Skip to main content

FTC should look at the Republicrats

It strikes me that the Republicrats (the Democrats and the Republicans) form an unfair monopoly. 

While antitrust law is typically associated with corporations, it could, conceivably also be applied to government (the FTC is an independent government body).

Triggering the antitrust laws typically means that you have a monopoly (hard to argue against that for the Republicrats) and that you abuse that position.  It has become abundantly clear over the last year that both parties are abusing their positions by focusing all of their energies on "win at any cost" as opposed to "do something for the country."  This is also why they can be considered a single entity (for the purposes of a monopoly)...they are not really two parties; just one inward facing machine.

Unfortunately, it appears that there will not be any real third party, yet again, in the next election....so there is no motivation for either party to change their behavior.   It also appears that you can't change the system "from within", which I believe was one of Obama's unstated goals.  So, it needs to be changed from outside....and the FTC is the only thing I could think of :-/

If the FTC were shake things up a big, they would have to consider Durverger's law, which implies that the US political system is set up to converge to a two party system.  Some changes to the "representative" system would have to occur. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Fourth R.

Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic, and algoRithms.  My wife and I were just brainstorming about this: how coding should be the next "basic" skill.  Of course, someone was ahead of us and posted this .  It is awesome to see Mozilla Hackasaurus referenced in this article.  It is a small world. In the early days of the printing press, scholars wrote the books; the press was simply used for production (see this article ).  As time went on, "average" people became familiar with the medium, and used it for their own messages.  We are at just that point with the Web.  Software Engineers write the code, and the Web distributes it.   Software Engineers are the algoRithm scholars of today.  They won't be for long.  Soon algoRithms will be taught starting in elementary school, along with the other three R's.

Connectome as a Book

Your Connectome is a map of your brain.  Every neuron, every synapse. I am only a few pages into Connectome, but was intrigued by a sentence: "Human DNA....has three billion letters....would be a million pages long if printed as a book."  The companion question, "How many pages for the Connectome?" might be answered later in the book, but I thought I would take a shot at it here. Here is the punchline: Your Connectome book is 6.7 million times longer than your DNA book. That human DNA is about a million pages is not too surprising, although it probably is not optimized. According to quora there are between 1500 and 1800 letters per page.  I am going to use round numbers, namely 2000.  Then, the 3x10^9 DNA letters would actually be 1.5 million pages.  But this is very wasteful.  Even using just ASCII we can encode four DNA letters per character, so the book should really only be about 400K pages.  And, this book is much more interesting; in...