Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Even though this technically pertains to Congress, I give fault in equal or greater part to President Obama.

• Attempting to censor Wikileaks, which did nothing different than did The New York Times in disseminating leaked, newsworthy information.
• CIOCA: he actively supported the bill that would introduce internet censorship of sites that are considering to be in violation of copyright law with dubious due process, which could easily be extended to censor any additional type of website without our knowledge.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

• Immigration and Customs Enforcement seized at least 82 website domains, including search engines and including foreign-hosted websites, without court order due to copyright violation accusations.
• There is absolutely no evidence that he ended warrantless wiretapping of American citizens instituted under the Bush Administration.
• Allowed the FBI to track American citizens using their credit cards without court order.
• CALEA: he actively supported the bill that would obligate software makers to add back doors to encrypted communications so that the government can eavesdrop on internet users on a real-time basis.
• Allowed and continues to promote the FBI’s ability to place GPS tracking devices on cars without court order.
• He fully supported the extreme, unnecessary, and ineffective TSA security protocols that included virtual strip searches and enhanced pat downs.

No person shall be held to answer for any capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

• Despite promising to close Guantanamo Bay he continued to hold terror suspects without due process and without convicting them of a crime or putting them before a Grand Jury.
• Even worse, when terrorists were brought to trial (so-called), his administration made it clear that regardless of the verdict reached by the jury the terror suspect would not be released.
• He supported the secret international ACTA treaty that, among other things, would have included a three strikes provision that would have barred users from the internet for having been accused (not tried in court) three times by the music or movie industry of violating copyright.

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district where in the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.

• Again, terrorism suspects were not given the right to a trial, let alone a speedy trial, and were often denied the right to counsel or the right to see the evidence against them (the infamous “state secrets” claim, which has been used more times by this president than by any president in history). We cannot say that terrorists should be held to a different standard because how do we know if a person is guilty of terrorism unless he or she is actually tried and convicted?

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

• There’s no evidence that the practice of torture was continued under the Obama Administration. Nevertheless, he flat out refused to prosecute Bush Administration officials who authorized or engaged in torture despite the fact that their actions run contrary not only to American morality but were in flagrant violation of United States and international law.
• His administration has kept Private Bradley Manning (who did knowingly break the law by leaking the State Department cables to Wikileaks) in questionable conditions of imprisonment–without trial–including in solitary confinement for extended periods and forcing him to remain naked for periods of time.
• His administration came out in favor of the RIAA’s case against a twelve year old girl who shared 37 songs on Kazaa ten years ago with the RIAA asking for up to $150,00 per song in damages. In the end she had to pay $27,500.

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

I can certainly have a field day with this one so I’ll just list several without explanation:

• Education reform
• Healthcare reform
• Bailouts
• Threatening to overrule California’s marijuana referendum if it had passed

*I’m sure you caught on fairly quickly that I was enumerating the United States Bill of Rights. You should have also caught on that I skipped a few, namely the 2nd Amendment (it doesn’t matter what side you or I am on, let’s agree that this one’s debatable), the 3rd Amendment (regarding protection from quartering troops, which is irrelevant), and the 7th Amendment (regarding civil trials by jury, which is pretty mundane).

Please note that all the laws and actions cited above came off the top of my head (I have verified their accuracy, of course). I’m sure I could double the size of the list with simple news searches. This article wasn’t intended to be a laundry list, however. It was intended to show how we’ve completely lost any moral high ground that we once enjoyed in the world. We were the country that other nations turned to for guidance. We were the country that citizens all over the world looked to as a beacon of freedom. And while our government lectures everyone else about these very issues it turns out that we’re not trying very hard to lead by example.

More importantly than what the world thinks of us, we as citizens have somehow lost interest or lost sight of the fundamental importance that the Bill of Rights represents to us here and now. Maybe we’re complacent or maybe when rights are taken away a little at a time can’t fully contemplate the gravity of the situation.

