::::: : 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.

Stimulus roundup: Uncle Sam's plantation

Political ·Thursday March 5, 2009 @ 00:17 EST (link)

America. Where irresponsibility is rewarded with attention, money, and goods.

(Originally a comment about octo-mom, but I think it sets the tone for the recent "stimulus" bills.)

* * *

CLAMS responses to Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL)'s waxing rapturous about the porkulus bill:

KM: He's an idiot. There's nothing in the Constitution about the federal government meeting human needs. If they'd just get the hell of out of our way, we could meet our own needs!

DW: If had any real compassion for the poor he wouldn't leave them destitute and dependent on his programs for their livelihood. Temporary assistance is one thing. Uncle Sam's Plantation is another thing entirely.

* * *

Shortly after class, an economics student approaches his economics professor and says, "I don't understand this stimulus bill. Can you explain it to me?"

The professor replied, "I don't have any time to explain it at my office, but if you come over to my house on Saturday and help me with my weekend project, I'll be glad to explain it to you." The student agreed.

At the agreed-upon time, the student showed up at the professor's house. The professor stated that the weekend project involved his backyard pool.

They both went out back to the pool, and the professor handed the student a bucket. Demonstrating with his own bucket, the professor said, "First, go over to the deep end, and fill your bucket with as much water as you can." The student did as he was instructed.

The professor then continued, "Follow me over to the shallow end, and then dump all the water from your bucket into it." The student was naturally confused, but did as he was told.

The professor then explained they were going to do this many more times, and began walking back to the deep end of the pool.

The confused student asked, "Excuse me, but why are we doing this?"

The professor matter-of-factly stated that he was trying to make the shallow end much deeper.

The student didn't think the economics professor was serious, but figured that he would find out the real story soon enough.

However, after the 6th trip between the shallow end and the deep end, the student began to become worried that his economics professor had gone mad. The student finally replied, "All we're doing is wasting valuable time and effort on unproductive pursuits. Even worse, when this process is all over, everything will be at the same level it was before, so all you'll really have accomplished is the destruction of what could have been truly productive action!"

The professor put down his bucket and replied with a smile, "Congratulations. You now understand the stimulus bill! "

—From JS, CLAMS (via)

* * *

And finally a real stimulus idea, somewhat similar to Jim DeMint's American Option (from his blog). Joe's Stimulus Plan:

  1. Cut federal payroll taxes 50%

  2. Change tax tables to reflect that change

  3. Give taxpayers half of their 2008 tax bill back, up to $5000

  4. Fire middle- and senior-management government employees on a 1:1 ratio with private jobs lost

(From an article by Joe Michelotti (CLAMS) published in his local paper.)

"Wonderful" Wednesdays

News, Technical ·Wednesday March 4, 2009 @ 20:47 EST (link)

Workaholics by any other name is still workaholics ("Wonderful Wednesday"? What is this, Nineteen eighty-four?). It's officially optional this time around (not that they could actually lock us the building in in Word 12). For those that don't know about this, "Workaholics Wednesday" means that everyone stay late fixing bugs until a certain target is reached, at which time there is rejoicing and playing of Warcraft. This time, there's usually a fixed end in sight (around 2100) and we usually meet our goal well before the time. What usually happens is that people arrive late the next day, and bugs bounce back as testers and program managers (PMs) arrive in the morning.

The medical bear I bought Honey finally arrived (hah! on me; I expected it to arrive around Valentine's Day).

I installed the Firebug Firefox add-in to help debug the photo categorizing system that I've been working on.

Finished CSE P 505 homework question 4 (did 3 yesterday, 2 the day before); done, although I still want to do some more testing.

I updated my book database system to add a book as read on weRead.com (using my new module) whenever I add a book as read locally. Tested it out with Philip K. Dick's Minority Report and Other Classic Stories.

New computer from Costco arrived.

Obama's economy

Political ·Tuesday March 3, 2009 @ 22:16 EST (link)

I am for the separation of state and economics, just as we have separation of state and church.
—Ayn Rand

A few stories on Obama's economy:

A. W. Worley

News ·Tuesday March 3, 2009 @ 22:09 EST (link)

A.W Worley has passed (Memphis, TN); his daughter contacted me and let me know. He was a good man; he gave me some books while we lived in Memphis and attended Grace Gospel Chapel.

