Quotulatiousness

November 23, 2014

Working and middle class pushback against Obamacare

Filed under: Health, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:20

At Mother Jones, Kevin Drum looks at some of the reasons Obamacare is not being embraced by the working and middle classes the way many expected:

Obamacare winners and losersHere’s an interesting chart that follows up on a post I wrote a few days ago about Democrats and the white working class. Basically, I made the point that Democrats have recently done a lot for the poor but very little for the working and middle classes, and this is one of the reasons that the white working class is increasingly alienated from the Democratic Party.

I got various kinds of pushback on this, but one particular train of criticism suggested that I was overestimating just how targeted Democratic programs were. Sure, they help the poor, but they also help the working class a fair amount, and sometimes even the lower reaches of the middle class. However, while there’s some truth to this for certain programs (unemployment insurance, SSI disability), the numbers I’ve seen in the past don’t really back this up for most social welfare programs.

Obamacare seems like an exception, since its subsidies quite clearly reach upward to families in the working and middle classes. Today, however, Bill Gardner points me to a Brookings paper from a few months ago that suggests just the opposite. The authors calculate net gains and losses from Obamacare, and conclude that nearly all its benefits flow to the poor. If I interpolate their chart a bit, winners are those with household incomes below $25,000 or so, and losers are those with incomes above $25,000.

ESR on how to learn hacking

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:59

Eric S. Raymond has been asked to write this document for years, and he’s finally given in to the demand:

What Is Hacking?

The “hacking” we’ll be talking about in this document is exploratory programming in an open-source environment. If you think “hacking” has anything to do with computer crime or security breaking and came here to learn that, you can go away now. There’s nothing for you here.

Hacking is a style of programming, and following the recommendations in this document can be an effective way to acquire general-purpose programming skills. This path is not guaranteed to work for everybody; it appears to work best for those who start with an above-average talent for programming and a fair degree of mental flexibility. People who successfully learn this style tend to become generalists with skills that are not strongly tied to a particular application domain or language.

Note that one can be doing hacking without being a hacker. “Hacking”, broadly speaking, is a description of a method and style; “hacker” implies that you hack, and are also attached to a particular culture or historical tradition that uses this method. Properly, “hacker” is an honorific bestowed by other hackers.

Hacking doesn’t have enough formal apparatus to be a full-fledged methodology in the way the term is used in software engineering, but it does have some characteristics that tend to set it apart from other styles of programming.

  • Hacking is done on open source. Today, hacking skills are the individual micro-level of what is called “open source development” at the social macrolevel. A programmer working in the hacking style expects and readily uses peer review of source code by others to supplement and amplify his or her individual ability.
  • Hacking is lightweight and exploratory. Rigid procedures and elaborate a-priori specifications have no place in hacking; instead, the tendency is try-it-and-find-out with a rapid release tempo.
  • Hacking places a high value on modularity and reuse. In the hacking style, you try hard never to write a piece of code that can only be used once. You bias towards making general tools or libraries that can be specialized into what you want by freezing some arguments/variables or supplying a context.
  • Hacking favors scrap-and-rebuild over patch-and-extend. An essential part of hacking is ruthlessly throwing away code that has become overcomplicated or crufty, no matter how much time you have invested in it.

The hacking style has been closely associated with the technical tradition of the Unix operating system.

Recently it has become evident that hacking blends well with the “agile programming” style. Agile techniques such as pair programming and feature stories adapt readily to hacking and vice-versa. In part this is because the early thought leaders of agile were influenced by the open source community. But there has since been traffic in the other direction as well, with open-source projects increasingly adopting techniques such as test-driven development.

Margaret MacMillan: The Road to 1914

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Military, WW1 — Nicholas @ 00:03

Published on 11 Nov 2014

International historian Margaret MacMillan returns to The Agenda to discuss the events that led to the First World War, as chronicled in her book The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914. MacMillan tells Steve Paikin why Europe’s major powers made decisions that resulted in The Great War.

H/T to Mark Collins, who comments:

The author’s website. Two quibbles: she lets Serbia off far too lightly; and she does not mention the not-unjustified German fear that, if Russia was not defeated fairly soon, by around 1916 she would be unbeatable in combination with the French (see here: “German Fears about Russia“).

Based on my readings to put together my “Origins of WW1” series, I rather agree with Mark on the measurement of Serbian culpability. Mark also posted a follow-up on the topic.

The odd names of Britain – now available as a wall map

Filed under: Britain, History, Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:02

Like most denizens of North America, I’ve sometimes stumbled upon odd village names in Britain. There are some weird and daffy names still in use in the UK and you can now get a wall map highlighting a large number of them:

Weird British place names

H/T to Jessica Brisbane for the link.

QotD: Seasickness

Filed under: Humour, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

It is a curious fact, but nobody ever is sea-sick — on land. At sea, you come across plenty of people very bad indeed, whole boat-loads of them; but I never met a man yet, on land, who had ever known at all what it was to be sea-sick. Where the thousands upon thousands of bad sailors that swarm in every ship hide themselves when they are on land is a mystery.

If most men were like a fellow I saw on the Yarmouth boat one day, I could account for the seeming enigma easily enough. It was just off Southend Pier, I recollect, and he was leaning out through one of the port-holes in a very dangerous position. I went up to him to try and save him.

“Hi! come further in,” I said, shaking him by the shoulder. “You’ll be overboard.”

“Oh my! I wish I was,” was the only answer I could get; and there I had to leave him.

Three weeks afterwards, I met him in the coffee-room of a Bath hotel, talking about his voyages, and explaining, with enthusiasm, how he loved the sea.

“Good sailor!” he replied in answer to a mild young man’s envious query; “well, I did feel a little queer once, I confess. It was off Cape Horn. The vessel was wrecked the next morning.”

I said:

“Weren’t you a little shaky by Southend Pier one day, and wanted to be thrown overboard?”

“Southend Pier!” he replied, with a puzzled expression.

“Yes; going down to Yarmouth, last Friday three weeks.”

“Oh, ah — yes,” he answered, brightening up; “I remember now. I did have a headache that afternoon. It was the pickles, you know. They were the most disgraceful pickles I ever tasted in a respectable boat. Did you have any?”

For myself, I have discovered an excellent preventive against sea-sickness, in balancing myself. You stand in the centre of the deck, and, as the ship heaves and pitches, you move your body about, so as to keep it always straight. When the front of the ship rises, you lean forward, till the deck almost touches your nose; and when its back end gets up, you lean backwards. This is all very well for an hour or two; but you can’t balance yourself for a week.

Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog), 1889.

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