Published Jul 29, 2003

It must be worthless bastard season, because politicians are again screwing up our futures.

In California, the legislature just passed a budget that is:

  • Way, way late — well past the beginning of the fiscal year the budget is for
  • Fails to close a massive deficit
  • Resorts to borrowing to cover the deficit
  • Ensures that we have a budget crisis next year by not dealing with the deficit
  • Ruins the state’s credit rating (we now have worse credit than Alabama or Mississippi), making borrowing more expensive and costing us money down the line

Why did this happen? Well, it looks to me like nobody in Sacramento has the guts to compromise and work for what’s best for the state. Everybody’s too busy scoring a few points with the partisan crowd that elects them. Everybody’s gonna get term limited out. There’s no incentive to cooperate, and, without such an incentive, our elected representatives would apparently rather take the relatively non-risky path of playing to the choir than potentially fix our state’s big problems by working together and gaining wide acclaim.

So throw the bastards out unless they’re willing to do good for our state.

And then, even when they do stupid things, politicians are still too much weasels to stick by their mistake. Apparently the Pentagon decided to start a Web site at which people could invest in futures on terror attacks. Investors essentially bet on where and when terrorist attacks take place. Anybody can play. Sounds absurd, right?

Actually, it’s not. In the 60s, the Navy invented this method of statistical prediction called Monte Carlo Analysis, which assigns values to variables of unknown value by letting people guess as to said value. Basically, it’s based on the concept that, while intuition may be non-quantifiable, people’s predictions are based on unspoken knowledge and said knowledge is of value. Thus, the guessed values will normally distributed about the actual value of the variable.

This futures market is actually a spectacular way to gain valuable intelligence from previously unknown sources. This intelligence, while it may not be as quantifiable as that from other sources, provides useful “best guess” values and is after the example of Monte Carlo Analysis.

Allowing news of this futures market to get out was certainly an error; a great deal of effort needed to be expended to sell the concept so that people could appreciate it wasn’t just a morbid game. But, once the new was out and uncontrolled, well, either the idea was a good one or not. If it wasn’t good, they shouldn’t’ve done it in the first place. If it was, they should stick by it. Instead, politicians were so scared of looking bad that they backed down from a useful source of intelligence.

If politicians can’t stick up for unpopular ideas that are good for our national security, well, let’s throw the bastards out.