Linus promotes competence, attacked for it by Social Justice Warriors

The Linux community needs to kick out Linus Torvalds.
— Shanley (@shanley) January 15, 2015

 This is in response to a Q&A session in New Zealand where Linus made it very clear that competence and good code are most important for him and everything else is just an also ran when it comes to the Linux kernel. For him, diversity didn't rate at all. In the inevitable partial walkbalk followup, Linus tosses more salt in SJW wounds by raising the importance of diversity along other poles. The importance of genital equipment to programming continues to elude him.

At least @shanley gets one thing right. When you're launching an attack on the Internet, attack someone bigger and more important than you.

9/11 is not for muslim whining

A 9/11 muslim whine fest offended me today. It seems that Islam has an image problem in the US. Boo hoo. Today was not the day to publish that. It's tone deaf and likely to make american opinion of muslims worse. It's sort of a japanese journalist like picking December 7th to discuss anti-japanese sentiment, a problem that's only ever potentially there because the japanese are generally not dumb enough to do such a thing. 

In any case, if you want to measure hate over time, you're best bet isn't surveys but crime reports. Anti-religious hate crimes have been broken out and reported for years and we have good data for 1996-2012. Here are the trend lines for all the sub-groups. 

Hate is up for catholic, atheist, and multi-religious categories. Everybody else is flat to down. As always, anti-jewish hate crimes predominate the numbers but they've got the best trend line of the bunch so maybe in a few decades the jews won't be number one anymore. I'm sure they're looking forward to it. 

The muslim trend line is generally flat except for a 9/11 related, one year bump (481 incidents). Most of that went away but the baseline moved up from around 30 incidents a year to perhaps 140 give or take with arguably a slight down trend between 2002 and 2012. This is not the picture of growing anti-muslim persecution the article hints at with its talk of a recent bias crime spike. 

9/11 is not the time for a story hook of anti-muslim bias that isn't even accurate. 

I need a license for what?

The Town of Munster in Lake county, Indiana has a bit of a training issue on how they handle their solicitation licensing. I had heard that there was a local anti-solicitation ordinance and was driving by town hall anyway so I stopped by to figure out what was going on. The ordinance itself is pretty unobjectionable. In Munster if you're going to be asking for money, you need to get a background check and let the town know what you're doing and you're limited to going to the front door. You're not allowed to go wandering around private property.

I was directed to an office and asked if starting conversations and talking to people door to door would need notice and was informed that not only that it needed notice but that I needed to pay a fee as well. The explanation was vague and unsatisfying but they were at least savvy enough to suggest I look up the law on the town website as I had 1st amendment concerns. I stopped off at the police department and they called what I was doing a gray area and that in case of complaints (which they apparently get every day), I would get a warning to stop and then a citation for a few hundred dollars.

In the end, reading the ordinance made it clear that there was no need to apply for one. The town fathers hadn't flipped their lids and violated the Constitution. The higher ups knew what they were doing. They just aren't training their front line people to be clear about what's going on and their printed materials lack the text of the law so you have to do just a bit of digging. I wonder how many people just forked over the license fee?

Multiplying fishes

We got 4.5 times the expected Pacific salmon run this year due to one weird trick. We (and by we I mean an eco entrepreneur named Russ George and a BC indian tribe, the Haida) strategically distributed 120 tons of iron sulfate in the Pacific and created an ocean paradise for the salmon to feed on. 12 men and one boat worked in 2012 to set up that feeding ground to reduce the traditional levels of starvation among migratory fish going out into the resource poor Pacific Ocean. Open-sea mariculture has been hemmed in by unfortunate treaty language that fails to distinguish between pollution and setting out fish food. The 2012 experiment results are in.

The SE Alaska Pink catch in the fall of 2013 was a stunning 226.3 million fish. This when a high number of 50 million fish were expected. Those extra ocean pasture fed fish came back because their pasture was enjoying the richest plankton blooms ever, thanks to me a[nd] 11 shipmates and our work in the summer of 2012. IT JUST WORKS.

As a side effect of the process, a great deal of carbon dioxide was sequestered as the diatoms that did not get eaten by the fish died a natural death and sank to the bottom.

