Class wars

Getting rather annoyed about the use of the phrase "class war" to describe those arguing that the wealthy should pay more in taxes. Leaving aside the motives of those spreading it as a meme - a rather transparent yet successful attempt to discredit the argument by pretending it's something else - it's also wrong.

As an ex-Brit, I know what classes are, and being rich or poor doesn't determine the class you're in. Being a member of a privileged class though tends to mean you have power, which usually implies you're given wealth as part of the deal.

The US has classes, but it also has a number of other social structures that undermine the class system and make it less of an issue than it is (or to some extent was) in the UK. The rich and powerful do what they can to remain rich and powerful, and ensure their children are rich and powerful, and that makes it harder for those who aren't rich and powerful to move forward, but you can't really point at the rich and say they make up a unified establishment linked socially and economically. The wealthy's use of power tends to be through bribes - sorry, lobbying - and control of the media, not through sitting in a House of Lords or having friends who do.

You can argue that there's similarities, but in reality, the similarities are only in the sense that the powerful have the power to remain powerful.

Arguing that the wealthy should pay more in taxes is not "class war", even if, as those who promote the "class war" meme, the argument is because we're at war with rich people. Rich people are not a class.

And, just to make it clear to my right wing friends who slavishly repeat this stuff, nobody's arguing you shouldn't be rich. We just don't see it as good policy to tax those who benefit the most from a society - by definition - at the same or a lower rate than everyone else. And right now we know that we're in a state where there's a chronic lack of demand, which isn't going to be solved until money starts to flow into the pockets of the majority.

Rethinking abortion

I'm going to preface this with a summary because this is such a hot button issue, that it's likely to get misunderstood. The position described by this blog entry is this:

I am pro-choice, despite misgivings about the morality of abortion. I consider the legalization of choice important, but there are issues I care much more deeply about, that are more black and white, and my support for those latter issues overrides my support for the first.

-------------------

There aren't many reasons for a liberal to support the Democrats these days. The Democrats have anti-liberal policies in most spheres. They're pro-war. They're pro-torture. The TSA has continued to grow and become more draconian under Obama's watch. They support the war on the drugs, even going so far as to undermine state initiatives to curb the excesses of that war. They care little, or not at all, about the unemployed until it's a year or so before the next election and realize that lots of unemployed people equals lots of votes for the other guy. And I get into arguments with like minded liberals online, and usually, after a large number of statements like:

• Yeah, but they ended the war in Iraq
• You mean they kept to the timetable Bush agreed to? And they attacked Libya, illegally!
• But... they passed healthcare reform!
• Yes, but the reform they went for was anti-liberal. Now we're forced to buy insurance from the same abusive assholes who caused the problem in the first place, and with one or two exceptions, the same crap still exists. How is this better?
• But, uh, Bush!
• Can you point at a Bush policy of importance that Obama hasn't ultimately continued, or even extended?

the issue of the Supreme Court comes up. If we allow a Republican to win, says the reluctant Democrat, they'll appoint a conservative to the Supreme Court, tipping the balance and causing abortion to be banned!

And because I'm a liberal, and I support choice, that's usually the point at which I sigh and get frustrated. If the Democrats can always rely upon liberals to support them, even when they're anti-liberal, then how do we get the Democrats to actually stop being anti-liberal?

But as I've thought about it, I've become more and more convinced it's a bad argument anyway. Abortion is an important issue, but there are a hell of a lot of important issues. And for some reason, it's OK to throw our children under the bus in pointless wars, our dissenting voices and whistle-blowers under the torture bus, our cancer patients and other people in severe pain under the drugs war bus, our unemployed under the foreclosure bus, and our general freedoms under the bus, but it's not OK to "throw women under the bus" - or rather, a small number of women who, rightly or wrongly, end up in the doctor's chair wanting to end an unwanted pregnancy.

What's wrong with that picture?

Does it do liberalism any good if only one issue is fought for? And wouldn't it take care of the choice issue long term if there was a major political party willing to fight for liberal principles - that was scared of losing the liberal vote?

And, hold on a moment, but is this really the most important issue liberals should be fighting for, to the exclusion of everything else? Those Democrats who are considered liberals rarely spend as much effort fighting, say, the war on drugs, as they do the war on abortion, and yet there are significant similarities between the two, obscured in some ways because the war on drugs is current and criminalized by definition, and the war on abortion is not.

The war on drugs causes both "good" and "bad" uses of proscribed drugs to be banned. So both dope using cancer patients and stoners both end up criminalized. It's not entirely clear that many states would ban abortions in all circumstances, but despite that I'd agree with most assessments that both rape victims and "abortion as contraception" users would end up suffering under the ban.

The war on drugs makes matters worse for those who plan to take drugs anyway. Supplies become unreliable and unregulated, making them dangerous. Those who sell the drugs are criminals by definition, which means an above average interest by the criminal element in managing the distribution chain. Sellers have reasons to push overly addictive drugs, knowing there are no sanctions for doing so that don't apply to other drugs. Likewise, a cynic would probably wonder how many anti-choice advocates have shares in companies that sell wire coat-hangers.

Both the war on drugs and war on abortion are ultimately wars on the body, a belief that government has the right to intrude upon an individual's ultimate right to decide what their body can and cannot do. Governments have every right to help individuals make the right decisions - and obviously has every right to minimize the danger of one person's choices to others - but there are lines that should not be crossed. But, actually, in many ways the government has a stronger right to regulate abortion than it does drugs. At some point - the religious might argue around two weeks after the LMP, others would look at the development of the zygote, embryo or fetus and point at something significant such as brain development or a heartbeat - one has to come to the conclusion there's another body involved.

In our zeal to protect a woman's right to choose, it's become obvious that equal or greater principles have been thrown under the bus. More-over, it's not clear to me that simply the addition of a conservative to the Supreme Court would cause permanent, irreversible, damage to the cause. A conservative might overturn Roe vs Wade, but it would still be necessary for states to take the next step, and it's not immediately clear many would be successful. Free movement would also make it difficult for such laws to be effective. This is not to argue that a state could not cause hardship in its zeal to ban abortion, but a Republican winning an election does not mean an immediate, draconian, nationwide abortion ban.

Liberals should not focus on one issue to the exclusion of every other issue at each election, and especially not on this one. The Democratic party should not be allowed to think that its support for one issue - and the Republican's polar opposite opinion - should guarantee support for it from the liberal bloc. If the Democrats are ultimately an anti-liberal party, they shouldn't have our support.

New laptop, and Ubuntu Ocelot comments

Some news about my finances made me buy a laptop just after Christmas, not because they're good, but because this'll probably be the last time I get the chance to buy one for the next five years or so. Don't worry, the news is good news. I'll share more in a few weeks.

What I got was a Dell. Yes, I voluntarily went out and bought a Dell. Nobody buys Dells except (1) corporate IT departments and (2) "PC owners" in the fevered imagination of Mac zealots, until now. And in classic Dell style, the machine looks and feels boring. Corporate. Depressing. Urgh.

So why Dell? Well, because the alternative was Lenovo, and quite honestly, my last few experiences with Lenovo have not been good. I was thinking HP, but for some reason they refuse to include nipples on their laptops unless they cost four digits, which is a shame because I'd have gone in that direction given the budget PC I bought from them is excellent. And it gets harder to get nipples on your laptop with other brands. As it is, the Dell nipple could be a lot better, I'm on the look out for a better nub because it's actually quite painful to use.

What did I get? Well: It's a Latitude E6420, which is a Toyota Camry of the laptop world I guess. It has a Core i7, albeit a low end version (ie just the two cores, made to look like four using hyperthreading). The screen is a 1600x900 14" thing, which is very nice indeed, and there's a low end nVidia in there that, even under Wine, does a pretty good job on everything I've thrown at it, although GTA 4 is wanting. There's a (fairly crappy) webcam, an SD card reader, and a few things Ubuntu doesn't have drivers for like an RFID reader, finger print reader, etc. I've upgraded it to have a 750G disk, and 8G of RAM (which maxes it out unfortunately. With 4G being the standard today I'm bothered 8G will look pretty crappy in five years.)

I put Ubuntu 11.10 on it. Now, I'll be honest with you, while I like the direction Unity is going in, I do think - fairly strongly - that it was released too early. It's still not ready for prime time, in my opinion. There are major and minor complaints I have with it:

• Running an app that isn't on the dock is a PITA.
• The dock doesn't really understand/respect the "multiple workspaces" thing.
• The single menu thing is a great idea, but the whole "Move the mouse to it to see it" thing is bad. I'm a fan of Apple's solution here, change the "File" menu to have the same of the app and otherwise show the menu all the time. Or go the Commodore Amiga route and use the right mouse button. And, just showing the menu and not trying to id the app is OK in practice too (see below.) But however you do it, understand Fitts Law doesn't work well if you don't know where to send the mouse.

