::::: : 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.

FireWire and a union file system (aufs)

News, Technical ·Friday September 10, 2010 @ 19:01 EDT (link)

My first ever exposure to IEEE1394b (what Apple calls FireWire 800), which I opted for rather than (continuing with) USB due to the ability to chain devices rather than needing more and more sockets. My Syba PCIe card and Lacie d2 Quadra 2Tb external HD arrived Tuesday, and I finally got around to setting it up—fairly simple really, put in the card, connect the drive and format it ext3 (which holds its own quite well speed-wise against JFS, XFS, and Reiser, is better supported and more actively developed, and I know it well enough to fix a botched disk with a hex editor).

I also took the opportunity to upgrade the kernel (2.6.35) on the server and media machines, and did a little research and installed aufs (another union file system) (as it happened, the original unionfs failed to install). A union file system allows two physical drives to overlap in one directory—so movies stored on the new drive can appear in the same path as the old—without all the irreversible inconvenience of something like LVM. I did manage to get aufs to refuse to unmount once, though, with no files apparently in use, and forcing the module to remove lead to an understandable kernel BUG and instability until I restarted. But it's been well-behaved since, even shared over NFS.

Useful tools I learned about this weekend

News, Technical ·Monday September 6, 2010 @ 01:50 EDT (link)

A few useful programs I learned about or first started using this weekend:

The Git fast version control system—of course I knew of it, but hadn't ever used it. It has some great features, although its model takes a bit of getting used to. The best is being able to make branches and commits locally, without a repository (effectively a private repository). I was working on some code for the XBMC media center—scraper abstraction toward a goal of being able to use Python and other non-XML scrapers, since the XML scraper system is painful—and I was using the Subversion repository, and had a lot of changes stacked up locally which I bundled into a diff. Then I thought that I'd prefer to be able to commit these changes and move on to further modifications, but Subversion didn't do this, or at least not well; Git did. It also made it easy to split up my current changes into multiple branches and commits, and even to modify past commits (forgot to add a file… thought git commit -a would pick it up).
The Mediainfo command-line utility and library—I was using file to try to compare two different movie files' bitrate and dimensions, but one was MP4 and it only said "ISO Media, MPEG v4 system, version 1" (which really isn't bad for a utility that is supposed to identify file types and not be too concerned about content). I searched around and found Mediainfo, and found what I needed to know.
I've already mentioned symlink trees, but I found another use for them, not a new one by any means: shadow source trees. cp -sfr with an absolute path can probably create them, but I built a new pH.file.lncopy function in Python (using my pH.file.find) and had it run from a lnfix program with the paths in it. My lnfix utility is superior to cp since it will do incremental updates, and skip version control directories. The build tree points to the git repository, which keeps generated files (object files etc.) out of the repository and allows use of the Gentoo build directory and tools with my local modifications, and makes it proof against random cleaning.
The Visual Studio (2010) development environment. Now, working at Microsoft you'd think I'd use it at work, but I only use it as a debugger; I use Source Insight as editor and Office has its own build system using perl, build.exe, and nmake. I was looking for an IDE instead of my usual Vim in GNU Screen over PuTTY. I tried a few free ones, such as Komodo Edit, and found them lacking (e.g., Komodo Edit liked to randomly screw with my project's files), so I decided to try VS for XBMC (over a share). Fortunately there was a VS solution and projects in the tree already, and it scanned things in reasonably quickly. I did run into a bug where it wasn't finding includes (and hence definitions in them) in relative paths—"go to definition" didn't work, but oddly the code definition window did—but I added in some absolute paths and it sorted itself out.
I was forgetting to set "expandtab" (Vim setting to use spaces rather than tab characters) when editing XBMC sources; but I found a recommendation on StackOverflow.com (a site where more and more answers to my technical web searches tend to be located) for the local_vimrc Vim plugin, which searches up the directory tree for an applicable settings file (with some security checks).

There's a lot of great open source code out there—and some reasonably decent closed source stuff too—seek and ye shall find.

Books finished: Lies the Government Told You.

