There are few things more American these days than apple pie, partisanship, and national debt. The last of the three, the national debt, currently sits just north of $24 trillion. Many Americans think we will never pay it off, and the math backs them up. In 77 of the last 88 years, the federal government has run a deficit. Over those 88 years, the national debt has ballooned from $17 billion in 1932 to $24.22 trillion today.
Under the assumption that we want to pay off our debt, as I see it we have three potential methods for dealing with the problem. The first method was utilized the last time our nation faced a similar debt-to-GDP ratio. Immediately following WWII, the year was 1946 and the national debt sat at 119% of GDP1. 28 years later, even though the national government only ran a surplus in 7 of those 28 years and the debt nearly doubled from $252 billion to $475 billion, the national debt sank to 31% of GDP; the boom times of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, powered GDP growth to dwarf the swelling national debt. To put the idea in numbers, in 1946 GDP was $228 billion and debt was $271 billion2; in 1974 GDP was $1,532 billion and debt was $475 billion. This method works by growing the GDP pie such that the size of the debt is smaller relative to the size of the economy and thus easier to pay off. Unfortunately, our economy is much larger and more developed than in 1946 and would have trouble sustaining 7.03% growth like we averaged from 1946-1974. For example, over the past 10 years, we have averaged growth of 3.41%3. With long term interest rates, the rate at which our debt grows, sitting at around 3%, unfortunately, this no longer seems like a viable method to fix our current debt issue.4
The second option is to pay it off over time like a mortgage. If we pay off the debt as we go ( e.g. $500 billion every year for 48 years) our annual budget would be crippled, severely limiting our ability to fund new initiatives or forcing us to steeply increase taxes.
The third method is to use the power of compound interest. Financial advisors talk so incessantly about the value of compounding when it comes to our 401(k) plans that the word has almost become a clique. And yet the power of the idea remains strong. By doing some simple calculations we can see how this could be used to make our current debt more manageable. Under the assumption that we will not be adding to the current debt pile, and assuming a 3% interest rate on our current debt, our debt will balloon to ~$465 trillion in 100 years. Assuming an investment return of 6% annually, an investment of $1.37 trillion today would also grow to ~$465 trillion in 100 years. If we expand the time interval to 200 years, our current debt of ~$24 trillion will grow to $8,945 trillion, but we would only need ~$78 billion today growing at 6% annually to pay it off. This power of compounding is a result of the difference between our rate of return and our borrowing costs over a long period of time.
This type of investment idea, although unprecedented at the national level in the United States, has become increasingly popular around the world over the last 30 years. The general classification for such funds is Sovereign Wealth Funds. Norway has one with over $1 trillion currently under management. On a smaller scale there are a few in the United States: the Alaska Sovereign Fund, the Texas Land Trust, and the North Dakota Fund, to pick a few. Each has tens of billions under management. In many instances, both nationally and internationally these funds got their start with the taxation of a booming commodity like oil, gas, or ore. In total Sovereign Wealth Funds tally over $16.4 trillion under management. Thus, rather than being a vanguard in a new and unknown field, the United States would be just a large player joining a worldwide trend.
If we are in agreement that we would like to use compound interest to assuage our current debt problem, then the question becomes the size, scale, and implementation of such a plan. With interest rates at 3% and investment returns at 6% these are a few hypothetical figures: $72 billion invested for 100 years if we pay off the interest as we go; $1.37 trillion invested for 100 year if we do not pay off the interest as we go; $212k invested for 200 years if we pay off the interest as we go; $78 billion invested for 200 years if we do not pay off the interest as we go. These numbers are a starting point and the proper initial sum likely depends on the likelihood we will have governments which run balanced budgets while understanding that paying the interest payments as we go is a very sound idea. Depending on the size of this initial sum, the possibile funding methods include diverting the money which currently goes towards interest payments for a few years, a one-time appropriation by the government, a one-time tax on the citizens ($225 per citizen gets us to ~$74 billion), or Warren Buffet donating his personal fortune to the cause.
We have put ourselves in a tough position. If we do not pay off our debt and continue to exceed our budgets we will eventually default, our borrowing costs will go up, and our future growth will be stunted. Fortunately, we have an alternative avenue for getting control of our gargantuan debt problem, that does not involve undue hardship. It will take patience; but with the proper structure, we can utilize time to do the heavy lifting for us.
