Category Archives: Politics

On political parties and why they should not exist

Posted by under Politics

I was quite amused by a G+ post written by Google co-founder Sergey Brin today, which in summary, says the following:

I must confess, I am dreading today’s elections. Not because of who might win or lose. But because no matter what the outcome, our government will still be a giant bonfire of partisanship.

In fact, I have thought the same for some time now. Just before the Mexican elections, I had a long debate with an ex-friend of mine about this. We talked about how there should be no political parties, but instead, individuals backed by people with similar thoughts, where they aim to change the country following X or Y strategy, without naming themselves as “conservatives” or “liberals”, but rather as politicians with X or Y views. He strongly disagreed, to the point of ending our friendship because instead of analysing and debating this rationally, he was stubborn and single-minded.

In my view, you shouldn’t divide the political system into two bands. There is always scope for one person to believe in some things from one side, and some things from the other. I believe it shouldn’t be about “the way the party does things”, but instead, more about “what will benefit the country the most”.

This article, published today on TechCrunch, briefly talks about this:

“No free country has ever been without parties, which are a natural offspring of freedom,” wrote James Madison.

Of course, I believe this is absolute rubbish. Political parties are not natural offspring of freedom. Freedom is one thing, political parties are another. Whilst siding yourself with a political party can be considered freedom of choice, the choices made by political parties are often single-minded unilateral decisions which lack freedom of thought, as they are constrained within boundaries imposed by the political parties’ belief system.

The article furthermore offers the following possible solution:

One popular, if contentious, solution to bitter partisanship is a multi-party system, where multiple groups are constantly forging new alliances based on specific issues, rather than a constant zero-sum tug-of-war where each party has the same enemy on every problem.

However, I digress. A multi-party system will lead towards more confusion.

So what do we need?

What we need are intelligent, knowledgeable, enthusiastic people, who put their country before their set of beliefs, to put together a group of people with similar beliefs that will back this person, economically, emotionally and whole-heartedly, so that this person may get into office. This person would not be part of a political party, but instead, would propose a plan, establishing feasible time-lines, whilst adhering to a set of rules that would govern his/her time in office (apart from the constitution, of course).

This would also make voting much simpler of course. Don’t think left-right politics. Think alignment to values and proposals. Voting could be separated into three stages. The first stage would consist of a questionnaire, where you answer yes/no to a set of questions concerning the country, society, economy, education, business, war, and a few other factors. This questionnaire would give you a list of three candidates (and their backing groups) that fit the answers the best. The second stage would consist of an analysis of the available options, studying the background, the plan, and the ideas of each candidate. The third stage would be the actual voting process as we know it: Select a candidate, vote.

Of course, this can’t work without guarantees. Each candidate would have to guarantee that the plan will be followed, and if catastrophic misalignment of the plan ensues, that person would leave office and a new voting poll would take place.

Of course these are just a few ideas I’ve been thinking about for a while now. Implementing these may be next-to-impossible, considering the system we currently have, and the rate it takes to ‘commit new changes’. Nonetheless, I believe it would bring forth a better system.

What say thee?

The right fucking decisions

Posted by under Life, Literature, Politics, Society

The right fucking decisions. That’s what people should learn to make.

If people made the right fucking decisions, the world would not only seem better, it would be better. Less car crashes, less time wasted, less unemployment, less abortions, less suicides, less disasters, less stupidity.

  • Action-reaction: you decide to marry the wrong person, you have a child, you divorce, the child grows up. The child either becomes l/g/b/t, kills someone, becomes a criminal, commits suicide, or in a few cases, lives a “normal” life.
  • Action-reaction: you are skilled in arts but pursue a career in finance to become an investment banker, your ego outshines your skill, you make bad choices, the market collapses, you lose everything, you kill yourself.
  • Action-reaction: you are bullied in school, you feel you are being bullied for life, you feel so much better than the rest inside, you feel powerful, you take a gun, you go to school, you shoot everybody.

It’s not hard to make the right decisions, just think before you act, measure your options, make the best choice.

When it doesn’t work out, you know you tried your best, and it will probably turn out better next time.

If you lose your money, break your mobile, crash your parents car, befriend the wrong person… think, measure, then act… Next time. Tomorrow never comes when tomorrow is all you wait for. Today is the only time, this moment.

Lets stop acting like mindless fools and get our act together, lets make the right fucking decisions, for the sake of humanity.

How Police could effectively pre-empt riots

Posted by under A.I., Computers, Life, News, Politics, Society, Technology

Over the past few days we have seen violence escalate dramatically in different cities across England, with London being the primary location. Acts of violence, rioting, looting, and arson have taken place at night for several days.

I have been attached to the BBC News coverage through their website and I saw an interesting tweet posted there:

Tweeted by Hannah Robertson in GloucesterAt first I thought. Pre-empt where the next bout would take place? How on earth would they manage that?

But it actually isn’t that hard. They have a mountain of CCTV data, they have a good amount of servers, all they lack is a bit of artificial intelligence.

The best way I can think of to determine where possible bouts of violence could sprout in what seems like an apparent random non-deterministic method of choice is as follows:

The IT team of the police should annotate the direction of each CCTV camera, including which streets are in view and the coordinates.

Afterwards, the CCTV cameras should be plotted on a 2D map, as vectors (pointing in the direction they are facing, with the length of the vector being the distance the camera covers).

Map Plot of LondonAdditionally, all points of interest should be mapped, such as shopping centres, residential areas, commercial areas, shops with high-value items, and shops with low-value items. Most of this data can be readily obtained from Google Maps, amongst other online maps. This data can be extracted and annotated with the values we require (such as the value of the goods sold per area, etc.)

