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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page). Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
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Friday, August 22, 2008
No, I Don't Believe It But it is always nice to see a Democrat filing a suit like this: A prominent Philadelphia attorney and Hillary Clinton supporter filed suit this afternoon in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania against Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic National Committee and the Federal Election Commission. The action seeks an injunction preventing the senator from continuing his candidacy and a court order enjoining the DNC from nominating him next week, all on grounds that Sen. Obama is constitutionally ineligible to run for and hold the office of President of the United States.I don't believe it, mostly because it would be just too convenient, watching the Democratic Party self-destruct. But we all have little fantasies of wonderful but unlikely things that we would like to have happen, don't we? Our Space Brothers could land, bringing us a cure for cancer, hatred, and war. Warren Buffett could transfer $100 million into my savings account. A platinum-iridium meteor weighing 500 pounds could land on my property. A time traveler from the year 2224 could leave the plans for a desktop nuclear fusion reactor in my office. And someone could prove that Obama isn't a natural born citizen of the United States! Labels: 2008 presidential candidates Employment There's a strong possibility that I will get caught in the big layoff on Monday. If I could have sold the old house in Boise, this wouldn't be a major problem. I wouldn't mind teaching, and if I could get the old house sold, I could just about afford to do it. With only the one house payment, I would not be burning through savings. But that house isn't selling--even at the now bargain price of $289,000. This suggests that I should be looking for an engineering job. There aren't a lot of jobs for software engineers in the Boise area--and the jobs that are there are for people with experience that I don't have (C#, .NET) or where I have not terribly current experience (Java) but I would be competing with engineers with recent computer science degrees who are decades younger than me. I was thinking of going through the ABCTE certification process, so that I can get a high school teaching position--but this an extraordinarily bad time to be looking for a teaching position. (And I'm sure that my co-workers with school age children who get laid off on Monday, and have to relocate a month or two into the school year, are going to be even more upset than me. The joys of working for a company run by liberals.) Pretty obviously, the best situation would be another engineering job, one that pays well enough to keep those mortgages current while I wait for the economy to recover. If you are aware of a position that comes up that could tolerate a telecommuter (perhaps one week a month on site), I would appreciate hearing about it. My language experience: C (about 18 years, both embedded systems and user interfaces on PC-DOS and Unix); assembly language for antique microprocessors (about eight years, largely embedded); Java (about two years, a little rusty); C++ (just a little); PL/M-86 (about two years--try not to laugh); Korn shell (about six years); Perl (just a little). My application experience: data communications development (porting an SNMP server, porting a DHCP server, DSL access multiplexer development); telecom (telephone switch code); operating systems (device drivers for antique microprocessors and operating systems, building a file system in PL/M-86); in-circuit emulator development (both user interface design and development, and embedded code); telemetry processing software (for the Voyager mission at JPL); system administrator for a mixed Sun Unix, PC, and Mac network (some years ago). SCMs: I have made extensive use of ClearCase (these last six years); SourceSafe; and RCS. I have also been ClearCase administrator and SourceSafe for a startup (a dozen engineers), and I set up the wrappers around RCS for another startup--and those wrappers were still in use eight years later. Technical writing: Regular readers of my blog know that I write law review articles, popular magazine articles, books, and I'm pretty competent at it. I also have substantial experience writing technical manuals. At one startup, I created the technical writing department from scratch, leading a team of three writers in getting our technical manuals going. I'm a lot more technical than the average technical writer (as you can see above), and I'm a far better writer than the average engineer--a perhaps useful combination. Supervisory experience: At three different companies I have been a manager, supervising groups of 2-3 people (engineers in two companies, technical writers in the third). I'm pretty good at it. C# Whining Again One of the virtues of Java is that it was a clean sheet of paper. While there are some obvious similarities in keywords and syntax to C, they weren't slaves to it. C++, because it had as its goal to be upward compatible with existing C code, suffers a bit by comparison. C# doesn't have that need for upward compatibility from C or C++, and that's generally a good thing. But I don't think that one should break upward compatibility without a good reason. In C, and C++: int *x, y; means a pointer to an integer x, and an integer y. One of them is a pointer, one is an integer. C# decided that: int* x, y; means that both x and y are pointers to an integer. This is a significant difference, one that will almost certainly cause a lot of developers who have moved from C and C++ to make mistakes. Now, C# discourages the use of pointers--they are mostly present for getting access to pre-.NET interfaces--but therefore all the more reason why they should have stuck with the C/C++ declaration syntax. Labels: Csharp Thursday, August 21, 2008
Where The Money Is Coming From It is always interesting to see where the money is coming from in elections. To my surprise, Walt Minnick has raised quite a bit more money than Bill Sali (more than one million dollars vs. not quite $650,000 for Sali)--and when you look at where the money is coming from, it does suggest something about who wants Sali out. If you go to OpenSecrets.org, they give a variety of ways to breaking out the data. The breakdown of in state vs. out of state money shows that, surprisingly enough for an incumbent, the majority of Sali's contributions are coming from Idahoans: 59%. Minnick's money is even more lopsidedly the other direction: 69% is coming from out of state. The big individual contributors to Bill Sali are business PACs and the NRA. Minnick's big contributors seem to include a lot of labor unions--no surprise there. The breakdown by zipcode is quite interesting--and may not go over well with a lot of Idahoans.
