Quotulatiousness

November 24, 2014

Allow more competition in the broadband marketplace

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

At Techdirt, Karl Bode points out the existing problem with lack of competition in the US broadband industry is largely due to various levels of government meddling with the market:

While Title II is the best net neutrality option available in the face of a lumbering broadband duopoly, it still doesn’t fix the fact that the vast majority of customers only have the choice of one or two broadband options. It’s this lack of competition that not only results in net neutrality violations (as customers can’t vote down stupid ISP behavior with their wallet), but the higher prices and abysmal customer service so many of us have come to know and love. Stripping away protectionist state laws can help a little, as can the slow rise of services like Google Fiber. But even these efforts can only go so far in blowing up a broadband duopoly, pampered through regulatory capture and built up over a generation of campaign contributions.

One solution is the return to the country’s barely-tried implementation of unbundling and network open access, or requiring that the nation’s subsidy-slathered monopolists open their networks to allow other competitors to come in and compete. There are many variations of this concept, and it’s something Google Fiber promised in its markets before backing away from it (much like their vocal support of net neutrality). Obviously being forced to compete is an immensely unpopular concept for the nation’s incumbent ISPs. Given that those companies dictate and often literally write the nation’s telecom laws, these requirements were eliminated in a number of policies moves starting in 2001 and culminating in the FCC’s Triennial Review Remand Order of 2004 (pdf).

This was amazingly presented at the time as a way to improve competition and spur investment, but primarily resulted in a bloodbath as dozens of consumer-friendly, smaller independent ISPs and CLECs were killed off, perpetuating and further cementing the noncompetitive duopoly we have today.

[…]

Despite the fact this model clearly works, it’s never considered in policy discussions as a serious possibility. Why? Quite simply because the incumbent providers don’t want it. Through the use of their various PR folk, astroturfers, think tankers, fauxcademics and assorted hired mouthpieces, they’ve successfully managed to utterly vilify the concept, painting it as the very worst sort of government meddling in (not actually) free markets. Instead, we’ve chosen to head down the path of letting the nation’s duopolists dictate telecom policy, and the end result should at this point be painfully obvious to everyone. Well, except the industry lobbyists who still somehow insist we’re all living in a competitive broadband Utopia.

India’s slavery problem

Filed under: India — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

In The Diplomat, Ankit Panda talks about the prevalence of modern slavery in India:

The 2014 Global Slavery Report, conducted by the Walk Free Foundation, estimates that India has the highest number of individuals living in slavery out of any country worldwide. The report finds that out of an estimated 35.8 million men, women and children around the world living under conditions of modern slavery, 14 million are in India (followed by 3 million in China and 2 million in Pakistan). India ranked first in terms of absolute numbers of people in modern slavery, and fifth overall in terms of percentage of its total population (1.14 percent) living in modern slavery (Mauritania, Uzbekistan, Haiti, and Qatar ranked above India, in that order). The total number of slaves in India is 20 percent higher than the 2013 report because of a change in methodology.

Modern slaves are defined as individuals subject to forced labor, debt bondage, human trafficking, forced sexual exploitation, and forced marriage. This is a considerably broader understanding of slavery that addresses issues of human and labor rights beyond the conventional understanding of the term as human property. This is in part why the 2014 report estimates 35.8 million modern slaves worldwide while the International Labor Organization (ILO) counts 21 million worldwide — the ILO estimate focuses on forced labor primarily. According to the Walk Free Foundation, evidence of modern slavery in one form or another was found in all 167 countries surveyed for the 2014 report.

[…]

Given the continued de facto importance of caste in Indian society, social factors play a role in poor labor and human security outcomes for certain sections of Indian society. The report in particular highlights the vulnerable position of India’s Dalit caste, noting that they have the “least social protections and are highly vulnerable to severe forms of exploitation and modern slavery.” It also notes the relatively poor state of women’s rights in the country, leading to “significant discrimination and high rates of sexual violence” against women and girls in India.

