October 2015 – Page 5 – A Geek With Guns

Education Has Never Been Cheaper

While the Republicans beat on the fear of illegal immigrants drum the Democrats have been beating on the free shit drum. One of the things many Democrats claim should be free is education. In fact they go so far as to say the costs of education are unreasonable. This is nonsense.

Education today is cheaper than it has ever been before. Knowledge has been liberated from the ivory towers of universities and made openly available to the masses. Gone are the days when you had to be extremely wealthy to become learned in anything outside of a trade.

Do you want to learn a language? Duolingo and Memrise have your back. Do you want to learn how to program? Codecademy and Khan Academy have you covered. Do you want to learn history? Khan Academy and MIT are there for you. Do you want to learn mathematics? Khan Academy, MIT, and iTunes U will help you out. Do you want to learn history? Khan Academy, MIT, and iTunes U are all ready to fulfill your desire. Do you want to learn about economics? The Mises Institute has more economic knowledge available than a majority of universities (unless you subscribe to the fantasy economic dreck of Keyes, Marx, and other people who should never have been taken seriously).

What I’ve listed here is just a tiny sample of all the resources available to you to further you education. All of the ones I’ve mentioned above are freely available to you (which is not to be mistaken for free, somebody is footing the bill on these things) and of fantastic quality.

The cost of education has plummeted. What has gotten ridiculously expensive is a university education. More specifically the degrees they issue. But a degree is not synonymous with an education. We don’t need free education, that already exists (again, free to you). What we need is for people to use this knowledge to further their entrepreneurial goals and to help employers understand a Github repository makes a better programming resume than a university degree.

Good On Apple For Withholding Taxes

It has once again come to the media’s attention that Apple (and other technology firms the media doesn’t care about) is holding a lot of cash overseas, which means it isn’t required to pay Uncle Sam a cut. Any sane person would celebrate this as it means less money for the United States government to buy bombs to destroy the Middle East with, military equipment for domestic police to murder even more people with, and build out its surveillance capabilities to spy on everybody with. But most media sources, and a lot of American people, are griping because they believe the taxes Apple isn’t paying is hurting everybody here:

One tax law professor told Ars that this untapped revenue source could stand to significantly benefit the United States.

“Losing $90 billion of potential tax revenues every year is a very big deal,” Neil Buchanan, a professor at George Washington University, said by e-mail. “That money could be used to reverse recent cuts in Head Start, and/or assistance to state governments to fund education at all levels, or increase the Earned Income Tax Credit, and on and on. Politicians who respond to proposals to fund these programs by saying that ‘we can’t afford it’ are simply saying, ‘I’d rather cut Apple’s tax bill than educate our children.’”

First of all let’s correct the language being used by these quisling. The United States government isn’t losing potential revenue. Taxes aren’t revenue. Taxes are plunder. What the United States government is losing is the change to plunder wealth from Apple and other technology firms.

Now that we’re dealing with accurate language instead of doublespeak, let’s analyze the situation. The implication, of course, is that the lost plunder means Uncle Sam will either have to cut back on its programs to murder people or plunder more from the people living within its borders. This is the quintessential flaw in statism, the general argument boils down to, “Since I’m getting fucked everybody else should get fucked to.” But does Apple have a moral obligation to get fucked itself just because Uncle Sam is fucking his people? No. That would be like saying a victim who managed to escape an armed thief was morally responsible for that thief robbing other people. Just because you were able to dodge being a victim doesn’t mean you’re in any way morally responsible for other people who are victimized.

Instead of trying to ensure everybody is getting fucked over as hard or harder than you try building a world where nobody is getting fucked over.

Verizon To Sell Customer Data To AOL

There is a battle between Verizon and AT&T to determine which of the two companies is the most evil. Both companies have gone to tremendous lengths to fuck their customers over but Verizon’s latest ploy may be enough to put it ahead:

Verizon is giving a new mission to its controversial hidden identifier that tracks users of mobile devices. Verizon said in a little-noticed announcement that it will soon begin sharing the profiles with AOL’s ad network, which in turn monitors users across a large swath of the Internet.

That means AOL’s ad network will be able to match millions of Internet users to their real-world details gathered by Verizon, including — “your gender, age range and interests.” AOL’s network is on 40 percent of websites, including on ProPublica.

Here again we see the need for HTTPS everywhere. The key to Verizon’s tracking technology is its ability to inject a tracking number into its customers’ web traffic. HTTPS is not only good at preventing people in the middle of a client-server communication from seeing content. It’s also good at preventing people in the middle from altering the content in any way.

Verizon’s tracking technology works by exploiting the fact insecure web traffic can be modified. The modification, in this case, is including a traffic number, that is invisible to the user, into a customer’s web traffic. This is made possible by the fact Verizon, the customer’s Internet service provide, sits in the middle of all communications between its customers and the Internet. By using HTTPS to secure the connect between the customer and websites on the Internet Verizon can no longer alter the traffic and therefore cannot inject its tracking number.