Labels: Idaho politics Where Does Walt Minnick Stand On Illegal Aliens? A recent survey by Rasmussen Reports shows that there is overwhelming support for stopping the influx of illegal aliens into the United States:
I know where Bill Sali (R-ID) stands: Where does his Democratic opponent, Walt Minnick, stand? Under "Issues," Minnick has a number of different pages--but not a word about illegal immigration that I can find. Nor was I able to find anything that Minnick has said in the news media on the subject. I don't know about you, but I think it would be quite entertaining to try and get Minnick to say where he stands on this issue. Since he is a Democrat, I rather suspect that he is going to try and weasel word his response rather than admit that his objective is to keep cheap, easily exploited labor coming into the country for the benefit of business interests. UPDATE: Here's a video where Minnick agrees that we need to control our borders for national security reasons. He agrees that something needs to be done on the demand side, such as prohibiting hiring of illegal aliens. (Well, it's a bit late to do that. That's already illegal.) Minnick does claim that we need more immigration to fill jobs that Americans won't do, at least when the economy is growing. Minnick says that it "doesn't make sense" to arrest and deport illegal aliens, and wants to give them an incentive to "come out of the shadows" by paying a penalty and getting at the back of line. But he also said that deporting them doesn't make sense. It appears that he supporting the McCain/Kennedy amnesty proposal. UPDATE 2: Just to be clear about this: Minnick is correct that we don't have the resources to track down and deport all twelve million illegal aliens. But we do have the resources to deport those who come to our attention as a result of Social Security matching when someone starts work, or when an illegal alien is arrested. We do need to work on the demand side--by punishing employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens. We do need a better fence. But when city and county governments prohibit their police officers from informing ICE about illegal aliens that they have arrested--that's idiotic. It might take ten years to get this problem under control, using all of these methods. But it's better than rewarding those who have broken our immigration law, by giving them a path to citizenship. Labels: Idaho politics, immigration A Powerful Commentary By Someone Who Used A Gun In Self-Defense This appeared in the August 20, 2008 York [Penn.] Daily Record: It is worth reading in full. Mr. Fentiman is clearly a very thoughtful, very articulate man describing a horrible situation where the only realistic choice was for him to intervene to protect a woman from a person who was either insane or so filled with rage that he might as well have been insane. Labels: gun defense aftermath, gun self-defense California vs. the First Amendment I do hope that this gets challenged to the U.S. Supreme Court--there is a real issue here. From the Pacific Justice Institute's press release: In a major decision likely to re-draw the battle lines of the gay rights movement, the California Supreme Court today ruled against two doctors who declined to artificially inseminate a lesbian.There has been a long tradition in the U.S. of governments, when passing laws, making some accommodation for legitimate religious beliefs. For example, during World War II, our laws provided for conscientious objectors to refuse military service. Many of them were put to work in hospitals instead. Many of the laws prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals exclude religious entities. The argument that liberals use for this naked use of power is that the doctors are providing a service. If they don't want to be subject to the law, they can stop being doctors, or they can leave California. And I rather suspect that this is the goal: to force every Christian in California to either smile stupidly and pretend that there's no problem, or to leave. Unfortunately, there's no chance that liberals will decide that individuals have a right of conscience. Can you imagine how differently the world would be if 1960s America had been as intolerant of gay rights activists as gay rights activists are of Christians? Labels: homosexuality Visual Studio 8.0 for C# When I taught myself Java some years back, I started out using the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that was fashionable at the time--and I found that it so obscured what was going on, that I decided to just code Java using my favorite editor, running the Java compiler from the command line, and using JDB to debug it. This worked well. I discovered when I was interviewing for new positions, this was regarded as somewhat peculiar. One person I interviewed with expressed amazement that it was even possible to program a user interface in Java without using an IDE. I'm teaching myself C#, using Microsoft Visual Studio 8.0 for C#, which is an IDE. I really enjoy it. As much as my previous IDE experience with Java left me more confused than helped, I suspect that it was because I was trying to teach myself both object-oriented programming (OOP) and Java simultaneously. I started with procedural programming languages, and this might have been too much of a hurdle to have this many new learning experiences simultaneously. Even with this very nice IDE, writing a Windows application is necessarily fairly complex, especially when compared to the traditional C program using printf and gets! Anyway, if my job is still there