Lying Isn't Illegal

Hewlett Packard (HP) is in the news right now. They hired investigators who used the technique of "pretexting" to obtain the telephone records of reporters in an effort to discover who it was that leaked information about HP's private discussions. In pretexting, an investigator goes to a company - in this case, a phone company - and identifies themself as someone that they want private information for. For example, I go to Verizon and say that I'm you. Verizon believes me because I have your social security number and other private information that is rather easy to obtain. Now that Verizon believes me, I can ask them to send me a copy of my phone record. That's called "pretexting".

It's also called "lying". And it's not always illegal. The ninth commandment tell us that it is a sin to lie. A sin is something that has a negative consequence for the individuals involved. As a result, it has a negative consequence for their community. Last I heard, that's what laws were about: disallowing things that were damaging to the community.

I suggest that we put "lying" on the books as an illegal act. The penalty is commensurate with the impact of the lie. If I tell you that I'm a lawyer at a party and I'm not, I should be held liable and get smacked upside the head. If I tell you that I'm a lawyer and I'm not, and I offer you legal advice, I should be held liable and fined and tazered for emphasis (I'm a big fan of punishment including something physical). If I'm an advertiser and I say that my product is the finest product in the world, I better be able to prove it or else I'm lying, and I should again be penalized for my lie.

Things get more ticklish if we start saying that lying is sometimes good. We believe that when we are faced with telling a truth that will produce terrible repercussions versus telling a lie which will smoothly get past an unpleasant situation. It's easier to come up with a story for our parents than to confess to having done something seriously wrong. Unfortunately, we let ourselves get into those predicaments because we're willing to lie in the first place. We have learned that there are things that people are content to hear and things that they are not, and that the only thing that ultimately matters is what they end up hearing. So we have become practiced at lying.

A reflection of all this is that we have also mastered the art of the euphemism. When something is unpleasant, we don't talk about it directly. Illegal drugs might be referred to as "product". An unborn child is called a "fetus". Homosexuality is called "being gay". And lying to a company is called "pretexting". Euphemisms themselves are a form of lying because they attempt to perceive something about the world in a way that we are more comfortable with.

Spend some time today thinking about deceptions and untruths that you have either presented or supported. Look hard and you'll find them all over. I know that I have mine, and they are a monkey on my back. How big is your monkey? How big is the collection of monkeys on the backs of those who have lied in the "best interests" of of a company the size of Hewlett Packard?

Small Crimes, Small Punishments

Our prisons are chock full of criminals, and we're busily raising the next generation of criminals. In public schools, teachers are not permitted to physically discipline students. I believe that is the source of so many problems in our society. When a child misbehaves, that child should be physically disciplined. A spanking. A smack on the back of the hand. A firm grip on the shoulder and a steely look in the eye, warning the child not to transgress again.

This can obviously be taken too far, and it can become abusive towards children. That is clearly something to be limited. But we're currently at the other end of the spectrum, where children have an implicit association between getting in trouble and being either talked to death with yet another lecture or bored to death with another simpleminded punishment. These types of feedback for improper behavior work for some large percentage of children, but they don't work for some additional percentage. And those kids are the ones that need to be reminded, physically, that some behaviors are inappropriate.

Talking back to a teacher is serious stuff, and should be treated as such. That child should either be removed from the classroom or physically disciplined on the spot in some appropriate way. But in the spirit of "small crimes, small punishments", students shouldn't even be getting to the point of talking back to a teacher. When a child doesn't follow reasonable instructions in a reasonable way, there should be instant feedback for that child's behavior. If a child doesn't sit, the teacher can make the child sit. Not by talking him or her to death, but by placing a strong hand on the child's shoulder and making him or her sit.

This concept goes beyond school. It applies to all levels of our society. If a teenager commits a small crime, have them get some physical feedback. If a teen steals a car, tazer 'em. Twice, if need be. Public canings sound like a good way to get a message across to a young adult mind that our society will not tolerate vandalism and other petty crimes.

