Fixing the Filibuster

A lot of liberals, progressives, hippies, and Democrats have been complaining about obstructionist tactics by the Republicans since President Obama took office. On the radio I keep hearing demands that the Democrats take a page out of the old Republican majority playbook and deploy the “Nuclear Option” (aka the “Constitutional Option” to use the Republican terminology of the time). I thought that was a bad idea when the R’s were pushing it, and I still think it’s a bad idea when the D’s are being pushed by their base to use it.

The filibuster allows for a state with a small congressional delegation to stand firm in the face of a narrow majority on issues that are of great importance. If a senator strongly feels that the country, his constituents, or his principles are put at risk, he can force an issue to be tabled until a supermajority can shut him up via cloture or his objections can be addressed. This is a good thing.

How filibusters are used currently, however is not. The barest threat of objection now leads to cloture votes, nominations being set aside indefinitely, all at basically no cost to the obstructionist senator. Please note that I don’t think “obstructionist” is a bad thing in itself. There have been lots of bad laws passed and bad appointees approved for lack of vigorous and reasonable obstruction. It is currently possible for a senator to obstruct a bill without any appreciable effort or expenditure of political capital. That’s what needs to change. If a senator really wants to stop a bill or appointment, the rest of the senate should require that he stick his neck out a bit.

A couple of ideas that attempt to balance the value of the filibuster and other delaying tactics with the problems involved in its overuse:

Bills and appointments should only be remanded to committee or otherwise tabled once introduced by a supermajority of senators present or on a simple majority upon a failed cloture motion. This would force a senator to stop the business of the Senate as a whole in order to stop a bill. It would probably cause more cloture votes, but less actual delay.
Should a senator object to considering a bill or amendment “as read” (this currently forces the clerk to read the entire bill aloud, which can be quite onerous with long legal documents), then the objecting senator is responsible for reading the bill himself. He may share the burden with other senators that volunteer to do so, but may not physically leave the Senate chamber during the reading. Should the objecting senator leave the chamber for any reason, the bill will be considered “as read” for procedural purposes. If the senator actually has not read the bill, he can damn well read it himself.
All requests to delay committee votes or meetings must be publicly associated with the delaying senator. Frequently there are legitimate reasons for committees to not immediately take up an item; there may be reports demanded of various agencies, experts or witnesses to be scheduled for questioning and exposition, and so forth. Anonymous holds on whole swaths of issues need to stop.

None of these measures would stop the filibuster or unduly infringe on the rights and responsibilities of the individual senators to do right by their constituents, but each attaches a risk or burden in doing so.

Some lousy ads

For the 2009-2010 season, the San Jose Sharks have a quirky series of ads. They’ve been releasing them at an irregular schedule, apparently in an attempt to keep the comedy fresh. Here are the ones I’m aware of, in no particular order:

Jody Shelley

Joe Pavelski

Joe Thornton

Rob Blake

Todd McClellan

Dan Boyle

Ryan Clowe

Clearly the Sharks are lousy actors, but happily they’re a great hockey team.

When Graphs Hurt the Argument

Global Warning, Climate Change, the AlGorePocalypse, whatever you want to call it, there sure are a lot of data floating around about it, and a lot of tempers flaring. I’ll not address the merits of the conclusions people have been drawing from these findings not only because I don’t consider myself to be a qualified expert on the topic, but because I don’t give a rat’s ass. Instead I’m just going to take a look at a graph published by NASA regarding the mass of ice in Antarctic (reproduced above).

Clearly this graph shows a downward trend. The scale on the left shows the rate of change in the mass of ice, and the scale at the scale at the bottoms shows a left-to-right chronology, so downward from left to right is clearly a loss of ice. The caption accompanying this image is “The continent of Antarctica has been losing more than 100 cubic kilometers (24 cubic miles) of ice per year since 2002.” That’s all pretty clear-cut, right?

