RSS For Sites Without Feeds

Problem: RSS feeds and readers are becoming more and more popular. This is because they allow content from your favorite blogs (and some websites) to be delivered to you, rather than you having to go get the content. This value has been augmented by "pipes", which let you filter and adjust the content that you receive in RSS feeds. However, for sites that do not provide RSS feeds, you need to remember to check them on a periodic basis. Such sites are typically forgotten over time, and you may miss out on valuable content.

Solution: There are a few ways that sites without XML-defined RSS feeds could still be fed into an RSS reader. One way would be to check a site for changes, and then push whatever changes are observed into a manufactured RSS feed. Second, there could be a tool that does a screen capture of a site at a regular interval (e.g. daily) and pushes this into an RSS type feed. Lastly, perhaps a bot can go to a site and push the HTML from the site directly into your RSS reader at some regular interval. It seems to me that any of these approaches, although cludgy, would provide at least some capability for monitoring sites that do not play well with RSS.

Funding Social Security

Problem: Social Security has no trust fund (aka lockbox). There are going to be many more retirees per worker when baby boomers start retiring than there were when the program was created.The current benefit formula generally gives a much higher monthly payment to the rich than it does to the poor. Is this a problem? The Republicans say there is a problem because at current levels of SS taxation, benefits are expected to far outweigh taxes in the not too distant future. Whether or not you agree that this is a problem just depends on how you feel about raising taxes to pay for the promised benefits. If your rule is that SS taxes must stay where they are, then there is a dire problem because there will not be enough money to pay the promised benefits. The Democrats say that there is no imminent threat, so we'd better wait to fix the problem until at least such time that we can get a Democratic President and some Democrats running Congress. I say that there is absolutely a problem, because if nothing is done too much of our annual federal budget in the future will have to go toward SS benefits and it will cripple our government and our economy. Basically, this small safety net has grown to a huge liability that will be a massive part of our annual budget if it is not adjusted.

Solution: Given my expertise in the field of social insurance programs, I guess it is time that I commented on what should be done about Social Security. The trifurcation fallacy is very commonly heard in the media from people like Tim Russert on Meet The Press. Basically, they say that you must do one of three things to save SS - (1) raise taxes, (2) raise the retirement age, or (3) cut benefits. But that completely overlooks the option that we have been doing and will continue to do, which is to effectively pay for SS benefits by taking money away from other areas in the federal budget. What should we do about the SS problem? The first and most important thing that we must do is create a segregated SS trust fund. Every year we should value that fund and compare it to the benefit obligations to measure the shortfall (or someday, surplus). We should project future annual contributions to the fund that are equal to the current SS payroll tax. Then we need to either pay the annual shortfall from the federal budget on an accrual basis, or systematically change the benefit formula and the retirement age (whichever is deemed to be more desirable to the country's values over time) until the projected liabilities match the projected funds in the SS trust fund. This fund can be used only to pay benefits to entitled individuals, and the government must be banned from using funds in the SS trust for any other purpose. Doing these simple things will solve the entire problem by definition, without requiring an increase in SS taxes. Note, there are some relatively painless ways to cut the benefit formula. For example, don't cut benefit for current payees, but change the formula to use a smaller Cost-of-Living factor when determining future benefits for younger people. Another option would be to change the formula to pay more to those who need it the most. Either of these options would be generally acceptable and result in huge cost savings. The key is to do something now while there is time. If we do it now, we can cut future benefits. But if we wait, we will have to cut benefits to current recipients which will be even more unpopular for Congress to do. What about the Bush approach? There are two issues with SS that most people want to talk about. There is the critical solvency issue, which I discuss above. There is also the less important issue of how the money is invested. This is a sexy issue for politicians to talk about because SS has historically had lower investment returns than most other ways of investing money, which is frustrating to the ordinary Joe Q. Nascar. President Bush has unfortunately muddled the situation by trying to address both issues at the same time. Thus, any reasonably solvency ideas he has are combined with the concept of private accounts where people can invest their own money. This has created a lot of unnecessary opposition to the latter, and thus everyone has thrown their hands up and given up on solving the bigger issue. Congress has done nothing, and does not appear interested in doing anything in the near future. What Will Happen? Probably nothing for a while, since unfortunately the option of "do nothing" exists and has only subtle implications. The best we can hope for is that a future administration will reach a point where they have a strong majority in Congress and can get some of the above solutions enacted. But since senior citizens are the most likely cohort of Americans to vote, and they do so decisively, it may be that the majority of our resources go towards supporting the elderly (SS, medicare, etc.) for a long time - possibly until we have a major war or similar event to require a shift in budgetary priorities.

Belt Labeling

Problem1: Sometimes when you gain a little weight, your belt size increases by one or two holes and you don't even realize it.

