::::: : the wood : davidrobins.net

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.

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.

Thus begins the snow isolation

News ·Wednesday December 24, 2008 @ 01:09 EST (link)

20081217: Worked from home due to snow forecast and ice on roads; working from home for rest of week then off next week, probably week after too. (Started snowing heavily in the afternoon.)

20081218: Still snowing (10"-12" accumulation at 10pm) in "The Island Nation of Duvall" (as someone on the work Duvall mailing list put it), possible high winds this weekend.

Watched Saw (second viewing, or perhaps third): they try to present Jigsaw as a rational actor, "punishing" people, and giving them a way out of his trap. But I don't find him consistent, nor does he have standing to punish (he's not God, he has no injury if people aren't sufficiently appreciating life, despite the fact that he himself is dying). Lawrence saying that "Jigsaw Killer" is a misnomer because he never directly kills anyone is sheer sophistry.

20081220: Grades are in (supposed to be available on MyUW on the 17th, but they weren't available until today; until now the grade was "X" meaning not yet submitted); I got a 4.0 in Accessibility (I have no idea of the distribution; perhaps everyone did), and my 1.0 colloquium credit (colloquia are pass/fail). It's good news, but tough to maintain especially with more mathematical and programming-intensive courses, like I expect next term's Programming Languages to be. At least now I can put in for my tuition benefit at work.

Power went out for a half minute or so at 2345. minas-tirith decided to help out by turning off ip_forward (what the blazes?). Fixed it up in /etc/sysctl.conf; might have been due to the baselayout-2 change?

Having read the Wikipedia definition of paleoconservatism, I cheerfully identify as one, despising the managerial state; I suppose "paleoconservative libertarian" most accurately describes me (which is why I favor the Constitution Party, although I think the Libertarian Party has more of a chance of getting a candidate elected, so I support them too).

20081221: The promised windstorm never materialized (Honey wasted a lot of worrying). Sent Christmas gifts (money, since we didn't get out to pick gifts and postage is expensive for packages anyway) to (parents and younger siblings in) our families. Honey's relatives in Pullman finally got back to us on coming here for Christmas, begging off because of the weather.

11 o'clock news says Duvall got 19" of snow (up to 23" including overnight), more than anywhere else in the Seattle area (Seattle itself only got 9½).

20081223: Happy Festivus: shoveled the driveway out, took about three hours (1300-1450), went faster when a neighbor loaned me a snow shovel; but even after getting the car out, no dice; the local kids had been sledding on the road all day and it was too slick to get up and the library, one of our destinations, was closing at 1500 anyway. Argh.

Started watching Babylon 5; it's rather comical; bad acting ("Why, why… is the acting so bad?"), bad technology and special effects (you'd never guess it was made in 1993, contemporary with the end of Star Trek: The Next Generation (which ended in 1994).

Books finished: Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets, Into the Labyrinth, Day Trading the Currency Market, The Seventh Gate.

DVDs finished: Friends: The Complete Second Season, Paycheck.

Ammunition stamping: dumbasses and doubletalk

Political, Guns ·Saturday December 20, 2008 @ 22:41 EST (link)

I'd heard about this before but my father-in-law brought it to our attention. Here's the story. Once upon a time, an anti-gun businessman spent about $200k to create an ammunition-stamping system that would stamp serial numbers on batches of ammunition. He went around to ammunition manufacturers and tried to peddle it to them. They put their heads in their hands and thought: hmmm, should we pay money for this system that will increase our costs and decrease our profits? Since they're going concerns and not charities run by idiots (i.e. they're not US automakers), they laughed the guy out of their offices. But he vowed to get even, and bought up a lobbying firm or two who took some politicians out to expensive lunches and persuaded them that they should make this system law—for the good of the children, to bring dead victims back from the grave, and because criminals that will use a gun to commit crimes will certainly adhere to this law. After all, buying politicians was cheaper than employing a sales team or reading books, becoming informed, and building something the market actually wanted.

