Edwards, Giuliani withdraw

You know, I’ve kind of warmed up to John Edwards over the course of the Democratic nomination season. Sure, he’s a smarmy aristocratic statist faux-populist prick… but so is Senator Clinton, and Edwards hadn’t lowered himself to the same petty mudslinging depths as our friend from New York State.

Which depths are those?

• Dems are turning against the Clintons (Donkelephant)
• Why people will vote against Hillary (Donkelephant)
• The Real Issue on Hillary and Iraq (The Heart of the Matter)

…among others upon which I’ve reported already.

Alas, Mr. Edwards has withdrawn from the race:

• Edwards’ voters up for grabs (CNN.com)

I suppose he might redeem himself by endorsing Senator Obama, but I suspect that the two remaining Democratic candidates will simply split his part of the vote.

When you’re queuing to vote on America’s plains
And only one non-fucking-Clinton remains
While you still have your rifle, just blow out your brains
And go to your God like a voter
– also a parody

On the bright side, that fascist prick Giuliani is gone-fucking-gone!

• Giuliani endorses McCain (CNN.com)

(Looks like they changed the title before I blogged about it.)

I’d rather scorch my balls away with thermite than drip hydrofluoric acid on my penis or pack my urethra with Lewisite. I bring this up to set a certain context for my next statement: I’d rather see John McCain elected the 44th President of the United States than Mitt Romney or Hillary Clinton. The notion of a Giuliani presidency, on the other hand, transcends such horror as mere humans can inflict upon each other and enters the realm of Lovecraftian fantasy. I’m glad to see him gone, and I wish him nothing but misery and remorse until the universe dissipates into deathly cold gases.

Speaking of Lovecraft, I think it’s clear for whom I’ll vote:

I suppose it’s possible that Ron Paul will pick up a huge whack of delegates on Super Tuesday, but if that’s not going to happen (and I doubt that it will) we may as well move the capital to Rl’yeh and get it fucking over with.

What are “rights”, and are some of them specific to taxi passengers?

Most people talk about “rights” without knowing what they mean. (Similarly, most people use the verb “deserve” without knowing what they mean; the two may be related.) We have seen a proliferation of enumerated “rights” over the past several centuries, as well as a great improvement in aggregate quality of life; it is occasionally tempting to suspect that the one has brought on the other, but without defining our terms we can’t hope to verify or disprove this hypothesis.

Fortunately, James Sadowsky has quite simply and effectively defined “right”:

When we say that one has the right to do certain things we mean this and only this, that it would be immoral for another, alone or in combination, to stop him from doing this by the use of physical force or the threat thereof. We do not mean that any use a man makes of his property within the limits set forth is necessarily a moral use.

– from “Private Property and Collective Ownership”, quoted in Murray N. Rothbard’s “The Ethics of Liberty”, p.24

So, you have the right to do something if it’s immoral for me to stop you. Furthermore, having the right to do something doesn’t necessarily mean that doing so is okay. You may have the right to behave like an asshole, but you’re still an asshole if you do so.

Rights, then, are pretty powerful things.

It is therefore natural that when we want something important, we see it as a right — we see those who stand between us and what we want as immoral. This is often the case. The feminist movement, for example, demands the recognition of women’s rights; similarly, the American Civil Rights movement demanded recognition of the rights of African-Americans. The American Declaration of Independence declares that:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government[...]

Note that you cannot create or revoke rights — you can only choose to recognize them, or not. The feminists didn’t create women’s rights; they forced their recognition. The Declaration of Independence didn’t create the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; it recognized them. (It seems to me that “pursuit of happiness” is subsumed by “liberty”, but hey.)

Note also that rights are inherently individual. Again, feminists didn’t establish rights for the female sex; they established that individual women have the same rights as any other individual. It therefore follows that groups and institutions do not have rights — governments have no rights, corporations have no rights, political parties have no rights — except the individual rights of each individual in the group. Rights are based upon action, and only individuals can act; when someone acts in proxy for or under the authority or aegis of a group, s/h/it’s probably doing something wrong and trying to absolve s/h/itself of blame.