Environmentalists are beside themselves with fury. They're more interested in establishing a precautionary principle regulatory framework that would have led to many tons fewer fish to feed families across North America this year if not banning the process altogether. Their global campaign made the Haida blink and Mr. George has been fired.

We can't have fish multiplying beyond all reason and solving our global food problems while knocking down CO2 levels. That might reduce the need for environmental NGOs to study the problem.

Don't skip looking up the law

The Pennsylvania special ed student who recording a bullying episode and was threatened with a wiretapping felony charge has been making the rounds. What nobody seems to be mentioning is that what he did was perfectly legal. The school officials, the police, the judge, and even all the hyperventilating commenters all seem to have skipped looking up the law.

Title 18 Section 5704 Subsection 17

Any victim, witness or private detective licensed under the act of August 21, 1953 (P.L.1273, No.361), known as The Private Detective Act of 1953, to intercept the contents of any wire, electronic or oral communication, if that person is under a reasonable suspicion that the intercepted party is committing, about to commit or has committed a crime of violence and there is reason to believe that evidence of the crime of violence may be obtained from the interception.

I'm not a lawyer. I just know how to use Google fairly decently. Bullying is a crime of violence.

The law seems pretty clear. So why did the school officials, the cop, and the judge all fail to do their basic duty? Why aren't we calling them on not enforcing the law?

The only silver lining in this whole mess is that the judge is elected and could get booted for this.

Green Energy Insanity

Normally, the UK pays 50£ per MWhr. But for biofuel electricity they pay 105£ per MWhr. This makes it worthwhile to buy biomass pellets on the world market and North Carolina is happy to oblige. The CO2 emissions of cutting trees down in North Carolina, converting to biomass pellets, shipping them to the UK and burning them there is greater than if they had used domestic coal. The price for biomass pellet burning electricity his higher than wind, higher than solar.

It's all just one more example in a long line that shows that government doesn't know how to calculate a price and should be in the business of price setting as little as possible.

HT: Clayton Cramer

How to make governing harder, Obama style

Out of little olive branches and cooperation on noncontroversial things, trust can grow and we increase the chance of moving the country in a positive direction. The House GOP offered one of those olive branches by allowing a Democratic bill with only one Democrat co-sponsor to get out of committee and pass the House. Introduced on April 9, 2013, the House passed it on July 22, 2013 on a voice vote.

Harry Reid's Senate set fire to  that olive branch by not allowing the measure to come to a vote as part of a general unwillingness to allow House passed legislation to actually become law. President Obama, instead of asking for action on the bill, relieved himself on it by making the bill moot by accomplishing the bill's aims through executive action, saying "In my State of the Union address, I said that I would use my authority to protect more of our pristine federal lands for future generations."

All the Congressmen who spent time on this legislation, let it go through as Democratic legislation, and didn't give it a hard time have a nice little kick in the rear as a payoff. I expect this to generate a similarly arcane payback as the country spirals down the toilet.

Facepalm Government: Beaver Edition

Wild beavers seen for first time in England in hundreds of years; government pondering whether to kill them. Wild beaver reintroduction is a project under development in Devon England. Nobody mentioned this to the beavers who somehow have gotten ahead of the bureaucrats. Everybody is amazed and entranced except for DEFRA which is studying the matter and refused to comment whether the beavers might be removed or destroyed.

You can't even parody these people anymore.

Privileged Jesus

I ran across this image in my +google feed and ended up in a bit of a debate over it. Since comments don't really let me do the subject justice, here it is on my personal blog. 

One one level this is a an anti-GOP joke. I don't care enough about the party to really be bothered by it but the composition mostly bothered me because of the image on the right and just a bit for the one on the left. Now to be clear, this is the kind of thing I think of as a representation of Jesus.

In other words, I've got little invested in the north european localized image on the left side of the first image. I don't have anything against it. It's just not my cup of tea.

But I recognized the image on the right from a Popular Science article and thought at the time it was just poor science pushing forensic anthropology far beyond what it has any rights making scientific claims to. Among other things, the team that made the image started off from the Shroud of Turin, a long haired depiction of Jesus with above average height between 5'7" and 6'1" and turned him into a 5'1" short haired man because that was culturally appropriate for a 1st century semitic man and that was athe average height back then. Because that's what Jesus was all about, being culturally respectful and sporting an average physique. As an artistic call, this is perfectly acceptable. As science, it has zero value and is a misuse of the term. It is an example of scientism, adopting the trappings of science without the scientific method.

