Linux Kung Fu Blog

I won't be blogging here any more. I'm launching a series of blogs, each with its own focus. The first is a science blog about low-carb diets. There are lots of low-carb websites, blogs and forums, but most focus on weight loss or the details of one specific diet or another. This one does cover weight loss but its focus is on a broad range of known and suspected health effects. I cover these issues from different perspectives, including epidemiological, physiological and anecdotal. I make it a point to avoid making any claims without backing them up with citations to respected medical journals, non-controversial Wikipedia articles, etc. Anyway check it out at:

www.lowcarbforhealth.com

Some home remedies, everyone will agree, are complete hooey. Maybe most of them. Possibly even all of them, though I'm inclined to doubt that. What about pharmaceuticals? Especially prescription drugs. Do they all work as advertised? They can pretty much all be assumed to have side effects, and in many cases I'm sure they're worth it to get the primary effect. But we (Americans) as a society are increasingly medicated. Increasingly dependent (in the metaphorical sense, not the clinical sense) on the products of pharmaceutical companies. It seems the majority of spammers make their living on this fact. In pain? You've never seen so many drugs. Depressed? Oh, we got drugs. Allergies? Take your pick. Trouble in bed? Oh man, have we ever got drugs for that. And did I mention spammers? We must have a thousand times more drugs than we even had ailments 100 years ago.

So what, exactly, is a drug? How do we distinguish it from a home remedy? Maybe it's just a home remedy rammed into a pill form or something. But no. Prescription medications are, without an exception that I know of, chemicals that act so potently on the human body that they're consumed by the fraction of a gram, sometimes by the fraction of a milligram. "Inactive ingredients" constitute the vast majority of the pill, because if it weren't watered down like that we'd be lucky to be able to see the pill. In my mind, this pattern is readily distinguished from the clove of garlic, the teaspoon of vinegar, the glass of salt water. Also, and this is probably a better distinguishing characteristic, it's much easier to get a patent (and thus a monopoly, and thus an insane profit margin) on a novel molecule than on applegoodness concentrate. Generally speaking, is one more likely to work than the other? Is one more potent? The answer will surely differ from drug to drug and remedy to remedy, but on aggregate I doubt the correct answer will correspond with the prevailing attitude toward home remedies.

Some home remedies are outright ridiculed, and a good many of them surely deserve it. They're not based on any kind of science or even experience, but something more closely resembling superstition. Surely no one anymore would eat a "hair of the dog" that bit him, expecting results. But you'd probably be surprised how many people will swear by a spoonful of apple cider vinegar for acid reflux, as counterintuitive as that sounds. I myself am well on my way to believing in the efficacy of raw garlic for the occasional sinus infection - I know for sure the antibiotics they keep prescribing are to make me go away, because that's all they've ever done. And I'll never forget Grandma's meat tenderizer concoction for my wasp sting, not that I know of any prescription alternatives for that. None of these, of course, are exactly double-blind placebo-controlled scientific studies, but they have my attention.

But why is that? Why do there seem to be no gold-standard studies, published in peer-reviewed medical journals, on the safety or efficacy of apple cider vinegar for acid reflux? This may sound a bit conspiratorial, but tell me, who would pay for such a thing? Those studies are not cheap. I don't suppose the makers of Nexium are about to fund a study, the results of which may replace their blockbuster drug with something you can get at the grocery store for pennies per gallon. Nor will any other pharmaceutical company, for similar reasons. Nor will the government, for reasons that may sound even more conspiratorial, but I'm rather glad they don't. Who does that leave? The vinegar makers? How would that look? How long do you think it would take for "big pharma" to discredit that conflict-of-interest-encumbered study? Not that a zillion peer-reviewed studies per day don't have the exact same problem, themselves funded by an organization that stands to benefit from the (predetermined?) results of the study. But no! Surely no scientist would fudge his work just because his benefactor would profit from a specific result!

First of all, the fudging of work is a bit of a gray area in science. There are so many ways it can be done without even the conscious awareness of the scientist. If I already know what result to expect, and I can find some excuse to omit certain cases, reinterpret certain data, etc., in ways that lead me to my expected result, then hurrah! My hypothesis (or my sponsor) is vindicated, and I corrected what surely would have been errors in my study! Then again, there's no shortage of incentives, either, for results to deliberately be skewed. There are, sadly, scientists whose entire lucrative careers are built on the results of their own studies, whose ongoing work (employment, not just science) is funded by organizations who benefit from his consistent results, even if no one else can reproduce them. This is found to have happened with disturbing regularity. In fact, it has been found to be the case most of the time. Most peer-reviewed, published research findings are overturned within a few years of publication. Even then, only an infinitesimal fraction are ever retracted. And this is only counting the findings that someone bothered to re-check. Among those, it only counts the corrections that have not been rejected based on an existing body of evidence (read: scientific consensus (oxymoron!)) that is deemed to outweigh the results of the new study. But now I digress.

