Bounding the Problem

     Okay, I don't want to get tooooo mathematical on people here but I do want to get something across that is import to understand.  Please! I ask you to be patient in reading this.

     Let's start with a question.  Can mathematics solve ALL problems?

     The answer to that question is NO.  It can't.    Some problems are by there very nature unsolvable and those in mathematics know this to be true.   It's for this reason that all math theorems put boundaries on the issue they are trying to address.  These boundaries are extremely important in defining the solutions it can provide.  Some examples of this are:

• For every function of Real Numbers...
• For all positive integers....
• For all functions that are contiguous and homogeneous between x0 and x1

      In all of these cases we are defining the boundaries of the problem space so that those who try to use this theorem on problems that are outside this space will know not to waste their time trying to use it.  It doesn't just save time, it insures answers they might derive will be viewed as wrong by construction.   It also, says to those applying your idea on their problem that does fit this boundary that their results will be of use to them.

     The problem today in society is we fail to define the boundaries of the problems we are trying to fix and we jump right into the solution space.   To illustrate this, take for example Sacramento's recent decision to carve out $130 million in funds to combat homelessness.   If we were to put this into a mathematical form it would look like this:

For all homeless people living in the city of Sacramento, $130 million is set aside to build Tiny Homes for the homeless so they don't have to live on the streets or tents.

    So the boundaries of this problem are:

1. The homeless 
2. Living in the city of Sacramento

    On first glance it seems to define the boundaries quite well.  If you are homeless in Sacramento then you will be given a Tiny Home to live in.   But is that adequate?   Here is why it is not.

• What does it mean to be "homeless"?   
• Does having a backpack and a sleeping-bag automatically make me "homeless" ?
• How do I prove I am really homeless or just someone looking for a cheap place to live?   
• How do I show I have been homeless for a term of time you might require?   
• Am I homeless by choice or by life's circumstances?

     Next, we need to look at the issue of Sacramento being the boundary of where we are trying to fix this problem.  Again, on the outset it seems to be pretty clear.   We can draw on a map the city limits of Sacramento and say that bounds the problem quite well.   We are not solving homelessness for California or even Sacramento County.    Here are the issues that make this boundary not a boundary:

• How do you define a homeless resident of Sacramento?  
• By definition they have no residency because they have no physical home
• If someone hitchhikes from Roseville, would they instantly qualify for a Tiny Home?    
• How long do they need to be in Sacramento to qualify and how do you assess that time?

    Without proper bounding, this issue will not be fixed but will probably grow exponentially as more homeless will come from other areas to take advantage of this new program.  It will not SOLVE the problem at all.   Here it is not that the solution is "bad" it's just that the bounding of the problem is deeply "flawed" and will lead to more problems than solutions. 

     Of course we might just say we accept that people will abuse the system and disregard our porous  boundaries and do nothing to address them. If  you do that you might as well have no boundaries at all.   You might as well let the world know we are opening the Tiny-Town to all who want to come and use them.

 

When to Quit

   Other boundaries we fail to add to projects like this deal with results and when to end a solution.  In many mathematical theorems the concept of "until" often plays a role.   The theorem may require you to repeat a process either until a solution is found or there is found a problem from which the algorithm cannot resolve itself.  Often in combinatorial problems this can be the case.  We cannot try ALL possible combinations for some problems and the search algorithm we employed has tried skim through those combinations might spend too much time and has find no solution. We must QUIT and try something else. 

    When bounding our social problems we often fail to measure if any improvements have been found and quantify if those improvements were "worth it".    No one likes to fail, but it's part of the search process.   Edison tried over 10,000 different filaments before he found carbon-thread worked.  If he had kept trying solution #1 without quitting he never would have found his answer.  Tiny-Homes might be a solution for homelessness but it might not be too.  We can try it, but we need to be willing to admit our mistakes and move on to the NEXT solution no matter how married to that idea we might feel. 

   This often happens because people become emotionally and economically connected to the solution.  Take the Tiny-Homes project.  It will need someone to spearhead it.  It will take people to manage the property and the buildings.   It will take others to care for the residents and maybe extra law enforcement and security.    These peoples lives are economically connected to this never ending.   If it ends, they lose their jobs and thus lose their economic security.   They lose their objectivity in the process and will do anything to make it look successful or an absolute necessity to the community.

A Better Boundary

 I am not entirely opposed to this idea of helping people who really need it. 

    Maybe to better bound the problem, the solution should be written as this:

To combat the problem of homeless working families, who currently cannot afford decent housing. $130 million will be set aside to build low cost Tiny-Homes for a small rental fee to allow these families a temporary housing while they work towards better economic stability.   The project will be reviewed annually and if costs to the community outweigh the benefits to the community it will be shutdown

   Here we have bounded the problem to solve the problem of homeless working families first.  Second we have bounded the problem to those who can work but can't make enough to rent a place (work could even be provided to them if needed). The Tiny-Home site could also provide the "address" they will need to fill out job applications to employers.  The rental fee insures that people coming here will need to find and keep employment and also provide them with a sense of honor and value.