Public canings may sound medieval and cruel, but I suggest that it is far more cruel to permit young minds to develop with the notion that disrespecting or even violating the rule of law is perfectly reasonable. Such minds are forever handicapped by fundamental beliefs that will impair their ability to function effectively in society.

I'd even apply this to adults. What if driving faster than the speed limit resulted in being tazered instead of paying a small fine? It would wipe out a revenue stream for local governments, but it would also result in quick and simple justice that people would be really sure not to fall into.

The ideal is to have the punishment be applied instantly, as well. Drive too fast in your car, and a special unit arrives immediately that includes a judge and a medical team to apply the punishment right then, right there. Punish someone days or weeks after they commit a crime and the association between crime and punishment is lost. Punish someone in the very instant that they are commiting the crime and their brain will very clearly establish the association between the two events. That simple association is what's needed, and it's why I begin with school-age children.

Ultimately, we have a ponderous system for dealing with criminals and, as a result, we can only go after the most serious crimes. That's a lot like trying to put out too many forest fires with too few fire fighters. Put people on extinguishing fires as soon as they spark and there's much less of a need for putting out the big blazes.

Electricity

Commercial power generation is based in spinning a coil of wire inside a magnetic field. That causes the electrons to flow in the copper wire, and those electrons moving in the copper wire is what we know as electricity. We have a few ways of spinning that coil of wire. There's hydroelectric power generation, where the power of flowing water moves what is essentially a propeller, and that turns the coil of wire. Voila: electricity. There's also the use of wind power. Here the wind turns a propeller, which turns the coil of wire, producing the electricity. Then there's the steam approach, which burns something to create steam (at high pressure). Coal, natural gas, wood, old tires, whatever you might have that can generate heat. It lets you produce steam that blows past a propeller that moves a coil of wire inside of a magnet.

Now for the little shocker in this article (no pun intended): nuclear fuel does not directly produce electricity. It produces heat, which is used to produce steam to turn a propeller that moves a coild of wire inside a magnet. All of our advanced technology, seemingly culminating in nuclear technology, and all we use it for is to heat water.

Mind you, it produces a lot of steam for a very long time. A nuclear power plant can produce steam, and as a result power, for a very long time on a comparatively small load of fuel. But from a technology standpoint, that's all that a nuclear power plant is: a giant, high-tech steam boiler.

Fusion power is the next big step for power generation. That will produce vast amounts of energy from a kind of weird hydrogen. And that energy will be turned into electricity by... boiling water. After one hundred years of electrical power generation, we're still boiling water to turn coils of wires inside of magnets. We're very good at doing that now, and power plants that produce thousands of megawatts of power are in constant operation. But that's what most of them do: they boil water.

In my opinion, the neatest things coming down the pike for power generation are solar cells and fuel cells. We've had both of them for almost as long as we've had the wires and magnets approach, but they haven't been as economically feasible.

Solar power works by exposing specially-prepared surfaces to sunlight. Those surfaces passively use the sunlight to create electricity. No moving parts, which is very nice. A solar panel just sits there, producing electricity as long as the sun is shining on it. That's the caveat that has made it a difficult economic proposition; no sunlight, no electricity.

Fuel cells are in the news these days as a possible replacement for the gasoline engine, but fuel cells are far more than that. They are a device for creating electricity. Hydrogen fuel cells take hydrogen fuel, process the fuel in a very special way, ultimately combining the hydrogen with oxygen from the air to generate water and electricity. There are few moving parts inherent in the process, but dealing with hydrogen as a fuel has problems that undoubtedly end up requiring moving parts to solve.

I've been handwaving these technologies only to bring them up and to set them in a spectrum of solutions to the problem of generating electrical power. We rely on little more than steam, water and wind turning a propeller connected to a coil of wire inside a magnet for the vast majority of our electricity. I don't know about you, but I find that pretty amazing.

Me, I'd like to hear that somebody has invented a device that can convert the raw energy from nuclear fission directly into electrons, instead of banging that energy into water molecules to heat them up into steam. That would make it a kind of solar cell for nuclear light. We can make sure a nuclear light shines almost without limit, eliminating the primary deficiency of solar cells, which rely on the sun shining to do their job.