Now, dear reader, I’ve put you through this philosophical discussion simply to set the stage for yet another expression of West Coast idiocy:

• B.C. introduces taxi passenger’s bill of rights (CBC.ca)

This is why the word “rights” has so little meaning — people tack it onto every two-penny cause they can find and, like homeopaths, dilute it beyond efficacy or recognition. From the article:

Under the taxi bill of rights, passengers have the right to:

• Be picked up and transported to their stated destination by any available on-duty taxi driver.

This is probably the impetus for the whole debacle. It seems that people from suburban Vancouver would go downtown, get drunk, take cabs home at three in the morning, then dash off without paying for their rides (which are quite expensive — easily $50 and up). This leaves the cabbies with no fare for their long trip out to the ‘burbs, no prospect of picking up a new fare into downtown, and plenty of missed fares during the round-trip. Thus, many cabbies stopped taking people back out to the ‘burbs, “stranding” them downtown.

The interested reader might note that Greater Vancouver has a number of night bus routes intended specifically to take people from downtown to the suburbs after the bars have closed. This reader may well remember that the province has committed fourteen billion dollars — that’s a one, a four, and nine zeros — to public transit, in the explicit hope that more people will take the bus. He or she might put these facts together and conclude that, if ‘burb-dwellers feel “stranded” when there’s a perfectly good government programme to get them home, that government programme works about as well as the others and doesn’t merit fourteen fucking billion dollars of turd-polishing.

But that’s a rant for another time.

Is it immoral to refuse someone’s business on the grounds that it would be risky not to? Certainly not; it may in fact be immoral to risk someone else’s investment on a risky deal without their prior consent (see, for example, the American Savings and Loan crisis). This “right” is bullshit, merely a matter of convenience for customers; furthermore, asserting it as a “right” dilutes every other natural right.

Further, the Transportation Minister phrased this “right” passively. Rights are not passive; they are active, as they are defined in terms of actions. Passive “rights” are nothing more than impositions upon the behaviour of those not granted the “right” in question — in this case, a restriction upon the property rights of the cabbie (in particular, s/h/its right to free exchange). Indeed, most of the other “rights” of the taxi passenger are passive. Here’s one that isn’t:

• Pay the posted rate by cash, or accepted credit card or taxi-saver voucher.

This is indeed a right; it’s part of the right to property (via contracts). Once again, though, asserting a specific component of the right to property weakens the recognition of non-asserted components. So far as I know, no-one has specifically asserted my right to own an iPod; this may lead some people to claim that I have no “right” to own “frivolous luxuries” (after all, if I did, it would be stated somewhere, right? This is also my biggest issue with positive liberties).

The other legitimate rights listed in the “bill” are also components of the right to property, through freedom of exchange. (They are also phrased in active terms.)

Here’s where things get interesting:

• A courteous driver who provides assistance, if requested.

Bullshit once again. No-one has a “right” to be treated with courtesy. Taxi drivers have every right to be rude — it’s the “free speech” part of that whole “liberty” thing — and are welcome to risk losing their jobs if and when they are.

Does one have a right to assistance? That’s an interesting question. If you see someone being assaulted, is it immoral for you to not defend them? (If so, then nearly all of us are fundamentally immoral.) It’s certainly in one’s best interests to provide assistance to others, and thereby increase the chances that others will feel interested in assisting us, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a moral imperative. It’s certainly immoral to coerce others into providing assistance, which is what this “right” is trying to do.

So we’ve come full circle: Noticing that most people haven’t the slightest clue what they’re talking about when they talk about “rights”, we’ve established a reasonable definition for the term that satisfies all of the big ones and none of the frivolities, and used that definition to confirm that, in particular, the B.C. government’s Transportation Minister hasn’t the slightest clue what he means by the term. To paraphrase the late Col. Jeff Cooper:

I may seem quite pedantic, but improvement would be seen
If we could bring ourselves to say precisely what we mean.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, improvement has been seen. Say what you will about the evils of modern society: I’m pleased to live in an age of scientific medicine, pervasive sewer networks, Internet commerce, and the OLPC project. If we take the otherwise execrable “taxi passenger’s bill of rights” as an example (we could as easily choose the Airline Passenger Bill of Rights or the Homeowner’s Bill of Rights), we might be forgiven for concluding that the broad recognition of property rights, mostly in terms of freedom of commerce and exchange, is driving this improvement. (We might draw the same conclusion from even a cursory understanding of history.)

