Category Archives: 5×7

Short posts, sometimes condensed from other posts.

Social Security Invades the Family, 1939

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I am trying to educate myself on some of these things, in a detailed way.  I am seeking clarity on bouncaries, and I think I found the source of problems with Social Security.  If we allow for the fact that the government is going to run a safety net, and we wish to choose between good approaches and bad, then the following paragrpah from the SSA website shows the difference to me:

The original Act provided only retirement benefits, and only to the worker. The 1939 Amendments made a fundamental change in the Social Security program. The Amendments added two new categories of benefits: payments to the spouse and minor children of a retired worker (so-called dependents benefits) and survivors benefits paid to the family in the event … Continue reading →

Pakistan Civil War

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For all my criticism of our recent conduct in abandoning critical interests, I feel that the real loser in this week’s outrages in Pakistan is of course, Pakistan.  Pakistan is both a friend and an enemy, and to solve the problem in Afghanistan requires a solution to Pakistan.  The Army, much of the government, and much of the population are friendly to the US, NATO, and western influence in limited but welcome ways.  The intelligence and security services, parts of the military, and a well-connected (internally and externally) religious segment of the population are angling for their place in a post-American middle east, banking on our failure and departure, in no particular order, while working to achieve both.

I suspect that the recent border incident in which we … Continue reading →

The Point

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The Constitution is the instrument by which we arrange for our own government to act in accordance with the noble principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence.  Therefore, it is sometimes the Court, sometimes the States, sometimes the populace, and so forth which I support in a given struggle, so long as that actor forwards a position more in keeping with the purposes in the Declaration.

I do not find it difficult at all to “reconcile” Constitutional conservatism with advances in society which are beneficial.  The three branches of the federal government act to check and balance one another, just as the states, the feds, and the numerous individuals act to check and balance one another.

It is entirely conservative to support change if that change brings a … Continue reading →

SQL Triggers

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A fact which seems buried to me is that an after trigger actually does still have access to both the inserted and deleted virtual tables.

So if you have been struggling to re-implement a simple insert, update, or delete because you feel you must use an instead of trigger in order to access the values in inserted or deleted, relax.  You’re doing it wrong.

I can beef this up with some code, and I suppose I will, but the code is not the issue–it’s the concept, and once I learned to rely on the inserted and deleted tables persisting until my trigger itself goes out of scope, my life got much simpler.

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Join Us or Be Destroyed

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The Tea Party says to the GOP Join Us or Be Destroyed.  That’s not a threat–we’re rescuing you again, if possible.  If not, well, the Tea Party will not perish with the GOP.  If we cannot save this party from itself and its mortal enemy, then we will simply take it over or die trying.  We are left with no alternative.  We sent an awesome weapon to Congress in the last election, and you are breaking it into pieces because you’re afraid it will do more damage to you than to the opposition.  Sowing the seeds of your own destruction, you refuse to even fire it.

We intend to put you into a leading position in both houses of Congress and the White House, and we demand that the … Continue reading →

Decimate the Federal Workforce!

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The Federal government’s role is not to provide jobs, but to perform only those duties enumerated in the Constitution.  It is obscene for a organization with an IRS, a bevy of regulatory powers, and a military, to put itself in competition with the private sector which it is supposed to protect.

Thought experiment:  If every ten civilian Federal workers were required to vote one of their number off the gravy train and divide his former duties among the remaining nine, wouldn’t they select the most useless?

The word “decimate” means literally to kill every tenth member of your organization.  Well, all we’re talking about here is jobs, but the selection method for a decimation is just as valid now as it was back when the Romans did it.

… Continue reading →

SQL Tip of the Day

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COLLATE DATABASE_DEFAULT

This is a work-around, and a dangerous one, but it works in a pinch. If you are getting collation errors such as “Cannot resolve collation conflict for equal to operation” bubbling up from SQL Server through your application, you are likely trying to JOIN two datasets of incompatible collations.

The quick and dirty workaround is to COLLATE on the fly just as you would CAST a variable for a read but not a write. So you’ll do it in a SELECT statement, which I am happy to report works just fine.

Sample problem:

SELECT Trusty.Age, Shifty.Height FROM MyGoodDataSource AS Trusty INNER JOIN SketchyDataSource AS Shifty ON Trusty.LastName = Shifty.LastName

ERROR! “Cannot resolve collation conflict for equal to operation”

So we’re going to CHOOSE TO INTERPRET THE … Continue reading →

No Time

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Things I do not have time to write about:

Barack Obama is a domestic enemy of the Constitution

[pullquote]We we do not oppose our enemies and we do not support our allies[/pullquote]He is dismantling our defenses, economy, civil society, and rule of law. Contracts are changed by fiat, private companies are ordered to shift assets to do what Congress refuses to authorize, laws great and small are not upheld or defended. Immigration checks of transport hubs are shut down from coast to coast, we just surrendered in Iraq and will shortly in Afghanistan, we put al-Qaeda in power in Libya and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. We we do not oppose our enemies and we do not support our allies, who must now make accommodations with our enemies … Continue reading →

Marxism Colonizing Pentagon

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This is bad.

POLICY BOARD SHIFT

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta this week moved to replace key members of the Defense Policy Board, the advisory group of former officials that serves as a brain trust.

“He made it more ‘Democratic,’” one board member quipped about the changes.

Liberals added to the board include former Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, retired Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright and Jane Harman, a former Democratic congresswoman from California. Also added: former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead.

Most notable among the new members is Ms. Gorelick, who was notorious for erecting the so-called bureaucratic “wall” blocking law enforcement and intelligence agencies from cooperating closely before the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The … Continue reading →

Inequality would exist in a society with equal incomes « Nation of Beancounters

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Interesting:

To examine how much inequality you would get even in a perfectly equal society, I whipped up a simple Python script to compute wealth distribution in a society where every person works for the exact same salary (this should be enough equality for anybody, yes?) of which he saves the exact same amount. For a 5% annual interest rate, the five wealth quintiles controlled 2, 7, 15, 28, and 47 percent of total wealth, respectively. For 10%, these quintiles controlled 0, 4, 10, 25 and 60 percent of wealth.

It’s incredible but now that I think of it, I can’t recall any inequality studies adjusting for age.

via Inequality would exist in a society with equal incomes « Nation of Beancounters.

I can;t help but suspect … Continue reading →