When I was young, I began programming computers.  I think it was the summer of my 11th year that I ended up in a caste from an ice skating accident, and since I didn’t have skating practice, my mom enrolled me in a summer computer programming camp.  I took to it like a duck to water, and I learned a great deal not just about programming but about life from that one summer program.  On a computing level, I learned basic math, reasoning, logic and—believe it or not—creative skills.  I even learned how to program M.U.D.D.’s.  Yes, I’m that kind of nerd.  But it was the lesson of the necessity of trade-offs that has helped me in life.

The basic question of computer science is, “What can be automated?”  That’s the easy part.  The hard part is dealing with all the ones and zeros in an elegant manner.  By that I mean examining the means by which one arrives at an end.  The starting point and the finishing point are usually pretty easy to define.  It’s all the stuff in between that gets sketchy because there are always trade-offs.

First, you geniehave to think about your resources and how to spend them.  For instance, in designing a database, you can design it on the extreme side of efficiency, on the extreme
side of robustness, or somewhere in between.  I’m being a little obtuse here, but from a high level, that is how it is done.  Are you looking for speed?  Minimize field sizes and graphics thereby reducing required RAM and processing speed.  Do you require complex storage fields and searching and reporting abilities, including memory-heavy graphics?  Then your program will necessarily run slower and require some serious hardware to support it.  Think about the difference between the computing power required for Pong vs. the computing power to play Overwatch online.  It’s a calculator vs. a serious Alien computer or a PS4, and oh, by the way, a reliable high-speed Internet connection.  Those are the trade-offs.  “PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER!  Itty-bitty living space.”

Next, the trick is finding an elegant way to streamline code.  I learned early on that often the easy way of programming is not usually the most efficient.  As an 11 year-old I found out that even the most basic program can get out of control if you are lazy about it.  For instance, one of my early instructors showed me how four lines of code could be reduced to one.  In college, when I learned more advanced techniques with more sophisticated programming environments, I learned I could drop entire pages of code for just a few lines.  Streamlining code is another way to make things move faster and more efficiently, and is typically a programmer’s goal…unless you work for Microsoft and decide to embed an entire flight simulator in a Word program out of boredom.  But again, even elegant design involves trade-offs.

Finally, your implementation matters.  The interface you design, for instance, cannot be successfully designed in a vacuum.  I once programmed a simple database for the HR Dept. at my college.  They gave me a set of things they wanted to be able to do, and I programmed it in a way that made sense to me absent their specific input along the way.  It did everything they wanted it to do, but the interface made no sense to them nor worked for the specific way in which they worked.  It only made sense to me.  I had to start over and spent many sleepless nights working against a deadline until I got something that was a little closer to what they wanted, though still not perfect.

We all have our own personal bubbles—the vacuums in which we operate because that is where we are comfortable and because frankly we dread input from others poking the obvious holes in our personal theories.  Or perhaps we are so married to our ideas that we outright dismiss anything that doesn’t fit that model or worse, we create false claims to fit our own narrative.

This is what I see happening in our country now.  Politicians on both sides of the isle seem to continue to one-up each other on whoppers of lies and deliberate undermining of each other, with very few exceptions.  This seems to be more about sticking up for their corporate supporters and their own egos than it has to do with the good of the American people as a whole.  Interestingly, we wound up with GOP-controlled Executive and Legislative branches, and they understandably took that as a mandate.  The problem is the President didn’t win the popular vote by #2,865,075, the largest popular vote slide in history in which the candidate still did not prevail.  So no, our new President doesn’t have a mandate.  I don’t honestly know what to make of the Legislature yet, but my initial reaction is that when one looks at the corporations and private interests who contributed to various campaigns yield fairly clear leanings, and none of them are toward the other 98%.

This is complicated by “fake news,” and perhaps not entirely in the way one might expect.  There are three general categories of average social media participants: Those who work studiously to find real news, real facts, and share and debate on the merits thereof; those who stumble across fake news more often than not and use that online because it supports their narrative of the world, and those who are deliberately, purposefully ignorant and use utterly debunked nonsense to brow-beat others with because it makes them feel powerful.  This dynamic complicates the already complicated issues with which we are attempting to grapple.

But back to trade-offs.

Right now, we are being asked to do something I believe is unprecedented on this scale.  We are being asked by our government to cede our liberties as citizens in the interest of safety.  This request is being driven by the rhetoric of an administration that we have more to fear than we have to lose as opposed to actual, identifiable threats.  That, “I and I alone can fix this.”  I do not hold to that.

Our country is pluralistic by definition.  It is diverse in belief, color, religion, and way of life.  It is diverse in our concerns, our needs, our work, our pass times, our various ways of navigating the world.  But we are united in the idea of liberty, of strength through diversity, of knowledge through exploration, of understanding through trial and error, of wisdom from hard-earned experience.

After 9/11, we collectively took a breathtaking step back.  In the face of that loss, that horrific tragedy about which we were warned by intelligence operatives repeatedly but didn’t seem to have any idea where to begin hunting to prevent it, in the face of a monstrous destructive force, we had this reaction:

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In New York City, full of people of all walks of life who routinely name-call and nip at each other, who are so diverse and so packed in to a small space that its citizens are hardened after a fashion, everyone came together to work, to clean up, to help the wounded, to carry the dead, to assist first responders, to comfort the mourning, to offer a hand to visitors who didn’t even know where they were on a map, much less what had happened.  They did this.  They are an example of the best of us and a strong reminder that we are not weak, we are not fearful, and we can and will from the bottom up prevail.

In the aftermath, our government passed the Patriot Act, a piece of legislation that was deeply flawed and which, unbeknownst to any American who didn’t read the fine print (or who didn’t read between the lines for that matter), curtailed many of our rights and freedoms.  We began to find out about it much later after whistle-blowers began popping up and the Director of the NSA finally admitted to spying on American citizens with no probable cause or warrant.

There are those who say, “Well, if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.”  That is not really the case.  I do research on various subjects online all the time for various projects.  If I’m looking for fertilizer for my garden, I’m flagged because that is considered a bomb-making material.  If I’m researching chemical components for a story I’m writing, that gets flagged.  That, ladies and gentlemen, is not freedom.  That is creepy.  What’s more, it is a waste of our government resources because I can guarantee you the only other thing an analyst can pair that with is the satellite and drone footage of me gardening in the nude.  I always wave to them, by the way.

So, at present, we have a lot of issues on the political table.  All of them involve trade-offs.  Unfortunately, the parties negotiating those trade-offs are at such odds that it seems obvious the party with the votes will win the day regardless of the will of their constituents.  It is, unfortunately, quite clear that said party is far more bent on destruction than they are on creation.  They know what they do not want and by god they’ll demolish it, but they have no clear definition of what they do want.  Just like in programming, in order to create you have to at least have an idea of what that goal is, and you have to fill in the vast expanse in between with something that amounts to more than hot political air.  Then you have to navigate the trade offs.  My hope is that a reality check of sorts will reign them in, but until that time, we the people need to remind them: We are still here; we are watching you; we are not nearly as afraid as you hoped we could be persuaded; we are strong; and in the face of losing our liberties, our trade-off is that we will #Resist.