::::: : 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.

Puget Sound Conservative Underground meetups

News, Political ·Wednesday March 18, 2009 @ 22:55 EDT (link)

We joined a couple "We Surround Them" meetups (Seattle and Edmonds) and the Puget Sound Conservative Underground meetup. Get-togethers and protests and book clubs are all being planned. Victoria is organizing one book club, Dan another. We'll be attending Dan's for various reasons:
  1. he's in Woodinville, Victoria's in Seattle, so his will be closer (eastside);
  2. Victoria's approach is more of a lecture series, with the goal of "teaching people about the Constitution"; Dan's approach is more of a discussion (we're conservatives, we can read and think for ourselves), and
  3. Victoria's are during the day, Dan's are evenings and weekends (conservatives work during the day, remember).
Unless Victoria's a professor of constitutional law, I don't think she can teach any well-read conservatives about the Constitution: we'll learn and discuss together. If you want a cadre of followers, count me out. On the other hand, less well-read people can use the refresher that a DVD series and a lecture format will provide, judging from the vote in November and the news.

Workaholics today; fixed a decent number of bugs. Co-authoring has been working fairly well for the past week or so.

Still studying for CSE P 505 exam Thursday.

Nothing for outsiders

Political ·Tuesday March 17, 2009 @ 03:06 EDT (link)

Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato ("Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State").
—motto of the Italian Fascists
Por La Raza todo, Fuera de La Raza nada ("For the Race, everything, outside the Race, nothing").
—common statement of MeChA / La Raza

Note similarities in the above mottoes. Am I saying that MeChA and La Raza are fascist groups? Their actions speak for themselves. Any group that advocates for the domination of a single race or ethnic group is racist; and if they gather together along racial lines, promote violence to achieve their idea of lebensraum, declare themselves superior, and engage the state to compel it, they're certainly headed that way. For more about their "reconquista" (plans to take over the southern sovereign territory of the United States), see this Human Events article. It's chilling stuff, and not something that makes the idea of legalizing tens of millions of illegal and unskilled Mexican and Central American invaders a very comforting idea, even without the economic and social detriment they bring.

"Since I'm a guest here, I wouldn't presume to comment on priorities"

News ·Monday March 16, 2009 @ 01:17 EDT (link)

In January 2009, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported seizures of: Since I'm a guest here, I wouldn't presume to comment on priorities….

—BT on the "Canucks" (Canadians at Microsoft) alias.

Costco ZT computer failure

News, Technical ·Sunday March 15, 2009 @ 23:08 EDT (link)

I set up new Costco computer, installing Gentoo (from the AMD64 minimal install CD then network). Pretty smooth so far (downloading stage 3 now). Feels good to be overwriting a Vista installation. … And they gave me a bad SATA controller (ATI SB700/SB800: bugs 1 2 3). All I saw is that the VFS layer couldn't find the root partition (/dev/sda3) and couldn't find any alternates to suggest either. It wasn't until I compiled boot_delay support in that I could slow down the kernel messages enough to read the error and search for it. I'm not sure how the Gentoo install CD managed to access the disk; presumably it used an older or less specific driver. I tried two kernels (2.6.27-r8 and 2.6.28-r3). The box is going back to Costco. This was "ZT Systems Phenom II X4 920 2.8GHz Integrated ATI Radeon HD 3100" (item #384791), although no doubt a lot of ZT machines ship with this controller.

This is what I kept to cut and paste into my ssh window after I'd logged on with the minimal install CD, gotten the DHCP-assigned address with ifconfig, and started the ssh server (/etc/init.d/sshd start): 
swapon /dev/sda2
mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/gentoo
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/gentoo/boot
mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/gentoo/dev
chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash
env-update
source /etc/profile
export PS1="(chroot) $PS1"
grep -v rootfs /proc/mounts > /etc/mtab
Birthday card from my parents arrived today.

Books finished: The Grapes of Wrath.

DVDs finished: Friends: The Complete Fifth Season.