Property rights. Sounds awfully, um, libertarian, doesn’t it?

Must be coincidence.

Giuliani fucks the dog in Florida; may drop out

(In general, I try to keep my blog-post titles relatively reserved and save the real invective for the body of the text; however, given the horror with which many conservatives like to pretend to view sexual deviancy, I thought it appropriate thus to highlight Chairman Rudolph’s apparent downfall.)

We have heard that Mr. Giuliani saw Florida’s primary as a “make-or-break” event:

• Giuliani’s Florida strategy about to be put to the test (cnn.com)

In what many political strategists called a risky strategy, the former New York mayor essentially sat out the early contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, Nevada and South Carolina and focused on Florida and its January 29 primary.

And as his rivals notched victories, Giuliani has mostly been out of the headlines, and his standings in the national polls slipped. He is banking on a win in Florida, with its 57 delegates, to propel him back into the thick of the race and restore his front-runner status.

Florida’s Republicans, then, have broken Giuliani:

• Sources: Giuliani will endorse McCain (politicalticker.cnn.com)

McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, had been in “ongoing discussions” with Rudy Giuliani’s campaign about the former New York mayor ending his run and actively endorsing McCain’s candidacy, according to a GOP official familiar with talks.

CNN projected that Arizona Sen. McCain would win the Florida GOP primary Tuesday night, beating former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, with Giuliani in a tight race for third with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

Well, at least this time he managed to beat Ron Paul. (That fact speaks volumes — not volumes of praise, mind you — about our electorate and its understanding of words like “freedom” and “liberty”, but hey; this is Florida.)

Going into the New Hampshire primary, I was rather optimistic that Senator Clinton’s bid for the Democratic nomination was effectively over; I’m bitterly disappointed that it is not. Thus, I’m rather reluctant to dance a gleeful little jig at the apparent death of Giuliani’s Presidential bid; that said, it seems unlikely that he’ll be able to come back from this dismal a start.

Of the remaining plausible candidates, only Obama seems likely to even think about writing a memo regarding the possibility that he might one day consider addressing issues like the Federal Reserve’s flamethrower-like monetary policy, knee-jerk “war on terr’uh” military interventionism, the continuing erosion of Constitutional “guarantees” of liberty, and so on. I doubt that he will try to fix such problems, but I naively imagine that he’ll give a little bit of thought towards not fucking things up further as he does the sort of unsustainably stupid things that politicians seem to do these days. The others… uh, not so much. I can’t exactly see Edwards, McCain, Clinton, or Romney restoring habeas corpus or daring to ask the banks why taxpayers ought to bail them out for lending money to people with no income, no jobs or assets.

A more pungent metaphor is in order: all of the present front-running Presidential candidates are shit. Obama, however, may one day progress to fertilizer — for now, he stinks and spreads disease, but one day something useful might grow from the ground upon which he’s spread. The rest, however, are simply infectious human waste, distinguishable mainly by the colours of their buckets (and, if you’re a political pundit with the mainstream media, by their “unique bouquets”.)

Still, we may take some comfort in the (still hypothetical, I warn you) notion that Giuliani has passed down the Presidential toilet into the sewers of political irrelevance.

UK gov’t to coerce citizens into identity theft; film at eleven

Thus, from BoingBoing:

• Leaked UK gov’t doc reveals plan to “coerce” Brits into national ID register (BoingBoing)

UK campaigners NO2ID this morning enlisted the help of bloggers across the world to spread a leaked government document describing how the British government intends to go about “coercing” its citizens onto a National Identity Register. The ‘ID card’ is revealed as little more than a cover to create a official dossier and trackable ID for every UK resident – creating what NO2ID calls ‘the database state’.

Uh, “creating” a “database state”? This is rather old news.

