View 504 February 4 - 10, 2008 (original) (raw)
Friday, February 8, 2008
I woke up able to talk, which is surprising, since the night didn't start well. I am about to go out for my morning walk, but when I get back I may throw together the camcorder and fling the junk on my desk into a box and see if I can do a short podcast while I can still talk. We'll see.
I have not been following the Flight 43 memorial controversy. Indeed, I didn't know until today that there was a controversy.
http://errortheory.blogspot.com/2008/01/
plea-from-tom-burnett-sr-to-wonderful.html
I know nothing more about this. Could it be a case of political correctness gone mad? "Artistic integrity" leading to cultural treason is not rare. Is that what is happening here?
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On Tax Rebates and Borrowed Money
Robert Bruce Thompson on the tax "rebates"
Admittedly, I haven't been paying much attention to this tax rebate thing, so perhaps it's just me. But I was under the impression that the federal government was actually planning to refund taxes that we'd paid previously. Instead, as it turns out, all they're doing in effect is issuing refunds for 2009 early. They plan to get it all back next year.
<http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/02/08/economic.stimulus/index.html>
FTA:
"The checks are an advance on next year's refunds, and most, if not all of the money, will be deducted from taxpayers' refunds in 12 months' time."
So, in effect, what they're saying is "Here's your 2009 refund check early. Go out and spend it right away to boost the economy now so that we can get re-elected. And, oh yeah, we'll take it all back next year even if you've already spent it all."
To call them weasels is an insult to weasels. I really think we need to have an open season on politicians. I would love to have the head of one stuffed and mounted over my fireplace.
-- Robert Bruce Thompson thompson@ttgnet.com
Peter Glaskowsky notes:
Interestingly, that text is not present in the article now.
Searching CNN.com for "the checks are an advance" produces no relevant hits.
There are plenty of blogs and other sites discussing this article, so it's pretty obvious that the article used to contain this quote, but it doesn't any more and CNN doesn't even say it edited the piece. That's pretty awful.
. png
Pretty awful is a mild understatement; it's bad reporting. But the situation should not surprise anyone. A government running a deficit has no money to "rebate"; it has to borrow the "rebate" money, and that means it must collect it back along with the interest it cost to borrow it. Why be astonished?
Economic "stimulus" packages are fairly silly to begin with. It's warmed over Keynes: fill jars with money and bury them, and pay people to go dig them up. The point is not economically useful activity, but "found money" that will soon be spent, not saved. Savings are the enemy of a booming economy.
In the US the problems are two-fold. First the housing bubble, caused by government pumping money out and financial rulings that allow lenders to sell off shaky loans packaged with sound ones. The intention was to make it easier for people to own homes; the result was the inevitable bubble. Another result was to put temptation in the way of people who would not normally be thieves. If you allow someone to loan money with no consequences for making bad loans, and pay them according to the number of loans they make, then you have put enormous temptation in their path; and this is not an age of Saints (although, I hear to my delight, that Bishop Fulton J. Sheen is being considered for Sainthood).
Unrestricted capitalism will always head for the bottom: those restrained by ethics and good taste or even a decent regard for others will be at an enormous disadvantage. Unreconstructed Scrooge will always be on top. This makes for the most efficient allocation of economic resources, but it does not make for a lovely country; even those profiting from all this will not find their country lovely.
Burke had much to say on this subject, most of which has been forgotten.
The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may soon be turned into complaints. Prudence would dictate this in the case of separate insulated private men; but liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people, before they declare themselves, will observe the use which is made of power; and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons, of whose principals, tempers, and dispositions, they have little or no experience, and in situations where those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers. . . .
The age of chivalry is gone. -- That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.
The other problem with the US economy is that we have exported most of the jobs for those on the left hand side of the bell curve. Those were mostly manufacturing jobs. I can recall a time when you could see lofts full of sewing machines in downtown LA. The people who operated those are not likely to get jobs selling insurance or underwriting or being stockbrokers.
So we turn to a stimulus package.
The government is broke. We must borrow the money before we can send it back to the taxpayers. Why is anyone astonished that if we don't have the money, we will have to recover what we "rebate" to people (many to most of whom didn't pay that much in taxes in the first place). If the government can recover any of this "rebate" money, more power to them.
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MacProblems with the MacTrash
NOTE: READ ALL OF this, and read the column at Chaos Manor Reviews, before you send me email. This is a DAY BOOK, and these are notes taken while I was working the problem. The final conclusion to the story (INCLUDING THE HAPPY ENDING) will be at Chaos Manor Reviews.
I no longer need advice or help on this matter. My thanks to all those who did send advice and help. We now resume our regular daybook notes.
I am beginning to hate Macs. I cannot empty the trash. I get a message saying that "Send to" is blocked. To empty everything in the trash including locked items press the option key while selecting Empty Trash. Needless to say I have pressed the option key until I am blue in the face. It won't empty the trash.