There’s no more beating around the bush because the simple fact of the matter is that we’re not longer free as free as we once were. And anyone who can seriously look at what has been taken away from us by our own government not just in the past two years but in the past decade says that we’re free doesn’t know what it means to be free. The Bill of Rights that changed the course of history in 1791 is no longer a bar for which we strive but a piece of paper with words on it that we walk upon.

Our downfall was not caused by President Obama but it was my hope that he would have done everything in his power to reverse it and restore us to our place amongst nations. Instead he only accelerated our downfall. And I cannot take the responsibility for further destroying our principles with the power of my vote.

(As is the case with all posts on this blog, they are written at one time, revised over time, and posted weeks or months later. Nothing should be read into the timing of this post.)

I don’t want to get into a logical argument. Instead I want you to imagine the hypothetical world in a few years. Imagine that in the intervening period there has been an attempted terrorist attack at a major shopping mall somewhere in the United States and it was foiled merely be sheer happenstance (which seems to be the case with respect to terrorist attacks these past few years). Regardless of the circumstances, the authorities now deem malls high opportunity targets for future terrorist attacks and to ensure our safety, they will now be subjecting citizens to rigorous security before entering any of them. Bags coming in must be scanned and people are similarly subjected to full body scans or pat downs. What used to be a simple affair is now a matter of national security and federal scrutiny. There is an initial public uproar but nevertheless people subject themselves to these security measures out of fear and, alas, because they want to shop (see again: Hobson’s Choice). After a little while people get used to being treated like criminals just because they want to go to the mall.

I want you to think about this scenario. I want you to think about how you would react. And while you’re saying to yourself that this is an inane thought experiment that would never be able to happen in the United States, I want you to think why not. I want you to think about what we’ve already given up in the pursuit of security and I want you to think how, with each passing month, we lose more and more of what we had before 9/11. And how we freely hand it over.

I want you to think about whether we’ve defeated the terrorists–by thinking that intrusive and unnecessary full body scans and aggressive pat downs of everyone from children to the elderly as a condition of boarding a public means of transportation has stopped an attack–or if the terrorists defeated us long ago my making us so afraid that we’ve given the government carte blanche to do whatever it deems necessary to protect us regardless of its morality, constitutionality or practicality.

Now I want you to think about any time in the history of our nation when we would have sheepishly stood by and accepted a statement such as this: “You waive some of your rights when you go to the [insert place here].”
Finally I want you to think about what your inalienable rights are worth to you. Or if you’ve already sold them in exchange for your safety.

Synecdoche, New York (2008, director: Philip Seymour Hoffman) is one of those films on which the critics cannot reach a consensus. Many of them love it (like Roger Ebert, who named it the best film of the 2000s) and many of them hate it (like Rex Reed of The Observer, who dubbed it the worst film of all time–keep in mind, this so-called critic didn’t watch the whole film). I’m glad that I find myself in the former category. Watching this film for the first time around the beginning of the year, I can understood why some don’t care for it. I had no idea what to think initially, for that matter I wasn’t sure I really understood the plot let alone the subtext. It remained stuck in my head for the subsequent days and weeks, as I find that most great films do, as if my subconscious were trying to decipher it. Finally, I watched it again and then a while later. Finally, I watched it for a fourth time last night. With each subsequent viewing I found that I enjoyed it much more the second time and that I had understood it much better.