Some of these may seem minor, and it may not be a long list, but honestly, it's enough for me to not be able to stand the system for any great length of time. What I did instead was:

• Use the GNOME 3 "fallback" system
• Install the third party GNOME 3 panel applets that implement the Ubuntu menus (including the single menu) and that thing on the right with all the icons and your name and so on.
• Installed "Docky" and had that be the bottom panel. Docky isn't perfect, but it's slightly better at the multiple workspaces thing, and I prefer that style of window management - slightly - to the Windows 95 taskbar thing.

The third party PPA that includes Ubuntu panel applets for GNOME 3 is described by this article. The menu thing actually shows the menu at all times (no hiding it when the mouse isn't near it), and that works for me.

People are switching in droves to alternatives to Ubuntu because of Unity. I'm not convinced that it's quite as high as some of the claims - many people are citing figures from ISO distribution sites for instance, but most people upgrading from Ubuntu X to Ubuntu Y will never be in those figures. But still, Canonical does need to be a little more careful when releasing their new technologies. It's hard seeing giants of the Open Source/Free Software world fall not because their technologies are bad, but because they're willing to release unfinished crap as production code when they should sit on it and make it work properly before releasing it. Unity is getting there though. And from my brief testing of GNOME 3's Shell, I'm of the opinion Canonical are slightly ahead, although the GNOME 3 people have some great ideas too.

On that note, would it be too much to ask for Ubuntu to put Firefox 3.6 back in the repositories?

Also: Thunderbird is OK, but it's not Evolution, and quite honestly, I think Evolution is a much better product. It's much faster, and does more without the need for extensions. It's a little annoying that Ubuntu is supporting the former over the latter because even if you install the latter, it doesn't automatically integrate with Ubuntu's notification bar, while Thunderbird just sits there thumbing its nose at you.

Here's what I think Canonical needs to do for Ubuntu 12.04 (or 12.10, it's probably too late for 12.04.)

• Bring back hierarchical menus as a way to launch applications. Big translucent panels with huge icons that leave most apps hidden and with it being confusing as to whether an app is even on your computer or not doesn't work. It really doesn't. If you must do something like that, make the icons smaller.
• The dock really needs a lot of fixing. There's not enough space to show everything on most PCs which leads to awkward hacks involving scrolling. And it doesn't respect multiple workspaces. So, to that end:
• Make the dock thinner
• Let the user place the dock on the bottom of the screen if they so wish
• Only show icons for apps on the current workspace (plus launchers, widgets, etc), and if the same app has windows open on multiple workspaces, pretend those windows don't exist.
• Disable multiple workspaces by default (but make it easy for us to enable.)
• Reduce the number of circumstances in which the dock is hidden.
• The single menu needs to be implemented in all Ubuntu supported apps, including LibreOffice. It should not be hidden with the current window's name.
• Replace Thunderbird with Evolution.
• Replace Banshee (OMG. You know that thing causes the fan to start running, and both memory and CPU to be maxed out, immediately upon starting on my Netbook?) with RhythmBox. As a general rule, avoid replacing working software in the future just because it's imperfect and something else looks like it's going in the right direction - wait until that other app is proven first.

So, those are my opinions.

Finally, when did Wine get so good? With some minor exceptions, pretty much everything I've got on Steam that I tried has worked perfectly right out of the box. GTA IV needed some tweaking, and a third party DLL to disable Windows Live (which unfortunately disables all multiplayer, including LAN, alas) but once it works it's hard to believe it's not running natively. Awesome job.

Romney, Bain, and layoffs

Losing your job is a terrible thing. I should know. I've been laid off twice in the last two years. I wasn't fired, I remained on good terms with both companies, and the first, an automotive business consultancy, even contracted me to do work for them while I was looking for work.

But it still sucked. And so you might expect me to join the chorus of those attacking Mitt Romney for his stint at Bain Capital, during which time companies he was in some way responsible for laid off workers left and right. But I'm not going to. I don't think it's that simple.

The last few years have given layoffs a very bad name. This is in part because corporations have laid off workers when they've still been cash rich, and when there was no evidence that they couldn't afford to keep the workers on. By laying off people, they've reduced demand, which in turn, collectively, has damaged their own interests. This is a classic tragedy of the commons, or race to the bottom. It's in each corporation's best interests to lay off people if it can do the same work with fewer people, but collectively, the corporations end up with less work to do (and less income) because they've laid off all these people.

Of the two companies that laid me off, one fits the above description, the other doesn't.

The other laid me off because it was on the verge of bankruptcy. It's arguable it shouldn't have hired me in the first place, and even more arguably (because I'm me!) that it should have hired me a year earlier, because one of the problems the company was facing was it needed its IT infrastructure drastically upgraded, and that's the job I was brought in to do. But that said, actually primarily its problem was that it operated in the health field, and insurance companies were being bloody minded at the time because they didn't like HCR, and so a company that already had problems was suddenly fast-forwarded to bankruptcy many years too early.

Unhealthy businesses do need restructuring from time to time. When Bain bought companies, many companies it bought were in bad shape. Those companies needed to be restructured. It would be nice to claim that each company could have found some way to increase business 500% so that they could live with the same number of employees, but realistically, by the time its noticed that a business is doing badly, it's usually too late to do anything other than cut costs.

I have a second reason for knowing this. It relates to the first company that laid me off. As I said, we were an automotive business consultancy. To be specific, we collected information about the performance of our client's dealer networks (our clients were the manufacturers.) Car dealers are independent businesses, but they must operate efficiently and profitably in order for car manufacturers to stay in shape. We had one, and only one, client in Detroit. Guess which one?

If you said "Ford", and answered that because it was the only car manufacturer that survived 2008, then congratulations. You get the cookie.

Now, to be clear, I'm not arguing I saved Ford! Indeed, I have no idea what impact I had, although I'm 99% sure we helped them. What I do know is what Ford was doing at the time.

What differed Ford from GM and Chrysler was that Ford was on the ball well before the recession. It recognized it was unhealthy, that it needed to become healthy, and it enlisted a lot of help to make sure it did. Ford went through a restructuring without going bankrupt first. That restructuring left more of Ford and more of Ford's dealer network alive, and proportionally more people working directly and indirectly for Ford, than the bankruptcies did for GM and Chrysler.

It was hell for everyone involved at the time, of course, but we knew Ford didn't have much choice. There were hushed silences when we discussed the situation. We personally knew many of the people affected. We felt bad for them. We knew that some of the data we were supplying would affect the jobs of people we knew.

And because Ford did those painful things at the time, Ford is healthy today. People have jobs at Ford that wouldn't do today if it wasn't for the pain everyone went through a few years before the recession.

I never worked for Bain Capital. I can't say for sure whether Bain always made the right decisions. But I can say that there's nothing wrong with taking a company that has problems, and making sensible job cuts a part of fixing it if that's what's necessary to get the company working again.

And as such, I don't believe it's right to attack Romney for his Bain associations on this issue.

Ron Paul

One of the people I read who generally tends to be fairly on the ball about things (Glenn Greenwald) is insisting we should take Ron Paul seriously purely because he says some good things on the subject of foreign policy. The argument goes "Sure, he says some stupid stuff too, but why aren't you saying the same thing about Obama?"

Well, with respect, I am, which is why Obama isn't going to get my vote at this election, come what may.

I understand there's no perfect candidate at any Presidential election, but the reality is Ron Paul's worldview is not good. I can't support someone simply because he agrees with me on, say, the drug war and that current US government foreign policies are bad if the overall package is bad too. Obama and I probably agree on a few things too, but overall, the man is a monster. Here are my problems with Ron Paul.

• Economically he's a kook. He believes in the gold standard and a view of currency that's caused financial disasters everywhere it's been deployed since in the world became capitalist enough for currency to matter.
• I'm not convinced that he is much of a libertarian at heart. Paul's always advocated State's Rights when given the opportunity to, something I have severe problems with. When you're thinking about giving rights to a government, even at the expense of another, you're doing libertarianism wrong.
• If there's a major problem with the US at the moment that's causing havoc and likely to cause even more, it's that a small wealthy elite are wielding a disproportionate amount of power. It's hard for me to see how the "libertarian" policies Ron Paul does espouse are going to help that. I do want to see businesses regulated, I want to see playing fields leveled, and I want to have social programs that ensure the "99%" don't live in fear.
• I really am bothered by the Newsletter fiascos. Paul's defenders have come up with a lot of "explanations" for this in efforts to distance him from the newsletters in question, but the racism went on for years and somehow Paul didn't seek to stop his name being slapped on this garbage at any time during this time. Did he really not read his own newsletter?
• Paul advocates a different foreign policy, one that might be "better" but I believe is bad too. I don't see how complete isolation can be positive for the US, even if it would be preferable to us invading any country that some on the extreme right have a hard on over.

