Author: Leon

Categories
Business News Politics

Are you ready to swim?

“The truth hits everyone like a million atom bombs, and I can’t understand how everybody can be so calm. Time is running out and we all just sit around. So leave your message at the beep, ’cause I am leaving town.” —Leave a Message, Get Dead

Yesterday was Tax Freedom Day, although here in California it’s April 14th if you consider our higher-than-average income taxes. Divide up the days you work: the first hundred days are for the government. The balance are for you to spend on yourself, if you ignore all the other extortion you pay as sales tax or other fees.

It’s impossible to “get by” in the US now. The average family is left with $100/month after mortgage, food and health insurance, a scenario assuming no vacations and one car! So many people are out of work and leaning on government to take care of them, that 33 states are out of money to fund jobless benefits. California is at the top of the list. When income can be variable, a rational approach is to save during times of plenty to cover the lean times. Government does not work this way. Government moves by political pull and the expedient solution of the moment.

As all odds mount against any rational, moral person being able to make his way through life here, the Galt Meter tilts into the red zone. Can you imagine a meter that shows how close we are to the nightmare world described at the end of Atlas Shrugged, a doomsday clock that shows how close we are to destruction by weapons of immorality? It seems we’re now at a 53/47 split. Nearly half of us work so the other half can loaf and tell us what to do. Furthermore, the top 10% of producers pay 73% of taxes.

Mark Steyn calls tax-payers suckers, the rubes filling PT Barnum’s pockets. In fact, we are livestock. Within the system, we have little choice but to pay. You can choose self-destruction in the form of unbending resistance, or you can choose self-destruction by exchanging your soul for a whip in your hand. Disobey or obey. This dichotomy is false. The alternative is to stop participating.

The way forward is out. An incredible opportunity approaches. Statism is dead!  What was a theoretical conclusion will soon be demonstrated empirically. Because of its imminent failure, statism’s captains will lose sanction, and no longer be recognized as authority. That inspires fear and excitement, similar to jumping off a high cliff into deep water. Are you ready to swim?

References

Categories
Business News Politics

Rollback of Welfare Not the Only Way Out

In today’s TIA Daily, Robert Tracinski mentioned the Washington Posts’s Robert Samuelson’s continual apoplexy over the U.S. governments reckless course towards insolvency, and he concluded, “The bills are coming due for the welfare state, and the result is that we are entering a period of permanent fiscal crisis—a crisis that can only be solved if we decide to begin rolling back the welfare state.”

I would like to respectfully take issue with one word in that conclusion: only. Certainly, a rollback of entitlements would slow the inevitable decline of the state, but it’s not the only way, nor the most likely. Imagine the federal government coming to a consensus such as, “we just can’t afford it right now, so we’re halting subsidies for agriculture.” That’s an unlikely fantasy. What seems more plausible is a sudden disappearance of multiple programs, and the ones who’s beneficiaries have the least pull. Realistically, you can already see this. Big corporations get giant bailouts but schools want for funding.

It seems more likely that we will find decisions to cutback left unmade but made for us thanks to the hard facts of reality. These government programs will meet their just ends, and there will certainly be strong emotional reactions, tantrums even. I’m speaking euphemistically–I won’t be surprised when there are riots.

Some of these basic services our parents and grandparents handed over to the government are necessary and desired. (Being able to drive around on pavement is nice!) When the government fails to provide them, an opportunity might be seized. Without the a gun-powered monopoly chasing entrepreneurs away, what kind of wonderful solutions can we expect? I’m not sure, but I have been considering how I might help. Is anyone else thinking about how a collapse will provide an unprecedented chance to be productive?

Categories
Personal Poems

Mourning is a doorway back into daylight

Following is a song I wrote about 15 years ago. I thought I knew what it meant when I first wrote it, then I discovered a new meaning about seven years ago. I’ve discovered a more profound meaning, and it probably had this meaning all along. Before I explain, here are the words.

How Long Must You Cry

How long must you cry before you wonder why your life’s filled with pain? How long must you cry?

How long must you weep, crying yourself to sleep? Tear-stained memory. How long must you weep?

I know why you cry. I know why you cry. It’s for me. It’s for me. It’s for me. You cry for me.

How deep must you age before you turn the page? Gone is yesterday. How deep must you age?

How wise must you grow before you will know. I’m beyond your reach. How wise must you grow?

I know why you cry. I know why you cry. It’s for me. It’s for me. It’s for me. You cry for me.

When I first wrote this, this was kind of a bitter warning to someone who foolishly spurned my offer of friendship. I didn’t take the song very seriously and thought of it as “you don’t know what you’re missing”. The language is kind of extreme for the actual situation, but it’s stylized.

Years later, I discovered that instead of it being me speaking to someone else, it was someone I’d lost speaking to me. I imagined my father asking me how long I was going to feel sad about him dying. I took it as a statement to myself to suck it up, to repress the bad feelings.

Today, I started thinking of this song as an ideal version of myself, a version of myself who I dreamed I’d be as a child, speaking to myself as I really am. And I’m curious: when will I give up comparing myself to that unattainable ideal? When will I cease entertaining the idea of having a chance to replay the past?

So in this sense, I’m not attacking myself for feeling sad. There’s a version of me that could have been. There were decisions I made that got me where I am, and there were circumstances beyond my control that probably had a greater influence. It’s legitimate to mourn the loss of what could have been. The mourning is a doorway back into daylight. So, I’m pleased to find the song is not a bitter rant, nor a vigorous self-attack. It’s simply a question about when the truth will be accepted.

Categories
Programming

FreeTime 3

Thanks to the extra time provided by the holiday, I’ve finally put together a release of FreeTime 3, a pet project of mine for more than 10 years. This newest release is based on work I did on the software at Clear Ink from 2006 through 2009. Thanks to David Burk and Steven Nelson for sponsoring writing the code in the first place as their employee and more recently agreeing to donate the code back to the open source project. Their support is most generous!

FreeTime is a Web application written in PHP for MySQL that allows you to keep track of projects. It tracks comments, files and timesheet entries for projects divided up by clients and their divisions. Recently added features, not appearing in previous versions, include tasks, estimates and more reports. There’s also code that allows clients to log in to review work as if it’s a mini-site, but it hasn’t been tested in production. The most well-developed aspects of the application are related to timesheets, both gathering them from staff and then reporting on them.

I’m curious whether anyone will find the code useful, whether for educational or practical purposes. Its purpose was as a highly customized solution for Clear Ink, and it may have no utility outside the same type of consultancy. On the other hand, it could prove useful after some hacking. I would use it for myself if I do more consulting again.

You can download the source code from the FreeTime project page on SourceForge.

Categories
News

Canon MP620 on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

Earlier this year I got a cheap Canon MP620 all-in-one printer, which works great with Windows and works fine for Ubuntu. Canon released drivers as .deb files for the MP610 which work with cups. I remember sweating it out a bit because the printer does not work unless you track down a few pieces that aren’t in the Ubuntu repositories. Next time, I’ll check LinuxPrinting.org before buying a printer.

Anyway, I installed Karmic from scratch and found that I couldn’t install the Canon drivers because they want libcupsys2. Ubuntu renamed this package. I tried a few tricks to work around this, but the one works is to install the libcupsys2 dummy package from Jaunty. You can get it here: http://packages.ubuntu.com/jaunty/all/libcupsys2/download.

So, the new procedure is get the libcupsys2 .deb file and install it first. Then follow the instructions for Januty, such as Luca Gibelli’s Canon PIXMA MP620 Linux printing and scanning via wireless network on Ubuntu post from last April.

Update: check out Kevin Carter’s script for automating the process of adding support for the MP620.