::::: : 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.

weRead.com successfully automated

Technical ·Friday February 27, 2009 @ 19:13 EST (link)

Finished pH::Scan::WeRead: I can programmatically can add, modify, or delete books in on weRead (and hence Facebook, via sharing). This means I can have it auto-update when I update my internal book database. Just a small project I was working on. I won't upload it to CPAN (it'd need renaming if I did, since pH is my internal project namespace; maybe WWW::WeRead) since they plan on exposing an API at some point.

"The Second Amendment is not about duck hunting"

Guns ·Thursday February 26, 2009 @ 23:19 EST (link)

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.

—Edward Abbey (1927-1989) (via)

That twit Eric Holder is sounding out a new "Assault" Weapons Ban. May the fleas of a thousand camels infest his armpits.

"Assault weapon" is a political term, not a technical one. Laws about "assault" weapons describe cosmetic appearance (what we affectionately and somewhat satirically call the Evil Black Rifle (EBR)), not operating characteristics. It's meant to apply to a class of weapons that look scary, and is intended to confuse the public due to the similarity to the term assault rifle, a weapon capable of selective fire, that is, able to shoot multiple rounds at a time (think "machine gun"). It's a dirty trick. Not as big as the dirty trick of trying to take away arms from Americans and deprive them of their Second Amendment rights, but it's part of the whole Brady-and-pals dirty tricks arsenal. What's worse, depriving people of their right to self-defense does nothing to prevent crime:

these types of weapons are very rarely used to commit crimes
if they were illegal, criminals would still have them
if they weren't available, the crimes would still be committed
guns of any kind in the hands of lawful owners reduce crime (see e.g. John Lott's More Guns, Less Crime).

The Second Amendment is not about duck hunting… and I know I'm not going to make many friends saying this, but it's about our right, all of our right to protect ourselves from you all of guys up there.

—Dr. Suzanna Gratia-Hupp

The quote is from a video testimony that Dr. Gratia-Hupp gave before congress. She and her parents were in a store when a gunman shot up the place: no robbery motivation, just killing. According to her: it doesn't matter how many bullets fit in a magazine (something politicians love to make laws about)—"It takes one second to switch out a clip, and it's not enough time to rush a man." She usually kept a gun in her purse, but it was in her car because there were places where it was a felony offense to carry it. Her parents were both killed. "I'm not mad at the guy that did this… and I'm certainly not mad at the guns… I'm mad at my legislators for legislating me out of the right to protect myself and my family… I would much rather be sitting in jail with a felony charge on my head and have my parents alive."

The Second Amendment is about the ability to defend ourselves. From government. From thugs and from looters, and from the chaos that may well ensue if this recession becomes a depression. If necessary, it will allow an armed populace to stop a government bent on destruction of the American way of life, bent on overthrowing rule of law and free markets and the rights of free people. So if the army has tanks, then the people should have parity. If the army has helicopters and jets, anyone that can afford them should be able to buy them to defend themselves from tyranny of government, from the disaster that is Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and their merry band of socialists that want to rob productive citizens and remake the nation in their twisted image.

In the end, the Second Amendment is the right that ensures all of the others.

Facebook friend lists

Technical ·Thursday February 26, 2009 @ 23:17 EST (link)

When (initially) making friend lists on Facebook, it'd be nice to have an exclusivity option (i.e. don't show someone in the selection box if they're already in at least one list) and/or to be able to drag people into lists.

$10,000 a year for everyone and universal healthcare

Political ·Tuesday February 24, 2009 @ 23:57 EST (link)

I just finished In Our Hands by Charles Murray, which describes "A Plan to Replace the Welfare State", and wanted to discuss his ideas on this lively and erudite forum (note: originally posted to a "lively political discussion" forum at work; I hope this forum is equally erudite). I encourage people to read the book (it's not long, and your library should have it), but I'll summarize. Overall I think it'd be an improvement over the current system.

Short form: give everyone $10,000 every year, but scrap all income transfer programs (including Social Security, welfare, and Medicare).

