blitz, and thus allow them to focus on the voters that still need persuading. I fully expect a TV ad blitz on the three days bracketing ballot-day, just to catch the people who vote when they get the ballot.

All in all, vote-by-mail is probably more expensive for the campaigns because it lengthens the 'final mile' by four weeks in some cases. That said, we're still early enough in the learning process that we just don't know all the ways this will affect things. Political Action Committees were a campaign finance reform in the 1970's, yet these days they're the reviled 'special interests.' These things change.

When GPS and auto-insurance collide

Ars Technica had a nice piece about some California legislation that will soon require 100% of auto insurance policies to be of the, "pay as you drive," sort where your rate varies depends on miles driven. The problem is how do the insurance companies track this. There are two methods: the driver reports the miles driven (rife with fraud), or use a tracking device of some kind (rife with privacy problems). You can guess which way the EFF desires, and which way the insurance companies desire.

As it happens, I touched briefly on this back in October 2007:

The first area I predict to really come into play will be from insurance companies. Actuaries would LOVE the detailed information provided by a GPS location log and road data. Cross reference the two and you have all sorts of goodies:

• What percentage of the time does the driver exceed the posted speed-limits?
• How often is the car parked in high vehicular crime areas?
• How many miles per day/week/month/year does the car get driven?
• When the car gets driven outside of 'normal', such as driving to Grandma's.

As it happens, this is exactly what the EFF is worried about. All of these have an effect on the risk environment of a particular vehicle, and that should have a corresponding effect on the insurance rate. On the other hand, it does give a precise location trail of everywhere that vehicle goes, something that police and divorce-courts would be very interested in. The EFF wants legislation in place to restrict data collected to just miles driven.

Indeed, from the EFF link:

There is real danger that this information would not only be used to ascertain the political or associational affiliations of drivers, but also to charge more if you drive and park in neighborhoods with high vehicle theft and crime rates, to impose higher premiums for people who drive at night or to link your health insurance rates with location data that reveals your lunchtime trips to McDonald's.

Seeing that text about parking in dodgy neighborhoods is a bit spooky for me when I look back at my 2007 post, but it is a very valid concern.

As I've mentioned before (July 2004) Big Brother, Inc. is more of a concern than BigBrother.gov in the US. This is a classic example of that. The insurance industry already had these pay-as-you-drive policies on the books, and it was the State of California that set a must-carry bar for these without defining what the tracking mechanism was.

This will be an interesting debate to follow!

Newsweek hunts for a new audience

It has become very, very clear that Newsweek is hunting up a younger audience. A couple of issues ago they came out with a new format. A bit lighter on content, another trend in print media these days, but more attractively laid out.

And in last week's issue, they had a guest editor. Their first that I can remember. Steven Colbert. The comedian/anchor.

Nothing says young and hip like snarky.

Happily, the Colbert bits were easy to ignore. Also, I'm not the audience they're trying to attract. I've been reading this news magazine since at least the 1980's, and haven't dropped it in this era of news aggregators. When it comes to news consumption, I'm about 10 years older than my age would suggest. I haven't watched network news in years, but I still get a fair amount of news from dead trees. I'm the audience they're trying to keep not the one they're trying to attract.

Personally, I find the weekly news-magazine convenient. I suffer from short-attention span when in front of a computer, so long articles don't get read. Put a magazine in my hand, and I'll read whole articles in a sitting. Part of this is conditioning, but it features in how I consume news. If I'm going for in-depth reportage, I'm far more likely to read it closer in dead-tree format.

I realize that some change needs to happen to keep these magazines afloat. I can live with the new format, with its slightly larger line-spacing and colorful article headers. Even the occasional 'guest editor' since they're easy to ignore. This is change.