Now this scientific Jesus image is showing up as evidence that the GOP is anti-science. The actual message to the religiously educated and somewhat science knowledgeable is that in the name of science, we're going to rule in or out your artistic traditions. That's the sort of thing that incrementally makes it harder  to convince skeptical legislators to fund science. They've got plenty of projects clamoring for public dollars. Without an identifiable fingerprint on any of the decisions, now science will get a few dollars fewer. But hey, they get to make a hostile work environment for religious scientists, and politically alienate the GOP from natural allies in the scientific community so if that's what you care about, that top image is just great.

One thing it's not is scientific or pro-science.

Lobotomy by Bureaucracy

What does St Paul do to its school personnel that they thought putting a sopping wet kid dressed only in a swimsuit outside in sub-zero weather was ok? Is it the union? Is it that it's government work? Do they put chemicals in the water cooler in the teacher's lounge to reduce good judgment? Does it really take a case of frostbite to drive home the point that sometimes the rules have to bend?

The conditions were 5 below zero (-20C) temps with 25 below (-28C) wind chill barefoot, wet, and with just a towel. The kids tried to make a circle around the cold children to cut the wind down and share warmth but it wasn't enough to prevent painful frostbite. The only good news is that there won't be any amputation.

The school says that it's reviewing policy with the fire marshals  and will follow their recommendations. How about this for a recommendation "don't be a moron and endanger the kids for a fire alarm. If it's too cold, get the kids inside another building or a vehicle."

HT: Instapundit

David Brin's asking for it

+David Brin lets fly with both barrels at PJ O'Rourke and the Cato Institute for an amicus brief in the case of Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus. He ends up shooting himself because his own post has reviewable false speech in it that could run afoul of the Ohio law. Were Brin's preferred legal outcome to happen and the court not listen to the emanations from that "intellectual brothel" over at Cato, his own political discourse would be endangered. The ad hominem in Brin's post flies thick and fast.

Advertising a Tax on Stupid

I've seen a few bitcoin ponzi schemes advertised before but I've never seen something as brazen as this. "We want to be clear: This is a Ponzi Scheme - This means that the returns on your investments come from other investors."

Sometimes freedom is the freedom to be a scummy jerk who cons people into investing in a ponzi scheme and convincing them to carry the con forward so they're one of the few lucky winners instead of the many unlucky losers.

Climate Change Public Policy

Climate change as policy is a chain of claims that depends on all of them to be true to justify the public policies that warmists like Al Gore have been advocating. If the chain breaks down along the way, there is no justification for proceeding along that policy course. People seem to forget that so here's a list of all the things that must be true for the green policies being advocated to make any sense whatsoever.

Climate Science:

1. Anthropogenic (man released) CO2 is a major component of climate warming

2. CO2 sensitivity must be high enough

3. CO2 effects must not dampen out too fast (i.e. logarithmic instead of exponential curve for CO2 effect)

4. The net of atmospheric feedback effects must be durably overcome by CO2

Economics:

5. Anthropogenic warming effects must be more expensive to adjust to than to prevent. 

6. The discount rate for time preferences between now and 2100 must not exceed a certain value

7. Investment now in economic growth will not yield so much value that it's a superior use of funds over reallocating the resources to global warming prevention. 

8. Technology will not change enough in the next 90 years to sufficiently change the costs to make waiting and managing the effects the more prudent course. 

9. Purposeful planning on large scales and over decades will not suffer the sort of deviations en route that made a pathetic mockery of Soviet 5 year plans. 

This list is not exhaustive. I'm omitting, for example, the issue of focusing adjustments exactly in the areas where purchasing power parity (PPP) indicates the money is least effective. 

Every single one of these nine points has challengers. The amount of work proving points 8 and 9 are so minimal as to be laughable. It's just assumed to be justifiable as if we haven't had a century of data saying that the problems of long term state planning and government economic distortion are large and largely unsolvable, to a great extent because technology surprises require faster shifts than governments are capable of. 

