Gus Van Horn blog

Partly because a friend told me this topic might be of general interest, I am posting about my process of selecting a new web browser for my news scanning/reading and writing research. It didn't occur to me at the time to ask why he thought the topic could be of general interest, aside from the information I gleaned about alternative web browsers. That said, in considering my thought process, it occurs to me that how one goes about exploring an unfamiliar field might be generally interesting as well, so here goes. As regulars know here, I blog almost daily. I also am father to two very young children, and hope to expand my writing once again to include longer, more in-depth pieces while continuing to blog near-daily. Writing and research take significant amounts of time, preferably of the uninterrupted variety; Children find ways to gobble up that time and always threaten what's left. Suffice it to say I have major time constraints. Over the past few months, I have been looking at all aspects of this problem in order to find ways to speed up writing- and research- related tasks that seem like they should take much less time than they do. One area of particular concern was how much time browsing can take. For example, nothing is quite so irritating as having to decide whether to sit on my hands for a few more minutes or reboot my computer when my web browser coughs a hairball. (Were there an award for stupendous achievements in wasting computational power, it would surely go to some web scripter somewhere: I have six gigabytes of RAM, a 2.4 GHz, dual-core processor, yada-yada, and some page I want to load for the sake of reading a short articlefreezes it up?) This is astonishingly bad and amazingly common. I run Linux and, if I caught the problem in time, would usually kill my browser from the command line, but even then, I'd lose work. Something had to give. As you might guess from my last few sentences, I am no computer expert, although I probably know more than most people about computers. I also don't have enough time to, say learn all about the inner workings of web browsers and test dozens of candidates or code my own variant of a browser I like. I would need to take an initial stab at what I thought the problem might be and look for help from others. And I would base any testing I might do on that information and my own criteria for what I need, with a mind open to having to dig deeper at the problem if new information indicated I would need to. As I did when testing/learning/deciding to adopt Emacs as my new writing software, I would "learn by doing", with my old, familiar software there as a fall-back if I needed it. My old browser was Firefox, and when it started gumming up the works, a related process called something like "plugin-container" was usually the culprit. "I don't use plug-ins," was my thought upon seeing this information. (This turned out to be incorrect: I was actually using built-in plug-ins, most notably one for Flash content. More on this later.) Yes, Google's Chrome (and its open-source cousin, Chromium) was an option, which I'd turned to a few times, but I dislike several aspects of the browser, and wanted to find an alternative to either. This immediately led me to set my criteria for an acceptable replacement. For most software I use, I demand the following: (1) It runs at least on Linux and Windows, and preferably also Apple platforms; (2) It is under active development and has some critical mass of users; (3) It is capable of fitting in with my usual ways of doing things. In the case of web browsers, the last criterion would entail me being able to deliver full functionality of the accounts I have on a small handful of web sites. Oh yeah, and a web browser needs to allow me to have multiple tabs open without completely freezing my computer. With this in mind, I searched for alternative browsers, filtering for recent articles, and came up with all but the last of the below results. (I looked again when my first candidates fell short.) Here they are, along with my slightly edited notes: 10 Alternative Web Browsers for Ubuntu Linux QupZilla -- Solid, but nothing new. Can it not bring my computer to its knees? Web (formerly Epiphany) -- very simple and fast -- a commenter who uses this and qz rated qz higher. Six Alternative Web Browsers You Should Know About WhiteHat Aviator (privacy) -- no Linux version [no ads or media autoplay, duckduckgo by default] Citrio (media junkies) -- faster downloads Midori (lightweight) -- native to Linux, but Windows version exists, cuts out lots of RAM usage [may crash a lot] Coowon (gamers) -- Nothing for me here. SpaceTime3D (visually-oriented research) -- [or is it an extension? may or may not work in Linux possibly try later] This is actually an application that allows easy preview of search results The Best Alternative Browsers -- The Comodo offerings may be worth a look, if they can run on Linux. Comodo (Ice)Dragon -- more secure versions of Firefox and Chrome MaxThon Cloud Browser -- see below Avant Browser -- for people who want MS, but not IE Unhappy With Chrome and Firefox? Here Are Some Alternate Web Browsers -- maybe: Pale Moon, Maxthon, and Opera Pale Moon -- optimized for speed, native to Windows, ported -- to Linux and Android, like Firefox, but not made to look like Chrome, maybe Opera -- perhaps worth another look [not supported by default in Ubuntu] Iron Browser -- a Chrome offshoot that doesn't track your every move K-Meleon -- Windows-only Maxthon -- cross-platform, split-screen mode Chromium -- Chrome, without the built-in Flash player or PDF viewer Safari -- can't run on Linux IE -- can't run on Linux And here are my notes for the browsers I tried, in the order I tried them: Midori pros: doesn't bring my computer to its knees, good view source cons: crashes often enough to be a deal-breaker, some sites not functional, slow when lots of tabs open Pale Moon pros: zero learning curve since it's a fork of Firefox, not as Chrome-like as newer versions of FF cons: It happens a lot less, but I still wound up yanking out my battery and rebooting while looking for material. Added Later: Can I solve freeze problem by disabling Flash? It seemed to help with QupZilla, which still gobbled memory more than this. I think this did the trick. Opera -- WTF? It can't properly render GVH. QupZilla pro: very good source code viewer con: no text zoom, crappy fonts, GMail doesn't support "this version of Safari" And the winner is ... Pale Moon. I liked Firefox but for the crippling toll it took on my computers during heavy usage (or, apparently, sometimes just having it open for days at a time), and except for a trend in its development towards becoming more Chrome-like. As you can see above, I may have discovered the problem all along with Firefox when I returned to Pale Moon after I saw it happen again on two other candidate browsers. (It was still less frequent on Pale Moon, which seemed faster overall, anyway, and had the added bonus of being the "Coke Classic" to Firefox's current "New Coke". The feature list -- See the web site. -- is also a superset of a sort of "best of" from prior versions of the Firefox project, of which Pale Moon is an active fork. It is interesting to consider that, had I known more about browsers, I might have stuck with Firefox (with Flash disabled by default), and never discovered Pale Moon. On the other hand, it is also possible I might have found a better browser for my purposes, but the solution I have found is satisfactory enough for me to move on to other ways of shaving time off web research while being open to a better browser solution, should I happen upon it. Regarding the process itself, it is interesting to consider the measures I took regarding the fact that my knowledge of this area is limited and I did not have lots of time to increase it. Given my purposes, relying on the knowledge and experience of others, and supplementing my own knowledge when I reached an impasse was sufficient. We live much of our lives in situations like this, so studying them might be fruitful. -- CAV P.S. The inability of Opera, a fairly common browser, to render my blog, bothers me. If any regular here finds that he is having to avoid (or use) a certain browser just to read my blog, I would like to know more about it. Please leave a comment about your problem or email me. Thanks! Link to Original

