Watch it! That slope is slippery

This is interesting:

This case isn’t about censoring information, but about complying with French law.

Isn’t that like saying the following?

  • This isn’t about discrimination, but about complying with Jim Crow law.
  • This isn’t about rape, but about complying with the right of a man to have sex with his wife under state law.
  • This isn’t about suppressing political speech, but about complying with laws to respect the President.

People need to be careful about the rationalizations and precedent they set. It’s not very far down the slippery slope to, “This isn’t about political assassination, but about removing a tyrant from power.”

Perhaps it’s Stockholm Syndrome

This is the equivalent of a rapist using a condom and lubricant:

…this is the future of airport security here in the nifty fifty, but the changes that are taking places in Charlotte and Dallas are certainly something that we can support. Think more comfortable spaces, better signage, and even places specifically intended to use for slipping your shoes back on.

The perpetrators should be prosecuted not encouraged. I suspect Stockholm Syndrome has something to do with it.

Quote of the day—Alan M. Gottlieb

Under the First Amendment, California is not allowed to compile a list of books you can read, and under the Second Amendment the state should not be allowed to compile a list of handguns you can own.

Alan M. Gottlieb
November 6, 2013
GLOCK FILES AMICUS BRIEF SUPPORTING SAF’S CALIFORNIA CASE
[Nor is California allowed to compile a list of religions you may join, a list of crimes that you are required to confess to, or a list of people exempt from the 13th Amendment protection.

SAF, “winning back firearms freedom one lawsuit at a time”.—Joe]

ACA leads toward divorce

Remember what I posted a little while ago? Looks like it’s going mainstream as a consideration. No, I’m not predicting a sudden tsunami of two-income divorces, but society changes a bit at a time, incrementally, at the margins. And at the margins, ObamaCare makes divorce look like an economically sensible thing to do, and it’s yet another drag on the economy and social stability as people try to game the system for personal benefit at the expense of “the greater good.” The incentives in the law are really insane.

Progressive violence

I was looking at some of the mining history in Idaho and found this:

Labor unrest was a problem throughout the district in the 1890s, and martial law was declared on two occasions. In 1899 labor agitators destroyed the Bunker Hill mill with a massive explosion of dynamite (Figure 35). Attempts, often successful, to destroy property were a favorite tactic used by union organizers against companies whose management was opposed to having unions at their mines.

BunkHillAfterExplosionFigure 35. Bunker Hill mill following explosion in 1899. (Engineering and Mining Journal, v. 67, p. 648).

And from here:minewar

Business are frequently criticized for their oppression and violence against workers. Progressives/liberals/communists do not have any high ground to claim.

Make it moot

New York City’s has a “stop and frisk” policy where the police stop, question, and frisk people they deem suspicious. If drugs or weapons are found the evidence is used in criminal charges against them. In a typical year 500,000 to 600,000 stops are made. 86% to 90% of the time the person is innocent.

A Federal Judge told New York City to knock it off. But then she was removed from the case. Paul Barrett wants the city to use this opportunity “to come to a consensus on how the NYPD can continue its decades-long successful campaign to reduce violent crime, while at the same time respecting the Constitution’s ban on discriminatory government policies.“

As near as I can tell Barrett doesn’t have a problem with the searches as long as they don’t discriminate by race on who is being stopped for searches. I find this almost surreal. What would get it through his head that ignoring Fourth Amendment rights is a dangerous path to travel? Barrett’s mother escaped Europe as a little girl. Many of her relatives died in the camps during WWII. Maybe if consensus were for the police to refrain from frisking people unless their papers aren’t order. Have the police ask nicely and say, “Papers please.”

No. The “consensus” should be for the cops to cease stopping and searching innocent people. And another thing is the people should pass “constitutional carry” legislation and also end the war on drugs. After that what would be the point of frisking people? Suspicion of stolen property? Sure. Wounds from when they got shot attempting to harm an innocent person? Sure. But only after articulable probable cause that the person was a person of interest in a crime.

The number of innocent people stopped should be on the order of 10% or maybe 20%. When the innocent stop rate is 90% that is conclusive evidence the police need tall shiny boots and a German accent.

