We went to the AK Zoo for Father’s Day. Can you guess what this charming fellow is?
That’s right. It’s a climbing porcupine. Did you know they could climb? And with those teeth, do you think there’s anything in your house they can’t go through? Sleep soundly!
I posted about a dozen of my favorite pictures over on my Flickr page. Don’t miss Yoga Bear. (That’s yogA, not yogI.)
This is getting old, but I’ve been busy. I oppose legal carve-outs for people of faith, but I still disagree with the understanding of rights that says a bakery has to sell a wedding cake to a lesbian couple.
If I have a right to be served, what do you call the corresponding obligation that you serve me? Obviously, there is law compelling businesses that serve the public do so in a non-discriminatory manner. But that’s a law, not a right. It would disappear if Congress amended the governing legislation and the President signed it. Rights don’t come and go at Congress’ whim.
My rights don’t make demands on you. I have a right to free speech. (That right is not absolute; it is limited for slander, inciting to riot, fighting words, yelling fire in a crowded theater, decibel levels, etc.) But even if I am properly exercising that right, there is no obligation for you to listen. If you had a right to be served, it would be like a right to free speech that required people to listen.
Should you be required to work for R.J.Reynolds? Should you be required to shop at Walmart? If you don’t approve of Chic-Fil-A, should you be required to eat there? Of course not. But if you can refuse your services and your trade to those businesses, why can’t they refuse theirs to you? If you get to make economic choices to help you to achieve your objectives in life, why can’t businesses? Shouldn’t it be up to their management (and ultimately their shareholders) to decide whether to turn away paying customers?
If what’s being discussed is a government service — public schools, highways, police and fire departments — then as a citizen, you have only one government and you can’t go to one with a more enlightened policy. Citizens should all be “equal before the law.” So the law should mandate non-discrimination by the government.
But private businesses (even those that serve the public at large) should be free to discriminate just like the public is free to discriminate against businesses.
The root problem with Jim Crow — the discriminatory laws that people like President Woodrow Wilson passed — is that the water fountains and buses and hotels were required by law to be segregated. Rosa Parks was arrested for breaking the law.
Businesses were forbidden by law from making racial nondiscrimination part of their business model. Instead, the law made it so that companies run by and for bigots were protected from the economic consequences of their own stupidity. The law today simply reverses that, making all companies pretend to be enlightened, making it that much harder for me to identify and reward the ones that truly are.
Here’s an interesting map, showing where the areas of Anchorage most susceptible to seismic activity are located. (I live in one of the green areas, yay!)
(Via Twitter, like so many good things online.)
In the course of preparing for a sermon on the command in Micah 6:8 to “do justice” I came across these stories:
Aaron Swartz: read the Wired article and the Politico obit by Lawrence Lessig, and view a brief interview with Lawrence Lessig here.
The Attorney General for the District of Columbia’s treatment of David Gregory for possessing high-capacity magazines as compared with their treatment of James Brinkley.
Randy Balko has written articles at HuffPo about the unchecked charging power of Prosecutors, and at Reason about prosecutors’ immunity from lawsuits.
Glenn Reynolds blogs about everything, including prosecutorial misconduct, jury trials, and plea bargains.
I’m amazed at how many people — even people in the trade, who publish hymnals and other church materials — can’t seem to distinguish between “Oh” and “O.” Here’s the rule: don’t use “O” unless you know why.
I just implemented a bunch of spam countermeasures. Send me email if you got caught in the crossfire.
I like Walmart. (There: I said it!) I do a lot of shopping there. Nobody else stocks some of the things I want, and when I get them at Walmart, I know the price won’t be lower anywhere else.
I also like Amazon. But from this article, I’m guessing that Walmart doesn’t.
The country’s largest retailer, which for years didn’t blink at would-be competitors, is now under such a threat from Amazon that it is frantically playing catch-up by learning the technology business, including starting @WalmartLabs at Walmart Global E-Commerce, its dot-com division.
Walmart is right to be concerned about how to have an effective online business. (Walmart.com is to Amazon.com as Walmart is to Nordstroms.)
Still, it’s interesting to see a company that’s trying to catch up instead of just flailing helplessly.
The lesson: never give up, never surrender. Never rest on your laurels. The beauty of the capitalist system is that it rewards the Amazon’s of the world that take on the Walmarts and beat them, not by complaining, but by delivering superior value.
I bet it does: Billboard advocating jury nullification concerns local prosecutors.
“People are going to jail for weed,†Babb said. “Things are getting so weird. There needs to be this final safeguard to protect us from a tyrannical government.â€
The story also includes this: “In New York last year, an 80-year-old man was charged with jury tampering after passing out fliers about jury nullification to courthouse visitors; the case was later dismissed by a federal judge.”
Quite apart from the wisdom of interfering with great swaths of the economy to create new entitlements, there is the practical matter of making it work. And that’s proving to be a problem for people working on the Obamacare web site at HealthCare.gov:
The better way to do things is a school of software development called Agile — it’s been around since the 1950s, was basically codified in the early 2000s, now has a whole non-profit devoted to it, and is the dominant form of software design in teams. Rather than moving from one static stage to the next, it emphasizes constant iteration and testing, with prototypes building on prototypes so the endpoint is something that works. The only problem, from a government perspective, is that you need to be comfortable with not knowing exactly that they will look like.
Yes. Just because a type of software development got us to the moon (back when 1K of RAM was a lot) doesn’t mean it’s the right approach to use in the 1990s. Or especially the 2010’s.
That’s one lesson from software development. Here are some others:
1) avoid building centralized systems. The mainframe has given way to minicomputers and PCs then a client-server world and now a web of devices, browsers, and various types of service providers. Web 2.0, baby.
Where does a centralized “Five Year Plan” approach to governing fit in a world of decentralized independent actors?
2) have the right type of abstraction. A spinning metal disk has nothing in common with a USB stick nor with an internet connection, but I can save a file on any one of them with the same program. That’s because there is an abstraction called a file system, and my word processor doesn’t really care what the hardware looks like: it can be silicon, magnetic disks, or something in the cloud. Software drivers for each type of hardware present a common interface that makes them all look the same to the word processor.
A centralized approach to governing doesn’t permit there to be appropriate abstractions. A mix of federal, state, and local governments, with large and small commercial and nonprofit organizations, allows you to have abstraction. Each one does what it needs to do and only that.
A week ago I asked prospective Democrat candidate for governor Hollis French if he, as governor, would enter Alaska in the new Medicaid program. He replied, “Absolutely, yes.” (The argument he made is depressingly common among the people here: you spend $28M and the Federal government gives you a $1000M bridge to nowhere.) So Hollis French won’t be getting my vote next year.
In other Obamacare news, since Alaska doesn’t have its own exchange for nobody to enroll in, they’ve all not enrolled in the Federal exchange:
Enroll Alaska chief operating officer Tyann Boling confirmed that no one has enrolled as of late last week.
“Now things are looking a little bit better this week,” she said. “It’s not for sure we’ve enrolled anybody yet, but things seems to be functioning a little bit better, but as of last week, we had not known of one person that had enrolled in the state of Alaska.”