Month: February 2008

A small bug in an almost laughably little-used module in Bugzilla, namely that the email interface was case-sensitive and shouldn’t be, was finally resolved as “WORKSFORME” and closed.

Seven years later. A nice milestone for Bugzilla; I bowed out of working on the product about five years ago, and they keep on keeping on. Way to go, folks! Oldest bug I’ve ever been a part of…

With Super Tuesday happening right now, I found myself reflecting on what I’d do if I were the President of the United States.

So with a minimum of thought, zero worries about conflicting goals, and far too little foresight, here would be my campaign goals:

1. Balance the budget with no financial monkey business. Everything else is oriented toward balancing the budget on a monthly basis.
2. Withdrawal of US forces from the entire planet except our own nation and the minimum required for our contribution to international peacekeeping forces. This would reduce the budget requirements of the US by approximately 25%.
3. Spend the first year of my campaign, along with the Vice-President, attempting to visit every nation in the world to discuss treaties, and renegotiate them if necessary to support the first goal.
4. Increase our space exploration budget with money saved elsewhere, with the goal of encouraging monetizing research to increase the US technology lead.
5. Increase science grants, and provide incentives for more science and engineering curricula in elementary and secondary schools.
6. Throw out the destructive, unfunded mandate “no child left behind” program.
7. Break up the Exxon-Mobile oil monopoly in the US.
8. Mandate the installation of real-time and over-time fuel-usage gauges in all new production automobiles to encourage people to save their own gasoline.
9. Propose incentives for stronger nuclear and solar power programs. Vast stretches of uninhabited desert exist in the US which are suitable for solar power, and nuclear (not nukular) power has the smallest environmental footprint and largest power output of any currently-available technology.
10. Dramatically increase the number of visas available for the H1B program from today’s 65,000 back to pre-2000 levels of over 200,000. We want the world’s best and brightest to come here to the USA. I would also seek to provide incentives for H1B visa holders to remain working in the USA as long as possible and become US citizens. Part of this package should include fast-track citizenship methods for foreigners who engage in military service.
11. Seek closer ties with Canada and Mexico. We rely on one another too much to be building more walls, and have a vested interest in ensuring accountability for our goods shipped to one another.
12. Solve the Social Security shortfall simply: remove the $90,000 per year wage cap on Social Security taxes. Currently, if you make $100,000 a year, the last $10,000 have no Social Security tax.
13. Return capital gains tax to its historic level of 20%. The exemption for a homeowner’s private residence and other middle-class exemptions would be preserved. Temporarily devote 3% of that capital gains tax to Social Security in order to be able to handle the huge “bubble” of Baby Boom generation individuals currently retiring, with plans to sunset that tax by 2030 when many of them will be dying off.
14. Use a portion of the budget freed up by not policing the planet to provide better veteran’s health care.
15. Encourage corporations to buy and hire domestically through various economic incentives.
16. Increase our participation and openness in the United Nations. With our decreased world military presence, UN coalitions are more necessary.

I am sure there are a million things I missed, and a dozen things that are self-contradictory, but I’d float this as my goals to start and then improve over time. I’d consider being willing to change my opinion a virtue, not a problem. As a matter of fact, one opinion of mine — that we needed to occupy Iraq for the next 50 years for it to be stable — changed while I was writing this. Balancing the budget and occupying multiple foreign countries are incompatible goals.

I realized after I wrote this, too, that I didn’t say anything about music and the arts. They are important, too, but I’m not sure I want the government deciding what is artistic.

What would you do if you were elected President?

Slate’s resident Human Guinea Pig, Emily Yoffe, tops several of her previous columns with her own personal trial of The Secret.

I thought the ad campaigns for the movie were brilliant. They made me want to buy! Kudos. Now that I know what it is… meh, no thanks. Pseudo-scientific hokum.

The health claims bother me a lot. A friend was distraught recently because one of his friends had died. He saw it as completely senseless: his friend had been mentally retarded and believed some health claims provided by someone from her church. These health claims included things like “soap is harmful and unnatural”, “deodorant clogs your pores and leads to poor health”, and “you don’t need drugs, God will intervene on your behalf”. She was morbidly obese, and her refusal to use soap when showering or antibiotics when she developed cellulitis led directly to her demise.

The chief thing that bugs me is that it’s recently been proven (as far as science can be trusted) that a positive attitude has no effect on cancer survival, yet The Secret touts people as surviving cancer purely by the strength of their mind.*

I think that, if we had enough data on those cases, we could know exactly why the cancer went into spontaneous remission. It’s not some magical power of the mind appealing to a Universal Intelligence, but usually something as simple as the cancer starving itself for nutrients due to insufficient blood flow to the site it developed in, or bone marrow chancing upon a non-anergic T-cell combination capable of fighting the tumor.

To me, “The Secret” is nothing more than age-old snake-oil being sold to a modern audience: pray and believe, and you will find success in your endeavors.

I have a better recipe: work your ass off, live within your means, use a budget, and save your money, and you will probably find success. Then again, you might get hit by a bus and die. Good luck!

* Yes, a positive attitude helps in myriad ways. It’s been demonstrated to boost the immune system and of course improves one’s quality of life. But as far as diseases in which the immune system is compromised — like anergic T cells which refuse to attack cancer cells, or AIDS — positive attitudes appear to have no statistically-measurable influence on death rates.

I slid up in the right-hand lane behind a 1990’s-vintage Pontiac Grand Prix on my way to work. Minding my own business, doing my usual routine of driving a bit slower than the speed limit because I tend to get there just as fast the fellow in the next lane, but with less brake-mashing.

The Grand Prix wanders left. I think, “Oh, OK, he’s changing lanes without using his blinker.” This is an all-too-common event on Utah roads. I heard the rationalization from a friend once that “the reason I don’t use my blinker to change lanes is because if I communicate my intent, the driver in the next lane will speed up so I can’t do it.” Yeah, not my experience (generally) in any of the 20 or so states I’ve driven in, but there you have it. Barring the occasional jerk who does exactly what my friend described, most people are gracious.

So the car in the next lane, recognizing the intent of the Grand Prix driver to move in, taps his brakes and backs off a bit to make room. Well, the Grand Prix instead jerks his car to the right, hitting the slush on the shoulder, then correcting back into his lane again.

Next up: a stoplight. The light turns green. The fellow in front of the Grand Prix is almost 200 feet out before the Grand Prix driver recognizes that he’s gone, and floors it to catch up. I accelerate at the usual sedate pace I follow — in hopes of better gas mileage — and watch. The driver slams on the brakes once he catches up to the fellow in front of him.

Then he does the whole “wander left, correct right, get into the slush” bit again. And a third time a little further up.

Now the only thing going through my mind is “I don’t wanna pass this guy”. Although my reaction is to want to be as far away from an erratic driver as possible, due to the laws of physics in general sleepy, drunk, or high drivers don’t tend to hit the people behind them. So I maintained my cautious vigil behind this fellow, counting down the blocks until I would be as far away as possible from him. Eventually, I reached my turnoff, and the Grand Prix turned the other way.

Heaven help the people on that interstate.

So here’s the question: how do you handle it when you see people driving erratically?