Category Archives: View

View 682 Saturday July 9, 2011 test – x-lw

Bookmark Test

[Note: this repeats some material from a previous post. That was part of the test. Apologies]

I have two ways of creating entries for this site. One is to use Word 2007 (soon to be 2010 I think), and put that into “Blog mode” as I call it by doing Office Button menu item Publish, select Blog. The first time I do that Word wants a bunch of information about the blog site, after which it now knows that site and offers to create a new post or download and edit previous posts. It has its tricks and turns. One quirk is that while it understands what bookmarks are and has a series of operations that will allow linking to bookmarks. What Blog Mode does NOT have is any way to insert bookmarks. None. Zero. I can open a new non-blog Word window, put in the line which I want to link to, insert a bookmark, mark and copy that line including the line above it, go back to Blog mod, and paste that in. This puts in the line and the bookmark. Alas it does it badly, and the result has been some of the idiocies you have seen sometimes here. That can be fixed by editing the html code – but Word Blog Mode does not offer me an html editor.

The second way to create an entry is with LiveWriter, which is part of the free Live package that Microsoft offers and would in fact incorporate into Windows were there not some buffoonery in Europe that says it is unfair competition for Microsoft to give awy with Windows what some European companies are trying to sell for money. They will let Microsoft give the Live package free, but you have to know to go find it and download it. Many users won’t know to do that, and may buy some other package instead. This is a fairness doctrine. To whom it is fair is debatable. In any event LiveWriter, like the lamented and no longer supported FrontPage – a superior program in my judgment – LiveWriter offers edit, edit source, and preview views of what you are working on. It will also let you bring in previous pages to edit – but there’s the first rub. LiveWriter does not believe that any page it did not create exists, or that has been my experience. This is in fact a test of that hypothesis: I am creating it in Word Blog mode. I will presently publish it. Then I will see if LiveWriter can find it.

A Test of Bookmark

I am going to create a bookmark to the line above and paste it in. Then I will link to it. I want to see what LiveWriter sees as code, assuming that LiveWriter will see this entry at all.

Here goes.

As hypothesized, LiveWritr never heard of this, and doesn’t believe it exists. I will now copy and paste this whole mess to LiveWriter to see what happens.

It has now been pasted, with the designation of test- x – lw as opposed to the previous designation. The link, while tedious to create, did work on line. Now what happens when I publish this? Here goes.

And that worked. I also note that the list of latest posts lists both x and x –lw. Of course it would. But does that mean that x can be imported to edit here in LiveWriter now? That’s the next test. And the answer is NO. Although the “x”  version is in the Latest Posts list on the site, it does not appear in the menu to browse for latest posts to edit in LiveWriter.

I suppose the nest test should be to do this in the opposite order: create something in Plain old Word complete with bookmarks and links, copy and pasted that into LiveWriter, publish it, forget Word Blog mode entirely. I’ll try that next. Meanwhile the tests are done for the morning. I now need to do a Computing at Chaos Manor column. Thanks for putting up with all this mucking about. You’ll probably see this adventure in a column, since it’s part of the silly stuff I do so you don’t have to.

Meanwhile, BYTE launches shortly.

Dana Rohrabacher has a comment on the last Shuttle. Dana has not abandoned the dream. I have a ton of mail about the lady arrested for trying to grow a victory garden, and I’ll put up a selection with remarks in mail. And much more. Stay tuned.

View 682 Friday July 8, 2011

• The Road To Serfdom
• Firedrills

= = =

The Road to Serfdom

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an op ed essay called “The Road to Serfdom and the Arab Revolt” that ought to be required reading for everyone in the State Department, although I suspect that few in State read WSJ. Fouad Ajami of the Hoover Institution has a good analysis of what is going wrong in the Arab world. He also calls attention to F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Hayek’s 1944 masterpiece is such an essential part of any intelligent citizen’s education that I tend to forget that there are many who have not read it. If you know anyone who hasn’t, rag them until they do. It’s not a long book, and it’s not difficult reading. One key discussion in the book is “Why the worst get on top.”

I don’t know how you can read the WSJ op ed on line. It used to be that if you reached a WSJ piece by Google, you could read it all, but lately I find that there’s no continuation. I subscribe to the Journal, and I even know how to access it through the app in my iPad, but I haven’t yet figured out how to read the entire contents of a Journal article through Firefox; however I can do it through Internet Explorer. I suppose I ‘ll figure that out one day. Anyway, from the article

In his 1944 masterpiece, “The Road to Serfdom,” Hayek wrote that in freedom-crushing totalitarian societies “the worst get on top.” In words that described the Europe of his time but also capture the contemporary Arab condition, he wrote: “To be a useful assistant in the running of a totalitarian state, it is not enough that a man should be prepared to accept specious justification of vile deeds; he must himself be prepared actively to break every moral rule he has ever known if this seems necessary to achieve the end set for him. Since it is the supreme leader who alone determines the ends, his instruments must have no moral convictions of their own.”

There’s more. Read Fouad Ajami by all means, but it’s more important that you read Hayek. The Road to Serfdom is one of the essential books of the Twentieth Century.

FALLEN ANGELS is a science fiction adventure novel by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn. Much of it is satirical but it has its serious moments. The premise is a world in which The Ice returns: a good part of Canada is under glacial sheet ice, which is moving south. There is Climate Change all right, and human actions affect it. It has just been released in Kindle format by Amazon, and if you haven’t read it, you might like to. There has long been an eBook edition from Baen and that remains – it can even be had free from Baen – but this edition has been prepared with great care as an eBook, and Larry, Michael, and I have done a new afterword.

While we are on today’s WSJ, “Sorting the real from the phony spending cut options” by Fred Barnes isn’t bad. If you believe as I do that much of the economic debate is Kabuki theater – see yesterday’s View – then there won’t be a lot of surprises in there, but it may explain a few things to those who haven’t thought so much about it.