No, not really. Actually the caption and the graph are at odds with each other. The values shown are not the sum total of ice in Antarctica, but the rate of change of the mass of ice, the first derivative of it. In 2002 we see seven points, all of them above zero. Each represents an increase in the amount of ice in Antarctica. in 2003 there are another ten points, all still above zero. The graph is showing two years of ice growth here. The rate doesn’t dip below zero until the second point in 2004, and doesn’t stay under zero for a majority of samples until 2007. The trendline generated here crosses zero in early 2006, not 2002 as described in the caption.

The following is the result of estimating the values shown to produce the integral. I was unsuccessful at finding the actual mass values on NASA’s site, so I just measured (my estimates):

Clearly I didn’t put any effort into sexing up the graph. I also started with a zero value. That is ludicrous, but we’re being somewhat arbitrary about scales here anyway; the NASA graph also gives no indication of whether 1 billion tons is a lot or a little in relation to the total ice mass of Antarctica, so I’ll just assume it’s a heck of a lot and let the graph look big.

There were 78 points on the original graph, but only 36 of them are negative values. In under half of the samples shown, there was a reduction in ice mass. There were four samples shown that I estimated at zero, leaving 38 increases, with a total change over the sample period of -678 billion tons. Bear in mind that the total change from the first sample shown through the 49th is +9587 billion tons. I seriously doubt that anybody in mid-2005 was arguing that global warming was causing a massive ramp-up of ice deposits at the South Pole, at an alarming-sounding rate of 3,200Gt per year. Because that’s what these numbers would have shown.

I don’t think the folks at NASA were malicious in their presentation of this information, but it sure as hell is sloppy. Misleading and contradictory material like this undermines the general case for anthropogenic climate change and poisons the conversation. Don’t piss on my back and tell me it’s El Niño.

California bail-out

California’s budget is a mess, and has been since the big dot-com bubble burst. This is nothing new, and has been a political campaign topic at the state level for about ten years now. I don’t post about it much, but somehow every time KC Meesha gretches about his taxes, I end up steamed and monopolizing his comment section. I totally understand where he’s coming from on paying taxes in a town where he works but doesn’t live, and delight in pointing out the fact that he’s unable to do anything about it. I think he takes it quite well.

What got my goat, however, was a flyover-dweller bitching about California looking to get a little money from the federal government to cover our budget shortfall. Specifically “I Travel for JOOLS” brought this up:

And I just ran across this little article. The money quote, California’s unionized public employees can retire at 50 and receive 90 percent of their last year’s pay FOR LIFE !

AND THEY WANT US TO BAIL THEM OUT ????

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/08/AR2010010803593.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns

First, pensions are paid by the pension fund, not by the state directly. Second, she’s citing an article by George Will, who doesn’t know his ass from his elbows regarding how California spends its money. Third, she’s using all-caps, which I find obnoxious. Fourth, she’s using excessive punctuation (one question-mark is sufficient, folks). All of this just serves to raise my hackles regardless of the actual merit of her point, which is rather seductive: California is spending its way into this mess, why should the rest of the country be burdened by this?

Let’s take a look, shall we?

Where does California get its money? Specifically the general fund money that our congress-critters get to fiddle with every year? ebudget.ca.gov provides a nice little summary:

Mostly from income taxes and sales taxes. I see money come out of my paycheck every week on one, and see the other nearly every time I buy anything. I’d just as soon leave these alone or lower them.

Where does the money go? Again, ebudget provides a summary:

Education takes up almost 58% of the state budget. Ouch. That looks like a great place to look for fat to trim. It’s also a political landmine to go anywhere near that portion of the budget without alarming reactionary parents and grandparents. Grandparents vote, you see.

Health and Human Services makes up the next biggest slice of general fund, at about $21,000,000,000. This is the nebulous government waste that I think most libertarians and tea-party types are talking about most of the time that they whinge about government waste. If the federal congress were actually trying to fix health care, this could have been reduced significantly (partly through increase systemic efficiency but largely through federal spending). But they aren’t.

Which brings us to: where the hell is all my tax money going?

