::::: : the wood : davidrobins.com

My name is David Robins: Christian, lead developer (resume), writer, photographer, runner, libertarian (voluntaryist), and student.

This is also my son David Geoffrey Robins' site.

Socialist States of America

News ·Tuesday January 20, 2009 @ 13:35 EST (link)

So this is how liberty dies... with thunderous applause.
—Queen Amidala, Revenge of the Sith

When the New Republic of America breaks off from this socialist one, my wife and I will join it; and no lily-livered liberals will force us to stay in their redistributionist disaster.

The curious case of the lost network jack

News, Technical, Guns, School ·Monday January 19, 2009 @ 23:41 EST (link)

20090112: Bought a used computer (Celeron 2.4 MHz, Windows XP pro) from a guy at work for $100; carried it from his building (16) back to mine (36) so I wouldn't lose my parking spot. I set it up upstairs in the spare bedroom with the used Ikea desk I got a while back. At this point, we discovered the network (Ethernet) jack that used to be there was gone; apparently the contractors had covered it over when making the windstorm repairs in 2006.

20090114: Called our contractor about the lost network jack and he promised to send someone out.

Picked up AR-15 (no CPL, no "what country", since I put "U.K (ENGLAND)" instead of just "U.K" this time) at Cash Company; returned library books. Put the AR-15 together; trivial, just two pins to join the upper and lower. I'll pick up some ammo and cleaning tools at the WAC show this weekend.

20080115: Setting up a carpool to the WAC show, and a lunch meetup (which never panned out—two of us were there, with a sign even, and me wearing my Glock shirt as I had told people). Bought two polymer AR-15 mags from a guy here (on the msgun list) for $25 (total).

20090116: Watched pilot episode of Homeland Security USA. Pretty good; I suspect that for reasons of political correctness, Mexican criminals will be underrepresented, but at least they were included (kind of hard not to with the rampant immigration crimes in the south).

20090117: Puyallup gun show. Picked up a cleaning rod (Dewey 30"), some .223 ammo (500 rounds of Wolf and 100 rounds of reloaded brass). I need to get some brushes and a bore snake; will probably get them at a local place like Wade's, even though they're expensive for larger items.

20090118: Went shooting (at SVRC) for the first time in a while; shot my Glock and EMP, but not the new rifle yet, although I did talk to someone about procedure, how to set up, etc. The club provides iron target stands, which is nice, and there are holes out on the field where they can be inserted; bring your own cardboard backing and targets, same as the pistol pit. When I got back, Honey told me she'd noticed some mole hills in the back yard; argh. I wish it was legal to shoot them (it's too close to another house), although it'd probably be hard to catch them in the act anyway.

20090119: As promised last week, the contractor that handled the windstorm damage in 2006 (Jim Cameron, a generally good guy), sent an electrician to restore the network jack. Nice guy; didn't take too long for him to discover the network cable behind the phone jack in the room, and convert it to a phone-and-network jack. Plugging in the computer immediately netted it a network address via DHCP (from the downstairs server), and all was well. Thanks, Jim! (Because of that, I worked from home today.)

I'm working on assignment 2 for my class, which was recently posted; this one was easier than the first; I'm already finished (took maybe an hour, including the extras described below). Part of it is an interpreter and translator for a small subset of Logo , which produces a list of points visited from a script; I wrote further code to use ImageMagick to generate an image from the points visited (for fun, and as a verification).

We wanted to re-record a program (Dharma and Greg) on the Myth box without going through all the old ones individually; it wasn't too difficult: just find the show in the oldrecorded table (in MythTV's MySQL database, called mythconverg), and set the duplicate column to 0 (meaning allow record again), e.g. update oldrecorded set duplicate = 0 where title = 'Dharma & Greg'.

Review: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

Political ·Sunday January 18, 2009 @ 23:47 EST (link)

I finished Sinclair's The Jungle today; basically it's a sob story about a family of Lithuanian immigrants who get ripped off by several people who lie and take advantage of their ignorance and inability to read English; everyone dies but one man, who eventually becomes a tramp and survives as a thief, before finally returning to corrupt Chicago to see the light of socialism in the last few chapters (it has a very "tacked on" feel).