This is not to say science is a waste of time or money. There is such a thing as a good study. Happens all the time. But so does the other kind, and you would be well-served if you learned how to tell the difference. Look at how the study was funded. Did the sponsor stand to gain from the result? If so, that doesn't mean you should dismiss it, but it should raise an eyebrow. Was enough of the raw data published that another team could conduct the same experiment, or look over the analysis to check the conclusion? If not, maybe you should actually consider pretending you never saw this study, even if it confirms something you already believe. There is much more to look for - feel free to check out junkscience.com for some cool stuff, but keep a grain of salt handy, as they're also full of conclusions. Reproducibility is a vitally important concept in science, and it's what keeps certain branches of it from suffering (quite as often) from sloppy (or worse) work.

Thus, what we call our body of knowledge about medicine is "mostly wrong", which is a pretty bad state of affairs. And home remedies, for the most part, don't even figure into that "body of knowledge", what with never having been studied, what with no funding. And since most home remedies are along the lines of "drink two cups of strong coffee" and not "drink two quarts of gasoline", I hope you won't look at me funny if I head to the pantry before the medicine cabinet the next time I'm not feeling so hot. Oh, and I like my doctor and all, but he was trained by others like him, is well-read in overturned medical literature, and gets lots of free crap from the people funding and/or conducting mostly-wrong science. I see no reason not to try the risk-free, never-been-scientifically-studied, something-I-might-do-even-if-I-felt-fine, no-idea-if-it's-going-to-work option before going to see a man with questionable training and questionable motives, to ask him for a potent chemical, the prescription of which is supported by a study that is probably wrong.

Told you it wouldn't be another two years! The answer, I'm here to say, is Yes. How do I know? I've changed. A lot. I barely recognize the man I was even 5 years ago. So, what's changed? My basic desires are all the same - I occasionally find that I like something I had little interest in before, like coin collecting, but I still have all the same drives. Mostly the same drives as you, I imagine. But whether, how, and to what degree I pursue their fulfillment changes as I grow and learn.

What about my basic beliefs? I'm still a Christian, but I'm don't dare blog about what's changed in that regard, lest my parents find out. I remember the day I became politically aware. It was in my junior year in high school, and I knew immediately that I was a Republican. And so I stayed for a decade or more. But now I'm a Libertarian. And I didn't just switch labels - the distinguishing marks between the two parties flipped, one by one, until I could only call myself a Libertarian. Mom, Dad, I hope you're not reading this.

Those things are interesting, I think, but what's important is the changes in what I do. One very recent change is my spending habits. All my life I heard about materialism and "consumerism", and they sure sounded bad, and I was pretty sure I wasn't who those people were talking about, but it turns out I was. I wasn't a mall rat or anything, but a lot of the things I spent my money on were, in retrospect, a little shameful. Not a lot shameful - I couldn't afford those things - but my philosophy with regard to money and consumption has changed enough to affect my lifestyle, and I think I have my wife Anna to thank for that. First we ditched cable. No big thing, I was never a big TV guy. The list started growing. Most recently we've gone cold turkey on going out to eat, and I think that's the biggest one so far. It's made me realize I'm a small, sorry excuse for a human being, for having made the kind of money I've made over the years and having practically nothing to show for it. I currently have $0.01 in savings, but I finally actually believe that's about to change. Because I have changed.

And you know what else? No, you don't, I hope. I've changed in a lot of ways I'm not even going to mention because I refuse to admit publicly that I was ever the other way. I'm ashamed of a lot of things I've changed from, and I'm ashamed of some things that I still need to change. Which brings me to my next point.

What does it matter if people change? If I've changed? Having changed, I know beyond any doubt that people can change. That affords me an optimism about people that occasionally gets me into trouble, but usually enhances my happiness and that of others. They do things that are despicable to me. But hey, I've done some rotten things too - things that still make me cringe - things I know for sure I'll never do again. Things these people probably just haven't learned yet, how not to do, or why not. And even more significant, I know specifically that I can change. I have no reason to throw up my hands when I find something I don't like about myself, and I don't have to be afraid to admit (to myself, at least) those things, because I know they don't have to be that way.

