I am a populist libertarian. If you want to find out what I thought about the last election, scroll down two or three blog entries. Spoiler Alert: I voted for Kamala Harris.

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Essential Advice for At-Risk Seniors

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This came from Quora. My answer follows.

Q. I feel isolated and alone. I’m 67 with no family and no job. What should I do?

A. First priority::

Make sure you have a roof over your head. Especially in winter. You can die very easily, if you are relying on sleeping in your car or staying in shopping malls. All of these places close. An ice storm, even in a Southern state, could be fatal. Especially because cars do run out of gas. The reason could be as simple as a traffic jam that is unexpected. Gas stations can close or there can be unexpected shortages of fuel. So, if you know of a 24-hour gas station or truck stop and that is your lifeline, it’s just not a good way to go.

Second priority:: even though you may not feel like you have a rational reason at every moment of day, make a promise to yourself not to commit suicide. Do not break that promise. Be aware that in some states, including the one where I live, suicide can actually be prosecuted as a crime. This isn’t just an ironic joke! Believe me. It sounds funny, but something that is even perceived as a suicide attempt could make it difficult for you to pass a routine background check.

Third priority:: look on the bright side. You have an enormous one. You are past retirement age. You qualify for Social Security and Medicare. I don’t want to say that I’m jealous, but with 17 years to go, I have to conclude that those benefits are worth something.

I can’t solve your dilemmas for you, but there should be resources available in your community. Visiting a public library or even (gasp) a senior center is a great place to start.

I am not going to say anything about that guy in this post.

You know, the one who’s been in the news. Who made all the headlines. I think he made a terrible mistake. He is young, and he is throwing his life away. Whatever the poll numbers say about the surprizing number of Americans who support his actions, he used lethal force. I do not approve.

It does seem tragic to me that we don’t have better support systems in place in the Open Source “Community” for those who are not finding fulfillment in the work world. I will say that depression and suicide are unacknowledged problems in our field. From what I could ascertain in the brief news article I saw, another talented and promising programmer took his own life earlier this fall. He was a former employee of leading San Francisco AI startup, one that you have no doubt heard of. I am glad that his passing was acknowledged, but I think it is really absolutely as dangerous to glamorize suicide as it is to glamorize murder.

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to form a community that can provide a support system for people between jobs. It actually may turn out to be a little bit bigger than that, but I don’t want to overpromise. I am lucky enough to be employed but who knows what the future holds. I just know I want and need a part in shaping it. Hey, it’s getting late, even out here on Pacific Time.

I am going to call it a night.

Ok, so I’m about to finally mail in my ballot. (That’s how we do things in the State of Oregon, remember?) No long lines at the polls. But maybe a little suspense waiting for all the ballots to arrive and get counted… at least for the local races.

It’s pretty much obvious who the best candidate is, and in fact I did some phone banking for her on Saturday morning. This is my moment to give some space for anyone here who may tempted to vote for the other side. Or more likely, vote for a third-party candidate or not vote at all.

First off, you have to admire the devotion of the Trump voters. There is nothing subtle about it. They really mean it. The white pickup truck that’s been parked on my block all week long, with a huge sign attached that says,

“God, Guns, and Trump.”

Now that is making a statement. Same with the house I saw when I was back visiting my parents in Connecticut, which had a Trump banner covering most of the second story. They were just down the road from Town Hall. And these are Blue states, mind you. It’s not like these views are popular!

You had to figure that these people don’t care what their neighbors think of them. I guess having guns and ammunition handy could help people perpetuate that worldview. Unfortunately, even in the Northeast, these people are not just an isolated fringe group. I remember hearing the words of this country music song playing on AM radio, while I was driving away from the post office in my hometown. It was all about how if anyone tried to take our guns away, they would be real sorry.

Anyway, I don’t own a gun and I don’t want one. There are plenty of other ways to defend yourself and fight for your beliefs. The most effective ones are always nonviolent. That is the only way you can win a measurable number of the other side to your worldview.

Nonviolence doesn’t always mean marching and carrying signs, though. Nor does it always mean civil disobedience. I was lucky enough to cover some protests of that type, but that was years ago. Nonviolence can be as simple as paid advertising. Only problem is, that requires money. And platforms that will take your money.