I pay my taxes like a good citizen. I look for whatever deductions and credits I may be legally eligible, of course, but I understand that taxes are the price I pay for having a variety of safeguards and comforts that many others in the world don’t enjoy (into religion? love guns? hate paying taxes? you’d love it in Somalia!). But the bulk of the money coming out of my paycheck doesn’t go to Sacramento. It goes to Ogden, Utah. Where the IRS collects my annual 1040 form. So what happens to Californians’ federal tax money?

On the California income tax table, if you earn $70,000 a year (median income for a family of four in the state), and you somehow haven’t managed to deduct your way down to a lower bracket, you pay $2,304 in state income tax. Conversely, the US income tax for that bracket is $9881. That’s a very sloppy calculation, based on $70,000 taxable income without all the typical deductions and such, but really it’s just to demonstrate the proportions involved. I can expect to pay a quarter as much to the state as I do to the federal government in income taxes. It’s a good thing that comes back through federal spending, right? Right?

California produced $313,998,874,000 in gross tax revenue for the United States federal government in 2007. With a population of 36,553,215, that works out to $8,590 for every man, woman, and child. Meanwhile Missouri produced only $48,568,138,000 with their 5,878,415 people ($8,262 per capita). That’s OK, though; we have a progressive income tax, so states with higher typical wages will pay more taxes, and the difference isn’t really that high.

That said, we’re having to pull more of our weight internally than a lot of other states. For every dollar we pay into the federal government, we get $0.78 back. That’s $69,079,752,280 coming out of California taxpayers’ pockets that is landing in places like Missouri that gets back $1.29 in spending for every dollar of federal taxes they pay. Heck, it’s more than the entire tax contribution of that state by a significant margin. It’s also about 75% of our proposed state budget for next year.

I suggest that the Republicans in Sacramento have got it right: we don’t need to raise fees or taxes on Californians. I also suggest that Democrats in Sacramento have it right: we have much-needed health services, correctional institutions, and schools that really need to properly-funded. We need our representatives in Washington DC to start representing us better.

When the revised health care bill kicks its way back to the House of Representatives, Lynn Woolsey and other “progressive” Democrats should demand a better deal. If Woolsey isn’t going to get the public option she wants (much less single-payer), then she should get additional funding for the Palm Drive hospital in Sebastopol and the Sutter Medical Center in Santa Rosa. California should get the same kind of treatment Nebraska gets for Medicaid costs. If her party wants her to swallow her liberal principles to vote for an imperfect bill, she should bring home some bacon for her constituents.

The same goes for our other representatives of both major parties: put your constituents ahead of your party and secure funding for local projects. Your voters are paying for roads and bridges and schools and hospitals and army bases elsewhere, let that money flow back home.

*Mea culpa: I seem to have put a totally ludicrous figure on KC Meesha’s comments page about how much folks in Missouri pay per capita to the feds. I don’t know where that figure came from, but I noticed it while I was writing this up.

*edit: out of ignorance I had some gender pronouns wrong there.

Dumb Theory

I’m sure the new Doctor Who episode already aired and this theory is already rubbish, but here we go:

Donna Noble and her grandfather Wilfred Mott are ordinary humans that have been recurring characters. Both have shown great resourcefulness and calm under pressure. Both have been quite clever.
“Wilfred Mott” is an anagram for “Time Lord WTF” (or FTW, however you like to think of it).
The Doctor was originally introduced back in 1963 as a mysterious old man accompanied by his granddaughter Susan Foreman.
After the events of The End of Time Part 1, a reasonable case could be made that neither Donna nor Wilfred are actually human.

Therefore, perhaps Wilfred and Donna are actually The Doctor and Susan, disguised in a manner previously used used by other time lords in the series.

I just needed to get that off my chest before I actually see the new episode and am certainly proved wrong.

Ben Nelson is a hero

You don’t get many profiles in political courage these days. You get some grandstanding, of course. There are plenty of nutcases that have been put in office, particularly at the state level and in the House of Representatives, sure. But every once in a while you get somebody like Ben Nelson that’s willing to recognize a situation for what it is and act appropriately, even at the risk of burning his colleagues and open himself up to pressure from his own party on a high-profile issue like health care reform.