What's my secret? I wasn't going to write this paragraph, because I'm not sure I know the answer. But I've got a pretty good idea. The answer is that I care. I've learned that I admire good people. I especially admire good men. That makes me want, very badly, to be a good man. I know when I've done something a good man would do, and how it makes me feel, and I want more of it. That helps me to increase the frequency with which I make good decisions, and that inevitably makes it easier to make the next good decision.

For more good reading on the subject, check this out.

Wow, has it really been almost two years since I blogged? I'll try not to let that happen again.

I've been on a ketogenic diet for some time now, eating almost nothing but meat and green leafy vegetables - but mostly meat. You may have heard of the Atkins diet, which is very similar to what I'm doing, with the same theories behind it. I'm blogging about it because the state of the science behind it is abysmal. I did an incredible amount of research before embarking on it, and I still consume all the information I can find on it, but there is precious little information about the diet as it relates to my purpose - overall long term health. This kind of diet has been used with fantastic success for over 80 years now in treating pediatric epilepsy, but it's still considered a treatment of last resort and they're only now beginning to try it on adults. Over the last decade or so, finally, there has been a real upsurge in research on the effects of the diet on diabetics. Thanks to Atkins, it's been well-known since the 1960's that it's an effective diet for weight loss. Many of the studies that do exist complain of participants dropping out, presumably because the study is invalid unless they force participants to live on flax seed oil instead of bacon, completely missing the point. Given the potential importance in so many areas of medicine, especially the pandemic plague of obesity, why is there not more research on the long term health effects of the diet?

There is much anecdotal evidence that it has beneficial effects on the aging process, restoring elasticity to everything from the skin to arterial walls, that is typically lost as we age. My own personal experience is that my whole body cries "YES!" after a few days of carbohydrate deprivation, and even after almost 6 months I'm amazed by the overall feeling of wellbeing. Now, I'm a trust-the-organism guy, so given the way I feel, there would have to be a very convincing body of evidence to convince me I'm doing anything but exactly what my body was designed for. My experience has been almost 100% positive:

• I already mentioned that I feel noticeably more awesome, all the time.


• I have so much excess energy, for the first week or so I had trouble getting to sleep, so I was only getting about 4 hours a night, but I still felt alert and energetic all day the next day. No more sleep problems now, though, but I'm wondering if I really need 8 hours anymore. At any rate I get a lot more done, because all this energy is begging me to do something useful with it. Like blog.


• I've never been a big headache sufferer, but once a week or so I'd get a mild headache that would last all day unless I took something for it. I don't get those anymore since I started the diet.


• I lost 13 lbs in my first 3 days on the diet. That slowed quite a bit, but I lost a total of 35 lbs in the first 3 months.


• My skin has cleared up, and I don't get as oily anymore. I have no idea why.

... to name a few things. I say "almost 100%" because I'm eating a bit more fat than my gall bladder can keep up with, resulting in the occasional gastrointestinal inconvenience. By "a bit more fat" I mean that about 90% of my caloric intake comes from fat, and about 9% from protein, since my diet consists mostly of bacon, eggs and ribeyes. Now, getting to the point of this post, conventional wisdom says I'm killing myself to death. My cholesterol must be sky high, I'm certainly missing out on all kinds of essential vitamins and minerals, I need fiber, and so on.

First, the cholesterol issue. What made me decide to start this diet in the first place was a book I highly recommend, "Good Calories, Bad Calories", by Gary Taubes. It takes some very thought-provoking shots at some ideas we take for granted: dietary cholesterol raises serum cholesterol, and elevated serum cholesterol causes atherosclerosis and heart disease. I'm now convinced both of these are false. First, dietary cholesterol just doesn't have a way to get into the bloodstream, because it's not water-soluble. The only way it gets into the blood is when your liver packages it up (after manufacturing it) in water-soluble packets like HDL and LDL. The way it's taught in medical school, once it's in your blood, you get plumbing issues with these things in your arteries, causing an arterial buildup of fatty deposits and eventually death. There are some problems with this, as Taubes points out. First, you simply can't have plumbing issues with dissolved substances in the blood, because once a particle is dissolved, it's just part of the liquid. That part's mine, so if I've got it wrong don't blame Taubes, but don't worry, I've got it right. Taubes does point out an interesting related question, though: if it's a plumbing issue, why does it only happen in the arteries? Why not the veins? And why the severe buildup in the very biggest arteries, where there's plenty of room for bloodflow? He offers a fascinating hypothesis to answer these questions that I suspect will eventually be proved correct. Check out the book.