QotD: “… a modern Tory version of Mackenzie King”

Filed under: Cancon, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Harper is now the 6th longest serving PM in Canadian history having just surpassed Borden and Mulroney. The former fought a major war and the later revolutionized international trade policy. Harper? He abolished the Wheat Board. A sensible thing really. Not a big thing. This is not a government of big things, it is a government of small things. Harper is, as Lord Black has pointed out, a modern Tory version of Mackenzie King.

Now King did fight the Second World War. Sort of. He thought the whole thing rather a bother, getting in the way of his equivocating and crystal ball polishing. The general impression in Ottawa during the early Forties was that CD Howe was running the country. The only time in Canadian history when an engineer was given real power. I neither condemn or condone that fact, I simply point it out.

Harper would, of course, never delegate any important authority. Even the late Big Jim Flaherty was kept on a shorter leash than Paul Martin. A modern day CD Howe, assuming he could get elected, would never last five minutes in the Harper cabinet. Big Prime Ministers breed small cabinet ministers.

This leads to one of the essential problems of quasi-Presidential Prime Ministers. When the King falters so does the Kingdom. The Pearson government bungled along for five remarkably influential years. Mike had little idea of what was going on but with one of the strongest cabinets in Canadian history the business of government carried on.

If the PM doesn’t have any new ideas there are plenty of competent ministers more than willing to fill the gap. This is how men like Macdonald and King survived for political eons. How great Dynasties like those of the Tories in Ontario and Alberta were forged. If the King falters there is no shortage of Princes to carry the load.

Richard Anderson, “Steam Punk”, Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2014-11-18.

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.

November 22, 2014

Adrian Peterson talks to Tom Pelissero

Filed under: Football, Law, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:00

Tom Pelissero was one of the best local reporters in the Minneapolis area when he worked the Minnesota Vikings beat for 1500ESPN. Earlier this year, he moved to USA Today, but still lives in Minnesota. Earlier this week, he talked with disgraced Vikings running back Adrian Peterson in an exclusive interview:

Adrian Peterson the football player will be back one day. He’s sure of it, even after the NFL suspended the Minnesota Vikings’ star running back Tuesday for at least the rest of the 2014 season after his no-contest plea to a misdemeanor reckless assault charge.

Peterson had expressed remorse for injuring his son and maintained he was disciplining him — with a “switch” from a tree — the way he was disciplined as a child. If Peterson meets the court’s requirements, no conviction will go on his record. But Peterson, a father of six children by six women, knows he faces a lifelong challenge to prove he’s not an absentee parent, not a child abuser, not any of the demons he’s been portrayed as since the incident.

“I won’t ever use a switch again,” Peterson said. “There’s different situations where a child needs to be disciplined as far as timeout, taking their toys away, making them take a nap. There’s so many different ways to discipline your kids.”

In the more than 90-minute phone interview — Peterson’s first extensive public remarks since his Sept. 11 indictment — he spoke with USA TODAY Sports on a wide variety of topics, including why he refused to attend a hearing with the NFL before Commissioner Roger Goodell suspended him as well as his future with the Minnesota Vikings.

“I would love to go back and play in Minnesota to get a feel and just see if my family still feels comfortable there,” Peterson said. “But if there’s word out that hey, they might release me, then so be it. I would feel good knowing that I’ve given everything I had in me.”

Regardless of his football future, Peterson wanted to make clear his main focus now is on repairing his relationship with his son and trying to make people understand that, contrary to Goodell’s remarks in handing down his ban, his remorse is real.

What Thucydides can teach us about fighting ebola

Filed under: Africa, Europe, Greece, Health, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:43

In The Diplomat, James R. Holmes says that we can learn a lot about fighting infectious diseases like ebola by reading what Thucidides wrote about the plague that struck Athens during the opening stages of the Peloponnesian War:

Two panelists from our new partner institution, a pair of Africa hands, offered some striking reflections on the fight against Ebola.

Their presentations put in me in the mind of … classical Greece. Why? Mainly because of Thucydides. Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War isn’t just a (partly) eyewitness account of a bloodletting from antiquity; it’s the Good Book of politics and strategy. Undergraduates at Georgia used to look skeptical when I told them they could learn ninety percent of what they needed to know about bareknuckles competition from Thucydides. The remainder? Technology, tactics, and other ephemera. Thucydides remains a go-to source on the human factor in diplomacy and warfare.