All of these are major problems for me. At this point, the only argument for Paul is "Well, isolation better than war war war, and economy can't possibly get worse", but I don't necessarily agree. Isolation might be as bad as war war war, and efforts to destroy our independent central bank, which is the one agency that's had the freedom and power to try to mitigate the effects of our disastrous contractionary fiscal policies over the Obama years, would unquestionably be worse, especially coupled with the dismantling of the remaining Federal agencies that work to keep money flowing into the economy.

We need a better Presidential candidate, but Ron Paul isn't it.

Predictions for 2012

It's hard to know what's going to happen even three months from now, but I'm going to stick my head up and make some predictions about what will happen over the next year. Let's see what I get right!

January

The little known "Year 2012" problem causes problems with the Pontiac Aztec's onboard computer. There is much celebration as every Pontiac Aztec in the country blows up simultaneously.

Romney continues to lead in the Republican nomination fight, with a gay sex scandal causing upcoming rival Rick Santorum to drop out. Ron Paul continues in second place, though nobody thinks he will win anyway so who cares?

February

Apple releases the iPhone 5. Considered "snappier" than the previous iPhone, it comes with the ability to make phone calls, surprising pundits who were unaware of this lack of standard functionality present in all featurephones before now, a surprise that followed voice dialing, multimedia messages, tethering, and the ability to install apps. Reportedly the iPhone 6 will include the ability to send text messages, and the iPhone 7 will be able to take pictures.

Romney continues to lead in the Republican nomination fight, despite the Republicans  rallying around Joe the Plumber, who subsequently drops out after photos emerge of an "accident" involving a small pipe and something slightly too large stuck inside of it.

March

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Barack Obama declares war on Brazil after it is reported that Brazil is made up of foreigners, some of whom are Muslim, and after John Bolton claims that the country is attempting to acquire Nuclear weapons.

Liberals are divided between those sure that Obama has good reasons to be starting another war and who wouldn't do it if it wasn't the right thing to do, and those concerned Obama might be in the pockets of big coffee.

A surprise surge by serial killer Charles Manson threatens to knock Romney off his front runner status in the Republican nomination, until Manson's views on State's Rights ensure his rapid downfall.

April

With the war in Brazil causing coffee prices to be at all time highs, Nobel Peace Prize Winner Barack Obama invades Colombia. Liberals are divided amongst those who argue we should trust Obama's judgement on such matters and not question him, for fear of having some Republican war monger win the next election, and those who call for more tea drinking in order to wean America off of its addiction to coffee.

The Simpson's Montgomery Burns temporarily challenges Romney's lead in the race to the Republican nomination, but most Republicans unhappy with the contest reluctantly withdraw their support after hearing that Burns is a cartoon character and not real. This is despite last minute from Glenn Beck who claims that rumors Burns is "not real" are liberal media lies, and that he has "hundreds of hours" of video evidence, including a major feature film, showing Burns in person.

May

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Barack Obama announces the war in Brazil is over after President Rousseff is captured and waterboarded for several weeks. Obama announces a "complete" withdrawl of troops that will leave only a "skeleton force" of ten million soldiers in the country. Liberals are divided between those who praise Obama and feel vindicated, and those who roll their eyes and shake their heads in frustration.

Republicans coalesce around surging candidate Dennis Miller, until they realize they don't think he's funny either.

June

The new Facebook Phone is announced, which differentiates itself from other phones by transcribing everything the owner says, regardless of whether the caller is on a call, and posting it to the Internet.

Republicans express relief after little known Presidential candidate Margaret Thatcher leads Romney by two points, despite the fact that she's not a natural born citizen (or a citizen at all.) After being accused of hypocrisy given the Republican's "birther" movement, Republicans argue that they're not hypocrites, you're a hypocrite. Touche.

July

The iPad 3 is finally released. At 20", it's the largest tablet ever released, can only run three apps, and weighs over a ton. It sells one billion units in the first week. Other tablet makers, who have tried to focus on, you know, usefulness, give up.

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Barack Obama announces a new war with France, with rave responses from Dick Cheney and many liberals. Meanwhile, the Republican nomination race intensifies with "Barry O'Bama" temporarily leading Mitt Romney, with over 90% of the vote, until it's discovered that Barry is, in fact, Barack Obama, wearing sun glasses and a hat.

August

Texas and Alaska both secede from the union. To the surprise of both, the rest of the nation reacts in celebration, until Nobel Peace Prize Winner Barack Obama invades both, pointing out both states have oil. Liberals are strongly divided like never before, with a small minority feeling that we must trust Obama's judgement, and the rest utterly bewildered.

Mysterious candidate "Ron Mitmey" challenges Mitt Romney for the Republican nomination, but even Republicans can tell it's Mitt Romney pretending to be not Mitt Romney.

September

With time running out, Republicans race to find a Presidential candidate they all like. Discovering the constitution makes no mention of Presidential candidates needing to be living, top Republican scientists attempt to re-animate the corpse of Ronald Reagan, who immediately starts campaigning on deficits not mattering, banning black people from owning guns, and on how Hollywood Celebrities make the best Presidents.

October

Realizing his support has plummeted, Obama immediately runs a campaign against himself, saying "Vote for me, Barack Obama, and not that guy who's currently President - isn't it George W. Bush? I think it is. Yeah, he's the President." Meanwhile, the re-animated corpse of Ronald Reagan beats Mitt Romney for the Republican nomination.

November

In a surprise upset, Paul Krugman is elected President. Virtually every incumbent in Congress is defeated, even Joe Lieberman who wasn't even supposed to be up for election. Realizing it's the end, the entire government is transfered over to the newly elected two months early, and by the end of the month, a strong stimulus, the worldwide withdrawal of troops, and the legalization of drugs has resulted in peace and prosperity across the world.

December

Unfortunately the world ends.

Got a Kindle Fire

Generally liking it, but I have to admit my major objection to it right now is that there's no Google. This means you can't, for example, install software you legitimately bought on the Android Market, unless you buy it a second time on the Amazon App Store. Not good.

Also meant I had to do some fancy sideloading to get Google Music installed - as Google Music has my entire music library, and Amazon Cloud doesn't (maybe the latter would if it (a) supported more formats and (b) had an automatic Ubuntu uploader like Google Music does.) And what's with it only having 6G of storage? Where did that come from?

Plusses - perfect size, not too big (I've used 10" tablets before - they're not portable and anyone who tells you otherwise is a fanboi), not too small; UI is pretty decent for the most part. Battery life seems to be excellent, better than my Android phone indeed.

I'm thinking though it's highly likely that the rumored CyanogenMod 9 version for Kindle Fire (that's Icecream Sandwich) will end up on mine, simply because I can't do without teh Google, and quite honestly, I trust Google more than I trust Amazon as far as giant faceless corporations go.

Politifact, handwaving, and "Both sides do it"

Both sides do do it.

Democrats complain about abuses of civil liberties outside of office, then go in and do the same thing that Republicans complain about.

Democrats express concern about the unemployed with out of office, and then suddenly don't give a rat's ass when in office.

But that doesn't mean you can simply point at any random fact and say "Oh, both sides do it". For example, both sides lie, but that doesn't mean you can point at a random fact stated by one party and say "It's a lie".

Politifact has decided that Democrats who argue that the Republicans plan to abolish Medicare are lying. It has no basis to make this claim, given Republicans did, actually, plan to abolish Medicare. And Politifact knows that. This is the first paragraph of its attempt to argue that Democrats are "lying" when they claim Medicare is being abolished:

Republicans muscled a budget through the House of Representatives in April that they said would take an important step toward reducing the federal deficit. Introduced by U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the plan kept Medicare intact for people 55 or older, but dramatically changed the program for everyone else by privatizing it and providing government subsidies.

OK, that looks like abolishing Medicare to me. People over 55 will eventually die. For the rest of us, we won't get what we know as Medicare, we'll get its replacement, which is government subsidized private system. Of course, Politifact is leaving itself wiggle room for its attempts to call Democrats liars later on - it says Ryan's proposal is about "changing the program" rather than "replacing it", but, well, what is described is clearly not, by any definition, Medicare.

So, what statements does Politifact claim are lies? Let's look at what riled Politifact:

But more often, Democrats and liberals overreached:

• They ignored the fact that the Ryan plan would not affect people currently in Medicare -- or even the people 55 to 65 who would join the program in the next 10 years.

• They used harsh terms such as "end" and "kill" when the program would still exist, although in a privatized system.

• They used pictures and video of elderly people who clearly were too old to be affected by the Ryan plan. The DCCC video that aired four days after the vote featured an elderly man who had to take a job as a stripper to pay his medical bills.