There’s some truth in it

BlondeObamacare

Via email from JoeyD.

Let’s look to the UK for healthcare

The UK has government run health care. That’s been working out well hasn’t it?

Oh! Maybe not:

A plan to create the world’s largest single civilian computer system linking all parts of the National Health Service is to be abandoned by the Government after running up billions of pounds in bills. Ministers are expected to announce next month that they are scrapping a central part of the much-delayed and hugely controversial 10-year National Programme for IT.

“The department has been unable to demonstrate what benefits have been delivered from the £2.7bn spent on the project so far,” Margaret Hodge, chair of the PAC, said. “It should now urgently review whether it is worth continuing with the remaining elements of the care-records system. The £4.3bn which the department expects to spend might be better used to buy systems that are proven to work, that are good value for money and which deliver demonstrable benefits to the NHS.” A further £4.4bn was expected to be spent on other areas of the vast IT project.

H/T to Adam Baldwin.

What I don’t think most people realize is that software doesn’t scale in a linear fashion from small projects to large. I can write, debug, a deliver a program to you that prints out, “Hello world!” in a minute or two. I can easily do it in five lines of code. That figures out to about 1200 lines per day* if I were to spend the entire day coding at that rate.

Yet when you look at the number of lines of code delivered on real projects it’s about 10 lines per day per developer. On a project as large as an operating system like Windows it’s much lower.

The problem is that planning, complexity, documentation, testing effort, and difficulty goes up much faster than the number of lines of code increase. You can pump out the code at a fast rate but it’s not something that is going to work well. It will be very fragile. You can find test cases where it will work correctly but as soon as you do something a little unusual or the system is under load and the timing on something changes you can end up extremely difficult to find bugs.

As the size of the project goes up communication between teams become a problem. With a poor design a small change in one part of the system affects many other parts. Communicating and coordinating this occupies increasing amounts of time and care. A change occurred “somewhere” in the system and your code stopped working. It can take an hour or a week to find the problem and get it fixed so you can continue to add features. Even worse are “build breaks”. This is when someone changed something and you can’t even build the software into something that runs so it can be tested. This can mean every single programmer on the entire project is at a standstill. As you might imagine these are very high priority events and you can have people baying for your blood. People take them very seriously and the consequences are high but they still happen.

A former roommate working on Windows NT back in about ‘99 told me she had a bug fix ready for check-in but wasn’t allowed to for months because of concerns that it was a change that could affect other people.

How many lines of code are in the Obamacare system? I don’t know for certain but there are reports that it contains 500 million lines needs to have 5 million lines rewritten. Do the arithmetic to arrive at your estimate of how many people working for how many days is required before it will be “fixed”. My best guess is that the politicians had the U.K. model in mind and that’s what they will get (see above).

Everything I see about the Obamacare web site indicates it was thrown together by someone who didn’t know what they were doing. There are very few companies that have been able to write very large complex systems successfully. Microsoft and Google come to mind. The contractor for Obamacare isn’t on anyone’s list of successfully large scale system developers.

They claim it will be working by the end of November? Did they say which November?


* Yes. Lines of code per day is a poor way of measuring productivity. For example one can be very productive while reducing the number of lines of code in a program. Yet, it is good enough for many uses and can illustrate valid points with serious error.

It’s for your own good

Sometimes people just don’t get it unless you can present the information to them in the proper format for their brains to grasp it.

Does the following help?

From @State_Control:

CapitalistsSocialists

What if it were a business that told you to buy their product or they would send men with guns to collect the money anyway? It’s for your own good they tell you. What would you do?

Why should it be any different if it is Obama doing the same thing?

Quote of the day—Robert J. Avrech

We return to Stalin’s omelet. Over and over, Democrats calmly and cruelly explain that only five percent of Americans will be booted off their insurance plans. And those insurance plans were substandard anyway.

First of all, five percent translates into roughly 16 million Americans. Each person whose insurance is terminated because Obama does not like his or her choice is a story of fear and panic and possible financial ruin. Further, does anyone even believe the Democrat apologists’ quote of five percent? That number will grow and grow as ObamaCare tightens its death grip.