Firedrills

The morning started well enough. I seem to be over the debilitation flu or whatever it was that laid me low from February to May, and I woke up full of determination to get started on a new Computing at Chaos Manor column for Chaos Manor Reviews. Then Roberta went for a walk and twisted her knee, and next thing I knew it was off to Kaiser. That all went well and she’s all right if a bit immobilized, but the rest of the day was consumed by locusts.

Last night when I connected my iPhone to the iMac for synch and charging, the iPhone was dead off. It started itself, and when it came on it showed the charge bar: a very thin slice of bright red. Clearly it had run out of power while in my pocket. All very well – it would charge overnight. But when it came time to go to Kaiser and I put the phone in my pocket, it still showed that red thin slice as if it had not charged at all during the night. When we got to the Kaiser center it still showed that when I turned it on. I had brought the charger and while waiting for Roberta I plugged it into the wall. Then I read the wall Street Journal editorial page. The little “I am charging” icon on the phone came on, but the red slice display never changed. Never. So when we got home, I figured that the battery was deaded, and it was time to get it fixed since I depend on that mobile phone. Actually I headed out for the Apple store with the intention of buying an iPhone 4. I should have got one a year ago, and would have by now except that different things kept delaying me. Time to do that. I headed for Fashion Square. Filled the car on the way. Had a shrimp burrito in the food court. Went into the Apple Store. Turned on the phone. It showed itself fully charged. It worked just fine. Nothing wrong with it at all.

Turned around and came home. It’s time to update my phone, but I sure didn’t need to do that today. But if you wonder whiy this is late and I haven’t got any other real work done today, there was more of the same all day. The day was eaten by locusts.

View 682 Thursday July 7, 2011 – 2

Kabuki Economics

Theirs but to do and die

Kabuki Economics

There is a flurry of activity in Washington about the debt limit. We all know that the United States is not going to default on servicing the national debt. Even if the ceiling were not raised a nickel, there is plenty enough revenue coming into the Treasury to service the debt. What we can’t do is continue to spend at current rates while servicing this debt unless we borrow more money. We could instead choose to stop funding a bunch of things we don’t need, and cut back expenditures to match revenue. Of course that would involve hard choices.

Perfection is the enemy of the good. We cannot cut back expenditures to the point where we don’t need to borrow more money without making hard choices – so we don’t cut back at all, not even on easy choices. If the President and Congress would like some easy choices, let me suggest a few. Start with the Inspectors in the Department of Agriculture whose job is making sure that stage magicians who use rabbits in their performances have a federal license. We can dismiss all those people, dismiss their supervisors, dismiss the people in Personnel and Disbursement and other service employees needed to keep those inspectors employed. Sure, the result will only be ten million a year or so, but that’s ten million a year we won’t have to borrow, and all the interest on the borrowed money. A few million here and a few million there and it adds up to real money.

I can suggest off hand another: the Inspector General of the Department of Education has a SWAT team. We can do without those people, and do without all the service personnel needed to pay and supervise and represent in union negotiations and all the rest of it. I don’t know what that SWAT team costs, but I would be astonished if it were under $50 million a year and it might be more. Save that.

And I am certain that if some intelligent people were to sit down with the Budget of the United States we could, within a few hours, come up with a lot more easy choices. By easy choices I mean things that might or might no be a great idea when we have lots of money, but which very clearly are not worth borrowing money to do. Every department in the government has such tasks and task forces, and any competent manager knows about them. I would venture that a 5% across the board budget cut would result in finding a lot of such things; but it is cruel and unusual punishment to make a managerial GS 12 or above reduce his department size. It’s painful and it’s way against the Iron Law; so let us do it for them.

Of course that would mean finding things that are not so easy. Take the Head Start program as an example. There is probably not a more popular program in the Federal government. Everyone wants to give a head start to kids from poor families. Give them an educational break. Heck, it ought to pay for itself. If only one in a hundred ends up with an education and becomes a useful citizen when otherwise the kid would just go on to be a gangster or crook or welfare cheat, then it may even save money!  The problem is that in decades of Head Start, with study after study conducted by people who love the program, not one properly conducted study has ever been able to find a dime’s worth of difference between those who went through Head Start and those of similar circumstances who did not. Not one study, and believe me the people doing the studies were trying to find ways to justify the program. Can’t find them. But that is a Hard Choice. We will probably go on funding Head Start because, well, because of all the things the Feds do, that’s the one many of us like the best whether it does any good at all.  OK, so we leave in place the feel good programs. Those are the Hard Choices.

But how many want to stand up the the Education Department SWAT team? Or the Department of Agriculture Pet Rabbit Permit Inspectors? Who feels good about those?

Do the easy things first. Then we can look for hard choices.

= = = 

Paul C. Light n today’s Wall Street Journal notes that there are on average 18 layers of middle management “between, say, the secretary of agriculture and the forest ranger, or the secretary of the interior and the oil-rig inspector – up from seven layers in 1960.” There’s more, but you get the idea. C. Northcote Parkinson described the process in which bureaucracy expands without regard to the actual work done. It is all quite real. But is any of this in discussion in the Great Debt Ceiling Debate? I would be astonished if it were so.

Theirs but To Do and Die

This was published some time ago, and I must have missed it when it came out; I found it this morning, and it is spot on, as good a layman’s account of what happened to end the French rule in Viet Nam as any I have seen. As it happens, I was involved (ten years later) in analysis of Dien Bien Phu as part of a team to propose new “brushfire war” weapons systems for the Army and Air Force. Messenger has done this well. The original printed account – I just found it in piles of unread stuff – had some maps and photographs which were useful, but the account remains about as good as any I have ever seen.