Open letter to Virginia’s Senate delegation
Senators Webb and Warner:
Today Senator Nelson was somehow swayed (no doubt with favors most outside Washington would consider “bribery”) towards support of Senator Reid’s as-yet-unread legislation to “reform” 1/6th of the nation’s economy to the tune of $1 trillion in debt and a sweeping expansion of federal power over individual health care choices. As both of Virginia’s senators you have expressed at least tentative support for this extra-constitutional usurpation with claims of lowered healthcare costs, improved health insurance coverage, and higher quality medical care. I submit to you these goals cannot be achieved with anything resembling the Democratic majority’s attempts thus far.
I have not yet seen the Senate’s latest attempt to “fix” healthcare, as Reid’s bill emerged from a smoky back room just yesterday, thus I cannot offer criticisms of specific provisions of the bill for your consideration. However if previous Senate attempts at “reform” legislation are any guide, Senator Reid’s latest will achieve none of the stated goals of “reform”, and instead will bring potentially ruinous consequences down upon us all. Allow me to address some of my objections to what is sure to be in the next permutation of the bill up for a vote this coming week:
* Most offensive of the provisions is a federal mandate forcing individuals to buy health insurance. Whether this mandate is dressed up as some sort favorable tax treatment for insurance premiums or left naked as an overtly coercive regulation carrying with it the penalty of law, we have fallen far from our roots as a constitutional republic. What would the founders of our country, not to mention the jurists presiding over the first 150 years of our legal history, make of such an extra-constitutional compulsion? I daresay they would take a dim view indeed.
What right have you as my elected representatives, or have the unaccountable federal bureaucrats to whom the Executive delegates, to compel me to spend my money to purchase a product or service? Where in the US Constitution did we the people delegate to you our elected government the power to force us to spend our money with anyone, let alone insurance companies squirming under the boot heel of federal regulators? It is an outrage which, if perpetrated, will no doubt be regarded as a pivotal moment in our country’s history.
* Next on the egregiousness list is a new regulatory regime imposed upon the health insurance industry in the name of controlling costs and keeping premiums affordable. These schemes call to mind the Randian legislator who in his hubris believes himself capable of simply legislating away problems of “unfair” wages, “dog eat dog” industrial practices, an “unequal” opportunities without consideration of unintended consequences or any regard for the liberty of the subjects of his benevolent ministrations.
Among the regulatory schemes proposed are measures restricting variations in premiums between the young and healthy and the old and infirmed, mandates requiring coverage of a long and sure to grow list of procedures, and in some bills even a profitability cap requiring a minimum percentage of premiums go to paying claims.
To illustrate the ruin that will come from this short-sighted scheme, allow me to share with you some details of my particular, but in no way unique, situation. As one who is young, healthy, and requires only coverage against catastrophic medical bills, these ‘reforms’ will cause my health care costs to skyrocket. Today I pay about $110/month for my high-deductible insurance plan, along with tax-free contributions to my health savings account. If I need a heart transplant or brain surgery, I can pay the first $5000 from my accumulated tax-free health savings, after which my insurance covers the rest. Odds are I won’t need expensive medical services any time soon, so I can accumulate my own savings for my own health care on my own terms.
Under the new regime, Federal bureaucrats will be presumed to know better than I what’s best for me. I will be forced to pay into a more traditional health insurance scheme which will provide coverage for a wide range of procedures I don’t care about. My premiums will rise not only to cover these additional unwanted procedures and lower deductibles, but much more so because of the restriction of the “unfair” insurance company practice of setting premiums in accordance with risk. In effect my financial freedom will be curtailed to the tune of thousands of dollars a year so the old and infirmed are spared the “unfair” experience of paying for insurance in proportion to what they will consume. If I choose to defy the Congress and the executive bureaucrats, I will face Federal sanctions including fines and God knows what else.
Sadly, it’s not as though you’ve no way of knowing this is coming. Individual coverage mandates and government-set “minimum” coverage standards have been tried with the same results in Massachusetts and elsewhere. Be assured the presence of 535 legislators and an army of Federal bureaucrats won’t make it go any better.