Seven steps to fix the country

Political ·Monday March 2, 2009 @ 00:13 EST (link)

Given sufficient power, these are seven first steps I'd take to fix the United States:
  1. Control immigration.
    1. Seal the borders (finish the wall, technical monitoring, minefield, armed border agents/national guard; with a mandate it wouldn't take long.
    2. Require employers to use employee verification, with harsh fines for non-compliance (e.g. 1% of gross yearly income for a first offense, increasing for each offense), and spot checks (concentrated in areas where hiring of illegals is high e.g. southern California).
    3. Deny any and all benefits (welfare, hospital care, food stamps, access to public education at all levels) to people not here legally, and require legal aliens that aren't lawful permanent residents to pay in advance for all benefits.
    4. Deny federal funds to any city that does not verify immigration status for all arrests and inform DHS for deportation.
    5. Abolish EOIR and BIA. The only appeal against deportation is being here legally and being able to prove it; deportees will be held until 30 days are up or they can be proven to be here legally, at which point they will be released.
    6. No more self-deportation: deported aliens are escorted to the border, ejected, and forbidden to return for any reason for 10 years (25, permanent on subsequent convictions). Biometrics are taken and/or chip implanted.
    7. All entrants to the country are biometrically identified (fingerprints or whatever technology is appropriate), and GPS-enabled tracking devices required to be kept on the person at all times (except LPRs). Spot checks will be made to ensure visa holders keep their device with them. If the device fails, they have 24 hours to report to a federal office (post office?) to get it replaced. Being away from the tracking device (except if legally abroad which requires DHS notification) = deportation as above.
    8. Any state-issued identification will expire no later than the expiration of the person's visa/permanent residency. No state may issue identification without proof of legal residence. Expired identification may not be accepted by any entity accepting federal funds (with the bailouts, this presumably now includes most banks and auto companies).
  2. No taxation without benefit (no wealth redistribution).
    1. No level of government may levy a tax on anyone that either (1) will not benefit directly from the use of the tax money or (2) does not opt in.
      1. This isn't as strong as I'd like (I'd like an exact commensurate pay-as-you-go requirement), but we can't change too dramatically in one step, e.g. we can't immediately sell off all the roads and charge drivers by use, but we can say that people that don't drive (don't own a currently-registered car) shouldn't have to pay the part of their property taxes that go to local roads, people without children shouldn't pay for schools, or people with their own well and septic shouldn't need to contribute to local water and sewage treatment.
    2. No person will receive benefit from tax-supported plans into which they have not elected to pay.
    3. Rather than passing a bill that appropriates money for a project, lawmakers need to propose a plan and get people to voluntarily subscribe to support and pay for it. People may opt out of the costs and benefits of a plan yearly on the anniversary of the execution (if they opt out earlier, their participation and contribution end at that point).
      1. Want a welfare plan? Design it, and convince people to voluntarily participate.
      2. What about free riders? E.g. government builds a new bridge or provides 'flu vaccinations. Ideally non-participants are denied use (no vaccine, no bridge access) but in practice that's hard; really we'd just have to do our best, and infrastructure upgrades and 'flu vaccines aren't among the highest costs. Perhaps an infrastructure subscription is a requirement for living in an area (comes under "will benefit directly" since if it's a footbridge, everyone walks).
      3. Note this fixes bailouts and entitlement programs completely, by elimination. It will also pare down all other departments as people elect not to fund them.
  3. No foreign intervention without American benefit.
    1. No foreign wars unless it directly benefits the economic (or possibly strategic) interests of the United States (no rescues, no policing the world): that is, the war must literally pay for itself.
    2. United States citizens may act as mercenaries provided they do not go against the interest of the United States (no fighting for enemies or against allies); this will be done via private companies.
    3. The United States military forces not currently at war or in rotation to go to war will be employed part-time at reduced pay (or perhaps moved to National Guard status, or let go). We don't pay for people to stand around.
  4. Reduce and re-organize the department of education.
    1. The department of education will only provide standard requirements for high school graduation and accreditation of colleges and universities, with input from representatives of the several states.
    2. Taxes may not be used to support extracurricular activities (or facilities only useful for such activities), or any costs not associated with a minimal level of elementary schooling (literacy, knowledge, shared values). Highschool and above must be user financed.
    3. Schools may pay and retain teachers at their discretion.
    4. States may organize and legislate schools at all levels at their discretion.
    5. Only citizens, lawful permanent residents, and students on study visas may attend state schools; students on visas require the consent of the state and particular school to attend a school and may be charged more than American students.
    6. Government schools will be sold to private concerns. The government will only certify schools at or below the elementary level so that vouchers may be used to direct tax monies to the school a parent chooses.
  5. English will be the official language of government.
    1. No government will pay for printing or translation services to or from any other language.
  6. Fair and simple taxation.
    1. Income tax will move to a single-rate system (or, if people prefer, instead a flat sales tax will be instituted and the federal income tax revoked).
    2. Tax credits and deductions will be revisited and as many removed as possible (e.g. child tax credit, mortgage deduction, etc.).
    3. Marriage is a religious matter. Marriage will not confer tax benefits or penalties, and the state will not become involved.
  7. Licensure.
    1. The government will decriminalize the performance of any profession without license.
    2. Licensing boards will now only offer certification. Buyers have the option to use practitioners that are certified by the board of their choice, or, at their own risk, ones that are not certified. Claiming certification not actually possessed is fraud.
    3. The Second Amendment is an individual right. The federal government may not add registration, fees, or taxation to firearms or ammunition. Individual states may impose limitations only by age (but not to those not over 18) or criminal record (only for violent felonies, with a five-year limit from the last crime or parole, whichever comes last). People may, if their means allow, purchase any unclassified weapon available.

