::::: : 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.

Delete files older than n days

Technical ·Monday May 17, 2010 @ 00:31 EDT (link)

Used this to clean out /usr/portage/distfiles (which also contains source control packages—"-9999" versions):
find . -maxdepth 1 -mtime +5 -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm
Keeping this around as a handy reference. (-maxdepth prevents recursing into source control directions—just svn-src now—and -mtime +5 tags anything 5 days old and older (the + means "and up".)

Books finished: Black Rednecks and White Liberals.

Guy Gavriel Kay interview/signing at Sammamish Library

News, Media ·Tuesday May 11, 2010 @ 21:13 EDT (link)

I went to Sammamish Libary Tuesday to see Nancy Pearl interview Guy Gavriel Kay, a fantasy author of whom I have long been a fan. The interview was recorded, so it should be online, but I couldn't find it yet. He signed the copy of Tigana that I brought with me. It seems he has written a few books since I last checked—Ysobel, a Celtic tale, and his latest, Under Heaven, set in China. The interview was definitely worth attending—worth the drive to Sammamish—he's a bright lively old elf; watch the video when you can find it. Excuse me while I put a few of his books on hold.

Liberty Belle debates a socialist

News ·Saturday May 8, 2010 @ 21:50 EDT (link)

We drove out to the University of Seattle (not much street parking, so we paid the $6) to see Keli Carender debate a socialist at the NW Socialism Conference. (Keli is Liberty Belle of Tea Party fame.) Although it was hostile territory there were a few conservatives and libertarians who made up by our volume what we lacked in numbers. The debate consisted of opening and closing statements, and four questions in between, allowing responses to each, with a few audience questions at the end. It was pretty decent actually. I had heard Keli speak but not debate and I was impressed that she held to a strong defense of individual rights versus collectivism, although she didn't go as far as to condemn theft, even when it got fairly explicit (taking "the rich"'s money because they have "too much" of it, and so on). I got to chat with a few socialists at the end—straightened them up about their "oppression of the workers" by pointing out how kind it was for corporations to actually give people money for their skills when, apparently, they have no better prospects. We talked briefly with some of the other conservatives and a (libertarian) lady who had asked the last question and made a statement about how much capitalists help "society" by providing jobs, and their frequent large charitable donations—none of which is stolen goods.

We aided the capitalist machine by picking up chicken Teriyaki from the place down the road for dinner.

Books finished: A Crown of Swords.

UW graduate student walkout

News, School ·Sunday May 2, 2010 @ 18:49 EDT (link)

Some idiot socialist-leaning group ("For a Democratic University (FADU), an independent labor activist organization") is trying to muster up a graduate student strike tomorrow (May 3, 2010) because of tuition hikes necessary because of a state budget crunch (i.e., it's not really a hike, it's a lessening of the existing subsidies—reality is intruding into academia).

From an email I received (I don't know how they got my address, or the address of anyone at UW; mail came from "UW Grad Walkout <uw.grad.walkout@gmail.com>"): "FADU demands … Freeze tuition as a step towards free public education. No cuts to interdisciplinary programs such as Women's Studies, American Ethnic Studies, and Disability Studies. Build them up instead! Free quality childcare for UW employees." While we'd all like "free" stuff, TANSTAAFL. Either students need to pay the cost of their tuition, or teachers and administrators and utility bills don't get paid, or someone else has to be robbed to pay the cost. There is no magic money source; the entitlements they want come from the hard work of their neighbors in the real world.

Furthermore, these are graduate students that are proposing walking out. While they may have a little leverage in the hard sciences, in all areas there are more places than applicants, and graduate students are usually getting if not a complete free ride then subsidized tuition, housing, and TA appointments to help pay their way. Welfare recipients don't strike! For us not receiving benefits—which includes all of us here in the CS&E PMP (which "pays for itself" and maintains a separate cost center, which is the reason they gave for no longer allowing supervised research in the program), probably most out of state students (who pay higher tuition generally), we have no incentive to strike. The ones that are receiving the handouts have no moral basis to strike; they should be thankful for what the hard-working people of the state are already giving them. If they must stand and hold signs, those signs should display a profound gratitude to the taxpayers for their sinecures.

