Sunday, February 21, 2021

Further Addendum

You can keep Schwarzenegger's 'servant's heart' and be a member of any political party.

It isn't actually saying that you must support any particular policy. However... 

The thing about putting ideas into practice, about executing them (which does primarily fall under the executive branch, but is also important for legislation) is that it requires feedback adjustment to achieve your goals. Fine tuning.

I could give some of the more famous sayings on this ('no plan survives contact with the enemy' comes to mind, though that phrase presupposes an enemy) but the point is that you have to check to see if your plan is working and adjust as needed.

When asked if it's better to have a good plan poorly executed or a poor plan well executed, I go with the latter - because the adjustments you make to execute it will make up for the weaknesses in the initial starting point. (This assumes it's a 'poor' plan in that it's not well thought out and doesn't account for key elements in the plan, and not a bad plan because the end goal is bad.)

So when trickle down economics was first proposed its entirely possible that people who genuinely cared for the American public supported it. There have been times in the past when burdensome taxes (as an example) hurt more than helped.

That said, you have to monitor the results, get the facts, and adjust as needed. As I keep saying, the tool best suited to one situation may not be well suited to another. 

We have had ample time to see the results, and there's a pretty strong consensus that it doesn't.

That means anyone still pushing it either a) isn't paying attention or b) knows it doesn't work and doesn't care.

When people care about finding solutions it drives them to find policies that work.

They'll monitor the results and try something else if what they're doing isn't working. (this, btw, describes a lot of how we troubleshoot in tech. See an error, look up possible reasons. Try a possible solution, check if it worked. If it does, great. If not, try something else. Rinse and repeat until you fix it.)

If we all care about the American people, we'll care about bankruptcies and evictions and healthcare on a holistic level. 

We can argue about whether the pharmaceutical industry really needs to charge crazy amounts for insulin in order to fund their research and development, or whether it's more important to make sure Americans don't have to spend massive amounts of money on something that can be manufactured rather cheaply in order to avoid dying - and in the course of that argument we might come up with a plan to help reduce the costs to diabetics while supporting a good R&D program.

It's when people lose sight of the end goal and get locked into one particular plan that things start going wrong. Especially, especially if you have to manufacture evidence to support your plan. 

Climate change is kind of like trickle down economics. Back in the day there were valid reasons to question it. (I still remember my father, who had a bachelor's in geology and master's in meteorology, complaining about how media misrepresented the hole in the ozone layer. Not that he was a climate change denier. He acknowledged it had grown bigger, and as a scientific consensus emerged he accepts that as well. But back when this was a thing he pointed out that there had always been a hole. Having a hole in and of itself wasn't the problem, so much as whether our actions were making it bigger.)

Now that a scientific consensus has formed, the people still insisting its not a problem are (again) either not paying attention and not updating their understanding as we continue to learn about it, or know and just don't care.


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