* The third and–due only to verbosity considerations, final–error I wish to call to your attention is the ruinous fiscal consequence of this grand experiment in government social engineering. The CBO’s estimates for these schemes ranges from $800 billion to over $1 trillion for the next ten years, and that’s with absurd assumptions like scheduled Medicare cuts being permitted to take place, and government cost projections being accurate. Historical evidence suggests the real number will be well in excess of $1 trillion.
Federal finances are already in terrible disarray, particularly after the massive bailout scheme to spare us the horror of 10% unemployment and the bankruptcy of institutions too big to fail. Medicare is already going broke with no solution in sight. Now the Congress would pile a nearly unimaginable amount of debt atop an already hopeless mountain. Surely you must recognize this is the sort of thing that precedes the fall of empires.
You are both intelligent and accomplished men; I’ve no doubt you recognize politically convenient financial legerdemain when you see it, so you must realize this ‘reform’ scheme carries with it a devastating cost. You must therefore believe the potentially ruinous economic consequences, not to mention the serious blow to our liberty, to be worth the price. I cannot for the life of me understand why.
What contempt or disdain for deliberative democratic governance is required to participate in an effort to ram this ruinously expensive and coercive legislation through Congress by the barest of partisan majorities? What disinterest in the concerns of constituents and the American people must one possess to at least tacitly support this effort at a time when a majority of Americans oppose the plans put forward thus far? Shouldn’t a wholesale restructuring of our economy along statist and command-and-control lines happen in the light of day, with deliberation, or at the very least with time to read and evaluate the bill?
I’m not rich, or powerful, or a special interest, or a shill for insurance companies, or a Republican partisan. I am a young professional Virginian who loves his liberty and reads his Constitution and votes his conscience, and I make you this promise: if any member of the Virginia congressional delegation wins re-election after voting to support a health care bill that takes some of my freedom and more of my money in the name of ’reform’, it will be in spite of my dedication of time and money to their opposition. Understand that this isn’t like a promise of open and transparent government, or thoughtful and deliberative legislating; this is a promise that will be kept.
Sincerely,
Adam Nelson
Motorola DROID one month in
I’ve had the Motorola DROID for about a month now. It’s my first smart phone, and only my second phone with a color display, so I’m catching up on the last several years of phone innovation.
Early impressions:
- Battery life is much lower than my K1m. I have to charge it every night or it’ll be dead sometime the next day. If it spends all day in my dead-zone of a basement, the battery is kaput by sundown. The the DROID is generally said to have good battery life. I’d hate to see what bad battery life looks like.
- Killer apps so far are ShopSaavy, Google Maps with turn-by-turn directions, and Google Places
- Get the car mount and car charger; who needs a dedicated GPS?
- Having email and a web browser wherever I am is kickass
- Screen is gorgeous, and touch interface is very responsive
- Switching from landscape to portrait is laggy but reliable
- My K1M would fit in the pistol magazine pocket of my 5.11s. The DROID is too big so it goes in a front pocket, which sucks. Too bad phone holsters are so gay and flimsy
- Verizon service fairly reliable, but forget 3G inside my aluminum-sided house
- Camera is crap. Do some people really use their phone’s camera exclusively?
- Physical keyboard is usable, but I never use it. Onscreen keyboard is fine for me
- Wifi sucks battery life like an electron vampire. Don’t use it.
- Google Latitude is fun but I can’t figure out what it’s used for
- FourSquare is cool but I keep forgetting to check in to places I go
- I haven’t taken advantage of Android’s open architecture, but it feels good knowing that Steve Jobs can go fuck himself
Overall, I like it and don’t want to go back. If I had to pay for the service myself instead of expensing it, I probably wouldn’t do it, just because it’s not worth the $100 to me.
Christmas 2009 Wishlist
- Mystic Monk Decaf Coffee
- Shop Stool
- 5.11 long sleeve shirt in blue oxford and light blue plaid size XL
- Mya Saray “Alpine” hookah (be sure to take advantage of the ‘Multiplier Effect‘ promotion to upgrade to a four hose for $10 more) (10% off coupon code ‘hookahdomain’ may or may not work with Multiplier Effect promo)
- Japanese hookah charcoals
- Alarm clock
- SmartWool Light Hiker Socks Gray XL
- Fire/Water Safe
- Peg board accessories:
Pro Tip: Fix your Google Account after Gmail
No sooner was the ink dry on my rant about how Google screwed me over with separate Google Apps and Google accounts than I found a (partial) fix. No, you still can’t merge the two accounts, but you can remove Gmail from your Google Account, thereby putting it back the way it was before Gmail was provisioned.
