poli-sci@ucbvax.ARPA (10/05/84)
From: JoSH <JoSH@RUTGERS.ARPA> Poli-Sci Digest Thu 4 Oct 84 Volume 4 Number 92 "The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer." --Henry Kissinger Contents: Defining freedom and rights Letters to Govt Officials Homework ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 14-Sep-84 11:56 PDT From: Kirk Kelley <KIRK.TYM@OFFICE-2.ARPA> Subject: Re: Defining "freedom" I use the following definitions to quantify concepts like "freedom" and "life". freedom: the total capabilities of a control process. capability: a controlled alternative: an alternative controlled by a control process. control process: a negative feedback loop. alternative: any possible state of a system. time: a process maximizing alternatives. life: a process maximizing capabilities. Despite the current lack of a specific methodology for measuring the quantity of alternatives actually controlled by a process, I find these definitions provide a meaningful basis for thinking about resolving conflicts that arise between different control processes trying with various degrees of awareness to maximize their capabilities (individuals trying to live, whatever that means to them), especially in relationship to their environment which must also maximize its capabilities for any of its parts to survive. -- kirk [Let's expand these macros. Freedom is thus: the total possible states of a system controlled by a negative feedback loop. This being so, we can measure freedom in bits: How many bits are required to measure the number of states between which the control process can choose. Consider a frictionless cylinder of gas, sealed at both ends, with a piston in the middle. If the piston moves from the center, the pressure rises in one end and lowers in the other, moving it back in a negative feedback loop. We do not have a definition for control, but it seems reasonable to say that the negative feedback process controls the position of the piston and the PVT state of the gas. How many states does the process control? In attempting to quantize the position, pressure, volume, and temperature we are driven to consider the QM energy level occupancy states. The number of states available depends on the total energy, but we can easily imagine such a system having 1E30 states from which to choose. This means that the feedback process has about 100 bits of freedom. Please note that this process controls all the states of the system; its control is thus maximized and it is therefore alive. It is also interesting to note that the American political process is also alive under this definition. Such a huge, enveloping voracious monster Hollywood has yet to dream of. Notice that the freedom of this Leviathan is actually several hundred bits (the number of contested seats in a given election). When we divide that freedom up among the people, however, we get about a millionth of a bit apiece. Oh well. --JoSH] ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 1 Oct 84 15:20 EDT From: Aspnes@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA Subject: Objective rights Sure, there may be an objective system of rights and/or justice. But unless it's self-evident, it's in the same boat as the subjective theories. I have yet to see a set of principles that does not require either explicit assumptions or quasi-syllogistical mumbo-jumbo to justify its apparently subjective premises. (If you know of one, I'd be happy to hear about it.) --Jim (Aspnes@MIT-MULTICS) [Systems of rights don't really break down as subjective vs objective. They are something like geometries; you can have several systems, each internally consistent, each "correct". (They are more complex than geometry, so it's harder to get them consistent.) You can take different systems and apply them to different real-world situations with varying degrees of success. I never heard of "subjective" geometry. --JoSH] ------------------------------ Date: 1 Oct 1984 0637-PDT From: CAULKINS@USC-ECL.ARPA Subject: Kennan on USSR + US policies In the 24 Sept 84 issue of the New Yorker George Kennan has some interesting commentary on Russian and American policy in the form of two letters to anonymous (and probably fictional) high government officials in each country. Some quotes: from the lettter to the Russian; "... That such things could happen as did happen in the Soviet Union in those years from 1935 to 1953 - that they could happen, above all, to a great political movement and a great advanced society in the modern age - is puzzling enough, but that the political regime through which, and to which, these things occurred should not be interested, some 30 or 40 years later, in inquiring into their causes, and should instead try to bury in oblivion what were, after all, the dominant domestic-political realities of two momentous decades of Russian history: this, to us, is not comprehensible at all. It is, in fact, a bad sign. When an individual is unable to face his own past and feels compelled to build his view of himself on a total denial of it and on the creation of myths to put in its place, this is normally regarded as a sign of extreme neurosis. ... Can it be otherwise, we wonder, with a political regime ? ... let us ... consider certain aspects of the official Soviet personality (not unconnected, incidentally, with Stalinist traditions) which have remained generally constant for over half a century and have , in my judgement, done as much as anything else to poison the relations of the Soviet Union with the West. They constitute, collectively, something that is very hard to sum up in a single sentence ... It has been sometimes described as the "siege mentality". It is, in essence, the state of mind that assumes all forms of authority not under Soviet control to be, or to be likely to be, wicked, hostile, and menacing. It conjures up the image of a Soviet regime endowed with unique insight, wisdom, benevolence, and nobility of purpose, standing out bravely through the decades against misguided and dangerous foreign forces, frustrating their evil designs, protecting its own grateful people from their wily encroachments. A number of troublesome phenomena flow from this neurotic view of self and surroundings, among them the conspiratorial nature of the regime itself; the dark suspision of everything and everyone foreign; the obsession with secrecy, espionage, and internal