So, let's see:

• Democrats didn't mention that some people will be grandfathered in. And?
• Democrats said the system would be killed, when in fact an entirely different system with the same name will exist. This means they're lying... how?
• Apparently only young people are affected by changes to Medicare.

Of the three objections, the first is protesting that the Democrats need to explain points irrelevent to their argument. The fact some people are going to be grandfathered in does not mean that the program isn't being abolished.

For the other two complaints, it's Politifact that's lying. Politifact is trying to argue the following:

• That a system utterly unlike Medicare is Medicare if it has the same name going forward.
• That people who are young now are not going to get old, and thus it's not legitimate to make a complaint that abolishing (or completely replacing with something else) Medicare will affect people who are going to be old when they themselves suffer the effects.

According to Politifact's logic, the campaigns going forward should show young, healthy people, instead of the elderly, when depicting victims of Ryan's proposals.

I'm not suggesting that no campaigns contained a minor misleading point or two, but that's true of any campaign. To describe, however, the general thrust of the Democrats objections to the Ryan's proposals as "lies", when actually they were fundamentally true and alerting people to a real danger, is hideously wrong.

Of course, even Paul Ryan has walked back the proposals. What we're now seeing is a proposal to offer people a choice of Medicare or subsidized private services. We can argue about the wisdom of such a choice, but there's little doubt that the revised proposal exists because people were concerned about Medicare going away.

In their efforts to appear non-partisan, Politifact has resorted to sophistry and demands parties be actively misleading, both of which are opposite to its supposed advertised purpose. It's difficult to take the group seriously going forward, and that's a shame, because a group that actually fact checks campaign statements, rather than criticizing anything it deems unbeltwayish, would be actually very positive.

Instead, we see handwaving, sophistry, and in some cases the shoring up of actual lies, in an attempt to portray one party as actually lying about an issue. One thing's for sure - Politifact isn't a fact checking organization any more.

IT IS THE YEAR 2000

The Earth is ruled by FOUR GIANT CORPORATIONS!  The largest, VT&T keeps its people distracted by DEATH MATCHES between CONDEMNED PRISONERS. The CITIES of LOS ANGELAS and SAN FRANCISCO have been turned into a GIANT MEGA PRISON. Meanwhile, people are falling ill DUE TO  A MYSTERIOUS VIRUS and TURNING INTO ZOMBIES! Doctor Ann Ordinary must TRANSPORT a mysterious BABY to the YOOGLE CORPORATION OFFICES in New Seatle. Can this BABY be the KEY TO MANKIND'S SURVIVAL? And does YOOGLE have a SECRET AGENDA?!

(The other two corporations are Microflacid and Ben and Jerry's. No, I don't know how Ben and Jerry's got to be a megacorporation ruling the world either. I mean, they make nice ice cream, but I personally always thought it was a little... well, overrated. I mean, I like their politics, and I'm glad they're successful, it's just, well, not for me. Anyway, they're a megacorporation by the year 2000.)

LXC

So, it's been over a week since I switched to LXC from Xen. I thought I'd post something about my experience with it.

Why did I switch?

Quite simply, I had two problems with my existing Xen set up, neither of which is the fault of Xen. I want to make that clear: I love Xen, I love the concept, it's a great system.

But I'm also a Ubuntu guy, and (problem #1) frankly, Xen is one of those things Canonical has never taken seriously. Getting a Xen compatible kernel usually means downloading it from somewhere obscure, and the repositories are far from ideal. You can't, in a 8.04 VM, upgrade to a more recent Ubuntu simply by using the usual upgrade tools. And I needed to upgrade. Everything I was running, from the version of Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) to the version of Xen was old, had little support, and didn't really work the way I wanted. In fact, bugs in the versions of Xen and Linux I was running meant that if any VM had to do a lot of disk activity, the chances were that one or more VMs would crash.

The second issue was my CPU. It's a 64 bit Intel contraption, but unfortunately it doesn't have native virtualization. This is fine for Xen, if you have operating system support (but I'm running Ubuntu, so I don't) but it's not fine for any of Ubuntu's supported virtualization platforms. KVM, as provided by Ubuntu, requires full virtualization be supported in the CPU. Other options such as VirtualBox likewise require CPU support. I still find it ludicrous that Canonical (and, to be fair, the organizations Canonical relies upon) decided to support KVM over Xen when Xen is clearly more efficient and has a much better architecture for this kind of thing. And yes, I know that KVM pays lip-service to paravirtualization, but in practice you can't use it.

This doesn't leave many options without spending money, and right now I didn't want to do that if it was avoidable. That meant looking at other technologies supported (enough) by Ubuntu, and frankly, there aren't many. After reading about OpenVZ (a common technology deployed by VPS vendors), I decided to give LXC a try.

LXC is essentially a "supported" version of OpenVZ - the latter requiring kernel patches, just like Xen. LXC is pseudo-virtualization. Rather than actually emulate a full computer (virtualization) or provide an infrastructure for multiple operating systems to share a computer and allocate resources (para-virtualization), LXC's approach is to have a single operating system kernel run multiple operating system userlands.


About LXC

LXC's approach is interesting. Services provided by the kernel - file systems, networking, process scheduling, memory allocation, etc, exist once. The kernel hides (or tries to hide, see later) anything that doesn't belong to a process's userland. chroot is used to provide a completely distinct part of the core file system (of course, the administrator can  still give a "VM" - called a container - a disk or partition of its own by mounting a disk and chrooting to it.) Each container is given certain rights such as devices it can access and memory and disk usage quotas (which can be unlimited.)

This approach leads to advantages and disadvantages. The primary advantage is efficiency. If there's one kernel running, there's no need to have a layer arbitrating between competing systems or, worse, emulating hardware so that operating systems "think" they have the run of a system. Better still, resources not in use by one environment aren't wasted as they might be in a virtualization or paravirtualization system if the latter has no specific strategy to handle them.

The major disadvantages are:

• Each container's "operating system" must support the provided kernel. In practice, this just means "run something recent, and don't try running an operating system that has wild requirements." The standard Ubuntu kernel is able to host all the major distributions, other Ubuntus (including older versions, see below), CentOS, etc. And yes, you can have different containers have different operating systems. It's just they all have to run Linux.
• LXC is unfinished. As an example, go into a container and type "ls /sys/class/net" and compare it to the output of ifconfig -a in both the container and the "host" system. Both sysfs and procfs have problems with containers, and in some cases, there are actually real security holes - as in you can have a container execute a local script in the host environment. Also there are other little things that don't work, like rebooting or halting containers using the reboot and halt commands.
• LXC doesn't have the more advanced features offered by virtualizers. For example, you can't take snapshots or migrate running VMs from one computer to another.

The latter is considered a major issue by LXC's developers and is being worked on, but it takes time. 

The concept behind LXC isn't new by the way. LXC is Linux's answer to BSD's jails system, and jails is often seen as a "fixed" version of chroot, a technology that appeared in Unix a long, long time ago. 

Migrating to LXC

I'm bothered by the security aspects of LXC, but for the most part I'm OK using the system, at least in my own environment. There's not a lot worth hacking about my own computer network. Still, I'm looking forward to LXC being finished.

To set up LXC in a Ubuntu 10.04 environment, this is what I did:

1. Installed the latest version

LXC doesn't actually work in the official Ubuntu 10.04 release. You heard that right. It ships with a major bug that causes problems starting up a container if you have multiple volumes mounted. As my /boot is on another partition (2T drive on a BIOS that doesn't support disks that big) mine failed every time with an error about not being able to unmount the root file system.

So the first thing to do is add a third party repository that provides a more recent LXC:

# add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-lxc/daily

Networking needs to be manually configured, you don't want Network Manager getting in the way. The easiest way to fix that is to uninstall it:

# apt-get purge network-manager network-manager-gnome

And then there's the installation of lxc and some other important tools:

# apt-get install lxc bridge-utils debootstrap cgroup-bin

2. Configured networking

Networking requires configuration of tunnels, which isn't that hard fortunately. The key thing to understand is that tunnels replace your existing networking configuration. When you configure eth0, for example, you have to do leave as few options (IP addresses, etc) configured as possible. Here's what my /etc/network/interfaces looks like:

# The loopback network interface

auto lo

iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0

iface eth0 inet manual

auto br0

iface br0 inet static

   address 10.0.X.X

   netmask 255.0.0.0

   gateway 10.0.X.Y

   bridge_ports eth0

   bridge_stp off

   bridge_maxwait 5

   post-up /usr/sbin/brctl setfd br0 0

At this point you should reboot to make sure everything is working as wanted.

3. Made a space for the containers to live

I decided to create a user "lxc" which I did using the adduser command in the usual way. Under /home/lxc I put my containers. Each container is a directory, and each directory contains the configuration file, file system mounts, and root directory of the container itself, like so:

/home/lxc/endothelial/lxc.conf

/home/lxc/endothelial/fstab

/home/lxc/endothelial/root/

I'll explain how to create those files and directories shortly, the important bit right now though is that /home/lxc/container-name exists.