Javascript splitter pane

Technical ·Saturday March 14, 2009 @ 01:13 EDT (link)

Regarding my CSS splitter pane issues: I posted two questions to stackoverflow.com; one helped a little, and the other netted a suggestion to use a table, which sort of worked, but when the splitter moved too far to the right, whatever calculations were being done blew up and the thumbnail pane jumped below the main page (as in, below the viewport, causing a new top-level scrollbar to appear; the scrollbar's not the problem: overflow: hidden would get rid of it, but it'd also get rid of my content ). What I need is to be able to set width: 100% - 3px, and I finally had to go with a Javascript hack to calculate it (I also tried calcualting a percentage width, but like the tables, when the splitter was moved over too far it broke down). Setting the width in pixels rather than as a percentage (I had been using a width: 99.5% hack) meant that I had to update it when the splitter bar moves. I hope CSS 3 has better solutions to this problem.

CLAMS meet at Red Robin

News ·Friday March 13, 2009 @ 20:45 EDT (link)

Count me among those that don't like the new Facebook (I miss Live Feed, although getting rid of it probably helped their server load).

Met with CLAMS (Conservatives and Libertarians at Microsoft) at Red Robin for lunch today. No photos, since I didn't really like how they came out. A crowded restaurant with a full table is no place to take candids, anyway.

Also watched Glenn Beck's "We Surround Them" show; see The 9.12 Project (servers currently overloaded).

Educational choice and freedom

News ·Wednesday March 11, 2009 @ 23:47 EDT (link)

This chapter of Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman, University of Chicago Press, 1962) presents four key points which I've excerpted below:
  1. denationalizing schooling would improve choice and lower costs;
  2. a voucher system would promote competition, variety, and flexibility (and stop making people that want to send their children to private schools pay double);
  3. merit pay for teachers should be introduced; and
  4. taxes should only be levied for basic education (not vocational or professional schooling, extracurricular activities best traded privately, etc.).
The last point comes close to addressing the problem of non-users paying for the system. Similarly, he does not thing that state higher education should be subsidized (since neighborhood effects are gone), or if it must be, an equivalent should be provided for private schools (i.e. vouchers again). Text in [square brackets] is mine, to clarify remarks extracted from a larger context.

In terms of effects, denationalizing schooling would widen the range of choice available to parents. If, as at present, parents can send their children to public schools without special payment, very few can or will send them to other schools unless they too are subsidized. Parochial schools are at a disadvantage in not getting any of the public funds devoted to schooling, but they have the compensating advantage of being run by institutions that are willing to subsidize them and can raise funds to do so. There are few other sources of subsidies for private schools. If present public expenditures on schooling were made available to parents regardless of where they send their children, a wide variety of schools would spring up to meet the demand. Parents could express their views about schools directly by withdrawing their children from one school and sending them to another, to a much greater extent than is now possible. In general, they can now take this step only at considerable cost—by sending their children to a private school or by changing their residence. For the rest, they can express their views only through cumbrous political channels. Perhaps a somewhat greater freedom to choose schools could be made available in a governmentally administered system, but it would be difficult to carry this freedom very far in view of the obligation to provide every child with a place. Here, as in other fields, competitive enterprise is likely to be far more efficient in meeting consumer demand than either nationalized enterprises or enterprises run to serve other purposes. The final result may therefore be that parochial schools would decline rather than grow in importance.

The arrangement that perhaps comes closest to being justified by these considerations [neighborhood effects, stratification, and technical monopoly]—at least for primary and secondary education—is a combination of public and private schools. Parents who choose to send their children to private schools would be paid a sum equal to the estimated cost of educating a child in a public school, provided that at least this sum was spent on education in an approved school. This arrangement would meet the valid features of the "technical monopoly" argument. It would meet the just complaints of parents that if they send their children to private non-subsidized schools they are required to pay twice for education—once in the form of general taxes and once directly. It would permit competition to develop. The development and improvement of all schools would thus be stimulated. The injection of competition would do much to promote a healthy variety of schools. It would do much, also to introduce flexibility into schools systems. Not least of its benefits would be to make the salaries of school teachers responsive to market forces. It would thereby give public authorities an independent standard against which to judge salary scales and promote a more rapid adjustment to changes in conditions of demand and supply.

If one were to seek deliberately to devise a system of recruiting and paying teachers calculated to repel the imaginative and daring and self-confident and to attract the dull and mediocre and uninspiring, he could hardly do better than imitate the system of requiring teaching certificates and enforcing standard salary structures that has developed in the larger city and state-wide systems. It is perhaps surprising that the level of stability in elementary and secondary school teaching is as high as it is under these circumstances. The alternate system would resolve these problems and permit competition to be effective in rewarding merit and attracting ability to teaching.