I am stuck with about 50 GB of junk in the trash, taking up room on my hard disk. I have wasted half an hour on this. Clearly there must be some way around this mess but I sure as hell cannot figure it out.
It was probably my fault for using the Mac to delete about 50 GB of old backup files on the Seagate firewire external disk I was going to use for Time Machine. I should have used Windows to clean off that disk. Alas, I tried to delete the files on the Mac, and moving them to the trash was the way to do that.
Well, they are now permanently in the trash, taking up 50 GB of space, and NOTHING I can do will get rid of them. I may have to buy a new hard drive for the Mac to recover that space. This is not a good way to have an operating system. I hate it.
If I could get anything OUT of the trash, I could try deleting what is left, and get rid of this junk a little at a time, perhaps; but I can't get anything OUT of the trash. Is there anything that will let me extract files from the trash to another folder without leaving a ghost of those files in the trash?
--- All right, I see I can MOVE stuff by doing Command Key - drag. So I will MOVE everything out of the trash to a FOO file folder, then start moving things one folder at a time to the trash and see if I can empty them. This may take all day. MACS are blooking SLOW about moving files. I suppose you get used to that?
IS THERE A UNIX COMMAND that will empty the trash? It really is trash. I really want it gone. I don't care if Send To is locked or whatever it says. I just want to get rid of the trash and not have to buy a new hard drive so that I can have the full capacity of the drive.
I really truly hate this.
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NOW I CANNOT MOVE SOME OF THE ITEMS from the trash to the foo folder. I do not have sufficient privileges!!! The MAC is protecting me from deleting old Windows backup files. I don't have sufficient privileges. This may be the stupidest operating system yet with the possible exception of Vista.
Ye gods!!!
It will take about an hour to move the "Norton Backups" Folder from the Trash to a Foo folder. Since it took 20 minutes to move Documents and Settings from Trash to the Foo folder, and then I was told I didn't have sufficient privileges to do that, I do not intend to invest an hour in that. Incidentally, when I tried to get the Documents and Settings folder out of the Foo folder it made ANOTHER huge folder in the Unemptiable Trash.
Apparently I really will have to get the hard drive replaced to have a full 500 GB drive on the Mac, since it will not allow me to get rid of 50 GB of trash. This must be stupidity on stilts. Why does it tell me to use the OPTION key when that doesn't work? And HOW can I not have enough privileges?
I need a UNIX guru to fix this. Hmm. I recall back in the 80's saying that UNIX would never be the operating system for the rest of us because it would require a guru on call to make it useful. Apparently I was right. Apple OS X still needs a guru to be workable.
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OK, UNIX Guru's have come to the rescue. Sort of. But I have a bunch of items in the Trash directory that the command line terminal reports
Operation not permitted.
Repeating the rm command doesn't even get that message. I wonder if restarting the system will help? Or pulling the plug?
Captain Morse reminds me that this is UNIX and restarting almost never works.
Mac fanatic Tim Loeb says I should pull the plug on the external drive. That worked. It had consequences. My current status is
By removing the plug on the external hard drive, I got (1) a message saying I had probably ruined the drive, and (2) the trash emptied using the rm command.
I now had no trash
Plugging back in the external hard drive I was informed that it is unreadable, and disk utility opened. It offers to reformat.
MY choices are
Dos Fat
OS X Extended Journaled OS X Extended
OS X Extended Case Sensitive Journaled OS X Extended Case Sensitive
I have NO IDEA which one of those I want, or why. I don't know where to go find out about it. What I do want is to use that disk for Time Machine.
This is all grist for the column where it will be a lot smoother and less emotional, but one conclusion is obvious: Aunt Minnie had better have a smart nephew to advise her. Tim Loeb suggests this is all operator error; which is technically true, but I did nothing that was silly, and pulling the plug on the external drive was on his advice. It's significant that 6 UNIX gurus including Dan Spisak worked on UNIX commands for me to use but only one, Loeb, understood that the real problem was that the Mac didn't move any files to the trash at all; it merely moved POINTERS to those files to the trash. Emptying the trash didn't work. Even the UNIX terminal commands didn't work. Only pulling that plug to the external drive worked to allow me to empty the trash on the INTERNAL hard drive. This is very counter intuitive.
I will ponder on this before writing it up for the column. I am sure that by now my mail has advice on which format to use for the hard drive.
Macs are great if you're me, with access to lots of advisors. I am not so sure about Aunt Minnie. But all is now well, and Time Machine is doing its thing automagically. We have a happy ending. Now I have to go out while Time Machine runs its backup.
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Japan's space agency planning space-based solar power arrays
http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/07/
japans-space-agency-planning-space-based-solar-power-arrays/
I guess the Japanese-language version of your column has more influence than you knew.
Tim of Angle