Passing a dumbass law like this would:
  1. criminalize handloaders
  2. criminalize private ammunition sales
  3. criminalize importing ammunition (unless foreign companies also employ this useless coding, which is unlikely
  4. criminalize storing non-coded ammunition after 2011
  5. further increase size and cost of government
  6. do nothing to reduce crime
  7. inordinately increase the cost of ammunition for legal users (probably as designed)
  8. criminalize hitting a bullet with a hammer and removing the mark
  9. further reduce privacy and increase government surveillance of what are becoming not free citizens, but subjects.
You can get more propaganda from ammunitionaccountability.org (intentionally not linked). They don't tell you about states where it's already failed, of course, such as Arizona. In Washington it seems to have died in committee (we can hope). Let your legislators know that you oppose this attempt at deprivation of liberties in the strongest terms, and that their support for it means the loss of your vote.

Books finished: Investing For Dummies, Fifth Edition, Short Term Trading In the New Stock Market, Stock Market Strategies That Work, How To Make Money In Stocks, The Hand of Chaos.

DVDs finished: M*A*S*H : Season #2, Back to the Future: The Complete Trilogy, Saw, Fracture, Saw II, Saw III, Saw IV.

Refactoring with the Template Toolkit

News, Technical, Guns, Trading ·Tuesday December 16, 2008 @ 15:37 EST (link)

… Government policies supporting homeownership (Fannie, Freddie, Community [Reinvestment] Act, pro-mortgage tax policies, …) caused a massive over-investment in housing. So massive that it could end up being the largest capital misallocation of our lifetimes.
—MK on the Investment Club list (MS)

20081210: All About Investing (Faerber): not very deep, nothing about analysis, but I learned a little more about futures and a lot more about bonds, since I'd hardly read anything on them yet. I'll still focus on equities, but it's good to have broad knowledge.

I'd put a few books on (artificial) neural networks on hold at the library, and Honey picked some up for me today. Baby Teacher: Nurturing Neural Networks From Birth to Age Five (Rebecca Shore, ISBN 0-8108-4284-X) sounded like a colorfully-titled book on training neural networks, but it was actually about real babies and real neurons; go figure.

20081210: McDowell's The ART of Trading is just an advertisement for his software, filled with useless bromides, lies, and cheap tricks to convince you that his program doesn't suck. Title sounds good (no wonder it has a lot of holds on it) but "ART" is actually an acronym for his system. So much for that.

20081211: Bad driver: WA 438 PBB, Blue Honda Civic (?) (late model, with silver-backed Honda logo), at around 1850: queue-jumping on Novelty Hill, and again at the WA-203 roundabout. Almost collided with the guy in front of me on the Novelty Hill attempt, so I had to let the twit in.

20081212: Gave Honey her Wii—a few days before her birthday, so she could learn it before her friends are here Saturday (turns out none of them could make it). She played until about 0300, but I hacked on my book tracking system until about 0400. Started with a plan to add topics (in a similar way as I did to my log), but ended up playing around with Template Toolkit, and using it for the book list view (existing, alphabetical by author last name) and a books read view (new, ordered chronologically by date read, internal only). All checked into Subversion and running smoothly.

20081213: Went to the gun show (Puyallup), picked up some Glock magazines (so-called "high capacity", which has as much meaning as "assault weapon"): two extended 33rd (made for the automatic G18, but fit semi-automatic standard 9mms, although they stick out, hence "extended") two standard 17rd, and 1000 rds. MagTech 115 gr. FMJ ammunition. Worked on this log (I'm still back on Alaska, August 26, which puts me almost four months behind). Imported photos on my camera (Luke Williams' goodbye party, Thanksgiving, and Honey opening her Wii from Thursday); realized I hadn't installed ImageMagick on the new machine, so went and did that, then had to fix the Gentoo USE flags (/etc/portage/package.use) so it could read JPEGs, since i'd set fairly minimal global flags. Installed ExifTool to look at image creation dates (exiftool -CreateDate <file>).

20081216: Had roast beef and champagne for Honey's birthday. Changed flat (left rear) tire on Solara. Don't know how it happened; either some reprobate slashed it in the Microsoft garage or I picked something up either in the garage or later.

What warrants local news excitement

News ·Tuesday December 16, 2008 @ 12:48 EST (link)

So, after 15 years of living up here my take on what warrants local news excitement is as follows:
  1. Lightning. Seriously, they will lead a newscast for lightning and severe thunderstorms. Back in North Carolina we used to call this "a summer afternoon."
  2. Snow.
  3. Bright sunlight.
—JT, Canucks at Microsoft list

Books finished: Mexifornia, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing, A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market.

DVDs finished: Shanghai Noon, Dreamcatcher.

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