So what makes us think cholesterol causes heart disease in the first place? There's a very interesting answer to that question, but it's beyond the scope of this post. Read the book, and meanwhile suffice it to say I'm advising you to take that "information" with a grain of salt. Anyway, dietary fat does impact cholesterol levels. Some kinds of fat raise LDL, some lower HDL, some raise one but lower the other, and so on. I'm eating copious amounts of all kinds, and I'm proud to say I correctly predicted the impact on my lipid profile. HDL (the "good stuff") is back up to what's considered healthy levels. VLDL is back down to "healthy levels", and LDL, the "bad stuff", is up even higher than before, sending my doctor into a tantrum. Triglycerides are practically gone - another successful prediction, since glucose metabolism is required for the manufacture of triglycerides. That is to say, every part of my lipid profile except LDL made huge moves in the "right" direction. Doc says LDL is the most important part. Any doctor would tell me that, he says.

Well, this field of research has been moving pretty quickly, and I suspect he's a little behind. First, triglycerides and HDL have both been shown to be good independent indicators of risk of heart disease. Perhaps more importantly, though, is that the LDL number is both wrong and misleading at the same time. Wrong because in the standard test, they don't even measure LDL, they just calculate what it probably is based on a formula that probably gets pretty close for most people. But the formula assumes LDL is 20% of the molecular weight of HDL, which is only sort of true. The truth is that there's a very wide range of LDL molecules, from the tiny "dangerous" ones to the big, fluffy lovable ones nobody worries about, and if you have a lot of the latter, your LDL number is going to be way off. Misleading because if they had actually measured my LDL, they would have found that it's almost entirely the stuffed-animal variety. How do I know that? Because when you have high HDL, low VLDL and low triglycerides, that always turns out to put your LDL into the kind of gradient that freaks your doctor out (because he doesn't know the details) but is statistically associated with a very low risk of heart disease. All that is to say that my cholesterol numbers are freaking awesome, in direct conflict with the predictions of the standard model of dietary fat -> cholesterol problems -> heart disease.

I wish there was more reputable science to back this up. My story is anecdotal but, if you ask me, very interesting. Another great anecdote is the story of Dwight Eisenhower's futile attempts to lower cholesterol by going on a diet of rocks and hay, but I digress. I've been able to find exactly one study that even attempts to look at these effects, but while it's in a well-regarded peer-reviewed journal and appears to have been well-conducted, it was funded by the Atkins foundation and thus has potential conflicts of interest, so I'm not going to make a big deal of it. That study is over 7 years old as of this writing, and I haven't found any studies done by anyone trying to reproduce (or discredit) it. What it finds, by the way, is exactly what happened to me.

I am thus totally convinced that modern medicine has got the whole thing wrong. That, and most of the rest of what it has to say about diet and nutrition. Which leads me to the next point.

How in the world can I expect to get my government-approved dosages of vitamins on such a diet? I'll get scurvy! Well, it turns out that red meat, of which I eat a LOT, contains copious - and I do mean copious - amounts of every vitamin except C. I'm practically megadosing on vitamins. Except C. So I guess I focus on vitamin C. I can just take a supplement, right? Pfft, I say. Trust the organism. You've probably heard about how British sailors back in the day would get scurvy, a nasty disease, and that lime juice both prevented and cured it, to everyone's eventual delight. Nutritional deficiency. Right? Maybe not. Maybe the fact that they were living almost exclusively on rum and sugar biscuits drastically inflated their need for vitamin C, and lime juice contained enough of it to satisfy their abnormal need for it. Maybe among all known remaining hunter-gatherer populations in places like Africa and Alaska, both citrus fruits and scurvy are completely absent. So, by the way, are cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer's disease and every other chronic illness you've ever heard of, but again I digress. It appears as though the only nutrient I'm getting less of than Uncle Sam says I need is one I hardly need at all. And red meat does, by the way, contain small amounts of even vitamin C.

Way I see it, if this diet was good enough for the whole human race up until the invention and ubiquitization of agriculture, it's good enough for me.