Nelson isn’t a pro-choice Democrat. I’m not from Nebraska, but so far as I can tell he never has been. The people who voted for him weren’t looking to enshrine the reproductive rights of women. There was a perception that the health care reform bill before the Senate would result in taxpayer money subsidizing abortions, and the Democratic party was scratching and scraping for 60 votes to get cloture. Ben Nelson was in a position to be the 60th vote, the last senator to commit to a “yes” vote. He could have taken the easy route and gone with his party on an issue that was important to the president. He could have taken the somewhat harder route and stuck to his avowed principles regarding the sanctity of human life.

He did neither. He rolled up his sleeves and got to work for his constituents. He burned his party and his ideals, holding out until he could get the best deal possible for his state. Nebraska is set to enjoy a tremendous advantage in Medicare compensation, at a savings likely to total in the billions as health care costs increase for the other 49 states in coming years (barring any actual substantive reform, which doesn’t look likely at the moment). Good for you, Ben Nelson. Good for Nebraska. Bring home the bacon for your voters. I wish my representatives had done the same.

Ships you don't want in Tradewars 2002

My ISP just put up a Tradewars 2002 server available for subscribers, so I figured I’d get my feet wet again after over a decade of not having touched the thing. There is an awful lot I’ve forgotten about plying the ANSI spaceways, but one thing I recall clearly is that there’s little more frustrating than trading in a perfectly good ship for a clunker. For most of your gameplay, you’re going to be either trading or stealing, both of which require you to move around a lot and have a lot of cargo capacity. For a small minority of circumstances, you will be fighting stuff.

There are several arguments to be made in favor of ships like the Merchant Freighter, CargoTran, Mule, and Starmaster, though it’s pretty much universally understood that the Corporate Flagship and Imperial Starship are the two best overall ships in the game. Getting into the finer points of these ships’ merits is beyond the scope of this article; you can do fine with any of these. The following ships, on the other hand, are simply to be avoided:

Merchant Cruiser


     Basic Hold Cost:   10,000   Initial Holds:     20 Maximum Shields:   400
     Main Drive Cost:    1,000    Max Fighters:  2,500  Offensive Odds: 1.0:1
       Computer Cost:   20,300  Turns Per Warp:      3  Defensive Odds: 1.0:1
      Ship Hull Cost:   10,000        Mine Max:     50      Beacon Max:    50
      Ship Base Cost:   41,300     Genesis Max:      5 Long Range Scan:   Yes
 Max Figs Per Attack:      750 TransWarp Drive:     No  Planet Scanner:   Yes
       Maximum Holds:       75 Transport Range:      5 Photon Missiles:    No

You start out with one of these, but there’s no good reason to keep it when you can trade it in for a Merchant Freighter on your first day of play and get more cargo holds, faster warps, and spare change right off the bat. It’s nothing special in a scrap and not efficient for trading.

Scout Marauder


     Basic Hold Cost:    5,000   Initial Holds:     10 Maximum Shields:   100
     Main Drive Cost:    3,000    Max Fighters:    250  Offensive Odds: 2.0:1
       Computer Cost:    5,200  Turns Per Warp:      2  Defensive Odds: 2.0:1
      Ship Hull Cost:    2,750        Mine Max:      0      Beacon Max:    10
      Ship Base Cost:   15,950     Genesis Max:      0 Long Range Scan:   Yes
 Max Figs Per Attack:      250 TransWarp Drive:     No  Planet Scanner:   Yes
       Maximum Holds:       25 Transport Range:      0 Photon Missiles:    No

She’s fast, but no faster than a Merchant Freighter, and with under half the cargo capacity. It gets great per-fighter combat odds, but only carries 250 of them. If you find yourself in a position where this is the only ship you can afford, trade up as soon as you can, and shame on you for not keeping a little money in the bank.

