My name is David Robins
(dbrobins@davidrobins.net),
Christian, programmer, writer, photographer, runner, gun enthusiast,
libertarian, and student.
This is also my wife Honey Robins' site.
Private school cost breakdown
Political, School, Economics ·Thursday July 29, 2010 @ 21:15 PDT (link)
Public schools spend around $10k per student (or perhaps up to $25k?); I've also heard floated $15k in DC and $13k in Washington state. Apparently most private schools in DC cost less than $10k per student.
When you think "private school" the image of a school like Eton, or the school in Dead Poets' Society or The Emperor's Club comes to mind: massive and ancient ivy-covered buildings, manicured lawns, vast campus, sports facilities, rich kids in uniforms. Erase that from your mind: we're just talking about schools that are run as privately—like grocery stores or car dealerships or fitness clubs—as corporations, possibly for profit, but not necessarily. Nobody is compelled to give them money as in the state ("public") school system. Their tuition money (and private donations) have to cover all their costs; they don't get any handouts. They don't need to be fancy, or have any more clubs and extra-curriculars than a public school. Nobody needs to wear uniforms (although it's supposed to be conducive to order).
Of course, if all schools are private, people wail, the poor will not get an education! (Please go off and read Stefan Molyneux's book Practical Anarchy if you think that; I'll wait. It'll answer those questions generally. In short, those that are concerned that the poor will not be educated will fund it; and if they will not, then democracy is a sham anyway.)
Let's consider how much a school in a poor neighborhood, populated with hard-working people that want what's best for their children. It's reasonable to assume that these people can pay $3k/year/student, or for those that cannot afford it (not "don't want to"), private charities will make up the deficit. (These private charities don't have to be politically correct, so they don't have to give money out to people that can't prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they can't afford it; if they did start handing out money where it wasn't truly needed, first, they'd run out—not enough to go around, and second, they'd run out—people would stop donating if they didn't think their money was going to the needy.)
Then let's consider costs. Suppose class size is 30 students, whose parents are paying a total of $90k. Take $60k to pay the teacher and provide reasonable benefits (probably not current union level—I did say reasonable), leaving $30k for overhead. Suppose this particular school has 20 classrooms, bringing the total to $1.8M; $600k remains after paying the teachers. That can be used for building rent, paying a principal and secretary, janitorial services, and perhaps some profit to the owner. No cafeteria; no fancy sports equipment (bring your own, use donations); no extracurriculars that aren't free or paid for by participants. Remember, this is a poor area (which also keeps costs down). If we pay the principal $100k, secretary $30k, $20k for janitorial services, and assume building and grounds rent at $100k, $50k for utilities, there's still $300k left. Maybe we can buy some sports equipment and chess sets after all.
The point is, even though these are ballpark figures, it's quite reasonable to be able to privatize all schooling, quit mulcting non-participants through property taxes, and provide education that is within reach of anyone and everyone—and more likely than not (given history) at better quality than the state, and definitely more efficiently.
Update: A demonstration that my back of the envelope calculation is pretty good. Teresa Middleton charges $3k per child at her private school in Russellville, SC; the kids are excited about school and they do much better than the nearby public schools (which get $8k per child). Source: Stossel, John. Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel—Why Everything You Know is Wrong. New York: Hyperion, 2006.
Do we like our private offices too much?
Technical, Work ·Thursday July 29, 2010 @ 19:38 PDT (link)
Just a random thought. Although private offices are nice—one of the selling points of working at some places, including Microsoft (and a big disappointment that I had to share with someone my first few months there), and considered almost a requirement by Joel of Joel on Software. Offices allow for deep concentration, getting "into the zone", hacking marathons, etc. They are also of course status symbols: it is indicative of better status to be in your own office with a door than a shared office, or a cubicle, and cubicle sizes and even wall height affect perceived status (I was pretty happy when I had a high-walled fairly large cubicle at Hilton, but not so much with the tiny one).
But do we like them too much? Wouldn't more of a "bazaar" atmosphere be better, an open layout perhaps, even (!) cubicles, for certain stages of a project, especially brainstorming and scenario design? In the article above, apparently this has already been considered and the answer is that private offices are not only nice to have, they increase productivity and prevent disruptive conversations ("there was no such thing as a conversation between two people"). Sometimes it seems like it would be nice to sit in a shared area for a while to bounce ideas of others; but I suppose being able to walk by other people's offices (most keep their doors open) or in common areas (there are chairs and tables by the kitchen) is enough. Certainly I agree that I wouldn't want to permanently exchange my office for a cubicle, especially a short one where others were conversing constantly.