So if I go another 2 years without touching the blog nobody reads anyway, you can all - I mean both - assume I was wrong about all this and my diet killed me, just like my doctor said. With a name like mine, it shouldn't be too hard to google up my obituary and find out if it was scurvy or heart disease. Until then, I got some ribeyes to grill.

I hear it all the time. "I don't have anything interesting on my machine, so I don't care if it gets pwned." Well, I care, and so does the rest of the world, and I'll tell you why. If your machine is compromised, odds are it's not some kid in his parents' basement looking to get your credit card numbers. Most of the time a PC isn't attacked because someone wants access to it - it's because someone wants control over it. Your machine will be used to attack someone else's machine, either to mask the identity of the real attacker or as part of a distributed attack. It may also be used as a spam zombie to send hundreds of thousands of spam messages per day at the behest of its new owner.

Apathy about the security of your machine or network not only makes you a jackass, it makes you a menace to society. It also betrays ignorance and laziness. Making a machine reasonably secure is really not that hard, after all. Follow a few simple steps, and the vast majority of attacks aimed at your machine (make no mistake, if you're on the Internet, you're a target) will be thwarted.

• Keep your software up to date!
  This is the single most important thing you can do. Most attacks on the Internet attempt to exploit security flaws in your operating system or software for which fixes have long been available. On modern operating systems, staying up to date is a simple and effective means of securing your machine.
  
• Don't run services you don't need
  You should check to see whether you have services (webservers, FTP, etc.) exposed to the Internet that you're not using, and if so, shut them down and/or uninstall them. Most automated attacks (and all worms) need a "listening" service to gain entry. If you must run Internet-facing services, you have the additional responsibility of making sure they're configured securely.
  
• Don't be stupid about Email
  It used to be "don't open Email attachments from people you don't know". While that's still true, it's not unlikely that someone you know has a virus that will replicate itself by sending itself to people in the machine's address book. Don't open attachments you weren't expecting to get, period. I've gotten about a zillion virus Emails over the years, and not one of them stood a chance of fooling anyone who cared enough to think about it. (One exception might be that Anna Kournikova virus that promised to show the tennis star naked. People who knew it was a virus still opened that one.)
  
• Install a firewall
  Don't bother spending money on one. If you're running Windows XP or later, or any UNIX-like OS including MacOS, your OS probably ships with one, and if not, there are plenty of free ones available. It's been a long time since I've seen a bad firewall. They stop traffic, and most of the tricks people used to use to get past them don't work on firewalls made in the last 10 years or so. Honestly, though, if you have no listening services, you don't need a firewall, and if your software is up to date, you shouldn't need one. But if you're one of the jackasses who heretofore didn't care about security, please, install a firewall.
  

That's it! Obviously a lot more can be done to harden a machine, but that's beyond the scope of this post. If you expose services to the Internet, you've got more to do, but most of you have no need to do that. Go forth and sin no more.

It's been my subjective observation that very few people have "pet" conspiracy theories. They believe almost anything conspiratorial they read, or they believe almost none of it. As a non-believer, I want to ask why believers believe. For believers who wonder where I'm coming from, I hope it will become apparent in the course of my analysis.

I think there are a lot of factors at work here. People in general like to believe sensational things. We like to know things that others don't know, or to be "willing to acknowledge" things that others are too naive to. We also like to be victims, because it's satisfying when something doesn't go to plan, to have a scapegoat. These things are, I believe, part of the reason people like to believe in conspiracy theories, but it doesn't explain why reasonable, sensible, intelligent people often do believe in them.

Conspiracy theories have a lot of things in common. One very common (but not universal) feature is simplicity. Complex social phenomena are reduced to a simple explanation (which then requires an increasingly spectacularly complex series of arguments to accommodate the known facts). One common explanation involves a person or entity (politician, pharmaceutical company, etc.) who stands to gain from the situation about which the theory is posited. The President had the WTC taken down because then he had an excuse to go into Iraq, which would then... something about oil. Drug companies develop but then hastily bury cures for common or terrible diseases because there's more money in treating them than in selling a cure.

Another common element is that the conspirator has, or has access to, unlimited resources or superhuman talents. For example, the idea that the President could direct passenger aircraft into skyscrapers, or arrange for those buildings to collapse in such an event when they shouldn't have. Or that a pharmaceutical company could silence every one of the hundreds of researchers and scientists involved in the research that led to a cure, when any of them, by succumbing to moral and ethical imperatives, would be hailed as heroes for blowing the whistle and releasing a cure to the world.