The helpful people at weRead.com

News ·Sunday March 1, 2009 @ 18:04 EST (link)

Colloquia reviews/viewing finished! CSE P 505 homework 4 question 1 finished!

I have to say something good about weRead; I've sent them some questions (beginning by asking about an API) and they have been very helpful and responsive, and they have a great service. (Can't write code for beans, though, judging by their Javascript, but at least they've hacked at it long enough to make it work, to a first approximation.)

Style sheet overhaul

Technical, School ·Saturday February 28, 2009 @ 21:59 EST (link)

I altered my home page style sheet: shrunk down log entry titles, moved the rule underneath, and shrunk text a bit. It gives it a more modern look, and makes the overhead of an entry smaller, with the idea of getting rid of "multi-date" entries (resulting from queuing things up in OneNote until I have a enough to enter). I also modified the RSS output to include topics in the content (although they are in the RSS, readers seem to ignore them); they'll show as "Categories: …".

I finished watching the four colloquia for my 1-credit colloquia course (did the last 3/4 that I have to review today, and will watch the four others that don't need reviews tomorrow). Thanks to the program advisor for the reminder that these are due by Friday next week!

I had my first de-friending today… maybe someone didn't like my politics or religion, or perhaps it's less nefarious and someone I added realized they didn't actually know me. Facebook doesn't notify you when someone removes you, so, although I hope it doesn’t happen again, I added the Unfriender application to notify me.

I finished hacking up a splitter control for my new (internal) photo viewer/manager. It's a utility I'm writing to help categorize my photos, which will make it easier to upload them to Facebook in discretely organized albums.

CSS columnar layout: where's "div:rest"?

Technical ·Friday February 27, 2009 @ 19:18 EST (link)

CSS layouts: If you want one div to use "the rest" of the parent containing block, one way is to divide it into two divs: one that floats (left or right as needed), and then the other one will use the rest of the area. If you need more divisions, don't add another div to the top-level parent: add it in the "remaining space" div. This allows specifying percent widths usefully (as a percentage of the containing block, not the whole page). It makes the "holy grail" three-column layout trivial, if that's what you want.

This, however, still has problems: the "rest" of the area still has the full width (apparently there's a margin hack that can be made to work, but I had no luck with it). A better way to go about it is to use two adjacent (no intervening whitespace!) display: inline-block elements (make sure to use vertical-align:top); they can be given percentage widths. My last issue is that I want to give my divider div a width of 3px, and its neighbor the rest of the space, but you can't say width: 100% - 3px (a width: rest would be even better; too bad auto doesn't do that). I'm working around it by using width: 99.5%, but it's a nasty hack. I still don't know of a way to require a div to use the rest of the space, which is unfortunate, as it would be trivial to implement.

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: 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.

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