OT: Celebrity advice (was: Advice to a Junior in High School?)

[Andrew Dalke]

Alex Martelli:
> ID cards are a tool that can make government more efficient -- for either
> good or evil purposes equally well.

Personally, I don't think it's uses for good are all that clear
for making government more efficient.  It costs money to
develop and maintain an ID card system; estimates for the
UK "entitlement card" sytem were on the order of 39 pounds
 (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/31581.html )
per person per renewal.  Small compared to the average
household income of about 23k GBP, but non-trivial.

Add to that the hassles when you don't have an ID card:
if you forget it / have it stolen / lose it, does that prevent
you from getting medical card?  get you arrested (as in
Belgium where an ID card is required)? prevent you from
voting? Can you get out of jury duty (in countries which
have citizen jurors) by claiming you lost your id?  Are you
arrested if it isn't replaced in time?

Top it off with improper assumptions people have about
the validity of said card and likelihood of misuse, and you
get such modern problems as identity theft, or credit
records messed up because of simple transcription errors.

There is better efficiency in tracking down someone
known, although again it's not unknown for that information
to be wrong.  (I recently read a case where a man was
almost sent to Miami on a 30 year old warrant even though
the name on the warrant wasn't quite his - the middle name
was different - and spent several days in jail before his
figureprints were checked.  Would an id card have helped
there?
  http://www.sptimes.com/2003/08/21/Tampabay/Here_s_one_guy_who_re.shtml )

But you still need to know the person (and be correct).
Consider another possibility - what about hiring more
police officers instead?  That would help track down
the person who commited the crime.

Figure renewal of every seven years means ~6GBP/yr.,
If a police officer is paid average wages, then with a factor
of 2 for overhead means that 8,000 cards is about the
same as another police officer.  Minors might not have
cards, so that's about, say, 15,000 people.  (Wild guess.)
  http://www.llcc.cc.il.us/gtruitt/SCJ290spring2002/France%20CJS1.pdf
claims there is about 1 officer per 300 people, so ID
cards correspond to about 2% increase in the police force.

So I am not convinced that ID cards can make a government
more efficient, or at least not all that much more efficient.

(A rhetorical question: Belgium requires ID cards.  Does that make
the Belgium government more efficient than, say, the Dutch one?)

> Similarly, promoting Python use in government-used programming makes
> government potentially more efficient.  Generally, tools are morally
> neutral -- for an engineer there may be some moral (or, equally,
> aesthetic -- "beauty is truth, truth, beauty") value in a specific
> tool, but that's a biased viewpoint;-).

"potentially more efficient" is different.  I can say "potentially
SNOBOL use in government-used ...." and be equally correct.
Attempting to verify that shows otherwise.  And potentially ID
cards could make a government more efficient, but there may
be other ways which make the government even more efficient,
for less cost, and without the human rights concerns.

Chaining everyone to a stake on a limited line may make
government potentially more efficient.  (Easy to track people
down - don't need the change-of-address system for the postal
service! - very hard to commit any crimes).  Doesn't mean
it's a good idea.

                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com