Tholian Sentinel


     Basic Hold Cost:    5,000   Initial Holds:     10 Maximum Shields: 4,000
     Main Drive Cost:   10,000    Max Fighters:  2,500  Offensive Odds: 1.0:1
       Computer Cost:   25,000  Turns Per Warp:      4  Defensive Odds: 1.0:1
      Ship Hull Cost:    7,500        Mine Max:     50      Beacon Max:    10
      Ship Base Cost:   47,500     Genesis Max:      1 Long Range Scan:   Yes
 Max Figs Per Attack:      800 TransWarp Drive:     No  Planet Scanner:    No
       Maximum Holds:       50 Transport Range:      3 Photon Missiles:    No

Sorry, it just isn’t worth the money. 400% fighter strength on the defensive sounds good but there’s just no fun to it. Worthless as a trading vessel, worthless as an attacking vessel. Just not worth the credits.

Interdictor Cruiser


     Basic Hold Cost:    5,000   Initial Holds:     10 Maximum Shields: 4,000
     Main Drive Cost:   50,000    Max Fighters:100,000  Offensive Odds: 1.2:1
       Computer Cost:  380,000  Turns Per Warp:     15  Defensive Odds: 1.2:1
      Ship Hull Cost:  104,000        Mine Max:    200      Beacon Max:   100
      Ship Base Cost:  539,000     Genesis Max:     20 Long Range Scan:   Yes
 Max Figs Per Attack:    15000 TransWarp Drive:     No  Planet Scanner:   Yes
       Maximum Holds:       40 Transport Range:     20 Photon Missiles:    No

If there’s an argument for the Tholian Sentinel, there may be an argument for the Interdictor. Would be a good attack vessel were it not for the prohibitive turns-per-warp stat. Its good personal transporter range makes it easy to leave behind, but it’s hard to justify spending over 500,000 credits on a ship you’re going to basically abandon somewhere.

I’m generally disinclined to buy ships like the Corellian Battleship or Havoc Gunstar in favor of the Starmaster, but I understand they have their merits.

Seven reasons I'm not upgrading to Windows 7

It’s October 22, 2009. Time for our buddies at Microsoft to release their newest, sexiest operating system. And here I am not using it. A few simple reasons:

Sexiness

Windows 7, despite what people may tell you, is an operating system. It manages the resources of a computer, such as the memory, storage, input, and output. Whatever Steve Jobs tells you to the contrary, this is just not exciting.

Utility

I already have an operating system on every computer I own. All of my computers work. This really is more a lack of a reason to upgrade than a particular reason not to.

Fear

Not much of a motivator compared to the others, but time-honored principle of “If it ain’t broke, don’t break it” is a factor. Everything about my current setup works, so there is probably greater risk in changing than in leaving well-enough alone. This isn’t meant to be a criticism of the quality-assurance folks at Microsoft, but rather my confidence in them.

Not only do I not want to have to wrangle with my system to make something that used to work for me run again, I really don’t want to go to war to fix the strange stuff my wife uses (like spreadsheet software). The intrinsic frustrations of troubleshooting aside, it undermines the perception in my family that I am any good with these electronic thingamajigs.

Peer Pressure

I work at a place where our servers run Linux. Several of my friends own Apple products of various descriptions. We tease each other about such things. It’s merciless.

Pig-headedness

This is a serious factor in a lot of my decisions. I picked up Vista Home Premium a while ago, and found I rather liked it. Hell, I even appreciate the much-criticized admin authority auth bongs. They make me much more comfortable with letting my three-year-old near a keyboard.

Cost

Windows 7 Home Premium costs $199.00. This brings up some sub-points:

I’ve got bills to pay.
I could buy a netbook for what it would cost to buy a license for my home system and existing laptop.
If I had $199.00 burning a hole in my pocket, I’d much rather spend it on booze. Or booze and a copy of Tropico 3.

The Real Reason

I’m lazy. There is nothing about the newest version of Microsoft Windows that budges me out of my OS inertia. I am presently an object at rest on such matters. All my devices work to my satisfaction, all the software I want to run works properly, and I fully expect this to be the case for at least as long as I’m satisfied with my processor speed (which may be several years with that Core i7 I’ve got under the hood on my home system).