4. I was migrating my existing Ubuntu 8.04 Xen systems. To do this:

4.1 Mount the VM's file system

losetup -f /path/to/disk.img

mount -r /dev/loop0 /media

4.2 Copy the contents making sure permissions etc remain unchanged

cp -a /media /home/lxc/endothelial/ ; mv /home/lxc/endothelial/media /home/lxc/endothelial/root

4.3 Modify the VMs to remove anything that'll interfere with the new environment

cd /home/lxc/endothelial/root/etc/init.d

mkdir DISABLE

mv checkfs.sh  checkroot.sh  udev  udev-finish DISABLE/

4.4 One more modification - Xen uses /dev/xcv0 for the console, change it to /dev/console

vi /home/lxc/endothelial/root/etc/event.d/tty1

Change the last line to:

exec /sbin/getty 38400 console

5. Create the configuration files mentioned above.

lxc.conf looks like this:

lxc.utsname = endothelial

lxc.network.type = veth

lxc.network.flags = up

lxc.network.link = br0

lxc.network.mtu = 1400

lxc.network.name = eth0

lxc.network.hwaddr = (my VM's mac address)

lxc.network.ipv4 = (my VM's IPv4 address)

lxc.network.ipv6 = (my VM's IPv6 address, I'm sure this is necessary but...)

lxc.cgroup.devices.deny = a

#/dev/null/zero/random

lxc.cgroup.devices.allow = c 1:3 rwm

lxc.cgroup.devices.allow = c 1:5 rwm

lxc.cgroup.devices.allow = c 1:9 rwm

lxc.cgroup.devices.allow = c 1:8 rwm

#Consoles

lxc.cgroup.devices.allow = c 5:1 rwm

lxc.cgroup.devices.allow = c 5:0 rwm

lxc.cgroup.devices.allow = c 4:0 rwm

lxc.cgroup.devices.allow = c 4:1 rwm

#Ptys

lxc.cgroup.devices.allow = c 136:* rwm

lxc.cgroup.devices.allow = c 5:2 rwm

#rtc

lxc.cgroup.devices.allow = c 254:0 rwm

lxc.tty = 4

lxc.rootfs = /home/lxc/endothelial/root

lxc.mount = /home/lxc/endothelial/fstab

fstab looks like this:

none /home/lxc/endothelial/root/dev/pts devpts defaults 0 0

none /home/lxc/endothelial/root/proc proc defaults 0 0

none /home/lxc/endothelial/root/sys sysfs defaults 0 0 

6. We want the server to start automatically, so create symlinks in /etc/lxc/auto

# ln -s /home/lxc/endothelial/lxc.conf /etc/lxc/auto/endothelial.conf

7. Start the session

For now, we'll start it interactively. We can always shut it down and start afresh once we know it's working.

# lxc-create -n endothelial -f /home/lxc/endothelial/lxc.conf

(Note, each time you change lxc.conf you need to do an lxc-destroy -n container-name and then do the above command.)

# lxc-start -n endothelial

If everything's set up correctly, your console session should become the container's console and you should be able to log in and all that jazz. To shut down the container, open a different console on the host, and type lxc-stop -n container-name.

In use

The above works for me and I was somewhat surprised by how well it works. Despite the 8.04 images I migrated being completely unaware of the LXC system's existence, they run well with no noticeable problems.

Everything's much faster. I'm sure part of this is that I never had a particularly optimal Xen environment to begin with, but, well, the LXC environment is much more efficient anyway, and it really shows.

Things I'm happy about:

• Fast, efficient, and reliable
• Power management is reliable. Xen had a habit of running everything at full blast
• Migrating back ot Xen should be easy. At worst, I can run LXC within Xen VMs without penalties.

Things I'm uncomfortable with:

• Not 100% transparent. I don't know what will break as a result. Nothing as yet, but it doesn't help my confidence in the platform. Supposedly Oracle will not install because the LXC APIs tell it there's no virtual memory available - but my view is that's a bug in Oracle, who the hell codes that kind of logic into their systems anyway?
• Security issues
• No scope for experimentation with operating systems other than those based on Linux. No Solaris or BSDs for example.
• I'd like to make containers that have no virtual memory for those few applications that absolutely definitely must be available at a moment's notice - Asterisk for example. This isn't possible in LXC, to the best of my knowledge. Still, Asterisk works pretty well in the new environment, while it crashed a lot under Xen.

The list of things I'm uncomfortable with is longer than the "things I'm happy about", but that's a little unfair. Most of the uncomfortable issues are theoretical. The platform is working very well at the moment, and I hope the developers can get the kinks worked out so I can feel more comfortable about the security of my system while running it.

Republican presidency? Can't be worse

It's looking increasingly like the Republican nominee for President will be either Mr Romney or, slightly less likely, Mr Gingrich. Romney has been the front runner for most of the campaign (and when not, the man to beat.) Gingrich follows a trail of beaten down nominees of the moment - Bachmann, Perry, and Herman Munster, who have had a few moments in the Sun before it become obvious they were unelectable lunatics.

From the point of view of this liberal, I'm down with either. I wouldn't vote for either, don't get me wrong, but Obama needs to be thrown out at this election, and pretty much the only reason not to vote him out is if the Republicans nominate someone much worse. Given that, I can safely cast a vote for a liberal third party candidate at this election knowing I will not be throwing the country to the wolves by not voting for a lesser-of-two-evils candidate.

Why Gingrich and Romney? Well, I'm sure the former is going to be more controversial, but actually I'd like either to win because I don't believe, at heart, either's evil, and Romney has the added benefit there's a 10% chance or so that he'll completely divide conservatives when he becomes President.

While the knocked down candidates may have been loonies, neither Gingrich nor Romney are. Both are to some degree technocrats, they may rant and rave in public and occasionally say some very extreme things, but in power they try to find academically smart solutions, according to their respective ideologies, to real problems.

Is there any evidence Romney would be worse than Obama on the issues that matter most to me? I don't see any. Obama's far right views on the surveillance state, on torturing whistleblowers, on extra-judicial executions, do not seem to me to be bettered by anything either has said. Indeed, it seems probable that those views both has put in public that appear to show fear of terrorism are as much to do with appealing to the Republican base as anything else. There is a strong chance that Romney would actually be more liberal than Obama, and a slight chance that Gingrich would be too.

Romney would be an interesting President because he's a city man in a party normally associated with country politics. That means he takes some interesting positions not normally widely associated with Republicanism such as gun control. If Romney can engineer a Republican dominated Congress, that could be his - and the Republican's - undoing. Conventional wisdom is that Republicans would never vote for a gun control bill. But the reality is that dominating congress can only be done by taking seats from Democrats, and in general the pro- and anti- gun-control lines are drawn not by ideology but by location and demographics. This is why someone like Guiliani, considered far-right by most liberals, takes the pro-gun control line. And while Democrats are scared to go there, Republicans have no reason to be. A Republican party dominated and controlled by City-Republicans may well pass some laws that undermine key planks of its support for decades to come.

Gingrich's major problem is that he's also somewhat on the slimy side when it comes to politics, he wants power (which is why he keeps running for President despite - this time excepting - always being knocked out at an early stage.) He was extremely successful with the framing exercises of the early nineties and practically made "Liberal" a bad word. He went after Clinton for consensual sexual transgressions and almost brought the country to its knees in doing so despite his own, somewhat worse, private life.

But Gingrich is, at heart, a technocrat. He tries to find free market solutions to real problems rather than pretending the problems do not exist. While Romney's healthcare reforms may have formed the roots of Obamacare, the reality is that they first cropped up during Gingrich's leadership of the opposition at the time of Clinton's health care proposals. The healthcare proposal, which included an individual mandate, never went anywhere, but it was typical of Gingrich's approach, an attempt to craft a system that would leave the majority of the health system in the free market, while creating an infrastructure to ensure it was available to everyone, the goal of any real healthcare reform.

Gingrich is also notable as being one of the early supporters of the Internet, at a time when it was barely heard of outside of nerd circles.

The bottom line is that I don't think either candidate will cause the collapse of America, or if they do, Obama would do it sooner. As such, given a vote for Obama is a support for torture, executive ignorance of the rule of law, unnecessary and blatantly illegal wars, compromises that are worse than doing nothing, and not giving a rat's behind about the unemployed, victims of corporate malfeasance, and general cronyism, I believe that it would be better to vote for a liberal third party thereby allowing either candidate to win, than to vote for Obama.

Why I switched from Xen to LXC and other regrettable decisions

After playing around a lot with Asterisk I found my closet server was straining under the load. The issue wasn't the hardware, it's just I was running a fairly ancient version of Xen, and I was running that because I couldn't upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04, which was because later versions of Ubuntu didn't properly support Xen (as it was 8.04 barely supported it.)