I found out about it thanks to this article, which also notes that if you add secondary email addresses to your Google Account, you can also log in with those addresses, plus Google Calendar knows to include invites sent to those addresses in your calendar. Pretty cool.
There is, however, a downside. For whatever reason, my anelson at apocryph Google account still has a separate Contacts database from my anelson at apocryph Google Apps account. This sucks because it means I can’t easily use Google Voice to dial my contacts, or Picasa to tag faces based on my contacts.
Yes, yes, I can export from my Google Apps account and import into my Google account, and I in fact have done so, but it doesn’t stay in sync.
Since my new DROID phone can sync contacts between multiple Google accounts, I thought I’d try adding another email address, anelson.goog at apocryph, to my Google account, give it that email address and my password, and see if it would then retrieve my Google account’s contacts in addition to the Google Apps account contacts which it already retrieves, but I’m afraid the functionality is just too smart, and somehow detected that anelson.goog login was the same as the anelson login and since it already logs in to anelson at apocryph it just modified the existing account settings.
This is a big improvement, but the contact sync issue is a real drag. Hopefully I can figure out a solution one way or another.
Pro Tip: Don’t ruin your Google Account with GMail
For years I’ve had a Google Account under my personal email account, anelson at apocryph. It so happens that anelson at apocryph is a mailbox on a Google Apps-hosted domain, so I get GMail-like email capabilities, but as far as Google Accounts is concerned it’s a third-party email address. I thought that was a little odd, particularly if you have different passwords for your Google Account vs your Google Apps email account, but it’s not hard once you know about the distinction.
This worked great for me. When I ran apps like Google Reader, anelson @ apocryph was in the top right corner, and all was well. Then I made a serious mistake. I had been playing with Picasa Web and I really wanted to mess around with the face recognition. I was having so much fun that I wanted to setup a Picasa username so I could share URLs with a meaningful URL. Unfortunately, your Picasa username is also your Gmail username, and since my Google Account was a third-party account, choosing a Picasa username was actually setting up a GMail account attached to my Google Account (but of course none of that was disclosed at the time).
I finally settled on ‘repugnax’ for my username, and then something bad happened. All of a sudden, anelson @ apocryph was a secondary address on my Google Account; the primary was ‘repugnax’ and could not be removed. When I logged in to Google services I had to do so as repugnax at gmail now, and that’s the address that appeared in the top right corner. Argh!
Without warning or recourse, my Google Account turned into a Gmail account. I had to grit my teeth every time I saw that repugnax at gmail address, because it’s so much uglier than anelson @ apocryph. When I assign names to faces in Picasa, none of my anelson at apocryph contacts are available, because it’s using the contacts under the repugnax at gmail account (which of course are empty). The same goes for other google services (like Reader) that use your GMail contacts. These are minor annoyances, so I’ve suffered silently up to this point.
Then I got my DROID smartphone. If you have a DROID you know that step #1 in setup is to give it a Google Account to use. It doesn’t tell you this explicitly, but the account you give it will have a special status as the primary account, and can’t be changed without reset to FACTORY DEFAULTS! Since I don’t use the repugnax mailbox for email, I gave it anelson at apocryph, which (oddly) worked even though it’s not an actual Google Account. I could get my anelson at apocryph email on my phone, so I was happy.
Until I wanted to play with Google Latitude. You see, the Latitude feature of the Maps application on the DROID silently uses your primary Google Account to update your location. But my primary account wasn’t a Google Account at all, but a Google Apps mailbox, so I couldn’t activate Latitude on the account, so it wouldn’t work. Even if I didn’t hate the repugnax account, in order to go back and make it my primary account I’d have to repave the phone, which I wasn’t about to do.
So I manned up, removed anelson at apocryph from the repugnax account, and created a new Google Account under anelson at apocryph. I then migrated my Google Reader subscriptions over, and it’s like it’s 2006 again. Google Latitude works and updates my anelson at apocryph Latitude profile, and I see the proper email address in the top right corner of the Google services I use.