Over at Unclutterer I recently came across a posttitled, "Mise en Place Beyond the Kitchen". The gist is that it's a good idea to set things up in advance generally, as the French do specifically for cooking. While I agree, I have to admit to wanting to comment on mise en place itself, or at least how it commonly seems to be understood and applied in another post and comments at the same blog. My main bone of contention is that the best way to be organized necessarily entails setting out or preparing everything in advance. Here is one typical example: Read through the entire recipe to get a comprehensive idea of what I'll be doing. Read through the recipe again, this time taking notes on the recipe that are helpful to me during the cooking process. Set out all of the equipment I'll need to complete the recipe. Measure, chop, mince, etc. anything that has to be done at a very specific time during the cooking process. (If I'm making soup, I'll chop all my vegetables first, but I tend to just measure and grab ingredients out of the refrigerator and pantry as I go.) Heat the stove or oven, if applicable. Cook. Erin Doland admits to flexibility regarding chopping vegetables, but I think one can be more deliberate about when one chops vegetables or measures ingredients. I know this because I learned to take advantage of my own absent-mindedness years ago. While I have always read recipes ahead of cooking, things like "one small onion, chopped" in mid-recipe often annoyed me. If I had tons of time (and didn't forget), I could do such things first, but if I didn't. I'd have to remember to do them at some (hopefully) opportune time. It eventually occurred to me to just rewrite the recipes to explicitly call for the cutting, measuring, heating, or whatever at the most convenient time they could be done. For example, when I make chicken jambalaya, I normally chop vegetables while I cook the sausage. This strategy is especially helpful when there are sizeable time gaps in the action. Of course, one can always just hunt for words like "chop" and do a "regular" mise en place if advanced preparation is preferable, such as when one needs time gaps (for cooking other things at the same time) or a safer, simplified process (as when cooking while watching young children or socializing). I would summarize my approach to mise en placeas: Evaluate the procedure for steps that can be performed ahead of time or in parallel, and re-write it to make time savings extremely easy. State initial conditions, such as ingredients, total preparation time, special steps, and unusual equipment at the beginning of the procedure. Check initial conditions before starting the procedure, Evaluate the situation in which you will perform the procedure and plan any desired deviations. Perform the procedure In many cases, I can save 15-20 minutes of preparation time every time I cook a given recipe simply by spending a half-hour or less rewriting a recipe. I have the further advantage of being able to dump the ingredients lists into my grocery list using a few simple commands, rather than having to waste time writing out a full shopping list. (See the recipe at the end of the jambalaya post for further details. Note that I have since started dumping the text file (with some minor editing) into a smart phone app rather than printing it out.) -- CAV Link to Original

John Stossel makes a variety of good points in a recent columnon "The Right to Discriminate", but the following is one of his more interesting: It would actually be useful to see which businesses refuse to serve one group or another. Tolerance is revealed by how people behave when they are free. American law fosters the illusion that everyone is unbiased, while their real feelings remain hidden, making them harder to boycott, shame or debate. This Stossel says after reminding us that businesses run by bigots are vulnerable to being boycotted. I don't find the above quote to be a big revelation, and I don't think others should. But perhaps this is something that needs to be said. If so, it could be useful to speculate on why it would need saying. The result, if not the intent, of so much law over the past fifty years, during the vast expansion of the paternalistic state has been to make individuals dependent on the government for everything from money to judgement (e.g., all-encompassing regulations). This has especially been the case in the attempts to end government-enforced discrimination (a proper goal) and that of individuals (which is not properly the business of government). Furthermore, improper means, such as racial quotas, have been employed as remedies. The focus seems to have shifted from ending active discrimination to merely ending the results (or even what could be the results of discrimination. And so you have quotas and statistical analyses of hiring and promotion practices, police stops and the like. And now this is morphing into the government prescribing behaviors to individuals. This shift to increasingly meddlesome law has followed inexorably from the premise that righting wrongs (vice protecting rights) is the proper purpose of the government. Might corresponding cultural shifts, including an expectation of rescue, a mental passivity that doesn't see the value in ugly truths, and a failure to appreciate the value of freedom, also follow? People are free to reach their own conclusions and form their own habits, but our current state of affairs is hardly one that encourages thinking. -- CAV Link to Original

