Rabbits, Blinkity

There's been a lot of complaining about lottery winners getting food stamps. This makes a certain amount of sense, I suppose, but you've got to wonder how big of a deal this really is. So I thought I'd find out. Lottery winners over a certain amount times $200 per month food stamps times 12 months.

As it turns out, figuring out the number of lottery winners isn't easy. But according to this, there are about ten 1 million+ winners in California per year. There are similar numbers on the Oregon lottery website. So let's assume 40 "big" winners per year for each state. That's 2080 winners. Multiply it out, this is about 5 million dollars in wasted food stamps. For the whole country. Assuming every single lottery winner collects food stamps.

71.8 billion dollars in food stamps were given out last year, so the lottery winners are potentially ripping us off for a grand total of... 0.006%. Clearly, they must be stopped!

So. A lottery winner collecting food stamps may be a nasty thing to do, and perhaps states should pass regulations to prevent it. But at the same time, I'm quite sure that there are much bigger corruption concerns in the food stamp distribution business. Can we stop running our mouths about it already?

On the 1 in 1,000,000 change that someone reads this and hasn't managed to hear about SOPA, or isn't sure about it, or something, let me just urge you to look it up and consider it carefully. This is pretty bad stuff, even by post-9/11 standards. The really amazing thing, is how little our congresspeople seem to know about how the internet even works. Will this stop piracy? No. It won't even bother it a little bit. Will it seriously annoy legitimate content producers? You bet.

Could it potentially be used to censor anti-government, anti-corporate, or other forms of free speech? Absolutely. Will it? Probably not immediately to a great extent, and hopefully it would be stopped in court if it became too extreme, but in the future, well, who knows.

It's clearly wrong, clearly pointless, and possibly dangerous, which is why it needs to be stopped. Contact your congresscritters and senatecritters now.

The protesters on wall street have a problem. The rest of us don't know what they want, which means they don't know either. And this means they won't get anything done. The curse of true democracy, if you will.

That this is the case was made quite clear by this NPR story, but there were signs of it before. For instance, look at this list of "one demands". There are two real demands in there:

• Ending capital punishment
• Ending American imperialism (By this, I assume they mean a large scale troop withdrawal)

But I don't think that these are really the focus of the protest. The rest are either too vague ("Ending the modern gilded age"), impossible ("Ending war"), or such that nobody can actually agree on how to accomplish ("Ending joblessness", most of the rest). The official declaration is equally problematic. It's patterned after the Declaration of Independence, including a list of grievances, most of which are clearly true. But one thing is missing. The Declaration of Independence contained this:

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, .... solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States...

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