Under Construction
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A work in progress.
This Web Site is still under construction.
There is still much more to come.
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There are many other ideas that I have for making our future path better. As time permits, I will write these ideas down and then publishing them to this web site. In the mean time, I will introduce a few of them here.
There are many situations today in which people need to deal with people that they do not know. This is particularly true in the business world, but it is also true in our personal lives. With identity theft, false documents and the impersonal nature of today’s world, it is often too easy for someone to steal from us, to ruin our good name or to do worse things to us. The financial cost alone is staggering and lowers everyone’s standard of living, except maybe for some criminals.
There needs to be a way where a business or person can easily and quickly confirm someone’s identity. For instance, if someone wants to buy something with a credit card then they should be required to prove who they are, so that the store, the credit card company and all of us are not saddled with the losses from stolen credit cards and identities.
We live in an information age where those who control the information have the power. Humans have always had a quest for knowledge, which has lead to many advances. The value of and the quest for information has now lead to information overload. Nevertheless, people still crave information, especially when people or the government tries to keep it secret. In fact, one of the tenets of democracy lies in the transparency of our government and the freedom of information.
If people know that whatever they do will eventually be made public can help to keep them from doing bad things, but there still is a question of timing. If some information is released too soon, it could cause a great deal of harm to our nation, our businesses or our citizens. For instance, releasing the names or location of our spies could endanger their lives and our nation’s security. Certain business deals could fall apart if they were revealed too soon. The lives of witnesses could be endangered if their identity was made public. Someone’s identity could be stolen if their social security number and other information could be retrieved by criminals.
Although all information should be available eventually, limits are needed as to when and to whom it is released. The idea is to have independent oversight of information. When someone wants access to information, they should be required to prove who they are, state why they need the information and agree not to share the information with anyone until the information is released for public consumption. The people providing independent oversight would only access the information when it was requested, would determine whether or not anyone could see it, and then determine whether the requester had a valid reason for the information and could be trusted with it.
The other side of this freedom of information is the information about who requests and gets access to information. For instance, court records may be public records, but people should not be able to just go and browse the information. People should be required to have a valid reason for looking at the records. In addition, the fact that a given person requested to or did look at the records should become part of the record and that information should be available to others.
There is a lot of talk about how television violence encourages violence. I believe that this may be true for some people, but I think there is much more to the story. When we watch television we are generally observers who cannot participate in what is happening on the screen and many of us might even be called couch potatoes. For most of us, we are born with an instinct that tells us to participate in what is going on around us. For some people, this may mean acting out the violence they see on television. For the rest of us, we learn that we cannot get involved.
For instance, when someone on the screen appears to be in danger, our first instincts may have told us to save them, but since we were powerless to help, we soon learned to do nothing. Then, when we see someone in danger in the real world, we may want to help, but television viewing has trained us to do nothing.
By passively watching television, we are also vulnerable to believing whatever we see and hear. Of course, this can leave us susceptible to the hype of commercials, which may encourage us to spend our hard earned money on things that we really do not need. It can also lead some people to believe that the characters played by actors are real and to make them believe that they actually know them.
At an early age, everyone needs to learn that what is on television is not always real and that they need to actively analyze and evaluate what they watch. By promoting critical thinking, people will be better able to distinguish between the fantasies on television and what is real. For instance, one thing that I like to do with commercials is to take them apart to analyze who is promoting the product, whether there is any valuable information about the product and what they actually seem to be selling. Often, the person promoting the product seems to be acting like an idiot or fool, no important information about the product is given and the selling point often seems to be that those who buy the product can expect to be rewarded with sex.
There are a whole slew of problems with the way we handle marriage. Through our government, we dictate who and when people can marry and who and when they can divorce. We do need to have some standards in place to protect us and our children in our relationships, but we should have greater freedoms to define what our relationships are and how long they last. For the most part, how people decide to handle their relationships should be up to the people involved, and the government should not reward nor penalize us for our decisions.
In any relationship, all parties involved must be committed to the relationship. Whether we call it marriage or something else, these personal relationships should be defined as private contracts between the individuals involved. This should be an at-will contract, so that anyone involved would be able to break the contract at any time. We may need to have a short notice period to give everyone time to prepare, but nothing like the year that currently exists in some states. We also should not require that all parties must agree to the divorce, since we do not want to give someone the power to hold everyone in the relationship hostage.
Of course, we should set some default rules that would govern the financial aspects of these relationships when not otherwise spelled out in the agreement. For instance, I think that people should not completely merge their assets the second they get married. That should only occur over an extended period of time, so as to discourage gold diggers and gigolos. We also want to change our Income tax laws so that marriage does not penalize some couples.
The law should also be more concerned with who a child’s parents are and less about who is married. We want people to take responsibility for the lives they bring into the world irrespective of whether or not they are married.
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