The god of statists

Political, Theology ·Wednesday August 25, 2010 @ 22:26 EDT (link)

Statists and voluntaryists

First, "What's a statist?" Well, it's not a term I invented; see statism: "the principle or policy of concentrating extensive economic, political, and related controls in the state at the cost of individual liberty." Effectively, anyone who places anything above individual rights to life, liberty, and property would generally fit, although there might be some gaps (e.g., a serial killer does not respect life, but wouldn't necessarily want centralized control either), although we are not concerned with those gaps here. The term also does not only include the obviously violent states of the past (Nazi Germany, Stalin's Russia, Pol Pot's Cambodia, and so on), but anyone that endorses the power (never the right) of a state to infringe on those rights. If you're for involuntary taxation (is there any other kind?) you're a statist, for example, because taxation is theft, either direct or through extortion ("Give us your money or we will kidnap you and lock you up").

The opposite of statist is voluntaryist. Voluntaryists believe in natural (or, God-given, or, objective) rights to life, liberty, and property. These rights are not handed out by anyone and cannot be taken by anyone, although they can be infringed by individuals and states. Taxation infringes on the right to property; regulating victimless acts (use of illegal or unapproved drugs) and the arrests that result when violations of these regulations are found, violate your right to liberty; and when the state murders people, either through "collateral damage" (various wars) or sheer bloodymindedness (Waco, Ruby Ridge), it violates the right to life. All people still deserve liberty—have the abstract right—but it can be infringed by the state confining someone into a locked cell. Since individuals have the right to liberty, though, there is nothing immoral about attempting escape (or, if you have the necessary force, stopping the agents of the state that attempt to kidnap you). (Now, it is a bad idea to use many drugs, and the consequences, largely of dependence and crimes done to obtain funds, can be deleterious to families, but that's a problem of particular use, not in the drugs themselves, just as killing someone with a car isn't the car's fault.)

You always have rights. Slaves had natural rights to life, liberty and property; but they could not exercise those rights as they were infringed and denied by evil individuals and governments. I'm not trying to claim that they really were free (they were clearly not) or that freedom is in the mind (that may be true in part; but it's hard to mentally overcome an iron collar around the neck and forced hard labor); just that their right to liberty is innate, not owned by others. As such, they would be morally right to escape—to claim their rightful freedom—by almost any means necessary (I say 'almost' because, for example, it wouldn't be right to kill other slaves not hindering your escape, even if somehow their deaths would promote said escape).

So, what was that about a god of statists?

I'm still hoping that someday statists will find some justification for the theft called "taxes" that doesn't involve mysticism (or at least one that survives universal application). Many of them claim to be atheists, but you're not much of an atheist if you can't justify your actions without a god. But their theft and coercion always ends up involving arbitrary imposition of random involuntary obligations. (One of those being the hand-waving unsigned mystical social contract, for example. There are other myths too, such as the US constitution.) I understand that it's not going to happen, because it cannot. I can't impose involuntary obligations on you, nor you on me; and there is no rational method that lets any other entity do so morally. You can't get there from here without a theological jump. The only difference is that my god doesn't (modulo the Old Testament, perhaps) impose himself on those that don't want him (although I'll concede his followers can sometimes be a little pushy… the Crusades, not a fun time for a lot of middle easterners).

This "god"—mystical entity that must be used to explain why what is immoral for everyone else is moral for the state's agents—is also called a "null zone" by Molyneux, concealed by "middle truths" such as the various statist myths enumerated earlier. The priests of this god are those such as Krugman and Keynes, providing Machiavellian justification for anything the state does, and it offers worshipers salvation in exchange for blind devotion and ignore the man behind the curtain saying theft is not justified either by the divine "right" of kings or will of a majority.

So what does God think about all this?

Absent an actual theocracy (with God in charge personally, not people claiming to speak for him), God would seem to prefer anarcho-capitalism. The Bible allows for property (or equivalently, individual stewardship), and condemns theft and initiations of force. That doesn't really leave much wiggle room. It does not condone taxation. I can understand how one might confuse oneself into thinking that, since, e.g. Jesus paid a tax, but giving in to threat of violence doesn't mean one condones it. Jesus wasn't, as some hoped at the time, planning on driving out the Romans. Giving in to their extortion helped illustrate that. "Render unto Caesar", as a general principle (vs. applying strictly to Caesar), is then "Give to those you owe, what you owe them" (or "what is theirs"; same idea). One could substitute, for example, the Washington state governor: "Render unto Christine Gregoire, what is Christine Gregoire's" (or to the President). But that includes absolutely nothing that I own, none of my income or my labor.

