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.

Random politics musings

The libertarian refuses to give the State the moral sanction to commit actions that almost everyone agrees would be immoral, illegal, and criminal if committed by any person or group in society. The libertarian, in short, insists on applying the general moral law to everyone, and makes no special exemptions for any person or group. ... The libertarian insists that whether or not such practices are supported by the majority of the population is not germane to their nature: that, regardless of popular sanction, War is Mass Murder, Conscription is Slavery, and Taxation is Robbery. The libertarian, in short, is almost completely the child in the fable, pointing out insistently that the emperor has no clothes.

Paul's desire to secure U.S. borders remains a key topic in his 2008 presidential campaign. He opposes the North American Union proposition and its proposed integration of Mexico, the United States of America, and Canada. Paul voted "yes" on the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which authorizes the construction of an additional 700 miles of double-layered fencing between the U.S and Mexico. Paul opposes illegal immigration as well as amnesty for illegal immigrants. He also introduced legislation that would amend the Constitution to stop giving automatic citizenship to babies who are born in the United States to non-citizen parents, which has been in effect since the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868.

It's delusional to suggest that this would not be anything but a David and Goliath situation, but after all, David won.

Get married, but don't have kids. According to Andrew Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick in England and something of an expert on the intersection of money and happiness, getting married adds a happiness factor that's equivalent to having $100,000 added to your household income. This is not true of having children, Oswald says. His surveys have found that adding kids to your life (or not having them at all) didn't seem to change people's happiness one way or the other. Which is good. Kids are expensive, and since most rich people just send theirs away to boarding school anyway, you could argue that the best thing for your Live Cheap, Look Rich lifestyle is not to have the little darlings in the first place.

To defend Wal-Mart for its low prices is to claim that the most perfect form of economic organization more closely resembles the Soviet Union in 1950 than twentieth-century America. It is to celebrate rationalization to the point of complete irrationality.

Honey's appendectomy

We'll make random things happen to your document

1. I'm annoyed at the state of Linux NES emulators: most are about 5 years abandoned and horribly documented. (I suppose the closed source crowd will crow something about free lunches.) FCE Ultra is supposed to be one of the best, but it looks like it died and then an attempted revival in 2006 also died. In its current state, very few games work; most fail with a gray screen. I'll try one of the better-supported Windows versions (perhaps Nesticle), but that of course means I can't play using the TV, just my laptop, my only Windows box (actually dual).

2. Windows is an intolerably lousy piece of software for requiring a reboot after changing the domain/workgroup. True, it has gotten much better in that it requires a reboot for far fewer things than, say, NT 3.51, but that's faint praise. Changing the domain should be a minor change to the system. It's personally annoying since I have to switch between my work domain to work remotely and my local workgroup to share files over my internal network.

3. Speaking of working remotely, IT Connection Manager, the software I use to connect to my work VPN, is also intolerably lousy: it frequently gets "wedged" into a state where it can't connect any more (even after being restarted), and (this I've mentioned before) the "smart" access card needs to be removed somewhere between 2 and 4 seconds into the "checking password" phase, or the password check will count to infinity.

Recently a woman called me and said she had no idea who I was but she had been told by someone—she couldn't remember who—that I give money to people like her. The woman said that she and her husband had nine kids and had moved to a desert in the Middle East. Now they were having difficulty supporting themselves because, well, they had nine kids and had moved to a desert. She figured the best solution was to call me and ask if I would support the entire family indefinitely. If you have nine children and think it's a good idea to move to the desert it is fair to say that you are not a good decision maker. So the question I had to ask myself was this: If I gave her money, would she be more likely to a) use it to feed and educate her children, or b) grunt out nine more children and move to a dislodged glacier floating in the Arctic Ocean?

The interesting part of the conversation came after I politely declined her invitation to fund the nonstop production of doomed babies. She got mad at me. Apparently she analyzed her situation and came to the conclusion that the root cause of her problem was the unwillingness of total strangers in other countries to give her money. And her solution to that problem was to get angry.

House is done, grass is mown

Abide With Me

Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes;
Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies.
Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.

Waiting for carpet

Once more into the interface compiler

interface IDBorders
{
...
   properties
   {
      VT_I4 DistanceFromRight
         dispid 22
         undo_auto
         get proc HrOamBordersGetFromTextRight
         put proc HrOamBordersPutFromTextRight
   }
}

/* H R  O A M  B O R D E R S  G E T  F R O M  T E X T  R I G H T   */
/*----------------------------------------------------------------------------
   %%Function: HrOamBordersGetFromTextRight
   %%Owner: NoBody
   %%Id: 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000

----------------------------------------------------------------------------*/
STDMETHODIMPC HrOamBordersGetFromTextRight(IDBorders* pidBorders, long* plFromText) throw0
{
   return HrOaFormatBorder(pidBorders, wpropFromTextRight, plFromText, fTrue/*fGet*/);
}

/* H R  O A M  B O R D E R S  P U T  F R O M  T E X T  R I G H T   */
/*----------------------------------------------------------------------------
   %%Function: HrOamBordersPutFromTextRight
   %%Owner: NoBody
   %%Id: 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000

----------------------------------------------------------------------------*/
STDMETHODIMPC HrOamBordersPutFromTextRight(IDBorders* pidBorders, long lFromText) throw0
{
   return HrOaFormatBorder(pidBorders, wpropFromTextRight, &lFromText, fFalse/*fGet*/);
}

interface IDBorders
{
...
   properties
   {
      VT_I4 DistanceFromRight
         dispid 22
         undo_auto
         get { return HrOaFormatBorder(pid, wpropFromTextRight, plProp, fTrue/*fGet*/); }
         put { return HrOaFormatBorder(pid, wpropFromTextRight, &lProp, fFalse/*fGet*/); }
   }
}

Looking back, looking forward

New window

Packed garage

MDM gives away my address

New drywall

New roof

1. Make it a felony to be an illegal immigrant. (Instead of a civil misdemeanor as it is now.)
2. Punishment options are deportation or jail time billed to your country in the form of tariffs etc. (We'd soon own Mexico and everything in it.)
3. Arrest illegals any time they are discovered, be it school, hospitals, traffic violations etc. (No more crap like "sanctuary cities" or not being able to ask about legality during traffic stops.)
4. Anyone helping hide illegals is charged with aiding a felon. (This means you, Roman Catholic church of Satan.)
5. Any company found to have funny tax information (i.e. their employees are using stolen SSNs etc) or employing illegal immigrants repeatedly loses their right to do business inside the US until the issue is taken care of along with the people in charge of the company are not allowed to run any other companies or businesses. (Punish the enablers, too.)
6. Any time your Social security number is found being used with another name or in another town every person listed with that number is sent a letter instead of nothing happening. (It's my identity you're stealing; you haveno privacy rights.
7. All credit reports pull everything based on your social security number on its own even if the names don't match up.
8. Make English the official language of the United States. Any and all government documents and paperwork are only in English. If you require a translation it is on your dime.
9. You are only an American Citizen by birth if your parents are American Citizens or were legally in the United States when you were born. If you cannot prove they were here legally when you were born you are not an American citizen. (I can see relaxing this to require only one parent to be a citizen, and only requiring the other to be a legal resident, and not merely for my own sake; it's just reasonable.)

10. Also fine business employing illegals, say $10k the first time, $100k for the second and subsequent times; raise it for larger companies.
11. Build the wall; regularly check for tunnels, let agents use them for explosives exercises.
12. Mine the border, posting appropriate signage (see the Fark link for examples).
13. Let anyone patrolling the border shoot invaders on sight.

We now return to our original problem

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