Books finished: Dred Scott'S Revenge.
Giving away the future
Political ·Tuesday July 27, 2010 @ 20:10 PDT (link)
Future promises: how much can legislators give away?
We frequently talk about making our posterity pay (e.g.,
"We are prostituting future generation’s livelihoods by not paying off these debts."), but even anything beyond the current legislative session needs to be reconsidered.
Legislators should have to pay for anything they promise during their term. I.e., if they promise a government union a pension, they have to put real money away in an escrow account for everyone they promise it to, and the promise can only be "We will use this money for that pension" not "No matter how many people are hired by this union, or how the economy changes, they will all get this fancy pension". One could possibly also allow claiming a known revenue stream, but the benefit paid should depend on that stream and (as when I spend my income) it should only be allowed to be allocated once. They can't bind future congresses. Every act needs to be undoable by the next congress, and they should have to explicitly continue to fund it with a bill or it goes away on its own (i.e., a sunset matching the end of the current house term). Perhaps they can fully fund a few pensions, and promise them to n people, but more likely they can partially fund more, and hope that the funding is renewed. Better still, don't promise anything, and make them invest in 401(k)s like the rest of us; better than that, don't tax anything and nobody'll need 401(k)s.
Thomas Sowell concurs with respect to Social Security, which he calls a pyramid scheme (government term is "unfunded liability") in "Social Security: A Fraudulent Pyramid Club":
When an insurance company writes a policy, it has to have enough assets to pay out what it promises. Otherwise the company can be declared bankrupt and its officials can go to jail. An insurance company that had the same benefits, premiums, and reserves as the Social Security system would be shut down by court order and its managers led away in handcuffs to face charges of fraud. … The larger question is, why do we continue to allow politicians to write laws promising benefits that they have not raised money to pay for?
Madoff was a piker compared to the state. See also: Lysander Spooner's "No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority"—in a similar vein, we can't make contracts that bind our descendants. Of course, for voluntaryists, "representatives" cannot make promises binding on anyone either, unless they agreed to that specifically. But requiring spending bills—and maybe every law on the books—to be explicitly, and individually (no omnibus bills!) renewed (rewritten, as fresh bills) at the start of each legislative session would be a positive step forward, and get rid of so many of the present problems of having bribed (in the present particular cases) the venal thugs of various government unions in good times with perpetual payouts, and being on the hook for them in lean times too. It would also lessen the incentive, or increase the cost, to buy off members of congress, since their awards (of stolen goods) would only last for a maximum of two years.
While the best answer to the question we began with is "Nothing at all", forced renewals and true "pay as you go" would definitely be an improvement.
Books finished: Under Heaven.
Can the unseen be contracted away?
Political, Work, Law ·Monday July 19, 2010 @ 01:17 PDT (link)
(This entry inspired by some thoughts I had while writing the entry on property and liberty.)
How much freedom of self (or your car, or other mobile entities) do you have on someone else's property? Do you have a (natural) right to carry concealed weapons, even if the owner is hostile? Can you ever sign away these natural rights to property (contract to not carry weapons) or are such contracts not binding? How about if the property owner has means of detection (metal detectors, guards)? If you believed that contracts can't infringe natural rights, you'd necessarily be similarly opposed to metal detectors infringing privacy, and not think that even if they found something that it could be taken. But on the other hand, right to enter property could be denied for any reason, even assertion of your own natural rights (or because you were wearing a yellow shirt). This puts the rights of the real property owner against the rights of mobile property owners (cars) or individuals (self ownership). This article also examines the rights of (real) property owners.
In a similar vein, the question may be asked, Can you contract away the unseen?
That is, can you sign a contract with, say, an employer, about something he cannot see (or, to be more general, detect). Can you sign away, for example, your freedom to go skiing on the weekends, or to drink apple juice, if it doesn't substantially affect your job? (Going skiing Saturday might make you a little more tired Monday, but it wouldn't affect your work to the detriment of your employer, or at least not more than many other activities.)
For example, you could sign a contract saying you will not do illegal "recreational" drugs, because it could affect your work (more on that in a bit). You could possibly agree to random urine testing to verify this. I would argue that if there were not some indicator (smell, behavior, poor work) indicating a behavior that one had agreed to forgo, then the employer has no business testing for it. And there could be a gray area here. Perhaps you can't easily observe drug use without taking a lot of time to observe a person, but it could still lead to grievous errors (say, on an industrial shop floor); then it might be reasonable to contract to allow random testing, but even then, a zero tolerance policy is not compatible with the "detectable" policy; there must be a level of intoxication that would compromise safety (not 100% chance, just reasonably, and I'll bet that level is above zero).