Conclusion 

   Does this fix ALL homelessness?  Of course not, but it solves one big piece of it that we care about a lot.   For other homeless bound people we might need other solutions.  For the drug-addict we need treatment facilities to get them off the drugs and re-connected to families and communities.   For mentally-ill people we need to get them back into mental health facilities and not prisons.  Those problem-spaces need much different solutions than tiny-homes.  The tiny-home solution will not work for them, but instead will probably exacerbate their problems and make things worse for those it would help.   Maybe for some who get the help they need, the tiny-home would be a step in the right direction for them, but they need to first get those other problems out of the way.

   We must resist searching for simple answers to complex problems.   They are as rare as unicorns.

   PS - this solution is not new at all.  A "shanty town" was erected in the middle of New York Citiy's Central Park in the 1930's to deal with the Great Depression's homeless problem.  Readers will note that it was a disaster and the cause of many deaths by violence and disease.


 

We should not punish people for crimes they have not committed

    Recently "60 Minutes" did a story on Red-Flag-Laws.   In their article they led with the story of a man who was mentally unstable and had a large assortment of guns in his apartment.   The police had dealt with him in the past, but never were able to hold him on any law he could be charged with.  In the story, he shoots several police officers as they were in the process of breaking down his door to investigate an issue and talk to him.  One office was killed by the man.   60-Minutes talked to a police-chief who was in support of passage of Colorado's Red-Flag-Law.   He believed it would save lives in the long run.

     How do Red-Flag-Laws work? 

     First you have to go to a court and issue a statement showing that a person has made "threats" to your life and safety.   The defendant is not required to be at the hearing, but if they are they can make counter claims to the judge.   The judge then issues a judgement of whether the guns should be confiscated or not.   If the judge does, then the police are sent to the persons home to confiscate them.  The person can come back in a period of time (30 days usually) to prove that they are not longer a threat and that they should be given back their guns.

     Sounds easy... right?

     Here is what is wrong with it. 

     First of all, judges will side with the threatened person nearly 100% of all the time.  Why?  Because it's safest for them, the judge.   If they rule in favor of the gun owner and he does shoot someone then that murder will be on the judge because they "could" have stopped it.   There is no upside to letting you keep your guns, but there is plenty of upside to take them away. 

     Second, you have not been charged with any crime, but you are considered "guilty-until-proven-innocent".    On top of that, you now have the impossible task of proving to the judge you are NOT a threat.   How do you do that?   If a judge asks you "Will you never use these guns to harm a person?" and you reply "Never, your honor!", then the judge has a choice to either believe you or keep your guns.  What is safer?   It is impossible to "prove" you will never ever do something.   Yet here you are, guilty of nothing, but punished for life because not only can you never get your guns back, you will never ever be allowed to buy another gun.   You can go before a judge a 100 times and declare you are no longer a threat to others but have no way to prove that beyond a shadow of a doubt.  It will always be in the best interest of the judge to keep your guns rather than let you have them back.

    It's a life-sentence without committing a crime.

    This is the biggest problem with Red-Flag-Laws.  They go against the most fundamental basis of our Constitution and Legal System:

 INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY IN A COURT OF LAW.    

     Nothing is more sacred in our legal system than that.  NOTHING!   If we allow our legal system to do away with this in these cases we now have a legal precedent to do away with it altogether.  We cannot let that happen, no matter how many "lives it might save". It moves our legal system from one of trying crimes that have been committed to one in which we take away rights in order to prevent crimes that "could" be committed.  While we do have laws on the books to put restraining orders on people who pose a threat to others, those orders do not take Constitutional Rights or Property away from them or there ability to protect themselves.

      It reminds me of the Tom Cruise movie, "Minority Report", where people are tried on crimes that are "foreseen" by 5 girls who have precognition abilities.   It seems to work until it is found out that the girls "visions" can be tampered with to put innocent people away.  Our legal system must never become a system to prosecute people for crimes they "might commit", no matter how many lives it "might save".   . 

     That brings me to my final issue.  I take issue with the Sheriff who sided with the Red-Flag-Law, who claimed it would save lives.   It is the police officers who will have to serve these judgments.  They will be put into harms way to confiscate the guns.   In the story 60-Minutes used, the mentally ill man would have been met with the same police officers at his door who wanted to talk with him.  Only now, they would have had to tell him they are there to confiscate his guns.  Would he have handed them over peacefully?   I very much doubt that.  Instead, the might have wounded even more police officers and killed even more of them.  To me, the only people who would hand over their guns peacefully are mentally-stable-law-abiding-citizens.  But if they are mentally-stable-law-abiding-citizens, then most likely they were no threat in the first place and the issuance of the Red-Flag-Law is completely unneeded.