1. https://www.thebalance.com/national-debt-by-year-compared-to-gdp-and-major-events-3306287
2. https://www.thebalance.com/national-debt-by-year-compared-to-gdp-and-major-events-3306287
3. https://www.multpl.com/us-gdp-growth-rate/table/by-year
4. https://www.thebalance.com/interest-on-the-national-debt-4119024
Let bikes save us from the transportation quagmire we find ourselves in. The public transportation system in most cities is old, expensive, and extremely limited. In many American cities, there is not even a single subway line. In others, the subway and bus system is not nearly broad enough to attract a large percentage of the population out of their cars. The reason for the current quagmire is that for much of the past century the vast majority of public infrastructure dollars have gone towards road construction and maintenance. Recently this has begun to change. In my current city of Boston, there is a $2 billion project currently underway to expand the green line from East Cambridge up into Somerville and Medford. And in my hometown of New York City, there is a $37 billion overhaul to the subway system planned for the next 10 years. These projects are wonderful and worthwhile but they are costly and slow. Meanwhile, we have a cheap and quick way to lessen the load on the system through bike-sharing. Through free universal bike-sharing, cities like Boston and New York, and especially cities like Charlotte and Nashville which don't have a subway system yet, could buy themselves time and reduce the capacity needed on public trains and buses.
For a city like Boston, with a population of 1 million, 25,000 bikes distributed strategically across the city, would be sufficient to accommodate maximum demand. At an average cost of $1,000 per bike, cost of bike, docking station, and installation labor included, a free bike-share system would have an initial cost of $25 million. Using NYC’s current citibike system as a reference, such a system would cost an additional $5 million per year to maintain. Thus for comparison, a free bike-share system would cost the city of Boston $75 million over the next 10 years. In comparison to the subway expansions, the cost of a free bike-share system would be a drop in the bucket.
The hope for such a system is that given the option of a $2.75 subway ride, a far more expensive taxi, or driving their own car, inhabitants would choose to use a free bike instead. This would reduce the pressure for immediate public transportation expansions, reduce the number of cars on the road, and provide a healthy form of exercise for the participants. Using the numbers from a 2017 study, such a system could reduce the load on the public transportation system by 23% and reduce the number of cars on the road by 6%. Whereas bike-sharing systems that cost the user similar amounts as public transportation only reduce the load on public transportation by 7% and car usage by 2%.
One consideration municipalities will have to think about when implementing such a system is bike lanes. Such a system will greatly increase the number of riders on the road and without proper forethought, the spontaneous mixing of bikers and cars could be dangerous. In NYC, most of the bike lanes that have been installed are on the one-way avenues like Columbus and Amsterdam. At first glance this makes sense, you move the parked cars over one lane and give bikers a designated lane. However, this has the unintended consequence of dramatically reducing the efficiency of the road for cars. Double parked cars or trucks are often on the outer two lanes of these three-lane avenues, causing thru traffic to condense into a single line of slow-moving cars. The result of such bike lanes is that avenues no longer provide for efficient car transportation, as now the one way avenues are just as slow as the two-way avenues. Bike lanes of this design are caused by limited thinking. The purpose of transportation is to move people and goods as quickly and safely as possible. Maybe it is worth adding bike lanes as the cost of car traffic, but I think there is a better way. Not all roads need to be made suitable for bikes, and not all roads need to be made suitable for cars. Make some avenues, like Amsterdam and Columbus, four-lanes wide with timed lights for brisk movement of cars. And make other avenues, like Broadway, where two-way car traffic moves slowly anyway into very safe and pleasant bike paths. If you make the two types of streets frequent enough then cars or bikes would only have to go over a block or two to reach a roadway designed specifically for their form of transport. This way we maximize speed and safety while supporting both forms of transportation.
What is true for bikes is also true for scooters. We are not taking advantage of these alternative modes of transportation even though they provide us with an easy answer to many of our pressing transportation needs. A free bike or scooter share is cheap to set up and maintain while providing many positive externalities to society. If you are worried about bikes or scooters getting stolen require riders to place a credit card on file when they take one out but don’t charge. Simple, green, and relatively cheap, it makes you wonder why we are being penny-wise but pound-foolish when it comes to charging customers for using bike-sharing systems.
I like to say I am dyslexic because I am one of the more incompetent spellers you will find. This has given me a general skittishness around all grammatical issues; thus I wade into this one warily. The use of the word woman seems to be one of the more misused in the English language. Take this sentence, seen recently in an ESPN feature, “A confident Lindsey Vonn enters the Olympics as the most decorated woman skier in history.” Now imagine that sentence being changed to “A confident Bode Miller enters the Olympics as the most decorated man skier in history.” It’s an incorrect sentence. Man is wrong; it should be male skier. Woman is wrong; it should be female. This error occurs all the time, and galls the ears every time. Female is the adjective, and woman is the noun.