Perhaps the most common element in conspiracy theories is that the true (sorry, "non-conspiratorial") explanation involves sufficient complexity and/or technical detail to be beyond the immediate grasp of theorist and believer alike. Conspiracy theories generally enjoy so little credibility among experts in relevant fields that they refuse even to argue the point, further fueling the theory. Take for example the theory that the collapse of the WTC was unrelated to jets crashing into them, because jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel. Jet fuel burns at around 1500ºF, and typical structural steel melts at around 2700ºF, therefore anyone who believes that the towers collapsed because of a couple of measley jets is sadly naive and gullible. What's more, a representative from the company who certified the steel insists that it should have withstood those temperatures, and who can refute that! The facts are, of course, more complex than this. The impact of the jets stressed the steel and knocked loose the spray-on fire retardant. Steel doesn't have to melt to fail as a structural support - it expands even under mild temperature changes and loses substantial structural strength far below its melting point and well below 1500ºF. Jet fuel doesn't always burn at 1500º - environmental and other factors can cause it to burn much cooler or much hotter. Jet fuel wasn't the only thing burning, once the fire started. Suffice it to say the technical detail and complexity of the explanation of how this happened are beyond the reach of the casual reader. See this Popular Mechanics article for a more detailed analysis. Some simple numbers (1500 < 2700) combined with the insistence of the company responsible for the quality of the steel are plenty for an audience inclined to believe in conspiracy theories.

This suggests that believers are simple-minded, or uneducated, or just stupid, but there doesn't seem to be a direct correlation between intelligence and attitude toward conspiracy theories. The answer seems to be that, for some people more than others, the only satisfying explanation for an important event is an important cause. The explanation that a group of culturally and religiously (to most of us) incomprehensible people attacked the World Trade Center is less satisfying than an explanation involving an unrealistically (even for the President) powerful man to have orchestrated it for his own personal gain. The complicated legal reasons the courts have universally thrown out claims of the unconstitutionality of the income tax are less appealing than an unconscionable conspiracy by the powerful to confiscate our hard-earned money illegally. And there are good reasons for these simple arguments to hold the appeal that they do - Occam's Razor states that (paraphrasing here) the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. "Follow the money" is a good rule of thumb. "Common sense" (the trait to which conspiracy theories universally appeal in their simplicity) is obviously a good thing to have and use. And none of us wants to be naive or gullible.

In support of this hypothesis, please read about this interesting study in which participants, when presented with the same evidence for an event with different outcomes (successful assassination of a president, president was injured but survives, etc.) were more likely to distrust the facts as presented, and form a conspiracy theory, if the outcome was more important (death of a president). Said the leader of the study, "If people become distanced from institutions of power and state, they are more likely to distrust official accounts. This, alongside the bias toward attributing major causes to major events, makes the spread of conspiracy theories more likely."

For those of you who believe in conspiracy theories, I encourage you to read up on logical fallacies and to subscribe to, or at least browse through, the excellent material on overcomingbias.com, where I hope you learn as much as I have about how to recognize and overcome your own cognitive biases.

The hot issue for the 110th Congress seems to be increasing the minimum wage. Why are Democrats so adamant about this, and why are Republicans so opposed? The answer to the first question should be obvious to anyone who has ever paid attention to American politics - it benefits the little guy at the expense of corporations. That may also seem to be the answer to the second question, but it bears further analysis.

The picture painted by the proponents is one of the single mother working for minimum wage to scrape by and feed her children. Increasing the minimum wage is supposed to help her put food on the table, pay rent and so on. Who is she? Do you know anyone making minimum wage? If so, is she a single mother? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 2% of the hourly-paid workforce makes minimum wage or less. The hourly-paid workforce represents a little more than half the total workforce, so just over 1% of the workforce, or 1.4 million souls, are paid at or below the minimum wage. Workers paid less than the minimum wage earn tips or other compensation, putting them well above the minimum wage in almost all cases (about 75% of these are in the service industry), leaving us with 479.000 workers nationwide making minimum wage. These numbers are, by the way, about a fifth of what they were 25 years ago, when 13.5% of the workforce was at the minimum wage. If we assume that only full-time employees depend on this income for survival, we're down to about 380,000, 45% of which are either men or married women with present husbands.