It persuasively argues that unfettered capitalism is bad, but it doesn't succeed in arguing that socialism is the only, best, or even a cure. There are many forms of government that would innately oppose corruption, and many groups of rulers that would oppose it despite the government in which they participated. Libertarianism, which has at its foundation non-aggression, is superior to most, given that it also preserves the individual. To begin with I thought it far different than Skinner's Walden Two, but it's really two sides of the same coin: both want to form an oligarchy to dictate to and steal from the population.

Clearly, at the stockyards, the supply (of labor) vastly exceeded the demand. Basic economics says that this will push prices (wages) down. Immigration should have been restricted. The Lithuanian families that the book centers around should never have been allowed into the country, especially since they had no claim of asylum (which is frequently abused, anyway).

The wedding in the book is a Lithuanian tradition, part of which involves the attendees, who benefit from food and drink, contributing to the wedding after dancing with the bride. Many leave early without paying anything. I'm not sure if this is meant to be a metaphor for anything, but under capitalism, you pay for what you use. Neither people's dishonesty nor non-adherence to old customs is the fault of capitalism. Not all traditions from the old world are helpful; many traditions from the third world are downright deleterious: that of having too many children, for example (fine enough in the old world when half would die off and the other half would work in the fields, but a liability in the new, except now, of course, when living beyond your means is a meal ticket).

Regarding the fraud perpetrated by the real estate salesman (claiming the house was new, etc.): libertarianism would regard that as aggression, and as such the government would legitimately step in to punish the aggressor (e.g. perhaps releasing the family from the contract if they so chose, allowing them to leave or renegotiate; they might elect to stay, but they would have at least some chance of negotiation, since although the house market there was a regular revolving door, occupancy was quite low when they got there; on the other hand, since the company was making 3x what they paid, perhaps they could afford to wait). The real estate company would also be liable for damages due to the fraud, although they'd likely vanish and reappear under a new name the next day: libertarianism tends to frown on giving person status to corporations for this very reason (this blog an explanation of why they conflict) and might hold the owners personally liable.

It's pretty much analogous to the current mortgage crisis where people are being foreclosed on because, well, a fry cook can't afford a $500,000 house, no matter how you cook the books or how much the government threatens banks. Read the fine print, and if you can't, don't close the deal. While personally attractive (since it keeps up the value of my house), any sort of bailout for people being foreclosed on (and companies going out of business) is morally bankrupt: they entered a contract, and the government should not be either giving away responsible people's money to save the irresponsible or altering a mutually agreed-upon deal.

Regarding the horrible working conditions in the fertilizer plant: should the government be regulating these conditions? The company is not aggressing against the employee; the employee has the choice not to work there. But that answer is of course altogether too facile: most jobs in the stockyards were replete with horrible known health hazards (known to everyone, "common knowledge" even). Does that mean that the act of offering the job is aggressive and thus must be stopped by government? If so, it's a slippery slope: police work is dangerous too. Perhaps then the criteria has to be that a job can be offered only if the company stops any preventable harm: but how far does that go? Police don't drive in tanks, but a tank could save their lives against a rampaging drunk driver or gunman. Where, objectively and systematically (that is, fairly) is the line drawn?

Antanas, Kristoferas, Ona and her baby all die from what are probably easily prevented diseases (due the poor conditions and lack of care). Socialists will tell you they should have been protected by free (i.e. others pay for it) healthcare, and by government-mandated safety standards. We addressed the safety standards in part above (providing an unsafe job can be considered an aggressive act); also, industry tends to regulate itself, but it also tends to manipulative monopolies while in its infancy. It seems that if it were not for those that cheated them and thus aggressed against them, the family would have been well enough off to own their house and be in reasonable if not excellent health, with the money to afford a doctor when necessary (but nobody would be picking their pockets to provide for those poorer than them).

Regarding corruption: the less power government has, the less chance it has to corrupt (no power, no corruption). A libertarian government is a small and well-heeled one, servant to its citizens in more than just name. As I've said: the book argues well against unfettered capitalism and corruption, but any nation of laws would abominate the aggression in the book, and a libertarian one would also leave them free to profit from their labors.