1. http://www.espn.com/espnw/feature/22331122/broken-bones-torn-knees-us-skier-lindsey-vonn-fearless-heading-pyeongchang-winter-olympics
At commencement, the head of the Board of Trustees Peter Dolan stated that Tufts is a student-focused research institution. On the same day, the Board of Trustees denied tenure to beloved computer science (CS) Assistant Professor Ben Hescott, winner of the Lillian and Joseph Leibner Award for Excellence in Teaching and Advising (2012), the Graduate Student Council Award for Outstanding Faculty Contribution to Graduate Studies (2013), the Professor of the Year award (2016) and the Recognition of Undergraduate Teaching Excellence Award (2016). The latter does not follow logically from the former.
In theory, an application for tenure and its subsequent review should possess a balance between teaching, service and research. Service in this context is work related to advising, course offerings, reading graduate school applicants, faculty meetings, etc. However, according to a current CS professor who preferred to remain anonymous, in actuality, teaching and service do not factor into the decision.
Personally, Hescott was tremendously helpful to me during my junior year, when I was thinking about taking the spring semester off to do an internship. Even though I am not one of his advisees, I talked with him multiple times over a three-week period about which classes were going to be offered in the upcoming semesters, the internship itself and why he thought I should not take the semester off from school. He said that he similarly took a semester off during his undergraduate years at Boston University and found it tremendously hard to get back on track when he came back, and it led to his own delayed graduation. In addition to this episode, Hescott has always been an available life coach and welcoming smile around Halligan. In context, the two actual advisors I’ve had in the CS department, who are tenured, still do not know my name and have never provided me with anything other than a signature on my advising forms.
Looking at Ben’s record, it is clear his teaching and service are stellar and his research is good. However, he changed his area of research when he started the tenure track at Tufts from Complexity Theory to Computational Biology. Usually, an assistant professor who is up for tenure has a research history that includes their postdoc and Ph.D. research in addition to their completed research as an assistant professor; because Hescott switched his field of research, he only has five years of research in his portfolio in comparison to the usual 12. This makes his case unusual because compared to a normal tenure applicant his research looks small in quantity. However, this seems remarkably short sighted as a tenured professor could be a hire for the next 40 years, and the quality and quantity of his research since switching fields is above the bar for tenure according to the CS department.
To backtrack a bit, tenure track works such that an assistant professor gets a six-year contract from Tufts during which they teach, advise and do research. At the conclusion of the fifth year, the individual is brought up before the Board of Trustees to be considered for tenure. As described in Statement 11, the department from which the candidate is from then accumulates his or her research, has an anonymous vote of the tenured-department faculty to decide which way to give their recommendation and then writes a detailed letter explaining their support for or against tenure. In this case, the CS department gave very strong support to Hescott’s candidacy. Then that department recommendation goes to the Tenure and Promotion Committee, which is a collection of eight current faculty members from the university and Provost David Harris, who is not a voting member of the committee. The committee reviews the candidate’s credentials and gives its own recommendation. In this particular case, it recommended against Hescott receiving tenure. From there those recommendations go to the dean of the school in which the person up for tenure teaches, who also writes a letter detailing his or her own recommendations on the case. In this case, Dean of the School of Engineering Jianmin Qu was supportive of Hescott’s candidacy. After that, the decision seemingly is made in a black box. The president and provost, in conjunction with the letters of the previously mentioned parties, present each case in front of the Board of Trustees along with their own opinions. And finally, given the financial responsibility a close-to-40-year hire entails, the Board of Trustees makes the final decision. If the decision is negative, the candidate is in effect fired as he or she is offered a one-year good will contract, so he or she has time to find a different job. As is usual, Hescott has decided to pack up and ship off without taking the one-year contract. It was announced on May 24 that he has taken a position at Northeastern University, which offered him a job instantly upon the news of his dismissal.
As a graduating senior, I have been witness to the CS department as it has transitioned from a Podunk little major of 121 students in 2013 to the largest major at Tufts in 2017 with 568 students, the latter figure of which is according to the department. The school has responded to the sharp increase in CS enrollment by increasing class size and limiting most classes in the department to only CS and related majors. It got so bad this past semester that many CS seniors found themselves locked out of required classes to graduate before their enrollment time even arrived. Personally, due to the extreme scarcity of seats in CS electives, I have only ever gotten into one of my top-two electives once in my four years.