The film has many dimensions and many motifs, however the one that stood out to me the most (a common thread in many of my favorite films) is the microscope it puts on the way that we go about our lives. The viewer needs to allow him/herself to go beyond the hyperbole of what the protagonist (Caden) is undertaking. The idea of creating a mimetic representation of his life inside a giant warehouse and of creating a cast to play himself and all his associates (and ultimately of doing it yet again inside small warehouses inside the first warehouse like Russian dolls) is absurd. But it says something important about our life: many of us can only watch our lives from the sidelines as other people live it for us. Caden, the director of this magnum opus, per se, is lost, indifferent, and he can only create meaning when he’s the ‘director’. He casts another man as himself and watches his own life, directs it, and makes life decisions through him. Ultimately, the fake Caden begins to live the real Caden’s life. In what I view as the seminal moment of the film, the fake Caden gives Caden the address of his ex-wife’s art exhibit because he wants Caden to go there so he can “follow [him] there and see how [he] loses even more of [himself].” For the fake Caden it has become more than character research, he is now actively participating in the real Caden’s life. Later on the fake Caden precipitates the real breakup of Caden and his girlfriend, who is promptly replaced with an understudy. Ultimately, Caden, tired of decades of directing this play, leaves his role as himself, switching places with the actress depicting the cleaning woman. He is no longer himself and now he is receiving the cues through an earpiece.

It’s interesting just how true it is that many of us can only live vicariously, never willing to seize life, or that many of us can only live dependent on the instructions of others.

These notions are underlined by the burning house motif. Early on in the film, Caden’s to-be girlfriend Hazel purchases a house that is perpetually on fire. While absurd at face-value, it’s merely a metaphor for the decisions that we make in our lives. She comments to the real estate agent, “I like it, I do. But I’m really concerned about dying in the fire,” to which the realtor responds, “It’s a big decision, how one prefers to die.” The house, which does ultimately kill her (from smoke inhalation), doesn’t resound to me as a comment so much on how we die but rather on how we live. This idea is connected to her death, in my opinion, several scenes later, during a funeral scene in Caden’s fake life. The pastor’s eulogy goes like this:

Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make. You can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won’t know for 20 years and you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is, it’s what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and eons you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain wasting years for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes, or it seems to, but it doesn’t really. So you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to make you feel connected. Something to make you feel whole. Something to make you feel loved…

This is not to say that Hazel committed suicide, in effect, because it’s not. This monologue is more optimistic than that, even if the optimism is well concealed. You can see the point if you connect the lines, “You can destroy your life every time you choose” to its foil, “So you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along.” It’s a warning, in my view, to seize opportunities. Hazel bought the house on fire because she had found a house that she truly liked. But if you think about it, everything we do is on fire. Everything we do brings us closer to death (it’s not pessimistic to think like that because it’s a fact) but it’s what we do that determines if we die satisfied or not. Hazel could have turned down that house and spent the rest of her life looking for one that wasn’t on fire–but she wouldn’t have found it.

I suppose that the opposite side of this view would entail the idea that life is meaningless (taken to the extreme by philosophies such as cosmic pessimism, by Italian writer Giaccomo Leopardi, which holds that human civilization is an insignificant passerby on a time line of creation and destruction). I believe that such theories entail at least a fair amount of psychological reasoning, specifically the fact that perception is constructed. If perception is, to the best of scientific knowledge, a figment of our neurological processes, then life is a fantasy, no? I take exception to this notion; the idea that perception is constructed doesn’t mean that life is meaningless but rather that it empowers us to create meaning. Life can be whatever it is that we want it to be

So ultimately, going back to the film, two of the main characters, Caden and Hazel, are contrasted. Hazel makes her own decisions and plays her own role. On the other hand, Caden needs decision to be made for him and needs someone else to play his role. The clearest contrast is viewed in their respective deaths. Hazel dies in her burning house, a result of the decisions she made, with a Mona Lisa-esque smirk on her face. Caden, however, dies resting his head on the shoulder of his deceased mother, his life having devolved into taking cues from a director on how to go about any and all daily events. In his final breath he utters he utters the words: “I know how I’m going to do the play now,” which also symbolically refers to his own life. Then he receives his final cue: “Die.”

On Monday, The New York Times reported that President Obama will seek sweeping laws enabling law enforcement to more easily eavesdrop on the internet. Technologies are changing, the administration argues, and modern digital systems aren’t as easy to monitor as traditional telephones.

The government wants to force companies to redesign their communications systems and information networks to facilitate surveillance, and to provide law enforcement with back doors that enable them to bypass any security measures.

