Is the United States a Tyranny?
Sunday January 22nd 2012, 4:42 pm
Filed under:
EtcThis of course depends on what tyranny means. The general
definition is 'the
arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power'. To me the key term
is 'unrestrained'. In the United States we theoretically have three
co-equal branches of government that are supposed to check each
other. But those checks appear to have failed. As evidence just take
a look at an article published in the Washington
Post. What we see there is a well enumerated list of powers that
are now held by the Presidency. Powers that explicitly allow for the
unrestrained use of power by the President.
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Investing in the global stock market
Sunday January 22nd 2012, 12:04 pm
Filed under:
financial
I want to invest in a global capitalization weighted free float stock market index. Below I explain what I mean, who provides such indexes and how I would build such an index using just two funds.
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Losing exceptions in C#, there has to be a better way!
Wednesday January 04th 2012, 4:24 pm
Filed under:
Tech
A nasty problem I’ve been tangling with for a while now is that C# likes to eat exceptions. If one is already in an exception context and another exception gets thrown then the first exception, by default, is just lost. I explore below some ways to deal with this and honestly they all suck. Does anyone have a better idea?
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Where to stash emergency cash?
Sunday November 27th 2011, 7:53 pm
Filed under:
financial
In this article I explore the options for places to stick my emergency cash. This is cash I need in case things go ’bad’ for us. So my primary concern is safety. Below I walk through the options and discuss how I handled things. Since I am not a financial expert and don’t play one on T.V. your mileage may vary.
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State diagrams for Paxos made simple
I was reading through
Paxos made simple and I really wished there were state diagrams to help explicate the protocol. So I wrote them up and share them below. Please keep in mind that the diagrams just explore naive Paxos, that is single value, no distinguished proposer or distinguished learner. So this version of Paxos is pretty useless in practice but it completely captures the core mechanisms that make Paxos work (with the exception of how to pick a distinguished learner). Please note that this article is intended to be used by someone going through Paxos made simple. It is an adjunct, not a replacement.
Wrapped or Native Paxos?
So let’s say I want to build a nice highly consistent multi-data center store, something like
Megastore. Most everyone at this point has something like Bigtable already deployed in their data centers. What they typically don’t have is a way to keep different instances of their table stores guaranteed consistent with each other across DCs. Megastore steps in to address this issue. But this begs a fundamental question - what’s better, to wrap a Paxos coordinator on top of existing table stores or to build a new Paxos native storage service?
To rent or buy a house?
Wednesday November 09th 2011, 11:22 am
Filed under:
financial
Should we rent or buy a house? A fairly quick and easy rule of thumb is
(Price of a new home)/(monthly rent for equivalent home*12). As Dean Baker
argues if the result is 15 or below then it makes financial sense to buy, otherwise renting is cheaper. For those who want more control over the calculations see the New York Time’s
rent vs buy calculator. My own settings for the calculator are give below.
Parallels 7 vs VMWare Fusion 4
Sunday November 06th 2011, 5:20 pm
Filed under:
reviews
I use a VM on my mac to run Windows for the sole purpose of using remote desktop to my work laptop. Yes, I know that Microsoft offers a
free RDC client for the Mac. But the client doesn’t support multiple monitors on a mac and that’s a show stopper for me. I’ve been using VMWare Fusion 2 & 3 for a bunch of years now and I can’t say I was ever really happy with it but it seemed to do the job. But I recently compared VMWare Fusion 4 to Parallels 7 and for my use case Parallels 7 is slightly better than VMWare Fusion 4 and with Parallel’s upgrade offer for VMWare Fusion 3 users it’s a no brainer in my opinion to switch to Parallels 7. So I have. More details below the fold.
Social Security is doing fine
Sunday November 06th 2011, 5:08 pm
Filed under:
financialOne of the discussions I have with friends that most seems to confuse them is when I say that Social Security is in great shape. They take it as an article of faith that Social Security is doomed. Now while I’ve long argued that Social Security will end up means tested this isn’t because the system doesn’t work or is running out of money, it’s rather my own belief in how politics will play out in the country. But regardless Social Security is doing fine now and into the foreseeable future. Salon recently had a reasonably simple article that explains why things really are fine and provides links to more in depth information for those who care.
11/8/2011 – General and Special Election – Seattle, King County, Washington
Sunday October 30th 2011, 3:40 pm
Filed under:
reviewsI can't say any of the candidates really got me all that terribly
excited, it was mostly an exercise of picking who I hated least. As
for the initiatives the only one that I think is really super
critical is City of Seattle Proposition No. 1 which is the school tax
levy. Initiative 1183 really annoys the hell out of me and I hate
CostCo for putting it out there (I especially like the tax loopholes
they put in for themselves and the bans they put against their
smaller competitors) but as I explain below our dear government has
passed a lovely bill that I think is worse than 1183 so now I have to
vote for 1183.
Initiative Measure No. 1125 - No
Initiative Measure No. 1163 - No
Initiative Measure No. 1183 - Yes
Senate Joint Resolution No. 8205 - Approved
Senate Joint Resolution No. 8206 - Rejected
County Directory of Elections - Mark Greene
Port of Seattle - Commissioner Position No. 2 - Gael Tarleton
Port of Seattle - Commissioner Position No. 5 - Dean Willard
City of Seattle - Council Position No. 1 - Bobby Forch
City of Seattle - Council Position No. 3 - Brad Meacham
City of Seattle - Council Position No. 5 - Dale L. Pusey
City of Seattle - Council Position No. 7 - Tim Burgess
City of Seattle - Council Position No. 9 - Sally J. Clark
City of Seattle Proposition No. 1 - Levy, Yes
Seattle Transportation Benefit District - Proposition No. 1 -
Yes
Seattle School District No. 1 - Director District No. 1 -
Sharon Peaslee
Seattle School District No. 1 - Director District No. 2 -
Kate Martin
Seattle School District No. 1 - Director District No. 3 -
Harium Martin-Morris
Seattle School District No. 1 - Director District No. 4 -
Marty McLaren
Note: For brevity's sake I'm omitting any uncontested races.
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