OPEN THOUGHT
DON SAMBANDARAKSA
There is a time and place for democracy, and there are some laws that transcend the justice of majority rule. One such law is the law of mathematics.
If you have 32 boxes and fill up four of them, how many boxes will you have available to use? If you ask that question to a primary school student, most of them will say 28. Some might have a bit of difficulty and give another answer, a number that is somewhat off, but still a number.
However, if you ask that question to certain high level officials at the ICT Ministry, the answer one gets is not a number, but, "the committee voted them as compliant."
I am, of course, referring to the 888 million baht smart ID card purchase. One of the four points in which most men of good conscience decided the card failed was memory capacity. The Terms of Reference asked for 32KB to be available for the JavaCard engine. The card left the factory with 66KB, was divided so that 32KB was usable and of that 32KB, 4KB was used by bug fixes, leaving 28KB left for use.
The engineering documents which would have shown who ordered the division thus have disappeared, last time I checked on the situation with the previous ICT Minister.
Democracy came into play and was of higher priority than common sense, logic and indeed, maths, or any other one of those pesky laws that do not matter in a modern democracy. The committee voted it as "compliant", albeit with a five to three vote on a committee of 10.
The representatives from the Ministry of Science, the Ministry of Interior and the ICT Ministry's own legal officer decided that the law of mathematics was intact. One academic felt that the conflict between the law of mathematics and democracy was too much and resigned while the one giving the orders abstained. In the end, democracy prevailed and the cards were compliant. They might have only 28KB available to you and me, but in the eyes of the law, because the majority of people voted them as having 32KB, they had 32KB and when democracy has spoken, all dissent should cease.
That episode reminds me of how Galileo was found guilty of heresy and placed under house arrest for saying that the Earth moves around the Sun. Of course, if more people think that the Earth is the centre of the Universe than those who think that the Sun is the centre of the Universe, the majority is always right. Plus, the church says so and the church has the mandate from God, and that is even more powerful than a majority in an election.
Yes, I am sure that if we sail far enough East, we will fall off ocean into the void as the world is flat and perched on a giant tortoise's back.
Not only does democracy override the law of subtraction, but it also overrides the law of addition too. By and large, communication satellites are worth more than one billion baht, the threshold which the law requires projects to be approved by the Cabinet. However, Thailand's democratic bureaucracy has managed to send individual transponders into orbit, each worth less than one billion baht, and then re-assemble them into a multi-billion baht communications satellite up there in the sky. The Ministry of Transport and Communications committees certainly have a different sense of logic than you and me. Amazing, isn't it, what we can accomplish when the country is at peace and the nation is not divided like it is today.
However, the gods were obviously not in agreement and destroyed one of the satellite's power linkages to show us mere mortals what happens when we break certain laws.
My world is round and orbits the sun. I can add, and I can subtract.
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