The proposal may seem extreme, but — unfortunately — it’s not unique. Just a few months ago, the governments of the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and India threatened to ban BlackBerry devices unless the company made eavesdropping easier. China has already built a massive internet surveillance system to better control its citizens.

Formerly reserved for totalitarian countries, this wholesale surveillance of citizens has moved into the democratic world as well. Governments like Sweden, Canada and the United Kingdom are debating or passing laws giving their police new powers of internet surveillance, in many cases requiring communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell. More are passing data retention laws, forcing companies to retain customer data in case they might need to be investigated later.

Obama isn’t the first U.S. president to seek expanded digital eavesdropping. The 1994 CALEA law required phone companies to build ways to better facilitate FBI eavesdropping into their digital phone switches. Since 2001, the National Security Agency has built substantial eavesdropping systems within the United States.

These laws are dangerous, both for citizens of countries like China and citizens of Western democracies. Forcing companies to redesign their communications products and services to facilitate government eavesdropping reduces privacy and liberty; that’s obvious. But the laws also make us less safe. Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems with those capabilities built in.

Any surveillance system invites both criminal appropriation and government abuse. Function creep is the most obvious abuse: New police powers, enacted to fight terrorism, are already used in situations of conventional nonterrorist crime. Internet surveillance and control will be no different.

Official misuses are bad enough, but the unofficial uses are far more worrisome. An infrastructure conducive to surveillance and control invites surveillance and control, both by the people you expect and the people you don’t. Any surveillance and control system must itself be secured, and we’re not very good at that. Why does anyone think that only authorized law enforcement will mine collected internet data or eavesdrop on Skype and IM conversations?

These risks are not theoretical. After 9/11, the National Security Agency built a surveillance infrastructure to eavesdrop on telephone calls and e-mails within the United States. Although procedural rules stated that only non-Americans and international phone calls were to be listened to, actual practice didn’t always match those rules. NSA analysts collected more data than they were authorized to and used the system to spy on wives, girlfriends and famous people like former President Bill Clinton.

The most serious known misuse of a telecommunications surveillance infrastructure took place inGreece. Between June 2004 and March 2005, someone wiretapped more than 100 cell phones belonging to members of the Greek government — the prime minister and the ministers of defense, foreign affairs and justice — and other prominent people. Ericsson built this wiretapping capability into Vodafone’s products, but enabled it only for governments that requested it. Greece wasn’t one of those governments, but some still unknown party — a rival political group? organized crime? — figured out how to surreptitiously turn the feature on.

Surveillance infrastructure is easy to export. Once surveillance capabilities are built into Skype or Gmail or your BlackBerry, it’s easy for more totalitarian countries to demand the same access; after all, the technical work has already been done.

Western companies such as Siemens, Nokia and Secure Computing built Iran’s surveillance infrastructure, and U.S. companies like L-1 Identity Solutions helped build China’s electronic police state. The next generation of worldwide citizen control will be paid for by countries like the United States.

We should be embarrassed to export eavesdropping capabilities. Secure, surveillance-free systems protect the lives of people in totalitarian countries around the world. They allow people to exchange ideas even when the government wants to limit free exchange. They power citizen journalism, political movements and social change. For example, Twitter’s anonymity saved the lives of Iranian dissidents — anonymity that many governments want to eliminate.

Yes, communications technologies are used by both the good guys and the bad guys. But the good guys far outnumber the bad guys, and it’s far more valuable to make sure they’re secure than it is to cripple them on the off chance it might help catch a bad guy. It’s like the FBI demanding that no automobiles drive above 50 mph, so they can more easily pursue getaway cars. It might or might not work — but, regardless, the cost to society of the resulting slowdown would be enormous.

It’s bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state. No matter what the eavesdroppers say, these systems cost too much and put us all at greater risk.