That is where I worry that progressive groupthink is really letting us down. There is an air of self-satisfaction that is prevalent amongst liberals (and I do consider myself one of them). But I prefer to question my assumptions, and draw information from a variety of sources. Bezos got it wrong when he forbid The Washington Post to endorse Kamala Harris. The question wasn’t whether Post readers would be swayed by that endorsement. It was more the “why” that becomes important — the content of those hypothetical paragraphs that would have accompanied her endorsement. People need to see reasons to be passionate and motivated about a cause.

I can tell you what I am passionate about and that is getting better healthcare. For me, personally, and for everyone. I found myself in the public system in Oregon after moving back here this spring. And what I learned is that it’s nearly impossible to see a doctor, or even a nurse practitioner. With a very few exceptions, we are not even allowed to pay for private appointments outside of the clinic system. This is really a problem when you experience constant pain.

The repetitive strain injury I live with hasn’t really gotten better, and at times (particularly after long drives) it’s been much worse. The question that I have been waiting three months to get an answer about is whether my physical therapy exercises are actually helping, or whether they might be exacerbating the injury.

In the meantime, I work for a few hours every day. I try to find workarounds that involve fewer mouse clicks and above all, less time on my phone. There is a really strong possibility that I meet the criteria for receiving disability, but I would rather not go that route. I’ve investigated the assistive technologies currently available, but they really seem to be designed for people who use one or two software productivity applications only — and not for people in management or creative roles, who are constantly toggling between a dozen or more open screens and tabs (many of them web apps). I may just to have to write my own. The irony is that the only way I would have time and funding to do so would be if I were on disability… and since the cost of housing is at an all-time high, and you need to drain nearly all of your savings to qualify, it strikes me as an extremely risky choice.

Some of us have a good safety net to fall back on. I really don’t. I did the math.

We won’t even talk about women’s health, or the complete lack of specialists or referrals in this area. I haven’t even been offered a mammogram screening. Forget about trying to schedule an appointment to discuss HRT, even if like me you are missing a uterus, constantly fatigued and run down, and concerned that menopause or perimenopause could catch you unawares.

Not sure yet what my long term plan is. Just hoping it’s not an endgame.

Really, really wishing that there was a better way to improve the quality of public healthcare in the place where I live. For me. And for all the people in the system who have even less in the way of choice or good information about the treatment options they have available. For good or ill, Medicaid-subsidized care public healthcare here in Oregon is “socialized medicine.” It covers a lot. Something like cradle-to-grave. The clinic system even has a public daycare. I have friends who use it.

But the appointments and the spaces aren’t necessarily there when you need them. Rationing is a fact of life.

Switching insurance providers is as giant a gamble as anything else. You never know which providers are going to drop out of a given private plan, or how long the wait will be to actually get in for an appointment with a primary care provider.

I don’t believe the solution is throwing more money at the problem. I believe the solution is better accountability. The profit system built into free markets does act, in some rough and almost always unintentional ways, as a way to measure performance. Take that out of the equation and you have every incentive for abuse and bloat.

We need greater transparency. And we need ways for consumers of public services (and yes, that means poor people) to make their viewpoints known without having to fill out a 15-minute survey. Most of us are working poor, and we don’t have those fifteen minutes to spare.

I was going to ask a VC that I knew whether he felt like a simple, universal AI-driven response and feedback measurement system could ever get adopted by the federal government. The process to become an approved federal vendor is laborious and time-consuming, and typically you can’t really “pitch” government organizations on tools that they might actually use internally. You can only go after grants, which are nearly always highly competitive and reserved for those on the inside track.

Which, ahem, I am not on. Not in the Biden administration, and certainly not in the administration that preceded it. Read the post below this one, and you may start to have an inkling as to why.

This article can also be found at pdxlocal.net and was originally published in 2022.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Surviving the Surveillance State

December 4, 2022
by Rose C.

Portland ranks among the Top 10 Most Surveilled U.S. Cities, according to Cybernews. Atlanta tops the list.