Light Posting Possible Due to family obligations, I may be unable to post regularly, if at all, until Thursday, April 16. Regulatory Doping? A PandoDaily storydescribes the success of alcohol delivery startup Drizly in Seattle -- vis-á-vis the difficulties of Amazon -- as some kind of David and Goliath story: But what's most impressive is that on its own turf, delivery powerhouse Amazon has been made a spectator in the alcohol delivery game. My reading is a little different: I think a big part of the story is that Drizly games alcohol regulationsbetter. And we haven't even gotten around to the fact that Amazon is being kept from trying drone delivery by other regulations. Weekend Reading "Unless you can live under the shadow of his tantrums, you're going to have to move on." -- Michael Hurd, in "I Can't Live This Way" at The Delaware Wave "... I've come up with 5 things that some therapists might do, often unwittingly and for whatever reason, to keep you in therapy unnecessarily." -- Michael Hurd, in "Shopping for a Psychotherapist" at The Delaware Coast Press Why the Odd Shape? There is an interesting article explaining the design considerations that lent the International Space Station its strange shape: We don't yet have the technology to do construction in space, so we have to assemble a large vehicle in space from launch-able components. At the time of the ISS assembly, the two mechanisms for getting a large payload to space were the Space Shuttle Orbiter and the Russian Proton rocket. There is also a video at the above link showing the station at the various stages of its construction. -- CAV Link to Original

1. The nightmarish story of the only man known to have parachuted through a thunderstorm and survived is nevertheless about as captivating as it is short: No human before or since Bill Rankin is known to have parachuted through a cumulonimbus tower and lived to tell about it. Lt Col William Henry Rankin passed away on 06 July 2009, almost exactly 50 years after his harrowing and history-making ride on the storm. Rankin's journey took forty minutes from when he ejected from his failing aircraft to his entanglement in a tree, and being a professional, he was well aware of the many dangers he escaped. 2. This one vies with another bug I blogged -- a file that could jam a printer -- for apparent implausibility: An odd feature of our campus network at the time was that it was 100% switched. An outgoing packet wouldn't incur a router delay until hitting the POP and reaching a router on the far side. So time to connect to a lightly-loaded remote host on a nearby network would actually largely be governed by the speed of light distance to the destination rather than by incidental router delays. As a result of this bug, some email users were unable to reach anyone more than about 500 miles away. 3. "The Ten 'Commandments' of Sushi" is quite lengthy, but there is a method to the mandates, issuing as they do from a man who loves his craft. "For me," says Yajima, "this isn't a job. It's a hobby I get to do all day, every day. It's something I love. I'll never retire from being a sushi man." And I thought I liked sushi before I read this... 4. Here is a comment that perfectly summarizes my own experience with Emacs: The truth about Emacs: Everything seems way too hard at first, then you use it for a while, then you can't live without it. [format edit] Amusingly, I recently learned by accident that I finally fulfilled an old ancient new year's resolution by switching to Emacs starting in February. I don't remember why that goal fell by the wayside back then, but I'm glad I finally saw it through. -- CAV Link to Original

George Will becomesthe latest commentator -- among others he cites -- to warn of the dangers inherent in a massive federal regulatory code that improperly criminalizes myriad activities: Regulatory crimes, [Michael Anthony] Cottone observes, often are not patently discordant with our culture, as are murder, rape and robbery. Rather than implicating fundamental moral values, many regulatory offenses derive their moral significance, such as it is, from their relation to the promotion of some governmental goal. The presumption of knowledge of the law is, Cottone argues, useful as an incentive for citizens to become informed of their legal duties. Complete elimination of the presumption would be a perverse incentive to remain in an ignorance that might immunize a person from culpability. But "there can be no moral obligation to do something impossible, such as know every criminal law," let alone all the even more numerous -- perhaps tens of thousands -- regulations with criminal sanctions. We face immediate and long-term dangers from this state of affairs. First is that from effectively arbitrary criminal prosecution. Second, unless we reverse course soon, cultural respect for law and order will suffer as abuse of the law by government official becomes familiar, and people generally forget what good government is like. -- CAV Link to Original

An amusing, if lengthy blog post speculates on how renowned physicist Richard Feynman might have reacted to a popular job interview question. The renowned physicist concludes his interview with the following: Then why would you ask an interview question that tests my willingness to abandon industry-standard, well-established techniques that use common electrician's tools to determine continuity of a portion of an electrical system? And why is the solution you were clearly driving me towards one which takes advantage of an undocumented and unreliable epiphenomenon? Does your team usually write code whose correctness relies upon undocumented and unreliable correlations, correlations whose magnitudes can vary widely as a result of implementation details? One senses that he won't get the job. I have to admit that I have felt clever about coming up with the "correct" answer to that question and others like it in the past. I will also concede that the question might be useful in determining how well someone can think, armed with common assumptions. But the implicit question is very good: Why not look for more from a potential collaborator or hire? The extra effort will almost certainly be worth it. -- CAV Link to Original

Two columnists offer deservedly scathing assessments of Barack Obama's foreign policy "success" with Iran. Brett Stephens, countinghimself among the President's "inevitable" critics, sums up his assessment of the "deal" as follows: So let me rephrase the president's question: Is targeted military action against Iran's nuclear facilities -- with all the unforeseen consequences that might entail -- a better option than a grimly foreseeable future of a nuclear Iran, threatening its neighbors, and a proliferated Middle East, threatening the world? Thomas Sowell makes a similar argument and draws further on the parallels of this "agreement" with that between Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler before World War II: Comparing Obama to Chamberlain is unfair -- to Chamberlain. There is no question that the British prime minister loved his country and pursued its best interests as he saw it. He was not a "citizen of the world," or worse. Chamberlain was building up his country's military forces, not tearing them down, as Barack Obama has been doing with American military forces. It is interesting that, as Sowell notes, Iran publicly disputes the very nature of the "preliminary introduction to the beginning of a tentative framework for a possible hope of an eventual agreement": Will Iran's thick-headedness prevent even Obama from being able to pretend he has triumphed? I hope so, for neither current public opinion nor the "opposition" party seem to stand in his way. -- CAV Link to Original