Collectivism

A major part of these myths involve collectivism or collectivist behavior: attribution of volition to a group, where no such volition can ever exist. Evil acts are "for the good of the state"; they are by "us"; the rights of the group trump those of the individual; and so on; Rothbard does it excellent justice in The Anatomy of the State. Statists will call for "balance" of the group will against the individual, but see past it to the call for violence to benefit the "chosen oligarchs of god"—the state-worshipers and those that can help the state gain power and influence. There is no such thing as a group will, any more than a flock of birds does anything outside the acts of individual birds.

Theft is immoral; initiating force is immoral. Raping someone isn't merely a disagreement of values, a quirk or pecadillo, it's objectively and universally an immoral act. There are universally preferable behaviors, and wrongs. (By "immoral", I mean a violation of the principle of non-aggression, rather than something more subjectively defined, such as using presently-illegal drugs which does not involve initiating force.)

If I washed someone's car and held a gun to their head and told them to pay me a vastly inflated price or I'd imprison them, they would consider that wrong. If the state did it for one of their services, a statist considers it a divine pronouncement that must be obeyed; the statist is inconsistent at best. Using violence on people to steal from them is immoral. It's not "contribution" to "society", it's theft for the doomed projects of the chosen oligarchs of god. Sometimes the claim is that people that don't want to be extorted are "freeloading"; but examine the definition and one sees there's nothing morally wrong with "freeloading" since it involves others voluntarily giving without obliging the recipient to any sort of return. Taking samples at the grocery store doesn't oblige repayment. Similarly, if one generation is robbed to build a bridge, future generations are in no wise obligated to repay them or anyone else for that bridge. (The only obligation incurred by robbery is to return the stolen property. The state did the stealing, not the future generations, who had no choice in the matter.) Furthermore nobody is even claiming that taxes go to "pay back" past generations. Voluntaryists would love to pay for services they wanted and used in a free market, rather than one in which violence is used to suppress competition.

Voluntaryists, then, ask statists: Put down the gun, and then we'll talk. But once a statist stops relying on violence as a means, it is over, for they are statist no longer.

Books finished: Crossroads of Twilight.

Symlink trees

Technical, Media ·Friday August 13, 2010 @ 00:36 EDT (link)

BitTorrent downloads: I want to keep the original in case there's a problem and I lose a file (disk corruption, accidental deletion) and want to download it—much faster if the rest of the set is there—but I like to rename everything my own way. Solution: symlink trees (pointing to a non-browesable location).

Books finished: Ysabel, Constitutional Chaos.

The morally dubious power of identity

Political ·Tuesday August 10, 2010 @ 22:11 EDT (link)

Some speakers and writers I've been reading or listening to lately include:

Jennifer Burke, conservative teacher (and wife of congressional candidate Matthew Burke)—opposes Obama, affirmative action, etc.
Thomas Sowell, libertarian conservative economist—against "reverse" discrimination, negative and self-destructive aspects of black culture and communities, blame, government handouts and dependency on same.
Greg Perry, libertarian writer—against the ADA and the government "helping" disabled people that don't need or want it, in fact harming them.

These are good spokespeople against or advisers of others that are of the same particular class or group as them; yet they should not be necessary. Or, rather, it should not be necessary that a person be part of the same class as a person or legislation being criticized to attain immunity or be taken seriously. (This is also entirely distinct from their experience which can be invaluable.) Some see it as more powerful to hear from a black person that Obama is a bad president—because it takes away the fallacious claim of racism, for one thing, or from a disabled person that the ADA is generally detrimental waste—but it should not be so. Facts and arguments should stand alone despite the source. And I would recommend reading or hearing any of the people listed entirely on their own merits.

Hiking at Olallie State Park

News ·Sunday August 8, 2010 @ 19:04 EDT (link)

Nice little hike at Olallie State Park; about 45 minutes to get there from Redmond (it's right at I-90 exit 38). I stopped at the picnic area/ranger residence first, didn't see anything interesting, so went on to the next stop and walked the short trail near the falls lookout (I didn't notice the scale, and thought it would be much longer). Nice view of the falls and some nice access points to the river. I then drove back to the Homestead Valley Road trailhead and figured I'd head down the trail to Iron Horse and Twin Falls parks and see how far I could get (started 1600, planned on heading back after an hour if I hadn't gotten there yet). The first part was a bike trail—it overlapped the John Wayne pioneer trail—and had a number of raspberry bushes alongside, with some ripe berries.