Problem2: Some people buy the wrong size pants, not realizing their true size because they cinch things up with a belt adjustment.

Solution: A belt that has labels above each of the holes indicating the corresponding waist size. So it will be immediately obvious, for example, if you slip from a 32 to a 33 by going out one hole in your belt. Is there any reason not to have these labels? It would be so easy to do. I think this is a concept like those tagless t-shirts they came out with a few years ago. Once someone starts doing it, it will become an expectation for all belts (except reversible ones).

Teaching Fuzzy Logic

Problem: In life, we commonly find that a little bit of bad information can be far worse than no information at all. Here are some examples of what I mean:

1. One time we were Geocaching, which means we were looking for a small "treasure" that was hidden in about a 20 foot radius. A friendly jogger came by and told us that she had seen people looking for this cache before, and we needed to be looking much deeper into the woods. This turned out to be incorrect, which led to our spending about an hour unsuccessfully searching for the hidden container. (We found it on a subsequent trip, after getting more reliable information).

2. A few years ago, there was a sniper loose in our metropolitan area. Ten people were killed, and three others critically injured, including one man who was filling his gas task a few miles from our home. The police identified a white box truck as the likely vehicle, and weeks went by with massive searches of white box trucks. Traffic was tied up for miles, etc. The suspects were ultimately apprehended in a dark blue Chevrolet Caprice sedan.

3. How often do you hear a company say that you can find more information regarding a certain topic on their website? Then you go to the site, and search hopelessly throughout the site with nothing to be found on the topic - certainly nothing plainly visible on the front page. You would have been better off searching quickly on the site, then just going somewhere else for the information.

Solution: Computers fare much better than people when they are given small amounts of incorrect information. This is because they can implement algorithms based on "Fuzzy Logic", which essentially allows certain facts to be temporarily overlooked or reduced in value when other facts seem to give a more compelling solution. A classic example is those 20 Questions games. Surely you have been amazed that the computer often can ultimately identify your item, even in some cases where you tell it an outright lie for 1 or 2 questions.

Children are not taught fuzzy logic in school. Wouldn't it be interesting to have some logic questions for students to answer where they are presented with some facts, and told that 1 of the facts is wrong? It seems to me that this would be a great skill to develop, given the reality of the world. With so many of the issues you hear discussed today, you need to be able to develop sound conclusions when there are red herring facts vying for your attention. Global warming and evolution are two examples that jump to mind.

So let's get this new brand of teaching started. See if you can solve the example below for x and y! (Exactly one of the statements is wrong)

2x + 3y = 27
4x + 4y = 40
x + y = 9
2y - 2x = 8
5x + y = 22

The Willinator

The Willinator is a fun idea because it is very simple to explain, and most people to whom I have mentioned the idea have liked it!

Problem: Setting up a will is one of those things that we all know we should do, but many people do not seem to find the motivation to do so (until very late in life). It can seem very complicated and expensive to go through the process of thinking about the various pertinent issues, writing a legal document, getting it notarized, etc. And making modifications to a will, once established, also seems more onerous than it should be.

Solution: The Willinator is an online service that lets you create a legal will for a modest fee (much less than it would cost to do through an attorney, as most people now do). The best part of the Willinator is that you can log on any time and make changes. This means that your children must be nice to you at all times. The last thing they want to do is perform some offense to lower their standing in the will right before you die. You can even give shared access to let everyone know where they stand at any given time. This might motivate them to give you the best possible treatment – with immediate gratification.

Caveat: Society may not look favorably on people being able to make adjustments to such an important document in such a whimsical fashion.

"Implement" Tag

I've noticed that some of my ideas on this blog would fall into a "non-implementable" category, because they are one of the following:

• not practical
• not fully-formed ideas
• rely on technology that has not been developed
• require someone doing work/research before they are ready
• probably have already been implemented by someone
• are just stupid

But, for the small number of items that I believe could be implemented at this moment, I will henceforth try to start tagging them as "implement".

Online Timestamp for Predictions/Ideas

Problem: You had a certain idea or prediction, perhaps that you shared with others, that turned out to come true. But after the fact, you have no proof of your early version of the idea, and your friends don’t remember or care about your prescient vision.

Solution: WebTimestamp is a service that let’s you simply enter a block of text and timestamp it. Once an item is stamped, it can no longer be edited. One example I wish I had “timestamped” was my opposition to the Iraq war expressed before the war started (back when most were mildly in favor of the invasion). Other examples might be sports or political predictions, suicide notes, etc.

Caveat: A site like this could potentially be abused by people who make numerous predictions - especially on both sides of an issue. For example, someone could predict a bunch of stocks to go up or down, with different user ids, and then advertise just the predictions where they were correct.