The bit that gets me about BoingBoing’s (well, really “NO2ID”’s) mildly hysterical “call to action” is the naive shock therein. “Oh my! Government really isn’t my friend after all! They’re invading my privacy and stuff!” It’s kind of cute, really; like watching a six-year-old’s face fall when he realizes that Santa is a lie told by the Coca-Cola Corporation and his parents are the ones stuffing gift-wrapped consumer goods under the tree.

“Yes, Virginia, there is a Leviathan State. It exists as certainly as avarice and envy and lust for power exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its darkest suffering and helplessness. Alas! How beautiful would be the world if there were no Statists! It would be as beautiful as if there were no Presidents! There would be no lock-stepping party politics then, no legislation, no gunpoint taxation to sap the fruits of this existence. We should have but liberty, in thought and deed. The baleful fire with which arbitrary authority scorches this world would be extinguished.”

– Yes, it’s a parody

Grow the fuck up, children. This is what happens when we give up essential liberty for a little temporary security.

“Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

– George Washington

Oh yes; here’s that document:

• NIS Options Analysis Outcome

To protect and serve, part two

(Part one was here.)

So my Member of Parliament wants more police officers to combat gun violence (regardless of what inciting hysteria about those evil awful firearms does to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms; regardless of the fact that if someone stabs me to death with a screwdriver I’m just as dead as if I’d been slain with a firearm). What can I say? Hoplophobia is popular with the voters these days, and politicians just want to get (re)elected. We’ve voted ourselves into this clusterfuck, and we’ll have to vote ourselves out of it while we still have the right — or is it a privilege now? — to do so.

But if this is how those new cops are going to protect and serve their community, count me the fuck out:

• B.C. teen alleges she was assaulted and unlawfully detained by police (CBC.ca)

(Just as an aside, I find it rather fascinating that the CBC is so careful to point out that the victim here has only “alleged” that she was assaulted by Victoria’s Finest, while it displays no such circumspection in its reporting of brutality that isn’t dignified by government subsidies. Well, we all know who funds the CBC — taxpayers! Uh, I mean, the government.)

See, kids, this is what happens if you get a sober friend to drive you home from a party:

The teenager said her friends dropped her off at home around midnight, but she was locked out because she lost her keys. Neighbors called 911 when they saw her staggering outside, out of control. Paramedics arrived and called police.

Police said that when Kinloch was unable to tell them where she lived, they took her to the main Victoria police station and put her in a padded cell to sober her up. They chose a padded cell because no other cells were available at the time police said.

[...]

After four hours, Kinloch said, she calmed down and sobered up. At 4:30 in the morning, police released her and tried to take her home. Once there, Hamilton said, they found that neither the buzzer nor the phone at the Kinloch family apartment was working.

Kinloch said the two male officers refused to let her out of the car to yell to the second-floor window to her parents and refused to let her call her sister, who, she said, had a cell phone.

Are you ready for some weapons-grade irony, dear reader?

Because they couldn’t legally release a 15-year-old onto the street, Hamilton said, the officers took her back to the station as “a child in need of protection.”

This is how Victoria’s Finest “protects” children:

The surveillance tape shows a female guard coming in and gesturing to Kinloch to remove her jacket and her bra. Kinloch complies. When the guard tells her to take off her shoes, the tape shows Kinloch kicking one of them off, and it lands in the corner of the cell. There is no audio on the tape.

The guard, later identified as special constable Merle Edmonds, then grabs Kinloch by the throat and pushes her into the back wall. The two male officers who had tried to take Kinloch home earlier, Const. Ryan O’Neill and Const. Brian Asmussen, rush in and use force to put Kinloch face down on the floor. They hold her down by her legs, body and head for several minutes while they handcuff her.

Another guard, who is named as John Doe in the civil suit because he was not yet identified at the time the suit was filed, arrives with what looks like a strap or a leash. He ties Kinloch’s feet together. The three male officers turn her around and drag her, feet first, to the door. They secure the strap outside the door and close it.

Kinloch was left tethered to the door, hands and feet bound, for four hours.