I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for calls for getting the government out of education, but a story on "The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much", appearing as it does in the New York Times, may be a step in the right direction. Law professor Paul F. Campos, author of Don't Go to Law School (Unless), directly challenges the conventional "wisdom" that tuition increases are due to spending cuts on higher education. For one thing, there have been no cuts: In fact, public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s. Such spending has increased at a much faster rate than government spending in general. For example, the military's budget is about 1.8 times higher today than it was in 1960, while legislative appropriations to higher education are more than 10 times higher. In other words, far from being caused by funding cuts, the astonishing rise in college tuition correlates closely with a huge increase in public subsidies for higher education. If over the past three decades car prices had gone up as fast as tuition, the average new car would cost more than $80,000. Campos even goes on to show that, despite a larger percentage of the population attending college, these funding increases have resulted in more spending per student than during the 1960s. Campos furthermore tells the readership of the Times what many non-leftists have known or suspected for a long time: A metastasizing college bureaucracy has been eating up all the extra money. As regulars here will know, facts alone, however broadly disseminated, will not be sufficient for our culture or politics become more self-reliant or capitalistic. I can see calls for price controls or an outright government takeover of higher education (as if we don't have enough central "planning" as it is) much more easily. But at least even those on the left are having to admit that dumping more and more money into education is not necessarily a good idea. -- CAV Link to Original

As Frank Costanza might put it, "I got good news and bad news. And they're both the same": New Jersey has just made it legal for Tesla Motors to sell directly to individuals statewide. The bad news, which greatly outweighs the good, is that this move is in no way a lessening of the state's regulatory stranglehold on the automobile industry: With Gov. Christie's action today, Tesla can turn its existing two New Jersey facilities into full-fledged Stores and open two additional stores. The bill requires Tesla to also open at least one dedicated service center in the state. Got that? Tesla won't be selling directly to customers by right, but by permission. Notice the limited number of stores and the requirement that the company run a repair shop. Tesla left the adjective "Pyrrhic" out of its tweet announcing this decision. Anyone interested in buying any particular car ought to be able to purchase it from whomever he wants, so long as that person owns the car. It is wrong for the state to interfere in such a transaction, period. And shame on Governor Christie for signing this bill. He plainly has no idea what a free market entails. The fact that he is also pandering to climate change hysteria merely adds insult to injury. -- CAV Updates Today: Corrected wording of one sentence and deleted another.. Link to Original

A former contributor to the programming Q&A site, Stack Overflow, explainswhy he no longer participates in the "community" there. He summarizes his reasoning as follows: There are a number of reasons why I stopped contributing to StackOverflow. I am disquieted by its poor pedagogical value, I think its scoring system is fundamentally broken and rewards the wrong things, and I think its community lacks maturity even while it becomes more and more pointlessly authoritarian. So what would I recommend as an alternative? How about learning? You know, that thing that puts information in your head that you can apply later at need. Use Google. Use Wikipedia (if you must). Use RosettaCodefor code examples. (Contribute there too!) Engage with other users of the tools you use in the form of user groups, mailing lists, web forums, etc. Learn foundational principles instead of answers to immediate questions. Michael Richter's piece both reminds me of why I have always limited my participation in online discussion groups, and summarizes some of the things I have observed in such groups over the past couple of decades of using the Internet. His "recipe that all such 'community-driven' approaches almost, but not quite, invariably follow" particularly reminds me of the latter. In fact, I think it, along with the observation that the site's points system is flawed, might go a long way in explaining why so many online communities fail. Recall the glib Internet-age maxim that "many minds are better than one". This turns out to be false unless these minds think independently. Schemes like the Stack Overflow points system are imperfect attempts to harness such minds but, because there is no shortcut when judging the talent or integrityof others, they end up falling short. Those who yearn for prestige learn how to game the gamification system, so to speak. And then, because small minds need to control people to gain an illusion of efficacy, they start wielding power over others. When this happens, the crowd is less like a meeting of independent minds and more like a mob. The forum suffers as a result. Some of the alternatives Richter suggests arguably would suffer some of the same pitfalls he notes at Stack Overflow, but I don't take this as being necessarily a reason not to avail myself of them (any more than I would completely avoid Stack Overflow, which has helped me on occasion). Rather, as at any other time one considers advice from others, one must be aware of the limits of his knowledge and seek out more than one answer, particularly when his question is about an area he knows little about. This is no substitute for learning more for oneself, but it can prevent one from falling for bad advice or failing to get good advice. One acquires real knowledge by means of differentiation and integration. But when one must consult others, one's best protection lies in making sure they are as independent of one another as possible, at least until one is better-equipped to judge the advice itself or, better yet, no longer needs it at all. -- CAV Link to Original