Best of luck with your new OS, Microsoft.

Postbox 1.0

Several months ago I saw somebody mention a new mail client that had much better threading behavior than most. There wasn’t any description of the behavior itself, nor any reasoned critique of what is wrong with how mail clients like Outlook Express or Thunderbird handle threads, but I was intrigued, so I went to check it out. A beta copy of Postbox was soon running on my laptop, and would shortly end up on my home and work desktop machines.

There are supposedly a number of Social Media / Web2.0 reasons to use Postbox, which explains the presence of a Facebook button that I never clicked. Other features I didn’t get much mileage out of (your results may vary) include a sidebar when viewing a message, containing contact information (ooh, a silhouette where the photo I don’t maintain of my coworker would go!), a listing of all attachments and external links in the message. This proved mildly useful maybe twice. Maybe I’m just old and set in my ways.

The real selling point here (selling point? more on that in a moment) is the threading, though. Take for example the following mailing list discussion with over a dozen responses, first in Mozilla Thunderbird:

In Postbox the whole thread is displayed as a single item by default. Selecting that single line will display the whole conversation formatted much like you’d expect from a mailing list digest. No expanding a thread into a big messy tree is necessary, but if you feel you need to pick out a single message from the discussion, everything’s presented cleanly and sorted by whatever criteria you are currently sorting the folder by (in my case this is nearly always chronological, but hey).

A small touch that I rather appreciated with Postbox what that old threads will display by the date of the most recent reply, not the date on which the thread started. This worked very nicely for me; it is a behavior familiar from web bulletin boards in which people will frequently “bump” a topic to the top of a forum and thus revive a discussion. I’m not in the habit of deleting mail as I read it, so getting to a new post in a week-old topic would frequently involve some digging around. Not efficient.

The only problem I ran into with Postbox was the new-message alerts. I was repeatedly notified of unread messages as though they were new. I may have retrieved a new message five minutes ago, but that does not mean I necessarily read it. To have a pane appear notifying me of new messages while I’m in another application is a useful feature. To be repeatedly notified about the same unread status message from some automated system I don’t actively care about at the moment is just a nuisance. A minor nuisance, one I’m willing to live with.

Then the dealbreaker: a notification that I had 14 days to register my copy.

I don’t normally think of myself as a cheapskate. I am not in the habit of clipping coupons or attending short-term pricing events at local retailers. I’ve been known to occasionally purchase brand-name acetaminophen.That said, I’m not in the habit of paying for stuff that I’ve had free-of-charge for years. I can switch back to the mail client that came with my operating system and be reasonably content. I can switch back to Thunderbird and be quite content. I like Postbox, but I can’t value it at $39.95. I wouldn’t pay that much for a web browser, either.

I recommend Postbox 1.0 as a mail client for anybody who is operating on a somebody-else’s-money basis.

Dangerous States

Let’s take a look at a few key indicators of how dangerous the Islamic Republic of Iran is compared to more responsible, civilized, and democratic states in the world. We’ll take this back to 1979, as nobody seriously thinks the current Iranian regime bears any responsibility for anything the Shah did.

Criterium	Canada	Iran	U.S.A.
Lets women vote	Yes	Yes	Yes
Invaded Grenada	No	No	Yes
Invaded Panama	No	No	Yes
Invaded Iraq	Yes	Yes*	Yes
Bombed Yugoslavia	Yes	No	Yes
Invaded Afghanistan	Yes	No	Yes
Invaded Iraq (again)	Yes	No	Yes
# of wars	4	1	6
Has nuclear weapons	No	Maybe	Oh hell yes

I didn’t count United Nations peacekeeping missions as wars for this table. Iran’s invasion of Iraq gets an asterisk for what should be a fairly obvious reason: it was part of a war that started with Iran getting invaded, not the other way around. Compared to many of the more globally-influential powers in the world, Iran has pretty much kept it in their pants for the past thirty years.

Burrowowl

Infrequently-updated geek ramblings