security; the evident compulsion to conceal and protect the centers of Soviet power with an elaborate facade; the determination to force others either (and preferably) to mistake this facade for the reality or at least to connive at the fiction that it is real. ... And this does endless damage to your foreign relations. Consider just your treatment of the foreign resident in Russia - the diplomat or journalist. There is the beady, mistrustful, clandestine observation; the determination to isolate him from Soviet society ... If an example of this is needed, take only the recent Soviet televison series so obviously designed to make the American Embassy in Moscow the target of general hatred and suspicion. ... You cannot wall yourselves off in this way, like some Oriental despotism, and then expect sympathy and admiration and confidence from the world outside. ... Exaggerated suspicion invites exaggerated suspicion. Don't you realize that by this sort of overreaction the Soviet government has been "graduating" for more than half a century a new class of embittered foreign diplomats and journalists, and sending them out into the world to spread their bitterness ? ... They [Soviet authorities] probably do not wish the Soviet Union to appear threatening, but they are also not unhappy that it should appear strong - perhaps, even, stronger than it really is. If this is the case, I am sure they are making a mistake, for we are all now in the danger zone with our wild military competition, yet the impression of a Soviet Union arming inordinately, needlessly, and with implacable determination, in a manner explicable only by aggessive intentions, rests in large part on just such uncertainties, and on just the exaggerated speculations they encourage. ... The concept of bilateral relations that sees the two sides as two deadly spiders in a bottle, only one of which can expect to survive, is now self-defeating even from the standpoint of national security. ..." from the letter to the American: "...I believe that it is generally recognized today that the nuclear balance, whatever it may once have been, has long been subject and continues now to be subject, to steady destabilization by precisely this process of technological innovation, the pace of which is faster than the pace of negotiation. ... Nor, incidentally, will the Russians have forgotten that they once negotiated with us for some 6 or 7 years over a second SALT agreement, only to see us, after signing it, decline to ratify it and then add insult to injury be reproaching THEM repeatedly with allegedly violating it. None of this encourages them to repeat the performance. ... Despite the fact that there is no political issue in the relations between the two countries which could conceivably justify a war between them, the preparations, material and psychological, for such a war have been allowed to become an ingrained dominating habit not just for our armed aervices but for large parts of our civilan society as well. ... The fleets and planes of the two powers chase each other about on the high seas and elsewhere, snoop on each other, and take high risks in the process, with an intensity that could not be greater if it were known that war was coming next week. ... Preparations on a vast scale for a specifically envisaged war, however defensively conceived or masked, are a species of cogwheel that permits of advance in only one direction. ... We can no longer go on talking endlessly about a war with the Soviet Union and then cllaim we are seriously attempting to avoid it. We can no longer try to reassure each other of our patriotic vigilance by striking the high-pitched heroic-chauvinist note in our domestic-political discourse and at the same time try to assure the outside world, including our political opponents, that our aim is only peace. The truth is that the general attitude this country has adopted in recent years in matters of East-West relations, of national defense, and of arms control is not one that lends much credibility, in eyes other than our own, to our claimed enthusiasm for renewed arms talks. Rather, it suggests an anxious pursuit of that most unreal and unreachable of all mirages: some sort of nuclear superiority that threatens the adversary and does not threaten us in like measure. ... The question is whether business can usefully be done with them [the Soviets] over the removal of the greatest of all dangers: the danger not just of nuclear war but of any further great war at all in this age of high technology and of tremendous - almost uncontrollable - destructive power. The fact that the Soviet leaders have no desire for such a war, and would greatly like to see it avoided, is unmistakably clear to anyone who knows anything about them. ... The issue of war and peace is the crucial issue. The others, real or fancied - Angola, Afghanistan, Central America, human rights, what you will - all pale beside it. These others can wait. The crucial issue cannot. But to get on with this crucial issue (and this is the essence of what I am trying to say to you in this letter) we will have to look more closely at ourselves - at our own motivation, our own behavior, the formative processes of our own society - than we have done to date. A mere "return to the negotiating table" will not solve the problem." ------------------------------ Date: Saturday, 29 September 1984 11:13:19 EDT From: Hank.Walker@cmu-cs-unh.arpa Subject: Re: ban on home hacking This was discussed briefly on our local opinion bboard: Current law bans "homework" for women's outerwear, and possibly a few other items of clothing. This law was written back in slave labor days, but seems silly now. For example, with unisex-style clothing, it is legal to make a coat with the buttons on the wearer's right (men's style) but illegal to make the same identical coat with buttons on the left. The ILGWU guy then went on to say that computer homework should be banned too. Comments: Me: I believe that the type of home computer work the union leader (the man behind the union label) has in mind is data entry, not hackers at home. Data entry operators type in handwritten forms, such as insurance claim forms, credit card slips, etc. I know someone who used to do this down at Mellon Bank. The work environment is best described as an electronic sweat shop. The system monitors your typing rate, error rate, etc, and you