Written in 1906, it naively touts socialism before the disastrous regimes ushered in by the Bolshevik Revolution, Hitler's National Socialists, and Mao's Cultural Revolution, all of which formed the same oligarchy, which, being were more equal than others, plundered their nation's wealth and left only crumbs for the working person, who is inspired by the system to mediocrity and graft. Skinner's vision seems more gentle, until you read about how he envisions forcing the surrounding population into his socialist utopia "for their own good" (the usual mantra of the dictator). As a voluntary society, formed by contract, it would be welcomed within a libertarian realm, just as any voluntarily formed city-state; as a tyrannical dictatorship, no matter how much velvet on the iron glove, never.

Books finished: The Jungle.

My AR-15 has shipped; server-side mail filtering

News, Technical, Guns, School ·Sunday January 11, 2009 @ 20:14 EST (link)

Democrats made fun of Reagan because he was an actor. And now they roll out a comedian. Figures—to them government is nothing but a joke masquerading as a punchline pretending to be funny.

—KM in CLAMS, on Al Franken putatively beating Norm Coleman in the MN senate race.

20090104: Tried to get up the driveway at 0630 with both cars, no dice. Worked from home.

20090105: My AR-15 is in (Rock River Arms Elite CAR A4)! Pete at AR15sales.com had said not to expect it until February, so it's early (still a long wait, since November). It should arrive at my FFL soon, and then I can take it to the range to sight it in. To do: buy ammo and appropriate cleaning supplies (probably at the next WAC gun show). Still snowed in today.

20090106: Honey had her arm cast (broke her wrist falling on the ice getting the mail last week). Blue cast, can't hardly do anything with that hand or arm, on for six weeks, doctor wants to re-examine in four.

20090107: 124th flooded (snow then a flood, what lovely weather); I left work early (1530); Woodinville-Duvall (the other road into Duvall) was moving at a snail's pace (idiots… it's a straight road, how hard is it to get some volume through?) Woodinville-Duvall closed later that night: the Island Nation of Duvall had severed ties with the mainland.

My new monitor (Acer x223w, 22", 1680x1050) arrived today (Costco special); it's gorgeous. I can easily view 3x3 candle charts in thinkorswim's trading application; Internet Explorer was fuzzy until I turned off ClearType (it's really fugly on an LCD monitor). This is my first LCD monitor; it's very nice, quite slim, had to put a box under it to make it high enough, but works fine with my laptop (new computer should be arriving soon; I think the laptop's graphics unit may be a bit slow for the screen size; there's some flickering; if it persists with the new machine too, I'll return the monitor).

20090108: Regarding the current flood that has cut off the Isand Nation of Duvall from the rest of the world (a 10-year flood that's been happening every few years now), someone on the Microsoft Duvall employees mailing list commented:
I gotta say, the year 2016 is underwhelming so far. Still no flying cars or FIOS.
(FIOS = fiber optic networking, a running joke because our local cable Internet provider, Broadstripe, sucks badly, and Verizon, the DSL provider, keeps promising FIOS and we see people laying cable, but they have yet to deliver). Went to the library to pick up some more books.

It's about 1700, and the noisy neighborhood kids are standing on one of the remaining piles of snow—right outside our place, love it—and yahooing (like Swift's Yahoos).

Due to the flooding I missed my first class of my current University of Washignton PMP course (CSE P 505, programming languages), but I finished homework 1; programming for the course is in the functional language Caml (using the OCaml implementation).

20090109: Still cut off; Woodinville-Duvall is a mess even with the floodwater gone: a section of road came up in chunks, and it's impassable; repairs are expected to be completed Sunday. The WA-203 to Monroe is still closed (Carnation is open), and a big chunk of WA-202 washed away (which is unfortunate since it's near SVRC, my range, and the detour adds 10 miles). Watched Thursday's lecture; this course is recorded (might as well since they have to stream it to Microsoft anyway).

(Helped my father-in-law Doug with a trojan, VirusRemover2008; took a while to talk him through killing VRM2008.exe in the task manager then installing Spybot S&D.)

20090110: Moved "The Rebel Rec" (site for Mullens highschool alumni in WV, Honey and her parents' friends) from MSN Groups to Multiply. Multiply is more of a blog than a forum, so it's not great, but perhaps it won't have the issues with allowing emails direct to the group and keeping all the headers and footers.