on Monday, great! I'll be ready to throw myself into C# for the project that I am hoping will be taking me on board. If not, I can hope that there is some employer out there who will see some value in the applications on which I have worked in the past, and decide that they can afford the time it will take for me to become completely proficient with C++ or C#. (I would love to do Java, but there's no shortage of kids fresh out of school with a year or two of Java--and obviously, no one is going to hire a fossil with the same amount of Java experience.) Labels: Csharp McCain's Houses Barack Hussein Obama is running ads that make a big deal about how many houses McCain and his wife own. Yup, seven houses worth more than $13 million. Perhaps the response that McCain might want to make is, "Yes, but none of them were bought as part of land deals with convicted felons--unlike Obama's curious land deal with Rezko." And of course, when it comes to obscenely rich politicians with multiple houses, I recall that this was an issue in the last presidential election as well. This article in the August 21, 2008 Politico reminds us that it wasn't a Republican: In recent weeks, Democrats have stepped up their effort to caricature McCain as living an outlandishly rich lifestyle — a bit of payback to the GOP for portraying Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) as an elitist, and for turning the spotlight in 2004 on the five homes owned by Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry.I do agree that there does come a point where spending like this disturbs me. At a certain point, the money spent buying and maintaining those extra homes is money that could be invested in productive enterprises, or helping the poor. But there is no obvious bright line that separates, "It's nice to be able to afford this" from "This is obscene when children are going hungry in the Third World, and little girls are being sold into prostitution." I wouldn't buy a new Corvette, even if I were as rich as many people I know; that would be extravagant. (I got such a deal on mine used in 2002!) Certainly, Gulfstream liberals like Laurie David and houses like John Edwards's, which is so large that you can only photograph it from the air, are on the far side of this murky line. Democrats are in no position to be casting stones about excessive wealth--and Obama's house in Chicago is so sleazily involved with a corrupt guy like Rezko that he shouldn't be raising the question. To John McCain's credit, he at least has taken the position that he wants everyone to have the opportunity to get rich--and his general approach to tax policy suggests that he is serious about this. The contrast with Democrats is quite startling, who talk "tax the rich" but actually support policies that tax those trying to get rich. Since Obama's ad makes a big deal about the problems of the housing market in America, I suppose that it is worth wondering if at least some of McCain's seven houses might represent the results of a rather weak market. I own two houses right now--and believe me, I would love to sell the one in Boise. I've knocked it down to $289,000, and still no offers--and that's more than $30,000 below the county assessor's fantasy of what it is worth. UPDATE: I heard some discussion of this on Fox News last night. Some of these houses are occupied by the McCain children. A reader tells me at least some of these properties are actually rentals. That puts a whole new spin on the matter. If they owned seven houses for their own occupancy, that would be extravagant. If some of these homes are for their children, this becomes praiseworthy. As one of my readers pointed out: "John McCain may have eight homes, but none of them ever hosted a fund-raiser where one of the guests was a terrorist who attempted to bomb the U.S. Capitol, and who said he didn't do enough." Labels: 2008 presidential candidates Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Where Lying Is Required I have known a few people who emigrated from the Soviet Union--and one of the recurring themes is how much they got used to lying to people, because there was no other way to survive. This column by Mike Adams is about someone who is now in serious trouble because she refused to lie:
Go read the whole column. Adams makes the point that accommodating homosexuality in a Politically Correct manner is turning us into a nation of liars--where to help them feel comfortable about themselves, we have to lie. UPDATE: A lawyer who specializes in ethical issues relating to counseling tells me that the problem of how to transfer someone to another counselor is well understood, and points to the many circumstances besides this one that might require this--and methods to avoid lying about it. It sounds like a training problem. Labels: homosexuality Obama: McGovern For 2008 I've pointed out in the past that Obama reminds me of McGovern's 1972 campaign: full of youthful idealism that simply doesn't understand the real world of foreign policy, or of domestic policy. The hard left was enthusiastic about McGovern in the primaries, when he was spouting stuff just this side of democratic socialism. Leftist enthusiasm faded as McGovern moved from the primaries into the general election, where he had to move so dramatically to the center to get, you know, ordinary Americans. I mentioned that article in The Nation a few weeks back in which Obama's leftist supporters chided him for moving to the center. It's a pretty good indication that Obama is in trouble when Obama speaks before a faith-based community--and Investor's Business Daily, definitely a libertarian-leaning publication, not conservative, makes much the same criticism as social conservatives like Rev. Bryan Fischer. The August 18, 2008 Investor's Business Daily observes: Election '08: Last weekend's McCain-Obama protodebate made it clear why Obama won't keep his promise to debate McCain "anywhere, anytime." McCain, with a robust resume and details at his fingertips, won big. Bryan Fischer at Idaho Values Alliance described what happened a bit more concisely:
And this was before the debate at Rick Warren's church. Labels: 2008 presidential candidates Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Idaho: The Unregulated State Or at least, that's how Idaho liberals like to characterize it. (Except, of course, when it involves sex and alcohol, at which point, suddenly, it is none of the government's business what consenting adults do in private.) So imagine my surprise at seeing this article from the August 19, 2008 Inside Higher Education: On July 1, in Idaho, Harv Lyter stepped in as proprietary schools coordinator, filling for the first time a new state position dedicated to overseeing the for-profit college sector. The next day — having prepared for the job for several months — he sent letters to Breyer State University and Canyon College, indicating that they were not registered in accordance with Idaho law.1. Not only did Idaho crack down--but these operations ran off to California--which, in spite of being liberal heaven, is apparently taking no steps at all to regulate for-profit colleges. While theoretically, there's no reason for a for-profit college to be inferior to a non-profit (private or governmental), what I have seen suggests that profit sometimes takes precedence over education. (Unlike non-profits, where ego or leftist politics sometimes takes precedence over education.) I confess that I am a lot more skeptical of for-profit colleges than I used to be. I am not skeptical enough to propose regulation. If someone wants to call their diploma mill, "The Intergalactic Institute of Advanced Consciousness," and there are people foolish enough to give them money, the phrase, "A fool and his money are soon parted" comes to mind. If a private school claims to be accredited by some established organization, and they are not, that's fraud, and properly deserves punishment. In some cases, of course, diploma mills exist to serve a governmental purpose. Many years ago, I worked as an employment agent. A black guy came to us looking for a better job. He had an unusual job history, for an engineer. He had worked from 1960 to 1973 for a particular denomination's printing operation in New York City, as a printer. Then he went to work for an aerospace company in Los Angeles that I will call N, as a System Engineer. His education was also quite startling. While he was working full-time for N, he completed his B.S. in Chemistry in 1975, his M.S. in Physics in 1977, and his Ph.D. in Cosmology in 1978--all at a little college in Orange County that I had never heard of before--and that no one else had heard of, either. (I later saw them in a piece on diploma mills getting busted, many years later.) I spent quite a bit of time trying to nail down exactly what he did in his Systems Engineer job--and I couldn't see that he did anything at all at N. He did expect a sizable raise to go to his next job, for which he was probably just as qualified. (And he did get a nice raise to go to his next job, where he was black Ph.D. in charge of sitting at the door.) So what was going on here? He was also married at that time to a rather prominent black politician in the California legislature (I'm not naming any names). He fulfilled N's minority professional quota, and he had a Ph.D. And while I don't know for sure, I suspect that being part of a politically important couple might have helped N with government contracts. So diploma mills did, at least back then, fulfill an important function for liberals--making it easier to fill minority quotas with unqualified workers, rather than fixing minority education so that there were qualified black engineers. 2. Calling yourself "Breyer State University" when you aren't in any way a state university, smells like fraud. There are a lot of state universities out there that have names that don't include the state. For example, my alma mater, Sonoma State University, is part of the California State University system. There are so many schools that are part of the CSU system that it would be very easy for someone elsewhere in the U.S. (or especially outside the U.S.) to assume that a college that calls itself "Breyer State University" and that is located in California, is part of the CSU system. C# I'm busily learning C# right now, in the hopes that there's a still a job for me next week. (There's a lot of gallows humor at work right now. And to think we used to regularly make the list of best companies to work for in America.) C#, whether Microsoft will admit it or not, is an attempt to get some of the better qualities of Java merged with many of the features of C++--although it is openly stated that C# is not upward compatible with C++. It also appears that C# is not the best choice for embedded programming that has substantial real-time requirements, because C# uses a similar garbage collection strategy to Java. There are virtues to this approach, but real-time performance isn't one of them. I think I was the engineer who originated the aphorism "C++ is to C, as lung cancer is to lung." I don't have anything quite as pithy and cute to describe