Shannon Love

Three Times is Slavery and Treason

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Back when I did computer tech support, we had a rule of thumb for evaluating the significance of reports of unusual and previously unreported failures .

  • One report of a failure is a fluke.
  • Two reports of a failure is a coincidence. It might just be two users making the same error.
  • Three reports indicates a pattern of failure that arises from the hardware or software itself.

This rule of thumb evolved after observing the failures of millions of computers. We learned that three separate computers would only suffer the same failure if the failure arose from a common source in the computers themselves. Just three machines out of millions told us we most likely had a systemic problem.

This brings me to the Acorn child prostitution scandal.

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I Want to Be Like Norm

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This panel below is from a the web comic “Escape From Terra”.  It’s a pretty good hard science fiction story which examines how a libertarian/anarchist society might function in space. The centeral conflict revolves around those in space trying to keep their freedoms in the face of ever-present encroachment from the statist world-government of Earth (it’s modelled on the EU).

In the story, two pilots deliver a chunk of a comet to a self-made billionaire who is hiding out on his own little artificial habitat. The billionaire has to hide because he keeps creating disruptive technologies that empower ordinary people to live their lives independently of the state, and the government doesn’t like that — to the point it wants to see him dead.

In this panel, the billionaire explains his motivations:

[Click for full size]

disppage2

[Source]

Every geek in the world should strive to emulate the late Norman Borlaug. Geeks and business people have done more good for the world than all the politicians and wannabe-politicians combined.

In 1969, the people who changed the world for the better weren’t left-wing, pro-communist-victory “activists” but the engineers and scientists who landed men on the moon and fired up the first two nodes of the Internet. People who view “progress” in terms of politics first and foremost have done far more harm than good. Yet, as the comic points out, we know their names while the names of those who made our lives so much better are erased from common history .

People in the developed world (and increasingly the rest of the world as well) have lives of physical comfort, social equality and political freedom mostly because of the efforts of geeks like Borlaug who use knowledge and hard work to turn dirt and water into happiness.

When artists whip out posters of people like Borloug instead of the glorious leader du jour, we will know we have become a truly wise civilization.

An Important Qualifier

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Via Instapundit comes a major  (albeit British) media report that the Tea Party protest in Washington turnout could be as high as two million.

As impressive as that no doubt upper-limit estimate is, I think that the raw number leaves out an important qualifier.  To be    truly accurate, the report should say:

Two million people with jobs…

Getting hundreds of thousands of kids, the professionally unemployed  and government workers to show up isn’t that hard (especially if someone buys the bus tickets). Getting two million middle-class, middle-aged people with jobs, careers, children and businesses is way, way more impressive.

We can safely assume that for every individual who made it to the protest that there are dozens of people whose grown-up obligations prevented them from attending.

That thought should keep Obama and Pelosi up at night.

[update (2009-9-13 10:17pm): I should point out that I don’t think anyone really believes that two million people showed up in Washington. One percent of the entire U.S. population is 3 million people so two millions gets you two thirds of the way to one percent of the entire population. I don’t think there is a city in world that could handle that big an influx of people. Washington D.C. itself only has a population for 590,000 so having nearly four times the population of the city show up is really not credible no matter what the senior Democratic leadership thought. On the other hand, having hundreds of thousands of people, most who have never protested before, show up is significant and puts the tea party in the big leagues no matter how you cut it.]

[update (2009-9-13 6:53pm): For unknown reasons, all comments by Hippeprof were deleted from the thread below. This issue is being investigated and we will try to recover the comments. If anyone else saw their comments disappear please email me at the link to the upper right.]

[update (2009-9-13 8:02pm): 20 comments were found to have been removed by the spam filter. We have restored them and I will be cleaning up duplicates and removing the “hey, what happened to my comments?” post in order to keep the thread clean.]

[update (2009-9-12-10:16): The technical problems have resurfaced. Your posts may not show properly. We may have to freeze the comments. If you have an important point to make  you can email at the link to the upper right and I will add your comment to thread manually as time permits.]

Health Care and the Crypto-Marxist Model

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From the Presidents latest health care policy speech:

Despite all this, the insurance companies and their allies don’t like this idea. They argue that these private companies can’t fairly compete with the government. And they’d be right if taxpayers were subsidizing this public insurance option. But they won’t be. I’ve insisted that like any private insurance company, the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects. But by avoiding some of the overhead that gets eaten up at private companies by profits and excessive administrative costs and executive salaries, it could provide a good deal for consumers, and would also keep pressure on private insurers to keep their policies affordable and treat their customers better, the same way public colleges and universities provide additional choice and competition to students without in any way inhibiting a vibrant system of private colleges and universities.

There’s a lot that’s revealed in this paragraph about how Obama views the world. Most importantly, I think his statement about profits being inefficient reveals his crypto-Marxist model of economics.

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Because It’s the Politicians’ Money

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Writing on Obama’s claim he would pay for politically-managed health care by eliminating waste, fraud and abuse, Megan McArdle says:

Ah, our old friends, waste, fraud, and abuse, the bane of politicians everywhere.   Based on the number of politicians I have heard during my adult lifetime promising to generate massive savings from cutting waste, fraud, and abuse, I estimate that this diabolical trio accounts for approximately 113% of all Federal spending.   The percentage may be even higher at the state and local levels.

I learned what a scam this was back in my wayward leftist youth when I observed that rightwing politicians loved to claim they would pay for tax cuts, without reducing benefits, by  eliminating waste, fraud and abuse.

Of course they never did, and as I grew older I realized that no one ever believed that politicians could find savings of 10%+ in massive government programs as quickly as they could cut taxes. Instead, the “eliminating waste, fraud and abuse” claim served as a ritualistic fig leaf so that politicians wouldn’t have to answer the question of where the real money was coming from.

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