I'm playing with using procmail to file local mail into folders (server-side; I used to have my client, KMail do it, but now I mainly use mutt, and client-side filtering is suboptimal anyway). Looking around, I found something better (clearer, more powerful, easier to use) than procmail: maildrop, a mail delivery agent with a filtering language. It looks like setting | maildrop in my local .qmail file and writing a .mailfilter file is all that's necessary to set it up.

20090111: 20080111: Woodinville-Duvall re-opened (the floods receded Friday, but a huge chunk of the surface of the road had been torn up, so this was actually pretty quick work). WA-202 is still closed between WA-203 and 356th SE on the way to the range.

Books finished: Invasion, Intermarket Analysis.

The Anti-Theft Amendment

Political ·Saturday January 10, 2009 @ 16:51 EST (link)

I started by asking myself: how would congress work if it didn't have power to tax? They'd have to persuade people to opt-in; this is easy to see how it works with e.g. healthcare, but less easy with infrastructure that everyone uses.

Representatives should be empowered solely to put together proposals which people can opt into, and perhaps to make laws, although only against malum in se crimes, i.e. those that cause harm (to people or property), handle national defense, and borders. This should work at all levels, so e.g. at the municipal or county levels, representatives would have to persuade people to opt in to support e.g. schools and libraries (with people able to change their election either at any time or at least yearly).

Regarding infrastructure: roads, e.g. Interstates at the state level, possibly even at the federal level (although that's dubious since things should be as granular as reasonably possible and it doesn't do a Washingtonian any good if New York highways are improved; if he uses goods transported on those highways, the price of the good should include the cost of transportation which should include route maintenance) etc. should be counted as opted into if used. Until all roads can be made toll (possibly with computer tracking), this means people that drive will contribute a share of their city, county, state, and federal road taxes, ideally by use (gasoline tax distributed to each depending on number of drivers and roads).

Opting in by use needs to be very narrowly restricted, i.e., a politician can't claim that people have opted-in by use by taking no action (e.g. they shouldn't be able to claim someone's opted into welfare payments just by existing, or even by working, but driving on roads is sufficient to opt into their upkeep, although not necessarily building new ones or upgrading).

How would the actual voting on proposals work? Perhaps by default, people's choice is allocated to their representative (later, these representatives will go away, replaced by delegates: anyone can delegate their choice to anyone else, again, changeable either at any time or yearly). A proposal comes with an associated (hard) cost or cost range; the first vote is support; the second is to fund it (after figuring out how many people are supporting it). Perhaps people commit to a range of funding, and then after the first vote an algorithm is used to determine who's in?


I've been exploring some ideas that could fix the corruption of government and I think I've hit upon an axiomatic (and short) amendment, one that, if enacted would stem the corruption almost immediately.

No tax shall be levied without direct consent of the taxed (with annual opt-out).

I'm still trying to work this idea out exactly. I think use should constitute consent (you drive on a road, you've consented to pay your part of its upkeep; you send your kids to school, you've consented to pay your part from property taxes, etc.). It's very much a thought experiment; it'd be virtually impossible to pass it (and it was virtually impossible for a ragtag bunch of colonists to defeat the British army and navy). I think it would have been impractical for most of the life of the Republic, due to communication difficulties, but with today's technology it's an idea whose time is near.

At the core of the idea is that instead of politicians introducing a bill and its passing giving them the right to appropriate funds, rather, after the bill passes, it goes to the population to be funded. As now, people can delegate their support to others, or they can elect for themselves. The benefit here is that it allows people to opt out of government programs they don't use (but they can choose to opt in even so: even if I don't visit any national parks this year, I can still decide they're valuable and to pay some money to support them). (It's a bit like company benefits, with annual election and renewal.)

There's definitely more fine-tuning needed for the raw idea, and as a legal proposal it'd need more ironclad language to prevent abuse (cf. the abuse of the "general welfare" clause). Do people "use" national government; and if so, does that mean that a congressperson can charge any excesses to the population (as now), hire as large a staff as they like for whatever amount they wish, lease a private jet, etc. and bill the taxpayer? Representatives deserve a salary, decided by the people, and after that the public should have to give direct consent for expenses incurred.

Books finished: No Exit, and Three Other Plays.

DVDs finished: M*A*S*H: Season Three, Children Of The Corn 666: Isaac's Return, Friends: The Complete Third Season.

S&P rally?