If you think this is a very hard task, it is not. A very simple way of doing this would be to go to the website (or ask by phone) of each major retailer and chain for a list of addresses of their shops. Google Maps can plot them on a map using a spreadsheet as input. There you go, simple as that!

A Machine Learning program could be developed using WEKA (for instance), in which an SVN is programmed to take data from the map-plot, where priority spots include places where high-value items are sold. Additionally, it would take data from each CCTV camera.

Now, how do we represent the data from CCTV cameras? One way would be to take a selection of pixels from each camera, measure the amount of change for a second, and wherever there is a large enough change in different areas of the same camera, we might have a lot of movement going on. So we automatically annotate the data per CCTV camera as having “movement” or “no movement”. Additionally, a range from 0-1 would produce better results (hopefully).

So now we run an SVN machine on the data and hopefully come up with some interesting results.

What could essentially be obtained from this is a vector describing the movement of as mass of people from camera to camera, this vector would be projected on the 2d map. Multiple vectors could be plotted at the same time if there were multiple riots taking place at the same time in the city. A confidence level can be given to each vector (assuming we have built in a few mechanisms to differentiate people from cars, etc). The places of interest could be mapped as hotspots, and furthermore we can predict paths to possible places of interest, derived from the speed and direction of each vector.

So there you go. If you belong to the MET, please share this blog post with your boss (or the IT team) and get working on a system to perform such actions, it would certainly help prevent further stupidity in the future. 6,000 police officers should be able to deal with outbreaks of crime provided they knew where the rioters would be gathering and where they are heading.

Carta en contra de la corrupción Mexicana

Posted by under Politics

Alemania en la era Nazi era una Alemania unida. Una Alemania que luchaba por un ideal. Aún siendo un ideal a expensa de millones de inocentes luchaban unidos. Confiaban en un hombre y trabajaron duro por cumplir con su meta. No hay duda que lo que hicieron estuvo mal, pero no hablo hoy sobre lo incorrecto que estuvo el ideal, sino de la gente que trabajó unida. Algo que México no sabe hacer.

Desde hace años me llegan correos, algunos de ellos re-enviados cientos de veces, en los que los ciudadanos no hacen más que culpar a los políticos por todas las desgracias. Correos electrónicos sobre promesas que no se han cumplido, correos en los que desearían que México fuera un país mejor. Sin embargo, todos aquellos correos solo apuntan hacia los errores que se han cometido, y pocas veces dan una solución concreta hacia los problemas del país.

¿Cual es el problema verdadero? Nosotros, los ciudadanos Méxicanos. Vaya, al menos no estamos haciendo protestas estúpidas como Francia, España y Grecia que pocas veces logran un cambio verdadero, pero estamos esquivando el problema verdadero a final de cuentas. El país no está unido, los Méxicanos parece que por naturaleza queremos aplastar a los que nos rodean, no le damos la mano al compañero para que suba, queremos ser los primeros en alcanzar un puesto mejor, queremos ser los que nos reconocen como “los buenos”, a expensas de otros la mayoría del tiempo.

Para que México en realidad mejore tenemos que actuar como un país unido, dejarnos de mamadas, y empezar a cambiar la cultura negativa que nos rodea. Tenemos que empezar a confiar en aquellos que quieren lograr un cambio, y luchar para que se logre. Aquí estamos quejándonos del crimen organizado, de la guerra de los narcotraficantes, de que el IVA subió a 16%, de que se prometió remover la tenencia, en vez de trabajar más, dejar de quejarnos, ayudar a otras empresas y otros individuos, crear una mejor industria, proponer planes de mejora, y lograr cambios verdaderos y concretos.

Tenemos un presidente que está haciendo algo por primera vez en años para combatir el narcotráfico, o al menos disminuir sus consecuencias en la población general. Y nos seguimos quejando. Por el amor de Dios, cierren la boca y pónganse a trabajar. Démosle un aprecio al presidente Calderón por al menos intentar hacer algo positivo en vez de seguir quejándonos de nuestros gobernadores y políticos.

Ahora, después del huracán que ha devastado cientos de calles en Nuevo León y sus alrededores, ¿a quién le echaremos la culpa? Solo falta que algún ingenuo empiece a enviar una cadena de correos culpando al gobierno nuevamente. Es cierto, el drenaje podría estar mejor diseñado, las calles podrían ser de mejor material, pero no es tiempo de quejarnos, es tiempo de ponernos las pilas y comenzar a trabajar en la reconstrucción, en crear mejores planes de contingencia, y en actuar como el país que deberíamos ser.

Volviendo al punto de Alemania: Ellos no se quedaron sentados después de la guerra, no se pusieron a llorar, se pusieron a trabajar, reconstruyeron el país, y se volvieron mas fuertes que nunca, hoy siendo una de las potencias económicas más fuertes de Europa nuevamente. A nosotros nos revienta un huracán y a los dos días estoy escuchando comentarios negativos de que todavía no hay agua, quejándose que el gobierno no está haciendo nada, y todo esto sin saber si realmente está haciendo algo o no. Saquen las palas, las cubetas, las escobas y pónganse a trabajar. Hagan un mapa de daños, envíenlo al gobierno para ayudarles a que establezcan las prioridades. Aquellos en el gobierno: Hagan un plan de rescate y reparación, y pónganse a trabajar. Aquellos que tienen contactos en el gobierno: Insistan, propongan, mejoren.

Si luchamos unidos México puede ser una verdadera potencia mundial. Solo es cuestion de apoyarnos, unirnos, pelear. Esta es una guerra contra nosotros mismos. Para erradicar la corrupción, el narcotráfico, el crimen organizado, y la plena hueva, tenemos que dejar de quejarnos y empezar a actuar como los ciudadanos Mexicanos que somos.