are evaluated on that basis. Full-time employees in these fields are ripe for unionization. However much of the work is part-time, which makes unionization difficult. Home-based data entry makes the work even more attractive to large numbers of women with small children. I don't think attempts at banning will go anywhere for two reasons. First, professional programmers working at home are just as immune to unionization as professionals at a workplace. Second, the whole concept of data entry can be viewed as a temporary hack to make up for the fact that computers are not sufficiently networked, adequate interchange standards don't exist, and speech and image understanding isn't there yet. If the information was entered as it was created, then most of these jobs would disappear. Developments such as debit cards (use your Cashstream card at Gulf Oil) are leading the way. Dave Black@cmu-cs-a: Actually I think the unions are after the CRT operators (modern version of keypunch). I've already heard mumblings from various groups about how bad work conditions are, and how awful it is to have a computer measuring their work output. If they work at home, unionizing them becomes a non-starter. On the other hand the engineers (many of whom are programmers) at Sperry Corporation's Great Neck, NY facility (on Long Island) and possibly elsewhere are unionized by some part of the AFL-CIO. [and have been for some time; original dispute stemmed from management dismissing people just before they would be entitled to pension benefits and similar idiocy.] The only major difference this seems to make is that overtime is not mandatory (but promotions are less likely if one is unwilling to do it when needed), and must be paid at overtime rates. ------------------------------ From: Laurinda Rohn <rohn@rand-unix> Date: 01 Oct 84 07:51:57 PDT (Mon) Subject: Sixty Minutes and Working at Home This is mainly a clarification of what Mike Zaleski said about the working at home controversy, as he got the story mostly right. I did see the 60 Minutes segment in question and have been following the USENET discussion fairly closely as well. In fact, it is already illegal for the women in New England to knit their sweaters at home and sell them. This apparently dates back to an old law trying to prevent garment manufacturers from forcing their employees to work at home for virtually nothing. The real controversy started when some law enforcement agency actually went to the home of one of the women and told her that she was breaking the law. A point worthy of note is that if the women had been making MEN'S clothing, they would not have been breaking the law. Apparently, when the no home-work law was passed, the legislators decided that men's clothing was harder to make than women's and required such heavy equipment that people wouldn't be able to do it at home. At any rate, the whole situation is absolutely absurd. These women are obviously not working in a sweat shop environment. They are, however, getting around the unions, which amuses me no end. I think this is yet another example of the unions trying to get in where they don't belong. But then I'm not convinced they belong anywhere. An item was mentioned toward the end of the segment that might be of more direct interest to a lot of us. It seems that the AFL-CIO is now trying to get this no home-work law extended to prevent people from working at home on computer terminals. I find this even more absurd than the garment workers law. I sincerely hope that Congress doesn't take this seriously. Lauri Rohn ------------------------------ Date: 2 October 1984 06:39-EDT From: Jerry E. Pournelle <POURNE @ MIT-MC> Subject: Government on the move: Home computer use It is already illegal under federal law to make ladies garments for sale if you work in your own home. ILGWU doesn't need to get a law; they only need to (1) keep the one they have and (2) get marshals to jail the women who use their home kniting machines to make ski caps, underwear, etc, if intended for women. If intended for men it's legal; women are EXPECTED to make clothing for men, apparently. ILGWU strikes again. Sing, sing the praises. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 3 Oct 84 10:07:50-PDT From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA> Subject: Computer Homework Re: Women are EXPECTED to make clothing for men ... The 60 Minutes piece made the point that the homework law was passed (about 30 years ago) to correct specific abuses. At the time, men's clothing was commonly made in factories using heavy machinery. Women's clothing was, I presume, more detailed, individual, and delicate; it was commonly made by hand either in factories or at home. Times have changed and the law is now absurd, but I don't expect the law to change until some larger issue such as computer homework forces a complete restructuring. (Factory sweatshops also exist; there are separate laws covering them, but enforcement is lax. Milton Friedman apparently supports such shops as an entry for immigrants and the poor into the mainstream of the American economy. The same can be said for homework. We certainly should not shut down the workshops unless we provide alternative channels for these people.) Computer homework and factory work can be just as abused as any other kind of work. Not every terminal is going to have mailer capability or storage of personal files. Terminals can be made to count keystrokes and are thus ideal overseers. Some legislation may indeed be necessary; let's just make sure it's sensible legislation. Don't you wish your congressman had a terminal? -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: Thu 4 Oct 84 14:53:45-PDT From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA> Subject: Homework I just ran across a short article on the telecommuting homework problem in the May issue of Data Communications. At that time Reagan was trying to eliminate the homework laws (including knitting, etc.); other candidates had taken no position. It seems that the AFL-CIO has already petitioned that the current laws be extended to include computer homework after the members of one of their subunions (United Service Industries Employees?) voted for such an action. Politicians have not been very receptive to the AFL-CIO position. -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ End of POLI-SCI Digest - 30 - -------