The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Nathan Williams:

This form of "on the take" seems to involve being invested in the country's most popular mutual fund (Fidelity's Magellan fund), which (a) is huge and (b) owns shares in a lot of stuff. That's a remarkably low bar for being corrupt - I bet most of the readers/commenters here have some retirement money in similar funds.

Or is the claim a stronger one - that someone who made a reputation opposing (some) large corporations must maintain purity by carefully avoiding such in what are otherwise quite generic investments?

Here's something I don't get: who benefits from the prescription status of most medication? I can see the usual drug-war issues for addictive painkillers (they have known "recreational" uses), as much as I disagree with them there as well as with criminalized drugs, and I can see good public-health reasons for restricting the use of antibiotics, but whose interest is served by making (say) Viagra or Prozac anything but a plain over-the-counter product? You can hurt yourself with it, sure, but that's not exactly a standard we apply with any consistency: see Tylenol, low theraputic ratio, overdose of, or just the fascinating toxic/caustic chemicals we sell as cleaning products.

I'm a bit hesitant to take some of these technology comparisons at face value. The worst culprit here is actually one that was used to drive the adoption of direct-entry electronic voting machines (DREs) - the comparison to an ATM. That comparison is flawed. ATMs do things that are, by design, personally identifiable and logged; an implication of this is that if there is a screw-up, it can be unwound and corrected. This means that the machines themselves can be held to a relatively low standard.

Slot machines and other electronic gaming devices are a pretty good comparison. The difference in usage rates (both for the user and the machine) is important, but the issues of user trust and non-reversability are similar. An interesting difference is the profit motive of the casino versus the quite mild interest of the government in getting out the vote.

Certainly, all of the certification, spot-checking, and manufacturer review procedures seem applicable. An interesting effect would be if the requirements were sufficently onerous that they caused DREs to fall out of favor versus paper ballots (okay, perhaps optically-scanned paper ballots).

Canned tomatoes often have calcium chloride (not chalk, which is calcium carbonate) added to keep them firm.

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