In these strained times for the department, Kathleen Fisher took over as chair of the department under the condition that the school hires six new teaching positions: four professors and two lecturers. To me this sounded like the light at the end of the tunnel; the school and department acted swiftly to deal with the exponential rise in enrollment. However, this latest action to fire the best teacher in the CS department, if not the school, during a period of unparalleled hiring, because he possessed an excusably small quantity of published works, shows brightly what is going on in the mind of the school’s leadership. It is a clear message to all future tenure candidates that they should focus solely on their research. No level of excellence in teaching or service will help them. The poster boy for excellence in these two categories, who also possessed adequate research, was summarily rejected for tenure by the Board of Trustees.
The bigger story here is not Hescott. He will be fine and he is taking a tremendous job at a competing university. It is the incentive system the school is putting in place for all future tenure applicants. How can a school be student-focused when service and teaching are not factored into tenure applications? As I leave Tufts, if a parent or a child were looking to me for advice or recommendations about college, I am not sure I could recommend Tufts. Its disregard for quality undergraduate teaching becomes overwhelmingly damning when we are paying over $65,000 for a world class education. I recommend you take your money elsewhere.
My alarm went off at 6:23am this morning, and I hit the snooze alarm. Three times. Today is Saturday. I have caddying. I have to be at Willow Ridge Country Club by 7:30. As long as I get out of the house by 6:56, I wont be late. Because of the slow start, I just grab a banana from the fruit bowl and eat it in the elevator. At 7:11 I find myself in the left lane as the road forks at the George Washington Bridge. The road ducks down under the bridge and the speed limit drops to 45. I am comfortable at 55 as I head up out of the swale. There is often a cop hiding at the top of the hill, so I always make sure I am less than 10 over the limit. The road then plateaus and starts winding back and forth as I approach the Cloisters. The limit drops to a snail’s pace (25mph) and I drop accordingly to 45. After the Ft. Tryon exit, the road starts straightening and for a short stretch the speed limit picks up to 40mph. Then finally past the Dyker exit the roadway opens to a three lane straight away. I hit the brakes. The speed limit has dropped down to 30mph. I was cruising at 50, and am now forced to slow down to 45. There’s a cop, and he has his gun out. By all accounts I should be dead meat; I am at least 15mph over the limit. I look to my left and there is a red Nissan Leaf passing me. He must be going 50. I look in my right side mirror to see if the cop will pull out. Nothing. No movement. I am not surprised. If he waits, there will be bigger fish to catch. Commuters at 7am on a Saturday don’t mess around.
This is the chaotic road logic on Saturday mornings on New York City’s West Side Highway. The rules say one thing, logic says another, and history a third. Logic would say that the speed limit should not drop on the straightest part of the highway, that such blatant disregard of the word “limit” throughout the journey would be prohibitively dangerous, and that a cop would not be so loose with enforcement. To add to the complexity, if you are driving later in the day or during the week when more cops are on duty, the rules are completely different. The system of speed limits means different things to different cops at different times of the day. When actions and law diverge to such a degree, something is broken.
The issue with speed limits is fourfold.
1. It is a butchering of the English language. Limit is supposed to mean a point beyond which it is not possible to go. Instead, speed limits function more like very safe recommendations. Going above the limit is not prohibitively reckless. The average driver “speeds” every time he or she is on the road and survives. If it were so dangerous, why are you free to drive at any speed that is less than 10 mph more than the limit? Showing such disregard for the meaning of words will not hurt anyone, but it does set a precedent of fluid meaning in law.
2. The number of crashes increases as the variation in speeds on the road increases. If there are fast cars and slow cars on the road together, you will have more accidents.1 If the average car on the road is travelling at a speed seven mph faster than the speed limit, then by driving at the speed limit or below it, the chance of a car crash is higher.2 Thus, by not enforcing the speed limits, you are creating a dangerous situation for any driver who is trying to abide by the speed ‘limit’.