Thomas Sowell, commentingon a recent editorial alleging that conservatives like to "trash" the humanities, offers the following rebuttal: [Leftist] professors have trashed the liberal arts, by converting so many liberal arts courses into indoctrination centers for left-wing causes and fads, instead of courses where students learn how to weigh conflicting views of the world for themselves. Now a professor of English, one of the most fad-ridden of the liberal arts today, blames conservative critics for the low esteem in which liberal arts are held. This reminds me of numerous similar comments made by Ayn Rand on that score decades ago, such as this one: The disintegration of philosophy in the nineteenth century and its collapse in the twentieth have led to a similar, though much slower and less obvious, process in the course of modern science. Today's frantic development in the field of technology has a quality reminiscent of the days preceding the economic crash of 1929: riding on the momentum of the past, on the unacknowledged remnants of an Aristotelian epistemology, it is a hectic, feverish expansion, heedless of the fact that its theoretical account is long since overdrawn -- that in the field of scientific theory, unable to integrate or interpret their own data, scientists are abetting the resurgence of a primitive mysticism. In the humanities, however, the crash is past, the depression has set in, and the collapse of science is all but complete. The clearest evidence of it may be seen in such comparatively young sciences as psychology and political economy... [bold added] That noted, Rand was clear that ordinary Americans -- her "man on the street" -- felt an understandable, but mistaken contempt for philosophy and the humanities as such, based on a passing familiarity with their twisted, modern versions. Rand was always careful to note the value of these fields, as she did with the title of her famous West Point address, "Philosophy: Who Needs It". Not all conservatives seem to hold this realization, and some even seem eager to cash in on the disaffection. Sowell is not among them, but I think there is room for him to criticize some of his conservative brethren. -- CAV Link to Original

Anyone who thinks that policemen are the only target of the thugs unleashed nationwide by communist-led activists and their media apparatchiks in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting is wrong. Video of a brutal attack on the St. Louis MetroLink shows an adult male (pictured) -- This is no man. -- using the incident as an excuse to attack someone who refused to let him use his cell phone. It is law and order, and the reasonable expectation of being free to mind one's own business, that are the real targets. (Emboldened criminals and their abettors are just useful idiots.) According to the 43-year-old victim, a man in his early 20's asked to use his cell phone. When the victim declined to let the suspect use his cell phone, the suspect sat next to him and asked what he thought about the "Mike Brown situation." When the victim responded that he had not thought much about it, the suspect began punching him in the face, according to the police report. "I think it was disgusting that no one [helped]," the victim said. "People were sort of laughing and smiling about it. No one offered to help and no one attempted to call 911." A popular slogan among the protesters and their sympathizers is "Black lives matter." The media made sure (first link above) that Michael Brown's actual moral character received little attention, so let's set that aside for the sake of argument. If lives, black or otherwise, matter, the things that make them possible matter. These things include property rights, the ability to sit on a train without fear of being attacked, law and order, and respect for other human beings as individuals. The attacker, his immediate accomplices, and the cowards who smiled and laughed -- all seem, by their actions, to think that none of those things is important. It's easy to say, "Black lives matter," but understanding what that really means and then acting like it takes effort. There is a strong case for police and municipal government reform, but our society's problems don't stop there. Nor are government officials the only people who must be held accountable for their actions. I think the declarations of open season on policemen (vice actual reform) and the canonization of Michael Brown are manifestations of a soft bigotry of low expectations or crude pandering. The problems these exacerbate are not confined to rough parts of town or to members of one race. Until we all start insisting on civilized behavior from each other and doing what we can to promote law and order, we will continue our descent into barbarism. -- CAV Link to Original

They Won't Stop ObamaCare This Time, Either I agree with Barton Hinkle that the Supreme Court "should have killed Obamacare when it had the chance", when it ruled on the constitutionality of the individual mandate. That said, I agree with his analysis of the current challenge to the legality of some of the premium subsidies. Among other things: [T]here is also good evidence to support the other view. For instance: Another section of the law limits individual eligibility to buy insurance to those who "reside ... in the State that established the Exchange." If that excludes federal exchanges, then nobody will ever be eligible to buy insurance on a federal exchange. In that case, why did Congress provide for such exchanges at all? Did Congress mean something else -- or was this a another drafting error? And if this was a drafting error, then what does that say about the plaintiffs' contention that the wording of the five-word phrase is intentional? Whatever the outcome of this case, wishful thinking will prove no substitute for principled, disciplined opposition to this improper law. Weekend Reading "Seeing yourself objectively, and with detachment is an effective method for resolving whatever conflicts or issues you may face." -- Michael Hurd, in "Laugh Yourself Well" at The Delaware Wave "My experience has shown that alcoholics tend to take this misguided philosophy [of altruism] to heart." -- Michael Hurd, in "Why Not to Call an Alcoholic 'Selfish'" at The Delaware Coast Press My Two Cents Upon reading Michael Hurd's column on the mental health benefits of humor, I sound myself thinking, "Oh, yeah! That makes lots of sense." The point about humor coming from and helping maintain the kind of perspective that mental health requires seems obvious after reading that piece. Literary Alchemy At Futility Closet is a satirical list of terms that could, "like machinery in factories", according to C. L. Pitt, turn a Gothic romance into a sentimental novel and vice versa. My favorite word substitution: the "assassins" in Gothic novels could be replaced by "telling glances". -- CAV Link to Original