I’m basically left speechless, as are most people, even those whose knowledge of privacy and security go no further than what’s written about them in the dictionary. The notion is constitutionally unjust, ethically backwards, and practically unsound. Should we also remove our curtains from the windows so our behaviors indoors can be readily watched? Should there be made locks for our houses like the ones for our suitcases, which are also unconstitutionally subject to search when we go to the airport, so the government can enter our house without breaking down the door?

The practical issue are of this are (at the very minimum) two-fold. 1) It will not aid surveillance. Terrorists and criminals will be using their own homebrew encryption that will obviously not contain a mechanism for government intrusion. What that leaves us with is law-abiding citizens being subject to eavesdropping by the government, which has shown callous disregard for the legally proscribed judicial oversight (as alluded to above), while terrorists and criminals can continue to communicate behind a wall of secrecy. 2) It will expose every user of any internet product to a gaping security hole. The mere existence of a backdoor to internet communications puts us at risk of hackers accessing them. No matter how well secured, no security is perfect and it will be only a matter of time before unauthorized users begin to take advantage of the government-imposed system.

“A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.” George Orwell, from Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool.

That said, I feel the need to clarify the use of the English indefinite article, if nothing more than for the benefaction of anglophone humanity in general. This is prompted by a recently surfaced FAQ on dictionary.com, which got the subtleties of the rule sorely incorrect. And subsequently ignored my intercessions to rectify their misinformation. As I’m sure you can see, I have no choice but to take matters into my own hands.

We all know that ‘a’ goes before words that begin with a consonant sound (thus including vowel words such as ‘user’) and ‘an’ goes before words that begin with a vowel sound (thus including consonant words such as ‘hour’ and before acronyms that start with a vowel sound such as ‘XYZ’).

Here’s the catch: ‘an’ is also used before multisyllabic words that begin with ‘h’ when the stress is not on the first syllable. This is why we say ‘an historic event’ or ‘there is always an however’. Similarly, you cannot say ‘an house’ or ‘an housing project’ because the former is monosyllabic and the latter is disyllabic with initial stress (savvy?). I’m sure you’ve heard ‘an however’ but you might not have known why and you might not have known that it can be extended to other ‘h-’ words such as ‘an Hungarian goose’ or ‘an humanitarian crisis’. The possibilities are…well, not endless but greater than you’d imagine.

Now go forth and use your superior knowledge of English grammar to make everyone else know that you’re smarter than them. That is all.

As much as Twitter doesn’t reflect the upper echelon of human knowledge and society, I think that is precisely what is important about cataloging it. For the first time in history, the common man’s daily life will be systematically and effortlessly archived and preserved. It’s always been the kings and queens, the rich and the educated whose ideas have been carefully preserved in time. Imagine in a thousand years when someone writes a history book about our time. Or an anthropology book. Or a linguistics book. They will know the exact thoughts, feelings, and doings of the common people on a day-to-day basis. They will have first-hand accounts of events and news unfiltered by reporters and the media. Cataloging Twitter means that those who represent the majority of the world but have had the smallest recorded legacy will now have one. Those who often hold the greatest influence over the changes that occur in any aspect of a society will now have a say that is no longer ephemeral but permanent.

So perhaps nobody cares what you’re reading on the toilet today. But who knows how it may come in handy a few centuries down the road.

My particular aversion to this show is not the hosts, it is not the subject matter, it is not the perspectives. Skimming the titles of all these episodes, I’d probably agree with them more than I don’t. However, it is the nature of the presentation of facts that bothers me. They approach with a preconceived opinion on the topic, which is fine, then they attempt to prove it. Ignoring for a moment their rampant use of anecdotal evidence, in proving their stance on an issue they persistently, literally juxtapose charlatans and quacks against scientists and intellectuals. And while they’re generally trying to disprove the quacks, this is probably the most infantile avenue for using the adversarial method that I can envision. As a result, the counterarguments to their claims are always weak and, as planned, laughable. Instead of countering their claim with a strong argument, they present something half-baked, near-imbecilic. A person could prove just about anything he would want by using this method.