The “only five percent” line of reasoning tells us a great deal about the utopian vision of Democrats. The individual does not count. Democrats claim to see the larger picture. But they see only a collective, a manageable herd. And once again, they know better. Forget that millions of Americans voluntarily entered into contracts they deemed right for themselves and their families. This counts for nothing to the Democrat political class. They are experts. They attended Ivy League schools. This makes the professional political class — overeducated, inbred elitists — better qualified to make decisions for us, the American people, that are truly about matters of life and death.

The core of American values is liberty, not government.

Robert J. Avrech
October 30, 2013
The Democrat-ObamaCare Purges
[You should never forget that “only five percent” line. Communists have used identical reasoning in their purges. The good of the whole is more important than the good of the individual. And if they have to “break a few eggs” they really don’t see what the problem is.

The differences between us cannot be resolved with a compromise. If they liquidate 1% or 10% it does not matter to me. They would still be committed mass evil and deserve whatever the “Nuremburg Courts” rule.—Joe]

NSA spying has rippling effects

From the Wall Street Journal:

AT&T Inc.’s ambitions to expand in Europe have run into unexpected hurdles amid the growing outcry across the region over surveillance by the National Security Agency. German and other European officials said any attempt by AT&T to acquire a major wireless operator would face intense scrutiny, given the company’s work with the U.S. agency’s data-collection programs.

This is no different than the problems China would have buying Intel, Microsoft, T-Mobile, or Google. Would you want a country with such a poor record of human rights having the ability to surreptitiously read all your Internet traffic, listen to your phone calls, and even read the snail mail letter you wrote using Microsoft Word?

Guess what. Our country now has a poor record on human rights and is suffering the consequences for it.


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Quote of the day—Roberta X

Lining up armed men in uniform to say “Verboten!” to members of the public wanting to pay their respects at a revered monument (one made of hard, hard rock and solidly anchored) is utterly necessary to the continued functioning of our great republic.

Okay, then.  But they’re gonna need taller, shiner boots.

Roberta X
October 6, 2013
Fed.Gov Has Shut Down The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall?
[I think I will start stealing that last line even though it’s not the shiny boots that make the difference. It’s the guns that back them up.

What they don’t seem to understand is that we have guns too. Not only guns but numbers. Numbers of people and numbers of guns that outnumber their guns and numbers. Please stop pushing because demonstrating the guns or the numbers will be very unpleasant for all involved.—Joe]

Chilling effect

New York City recently had its “stop and frisk” policy struck down as violating the Fourth Amendment. The city has not implemented a “monitor” of the program as the court ordered. Now New York City senior attorney Celeste Koeleveld says Judge Scheindlin’s order has had a “chilling effect” on police officers.

And her point is? Does she have a concern about the “chilling effect” of the Fifth Amendment not allowing police officers to torture suspects for confessions? How about the “chilling effect” of the Eight Amendment on Judges because of the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments in the Eighth Amendment?

The entire intent of the Bill of Rights was and is to have a “chilling effect” on the power of government. In U.S. law the phrase “chilling effect” refers to the stifling effect that vague or excessively broad laws may have on legitimate … activity. A “chilling effect” only exists when government passes laws that private citizens have to obey. Not when government is overstepping bounds that have been in place for hundreds of years. It appears Koeleveld either does not understand government is a servant of the people or she wishes to change the relationship.

NSA decryption

From Leaked Slide Shows NSA Celebrated Victory Over Google’s Security With A Smiley Face:google-cloud-exploitation1383148810

That’s good to know. What that means is that either they can’t break the encrypted messages directly or that it is more work to do so. So they do it by attacking the Google servers that do the encryption and decryption.

That means encrypting my data on my computer before it hits the Internet makes it more difficult or impossible for the NSA to read. Hence:

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If a tree falls in the forest

Yesterday, in reference to spying on U.S. citizens, U.S. Congressional Representative Mike Rogers and Intelligence Committee Chair insisted:

You can’t have your privacy violated if you don’t know your privacy is violated.

I can only conclude he would also insist that he hadn’t actually stolen cash from your wallet if you didn’t know it had been taken. Or that a teenage girl hadn’t been raped if she had been drugged and didn’t know what happened.