Sadly, my Google Voice account is stuck with repugnax, probably forever. I sent a Google Wave invite to my new anelson at apocryph Google account, but step one is to pick a username, which is, you guessed it, actually code for provisioning a gmail account, so I can’t (or, more accurately, won’t) use Google Wave with my new account. It’s definitely not ideal. Why the hell does Google do things this way? I’ve read lots of complaints about it in the support forums, but they don’t seem to care. Oh, and merging two accounts? Fuck you. Can’t be done.
Given that Google services are free it’s probably a little weak to bitch about them, but I don’t care. This is bullshit and it should be fixed.
Photos from Kyiv Trip are Up
I’ve finally finished geotagging and uploading my Kyiv photos. I didn’t get the chance to take as many as I would have liked, and many of them didn’t turn out as well as I would’ve liked, but there are still some pretty good shots in the bunch.
The Flickr set is here.
There’s alot there, but here are a few highlights:
The Ukrainian MFA:
St. Michael’s Cathedral:
Independence Square, site of the Orange Revolution:
The Soviet monument the People’s Friendship Arch, now made less intimidating by the addition of neon:
The Kyiv Funicular:
Panorama of Dnepr and the city:
Another panorama featuring the Dnepr:
Panorama 3:
Scene from the park:
I just can’t stop making panoramas:
Couple enjoying the view:
Another panorama, this one from the Friendship Arch:
Another Friendship Arch panorama:
An actual photo of me, at the Friendship Arch:
Max at the Softheme office, catching up on some reading:
Scene from the “Picturesque Alley”:
Nice view of the Dead City:
Jim Coleman Honda of Kyiv:
Trying out new StackOverflow Careers
I’ve been playing with the new StackOverflow Careers beta. Today they released a bunch of new features, which makes it pretty cool. If it had the ability to generate Word and plain-text resume files from the site, I would abandon my Word-based resume entirely. Hopefully that’s coming.
You can see my resume here. When the employer side opens up (supposedly next month) my company will definitely be using it to look for programmers.
Video from September 2-gun and 3-gun matches
I’m pretty late in posting the video from last month’s 2- and 3-gun matches at SEG, but better late than never.
9-September 2-gun
I didn’t do too well on this match. I placed 10th overall, most because of slowness than point penalties.
Stage 1 was a bitch, because it required several weak-side shots. I fired my rifle left-handed for the first time during that stage, which I guess speaks volumes about my rifle training. In any case:
On stage 2 I took my own advice and slowed down; in hindsight, probably too much. I was only down 1 point, but my time was 15 seconds slower than the winning time. Ouch:
On stage 3 I again shot fairly accurately, but very slowly. My time was 13.91; winning time was 9.15:
When I was watching the 7pm squad shoot stage 4, I thought to myself “I don’t get it; why are they shooting it so slowly?”. I then shoot it in 7.69 seconds for a score of 9.19. Best time was a blistering 5.72; winning score was 7.62. Ouch.
23-September 3-gun
This was the first 3-gun match I’ve ever shot, and the first at SEG as well. It was different from 2-gun in a few important ways:
1. Shotguns!
2. One long stage instead of four short ones
3. We each got to reshoot the stage one extra time
You’d think with a do-over that I’d turn in an awesome performance, and you’d be wrong. I placed 7th, with a time of 101.2 and 7 point penalties. Interestingly, I had the lowest penalties of everyone in the match, meaning I shot more accurately than any other shooter. You might think that means I’m a crack marksman inexplicably beaten by a bunch of hosers, but you’d be wrong again. A key aspect of winning in practical shooting matches (and, I assume, gunfights) is balancing speed with accuracy. It’s not that I was the only one in the match able to shoot as accurately as I did; I was the only one who traded speed for accuracy the way I did.
The winner of the match had only 10 points down, so not far from me. But I was also beaten by buys with 13, 18, and 21 points down, who nonetheless shot a fast enough time that even with penalties they still came out ahead. Every time I try to do that, I go too far in the other direction, and rack up alot of penalties without getting enough extra speed to balance it out, which is why I force myself to focus on accuracy and not speed. At some point hopefully I’ll be good enough I can pour on some speed and keep accuracy reasonable, but I’m not there yet.
Another thing I learned in this match is how to load a shotgun. Of course, I’ve loaded my shotgun before, but never on the clock. As you can see in my first run through, I dropped a shell and had to chase it all over the range, coming dangerously slow to breaking the 180. Gumbel was smart enough to just take the point penalty and skip that shot.