I ended up hiking all the way to the twin falls, but wasn't really in shape for such a hike and had trouble coming back (fortunately I had brought plenty of water and some food). Every hill I crested would bring another, which I was sure I couldn't climb, but then I did. The car was a site for sore eyes indeed. It was a little over five miles round trip and took about two hours, with some beautiful forest scenery even on a somewhat overcast day (which also kept the people down). I ran into a wedding party taking pictures when I came out of one trail, near the ranger residence. I didn't take my camera, though, so no pictures—just wanted to hike.

I'd like to get back to hiking consistently so a short hike like this isn't so tough. Maybe next time the Seattle Anarcho-Capitalists hike I'll go along.

Books finished: A Nation of Sheep, The Color of Magic.

The two powers

Political, Economics ·Saturday July 31, 2010 @ 16:06 EDT (link)

Does U.S. Need to Split Along Political Lines?

Williams has put together a good sample of constitutional violations (Andrew Napolitano has even more in two books). However, he doesn't say how it should be done geographically. I propose that the Free States of America pick a new capital (Atlanta perhaps) [or nowhere at all...] and then let counties or even individuals "join" it as they wish [really just declaring shared independence from the USA's federal government]. State services remain the same; only federal services, regulations, and taxes would change for the persons or counties opting out.

Of course, as the base of people that wanted to pay for expensive and inefficient federal programs shrunk, a snowball effect would begin and the trickle of first-movers would swell to a roaring waterfall of people leaving the system. Eventually only people getting more out than they were putting in, and perhaps some liberal idealists, would be left; and like Molyneux's story about support for the drug war (if only those that want it pay for it; the more that leave, the more the share of total costs for those remaining increases, and people suddenly get the "live and let live" urges, down to the last person needing to kick in a few hundred billion all by their lonesome).

Agorism: freedom now, freedom in our time

Political, Law, Economics ·Saturday July 31, 2010 @ 16:01 EDT (link)

Perhaps an underground agorist economy would work to get out from under the oppression of the state. While not underground, Craigslist is an example of a massive trading system where—so far—the state does not infringe on individual rights (but give them time).

To escape taxes on the sale of a house, for instance, instead of selling it "normally", transfer the money and everything but let the seller keep the "public" title and sign a private contract that the buyer has full rights to the house and will pay all property taxes etc. Some sort of system of underground courts might be necessary to resolve disputes. There would be parallels to, say, religious courts, except these would be hidden. And of course, barter and forms of private money may increase too.

Each trader have to start small: trust would be hard to come by until a reputation was established (just like on sites like eBay or GunBroker), and the violence of the occupying forces (police, courts, etc.) would be on the side of the seller if a dispute was brought before the state. True, the underground courts would not (may not) have the power of violence, but if someone has an excellent reputation in the community they will not want to lose it and be cut off if they renege. Or people might sign something like Schulman's General Submission to Arbitration. Plus, there will still be a private contract between parties, although US courts may not enforce it. Long-term leases or rentals might be another workable alternative. The free market can come up with infinite solutions. If an underground electronic currency was used, then the underground courts could have some power over it (delegated to them by the participants).

(Eventually the public rolls would be completely out of sync, but nobody would care. I suppose they'd make laws and let police go around and check who lived at each house… door to door Gestapo—a bit like they already do to ensure kids aren't lying about their address to get into a better school district: see John Stossel's documentary Stupid in America for footage.)

Technology would be a great boost to an underground economy. Technology can help the little guy more than the state—like in Iraq.

Books finished: Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity.

Goodbye, DVD cases

News, Technical, Media ·Friday July 30, 2010 @ 20:25 EDT (link)

We dumped our DVD cases, keeping only the DVDs in white paper sleeves (minimalize!), and also ripping them to files on our USB hard drives.

Some of the cases were nice, but there was no real justification for the shelf space wasted. We keep some of the nicest (LOTR) and good booklets. We saved a bundle of space, and we're simplifying, without losing anything (except bulk). Wish it was as easy to do with books, but I haven't found a reader device I like yet, and DRM/portability is still a worry.

Private school cost breakdown

Political, School, Economics ·Thursday July 29, 2010 @ 21:15 EDT (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, would cost. 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.