News, Trading ·Saturday January 3, 2009 @ 22:11 EST (link)

20090101: Finally got mail; parents sent Christmas card and Turkish delight; also got some cards from Graham and Wendy Martin and Chris and Vanessa, and Honey got some from people back in WV. Called my parents to thank them.

20090102: Went out to get a new tire (Les Schwab, Redmond); it cost about $150. Went to BCC to get the last of Honey's books while they were changing the tire; stopped at the library on the way home (four more books, returned three, yelled at them for having a fine on my account for a book I returned weeks ago). Got Honey some pepper spray at Wade's.

20090103: I'm a manager at the Rebel Rec (partly because of people quitting, partly because I'll be the moving it to a new location in February (Multiply), when MSN Groups shuts down.

It could just be the start of the year (around the holidays, when the amateurs play and the pros stay away), but looking at a monthly chart of the S&P (SPX), it appears that in the latter half of 2007 it hit the same resistance area as in most of 2000 (around 1550), and that we're now bouncing off support established in late 2002 through early 2003, which may mean a bullish turn, although it's far too early to tell. Support and resistance are about psychology, so if enough people believe (and act), it will happen.

(Switching back to a diurnal cycle, which means staying up most of the night and day today.)

Finished Walden Two; interesting. The idea of behavioral science making better behavioral scientists (among other professions, of course) is interesting, like bootstrapping a compiler or the robots of Code of the Lifemaker, as the comparison of freedom in a planned community to freedom given predestination. Seems plausible, but I'd like to see it. Some of the foundations are compatible with libertarianism, but then they veer into socialism and handwave about conditioning people to like it. The best thing about the version presented in the book is that it's opt-in.

Books finished: A Beginner's Guide To Day Trading Online, The Immigration Solution, Walden Two.

DVDs finished: Children Of The Corn 3: Urban Harvest, Transporter 2, Children Of The Corn 4: The Gathering, Children Of The Corn 5: Fields Of Terror, Disturbia.

Free market health insurance

Political ·Wednesday December 31, 2008 @ 04:00 EST (link)

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
—Thomas Jefferson

The key word is "IF". Unfortunately, President-Elect [Obama] was elected under the pretense of taking care of them.
—KM on CLAMS

Interesting New York Times letter to the editor and especially the FAQ on free market health insurance, wherein Dr. Paul Hsieh of Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine (FIRM) explains how the solution to skyrocketing healthcare costs is not more government control (and theft) but a free market; from his letter:
The skyrocketing costs of health insurance are the result of onerous government regulations, such as mandatory benefits.

Many states require insurance plans to include benefits like chiropractor care or in vitro fertilization. Such mandatory benefits raise insurance costs by about 20 percent to 50 percent, according to the Council for Affordable Health Insurance.

More fundamentally, mandated benefits violate an individual’s right to contract freely with insurers and providers according to his rational judgment for his best interest. Instead, a bureaucrat decides how the individual must spend his own money.

Eliminating these mandates would make health insurance available to millions of Americans who desperately want it but cannot now afford it.

The proper solution to the health insurance crisis is not more government, but a free market.
His FAQ answers some common questions, such as: Read it, read it now, and then tell me that you can, with a clean conscience, support such socialist mandates as "universal healthcare", no matter how it's suger-coated.

Books finished: Beyond Technical Analysis.

Programming languages and OCaml

News, Technical, School, Trading ·Tuesday December 30, 2008 @ 20:38 EST (link)

"Never get out!" he yelled. "That's it. Of course. We shall never get out. What a fool I was to have thought they would let me go as easily as that. No, no, we shall never get out."
—C. S. Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

20081228: The plow came today, while we were sleeping (we're nocturnal over holidays). Fortunately, our neighbo(u)r, AH, rang the doorbell and woke me up. When I say fortunately, I'm being sarcastic, since there's nothing we could do (can't move the car, it's already at the top of the driveway and there's too much snow and ice around it to move it back any further, even if I were inclined to put it back in the driveway, which I'm not, given the work of getting it out). We should be able to get out tomorrow, God willing. It's been a long time.

My course next quarter is CSE P 505: Programming Languages (Dan Grossman). It looks interesting. I worked on "homework 0" (no points, just "get to know you" questions), and read the syllabus (about as expected for a programming languages course; I was happy to read words like "elegance" and "minimalist", though).