But I digress. Ancient Greece suffered its own Ebola outbreak, a mysterious plague that struck Athens oversea during the early stages of the conflict. And the malady struck, perchance, at precisely the worst moment for Athens, after “first citizen” Pericles had arranged for the entire populace of Attica, the Athenian hinterland, to withdraw within the city walls. The idea was to hold the fearsome Spartan infantry at bay with fixed fortifications while the Athenian navy raided around the perimeter of the Spartan alliance.

[…]

That’s where the parallel between then and now becomes poignant. Thucydides notes, for example, that doctors died “most thickly” from the plague. The Brown presenters noted that, likewise, public-health workers in Africa — doctors, nurses, stretcher-bearers — are among the few to deliberately make close contact with the stricken. Relief teams, consequently, take extravagant precautions to quarantine the disease within makeshift facilities while shielding themselves from contagion. Sometimes these measures fail.

Now as in ancient Greece, furthermore, the prospect of disease and death deters some would-be healers altogether from succoring the afflicted. Selflessness has limits. Some understandably remain aloof — today as in Athens of yesteryear.

Teams assigned to bury the slain also find themselves in dire peril. Perversely, the dead from Ebola are more contagious than living hosts. That makes disposing of bodies in sanitary fashion a top priority. As the plague ravaged Athens, similarly, corpses piled up in the streets. No one would perform funeral rites — even in this deeply religious society. Classicist Victor Davis Hanson ascribes some of Athens’ barbarous practices late in the war — such as cutting off the hands of captured enemy seamen to keep them from returning to war — in part to the plague’s debasing impact on morals, ethics, and religion.

The rise of the Quebec libertarian movement

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:02

Back when I was active in the Libertarian Party of Canada, Quebec was an almost unknown area … there were so few libertarians or pro-free market people that we rarely tried to run a candidate in elections there. That apparently is now changing:

Published on 18 Nov 2014

“For a couple of years now, Canada has had a freer economy than the United States.”

That’s Martin Masse, one of the leading figures in the Canadian libertarian movement. Back in the late 90s, when libertarianism was a thoroughly marginal ideology in the country, Masse started Le Quebecois Libre, an online gathering place for allies to the cause.

Things have since changed. Free market ideas now inform Canadian public policy to a degree that’s probably surprising to the average American. Reason TV recently sat down with Masse to find out about this transformation and to discuss the future of liberty in our neighbor to the North.

A seasonal business model with growth potential

Filed under: Business, Humour, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:49

An ad in the Nashville Craigslist:

Thanksgiving fake date

It may not be a huge market, but there’s definitely a demand for these kind of services, especially at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and family birthday parties.

H/T to Marina Stover for the link.

QotD: The first “American” college football game

Filed under: Cancon, Football, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

… the first college-football contest was not played in 1869 between Rutgers and Princeton, but in 1874 between McGill and Harvard. The game the two New Jersey schools played was something close to soccer, with players (25 per side) allowed to kick the ball or bat it with their hands, and points scored by kicking the ball into the opponents’ goal. This game spread to a handful of other northeastern colleges in the next few years, under varying rules.

Meanwhile, Harvard played a different, more rugbyish game that allowed the ball to be carried and thrown. In 1874 it agreed to a two-game series in Cambridge with McGill, which also played a rugby-type game. The first game, played on May 14 under Harvard’s rules, was an easy victory for the home team. The next day they played under McGill’s rules, which permitted more ball handling, used an oval ball (unlike Harvard’s round one), and scored points with a “try,” similar to the modern touchdown. The contest ended in a scoreless tie, but Harvard’s players decided they liked McGill’s rules better than their own.

The “Boston game” soon became more popular than the kicking-oriented variety, and when representatives from four American colleges met in November 1876 to standardize football rules, they largely adopted the McGill/Harvard version. So while the 1874 game was quite different from today’s football, it is at least recognizable as an ancestor, whereas the game Rutgers and Princeton played in 1869 was an evolutionary dead end.