Of course, as far as the agents of the State are concerned, she had it coming:

When Kinloch kicked off her shoe, the police spokesman said, Edmonds felt threatened. At one point during their interaction, Kinloch grabbed the guard’s arm, Hamilton said.

“Oh my fucking god! A fifteen-year-old girl with a hangover grabbed my arm!“

After four hours, another police officer who had started his morning shift untied Kinloch and told her she was going to be charged with assaulting Edmonds.

If this is the way the State plans to protect me — count me the fuck out.

Traffic…

…I has it.

Looks like I should link to Y Combinator more often.

Most of our CS students suck at CS

Sucking at CS is a depressingly easy thing to do. If you have trouble with math, logic, or writing, your odds of excelling in computing science are pretty small. If you don’t like pulling things apart until you can see their fundamental structures, you’re in trouble. If you didn’t play with Lego and don’t see why anyone would, you aren’t doing so well.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with sucking at CS, of course. Many disciplines are at least as hard, and as easy to suck at, as CS — math, music, physics, painting, and motorcycle racing are the first five to come to my mind. The world is full of terribly difficult pursuits. Most of the people who excel at these pursuits are deeply and intrinsically motivated to them — you’d no more be able to keep Knuth from writing code than you’d be able to keep Mozart from writing music.

I’m not going to address the question of whether these talents are innate or acquired. One can surely be born with a mind that works well at computing science, just as one can surely develop such a mind through diligent effort. Similarly, mutatis mutandis, with intrinsic motivation.

The problem is that, thanks to the Computer Revolution and more recently the Dot-Com Boom, a thundering herd of otherwise perfectly talented people have decided that an education in computing science would get them a great (or at least stable) job and oodles of money in stock options that might (one day) vest into something more useful than ass-paper. These people are extrinsically motivated, and while there’s nothing wrong with wanting a decent job that might make you an unlikely bazillionaire that wanting isn’t going to make you a competent computing scientist.

I’ve written about this before, of course. Joel Spolsky started the ball rolling (for me, at least) with:

• The Perils of JavaSchools

More recently, other people have weighed in, chiefly due to a paper by Robert Dewar and Edmond Schonberg:

• Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow? (original paper)
• Who Killed the Software Engineer? (Datamation)
• Who did Kill the Software Engineer? (Ekinoderm)

In short: we have too many CS students, and most of them suck.

So the thundering herd mentioned above thunders its way into CS departments around the continent, dramatically raising enrollment figures. This is, essentially, Christmas in September for those departments: more students means more money (from the university administrations and, in many cases, the government) and more prestige. It looks great on paper for the department and for the university.

Of course, there’s a problem: most of these students can’t handle the tough and often mindfucking subjects that are central to good computing science — formal languages and automata, propositional and predicate logic, data structures, algorithms, calculus, linear algebra, graph theory, and above all the mental discipline of decomposing a problem into a complete set of mutually synergistic and tractably implementable subproblems (among others). Department administrators can’t allow these students to fail: to do so would damn them just as high enrollments exalted them. The students themselves are rarely motivated to throw themselves into these problems: they just want a good job, not (necessarily) an intellectual challenge, and while the theory of computing science is apposite to their jobs it doesn’t seem immediately “relevant”.

When “relevance” (as measured by reading job advertisements and counting the buzzwords) meets curricular revision (with an eye towards lowering the failure rate), they have drunken monkey sex and the end result is a JavaSchool. Lest you think that Java is the only problem, I’ll quote from the Datamation article:

To sum up Dewar’s argument: today’s college computer science programs aren’t rigorous enough, and don’t promote in-depth thinking and problem solving. Instead, in an effort to boost enrollment, CS programs focus on easily accessible curricula, and so fail to prepare students to compete with their international peers.

One of the article’s main points (one that was misunderstood, Dewar tells me) is that the adoption of Java as a first programming language in college courses has led to this decline. Not exactly. Yes, Dewar believes that Java’s graphic libraries allow students to cobble together software without understanding the underlying source code.

But the problem with CS programs goes far beyond their focus on Java, he says.