First they came for....

    Recently I was in comment-section at work on an article dealing with the future of the Automated-Car.   I had made the comment that I believe the "force" behind this technology is not the consumer, but the heads of corporations.  I say this because you hear very little support from your average person.   Google has tried automated taxis for sometime now and there has been very little increase in their usage.  The idea of letting go of the wheel and letting a computer do the driving is still unnerving for a lot of people (me included).   Our guts tell us that the world is a very complicated place and no programmer could think of every possible scenario. 

    This is why I said in my comment, "This is coming from corporations wanting to get rid of delivery jobs like truckers and home-delivery-drivers".   Another person from my work replied that these jobs will eventually go away but other jobs will take their place.  He ended it with "we should not worry about this".

    Of course he can say that...he's not a truck driver.  Tell that to a person is over the age of 40 and has 20-25 years left to work that he needs to change careers.   Look him in the face and tell him it's all for the better because now he can buy his stuff from Walmart even cheaper!   But what does he buy all that Walmart crap with???  His tears??

    My reply to him was that it's easy for us to say that... we are not truck-drivers.   But engineers have a target on their backs as well but don't want to face it.   I have written before how Moore's Law is shifting it's methods to achieve its goals.  For those of you not acquainted with it, it goes like this: The COST of the transistor will be cut in HALF every 2 YEARS.   In the past, we have had the luxury of a silicon process system where we could make transistors 50% smaller every 2 years (ie - double the number of transistors on a chip).   Year after year we grew the number of transistors on the chip and added more and more functionality.   Everything else could stay the same and our costs would be cut in half and Moore's Law kept marching on.  But now today, that is not possible.  Transistors are getting TOO SMALL and it's taking 4+ years (AND GROWING) to improve the silicon processes. 

    In order to keep the law going, focus is not on the transistor, but on those who put the transistors together to make new products; the engineers.  Some of this has been done by standardizing our designs.  By turning parts of the design into small "LEGO blocks" we can reuse them over and over again ( motto: design once and use many ).   But now the attention is focusing on the validation process.   What if I can write a specification in a way that a computer can read it and create validation content to verify it works or not?   I can get rid of teams of validation engineers. 

   Artificial Intelligence is the engineers "automated truck".   If you think it's too complicated you are wrong.   If I can have AI read medical documents and kick out cancer-treatment-recommendations I can surely have it read a design spec and kick out design-verification-tests.  What's really crazy is it's engineers who are putting these systems together.   It reminds me of a famous episode of the 1950's TV series "The Twilight Zone" in which a factory manager keeps automating more and more of his factory until all that is left is him.  Then on the final scene the board replaces the manager with a robot too.  We are designing our own replacements as we speak.

We should all pay heed to the old poem, "First they came for the socialists"

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Maybe a 21st century version would be

First they came for the Bank-Tellers, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Bank-Teller.

Then they came for the Checkout-Clerks, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Checkout-Clerk.

Then they came for the Truck-Drivers, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Truck-Driver.

Then they came for the Engineers—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Fighting over LAST place

      In week 9 of the 2019 NFL season, the NY Jets and the Miami Dolphins went to battle.   The Dolphins won the game with a score of 26-18.   The reason this game got little attention from the media was because both teams came into this game with a record 1 win and 7 losses. In a sense, both teams were fighting to not be in last place.  While at the end of the game one team was in last place, the other team could only claim to be in NEXT-to-last place.  Both teams were essentially mathematically eliminated from any Super Bowl or Playoff hopes for that season.  I seriously doubt either team was chiding the other at the end of the game with touts of "YOUR IN LAST PLACE!!" as their situation wasn't much better.   Nor do I think the players would have enjoyed watching a group of fans in the stands fighting with each other over the result of the game either. 

    In the long view, politics in our world is much like game between two last place teams.   In the end, God will bring an end to all political systems as they are not needed.    They have no future.  Yet we are like the fans in the stands fighting over our respective teams.  When seen from the long view it is quite ridiculous. 

    I believe this is why St. Paul doesn't mention Nero or the Roman Senate or issues with Roman Law and his predicament in jail.  Paul writes in Romans 8:18 

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.

   For us, much our present sufferings is watching our once great country fall into hatred, division and basic lawlessness.   We must be like Paul and take to "long view" to keep our perspective.    Capitalism/Socialism, Left/Right, Democrat/Republican, White/Black, Male/Female will all be gone and relegated to LAST PLACE.  If that is the case, should we place such importance on these things as we live out our lives?