I installed OCaml on my home machine, since it appears to be the primary language for the course, and tried to install the UWa. research "SEMINAL" patch (it's supposed to improve error messages, although unfortunately it only works against 3.08.4, not newer versions, latest being 3.11.0 at time of writing). I was able to use Gentoo's ebuild utility to fetch and unpack the base, then I applied the patch, then used ebuild again to compile (meaning build), install (to a temporary location as usual with Gentoo), and qmerge (merge the install tree with the live system). However, the install stage got stuck in an infinite loop (keeps spawning make, had to kill a huge nested stack of processes); that didn't happen without the SEMINAL patch, so the patch is probably causing the problem. I went back and installed the latest version, without the borked patch.

Sample OCaml code (this is a function from the second homework for the class, but it's not required to turn in; it's something I wrote for fun to converts a sequence of turtle graphics coordinates—generated by other parts of the assignment that interpret a subset of Logo (note time travel)—into an image using ImageMagick; it's not especially graceful, but it gives the general idea of the language; in the .NET world, F# is based on OCaml, except it has useful libraries): 
(* for fun, build a canvas and draw the moves on it using ImageMagick *)
(* in standard logo we'd have pu/pd to tell when we're drawing; here we have
   to just draw everything *)
(* tested with interpLarge/interpSmall/runTrans *)
let draw_cmd file size movelist = let pl = interpLarge movelist in
  let o = (float size)/.2. (* origin *)
  in let line x y =        (* generate ImageMagick MVG path line command *)
    "L " ^ string_of_float (o +. x) ^ "," ^ string_of_float (o +. y)
  in (String.concat " " (["convert"; "-size";
    (string_of_int size) ^ "x" ^ (string_of_int size); "xc:white";
    "-draw"; "\"stroke black fill none";
    "path 'M"; (string_of_float o); (string_of_float o)] @
    (List.map (fun (x,y) -> line x y) pl) @ ["'\""; file]))

(* test function for ease of use: draw on an 800x800 canvas to a web-accessible
   file generated from the given name *)
let draw name movelist =
  Sys.command (draw_cmd ("/home/static/htdocs/dbrobins/tmp/" ^ name ^ ".gif")
   800 movelist)
Burned some DVDs of some episodes sitting on the MythTV HD that we've already watched: mainly Stargate Atlantis. Wrote filldvd.pl to chunk a set of files into DVD-sized blocks, using Filesys::DiskUsage, Number::Human::Bytes, and File::Copy.

20081229: Found this new economy/finance blog, Pomp and Surkanstance (by two brothers Surkan), via the Investment Club internal mailing list. Looks interesting, especially his recent predictions for the technology industry in 2009. If he's right, I need to short GOOG, RIMM, AAPL, VZ and other tech firms (including MSFT), oil (OIL/USO/futures?), local (S&P, NASDAQ, DOW) and foreign indexes, and EUR/USD, and go long pay-as-you-go IT support and mobile phone companies. He predicts volatility, which is usually good for traders.

We finally got out (!): went to Safeway (groceries), Target (Wii game for Honey with birthday money, but they were sold out so she got a game at Circuit City), Half Price Books (extra 20% off), Circuit City (looked at monitors, bought another battery backup to replace one that died), Hard Drives Northwest (looked at computers and monitors, towards building a new trading system), Estate Arms (gun store nearby; closed), and Costco (bulk groceries). ViewSonic monitors look a bit fuzzy; HP and Dell looked good, but Acer looked the best; maybe it's just taste, but Acer looked sharper and clearer at Circuit City and HDNW. We got the following books at Half Price Books: Called my mother in the morning, since she was gone (she and Emily were taking Grandma Martin to other relatives Toronto) when I called Christmas Day.

20081230: Got out to the library today (it's closed Monday). Logged into work just before midnight to enter vacation time and avoid forfeiting time over the max allowed to keep.

Books finished: Safe Strategies For Financial Freedom, Beyond Candlesticks.

DVDs finished: Daylight, The Transporter.

Auto-importing DHCP hosts into local DNS

News, Technical, Photography ·Saturday December 27, 2008 @ 23:33 EST (link)

20081224: Went to sleep around 0700, got up 1330; two hour power outage, 1345 to 1545; played Carcassonne, power came back towards the end. Power bounced again at 1605.