If the financial burden imposed by such a schooling requirement [minimum literacy, knowledge, and common values] could readily be met by the great bulk of the families in a community, it might still be both feasible and desirable to require the parent to meet the cost directly. Extreme cases could be handled by special subsidy provisions for needy families. There are many areas in the United States today where these conditions are satisfied. In these areas, it would be highly desirable to impose the costs directly on the parents. This would eliminate the governmental machinery now required to collect tax funds from all residents during the whole of their lives and then pay it back mostly to the same people during the period when their children are in school. It would reduce the likelihood that governments would also administer schools, a matter discussed further below. It would increase the likelihood that the subsidy component of school expenditures would decline as the need for subsidies declined with increasing general levels of income. If, as now, the government pays for all or most schooling, a rise in income simply leads to a still larger circular flow of funds through the tax mechanism, and an expansion of the role of the government. Finally, but by no means least, imposing the costs on the parents would tend to equalize the social and private costs of having children and so promote a better distribution of families by size.

A major reason for this kind [luxurious grounds, extracurricular programs] of public money is the present system of combining the administration of schools with their financing. The parent who would prefer to see money used for better teachers and texts rather than coaches and corridors has no way of expressing this preference except by persuading a majority to change the mixture for all. This is a special case of the general principle that a market permits each to satisfy his own taste—effective proportional representation; whereas the political process imposes conformity. In addition, the parent who would like to spend some extra money on his child's education is greatly limited. He cannot add something to the amount now being spent to school his child and transfer his child to a correspondingly more costly school. If he does transfer his child, he must pay the whole cost and not just the additional cost. He can only spend extra money easily on extra-curricular activities—dancing lessons, music lessons, etc. Since the private outlets for spending more money on schooling are so blocked, the pressure to spend more on the education of children manifests itself in ever higher public expenditures on items ever more tenuously related to the basic justification for governmental intervention into schooling.

Capitalism and freedom

News ·Wednesday March 11, 2009 @ 23:01 EDT (link)

Some representative quotes from a book I'm reading, Capitalism and Freedom (Milton Friedman, University of Chicago Press, 1962) (emphasis mine):

The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest possible extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated - a system of checks and balances. By removing the organization of economic activity from the control of political authority, the market eliminates the source of coercive power. It enables economic strength to be a check to political power rather than a reinforcement.

Comment: O that the organization of economic activity was removed from the control of political authority: not only would we be better off in this crisis, we'd never have gotten into it in the first place!

A society which is socialist cannot also be democratic, in the sense of guaranteeing individual freedom.

A government which maintained law and order, defined property rights, served as a means whereby we could modify property rights and other rules of the economic game, adjudicated disputes about the interpretation of the rules, enforced contracts, promoted competition, provided a monetary framework, engaged in activities to counter technical monopolies and to overcome neighborhood effects widely regarded as sufficiently important to justify government intervention, and which supplemented private charity and the private family in protecting the irresponsible, whether madman or child - such a government would clearly have important functions to perform. The consistent liberal is not an anarchist. Yet it is also true that such a government would have clearly limited functions and would refrain from a host of activities that are now undertaken by the federal and state governments in the United States, and their counterparts in other Western countries.

Comment. By liberal above he means in the classical sense; probably what would be called libertarian today.

A few related quotes from CLAMS members:

Every tyranny must necessarily be grounded upon general popular acceptance. In short, the bulk of the people themselves, for whatever reason, acquiesce in their own subjection. The central problem of political theory: why in the world do people consent to their own enslavement? The mystery of civil obedience: why do people, in all times and places, obey the commands of government, which always constitutes a small minority of the society?
—Murray N. Rothbard

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.
—Attributed to Alexander Tytler

Workaholics, Facebook chat emoticons

News, Technical ·Wednesday March 11, 2009 @ 22:03 EDT (link)

It's Workaholics' Wednesday, but I didn't like the food (Italian, mostly heavy cheese lasagna-type stuff), so I only stayed until a little after 2000.

This guy reverse engineered Facebook chat and found all the emoticons. Don't abuse them.

Snow falls, Outlook Web Access goes down

News ·Tuesday March 10, 2009 @ 18:55 EDT (link)

Worked from home (snow). Broadstripe just had a ~10 minute outage, and Outlook Web Access is down for (at least) the second day in a row.

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