Every time I hear "the science is settled", it's invariably about points earlier up in the chain which establish that there's some sort of problem but do nothing regarding picking out a policy choice. But the policy choices among the warmists are settled at least as much as they view the climate science as settled. 

All those policy choices were made without going through the actual trouble of establishing any of the basic economic groundwork. We're all supposed to acquire historical amnesia about economics. This magical rehabilitation of state solutions justifies permanently moving 1% of global economic product into the service of handling climate change for the next nine decades (the Stern Report's recommendation). It is a fantastic sum to be thrown at a problem using a methodology that is known bad. 

Sick NY Times Icicle Cartoon

So the NY Times got Ed Driscoll going with this image

It's standard othering, let's kill our political enemies with a preprepared can't you take a joke fallback. Stuff like this has been on the left-wing propaganda menu for a long time in progressively more mainstream and influential outlets. It's almost a yawner that libs are being desensitized to political violence. 

It was another section that puzzled me how it got past the PC police at the NY Times, playing nasty tricks on your pet for your personal amusement. 

Why is this funny? What did the dog do to deserve being mocked by its owner? What was PETA's reaction? 

Update: It got weird and meta in Driscoll's comments suggesting that it was a clueless Commerce Department that was being mocked for attacking low priority tasks rather than concentrating on the economy. So we've got that going for us. The libs aren't going to come stab us until keynesianism works to create a roaring economy. We're safe. 

The feds are overregulating poop

Clostridium dificile bacteria is a minor normal component of your gut flora but when antibiotics kill the rest of your normal balanced population, out of control C diff is nasty problem to have. You can even die of it. It kills about 14,000 people in the US and 110,000 globally every year and the trend is going up.

Medically we've found a way to cure the problem and for once, it's a relatively cheap, if disgusting to contemplate, fix. It's called a fecal matter transplant (FMT) and it is exactly what it sounds like. You get a stool sample from a volunteer, make sure that their sample isn't going to make you sicker because they have a disease, parasite, or infection (CPT 44705 costing $500-$1500) and then get a GI guy to insert the sample from either end depending on where the problematic infection is. A colonoscopy is covered by multiple codes and can run from $740 to $8,500. That's an absurdly large variation but it's pretty clear that cash patients will not be going to the more expensive doctors. Whether a colonoscopy is even necessary or a simple enema is sufficient is under investigation.

Compared to surgery that yanks out sections of your colon, the major alternative when things go really bad with this sort of infection, this is getting off light. And even at the beginning phase, the transplant option outperforms vancomycin 94% to 27%. A study comparing the two options was terminated early because it was considered unethical to keep half the study population on the antibiotic.

The cash price for the "low dose" variant of 125mg vancomycin 4 times a day for 10 days is approximately $1000 to $1700 and for the "high dose" variant of 500mg 4/10 is $3900-$4300 so the cost of transplants is competitive.

Unfortunately, the FDA has decided to regulate poop as medicine instead of as a transplant. More specifically, everybody was going to have to go through a month long process of getting each FMT individually approved through the Investigational New Drug (IND) process but the benefits of FMT were so obvious over alternative therapies in the case of c-diff that for that purpose and only that purpose, the process is virtually unregulated. For everything else, the IND process rules and people are actually going the DIY route with poop slurry enemas because of a lack of doctors willing to go through the hassle and expense to go through the IND paperwork hoops.

This is politicizing medicine which is a lot more disgusting that poop transplants. The IND process shouldn't be used for something that isn't a drug. People are suffering and even dying because this area of medicine is being held up by paperwork. 

Suspending the Debt Ceiling Matters

The act of maxing out a card and responding to that by opening up a new card is a warning sign that you're going deep into credit trouble. It's a warning sign that helps some people back away from the cliff of personal bankruptcy and turn things around. That's the sort of safeguard the US has had with its debt ceiling limits running in parallel to the appropriations process. Until March 15, 2015 that debt limit safeguard is gone.

Until March 15 of next year, there is no process of getting a new credit card. Our present one is declared unlimited. The only constraint is on each individual purchase, and two thirds of our current spending doesn't even go through that process, being major item autopays like Medicare and Social Security that go up and down without act of Congress.