3. The purpose of vehicular transport is to get people and resources from point A to point B. Cars gained market share from the horse and buggy in the early 1900s because they were much faster, but not too much more dangerous. It is a fact that the faster a car is moving, the more likely a crash will cause serious injury or death. Simple logic: If you are moving 5mph, there is not enough force to cause a serious accident; there is at 60mph. Does this mean we should put speed limits at 30mph or below on all roadways so cars remain at speeds that are not fast enough to cause a deadly accident? Trade and commerce would come to a halt and the economy would start to slide. Clearly there is an optimal point where safety and practicality are properly balanced — a point at which the cost of the human lives lost in crashes caused by excessive speed is balanced with the economic benefits of quicker transport. In an ideal world, transportation from point A to B could occur in the blink of an eye, with complete safety. In our world, we are limited by the technology we posses. Cars are imperfect; their operators are imperfect; roadways are imperfect. And in this imperfect would, we must decide what the proper speed limit is. The better built the vehicle, the better skilled the driver is, the better designed the roadway, the faster that optimal speed limit should be. Considering all factors — such as congestion, curvature of the road, design of the on/off ramps, pedestrian traffic — a proper speed limit can be derived. The issue is that no such thoughtful calculations are occurring. As a counter measure to the oil crisis of the 1974, the speed limit was reduced across the country to 55mph to reduce fuel consumption. After the crisis passed, the law was lifted, allowing states to again enforce their own speed limits. Over time, states raised the speed limits on some of their state highways. The issue is that this recalibration of the speed limit has been haphazard at best. What I would like to see is a systematic recalculation of the proper speed limit for all roads in the country based on the current road condition, the capabilities of modern day cars, and traffic. Given that this new speed limit would be the optimal speed, whether it was faster or slower than current speed limits, it should be strictly enforced.3
4. By having traffic move at a speed faster than the speed limit, you are making everyone on the road a criminal. Obviously this does not affect most of us. We drive five mph over the speed limit and nobody bothers us. However, if a cop had a desire to pull you over, he has an easy excuse. Because every car on the road is driving over the speed limit, a cop is justified in pulling over anybody he or she pleases. For a segment of our population, this poses a serious issue. If they drive below the speed limit, they increase their chances of being in an accident, and if they drive at the same speed as traffic, they leave themselves vulnerable to whatever prejudices we may have in our police system. It is wrong to make them choose. If the natural enforcement of the speed limit is 10mph higher than the posted speed limit, it would make sense to increase the posted speed limit by 10mph and then enforce it.
P.S. Growing up in New York City, I saw a lot of traffic lights. They are a necessary evil. Stop signs are impractical because of the complexity of the intersections, and the street design does not allow for roundabouts, though they are far superior.4 Thus we are left with lots and lots of traffic lights. Some avenues like Madison and Amsterdam have their lights timed, such that by going at 25mph you will consistently make the next light. Others like Broadway or Central Park West have all the lights in one direction turn green at the same time, incentivizing drivers to speed to make it through as many lights as they can before the lights change. What is the reason that all the lights in the city are not timed such that traffic moves efficiently? Safety? The average speed of traffic on timed streets is higher, certainly, but that is because they are stopped much less. Cars on timed avenues are constantly in motion, but their speed is held in check at 25mph by the timing of the lights. On untimed avenues, the average speed is lower, but the top speed is much higher, as cars speed to make more lights. Logically, it seems like having cars go from a stop, to speeding, and back to a stop in the course of 10 blocks would cause far more accidents and be far more dangerous to pedestrians than timed avenues. It is too complicated? Maybe. It would not be possible to time all the avenues and cross streets perfectly, as many of these timings would conflict with one another. However, timing avenues and major cross streets (110th, 96th, 86th, 72nd, etc.) would be trivial. Thus by having major thruways, cars that were going far distances would funnel to these streets, leaving the less timed streets empty for local traffic. It would lead to safer roadways, less congestion, less wasted time, less honking, and the list goes on. It is an issue that drives me up a wall because of how simple the fix is.