Someone should tell him that must also mean his privacy wasn’t violated if someone made of video of him having sex with a sheep and didn’t tell anyone.

Quote of the day—Daniel Greenfield

Liberal supersessionists claim to be worried about conservative secessionists when they should be far more worried about conservative supersessionists. The consensus we all live by is a fragile thing. It is being torn apart by the radical left and once it is destroyed, it will not bind the right, in the same way that it no longer binds the left.

And then the true conflict will begin.

Daniel Greenfield
The Supersessionists of the Liberal Confederacy
October 20, 2013
[H/T Kevin Baker.

Every paragraph in this awesome post could qualify as a quote of the day or week or even month. It is very, very good.—Joe]

Ever had a cell phone get strange on you?

Ever heard of “carrierIQ?” Its an “app” on most cell phones (one that is hidden) that’s sort of part of the OS. It sends stuff to the carriers. It can also execute commands that someone texts to your phone by intercepting them before you see them. It has bugs, and might get a buffer overflow and blow chunks on your phone. Or it might just execute the code, and send a keylog or your current location or contact list back, then delete the text message so you never see it.

As a friend of mine that has been doing software research for years said, it’s basically a trojan that gets loaded by your phone manufacturer, and yes it’s been hacked more than once. (Of course I’m sure a software researcher would never hack the OS of a phone, any more than they’d see if they could run UNIX on an XBox 360, and here of course I’m just making up hypotheticals that no one would ever do.)

Just thought you’d like to know. Sleep well.

The government lies and people die

FACT: Nothing in #Obamacare forces people out of their health plans. No change is required unless insurance companies change existing plans.

— Valerie Jarrett* (@vj44) October 29, 2013

I asked a friend who is in the health insurance business if the above was true. I knew the answer but thought maybe there was some narrow definition of the word “is” or maybe “in” that would make it something other than a false statement.

The response was a laugh and, “No. That’s what I have been doing for the last several weeks. We have been preparing notification letters for individuals telling them their insurance plans are no longer available. Plans they were perfectly happy with and could afford cannot be offered anymore because of ACA.”

I was a bit surprised by the laugh and the almost cheerful mood. They explained, “It’s what we deal with everyday. They constantly say things that are not true and it has gotten to the point where we joke and laugh about it.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised, it’s obvious in hindsight, but they also told me, “We can’t say anything about it though. If we do we will be audited and harassed by the regulators. It’s just not worth it. You don’t say anything bad about the regulators.”

They also told me, “It’s going to be sad. Due to “health care reform” a lot of people that used to have insurance will no longer be covered.

I could say a lot, lot more…if it weren’t for the fear of the government taking revenge upon someone for exposing their lies.

A single person losing their health insurance is a tragedy. 16 million is a statistic. https://t.co/0hgOrYnSEZ

— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) October 29, 2013

If you don’t recognize the form of the quote above; it’s from Stalin who probably actually said, “’When one man dies it is a tragedy, when thousands die it’s statistics’”.

It’s appropriate to bring Stalin into the discussion for more than just this one reason. Read this book: How Do You Kill 11 Million People?: Why the Truth Matters More Than You Think. It’s a very quick read. There is one thing that government have proved, again and again, that they are very, very good at. It’s killing people. Particularly their own people. One of the crucial links in accomplishing this is lying to their victims and to those who carry out the orders to arrest, transport, and jail them. The lie could be a black as “Arbeit macht frei” or telling the friends and relatives of those executed in the basements of the local police station in the USSR that the ‘counter-revolutionaries and traitors’ had been sent to labor and reeducation camps. It could be the lie that the crowded rail cars were carrying everyone to a place where they would have good homes, schools, and jobs. Or it could be what many would consider a white lie of a campaign promise to provide universal health care. Never mind the “health care panels” administrating the “care” would decide who were treated and who were euthanized.

Obamacare is now being recognized for the disaster so many people knew it would be. What comes next is that the failure will and is being blamed on political obstructionists. This is a lie. The system, as I explained in my previous post, cannot work because of the principles involved. But some are calling for Republicans and the Tea Party to be tried for treason.