Two and a Half Men marathon

News, School, Media ·Sunday May 2, 2010 @ 15:25 EDT (link)

We finished season three of Two and a Half Men this morning, watching the last eight or nine episodes between about 0130 and 0630, with a few breaks.

Most of the day we'd both been working on homework—me on my Data Mining course, Honey on French. This assignment involves building a voted Perceptron to classify spam (the previous assignment had us write a naive Bayes classifier). I had a rather horrible bug which caused my success rates to be terrible (no more than about 70%, and falling back to about 42% and 57% in a 3-cycle); I wasn't clearing the previous message's word counts before adding the next one. Once that was fixed, after much gnashing of teeth (and copious debug tracing), my success rate converged to about 99.9% on the training set and over 98% on the test set, as expected. I may post the code for my various assignments at the end of the course.

Books finished: The Conscience of a Conservative, Politically Correct Guns.

Thoreau on government: the next step forward

Political ·Thursday April 22, 2010 @ 22:44 EDT (link)

I heartily accept the motto,—"That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,—"That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure.

The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to—for I will cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than I, and in many things even those who neither know nor can do so well—is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it. The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the individual as the basis of the empire. Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at least which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.

—Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience.


We all know of a few wars in recent memory that were "the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool". We know the system is broken. It is subject to demagoguery, to class warfare, pitting people against each other by robbing from some to share the ill-gotten loot with others in return for their votes, to manipulation, to corruptions, to bribery. It is designed to grow in scope and power. It was a little better that what preceded it. But Thoreau, along with the writer to the Hebrews, was persuaded of better things.

Just as a constitutional republic was the evolutionary step that "men [were] prepared for" to follow a remote constitutional monarchy in 1776, the next progressive or evolutionary step is no government at all—a voluntary society without coercion or robbery, without a state to infringe on the right to life, liberty, or property. Government has become inexpedient. True progressives in the United States will agitate for this "city on a hill" to throw off our chains and again lead the peoples of earth in this next great step forward.

Books finished: Alongside Night, Utopia, I, Robot, The Vision of the Anointed.

Tax Day Tea Parties 2010

News, Political ·Thursday April 15, 2010 @ 19:28 EDT (link)

Bellevue City Hall, 1100-1330; arrived about 1130, parked at Bellevue Square—bit of a walk—left about 1330.


Red Square at UW; the Young Americans for Liberty group were sign-waving; I stopped by and talked/stood with them from about 1330-1415. Frank at the parking gatehouse saw my Campaign for Liberty shirt and said he was a fellow Campaign for Liberty activist and gave me a copy of a resolution they were trying to pass to get Washington's congressional delegation to join (Ron Paul's) the Audit the Fed proceedings.


Back to work for a bit, then Honey met me and we went to Overlake Transit Center and took the bus (545 express) to Westlake plaza (4th and Pine) for the Seattle festivities. Huge crowd. Lot of great speakers.


Co-authoring morale event

News, Work ·Wednesday April 14, 2010 @ 17:47 EDT (link)

The Word and Workspaces co-authoring groups (developers, testers, and PMs—program managers) went over to The Parlor at Lincoln Square in Bellevue this afternoon for food and pool (I didn't play, and nor did Manasi; not enough experience to play on par with the rest). I took a few pictures:

Toasts and speeches were offered looking back over the long road to getting co-authoring to a state that we felt proud to ship. The following people were present: We ordered food and drinks—I got a burger and fries—and most of the time people played pool, although I did talk to Bryce and Eric some about fantasy works and authors.

Compassion versus theft

Political ·Monday April 12, 2010 @ 00:44 EDT (link)

An excerpt that illuminates a tactic I thought might have been only a local phenomenon: claim that people that oppose (failed) government programs, handouts, and redistribution are not "compassionate". A similar trick, not covered so explicitly, is to claim that it is compassionate to take money from people by force and use it to fund such programs.