20081225: I debated titling this entry Merry Christmas to some, bah humbug to PSE, but time truly does diminish wounds. The snow was far heavier than normal for this area, and I'm sure the people that fixed the various outages weren't involved in the design decisions that caused them (I'm sure they had mixed emotions about the overtime vs. being called out on Christmas Day). We had a short outage at 0306-0307, and a few more sub-minute outages in the early am. NTP was having trouble on the MythTV box (and our ancient desktop), possibly because it was so far off from the hardware clock (hwclock). Updated system time to be approximate, and then /etc/init.d/ntp-client worked, and I ran hwclock --systohc --local to update the hardware clock (and made sure it was being set on shutdown, via /etc/conf.d/clock). Then the big one came: the power went out from 0740 to 1205. Really? Yep. Christmas morning without power. Laptop didn’t resume from hibernation, had to do a full boot, and I even let the disk check run.

I set the various local machines to pass in a DHCP hostname (via either /etc/conf.d/net for the old baselayout-1 machine, /etc/dhcp/dhcpcd.conf for baselayout-2 machines), then setup tinydns (part of the djbdns toolset) on the server, using this Gentoo guide; tinydns is listening on 127.0.0.1, and dnscache redirects to it for .internal addresses. We're now powered by djbdns (the author asks people to write that so it shows up on searches). I wrote dhcp_tinydns, a (perl) program inspired by this one to update the DNS data for DHCP, using Linux::Inotify2 to watch dhcpd.leases, Text::DHCPLeases to parse the leases file, and a few DateTime modules to parse the lease end date and output it in TAI64 format for the tinydns data file. Now I can SSH to or ping machines by name rather than IP address, which is handy.

Snow's melting; we should be able to get out tomorrow. Called my family, talked to my Dad for a while; Mom and Emily were out taking Grandma to other relatives; talked to 3 of 4 sisters and a brother-in-law.


20081226: Tweaked dhcp_tinydns to log using Sys::Syslog (with tweaks to syslog-ng.conf to log to a new location), and daemonize using App::Daemon, and wrote a Gentoo init script for it.

Still couldn't get the car out today: snow, ice (slick from kids sledding on it), a front-wheel drive car, and a steep uphill street all worked against me.

20081227: Still can't get out, although the white crap is beginning to melt. Added internal reverse DNS support: needed to create /var/dnscachex/root/servers/0.0.10.in-addr.arpa containing 127.0.0.1, the internal address of the tinydns server, same as for the internal file in the same directory. For tinydns, I needed to add a nameserver line for the 10.0.0. prefix: .0.0.10.in-addr.arpa:127.0.0.1:a:259200. Now dig -x works as expected.

Books finished: Technical Analysis, Bioinformatics, Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques, The Candlestick Course.

DVDs finished: A Christmas Story.

The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan

Political ·Wednesday December 24, 2008 @ 01:37 EST (link)

The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan has the transcript of a panel discussion on the book The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan Than Today's (which I have on hold at the library, but haven't been able to pick up due to snow), held by the Center for Immigration Studies at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, October 30, 2007. Some quotes (summaries in italics, some elision for brevity, and highlighting is mine):

If conservatives have demonstrated anything over the last decade-and-a-half, it is that enforcing the law works. Liberals long claimed that crime could not be lowered until poverty disappeared. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton begged to differ, and began the most rigorous, accountable, and humane campaign of policing that [New York city] had ever seen. Crime dropped 70% and stayed down.

After 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security deported 1,500 illegal Pakistanis living in New York City. 15,000 Pakistanis then left voluntarily.

If someone proposed a program to boost the number of Americans who lack a high school diploma, have children out of wedlock, sell drugs, or use welfare, he would be deemed mad. Yet, our current immigration chaos is doing just that. Hispanics now have the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country. The Hispanic-out-of-wedlock birthrate is 50 percent, two times that of whites, and three times that of Asians. The Hispanic dropout rate is the highest in the country. And Hispanic children are joining gangs at younger and younger ages.

Somewhere around 2000, it was considered impolite to use the word illegal alien, even though it’s an entirely descriptive term… the imprecise word, undocumented worker, doesn’t tell us very much at all about the people who are here. Not all are working. Some figures have suggested that 25 percent of those on California entitlement are here illegally from Mexico. And undocumented suggests that there was documents at one point, and they had been forgotten or lost. In most of the cases, nobody had a document.