Presidential hopeful Marco Rubio mistitles a recent Fox News op-ed. "My Three Part Plan for the Post-ObamaCare Era" might sound good to those who merely oppose the so-called Affordable Care Act, but it will disappoint anyone who realizes that government meddling in any part of the economy is incompatible with freedom and prosperity (i.e., someone who supports free individuals and free markets): Third, we must save Medicare and Medicaid by placing them on fiscally sustainable paths. Without reforms, these programs will eventually cease to be available for those that need them. I believe we must move Medicaid into a per-capita cap system, preserving funding for Medicaid's unique populations while freeing states from Washington mandates. Medicare, meanwhile, should be transitioned into a premium support system, empowering seniors with choice and market competition, just like Medicare Advantage and Part D already do. This part of Rubio's plan may look like an aberration, but it follows a proposal to mix needed loosening of government control of insurance companies with what he calls "federally-supported, actuarially-sound high risk pools". Controls breed controls as the precedent for government intervention leads to calls for more of the same to "correct" for market distortions caused by earlier "corrections" of the market. That's how we got the ACA in the first place and staying that course can only rid us of it in name or saddle us with something even worse. This reminds me of something I said about Paul Ryan a few years back: [Paul] Ryan, who imagines that such programs as Social Security and Medicaid can be " reformed," ... is no capitalist. (Otherwise, he'd be clear that the best way to "encourage" competition is for the government to stop manipulating the economy altogether, and would speak of phasing out instead of reforming entitlement programs.) We can just about swap the names out, here. Perhaps Senator Rubio could have gone with, "My Plan to Tee Up My Democratic Successor", but I'm open to other suggestions. -- CAV Link to Original

Dick Morris sizes up possible rivals to Jeb Bush for the 2016 Republican nomination. The good news is that Bush seems much weaker than you'd think from media coverage. The bad news is who might emerge from the rest of the current list: Until he announced his candidacy at Liberty University, I had some cautious optimism about Cruz -- not that that would have lasted long. Of the rest, I can't support Carson and am leery of Rubio. I might be able to offer qualified support for Walker. It may be too late -- or too early yet -- for a decent, secular, limited-government candidate to emerge from the Republican Party. I haven't abandoned hope altogether for a not-completely-unacceptable alternative to emerge -- and I could revise my estimate of Cruz, Rubio, or Walker with more information -- but so far, I expect to abstain from voting for President yet again. -- CAV Link to Original

When Rahm Emanuel is the "conservative" candidate in an election, as he will be in Chicago's mayoral run-off in April, one is tempted to say, "that says it all", but one should resist the urge. It is instructive to understand how that state of affairs could arise. For that, I refer my readers to a snippy, insulting Salon column by a leftist about "Why the Left Hates This Man". Here's an aliquot of the poison: Garcia, on the other hand, is a local pol with a ton of experience in the trenches who is promising to do crazy things like stop closing schools and recklessly raid pension funds, both of which are among Rahm Emanuel's big accomplishments (along with taking lots of money from Republican donors). Historian Rick Perlstein, a Chicago local, has been chronicling this election and i n this piece for In These Times he lays out the case for Garcia's experience and political know-how. He also notes that the Emanuel campaign along with his various Republican spokesmen have been doing what you'd expect: issuing thinly veiled attacks on Garcia as lacking "responsibility" if you know what they mean. [link in original, format edits] I have no illusions about Rahm Emmanuel. His budget cuts represent no initial salvo in the battle to return America to proper, limited government: As far as I can tell, they might help Chicago spend money it doesn't have a little bit longer. But that's what passes for "fiscal responsibility" these days: A perfunctory acknowledgment that money has to come from somewhere. For this, Rahm is called a "racist" and the term "responsibility" is labeled racist code. The will of the people isn't just for politicians to acknowledge, it supersedes reality itself, and Emanuel is a meany for withholding his magic wand from all those schools he spitefully closed. The real reason the government hasn't made us all rich, and why only a relative few have lots of money is because a few people who must be defeated are withholding it. This is an example of a commonly-held metaphysical position, Primacy of Consciousness. The petulance -- and political "leanings" -- flow directly from it, and yet I share Thomas Sowell's exasperation: It is staggering that there are sane adults who can vote for someone ... as if they are in school, just voting for "most popular boy" or "most popular girl" -- or, worse yet, voting for someone who will give them free stuff. It beggars belief, and this bloc of voters, most of them unreachable by rational persuasion, will pose an electoral obstacle for the foreseeable future. They will hear of no limits on what their whims say the government ought to be handing out to them. To them, reality isn't just optional, as Sowell once titled a book: It's racist, if we are to judge by the epithet their leaders choose to hurl at anyone who hints that there is no such thing as a free lunch. -- CAV Link to Original

In an essay titled "The Rise and Fall of the Living Fossil", Ferris Jabr argues that, "The idea that some species are relics that have stopped evolving is finally going extinct." Jabr focuses on the crocodile for most of the piece, noting some of the errors that have resulted from the idea: Intrigued by this puzzle, a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Washington named Jamie Oaks began collecting DNA samples from all 23 living crocodilian species, comparing sections of the genome where mutations were most likely to have appeared. Although the fossil record had confirmed that ancient crocodilians were more diverse than previously realized, it also demonstrated that, on the whole, crocodilians were not particularly swift evolvers compared to mammals and other vertebrates. Even accounting for this slower-than-average evolution, Oaks did not find nearly as many differences between the modern crocodilian genomes as one would expect had those species diverged all the way back in the Cretaceous. He concluded that modern crocodilian species split from their last common ancestor between 8 and 13 million years ago, not long before ancient hominins split from their last common ancestor with chimpanzees. The living fossil theory of crocodiles had overestimated their evolutionary age by about a factor of 10. Jabr's piece relays fascinating details as to how this idea was shown to be false in the case of crocodiles, and it provides interesting historical background on both how the idea arose from Darwin's "fanciful" phrase and how it and other notions shape popular conceptions of evolution. -- CAV Link to Original