Details:

The amount a person gets is adjusted downward by 20% of their income over $25,000 (capped at $5,000, i.e. everyone gets at least $5,000).
The $10k yearly grant kicks in at age 21.
Murray suggests some reforms that will make health insurance affordable (he calculates it at $3,000/person/year, taken out of the $10k they get):
- Legally obligate insurers to treat the population (all ages) as a single pool.
  - But to counterbalance this, he requires everyone to use part of their $10k grant to buy healthcare (on the free market).
- Treat medical insurance provided to employees as taxable income. (Isn't it already?)
  - Decouples insurance from employment; gives some people incentive to choose more competitive insurance.
- Repeal medical licensing laws and alter tort law to make it easy to write legally binding waivers.
  - The desired result here is to make it possible to run (profitable) clinics for "minor repairs" that won't be sued out of existence for unforeseeable problems.
  - Compares current system to requiring anyone opening a diner to be required to hire a cook that can pass a master chef exam.
  - Pretty sure he's not saying doctors should no longer be licensed, just that it should be possible to get "minor repairs" done by qualified people that aren't licensed doctors.
This Plan makes no changes to current tax structure (you still pay the same amount, same deductions, etc.).
Income transfer programs that will be eliminated (from Appendix A of the book):
- Retirement and disability payments
- Medicare/veterans care/SCHIP
- Unemployment compensation
- TANF/EITC/child tax credit
- Food stamps/school lunch/WIC
- Housing assistance
- Pell grants/head start/Stafford loans/work-study programs
- Community development block grants
- Transportation subsidies/Amtrak
- Farming subsidies/corporate welfare/ARPA/energy conservation
- Doesn't apply a strict libertarian definition of "transfer" here. For example, state-funded education stays.
- He provides calculations to show that in most if not all cases, the grant easily replaces these transfers.
The Plan provides for a universal passport (issued to citizens at birth) that establishes eligibility.
The Plan requires recipients have a bank account for funds to be deposited into.

Why is this better than what we have now?

While it's not libertarianism by a long shot (Murray says if he could wave a wand and eliminate transfer payments altogether he'd do it—as would I), it gets rid of a lot of government bureaucracy and entitlement programs and in many ways stops rewarding bad behavior and incentivizes good behavior.
Guaranteed income; guaranteed retirement if you invest a portion (he suggests $2k and provides projections showing retirement income based on conservative returns), but also control over your investments (higher risk, higher reward).
Universal healthcare, yay (for socialists)! But also, free market healthcare, yay (for libertarians)!
It will cost less than the current system starting in 2011 ($549B less in 2020).
Provides only for citizens, not aliens (legal or illegal).
It disincentivizes:
- Births to single women (correlated with high crime), whether living at home or on their own.
  - But increases the likelihood of collecting child support: the father has known income.
  - And makes it easier for low-income couples to have children.
- "Sponging" off others: known income source means it's harder to live rent-free and claim penury.
- Not working: a $1k/month job gives $1k/month more income without reducing the grant.
Does it also disincentivize work?
- Sure, some people will band together, rent a house at the beach, and surf all day. But that gets old fast.
- For someone earning $25k (and thus getting the full $10k grant), not working reduces their wages by $25k.
  - Plan "lures people into working until they cannot afford to quit".
Makes it easier for one parent to stay home with children if desired.
Returns some former government functions to community, which:
- Reduces moral hazard (government has to be morally indifferent; private charities do not)
- Bureaucracy has its own welfare as its highest interest, and incentives to get more clients and funding, but private philanthropy has to attract volunteers by providing satisfying work and donors by assuring them money goes to the organization's clients

It's a definite step in the right direction (towards libertopia, of course…) yet one that should find widespread agreement (only parasites and government fiefs lose—but I repeat myself; everybody else wins).

Molehills: preparing for battle

News ·Tuesday February 24, 2009 @ 21:09 EST (link)

Honey bought a metal rake so I can rake out the molehills in the lawn. At least there haven't been any new ones for a while; maybe it ate the gum we put out and choked. That'd be really sad. (Not really.) It's still pretty frosty out there, although we get the occasional thaw. I'll probably wait until spring, in case the little rat makes more holes.

I finished Red Planet (Heinlein) audio book today (6 CDs). I really enjoy listening to it on the way to and from work, and will pick up another audio book.

Books finished: Red Planet.

In which I start using Facebook

News, Technical ·Monday February 23, 2009 @ 23:55 EST (link)

I was reluctant to start using "social networking" sites since they seemed faddish and content-free; the original reason I got a Facebook account (October 22, 2008) was because the University of Washington's Students for Concealed Carry on Campus (SCCC) group only had a Facebook page. So I added myself, poked around a very little, but didn't do much until recently. I found out yesterday from the conservatives and libertarians group at work (CLAMS) that the Redmond "Tea Party" event (which unfortunately didn't materialize) was organized there. That's when I started seriously looking for—and finding—people: lots of people, all the way from relatives and classmates in England, to more classmates (and friends from the assemblies, in Niagara, Ottawa, Waterloo, and Toronto) in Canada, to colleagues at work (and from previous places I worked: Toronto, Niagara Falls, Memphis, and Waltham).

(If you want to find me, since my name is rather common: I'm in the Seattle, WA and Microsoft networks, with Waterloo and University of Washington as my schools.)