The policy would even allow for people to bring in those drugs in, say, pants pockets, as long as they would not otherwise influence contracted work (dealing them, for example, is an abuse of company time and property, engenders profit from use of said property, could be breaking the law—depending if we're in Voluntarytopia or not, takes others' time, might result in customer complaints, etc.). It's not merely whether they can be seen, either; even if an X-ray machine could pick them up, until regular people start wearing X-ray glasses, having something in your pocket doesn't interfere with how you do your job.
An alternative but similar view (that would allow for concealed carry) would be to recognize the supremacy of the right to life, liberty, and property, and allow companies only to require people to contract away the ability to protect those rights (e.g., in the case of protecting life, the right to carry weapons for self-defense) if the company can protect those rights equally well. This might involve hiring personal security guards, or controlling physical plant access with metal detectors and armed guards. For most jobs, actually protecting individual rights in this manner would be prohibitively expensive, and so people would be able to protect themselves, but for occupations where employers really (for business reasons, possibly secret labs or weapons development, or even extreme prejudice) want to disarm people, they can accomplish it by providing equivalent protection (who decides what is "equivalent" is an implementation detail).
I’m certainly a huge fan of property rights, and private contracts, but I could accept that it is not reasonable for employers to be able to restrict things that do not affect the job they are hiring someone to do.
You could have a contract that says, for example, that an employee will do whatever job they're hired for and buy all their groceries from company-affiliated store X (or go to a specific church on Sunday, or only drink water), in return for being paid (and implicitly, being allowed in the employer’s building to work). But I don’t think an employee should be held to the groceries-buying part of such a contract because it's absolutely not relevant to job performance. Sure, if you believe in unlimited contracts you can say the employee shouldn't take the job if they don't like it, but I'm having some second thoughts about unlimited contracts. Or, to state alternately, maybe an employee is held to it, but since the employer suffers no harm they have no recourse: no damages will be awarded.
The relevance to the original discussion is that carrying a firearm in your vehicle (or, even, arguably, concealed on your person) doesn’t affect your job, so, under a "limited scope contract" theory it's off the table for employment contracts (or entirely unenforceable by contract law). Of course, a company could still fire you for any reason, so if they could detect a breach of even an unenforceable provision they could fire you. Does this mean they can install metal detectors? Sure. What if they do, with guards at the doors? It’d be a huge expense for companies that decided to go that route, but (depending on the training of those at the doors) might make people feel comfortable being unarmed if they had the choice. (All hypothetical, of course. Usual disclaimers.)
I would also use a broad definition of "affects your job" to the point that if someone else sees that you have a firearm and is alarmed, you may have violated a legitimate contract provision (keeping it undetectable is your problem), and companies can ask employees not to do things that might annoy others, such as wearing excessive perfume, since it does affect the work environment.
(Another argument that was made by others in the thread where I posted some of the above was that if self-defense is a right—via the second amendment, say—standing at the same level as the right to control one's property, then there's a bit of an impasse if both rights must be preserved. I'm not arguing constitutional rights, though, but rather natural rights, and both over one's own property.)
I would thus support a "personal castle doctrine" as it were (extending to more than just defense), where one's own body or vehicle or other property is inviolate if it doesn't interfere with whatever one is contracted to do. (This is all, of course, theoretical.)
Books finished: A Song For Arbonne.
Blackhawk Serpa holster for Glock 34
News, Guns ·Saturday July 17, 2010 @ 16:34 PDT (link)
Picked up a Blackhawk Serpa holster for my Glock 34 today at West Coast Armory ($46.99, which is comparable to online prices). I really do like the retention—a very solid lock. Very slick holster altogether. Comes with a paddle as well as having belt loops. The motivation to get it was to compete in Action Pistol events at SVRC; apparently my Galco CSL (Cop Slide) leather holster cants too sharply; they claim the impact point is more than 3' behind me. But I like the Serpa enough to consider making it my daily carry holster.
We also shot there today—between us, about 100 rounds each of .22 (through the Ruger 10/22), .223 (AR-15), and 9mm (Glock 34). Good times.