Writing at Time, basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar pretty well nails what is wrong with the well-intentioned "Race Together" campaign of Starbucks: The problem with Howard Schultz’s Race Together program is that he’s picked the wrong venue with the wrong audience using the wrong spokespersons. Most of the customers at Starbucks probably don’t want to have their political awareness challenged by the person foaming their coffee. Minds are more likely to be changed by someone with some form of expertise in the subject, which baristas generally don’t have. Those who do wish to engage in a conversation about something as volatile as race are not open to change, they are either already the choir of believers in equality or are racists looking for an audience. Either way, no change will result from the exchange. In fact, I worry that such conversations could quickly escalate to violence. Add to the list of would-be pugilists leftists in search of an audience. The few times I have been accosted at Starbucks have invariably been initiated by people I later observed annoying other customers with one-sided "conversations". For these "activists" (read: bullies) as well, the last thing on their minds is an honest pursuit of the truth. Somehow having a good knack for recognizing such individuals, I have become adept over the years at ending such encounters quickly -- or at least without ceding the moral high ground. Still, I don't need the staff encouraging such behavior. That said, while there are a few things Abdul-Jabbar says that I disagree with, I found his goodwill and general sense of optimism refreshing. May Starbucks VP Corey duBrowa read it! He doubtlessly needs a lift. -- CAV Link to Original

Not too long ago, I stumbled across a way to screen new contacts for seriousness and initiative via email. The trick: I identify leaders by giving people assignments. Here's how it works. I'm going to use a really simple example. Recognize that the range of inbound requests are all over the place, from a wide range of people, with very different degrees of experience. The initial interactions can be complex and my assignments vary dramatically, but with a goal of intersecting (a) what the person is asking for and ( a result that will be interesting to me in some way. Brad Field's example illustrates how this works quite well. In fact, his example was so clear that it helped me realize that a way I'd once come up with to diplomatically turn down potential clients was basically the same thing. And that realization helped me see that my method could, conversely, help me identify good clients. Perhaps I would have figured this out sooner or later, but thanks to Fields's advice, I know this now. -- CAV Link to Original

There is quite a bit of food for thought for anyone eager to defend the Ferguson Police Department (or at least the police generally) from its leftist detractors over at Red State. The author reports being appalled at several practices he learned about from the FPD's own records, which he presumed would be that part of the DOJ report most favorable to the FPD. Here's an example: Perhaps the most damning portion of the DOJ report is the beginning, which lays out in painstaking detail (consisting entirely of information pulled from the City of Ferguson's records) that the FPD's primary purpose in Ferguson was to generate revenue for the city's budget. The report contains a shocking volume of documentary evidence, including emails, that Ferguson's police supervisors, including the City Manager, repeatedly hounded Ferguson officers to increase their ticket fines without regard to whether the tickets they were writing were justified. While police departments across the country like to repeatedly claim that they do not have "ticket quotas," and that they are solely interested in public safety, this report gives the lie to that claim, at least in Ferguson. The internal emails collected during this investigation show a pattern of behavior that most Americans have long suspected exists behind closed doors in many police departments: discipline issued for failing to write enough tickets, threatening emails to cops who are under performing in writing tickets, and prominent "score sheets" posted showing who top "performers" are. One of the author's points -- with which I agree -- is that the use of the police as tax collectors -- is improper, whether the FPD is better, worse, or about the same as other police departments across the country. But there is much more of concern, as one can see even by skimming this lengthy post. In the same vein, part of the conclusion bears repeating here: I am not going to sugar coat this or engage in a lot of pointless throat clearing here -- the report, taken as a whole, even in terms of material collected exclusively from FPD documents, is incredibly damning of police and municipal court practices in Ferguson. Anyone who can read the actual report itself and be comfortable with the fact that citizens of an American city live under such a regime is frankly not someone who is ideologically aligned with me in any meaningful way. The practices of the FPD and Municipal Court are destructive to freedom and in blatant violation of our constitutional rights, and they depend for sufferance on the fact that most people are not willing (or, in the case of most of Ferguson's residents, able) to mount an expensive legal fight for relatively trivial amounts of money such as are involved in a traffic ticket. Evidence of the Ferguson PD's knowledge of their blatantly unconstitutional practices (especially with respect to the habitual issuance of arrest warrants for missing a payment) is shown in the report by the way that the Municipal Court regularly drops these warrants as soon as a defendant appears with counsel. I am singularly unimpressed with the argument that the report should be dismissed because it is the product of the Holder DOJ's dissatisfaction at the resolution of the Michael Brown case. The implicit admission in such an argument is that many police departments are worse; if so, the proper response is not to excuse the Ferguson PD but rather to acknowledge that there are, in fact, systemic problems that exist on a widespread basis that should also be solved. These problems, largely, have their root in the first matter highlighted above -- that many municipal police departments face increasing and unrelenting pressure from city hall to fill increasingly wide gaps in revenue with money from fines and citations. Even a well-intentioned police officer who respects freedom, the citizenry, and vulnerable populations can succumb to temptation when his paycheck and his ability to feed his family is put on the line. And in those cases, where legitimate offenses do not occur, he will be sorely tempted to create them, and to create them among the portion of the populace that is least likely to complain and least likely to be believed when they do complain: non-wealthy black citizens. Until we, as a people, are willing to understand and address the problem, it will never get better. Until we are willing to hold our municipal officials accountable for using the police force to suck money out of people's pockets instead of legitimately protecting the public safety, the problem will get worse. But most importantly, until and unless we are able to emotionally detach ourselves from the horrible Michael Brown situation and see that what has been exposed, even according to the (probably whitewashed) FPD records, is a travesty, there is no hope for improvement. [bold in original] Long ago, an old friend of mine observed that practices such as those discussed at Red State, in addition to violating individual rights, also have the cultural impact of causing an erosion of respect for rule of law. Conservatives and others who are aghast at the blatant anti-police motivation of many on the left must not make the same offense of reacting as if jerking their knees. A true defense of the police must include an insistence on reform when it is clearly called for. -- CAV P.S. I thank reader Steve D. for drawing my attention to this post. Link to Original

