Minimum time between a bill's proposal/amendment and its vote

Oh my, Blogger's interface is quite different now. I'm not sure how I feel about this.

Anyway, CISPA passed in the House today, and there were very significant amendments made to the bill the same day it was voted on.

Normally I would be one to say the government needs more red tape in the way of getting things done. But if we're going to have elected representatives, whose main crafts consist of networking people-pleasing, voting on all manners of sins, they need time to learn before making decisions. In my opinion, somewhere close to zero representatives should have voted today, because undoubtedly ~0 of them have the technical understanding to truly consider the ramifications of any changes to a bill like this.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. This is pretty fucking basic, guys.

Limit EULAs to to 140 characters.

These days we all live and die by software, every piece of which has an accompanying license agreement. Many web sites even have their own legally binding EULA. However, everyone loves to bloat and obfuscate their contracts/agreements with legalese. They're both confusing and burdensome. If I thoroughly studied and understood every EULA I've agreed to, explicitly or otherwise, I would no doubt have wasted years of my life on it.

The obvious result is that no user in his right mind reads them. When users are prompted for their consent, users are most likely to blindly accept terms the more their presentation resembles a EULA. Someone even wrote a piece of software to make understanding EULAs a feasible task.

I have a simpler solution: restrict the length of any EULA to 140 characters. There's a great reason Twitter is successful; let's run with that.

De-stigmatize protecting the environment

Despite my political aspirations, I haven't always been a particularly politically conscious person. As such, I don't know when making the environment a priority became a "left wing" issue rather than a "humanity" issue. I'm not sure whose fault it was -- no doubt, like most problems, it was the fault of both sides. In the end it hurts everyone equally, as our planet becoming uninhabitable leaves everyone equally dead.

We're already so screwed that Stephen Hawking, a guy that's no doubt smarter than you or me or anyone we know, says that the colonization of space is essential "to avoid disaster in the next hundred years." We're well beyond bickering over whether "being green" is part of the correct agenda. The clock is ticking. Saving our planet needs to be priority #1 for everyone.

(Hopefully by the time I take charge, this will no longer be necessary. Hope hope hope.)

Re-engineer college football

Now seems an appropriate time for a careful, articulate critique on college football. So I'll take a moment to say this:

The members of the BCS oversight clusterfuck need to all be tarred and feathered.

Obama wanted a playoff system, and surprise! The BCS committee didn't. You neglected to show them what's what, Nobama. Soon it will be my turn to step in.

The entire college football not-so-playoff system is cleverly designed to be the most miserable trainwreck imaginable. The most obvious failure of the Bowl Championship Series is that it has nothing to do with a championship. It replaces legitimate, structured competition with speculation by trying to find a middleground between which team played the best and which team is "actually" the best. However, the whole point of competition is to see who comes out on top when it counts. That's what makes it so exciting. The current system makes the college football experience a disappointing mixture of baseball's sleep-inducing 162-game season and reading US Weekly.

A grade schooler could easily craft a better system. There's only one reason not to change it: money. If there were a real system, regular season matchups and bowl bids couldn't be bought and sold. There's an absurd amount of money in college football, and the racket its handlers have managed to create is nothing short of criminal.

Post large scale tar-and-feathering, there will be no "shares" of championships to quibble over. Your team either won when it counted, or they didn't. (And players will get paid, 'cause God knows they deserve a slice of that pie.)

Limit privileges for bad drivers

A common sentiment among fearful drivers is that a great way to protect yourself on the road is by driving the largest vehicle you can possibly afford. This fearful feeling as created a horrendous trend of vehicle size inflation -- if most other people are driving full-size sedans, you'd better drive an SUV so that you can "win" should you be in an accident. Too many SUVs out there? You'd better upgrade to a 6,000 pound Toyota Sequoia.

Under my dictatorship, licensed drivers will be classified into a few different tiers based on their driving record. A freshly licensed 16-year-old will fall into the lowest tier, as well as those with numerous accidents and/or traffic violations. Drivers in that tier would be limited to driving vehicles that are 3,000 lbs are less, essentially limiting them to Mini Coopers and the like. The longer you go with no accidents or infractions, the larger vehicles you can drive. Only the drivers with the most pristine driving records would be permitted to drive a Hummer.

Not only would bad drivers be less dangerous to others, but the nation on the whole would consume much less gas as average vehicle size deflated.

Manufacture an alien conspiracy

I was raised to believe that all people are created equal. I was brought up thinking that as my generation rose to power, we would usher in racial and sexual equality. (Or at least equal opportunity.) I thought that our culture was infected with bigotry and that education and awareness would "cure" it. While that might be true to a very small degree, over the years I came to realize now how naive that hope was.

People need hatred. One of their greatest desires is to feel like they belong to a tribe, and in order for that to mean anything, their tribe has to be exclusive. Rather than go on a Tyler Durden-esque rant to try and convince the citizenry that they are not special, I will fabricate the existence of a hostile alien race.

I can only imagine the unprecedented level of camaraderie that will be experienced in the wake of the country learning that we have big scary aliens to fear and hate. Haters will go from seeing those damn border jumpers trying to steal our hard-earned welfare as friendly and relatable. Because they belong to the same tribe.

Abolish "capital punishment"

I put it in quotes because that's a moronic way to phrase it.

To err is human, but to err when taking someone's life is absolutely unacceptable. Just because a group of people (e.g. a jury) can agree that someone ought to die doesn't mean it's right. (Read: every case of genocide ever.) I fully acknowledge our need to protect society from dangerous people, but there are plenty of alternatives to taking lives. Cheaper alternatives at that.

It's time to get with the program.