The relationship between property and liberty
Political ·Friday July 16, 2010 @ 21:01 PDT (link)
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." — Frederic Bastiat
In effect, there are layers of ownership: the real owner of the land pays no taxes (rent), can sell it at will, and can build anything he wants on it; no restrictions (except the usual non-infringement on others' rights to life, liberty, and property). In a free society that's the individual; in a feudal society, that's the lord. The next layer is a lessee (in current society, a so-called home or business owner). They have some property rights, but the lord's always trump theirs. The lord might even enforce those rights (or instead decide to take the property and give it to someone else). They can do a lot, but they are regulated by the real owner (the amount of regulation is your degree of private property rights, less absolute right, of course). The next layer would be either a renter or a plantation with (Southern-style chattel) slaves; the plantation "owner" may allow the slaves some claim to shacks, or sleeping areas, or found or made or given goods, but they can be taken at any time and he does not need to provide any real justice. At the bottom of the pyramid, this slave can be abused by the serf and the lord; not a good place to be in at all.
Allodial title is a name for the true ownership mentioned above. It might be one thing that would turn a nation into a stateless society as people obtained and capitalized on full dominion over their property (no taxes, eminent domain, or police access). Private property must exclude any other jurisdiction. Jurisdiction is law through violence. It means somebody else has control over your property, so you do not actually own it. You effectively lease it at the pleasure of the state, and they can take it away, charge rent, etc.
If one supports the violence of the state (taxation, regulation, by force), then either (a) one believes "the state" owns everything or (b) one supports violence as a legitimate means to accomplish one's goals. The first is illegitimate; that was never intended in any country except communist ones, and land was always taken by force, and the founders believed in private property to a greater extent than now even though they erred and allowed for some infringements; there can be no such thing as collective ownership (who can sell it, etc.; see The Objectivist Ethics etc. on private property and collective ownership). So once the veil is taken away, then what? We claim that our local legislatures own all property in their zone of control? Not them personally; the current officeholder? But if the property is to be transferred by a vote, then they don't own it either. So it's either unowned (and claimable) or owned by whoever's name is on the title deed (since the voluntary trading that brought it into possession could and likely would have happened the same way in a free society) and they are being illegitimately charged rent.
In a similar vein, the video The Story of Your Enslavement (text) contains some explanatory elements relating liberty and truly private property, free from the coercive interference of the state. Also related: Can the unseen be contracted away? where I consider the rights of property within other property (e.g., a car in an employer-owned parking lot, or even an individual).
Books finished: Rich Dad's Guide To Becoming Rich Without Cutting Up Your Credit Cards, Give Me a Break, Beyond This Dark House, The Constitution In Exile, A Conflict of Visions.
epguides.com schizophrenia
Technical, Media ·Sunday June 13, 2010 @ 23:17 PDT (link)
epguides.com seems to be a bit schizoid. It seems to have two versions of most shows' episode lists, one of which is hopelessly out of date. For example, (the new) Doctor Who is currently showing as either having 6 or 13 episodes in season 5 (refresh a few times to see the other one).
This drives my monitor/show renaming program a little crazy, especially as it caches results (cache is cleared daily so the error doesn't last too long if the wrong version is read). I wish they'd fix it.
Books finished: Life At the Bottom, The ABC's of Building a Business Team That Wins, Kaplan LSAT Direct.
Nikon film scanner: SOLD
News ·Saturday June 12, 2010 @ 02:02 PDT (link)
Sold it for the same price I paid for it, $500. Had a little trouble since it doesn't work out of the box on Windows 7, but I found some instructions and got it to work on my new laptop, since the buyer wanted to use it on Windows 7 64-bit. The scanner.inf file needed one more tweak: the LS-50 (CoolScan V) line needed to be copied from the [Models] section to the [Models.ntamd64] section, which covers 64-bit operating systems, and then it installed. Argh, Windows… it gave me such trouble recognizing the device and trying to do things as administrator. The buyer wanted to use it to let his mother scan some negatives. I hope he's happy with it. I never really got around to using it, and I think given the time I calculated it would take to scan my thousands of negatives, it might be better (cost a little more, save a lot of time) using a negative scanning service like ScanCafe.
Books finished: Rich Dad's Who Took My Money?.
New laptop: HP from Costco
News ·Sunday June 6, 2010 @ 16:19 PDT (link)
My old Acer laptop gave up the ghost recently; it was quite sudden; it had exhibited some hard drive slowdowns and occasional boot trouble, but then a few weeks ago it either failed to boot up entirely or required a lot of power-up attempts to start, and then froze up completely a few minutes in. I suspected a heat issue, as did the technician at Hard Drives Northwest where I took it for service, although he also suspected that it was just the motherboard wearing out. He managed to back up the drive, which was going bad, to another IDE drive in a USB enclosure.