But it was getting to be a problem. My wife was, understandably, getting upset that all the cool stuff I'd set up with the Asterisk server were somewhat undermined by the fact that after a few hours you couldn't make any outgoing calls. When you did, the entire VM hosting the Asterisk server would freeze for a few seconds, preventing anything from happening.

As an experiment, I made a new VM, and tried to upgrade it to 10.04 using the usual Ubuntu command line tools. This did not work.

I also upgraded the server's memory, but that didn't have any affect either.

So, finally, I bought a big ass drive for the server, and got ready to migrate all the VMs to something that Ubuntu 10.04 would be happy with. And, well, that meant no Xen.

But as it happened, this turned out to be more work than I'd hoped.

A boot up the rear

First problem. Now, I think we can all agree that the PC drive partitioning system sucks. It dates back to the original PC XT, and has nothing going for it. Several efforts have been made to fix the issues with it, or to make something better, including OpenFirmware and EFI, not to mention hacks built upon the existing system like Extended Partitions. The latest attempt to fix the problems is called GPT. It started as a part of EFI, but has started to be supported by more ordinary BIOSes recently because the standard PC system doesn't really do disks over 2T in size terribly well.

So, anyway, the geniuses at Canonical decided to make GPT the default under certain circumstances, including circumstances where it really isn't necessary. If you tell Ubuntu 10.04 to wipe a 2T drive (not a 2.5T drive, that would need it, but an ordinary 2T drive that currently fits within the 2T limit) and put on a fresh Ubuntu install, it will install a GPT partitioning system, and not install a standard partition system.

I found this out the hard way. Now, there is a way around it, for those of us with motherboards more than three years old (I know! We're so behind!) What you do is cat /dev/urandom > /dev/sda (because there's no command to wipe out the GPT partition table, and if you just try to install a normal one using fdisk, then it'll simply be ignored by Ubuntu's installed if there's a GPT thing there too); then you fire up fdisk from the command line, create a new partition table, and create three new partitions, one smallish one (a few gigs) at the beginning, one for your swap partition, and then one big one for the rest of your system.

You then fire up the Ubuntu installer, tell it to format #1 and #3 as ext4, as /boot and / respectively, making #1 bootable, and #2 your swap.

You'll note there's no GUI for this. If you tell Ubuntu to wipe the disk and start fresh, you can't tell it "Oh by the way, please make sure my computer is able to boot from this disk, please?

Urgh.

KVM is not Xen

What's Xen? Well, Xen is a hypervisor. Remember that User Mode Linux thing a long time ago that still exists but nobody uses it? It's a special Linux kernel that's been designed to behave itself so it can run within another operating system. Well, the Xen people went one better and said "Let's make all operating systems run like that, and we'll create a special operating system that's really lightweight in which they can all live." And, well, it works. It's a great idea. And it's what I had on my server.

But Xen isn't universal. Well, actually, it is, because the Xen people recognized early on that not every operating system vendor was going to modify their OSes to play well with others, so they created a special mode for such operating systems that made use of special CPU features, but for Linux, you didn't have to use it. But, nonetheless, people kinda assumed Xen wasn't the way to go because it encouraged rivals to work together, and KVM was born.

KVM simply runs other operating systems under Linux. It's not Xen because those other operating systems don't cooperate, instead KVM simply makes use of features in slightly higher end CPUs to keep the operating systems in line.

Canonical decided to go with KVM and avoided supporting Xen shortly after Ubuntu 8.04 (actually it didn't work very well under 8.04 either.) Unfortunately, however, the very fact KVM needs hardware support means it doesn't replace Xen even if you ignore the major differences in the way they work together.

Unfortunately the cheap CPU in my server doesn't support KVM.

Even if it was, I was already wondering what it would take to migrate my existing VMs. Apparently Redhat is working on a solution, but thus far the nearest I found to a "solution" was a tool called Xenner. I immediately hit a snag (before I realized that my CPU was a piece of crap) as it doesn't seem to take Xen disk images as is, you have to make them more "hard disk" like. Before I had a chance to look for solutions, I found the problem with the CPU.

Other options

At this point, the options were:

• Try installing Xen server and find some way to make that work after all
• Look at one of the simpler virtualization solutions like OpenVZ.

OpenVZ isn't directly supported by Ubuntu, but LXC - an OpenVZ spin-off - is. OpenVZ/LXC takes a third approach to "virtualization". Given a fairly common scenario (one that happens to be mine) is to simply run a large number of Linux-based operating systems on a single box, largely to keep different environments from standing on each other's toes and make it easier to experiment, OpenVZ simply runs a single operating system (single pool of processes, single file system, etc), but has the kernel hide this from running processes, who are presented with a sub-view of the running system, Each sub-view appears to each process and user as an independent operating system instance. And the kernel can use quotas and other security tools to limit processes running within a sub-view so they can't take over the entire computer.

Despite the fact Ubuntu nominally "supports" LXC, it's a little messed up under 10.04. To begin with, the 10.04 incarnation actually comes with a major bug that makes the system unusable if you have any major system partitions (such as *cough* /boot) separated from /. Installing from a PPA fixes that issue.

Another is that the documentation is pretty awful. Essentially you're pointed at other people's HOWTOs, that might cover Ubuntu, and which tends to gloss over important details like networking.

What I did was fairly simple:

• I created directories for each VM under /home/lxc.
• Each directory contains an lxc.conf file, fstab file, and "root" directory.
• The root directory was the original VM file system. (I mounted it using losetup, and used cp -a to copy it. Nothing special.)
• I moved /etc/init.d/udev* and /etc/init.d/check* out of the way as these would cause trouble in the new environment.
• The lxc.conf and fstabs were cribbed from various blogs. I'd post them, but I'm not sure they're right yet
• Finally, I set up bridged networking in /etc/network/interfaces. This essentially means everything you'd normally assign to eth0 gets assigned, instead, to br0, and you specify br0 is connected to eth0. 

This, surprisingly, worked. My old Xen 8.04 images are working under a modern kernel, using LXC instead, and actually the entire system feels rather smoother - probably in part because LXC is extremely lightweight.

As if to tell me not to stray too far, Xen gave me a final surprise while I was setting this up. I had to reboot multiple times, switching between the working "old" system, and the new system. At one point I had a shell open on one of my VMs. I then spent fifteen minutes in the new system, before rebooting in the old system so I could access the Internet for a bit.

And to my absolute amazement, the shell session was still alive. When I'd shut down the old system, it had saved the state of the VM, and restored it fifteen minutes later when I rebooted back into the old system.

I love Xen. I really do. Apparently Canonical is rethinking their lack of support for the system. It would be nice to switch back. Perhaps 12.04 will properly support Xen. It's about time they did.

Kerry, Gore, Obama

It would be good to have a time machine and to somehow, without being noticed, distort the results of the 2000 and 2004 elections to see if Gore and Kerry would, like Obama, have betrayed everything they claimed to stand for.

Why I can't recommend Hulu Plus

You have to feel a little sympathetic to Hulu. It's trying (or claiming to be trying) to do the right thing, make TV content legally available online in a way that satisfies the conflicting demands of content creators and people like you and me. To that end, it's produced a fairly pleasant Flash based website that streams a large chunk of what's on TV to any PC webbrowser, supported by relatively short ads, for free.

But there are limitations. Hulu has said it doesn't like them, for example, the fact that the free version of Hulu can't be accessed from mobile devices has to do with the arcane licensing issues Hulu has to deal with.

To that end, Hulu decided to create a premium version that supposedly deals with the licensing issues. People who subscribe to Hulu Plus get more content, and get the ability to see it on mobile devices.

Except... there are two major catches.

The first is we're paying for this service, and it's still infested with ads. Infact, my wife and I counted five breaks during a 22 minute long TV show. To make matters worse, most of the ads are the same, which becomes monotonous after a while. Now, I have no problem in principle with serving ads to free users. But I'm paying for this. Why is this acceptable?

And to those at Hulu who argue that I don't pay enough, who's fault is that? You set the subscription fee. It's not as if there was some negotiation where I said "I'm sorry, I'm willing to buy this, but not willing to spend more than $9 a month." You never even asked. Frankly, even at $9 a month, I don't want ads. But I've never said I'm unwilling to pay more than that.

Ads every four to five minutes is simply not acceptable. It makes the service physically unpleasant to use. The extra content is not desirable if I don't want to use the service to watch it.

The second major catch? The mobile devices thing is crap.

There's an obvious way to implement "Make it available on mobile devices" which is this: stop blocking them. If I'm using a mobile webbrowser with a full version of Flash, there's no reason to stick code in your app preventing me from using it to watch content if I'm a subscriber and if you claim that the entire point of Hulu Plus is to cover that whole "We can't do this due to licensing."