What happens next? There is a good chance that the democrats will lose seats in the next election because of it. But that isn’t the only possible outcome. Stalin and the Khmer Rouge regimes handled the failures and criticism of their policies in a different manner without giving up control. And many in the U.S. media approved with rationalizations such as (H/T to Alan Gura):

The new government of Cambodia may have to resort to strong measures against a few to gain democratic socialism for all Cambodians. And we support the United Front in the pursuit of its presently stated goals.

The current administration has consistently lied about gun control, operation Fast and Furious, the massive spying, stopping the wars, closing Guantanamo Bay, Benghazi, jobs creation, and health care reform. But the really scary stuff is what they have told the truth about. They said they would be willing to use drones to kill U.S. citizens on American soil.

Lying is what comes naturally to them. They tell lies the people want to believe. But once you have told enough lies your brain changes and you have trouble telling or even knowing the truth.

History has some very brutal examples of what happens when government policy is to lie. We must not let that happen here.


* Valerie Jarrett (@vj44) is an official Whitehouse twitter account.

Quote of the day—Mike Konczal

It’s important we get more sophisticated analysis of what has gone wrong with the ACA rollout to better appreciate how utilizing “the market” can be far more cumbersome and inefficient than the government just doing things itself.

Mike Konczal
October 23, 2013
What Kind of Problem is the ACA Rollout for Liberalism?
[In other words, “Our government program is such a disaster that we need a new and expanded government program to fix it.”

Monopolies are almost always a bad thing. The lack of choice creates a situation where inferior and expensive products do not get improved or replaced. Konczcal and hard-core liberals want government monopolies. The soft-core liberals want to regulate the market.

What Konczal doesn’t understand is that he, politicians, and government in general, do not have the domain knowledge to solve most problems. This includes regulating the solution providers. When I read the instruction manual for my car and it says to use a particular grade of gasoline and change the oil every 5000 miles I follow their recommendations. They know their car far better than I do. Even though I am a software engineer when a software package says it requires X megabytes of RAM Y megabytes of disk space I follow their recommendations because they know their software far better than I do.

The advocate for more government might say, “We will bring in experts and/or we will become experts.” This doesn’t work. I worked in a government lab for three years. I remember sitting in a meeting discussing how to get more research contracts. One guy said, “What we have is the ability to become experts on anything within a couple of weeks.” He was serious. I felt the blood drain out of my face. I had been working with him for over two years and I had not yet discovered anything that I considered him an expert on. They spent several years and millions of dollars coming up with a software testing and quality program for the software being developed at the lab. What they came up with was something that the industry had left behind a decade or two previously (the “waterfall model”).

The reason government cannot acquire the expertise is because they are a monopoly and expertise is like a product. It must constantly be improved and updated to remain relevant. And without the marketplace pressure it will stagnant and become obsolete.

Because of this lack of domain knowledge and the inherent inferiority of monopoly products government “doing it itself” will always be the wrong answer to a problem that doesn’t involve the use of force.—Joe]

Incentives

Incentives matter. People pay attention to them. The larger the incentive, the more effective it is. Look at Obamacare. You get heavy subsidies right up to exactly 400% of the poverty line. Then you get nothing, you go directly from being heavily subsidized to being the subsidy, all for that extra dollar in income. This might easily mean for a married couple that they pay an extra $10,000 a year for the same health insurance policy (more or less depending on specifics, but this number is not atypical). Then look at the fact that a lot of employers are shifting to providing employee-only health insurance, and dropping coverage for spouses and dependents.

If a working couple are each making $30k a year, they receive a significant subsidy. If one gets a promotion that comes with a 10% raise ( $3,000), then it kicks them into zero-subsidy land and the net loss of $7,000 a year. The incentive for divorce in order to make ends meet is powerful, because if they divorce, then they both qualify for a bunch of other programs, too, which would effectively boost their effective incomes considerably. Meeting bills vs not meeting bills, being able to afford vacation vs not… This ACA thing is a powerful incentive that, if it stands more than two years, will drive a HUGE boom in divorce and application for “single parents with kids needing government assistance.”

ObamaCare is the most destructive bill to American society I’ve ever witnessed pass congress.