::::: : 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.

The UW healthcare debate: wrestling with a pig

News, Political, School, Law ·Thursday May 27, 2010 @ 19:40 EDT (link)

I went to the universal health care constitutionality debate at the UW law school today and, while the debate itself was rather a waste of time, I was reminded of an important adage: Don't get into a fight with a pig, because he'll win, you'll both get dirty, and the pig likes it. The guy from the CATO institute did that, and he regretted it.

Here, the "mud" is the constitution-as-currently-interpreted (CACI) and the pig is the UW law school expert steeped in all those rationalizing court decisions about whether something is a tax, or can be taxed, or can be regulated using the taxing clause, or if the interstate commerce clause can be used to regulate growing wheat (or marijuana) for one's own use, or whether the necessary and proper clause conveys absolute power to congress (of course it does! need you ask?) and so on. You're on their playing field, the playing field of the CACI, and the CATO guy was doomed before he started. He should have tried to arrange for a morality-based debate; but then nobody at UW would have stepped forward to debate him.

The UW law professor did make a valid point that would exist even in an originalist debate, though: the current lawsuits are generally problematical in that the court only hears "cases or controversies" of "injury in fact"; and since many of the provisions that require the states to pay don't go into effect until 2016, nor the individual mandate until 2014; and the states do not have standing to bring a case for their residents anyway. So it seems many of these suits will be validly dismissed for lack of standing.

It's was very clear that the originalist constitution and the CACI are two extremely different things. In one, for example, the federal government only has the powers explicitly delegated to it; in the other, all sorts of things creep out of the penumbras and emanations, giving congress powers never imagined by the framers. I think the CATO guy gave it a good shot and would have scored a lot of points if he was debating the morality of the healthcare bill, or how pro-liberty it is or is not, but on holding it up to the current interpretation of the constitution and active precedents, the UW law professor picked him up by the scruff of the neck and swept the floor with him. He even took him to task with the economics of it all, emphasizing a potential free rider concern, that, of course, is really made worse by the exclusions of pre-existing conditions from insurer consideration (if your house is burning down, you shouldn't be able to buy insurance).

We (libertarians) are too used to thinking of the original constitution, not the 300 years of corruption it's undergone to become the CACI. Thus, we still think of it as a good thing, and we still think that blatantly, obviously (originally) unconstitutional laws can be challenged on constitutional grounds. And they can, but big government will win just about every time because it's their pigpen—and SCOTUS is part of the government too, and they don't get appointed for being in favor of shrinking it.

So don't take up offers to play in their pigpen; if you must wrestle, wrestle in the light of day and over morality and economics, not in a pigpen designed, built, enclosed, and fully controlled by the other guy. Don't get sucked in to hopeless causes; don't walk onto a stage where their rules prevail and morality is utterly irrelevant. Why waste your time?

Books finished: Why Popcorn Costs So Much At the Movies.

XBMC and VDPAU headaches

News, Technical ·Sunday May 23, 2010 @ 06:42 EDT (link)

I upgraded XBMC from source control recently and all the background textures (overlays?) were gone—the Confluence skin looked like the sample but but without any of the shading behind the menus, weather info, or dialog boxes. Menus and movie info were quite hard to read with the text superimposed on other text or the background image without any contrast.

First I checked if it was the nVidia OpenGL, by switching temporarily to the (much slower) X11 OpenGL, but it had the same issue. I debugged around the code a bit to ensure the textures in question were being loaded, and they were.

Then I figured I'd play a movie anyway, but XBMC crashed in VDPAU code. It looked like it was trying to detect the graphics card or support, and eventually on a hunch I went to verify if my card actually support VDPAU and/or VAAPI. It turns out VAAPI uses VDPAU as a backend on nVidia cards (as in the crash callstack) and my particular card does not in fact support VDPAU. So it gracelessly decides that crashing is a robust solution: bit of a fail.

I uninstalled the VDPAU (libvdpau) and VAAPI (libva) packages and rebuilt the dependencies (primarily MythTV, Transcode, and XBMC), and as it happens the background overlays came back too, which made me happy, even though it was rather a long aggravating process. (To top it off, the machine I was using to debug—the machine I am typing on—also had some issues: D-Bus problems, KDE sync dependency hell, KDM ignoring keyboard and mouse input—the last was fixed by re-installing evdev). What a mess!

Does this mean Linux sucks? No, but it means if you want to run a source-based distro (Gentoo) and upgrade it frequently and to the bleeding edge, a little expertise is required. But nobody has to run a source-based distro (there are plenty of binary distros) nor use leading-edge packages. But where's the fun in that?

Books finished: The Path of Daggers.

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.

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