There were two tactics, I think, of [people] who wanted what I would call de facto open borders. One was to demonize people as racist who were concerned about enforcing the law… the second thing that proponents of open borders try to do is they try to confuse the issue of legal and illegal immigration.

We have sort of a lifecycle, where the employer uses, if I could say, the muscular capital of hardworking people from Mexico, and then after they are 40, to pick an arbitrary date, he throws them back on the entitlement industry. … So it is in the interest of the employer to keep the present system.

But the point is what is cynical about it—and I want to get back to that debate I had not long ago with the Mexican consul—is that, as I pointed out to him, the Mexican government expects somebody in Firebaugh or Mendota or Five Points who is struggling on $10 to $11 to send half of that wage back to Mexico. And that would, de facto, mean that he would have to work and live in conditions that are somewhat deplorable, and he would have to be subsidized by another government. His educational, his medical needs, whether in the emergency room or in the school district would have to be subsidized by the United States simply because he didn’t have the capital not necessarily because the wages were low but because half of his wages were being sent to prop up the Mexican government.

And when you couple that with the notion of La Raza, despite linguistic contortions … in Latin it means the race. No other group, whether it’s so-called white, Asian or black, would have a national organization of the race; it just would be beyond the pale.

Here’s what [the National Academy of Sciences] said about the first great immigration [1800-1925]: in general those immigrants were on par or slightly more skilled than the American workforce that was currently here. As a result of that, these immigrants succeeded fairly rapidly. … The majority of them didn’t stay here, and very few people understand this. America did not have a social safety net; we did not have welfare, we did not have Medicare, Medicaid, we did not have school lunch programs. If you couldn’t make it here, you went back. And in fact, it’s estimated that more than half of all immigrants during the first great immigration went back.

Now, not surprisingly, their children also succeeded… some of them did wonderful, great things. Most of them just became sort of solid members of the middle class. Economic studies have shown is that the children of the first great wave of immigrants essentially did 10% better than their parents economically. But it’s not like they made these great leaps.

There’s a third reason why these immigrants were able to succeed, a reason that we never talk about in this current debate, and that is that there were so many immigrants coming that there was a political reaction against them. That political reaction were the series of immigration restriction laws starting in the 1920s that eventually helped to cut off virtually all immigration to the United States; that combined with the Depression, which turned America into actually a net exporter of people during the 1930s, one of the few decades in American history when we were a net exporter.

Why is that important? Because economic research shows who immigrants compete most with; they compete firstly with other immigrants, and then they compete with native-born workers. When we had what you could call an immigration moratorium… we gave all those immigrants who were here and staying here an enormous advantage. They no longer had to compete with other… that immigration timeout is another reason why that generation succeeded.

(In summary: the three reasons previous immigrants succeeded:
  1. Their skills were equal to or greater than the American work force
  2. They self-selected as able to prosper (without entitlements)
  3. A reduction in immigration levels helped them establish themselves.)
 In essence, the educational levels and the skill levels of today’s immigrants are not much different than immigrants of the first great generation, but America is a hundred years advanced.

A study done by economists published in 2006, economists at Harvard and the University of Chicago, estimated that immigration has been responsible for 40 percent of the decline in male black employment in the United States over the last 20 years.

So when you look at these sorts of issues you begin to ask yourself, what can we do to make immigration a plus for the American economy&hellip. Australia I found to be a very interesting case, and here’s why. Australia, as late as the mid-1980s, had an immigration system that was similar to our old immigration system in that it was sort of based on national origin. They favored people from Europe, and then of course when people from Europe stopped coming because, you know, they’ve got their own opportunities in Europe. Then they favored people from Asia, and then finally they said, why don’t we stop this national origin stuff; why don’t we figure out what our economy needs and try to attract people with the right skills who want to come here, regardless of where they’re from? And so they shifted from a policy that was national-origins based and that favored people who had family relations to one that was based on skills.

To paraphrase JFK: we should not ask what America (and the American taxpayer) can do for immigrants, but what immigrants can do for America, and for individual Americans: and if that answer is that the immigrant will hurt individual Americans, then the door should stay closed.

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