A 2005 article on "The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security" isn't merely a treasure trove of still-good (and largely unimplemented) computer security advice, it offers a cornucopia of insights into other, more general, situations. I'll take the risk of sounding self-congratulatory by noting, the following example, of how wise late adoption of new technology can be: IT executives seem to break down into two categories: the "early adopters" and the "pause and thinkers." Over the course of my career, I've noticed that dramatically fewer of the "early adopters" build successful, secure, mission-critical systems. This is because they somehow believe that "Action is Better Than Inaction" - i.e.: if there's a new whizzbang, it's better to install it right now than to wait, think about it, watch what happens to the other early adopters, and then deploy the technology once it's fully sorted-out and has had its first generation of experienced users. I know one senior IT executive - one of the "pause and thinkers" whose plan for doing a wireless roll-out for their corporate network was "wait 2 years and hire a guy who did a successful wireless deployment for a company larger than us." Not only will the technology be more sorted-out by then, it'll be much, much cheaper. What an utterly brilliant strategy! In the same vein, it was instructive, not to mention entertaining, to see how one man used a conversation over a $200 dinner at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse to save over four hundred thousand dollars on a technology his company was contemplating. -- CAV Link to Original

Writingfor the New York Post, John R. Lott, disputes recent claims by Attorney General Eric Holder that a recent Justice Department report proves racism in the Ferguson, Missouri, police department. For example, Lott, who is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and a former chief economist for the United States Sentencing Commission, considers the report's findings regarding traffic stops: "Data collected by the Ferguson Police Department from 2012 to 2014 shows that African-Americans account for 85 percent of vehicle stops, 90 percent of citations, and 93 percent of arrests made by FPD officers, despite comprising only 67 percent of Ferguson's population." Those statistics don't prove racism, because blacks don't commit traffic offenses at the same rate as other population groups. The Bureau of Justice Statistics' 2011 Police-Public Contact Survey indicates that, nationwide, blacks were 31 percent more likely than whites to be pulled over for a traffic stop. Ferguson is a black-majority town. If its blacks were pulled over at the same rate as blacks nationally, they'd account for 87.5 percent of traffic stops. In other words, the numbers actually suggest that Ferguson police may be slightly less likely to pull over black drivers than are their national counterparts. They certainly don't show that Ferguson is a hotbed of racism. Critics may assert that that "31 percent more likely" figure simply shows that racism is endemic to police forces nationwide. Hmm: The survey also reveals that men are 42 percent more likely than women to be pulled over for traffic stops. Should we conclude that police are biased against men, or that men drive more recklessly? In fact, blacks die in car accidents at a rate about twice their share of car owners. That last sentence speaks volumes to me. Not only, as Lott puts it, don't "[d]ifferences ... necessarily imply racism", but the mere protestation that one is concerned with justice or racial equality does not, to be generous, necessarily guarantee that one's actions will achieve either. Not that it's the government's job to save us from ourselves, but this administration frequently acts on that premise. Given that context, isn't it interesting that this administration champions the misinterpretation of one statistic, traffic citations -- while remaining oblivious or indifferent to another, deaths from car accidents? -- CAV Link to Original

Adam Fridman of Inc. notes the value of failing faster en route to success, and then offers five ways of doing so. One of these he calls "Hunt the Negative": Your friends, family and support network will lie to you. They will tell you how great everything is and how well things are going--feedback which can prolong your demise. Don't listen. Go seek out the negative opinion. Find people who will be critical of what you're doing and listen to what they have to say. Making sure you are getting more than reinforcement needn't be limited to a social exercise, nor must it wait until you have started working towards some goal. It can start by careful research, such as by seeking out arguments and opinions different than your own, and it can include such mental exercises as "steelmanning". Don't settle for feeling clever or virtuous: Test those assumptions before they test themselves against reality, as they ultimately will. Cocoons are for developing insects, not human minds. -- CAV Link to Original

Writing for the Opinionator, a blog for the New York Times, philosopher Justin McBrayer notes(HT: HBL) and comments on a curious feature of the Common Core Curriculum mandated in government schools: It drums the false notion into children's skulls that there are no moral facts. After laying out his evidence for the claim, McBrayer considers some of the consequences of this kind of indoctrination: The inconsistency in this curriculum is obvious. For example, at the outset of the school year, my son brought home a list of student rights and responsibilities. Had he already read the lesson on fact vs. opinion, he might have noted that the supposed rights of other students were based on no more than opinions. According to the school's curriculum, it certainly wasn't true that his classmates deserved to be treated a particular way -- that would make it a fact. Similarly, it wasn't really true that he had any responsibilities -- that would be to make a value claim a truth. It should not be a surprise that there is rampant cheating on college campuses: If we've taught our students for 12 years that there is no fact of the matter as to whether cheating is wrong, we can't very well blame them for doing so later on. Indeed, in the world beyond grade school, where adults must exercise their moral knowledge and reasoning to conduct themselves in the society, the stakes are greater. There, consistency demands that we acknowledge the existence of moral facts. If it's not true that it's wrong to murder a cartoonist with whom one disagrees, then how can we be outraged? If there are no truths about what is good or valuable or right, how can we prosecute people for crimes against humanity? If it's not true that all humans are created equal, then why vote for any political system that doesn't benefit you over others? [links in original] As noted at HBL, McBrayer does not comment on how one could learn a moral truth, but his piece remains a loud wake-up call and a clear demonstration of the folly of central "planners" -- who are human beings quite capable of error -- determining what children should be learning on a national scale. -- CAV Link to Original