Since I don't have verifiable statistics showing how many of these are teenagers (26%, total) working their first jobs for blow money or something similar, or what percentage of these have children, let's assume that everyone left over (209,000) is a single mom struggling at minimum wage to feed and clothe her children. This very liberal figure represents less than a tenth of a percent, or one one-thousandth, of the population. If the minimum wage is increased by a dollar, as is proposed, these lucky souls will see a windfall of about $35 a week after taxes (assuming they get to keep their jobs, as management finds ways to make up for the new expense). What will this be spent on?

Let's take Jennifer, a hypothetical single mom on minimum wage. Hugging her new $35 to her chest, she leaves her modest apartment on a quest to make the most of it. She gets to the grocery store, many of whose employees, it turns out, also got minimum-wage raises, the cost of which has been passed on to her. That only amounts to a few dollars, so not to worry, she still comes out ahead. She returns home to learn that her apartment complex, which employs minimum-wage office and maintenance personnel, is regrettably forced to raise her rent. Just a little. She drops Johnny off at day care for another day at work, and finds out that - you guessed it - minimum wage babysitters now cost another dollar an hour. But that cost gets distributed over several kids, so it's not a complete loss. She's still ahead by a nose. But you get the picture. Everywhere she spends her money, she must now spend more of it. She's one of the lucky ones - enough of the vendors in her life have found creative ways to make up for the new costs that she manages to break even after her raise. Let's leave it at that, and assume that she doesn't lose her job because her employer can no longer afford as many employees as he'd like to. I like happy endings.

What about the rest of us? Hardest hit will be the industries that depend on a very low labor cost, because their employees earn tips. Restauranteurs (as we saw in Florida after they raised the state minimum wage) will certainly raise prices. Most of them (excepting the high end) operate at a very slim margin to remain competitive. They pay their wait staff, hosts, etc. half of minimum wage. The 50 cent raise means next to nothing to the tipped employees (I speak from experience), but it means a significant increase in labor cost that will almost always be compensated for with increased prices. You and I (and Jennifer, on special occasions) will pay for that. Unless you are wealthy enough to buy the very best of everything you buy, almost everything you spend money on will be affected (negatively, if you haven't been paying attention) by the increased minimum wage.

So, if we increase the minimum wage, we should expect a break-even situation for the very luckiest of the small fraction of a percent of the population it's supposed to help, and a net loss for everyone else. For a little bonus, remember to watch the stock market the day after the new minimum wage is voted on. We'll get to see what those in the know think about what impact it will have on the economy at large.

The Onion

I've been sitting on this all year, waiting for hurricane season to be unquestionably over. Now that it is, without a single hurricane having struck the US, I have something to say. When God tells you something about the future, you're a prophet. When you say God has told you something and are lying, you are a false prophet. The Bible gives short shrift to false prophets. When you say God has told you something (that has already been predicted by scientists), and you qualify it with something as ridiculous as "if I heard the Lord right", you are an especially slimy and stupid false prophet.

I've never been a fan of Pat Robertson. He's on my long list of Christian celebrities that I believe give Christianity a bad name. Now that hurricane season has ended entirely without incident, I would like to bring to your attention a pronouncement he made on May 8: "I go away at the end of each year to pray, and if I heard the Lord right about 2006, the coasts of America will be lashed by storms." He reiterated these concerns nine days later, adding that for the low low price of $20/month to the 700 Club, you can help the inevitable victims of these storms.

If you have no recollection of this, google for "if I heard the Lord right. You will get Pat Robertson results, because no one else has ever been stupid enough to utter that phrase.

I have nothing else to say about this.

There seems to be an awful lot of confusion around this concept. Many things in life are tradeoffs, and nowhere is this more true than in the computer world. You want stability, performance, security and convenience. You can have all these to a degree, but to maximize any of them you'll have to make sacrifices in others. The "right" balance is different for everyone, and every Linux distro has different tolerances and goals for each, depending on its development community. Gentoo focuses on performance, for example, at the expense of convenience (you have to wait for your software to compile). Debian is unusually stable, at the expense of new features. There is one measure, though, that almost all Linux distros implement in the name of stability.