Furthermore, I’d also have to argue that Penn & Teller are poor Libertarians, as they call themselves. By throwing around the word bullshit at ideas with which they don’t agree and by calling people motherf*****s and ***holes because they find their beliefs (albeit on religion or on aliens) to be ridiculous defies the whole premise of libertarianism, which is that individuals should be allowed to believe what they choose and do what they choose. By nature, most beliefs (when not imposed on others) do not harm others. Secondhand smoke does (it also happens to be an argument about which they are patently wrong). Granted, some beliefs can be harmful to those who hold them, such as the belief in mediums (when they trick someone into believing that they are communicating with a dear departed relative), but most of the topics of this series are completely beyond the realm of free choice, libertarianism.

Just as they’re magicians by trade, I suppose, in a twisted coincidence, that it’s also what they do on the show: make people believe something that’s not true. Stick to what you do best, P&T.

On the one hand many teenagers would argue that the drinking age should be lowered just so that they can drink. It is an argument without backing and it is circular at best. A more intelligent argument would entail that the underaged can drink responsibly because they’re legally adults. While this is true, the point of the higher drinking age is to prevent novice drivers from driving while further impaired. Some college students will then argue that they should be allowed to drink because they’re not going to drive. Let’s not forget, however, that common sense is lost in proportion to the number of drinks one has had. What might seem like a poor idea while sober may seem like a great idea when drunk. We all know that person.

Then there are those adults (I’m talking in particular about college presidents) who stirred up a polemic recently by arguing that the drinking age should be lowered. Don’t be fooled by these troglodytes. Their argument is Pyrrhic–they do not have the best interest of their students in mind, they are simply trying to wash their hands of any legal issues that come with students drinking illegally on their campuses. Rather than address the underlying issue they would rather bow to pressure. The problem is systemic and cannot be fixed by ignoring it. It’s akin to eliminating the speed limit on the interstate because the police do not want to have to write so many speeding tickets.

Don’t let what I’ve just said lead you to believe that I agree with the prevailing system in America. The point of the national drinking age, according to the current wisdom, is to prevent beginner drivers from getting behind the wheel and impairing their already-limited skill with alcohol. Instead, we make teenagers wait three to four years after acquiring their licenses to drink and drive. The system has it backwards and it is simply counterproductive. Just because someone has four years of driving experience does not indicate that that person is capable of driving while under the influence of alcohol. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that a given person will only have alcohol for the first time at age 21 (because this is the assumption of the current system). The problem is this: someone with little to no experience with alcohol does not understand its influence and his or her limits. People need to understand their limits prior to being able to drive and this is best done while under some form of supervision.

There are many countries around the world that either have a lower drinking age or do not have one at all and in those countries you will almost always find a lower level of alcohol abuse and alcohol-related incidents. The idea of not merely throwing teenagers into the deep-end and expecting them to swim is a good one. In countries, such as Sweden and Germany, where there is a lower drinking age, the excesses that currently occur in college instead occur while teenagers are still in high school and at home under parental supervision. As such, I would argue for a tiered approach to alcohol:

• Allow children of any age to drink beer and wine in moderation under close parental supervision to alleviate the notion of the forbidden fruit mentality (as is currently legal in 36 states, though largely unbeknown to the public-at-large)
• Allow those 14 and over to consume alcohol in restaurants with parental supervision
• Allow teenagers to begin driving at whatever age prevailing state law dictates but forbid operation of motor vehicle while under the influence (<0.01 BAC) with extremely strict penalties beginning with the first infraction
• Lower the legal age of purchase to 18 as well as the legal age of consumption of hard liquor
• Lower the legal age to drink and drive (<0.08 BAC) to 19 or two years above legal driving age, whichever is higher

Such a system would be a radical departure from the cliff-like system that we currently employ. It would certainly have to be ushered in over time and in phases. I pose this idea for discussion and opinions.