We live in a world where surveillance is a fact of life. Any encrypted software product may be backdoored, and even if it is not, you have no guarantee that the person on the other end does not have spyware such as keystroke monitoring or screen video capture running on their system. Encryption enthusiasts and amateur hackers, no matter how valiant, simply cannot compete with a nation-state in this game. Cf Pegasus.

Sneak and Peek, or “No Knock,” Warrants have been around since the Patriot Act was passed in 2001, but they receive scant attention from the media. What they mean is that you may have your home searched, and items removed from your home, without any official notice from law enforcement. Ditto for electronic files. If you file a FOIA request and the investigation in which you are named is still ongoing, you will not receive any confirmation that a warrant exists. (Pat Eddington, Cato Institute)

The most frightening aspect of these warrants is the potential for planting false evidence. The second most frightening aspect is the potential for planting surveillance devices for tracking and listening — as if cell phones were not effective enough.

“Nothing to Hide?”

Like roughly 2/3 of the U.S. population, I reside within the 100-mile “border zone” where Border Patrol agents are granted additional authorities and the Constitutional protections of the Fourth Amendment no longer apply. You may think all of this is irrelevant if you are a law-abiding citizen.

The problem is that who you know can get you put on a list. It can also make you a target. To put it another way, we all know somebody who has a cousin who is a drug dealer.

Laws in this country are changing, and not (in my opinion) for the better. Roe v. Wade is gone, and civil rights for gays and lesbians may soon disappear as this country takes a hard shift right. Remember ICE? Children in cages? Forced sterilizations?

Come 2024, they may all be back.

If you don’t feel like being a freedom fighter, if your first priority is keeping your family safe and saving for your children’s college tuition, I am not here to judge. Just remember that in a world where power rules in place of law, abuse of that power is an inevitable consequence.

Get in a traffic accident with somebody employed by the surveillance state? What if one of them rapes your daughter? Or your son? When a large class of individuals are above the law, nothing good will come of it. This is especially true when the same individuals fear consequences from their actions. They tend to lash out and do everything they can to harm and intimidate witnesses and injured parties.

I am not an America-hater. Far from it. The country I grew up in gave me 40+ years of freedom in its purest form: freedom to explore, to create, to love and befriend those I chose, to work as much or as little as I liked. Freedom to just be. I am a GenXer. I don’t mean to talk like a crusty old-timer, but I believe I’ve seen this nation at its absolute best.

Or maybe the best is yet to come.

Nothing is fixed. Nothing is certain.

The combined 2022 budget of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the 17 different United States spying agencies (of which CIA and NSA are only two) is over $150 billion. For comparison, that is roughly one fifth of the Department of Defense 2022 budget of $742B. But remember, the DOD budget covers submarines, fighter jets, aircraft carriers, helicopters, tanks, nuclear weapons, and anti-missile defense systems, not to mention an active network of bases around the world. That’s a lot of people and hardware.

What exactly are we paying for? This remains largely unclear. Marijuana is now legal in 19 out of 50 states, but the DEA’s funding continues to grow. If you were an officer monitoring wiretaps and running undercover operations in Colorado or Washington State, where and to what were you reassigned? And as far as truly terrifying threats to health and safety, the surveillance state could be doing a much better job. We read about mass shootings in the news practically every week. It failed to prevent the violent attempted coup at our nation’s capitol on January 6, 2021.

Your tax dollars at work, my friends.

Government salaries range from $20K (GS-1) to $147K(GS-15) — much less than the equivalent in the private sector. If we assume that wages (including benefits) average $100,000 per year, we would expect that the surveillance states employs as many as 1.5 million people in the United States. Keeping in mind, that is not accounting for slush funds to be distributed overseas, or James Bond style gadgetry, server space, or the cost of buildings and operations. But if we slash that number in half, that is still one federal domestic spy for every 440 U.S. citizens.

And that’s a lot.

Regarding terminology, “federal domestic spy” includes FBI informers, often recruited under duress or experiencing economic hardship. It does not include state or local police forces.

I am an extremely law-abiding citizen. That has protected me to some extent, but not completely. Somebody who has cheated on their taxes or who runs a warez server with their friends is at high risk of being “turned” and pressured by law enforcement to inform on others and further widen the surveillance network.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.