The contemporary anointed and those who follow them make much of their "compassion" for the less fortunate, their "concern" for the environment, and their being "anti-war," for example—as if these were characteristics which distinguish them from people with opposite views on public policy. The very idea that such an opponent of the prevailing vision as Milton Friedman, for example, has just as much compassion for the poor and the disadvantaged, that he is just as much appalled by pollution, or as horrified by the sufferings and slaughter imposed by war on millions of innocent men, women, and children—such an idea would be a very discordant note in the vision of the anointed. If such an idea were fully accepted, this would mean that opposing arguments on social policy were arguments about methods, probabilities, and empirical evidence—with compassion, caring, and the like being common features on both sides, thus canceling out and disappearing from the debate. That clearly is not the vision of the anointed. One reason for the preservation and insulation of a vision is that it has become inextricably intertwined with the egos of those who believe it. Despite Hamlet's warning against self-flattery, the vision of the anointed is not simply a vision of the world and its functioning in a causal sense, but is also a vision of themselves and of their moral role in the world. It is a vision of differential rectitude. It is not a vision of the tragedy of the human condition: Problems exist because others are not as wise or as virtuous as the anointed.

The great ideological crusades of twentieth-century intellectuals have ranged across he most disparate fields—from the eugenics movement of the early decades of the century to the environmentalism of the later decades, not to mention the welfare state, socialism, communism, Keynesian economics, and medical, nuclear, and automotive safety. What all these highly disparate crusades have in common is their moral exaltation of the anointed above others, who are to have their very different views nullified and superseded by the views of the anointed, imposed via the power of government. Despite the great variety of issues in a series of crusading movements among the intelligentsia during the twentieth century, several key elements have been common to most of them:
  1. Assertions of a great danger to the whole society, a danger to which the masses of people are oblivious.
  2. An urgent need for action to avert impending catastrophe.
  3. A need for government to drastically curtail the dangerous behavior of the many, in response to the prescient conclusions of the few.
  4. A disdainful dismissal of arguments to the contrary as either uninformed, irresponsible, or motivated by unworthy purposes.
… What is remarkable is how few arguments are really engaged in, and how many substitutes for arguments there are. These substitutes for arguments are, almost by definition, more available to adherents of the prevailing vision, whose assumptions are so widely accepted as to permit conclusions based on those assumptions to pass muster without further scrutiny.

—Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed, 1996.

Pay your economic education tax

Political, Humor, Economics ·Sunday April 11, 2010 @ 20:46 EDT (link)

Posted to the "Lively Political Discussion" alias at work.

I and others have spent a lot of time teaching the liberals in here about basic economics—things like supply and demand, incentives, free markets, etc.—and logic, by pointing out fallacies and being positive examples.

Therefore, I will be levying a tax on those liberals for services rendered. If you consider yourself "liberal" or "progressive", or think wealth redistribution is a good idea, I will be taxing you at 5% of your yearly income, and, to be sufficiently progressive, 50% of anything you make over $100,000. If you cannot calculate this for yourself, I am sure the free market will provide qualified accountants.

You are welcome for both the education and the opportunity to repay your debt to society. You have, of course, contractually agreed to this by joining this alias and remaining here.

I will be distributing the funds to the alias owner and to others on the alias that have aided my efforts to educate liberals in economics and logic (and naturally, taking an administrative fee). Failure to pay will be met by nasty letters and then I'll have to send in my enforcement team. We will also be conducting random audits.

You may pay via cash or money order in I/O mail. You may deduct the price of Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, or any books by Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, or F. A. Hayek.

We at the LRS thank you for doing your civic duty to support the common good and welfare.



David B. Robins
Lively Revenue Service

Books finished: Magician's Gambit, The Return of the Great Brain, Castle of Wizardry, Enchanters' End Game, The Great Brain Is Back, More Adventures of the Great Brain, Is Reality Optional?.

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