P.P.S. When you are parking your car, pull up towards the car in front of you. With city bikes and bike lanes galore, parking spaces are becoming increasingly rare. We need to maximize the space we still have. Because there is no convention, cars parked in large spaces sometimes pull up close to the front, sometimes close to the car behind, and sometimes they (gluttonous whores) sit right in the middle of a huge space. If we all pull up close (12”) to the car in front, they will be able to get out, we will reduce wasted space, and I will be able to park and get home for dinner on time.5
1. A 1987 study the US Department of Transportation found that number of crashes increases significantly when trucks drive at slower speeds than passenger vehicles. (http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/reports/tswstudy/Vol2-Chapter5.pdf)↩
2. If on a particular road, the speed variance is high, this will result in less predictability, more encounters, more overtaking maneuvers, etc. Therefore, when speed differences increase, the accident risk increases as well. Hence, a countermeasure that results in lower average speed, but in larger speed differences may not have the expected positive effect on road safety.↩
3. When speed limits are arbitrary, such as when set through political rather than empirical processes, the speed limit's relationship to the maximum safe speed is weakened or intentionally eliminated. Therefore, a crash can be counted as speed-related even if it occurs at a safe speed, simply because the speed was in excess of a politically determined limit.↩
4. Compared to stop signs, traffic signals, and earlier forms of roundabouts, modern roundabouts reduce the likelihood and severity of collisions by reducing traffic speeds and minimizing T-bone and head-on collisions. Other benefits include reduced driver confusion associated with perpendicular junctions and reduced queuing associated with traffic lights. They allow U-turns within the normal flow of traffic, which often are not possible at other forms of junction. Moreover, since vehicles on average spend less time idling at roundabouts than at signaled intersections, using a roundabout potentially leads to less pollution. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundabout)↩
5. It makes more sense to have the convention pull up to the car in front rather than the car behind because it is easier to see how close you are to the car in front. ↩
Donald Trump is the next president of the United States of America. The next senate will have 52 republicans of 100. The House of Representatives will likely have 240 republicans of 435. The Supreme Court will soon be majority conservative. Republicans will likely occupy 34 of the 50 gubernatorial mansions. The GOP will control 67 of 98 state legislative chambers.
This country was founded on the idea of checks and balances within government. If the president was over reaching, the legislature and Supreme Court were there to hold the country in balance. The government is supposed to be a slow moving beast that shifts with the general consensus of the country. This system of checks and balances only works if different parties control the different forms of government. However, we now have a single party that represents at most half the country's civilians in control of every major form of government across this country.
How could this happen? Democrats do not vote often enough. Vote early, often, and at all levels of government. There is this prevailing trend where democrats do not show up during mid-term elections, yet show up in force during presidential elections. This trend is even more drastic when the presidential election is compared to state level elections. Democrats are risking so much by not making the effort to vote for all levels of government. By being under represented at the state level, they are putting even more pressure on themselves to perform well on the national level. By not showing up in numbers for the mid term elections democrats put themselves in a hole in the presidential years, because they are losing contestable seats in the house and senate. Thus when it comes to the presidential election, the democrats have everything riding on it. They have to perform well or else they will lose the presidency and not reverse the congressional seats they lost in the midterm elections, and find themselves in a position where representatives of their views are not present in an major political position at any level of government.
It makes no sense to be so highly leveraged during the presidential campaign. You can have a bad candidate who does not draw out voters like the party needs. Maybe a scandal hits just before the election and for that reason a lot of potential voters switch over to the GOP ticket. There are an innumerable number of events that could cause a poor performance in a single election. To put all your chips on performing well on that specific day every four years is pin headed.
I am growing up in a world that will be recorded. Every online action will be recorded, preserved, and may be resurfaced in the future. For me, this presidential election put a magnifying glass on this issue. All email correspondences, speeches, interviews, which either candidate participated in since the inception of the digital era were reexamined for instances of moral lapse. In many ways this was positive in that it brought to the nations attention the flaws of the candidates that we were being asked to vote for. However it also means that a candidate is always on the clock. For a future candidate of my generation, every action from birth will be examined. The candidate is not afforded a private life. The candidate is not afforded a period of time to grow and experiment with different ideas, because in the era of sound bites those ideas will not be put in context and the candidate will not have a fair opportunity to explain him or herself.
The positive effects of this change are real. The negative effects just as much so. The change is here to stay, and we each must decide how we are going to proceed. In many ways the idea of staying silent and proceeding with our lives in a quite manor is increasingly attractive. However, for a thriving democracy, the citizens must be engaged, topics must be discussed, ideas dispersed, and for that to happen people must have the nerve to stand up and say what they believe. That is what I am hoping to do, here. To the best of my abilities I am going to lay out logical thoughts on various topics that I feel passionately about. At the moment I have no grandiose plans for high office, but nonetheless, if years from now you are reading these posts for the purpose of sullying my name, have empathy for a kid who is trying to move minds in a positive direction. Each piece is only a snapshot of my mind at the time. I try my best to have coherent, well thought out, compassionate pieces. However naturally I will be misguided at times in my beliefs, and I welcome an articulated argument in response. It is the only way towards enlightenment.