C#. Admittedly, I'm still learning it. But so far, I am not seeing any strong arguments for why C# is intrinsically a better choice than Java, at least if you have a Java compiler, not a Java interpreter. C# is different in some respects, but I'm still not seeing any enormous virtues to it over Java. I am impressed with the Microsoft Visual Studio C# 2008 program. (You can download and use the Express version for free.) I haven't done a lot of Windows programming over the years--in fact, I think the last Windows application I wrote was for Windows 1.0. (Yes, which was followed by Windows 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, then Windows 95.) The Visual Studio C# IDE is really slick, and I suppose that I could even, with some practice, become reasonably proficient at writing Windows applications. (You don't want to see what writing Windows apps for Windows 1.0 was like.) Labels: Csharp This Is Gutsy A Briton's website devoted to the idea that Britain's gun control laws have been ineffective, and even counterproductive--and need to be relaxed. Labels: gun rights Monday, August 18, 2008
Bill Sali (R-ID) Blog I guess that it won't be a surprise that Bill Sali, who represents the 1st Congressional District here in Idaho, has a blog trying to get him re-elected. I'm not sure how many Idahoans even know what blogs are--much less read them--but like a lot of such innovations, it costs almost nothing to do, and I like to think that blog readers are such technologically sophisticated and thoughtful sorts simply because they read blogs that this will make a difference. I may be biased, of course, in favor of the idea that people who read blogs are especially clever and with it. I will confess that backing Bill Sali isn't all that difficult a decision. The last thing I want is a bunch more puppets of billionaires up in Congress, which makes nearly any Democrat running for the seat a bit suspicious. One thing that I like about Bill Sali is that he says stuff that just infuriates left-wing newspapers like the Idaho Statesman--and when he makes clearly true statements such as that America was founded on Christian principles--it just drives the leftists crazy. That alone should be at least one argument in Sali's favor. Even if I didn't support Sali, my only encounters with Walt Minnick, who ended up with the Democratic nomination, sure haven't impressed me. Back in March, I pointed out that a letter that Minnick wrote to a number of newspapers around Idaho about the real problem of the uninsured was just flat out wrong: I saw a letter to the March 26, 2008 Idaho World from Walt Minnick, the Democrat intent on unseating Bill Sali, attacking Sali for his approach to solving the problem of uninsured Idahoans. In that letter, Minnick complained about "the 40% of Idahoans who don't have insurance." That sounded high, but I just assumed that Minnick is as careful as I am when making factual claims. I guess not.I also saw Minnick speak at a candidate's forum in which I participated, and I was not impressed. Minnick talked a lot about alternative energy, but it sounded far more like "Congress can spend money on stuff, and we'll get clean, renewable energy from it" than anything that suggested that he really had a clue about economics. These remarks on his web page seem to be more of the same mix of "the oil companies need to be taxed more" and the kind of subsidies to business that created the corn ethanol idiocy: I'm not quite sure what "special tax breaks and incentives" he's talking about. There is the depletion allowance: In tax law, the deductions from gross income allowed investors in exhaustible commodities (such as minerals, oil, or gas) for the depletion of the deposits. The depletion allowance is intended as an incentive to stimulate investment in this high-risk industry, though critics argue that mineral deposits are valuable enough to justify high levels of investment even without tax incentives. See also depreciation. Yes, I'm sure that there are ways to convert forest and agricultural waste to biofuel. But if the consequences of government subsidies of corn ethanol are instructive, it might be an argument against more such encouragement. As I have pointed out in the past, there is a rather fundamental difference between funding basic research and subsidizing energy waste: With respect to purely research activities, my sympathies with respect to alternative energy are a little stronger. (Of course, "alternative energy" includes nuclear power.) While some serious boondoggles definitely come out of such research projects, there is no question that some of the government promoted R&D has created some useful results. If we could get fusion power plants operating, petroleum would become just an interesting source of plastics--and oil exporting countries that have little to offer the world but overblown thuggish leaders would go back to the fourteenth century. No loss.Maybe Minnick is smarter than he sounds and smarter than his website suggests. But so far, I am not persuaded. Labels: Idaho politics Why Isn't Wikipedia Very Reliable? It is who is editing it. Mitchell Blatt over The Media Perspective has a couple of postings about Obama and McCain campaign workers using campaign systems to edit Wikipedia entries. Some of these examples are so juvenile that it makes me wonder if there is adult supervision at the Obama campaign: Yeah, because that would at least make sense to do. McCain's campaign, according to Blatt, at least is improving the accuracy of the Wikipedia pages:
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