I brought the laptop in for service on May 5th; they had it for several weeks; I picked it up on May 28th, a couple days after the technician gave up on getting it to stay booted. Much of the time was spent copying the drive to another one (also an IDE, since the first plan was to put it back in the hopes that the disk was the only problem). Total cost for the repairs and new drive (old drive was 100G, new 120G, the closest they had) was $156.56, not bad given the diagnostic work done and new drive too. I just attached the USB enclosure to a machine today and everything is accessible (even the Linux ext3 partition). The most important data I think was a OneNote notebook, which is unfortunately in the binary format difficult to view from Linux. I'm not sure if any open tools can open it and (due to sharing, range-locking, etc.) they don't have an XML format. I will attempt to convert it (via export, or possibly writing a convert myself in Python or Perl using the public MS-ONE OneNote file format specification).
The old Acer was a TravelMate 4504LMi (Intel Pentium M, 1.8GHz, 100G HD, DVD±RW, 1G RAM, 802.11b/g). I checked the database—I was wondering how much I paid for it—and I'd forgotten to enter it, but I found the original receipt (turns out I bought it at Hard Drives Northwest). (When I was looking at laptops at HDNW after picking it up, I noticed that a good many were slower than my Acer; improvements now are more in the multicore or low-power areas.) I bought it on May 14, 2005, so it lasted almost 5 years, which isn't a bad run for a laptop, around when we were getting our Washington drivers' licenses, so not long after we moved here.
The price I'm paying for laptops, probably of equivalent quality at time of purchase, is trending down: my Sony Vaio was $2381.45 (June 2002, Circuit City, Memphis, TN), the Acer was $1630.91 (May 2005, HDNW, Bellevue, WA), and the new HP was just under $1000 (Costco, Woodinville, WA).
I haven't unpacked the HP from Costco yet, but I liked the store demo model because it was reasonable small, among the lightest on display, and I'd been told by users that HP was a reliable brand (although I'm sure each line has good and bad models). I bought it from Costco because they have a 90-day no questions asked return policy. I'll bet that it gets abused by some (device "rental", returning items they damaged—they've even accepted returns of half-eaten food I hear), but it's also such peace of mind that it probably drives a good number of people to buy there and cancels out the cost of abuse. Since I'll be taking the laptop on our trip cross-country, where it will get more use than in the few weeks before, I might not find problems with it until then; so HDNW's 30-day return policy would be insufficient. Furthermore, Costco has stores all across the country and they probably allow returns at any of them.
A report on using the laptop will surely follow (assume no news is good news).
Books finished: Winter's Heart.
Word development party at Rob's
News ·Friday June 4, 2010 @ 00:19 PDT (link)
I went shooting in the morning (WCA, Glock 34, moved up to 30' and shot some good targets). Guys in the next booth had something very loud (maybe just a .45) but they left before I was done.
For Office 15, Word and Publisher (and PTLS—Page, Table, and Line Services) are merging into a new team called PARC (IIRC, it stands for Publishing, Authoring, Reading, and Collaborating, with a nod towards the Xerox PARC laboratory that produced so many innovations). Our new development manager (a Word lead when I started, who then moved to be Publisher's development manager, and originally started as a Word intern), Rob, invited us all to his place for the afternoon. He's not too far from our apartment, actually—a little way up Avondale and east on 116th.
I got to Rob's around 1330 and let myself in (event start at 1300, people actually got there on time), didn't bother ringing the doorbell since I could see people I knew. He's on a very steep road, and I parked at the bottom as suggested in the invite, even though there did happen to be space in the driveway. There was plenty of food and drink—Mexican themed—and then people gravitated to the Xbox and played Roy's Street Fighter IV game. In between, Rob said a few words about people that were leaving the former teams or arriving on the new one, both full-time and interns. I took a turn with the game—Roy's "fight stick" is great—and just used Blanka's shock repeatedly (what can I say, I don't know the game, so I stuck with what worked). Jessica had a good run, and Roy's blindfolded win against Levent was epic.
It was raining when I left—the crowd had thinned considerably and most people were heading out—around 1730, so I raced down the steep street (117th) to my car. Mark's ride had left without him, so I took him back to work and then got to face the usual 520/Avondale traffic. It was a decent party, and Rob says he'll be having more. With a new development manager and a lot of great new code projects to work on, Office 15 looks like it will be a lot of fun (and hard work).
Books finished: The Limits of Power, Universally Preferable Behaviour: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
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