But that would interfere, I suspect, with Hulu's desire to see revenue from "exclusive deals" with tablet makers. So Hulu Plus is only available if a tablet or phone maker has paid Hulu. Again, there's no way around it. You can't even buy the Hulu Plus client. It's either available, if you have a tithed device, or it isn't.

You're asking me to pay what for what? Not going to do it. I pay less for Amazon Prime, get free two day shipping on other stuff I buy, get to borrow books on my Kindle, and don't get ads. The content isn't as full as I'd like, but on the other hand, I can easily chuck a few extra dollars Amazon's way for content that's outside of the free sandpit. And it's worth spending that money because, well, it's actually watchable content. Content I can watch anywhere, even on my mobile devices.

If you want me to buy or recommend Hulu Plus, you need to make it what a sane, reasonable, person would expect it to be. If that means charging a little more, or charging for the Hulu Plus app, then that's fine. That's what you should be doing. Providing half the product that people expect it to be for half the price isn't delivering a bargain, it's just being dishonest.

Tax cuts for billionaires will not solve anything

Since the 1980s, Supply Side economics has been a staple of establishment economic thinking. Cut taxes for the wealthy, goes the argument, and the economy will grow.

Here's the problem. Right now there's plenty of supply. The Federal Reserve has been pumping money into the economy at an astonishing rate. The rich have the lowest taxes in modern history. Large corporations are sitting on piles of cash and are making quite respectable profits.

So... why has the economy not recovered? Well, ask why are large corporations sitting on piles of cash? Why are some banks suddenly asking those with savings accounts to pay maintenance fees on those accounts? Why are interest rates at absurd lows?

The answer is that nobody wants to spend the money. That is, corporations don't want to spend what they have, and banks can't find people to borrow what they have to set up new businesses. And nobody wants to do either because the problem right now is not supply, but demand. Demand is flat. People are worried about their underwater mortgages, and 9-16% of the country is looking for work and unable to spend money as a result. We all want to spend money, but we can't.

The argument for giving billionaires (or even the well off) even more tax breaks is that they'll stimulate supply, not demand. "Why tax the job creators" argue those proposing this point of view. Unfortunately, I can't see how the argument stands up in practice. Leaving aside the fact that business expenses can almost always be written off, the reality is that job creation starts with people affording to buy products and services. The more people who wave dollar bills shouting "I want!", the more jobs get created.

At this stage, our political establishment is obsessed with giving cash to those who don't need it, ignoring the problems of those who do, something that leaves us all the worse in the long run.

2012

Not looking forward to the first US Presidential election where I can vote. Largely because it looks like both candidates will be far to my right.

I'm desperately hoping the Republicans will pick a moderate like Romney. Romney is an out of touch conservative, and he has a number of views I strongly disagree with, but I believe he's a good man at heart.

This doesn't mean I'll vote for Romney however. As I said, he's far to my right. Neither will I vote for Obama, such a vote would be unconscionable. To stand as a liberal, and then when in office to promote extremist right wing policies such as torture, imprisonment without trial, extrajudicial executions, and more wars, is beyond forgivable. He will not get my vote even if the alternative is a wacko like Bachmann.

Obama isn't Clinton. Clinton stood as a right wing Democrat, made an effort (albeit a poor one) to promote the policies he stood for, and didn't drift far from what he always claimed to be, certainly never turning into an extremist. Obama essentially prevented the left from having a voice by stealing it, by saying "Oh, you're against the more extreme aspects of Bush's regime? Vote for me, I'll change it!", and then doing exactly the same crap.

So I'll vote, but I'll probably either pick a third party that's genuinely moderate or left wing, or I'll write in a candidate.

Why?

Wouldn't I be throwing my vote away?

Well, no. If you feel the same way I do, then I urge you to do the same thing. Obama won in 2008 because he courted liberals, something that neither Gore nor Kerry were willing to do. And Gore and Kerry didn't because, despite real records of liberalism, both were stuck in the Beltway Feedback Loop where it was simply taken as read that liberals were irrelevant and a bad thing.

Gore learned the hard way that this was a stupid move when Nader took enough votes in 2000 to make it obvious that had Gore gone a little to the left on certain key issues, he'd have had enough support to swing the election in his favor. Nader is usually criticized for taking votes away from Gore, but I'm not sure that's true. It's not clear to me that everyone who voted for Nader would have voted for Gore in Nader's absence, it seems more likely that most of Nader's supporters would have stayed at home.

Kerry didn't have a Nader either, but he found himself in 2004 fighting an election against an awful President... and losing. Even in 2004, Bush had lost his post-9/11 lustre, and I couldn't find a single person who had anything nice to say about him, but Kerry quickly gained a reputation, fairly or unfairly, as an establishment hack, as someone who would simply continue in the same mold as Bush even if he said otherwise. And the attitude I sensed from most liberals was that, if they were going to vote at all (and it wasn't clear they were), it was simply to get rid of Bush. And that wasn't enough for many, when it was assumed Kerry would do the same things as his would-be predecessor.

Obama's betrayal means it's going to be harder for some years to find a Democrat who can be trusted by liberals. It'll mean someone will need to have decades of political activism behind him or her, with a track record of promoting liberal causes. There are people who fit that - Pelosi is a name that springs to mind - but I'm not sure they have what it takes to get past the primary stage, and, for example, Pelosi has had enough demonization from the right that she'd find it hard to get broad based support anyway.

Either way, Obama needs to lose. It has to be shown that it's not enough to pretend to be a liberal when you have no power, you have to at least try when you're in office. I can handle Obama failing to push through liberal laws through a hostile congress. I can't handle the continuation of Bush's security state. And I can handle four years of a Republican President if that's what's necessary to prevent it from happening again.

The bad-ass gun: a detour?

As a follow up to my last post, I'm thinking of taking a little detour.

Here's what's happened since I wrote that. I'm still liking the FAL as the "bad ass" rifle for my heroine although there are problems. Just as the AR-15's ammo is underpowered, I'm wondering if the full 308 is overpowered for what she wants to do. And yeah, there's the 6.8 SPC and 6.5 Grendel and stuff like that, but they both feel like hacks to me, designed more because the AR-15's magazine slot is too short for a mainstream round like a .243 Winchester or .270 Winchester than because they're trying to make it optimal. But that's an aside.

But I also know that what's made me interested in guns to begin with is how they work. It was looking at the description of how the AR-15 worked that made me turn from someone totally uninterested to someone absolutely fascinated pretty much over night.

And then I discovered there's a sizable community of people who build their own AK-47s.

Now, to be fair, "build" in this sense means:

• Obtain a "parts kit" - basically an old military surplus AK-47 that's been dismantled and had the receiver removed and destroyed. Typical cost these days is around $300-400.
• Obtain a receiver flat, or more likely, go to a FFL and get a receiver. If the former, convert flat into a receiver. More on that in a second.
• Obtain a "compliance kit" which is essentially a bag of screws and other miscellaneous cheap AK-47 parts that are made in the US. This is because if you make your own firearm in the US, there's a numeric maximum on the number of parts you can include that weren't made in the US.
• Put it all back together.

The receiver is the interesting bit. You can either buy a finished receiver, or you can make your own. If you go the latter route, the general concept is:

• Order a flat online, which can be sent directly to your home. Flats are around $20, and they basically consist of a pre-cut sheet of metal with some holes drilled in it. Usually the flat is 1mm thick, and made of regular steel (carbon steel, nothing exotic.)
• Measure it up and enlarge certain holes, etc, while the receiver is still flat.
• You very carefully bend it, preferably using a relatively expensive press (a little under $200), but manual methods exist too. This is probably the part that's most likely to go wrong. It requires four bends, although two may have already been done for you. The two that may have already been done are on the extreme sides of the receiver, to make rails. The other two are bends where you'd expect them to be, to turn the receiver into a kind of squared U shape. 
• You heat treat it. This involves using a blow torch to make the metal round certain drilled holes glow red, immediately after which you throw the entire thing into a bucket of motor oil to cool off. Apparently. This is probably the most dangerous part of the entire thing. The heat treating is to strengthen those parts of the receiver that will suffer the most amount of stress.
• Finally, you parkerize the receiver. This can be done using kits on the Internet (price around $40 for bottles of acid and a bath) - you submerge the receiver in the acid for a little while, take it out, and polish it with an oily rag or something. Parkerizing, by the way, is just a way of rust proofing the receiver without using paint or something similar that might interfere with whatever you screw onto it.

Some background: the receiver is the component of a gun that holds all the working bits together. From a legal standpoint in the US, it's actually the gun, while everything else is just a component. As a result, the receiver is subject to more regulation than any other part of a gun. There's no law to prevent you from making your own (as long as legally you're allowed to have a firearm in the first place - and there are restrictions on what you can do with it once you've made it), but if you try to buy a receiver you have to go through the same channels that you would a full firearm.