Facebook Notes' blog import is handy (I updated my RSS feed generator to include the full content and fixed a time zone bug, then set the importer on it; it lets you preview first, so I made some tweaks and let it import). By design, my RSS feed only includes the last 10 entries; older material will always be on davidrobins.net.

One thing I really liked about Facebook is that it has an API, i.e. it can be programmed. (The other thing I like is that it doesn't let people create "home pages"; to see why, I give you MySpace as exhibit A, with oldies like GeoCities and a "great cloud of witnesses" trailing behind in garishly blinking splendor.) Naturally, I'm using the perl WWW::Facebook::API interface. It has a way to automatically upload and caption photos, which I'll be using when I get my huge backlog of photos organized (I'm writing a long-delayed local Javascript application for that, the Vortex Photo System, right now). I'll mass upload some photos over a period of time, in the hopes that people will tag them.

Fbcmd, a command-line interface to Facebook, seems cool (except: PHP, ew); had to fix a Unix bug (path separator, sent it to the author, who said thanks).

I was up until 3am finishing my Facebook photo upload test (random test photo, which my cousin immediately recognized).

Getting the application to talk to Facebook was a bit of a trick; the documentation is unclear. I learned some of it by looking at the Fbcmd application, too, since it's also a desktop application. It's necessary to go to the Facebook developer site (allow the Developer application access), add your application and get a key for it, then get a token by going to https://login.facebook.com/code_gen.php?api_key=your API key here&v=1.0. Pass that token to the WWW::Facebook::API $client->auth->get_token() method, which will populate $client->secret and $client->session_key, which can be saved and passed to the new method on subsequent invocations (initially, pass the application secret for secret; always pass the API key). I hope this information helps; the best Facebook desktop application information I could find was here on use.perl.org, and it was missing a lot. There's also an old Facebook login thread on Perlmonks (Perlmonks also has a Facebook group) and a status update script that's interesting since it uses LWP and not the Facebook API.

DVDs finished: M*A*S*H: Season Five, Stargate: Continuum, Dead Poets Society.

Walden

News, Media ·Saturday February 21, 2009 @ 23:45 EST (link)

Entered receipts into the computer; caught up on some shows (Damages, Terminator, ER, Grey's Anatomy, Private Practice, Knight Rider); finally finished Walden (it was a long slog). I expected Walden to be a socialist guidebook like Walden Two, but the relationship is more that they both describe self-sustaining lifestyles with time for leisure, with Two ("Too") extending it from the individual to the group. The message I got from Walden was "Do not be possessed by your possessions, but possess your own life." Which is sensible advice even for free market capitalists.

Books finished: The Electronic Day Trader, In Our Hands, Walden.

Costco return policy

News ·Wednesday February 18, 2009 @ 21:44 EST (link)

Returned computer that I hadn't set up yet to Costco when we went tonight to stock up on groceries, and bought another one (again at online) for the same price with 50% bigger disk and 4 x 2.8GHz instead of 4 x 2.5GHz processors (AMD Phenom II this time).

Costco has an excellent return policy (very few restrictions; only a 90 day limit on electronics items), although in some way I feel I'm taking advantage of it since there was nothing wrong with the computer, although on the other hand, their policy doesn't require anything be wrong with the item and it was in perfect condition; I'd just opened the box, and then just not gotten around to setting it up.

Books finished: Unhinged.

The computer room fork

News, Technical ·Saturday February 14, 2009 @ 23:08 EST (link)

Went to local Teriyaki/Sushi place for dinner. They gave us some edamame while we were waiting for our food; neither one of us all that fond of it. As usual, I had sushi, Honey had chicken teriyaki.

Lothlorien picked up a DHCP address from the wrong place (wireless router); couldn't see an easy way to tell it to only hand out addresses for wireless, so disabled its DHCP server via the web interface, since I only use it for wireless and donÂt use it much even for that. Now it should get the address from minas-tirith, which means it should add itself to the DNS via my DHCP DNS daemon. Lothlorien is moving upstairs, so I'd pinged it by name, which is how I found out about the DHCP issue. Apparently it was the noisiest PC in the room, too; it's almost eerily quiet now that I've moved it up (the laptop that I'm using now—connected to a regular keyboard, mouse, and my new 22" LCD monitor—is second; minas-tirith is very quiet as is cirith-ungol, the media box in the next room).

Books finished: Jennifer Government.

Red Planet on audio

News, Media ·Friday February 13, 2009 @ 21:57 EST (link)

I'm listening to a book on CD (first time trying it): Robert Heinlein's Red Planet, from the library. I like it: it's easy to follow and the narration and voices are well done. Got through 2½ chapters going to and from work today.

Books finished: The Puppet Masters.