When you install a "stable" release - that is, one that has actually been released and is not still under development - you will usually have all the features that will ever be available for that release. When the new version of your favorite application is released, don't expect to be able to apt-get or urpmi or yum or up2date it on your current release. Developers don't want to introduce new bugs into a stable release, and you don't want them to either. They avoid this by packaging the new software for the development version of the distro, to be released according to what is usually a well-known schedule. Because of this, you can expect your application to continue to work throughout the release cycle - it's not going to break on you because of a new bug introduced with the new version. If the new version of the application fixes a major bug or security issue, file a bug report and request that the fix for that individual problem be backported. Developers will try to identify, often with the help of the authors of the software, exactly what the specific fix is, apply the fix to the existing version of the software, and release the new package. This process keeps the number of bugs in a stable release headed in the right direction: down.

If you lust for new features and are willing to sacrifice stability to get them, you have options. Use the development version of your distro. Debian calls this version "unstable". Or "testing", or even "experimental", depending on just how bleeding-edge you want to get. Mandrake calls it "Cooker". Ubuntu calls it - well, as of the time of this writing, it's called "Edgy Eft", but that will only be true for a few more weeks. This is where all the exciting new stuff is happening. This means that by running it, you will get the shiny new features you crave. It also means that sometimes your computer won't boot. Your display won't start. You won't be able to log in. The list is endless. If you're not confident that you'll know what to do when one of these things happens, you should stick with stable releases until you're more comfortable with troubleshooting Linux issues.

In the mean time, don't ask on IRC, or on forums, and certainly not on development lists, when the new version of your favorite software will be available on a stable release. It won't.

Disclaimer: There are exceptions. Many distros have official and/or unofficial repositories where new versions of certain popular applications are packaged for stable releases. Disclaimer-disclaimer: unofficial repositories are often full of very buggy packages.

Spoiler: I believe that bad laws should be disobeyed. So, what is a bad law? Bad laws aren't always easy to identify, but there are some telltale signs. A bad law criminalizes an act without regard to criminal intent and without the existence of a victim. All bad laws do this, but not all such laws are bad. Criminal intent is huge. Think of the things that everyone has always known is universally, unambiguously wrong (those of you who think there's no such thing as right and wrong don't count. Ever.) Murder. Rape. Theft. Assault. All these things come with criminal intent built right into the word. To kill another human being is not always illegal, because it's not always wrong. To kill in self-defense, on accident, to protect another, etc., is legally permissible, not wrong, and in some cases even heroic. Rape is simple sex with criminal intent. Theft is taking something that's not yours, with criminal intent - not to be confused with taking the free sample, accepting charity, or picking up the dollar bill off the sidewalk. Assault laws do not criminalize boxing.

When a law is made that punishes an act with no victim and no criminal intent, one must carefully consider the Law of Unintended Consequences or be prepared to live with those consequences. All laws will be disobeyed - we don't bother criminalizing things that people don't do. But we have to think of the consequences of bad laws being disobeyed, and of bad laws being obeyed. Consider the "gun free zones", like schools. We don't like schools getting shot up, so we designate them gun free zones. As we've seen over and over, people break these rules. When they do, our knee-jerk reaction is to make more rules: the assault weapons ban, for example. But no matter how often people break laws that already exist (illegally acquiring firearms, then toting them into gun-free zones), we seem to think that the solution is still more laws. This kind of reactive legislation universally targets activities without regard to criminal intent.

When laws like this are disobeyed, what exactly is the problem? Someone is carrying a gun at a school. If no other laws are being broken, we know (at least here in Texas) that the gun is being carried by someone who is not, as far as anyone knows, criminally stupid. We know that he has been trained and certified in the carrying and handling of firearms. Without criminal intent, there is no problem. When there is criminal intent - when a psychopath with murder on the brain brings a gun to a school - there are two problems, and these problems combine to produce events like those at Columbine. The first problem, obviously, is the armed thug in a building full of children. The second problem is that his is the only gun in the building. Teachers and administrators, some of whom may have dutifully left their firearms locked safely in the trunks of their cars, can only bear witness (if they are lucky) to a massacre.

A gun free zone would be a fine idea if it were possible to make such a guarantee, but none can be made except to those who would violate it: that they can kill with relative impunity until they run out of ammunition or take their own lives. Only by breaking a bad law could any individual hope to stop such a tragedy. Only by revoking the law can the government hope to prevent it.

In Texas, I'm required by law to wear my seatbelt. That's not a great law. There is no criminal intent in leaving it unbuckled, and the only conceivable victim is myself. It's my own business if I want to take that risk, or if I would rather not be killed by wearing my seatbelt, as sometimes happens. But I feel no moral obligation to break that law. It's up to you to decide which laws are bad, and which are so bad that they must be broken; but I invite you to join me in breaking bad laws.