Now, a receiver flat isn't a receiver, it's fairly close, but as it can't be used as a receiver without a lot of modifications, it isn't legally one yet, or so the law goes. Apparently. I'm not sure this is safe to rely on for the long term future, but at any rate there are no stories of ATF agents raiding distributors of flats.

So... anyway. Uh. Yeah. Well, the making the receiver part bothers me, the rest - not so much. I'm kinda liking the entire concept for these reasons:

• As I said, it's the semi-automatic rifles that interest me, and they interest me because of how they work. How better to understand and celebrate that than to make one?
• It's manageable in terms of affordability. I can spend $50 a month buying parts, rather than spending $500+ on a finished rifle.
• I'll learn enough about the process to understand how possible or impossible it is to build something similar that is more accurate, or that supports a different cartridge.

There are, of course, a lot of negatives.

• The AK-47 is reportedly a relatively inaccurate rifle. Now, opinion seems to differ on it, with a large number of enthusiasts claiming the inaccuracy thing is overblown, but, still. The point is it's not the rifle my heroine is going to adopt, so I still have to get that one.
• I'm bothered by the safety aspect. I don't want to end up with a face that looks like Gus's at season finale of Breaking Bad after shooting it.
• The making your own receiver thing is both very attractive and scary. It's a lot of work, and looks like it'd be easy to screw up. On the other hand, flats are relatively cheap.
• I'm not a hardware person. I'd like to be, of course, and I'd like to learn. But I'm not right now.

 What do you think?

Well, shoot.

So now I have the right to, I'm going to buy two rifles. If you've been following me on Twitter, you know that already. Interestingly, if I understand the Wikipedia article correctly, I could have bought one as soon as I had my permanent resident card, but, well, whatever, it wouldn't have felt right (and I'm not sure I trust Wikipedia...)

Why two? Well, there's what interests me, and then there's what's practical. The latter is, in many ways, intended to prevent me from using the former. It's kind of like a newbie buying a motorbike - you really need to start with a low power motorbike, but the chances are what's made you interested was a bike that's anything but. The difference, I guess, is that you eventually can safely transition to the bigger, more powerful, bike, whereas the opportunities to use the "rifle that interests me" are going to be few and far between.

Some time ago I wrote a JE on my change of mind about guns. I'll see if I can convert it and import it into this blog over the next few days. But to hit the salient points:

Before moving here, I was very anti-gun. There's nothing unusual in that, people in Britain tend to be. I didn't see why anyone would want one, other than seeing gun enthusiasts in the rather crude stereotypes that, well, tend to get painted. After moving here, I found I had friends who had the things, and I started to actually think about the arguments in a way I hadn't before, coming to a couple of major conclusions that served to change my view of things.

The first is that everyone has a natural right to self defense. To ask someone in a terrifying situation where they legitimately feel their lives are at risk to be pacifist in the name of civilization and civilized values is unfair and unreasonable, and it's never going to work. In our constitution, this right is not described by the second amendment and no attempt to revoke the second amendment would change this: it's described by the ninth and tenth. A natural right can only belong to the people, never to any government at any level. It's unrelated to any need to have regulated militias or any other such arguments.

The second is that the case against ownership of guns has simply not been proven (and probably never will be.) It has not been shown that the wide ownership of a variety of weapons by law abiding citizens is itself harmful to society, that it creates a substantial danger where once there wasn't. And as a liberal, I can't support a law that bans people from doing something in private for no good reason.

At the time I changed my mind, I viewed the change putting my views on guns more in line with, say, my views on eating lobsters or on using computers to play Farmville. I didn't want to do it myself, but, hey, if others did, so be it.

What changed my mind from being a passive viewer to actually wanting one was looking up what an M16 is, after watching... I think my wife and I had just watched Full Metal Jacket, I'm not sure. Anyway, for some reason I wanted to know what the hell an M16 was, and I read up on it on Wikipedia. And that lead me to finding out it was type of rifle called an AR-15, which is a gas powered rifle. Explosive gas powered rifle I should say, you don't put propane in it.

Essentially, when you fire an AR-15 (like other semi-automatic and automatic gas powered rifles), the hammer strikes the cartridge, causing the chemicals in the cartridge to explode, turning them instantly into high pressure gases. These gases push the bullet through the barrel. A tube in the barrel captures some of the gases and those gases are used to power a mechanism to eject the spent cartridge casing, and insert a new cartridge into the chamber.

I found this fascinating, and started to read up on the different systems used by various semi-automatic guns, and found myself increasingly interested in owning one, and seeing how they work for myself.

And so now we're here.

So, going back to these two rifles. The "sane" one is pretty much already decided. LordBodak recommended a Ruger 10/22. I asked around, and I can't find anyone with a bad thing to say about it. One friend has one, others know of it and like it.

The 10/22 is a semi-automatic rifle that takes a .22LR cartridge. .22LR is relatively inexpensive, and relatively "safe" (as firearms and ammunition go); rather bizarrely the 10/22 was classified in Israel as "non-lethal" at one point, though not for very long. No gun is safe, but what you can do to minimize the effects of accidents is a positive.

I'm liking this gun because:

• I need something sensible to start with
• It's a small enough caliber that it's actually allowed in some indoor ranges.
• It's a semi-automatic, and it's not gas powered - at least, not directly - instead being powered by the movement of the cartridge case after the explosion. Again, I love the idea and it's going to be different to the "interesting" rifle. BTW, this terminology should not be seen as meant to imply I'm not going to be interested in the sensible one!
• Apparently it has a very low recoil, and it's generally pretty accurate.
• It has high third party support. You can buy alternative barrels, stocks, you can change the entire look of the gun if you want.

For the other rifle... well, my criteria was this:

• It had to be something I was interested in.
• Rather oddly, I had a general idea for a rifle in mind for my heroine in my novel. I wanted it to be her rifle.

Who's my heroine? Well, she's an ass-kicking young superheroine who regularly hides in a forest, and uses her gun there, but occasionally needs her gun for missions and such. So I figured it needs to be a good hunting rifle, accurate, and a bit of a battle rifle too. With that in mind:

• I ruled out the AR-15. The .223 caliber is something she'd feel is underpowered for precisely what she wants it for. For hunting anything large, you're generally going to want something bigger - which is not to say .223 can't take down something bigger, but... on that note, in the novel she even finds an AR-15 at one point (it's not actually identified though in the novel) and derisively says it's useless for shooting anything but rabbits and people.
• I ruled out the AK-47/74/etc. I figured she would consider them too inaccurate.

I initially thought the FAL (which uses a 7.62 NATO cartridge) would be ideal, as like the AR-15, it's popular and well supported, has a good reputation for being accurate and dependable, and it uses the aforementioned larger cartridge.

Friends also suggested the M1 Garand and its successors in in the M14 and M1A. The M1A is considered an updated, civilian, version of the M14, which was intended to be an upgraded Garand that could do "anything". The Garand itself was a very dependable rifle used by the US military in WW-II.

The problem here is that the Garand itself is antiquated, and the reputation of the M14/M1A is mixed. It's hard, actually, to get an objective view because at the time the M14 was adopted, and the decade or so it was in use, there were enormous political forces going on within the military about the future of standard issue military rifles. Many of the issues with the M14 were either because of minor issues - such as the choice of wood being used for the stock (which had a habit of swelling in high humidity) - or because it was intended to replace multiple weapons and ended up being a jack of all trades, but a master of none. Or at least, that was the perception.

Other options include modified, larger caliber, AR-15s. These are interesting, and there are apparently two families - the AR-10 based guns, and the DPMS LR-302. Parts for one family will not work on the other, and even within the families the devices aren't considered completely compatible. Of the two, the reviews for the LR-302 seem very positive, but it's a newer design and there's less support for it. Again, prices for new weapons seem fairly high.

M1As, AR-10s, and LR-302s seem fairly expensive, with prices generally being in four digits, regardless of the source of the weapon. By comparison, AK-47s are generally sub-$500, and AR-15s usually start around $600-700, although brand new models are usually in the four digits too.

Which brings me back to the FAL. Pricing for FALs is more in line with AK-47 and AR-15s, with refurbished imports costing around around $700 (Century Arms G1), and new clones being in the low four digits. I'd be happy with a refurbished import.

Friends have mixed views on the whole thing, I don't think they understand that I'm buying something because of the link to the novel, and the fact I want something because of the way it works, rather than because I intend to actually use it for anything but "Wow, it works" type stuff.

I'm thinking my heroine would want a FAL. It's a powerful, accurate, reliable, versatile, well supported rifle that can be obtained for a relatively low cost. But I'm also unsure of myself here, I really don't know enough to be certain that I'm right here. What do you think?