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Let’s recap.

On September 11, 2001, hijackers on four separate commercial airliners got their ugly mitts on the controls for the purpose of staging kamikaze attacks.

The only group of hijackers that failed to complete their kamikaze attacks failed because the good guys, the non-terrorist passengers, fought back.

This sobering lesson prompted our fearless leaders to institute a new airline security policy that consists of depriving the good guys of everything they could possibly use as a weapon.

I feel safer already.

(I’ll be flying later today. I wonder if the security guys would object to me bringing a rock. Probably so…. some terrorist might get hurt with that thing!)

And as an enthusiastic Linux, Java, etc. fan, I’ll go first…

Wait a minute, you say. Bill Gates? Isn’t he the Devil Incarnate? Isn’t he the sworn enemy of Linux?

I don’t know how he feels about Linux, and you don’t either… for all you know he’s got a Linux box at home he uses every chance he gets. (Actually, if I were Bill Gates, I’d use Linux every chance I get… if the competition isn’t going to even keep any secrets, you might as well learn all you can….)

But I do know if Windows or something very much like it didn’t exist, that sweet Linux box of yours would cost about 10 times as much. And it would suck.

Which puts that whole deal where most manufacturers would preinstall Windows and make you pay for a license whether you wanted it or not into perspective. Yeah, it’s kind of annoying to buy $200 “training wheels” with your box that you’ll just strip off and throw away. But it’s more than offset by the $20000 savings you’re getting courtesy of Windows and all the people who keep buying it.

What have I been smoking? (“I’ve been smoking the truth, man!”) Well, it all comes down to our old friend “economy of scale”; the more computers that get built, the cheaper each individual one will be, both because of amortization of fixed costs and because it pays to invest more R&D in a large market than a small one, and that R&D itself yields cost and performance improvements.

Now most users are running Windows rather than Linux, not because of any nefarious designs of Bill Gates, but because they are not geeks and never will be. Non-geeks will not start running Linux in great numbers even if we strung Bill Gates up from the nearest lamppost and burned every copy of Windows in a big bonfire. If Windows or something like it didn’t exist, most non-geeks would not buy a computer at all; they spend most of their time on interests that have nothing to do with programming, administration, or tinkering with technology, and will not willingly take the time to learn Linux no matter how much we wish they would. And, non-geeks outnumber us, by at least a factor of 20 to 1. Anyone who tried to sell a computer only to Linux fans would have to charge at least 10 times as much per box, and the box itself would be comparatively primitive because of all the extra R&D that didn’t go into it.

If you want to see what the computer market would be like if the non-geeks stayed out of it, take a look at the market for personal aircraft. The things are outrageously expensive, absurdly difficult to fly, and 40 year old planes are still considered worth owning and flying; the new ones aren’t advanced enough to blow them out of the water the way a new computer relegates even 10 year old computers to museums and junkyards. That’s because personal aircraft are only sold to committed enthusiasts, who are willing to invest large amounts of time and money to learn the primitive, user-hostile interface, get official permission to use the craft, and of course to buy the craft itself, whose price is kept high by the small number of units that can be sold to enthusiasts (aircraft-geeks?) like themselves.

The aircraft industry’s Bill Gates hasn’t come out with an easy-to-use interface for aircraft, and he’d lose his shirt if he tried, because non-enthusiasts wouldn’t be allowed to use it under current law and enthusiasts already know how to use the current user-hostile interface. That’s what would happen to the computer market if someone had stopped Bill Gates from “taking over the world” (i.e., selling huge numbers of computer operating systems to people who otherwise wouldn’t buy a computer at all, thus motivating all those non-geeks to pay the lion’s share of the fixed costs for hardware that would otherwise fall on Linux fans such as ourselves… much of which we couldn’t afford to pay and therefore wouldn’t get invested in developing the really nice hardware we enjoy today).

Yeah, he screwed with Java and now Web application programmers are usually stuck using clunky JavaScript and HTML to paint their GUIs rather than the nice applets we should be using. But again, without the non-geeks buying and using Windows machines, those applets would have a much smaller audience, and everyone (including Web programmers) would lose out.