“A lot of it is, ‘Let’s make this all more fun.’ You know, ‘Math is not fun, let’s reduce math requirements. Algorithms are not fun, let’s get rid of them. Ewww – graphic libraries, they’re fun. Let’s have people mess with libraries. And [forget] all this business about ‘command line’ – we’ll have people use nice visual interfaces where they can point and click and do fancy graphic stuff and have fun.”

Dumb down the curricula (often at the explicit request of many of the students), and you dumb down the graduating class. You’re still going to graduate some really sharp computing scientists — the sort of people who go on to make a bazillion dollars by applying that recondite CS theory — because you simply cannot stop them from constantly and aggressively improving their art. On the other hand, you’ll graduate a thundering herd of half-assed programmers, who all go out and get jobs at Microsoft and IBM and the like.

You run into real problems when Microsoft and IBM and all their little friends realize that they can hire better programmers for less money by outsourcing their projects to places like India. This doesn’t trouble the really good programmers — they’re all trying to get jobs at Fog Creek or money from Y Combinator or finish their Ph.D. dissertations. It does trouble the thundering herd, though, because they went into CS as a career, not as a productive and occasionally unhealthy addiction.

And just like that, CS enrollment drops through the floor.

“Quick! Enrollment’s dropping! Take out the hard courses! Make CS more fun!“

Those of us who’re into the theory recognize this as a positive feedback loop. It’s not a good place to be. Lower enrollment means dumber programmes means less-employable graduates means lower employment….

The irony of all this is that it’s at best a sideshow to the people who’re inexorably drawn to computing science. Those are the people who drive computing progress and create improbably successful startups every decade or so; they are the people whom the thundering herd seeks to imitate. They’re still signing up for CS degrees, they’re still relentlessly improving themselves, and they’re still doing the vast majority of important, innovative computing.

(And they’re probably still playing with Lego.)

Defeating the purpose

Let’s start with a bit of a metaphor.

Suppose you’re worried about some random sociopath breaking into your house while you’re asleep.  You might take in a watchdog.  You’d expect this watchdog to bark at anything he (let’s suppose your watchdog is male) finds suspicious, trading off your immediate involvement for the chance to go to sleep secure in the notion that someone else is looking out for you.  (Note that this is a watchdog, not a government, here.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.)

If the watchdog barks frantically in the middle of the night, this tells you that he’s upset about something.  That “something” could be the paperboy making an extra effort to jam your copy of the local fishwrap inside your screen door so it doesn’t get rained upon; it could be a drunken asshole making faces at him (at the dog, that is, not at the paperboy) on the long walk home; it could even be some goblin wedging a crowbar into your doorframe.  In every case, your watchdog is convinced that there’s an intruder out there, and is doing what you expect him to do: he’s raising a fuss you can’t ignore.  In every case, you get out of bed to investigate, with your cell phone and your flashlight (and if you’re privileged to live in a free country, your shotgun).

If the intruder in question doesn’t turn out to be a burglar, you don’t shoot your watchdog: you scrunch him behind the ears and tell him he’s a good dog.  After all, he’s doing his job, even if he did wake you up at the crack of fuckin’ dawn.

With that in mind, have a read at this:

• Nuclear safety watchdog head fired for ‘lack of leadership’: minister (CBC.ca)

Lunn just shot his watchdog for barking at the paperboy.

Here’s the executive summary: on 18 November 2007, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission shut down the Chalk River reactor in Ontario over safety concerns.  Chalk River produced some ridiculously high proportion of the world’s medical radiosiotopes (the story above claims two thirds).  On 11 December, the federal government overruled the CNSC’s objections and ordered the reactor to resume operation (which it did on 16 December).  Since then, the CNSC and the FedGov have bitched at each other non-stop.  (Here’s a hint: if your dog barks at you, you might be doing something wrong.)

I can, of course, expect little better than this from an elected official.  Nevertheless, this seems unusually petty and short-sighted… and ill-advised:

• Firing of nuclear watchdog head could silence other public servants: critics (CBC.ca)

If the rest of your dogs see you shoot one for barking at an intruder — you think they’re going to raise a ruckus when someone climbs through the window?