We've given a drunk the keys to a self-stocking bar for a year and expect, what? Sobriety is not a likely result. What are we thinking?

HT: Patterico

Mt Gox Exchange Collapse

The Mt. Gox exchange is engaged in a slow motion collapse, with accounts not allowed to withdraw in BTC at the present time. There is a $160 arbitrage opportunity as of writing for those brave enough to buy bitcoins at Mt. Gox and to hope that the market doesn't trend down to the Mt. Gox level before the exchange unfreezes and you get them out for sale elsewhere.

The collapse I'm referring to in the title is the collapse of Mt. Gox's credibility. This isn't a load issue, which looked bad but could be passed off as growing pains in a young currency. This is looking at a transaction that failed, not fixing it, and thinking that everything will be alright if whatever was wrong with the code failed infrequently enough. That's never acceptable. It's not the freeze or the technical mistakes that makes Mt. Gox dead to me. It's their poor management attitude that is exposed by the excuses they offer up in their statement justifying events.  Mt. Gox committed suicide by press release and management is too stupid to understand that they've killed themselves.

Is there a Mt. Gox deadpool?

Why Work Disincentives Matter

The usual partisan catfight has broken out again, this time because of a CBO report saying that Obamacare will destroy 2.3M jobs by 2021. It's disappointing to notice that both sides are ignoring the elephant in the room. There's work to be done.

There's snow to clear off the roads, fires to put out, garbage to be collected, potholes to be filled and all the other myriad things that governments do. A great deal of that is paid for by employment related taxes. Drop a few million jobs and the work is still there for the most part which means that the remaining working population is going to have a heavier load per capita.

The Democrats have an obvious interest in ignoring the basic facts. It destroys their chosen spin that people are liberated by not having to work.

It's much less clear why the GOP isn't mentioning it. They seem to be assuming that everybody understands this without having to explain it. That's a bad bet in today's information environment.

There are two ways to fix our unemployment problem. The first is to increase labor demand by legalizing work, reducing barriers to job creation and making company formation easier. The second is to reduce supply by making people less interested in going out and getting a job, leaving more jobs for the rest of us. The Obama administration seems just fine with the latter approach. That's unfortunate.

Watching Al Jazeera

My father and I watched Al Jazeera America for the first time today. It was a pretty effective bit of brainwashing whose subject was cartoon journalism but whose purpose was all about promoting emotion over thought, emotion over reason. During a commercial break they advertised an upcoming show on immigration. It offended the both of us but, as is usual in our case, for different reasons.

My father saw one more rerun of the nasty propaganda machine he had to suffer under in communist Romania. He knew the truth because he had known witnesses. The witnesses told simple stories that revealed simple truths. The Soviets, for 20 years on the Nistru river would shoot attempted border crossers in the water and the Romanians would collect the bodies and the wounded as they drifted into Romanian territory. Later, they started shooting them before they got to the river as they hardened the border. My father's witnesses were Romanian border guards who, in peacetime, had to pick up the dead and wounded at a pace fit for a small war.

In those days, a Soviet border guard would get a bonus and 20 days vacation for shooting a would be crosser. If they were in need of funds or a break in routine, they would sometimes threaten a local peasant with death if they didn't walk into the no-go zone. The guard would then proceed to shoot them and collect.

It's not a story you hear too often. I knew at least one of those men as a child. He never mentioned this story to me, though he told me others.

Usually I don't pass on the really brutal stories but today I've overloaded on Soviet apologists claiming moral superiority. We do not have the moral filters to weed out these evil degenerates for mass murder as we do for their Nazi cousins. It's a shame that we don't.

The dead weep.

Missing the point on Bridgegate

Nobody asked the most basic question when bridgegate became a story. What is the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and what is it for? It turns out that the Port Authority is designed to take politics out of NY Metro transportation issues, to isolate and insulate such decisions from political passions. 

That an underling of the Governor of New Jersey could pick up a phone and get the traffic configuration coming off the George Washington bridge changed is supposed to not be possible by design. 

Obviously the design failed. Obviously the Port Authority will not fundamentally change because its basic reason for being has been exposed as a fiction. That would make too much sense.