Fred Schwarz, “Why American Football Is Canadian”, National Review Online, 2014-11-13.

November 21, 2014

Paging Delos D. Harriman – come to the Kickstarter courtesy phone, please

Filed under: Britain, Space — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:33

This is a use of crowdfunding I didn’t expect to see:

A group of British scientists have taken to Kickstarter in order to get the first set of funds to attempt a landing on the Moon. All ex-teenage (very much ex-teenage, sadly) sci-fi addicts like myself will obviously be cheering them on (and recalling Heinlein’s The Man Who Sold The Moon no doubt) and possibly even subscribing. They’re looking for £ 600,000 or so for the planning phase and will need £ 3 billion to actually carry out the mission. That’s probably rather more, that second number, than they can raise at Kickstarter.

However, over and above the simple joy of seeing boffins doing their boffinry there’s a further joy in the manner in which such projects disintermediate around the political classes. That is, we’ve not got to wait for the politicians to think this is a good idea, we’ve not even got to try and convince any of them that it is. We can (and seemingly are) just getting on with doing it ourselves.

[…]

Here’s what they’re proposing:

    In arguably the most ambitious crowdfunded project ever attempted, a British team is planning to use public donations to fund a lunar landing.

    Within ten years, they believe they can raise enough money to design, build and launch a spacecraft capable of not only travelling to the Moon, but drilling deep into its surface.

    They also want to bury a time-capsule, containing digital details and DNA of those who have donated money to the venture as well alongside an archive of the history of Earth. Finally, the mission will assess the practicality of a permanent manned base at the lunar South Pole.

There’s no doubt at all that the Apollo and similar Russian space adventures had to be run by government. The technology of the time was such that only a government had the resources necessary to drive such a large project. But, obviously, the cost of rocket technology has come down over time.

Marsha Ivins talks about the reality of working in space

Filed under: Space, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:27

In Wired, former astronaut Marsha Ivins talks to Caitlin Roper about what it’s really like to work in space:

Everyone imagines that when you’re sitting on the launchpad atop 7 million pounds of explosive rocket fuel, you’re nervous and worried; but the truth is, there isn’t much to do for those two hours after you climb into the shuttle. Many astronauts just take a nap. You’re strapped in like a sack of potatoes while the system goes through thousands of prelaunch checks. Occasionally you have to wake up and say “Roger” or “Loud and clear.” But the launch itself is a whole other thing — from the pad to orbit in 8.5 minutes, accelerating the entire time until you reach the orbital velocity of 17,500 mph. That is a ride.

It turns out that once you’re actually in orbit, zero-g has some upsides. Without gravity, bodily fluids move toward your head. It’s a great face-lift. Your stomach gets flat. You feel long, because you grow an inch or two. (I thought, “Oh cool, I’ll be tall,” but of course everybody else was taller too.)

But zero-g also has some disadvantages. As that fluid shifts north, you get an enormous headache. Your body compensates and loses about a liter of fluid in the first couple of days — you essentially pee the headache away. And a lot of people get nauseated. The way to feel better is to “lose up,” to convince your visual system that “up” is wherever you point your head and “down” is where your feet are. When you can do that, and go headfirst or earlobe-first wherever you want, then you’re getting adapted to zero-g. On each flight this adaptation happens more quickly — your body remembers having been in space. But it can take a few days before your stomach finally settles down and says, “OK, what’s for lunch?”

I didn’t eat much on any of my flights. I don’t have a big appetite even on Earth, but between the lack of gravity and the shifting fluids, things can taste different in space. I’d bring great chocolate with me and it would taste like wax — it was very disappointing. But you don’t go to space for the gourmet dining. There’s no way to cook, on the shuttle or on the ISS. Space food is already cooked and then either freeze-dried and vacuum-packed — so you add water and put it in the oven to warm up — or it’s thermo-stabilized, like a military MRE. With no refrigerator on board, fresh food won’t keep. So on the shuttle we’d have to eat anything fresh — usually fruit like apples, oranges, and grapefruit — early in the mission.

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