Anyway, here we go. Attempt number 1:
(Stupid shitty Flickr can’t decide if it supports video or not, so it stops at 90 seconds. WTF?)
Attempt number 2, sans slug fumble:
Shoot IDPA at SEG Today; Did Poorly
Today was the monthly IDPA shoot at SEG. I did pretty poorly, and was even in danger of being beaten by Gumbel. I’m not sure why I shot so badly, but the whole night I was definitely off. I was missing easy shots, forgetting the course of fire, and generally doing stupid things.
I need a ton more practice with the new STI 1911 before I shoot it nearly as proficiently as I did my old Glock 19, but I’m committed to sticking with the STI, as it’s my daily carry gun and the Glock 19 is not.
The videos tell the sorry tale:
Here’s stage 1. It was actually a cool stage, with a reactive target rigged up so you shoot one target’s head, which then reveals another target. I rushed it, and I didn’t think clearly so I put a body shot into the target that required the head shot. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
On to stage 2, which involved some fairly long-range shooting. I did predictably badly on this, although mechanically I shot it fine.
Next came stage 3, which involved some shooting while retreating, and some shooting from cover. I flubbed a few of the shots from cover.
Finally, stage 4. Very simple, included one-handed shooting with strong and weak hand. I never shoot well with my weak hand, and this was no exception.
Overall, I was ashamed of my performance. I haven’t made it to the range to practice in two weeks, and boy does it show. I’ve GOT to get some practice in this weekend before next week’s 2-gun match.
Installing ‘pg’ gem with RubyInstaller 1.9.1 preview2
I’ve been running the latest RubyInstaller preview for Ruby 1.9.1 on my Windows boxes. It’s way better than the old 1.8.x stuff, but some things are harder than others. One thing that’s tricky is getting some gems installed that build from source. I recently had cause to install the ‘pg’ gem to access PostgreSQL databases from my Ruby apps. Here’s what I did:
I started with the RubyInstaller 1.9.1 preview2, which installed Ruby 1.9.1 P243. I got it here.
I then downloaded the DevKit 3.4.5 r3 from the same page, and extracted the .7z file into the directory where I installed Ruby (c:\work\tools\Ruby19 if you care).
Next I opened up a command prompt with the Ruby environment already set up, using the ‘Start Command Prompt with Ruby’ shortcut. If you instead launch your own command prompt, things probably won’t work right, as the paths won’t be tweaked appropriately.
After that, I tried gem install pg, which failed thusly:
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: Error installing pg:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
C:/work/tools/Ruby19/bin/ruby.exe extconf.rb
ERROR: can't find pg_config.
HINT: Make sure pg_config is in your PATH
*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of
necessary libraries and/or headers. Check the mkmf.log file for more
details. You may need configuration options.
Provided configuration options:
--with-opt-dir
--without-opt-dir
--with-opt-include
--without-opt-include=${opt-dir}/include
--with-opt-lib
--without-opt-lib=${opt-dir}/lib
--with-make-prog
--without-make-prog
--srcdir=.
--curdir
--ruby=C:/work/tools/Ruby19/bin/ruby
Gem files will remain installed in C:/work/tools/Ruby19/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/pg-0.8.0 for inspection.
Results logged to C:/work/tools/Ruby19/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/pg-0.8.0/ext/gem_make.out
Doh! The PostgreSQL pg_config tool isn’t in my path.
I’m running PostgreSQL 8.4.0-1 installed with the One-Click Installer, installed in the default path C:\Program Files (x86)\PostgreSQL\8.4. The pg_config tool is in the bin subdirectory:
set "PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files (x86)\PostgreSQL\8.4\bin"
Note the double-quotes are important, since the PATH includes paths that contain spaces. I then tried gem install pg again:
Building native extensions. This could take a while... Successfully installed pg-0.8.0 1 gem installed Installing ri documentation for pg-0.8.0...
Ok. Let’s test it:
irb(main):001:0> require 'pg'
=> true
irb(main):005:0> conn = PGconn.connect('pixel', 5432, '', '', 'testdb', 'test', 'test')
=> #
Yay! Nailed it!
Next up, getting it working with Rails.