There's a guy under my car!

At my oil-change place, there's usually one guy in the pit beneath the car and another at the open hood. The downstairs guy removes old oil; the upstairs guy fills new oil. The guy in the pit drains oil from all the cars. On a busy day, a quick-lube place might have one guy in the pit and three guys filling fresh oil, and doing the rest of the servicing on three separate cars.

Strikes me that the job of the downstairs guy could easily be automated. The crux of his job is finding the right location for the nut that he unscrews. If a machine could do this -- with some positioning-help from the guy upstairs -- the rest of the automation would be simple enough.

The Magna Carta

The Magna Carta (1215 A.D.) lists what one might call "procedural rights" or "concrete rights". Basically, these are implementations, i.e. concrete forms of, the rights to life.

The Magna Carta is a good illustration of the development of knowledge. In it, we do not see an abstract declaration of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. (Indeed, I would guess that many of the lords, churchmen and merchants who were asking for some rights would have said that peasants are far less deserving of rights than they.)

Instead of abstract principles, the Magna Carta is mostly a list of specific "procedural rights" (someone give me a better term). It makes sense that people in that far away age would start by groping for some specific rights, e.g. the right to cut down part of a forest to grow food on the land, before reaching the broader principle. It took a few centuries during which people enumerated various such rights before they could grasp the more abstract idea of the "right to life" and its applicability to all human beings.

For anyone who's interested, here's my summary of the rights listed in the Magna Carta:

1. King to have less control of Church.
2. "Free men" to have certain rights.
3. Heirs have a right to their father's land
4. A debtor's land may not be seized if he chooses to pay his debt from other assets
5. Certain types of taxes restricted
6. Special "independence" for the City of London
7. Ordinary law-suits will be settled in a fixed place, instead of moving around with the royal court
8. Other "roaming" courts established, to handle cases is some areas
9. Fines should be reasonable, and part of the test should be that the fine does not deprive the person of their source of livelihood
10. Constables & royal officials must pay for corn they take and must get an owner's consent before taking certain items.
11. Standards laid down for weights and measures
12. A person's confession alone is not sufficient basis to try him
13. In peacetime, merchants may freely enter and leave England without being taxed unduly
14. New forests created during King John's reign will be deforested

Law to enforce vegetarianism

Imagine this (fictional) news-story:

Sacramento, May 1st 2035: Governor, Richard Nader, today signed a bill that will make California the first vegetarian state in the nation.

The slaughter of animals has been illegal in California for the last decade, and taxes on meat products have been raised steadily. Per capita beef consumption has dropped from a high of 66 pounds per year at the end of the last century to just under 10 pounds today. Some cities, led by San Francisco, already ban the sale of meat and meat products within their jusrisdictions.

Lawmaker Ron Reagan III, who sponsored the bill, said: "Violent acts toward animals have long been recognized as indicators of a dangerous psychopathy that does not confine itself to animals. Without an all-out ban, people in the less progressive areas of the state were making a mockery of the rule of law. A vast majority of Californians don't support cruelty and killing. It's really simple actually; I think the bible says it well: 'Thou shalt not kill.'"

Think it can't happen? I'd agree. Wait though... why not? What's the reason? The only reason it would not happen is because it would not have popular support,.

I worked on one commuting assignment that had a liberal dinner expense account: Wolfgang Puck type restaurants at least once or twice a week. The veal at some of those places is yummy. My food-orders led to some discussion about the ethics of veal-eating. I figure there's a fair number of people who'd sign up to ban veal. A fair number, but not enough. So, what's a PETA activist to do? The answer: target a smaller constituency. They came up with a very creative target. Any ideas?

Foie gras! Who is going to object to a ban on foie gras? How many people even eat foie gras over their lifetimes? How many even know what it is? How many who eat it will really miss it if it's gone? Foie gras is a target with little democratic (small "d") support.

A veal-eater ought to object to a ban on foie gras; a beef eater should too. Will they? Nah! That would be to defend a principle, rather than to defend something real. Too abstract to worry about. So, Chicago just went ahead and banned it.
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When the Nazis came for the communists,I remained silent;I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,I remained silent;I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,I did not speak out;I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews,I did not speak out;I was not a Jew.
When they came for me,there was no one left to speak out.

- Martin Niemöller