Reading through a “news” paper the other day, I read the comments of an ardent Kerry supporter accusing Bush of having a “19th Century mentality”, apparently because Bush thinks that killing dangerous enemies and producing fuel are worthwhile activities. As I so often do when hearing the comments of Bush opponents, my reaction was “I wish!” I guess you know you’ve definitely become someone’s political enemy when you hear him accusing your candidate of things that would make you a fanatical supporter if only they were true.

At any rate, it constantly amazes me to hear people speak of a “19th Century mentality” as if it were a terrible insult, and to speak of the 19th Century itself as if it was a time when our benighted policies kept us on the road to disaster until 20th Century heroes took the reins of power and saved the day. I suppose that I must confess that I myself harbor a 19th Century mentality.

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Just as our Founders told us they would under our system.

If not for the enviro-nuts, I figure the safety nuts would have pushed through a law mandating that everyone drive SUV’s.

Too bad they couldn’t convince people that airbags release something toxic into the air while they were at it…

Update: According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the safest category of passenger vehicles for the driver is “Cargo and large passenger vans”; SUV’s were about average. Interestingly enough, pickup trucks had a very high rate of driver fatalities; small and large pickups had a rate that was surpassed only by “mini cars”. Cars from midsize on up are safer than SUV’s. The mini car, not surprisingly, does worst of all, and I’d place a high likelihood of it being banned if not for the enviro-nuts.

Follow the link, look at “Driver deaths per million registered passenger vehicles 1-3 years old, by crash type, 2002”, then under the “All crashes” heading for the total risk to the driver in various automobiles.

Recently, a discussion of a hate crimes post on this site included a discussion of anti-discrimination law. I would like to focus on anti-discrimination law specifically, and point out pernicious effects that I rarely see addressed.

Let’s take the “ideal” anti-discrimination law, one that doesn’t involve any affirmative action requirements. The idea is that the government is making it illegal to refuse to hire/promote/retain a person if you’re doing it because he’s a “minority”. If you do the exact same thing for some other reason, then in theory you are complying with the law.

This goes even further than “hate crimes” law or any other law. In the “hate crimes” case, an act that is already wrong, when it’s motivated by “hate”, is an even worse offense than that act usually is. In the case of employment discrimination law, an act that is morally neutral (refusing to trade with a given person) becomes wrong when the act is motivated by a “wrong” reason, but remains morally neutral when the act is not motivated by such a reason.

How on Earth do you enforce such a law? Without a mind-reading device, such a law cannot be properly enforced, except in a few cases where the law is lucky enough to find a damning paper trail or recording. For the rest of the cases, you have to look at hiring activity, and divine the employer’s intention from that.

Now anyone who offers employment will have a (nearly) constant number of positions to offer, a set of people he hires, a set of people he refuses to hire, and a set of people (more than a quarter-billion strong) who never present themselves for his consideration. Assuming that applicants outnumber jobs, every time he hires a person A, he must simultaneously reject some other person B. That means that punishing him for refusing to hire person B for whatever reason is logically equivalent to punishing him for hiring some other person who is not B.

Now remember that there are no mindreading devices. To even come close to enforcing the law properly, the employer must now be held to account for every hiring decision he makes, for every person he brings on board. Regardless of what is taken as evidence of his motivation for hiring A or for not hiring B, the result is that the employer will have to be ready at all times to prove to a jury that A was in fact the most qualified person available.

How do you prove such a thing to strangers who can’t read your mind, weren’t there for the interview, and in any event will never lose or gain any money based on whether your evaluation of everyone’s qualifications was correct? A good way to prove it is with documentary evidence. If person A has a generally recognized credential stating that he is qualified for the position and person B does not, the employer can prove his case and have a verdict in his favor. If person A does not have such a credential and person B does, regardless of whether the employer had another perfectly good reason for choosing A that isn’t so good at convincing a jury, his odds of a favorable verdict go down considerably.

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