I’m obviously beating a dead horse on this one but I will continue to do so until every website using HTTPS exclusively.

Make Dispute Resolution Part Of Your Agreements

Because of my gift for taking a great deal of bullshit and condensing it into a reasonable size (I also have a gift for the reverse) I’m often asked to help people develop agreements. More often than, if I’m not involved in the initial drafting of the agreement, I find myself looking at pages and pages of very specific points.

These days it seems very common for people to try to spell out every possible way a party involved in an agreement could violate it. This tendency results in pages of text pointing out specific actions that are in violation of the agreement. Everything from how close one individual can be to another (sometimes exact measurements in inches are even listed) to what language they can use often appear as points amongst the seemingly billions of other points.

When I’m asked to review one of these agreements I start with the Bill and Ted principle, which is “Be excellent to each other. Party on, dudes.” Such a basic principle seems to leave an almost infinite amount of wiggle room for people to be assholes. The real trick is to also include dispute resolution as a point in the agreement.

Every business contract you’ll read has a dispute resolution point but a lot of agreements for non-business groups lack them. A dispute resolution point is one that explains how a dispute amongst members will be resolved when they arises (and one will arise). Usually this take the form of a few individuals, either from within or outside of the group, respected by members of the agreement being appointed official dispute resolvers.

The old agreement may have said, “Personal space includes any and all space within one foot of an individual.” Through the magic of a dispute resolution point any disagreement over what constitutes personal space can be brought before the dispute resolvers. Instead of having to imagine every possible way members of an agreement could come into conflict (which is impossible anyways) an agreement can now fit on a notecard.

This method is effective because it’s simple enough for anybody to understand and flexible enough to handle changing dynamics within a group. Considering our society’s love for a practically uncountable number of laws and lawsuits regarding those laws it’s easy to see what even basic non-business agreements have blown up into 10 page documents. But sanity can be restored. All that’s needed is appointed a few trusted individuals to resolve disputes amongst members.

I Wouldn’t Allow A Liability Into My Establishment Either

I have a confession to make. Most of these “patriot” organizations annoy me. It’s not just because I’m not a patriot (in fact I find the entire concept of patriotism perplexing) but also because a lot of members of these groups tend to be knee-jerk reactionaries.

A couple of people I know were sharing a story about a guardsman being kicked out of Waffle House because he was carrying a gun. This upset quite a few self-proclaimed patriots because guardsmen are apparently even better than you so when they’re booted from an establishment for carrying it’s doubleplus ungood. As it turns out, the guardsman wasn’t kicked out for carrying a gun. He was kicked out because he was carrying a gun after being involved in a fight in the establishment:

The Waffle House franchise owner told Eater that Welch, the National Guardsman, had been kicked out of the restaurant for fighting a couple of weeks prior to being asked to leave his gun outside.

A representative of the Oath Keepers, one of those “patriot” organizations that tend to get on my nerves, said the claim was completely fabricated. It could be but I would find it strange for a franchise owner to make such a claim since it could be considered slanderous.

Working on the assumption the franchise owner was telling the truth (mostly to make a point), had I been in his position I would have also supported my employee’s decision to kick the guardsman out. If you’ve been involved in a fight in my establishment you’re not getting back in. Period. And if I had a leave of my sense and decided to let you back in I certainly wouldn’t let you bring a weapon in with you. Once you’ve proven yourself to be a liability I, as a business owner, and going to take whatever steps are necessary to protect myself, my employees, my property, and my customers.

Let us remember the saloons of the Old West. A lot of people carried guns in those days. Saloon owners recognized the combination of alcohol and firearms was really bad. To protect themselves and their patrons from the known hazards of combining alcohol and firearms the bartender often required patrons to surrender their arms if they wanted to drink. The situation the same if you have a patron who is known to be violent.

As a gun owner you should have a right to carry a firearm. Property owners should also have the right to determine who and who cannot be on their property. If they don’t want to allow armed individuals onto their property their desire should be respected (it’s their loss anyways). The key for gun owners is not to be a dick and therefore hopefully be welcome in most establishments.

Microsoft Hit It Out Of The Park Yesterday

As an Apple user I tend to pay far more attention to Apple’s products than Microsoft’s. Truth be told, with the exception of the Xbox line, Microsoft just hasn’t had anything that really piques my interest… until now. Yesterday Microsoft unveiled a number of new products and, damn, were those announcements sweet.

The Surface Book is everything the iPad Pro should have been. It’s a full laptop that converts into a tablet. Unlike previous computers that did so, the Surface Book doesn’t have a stupid hinge design. In fact the hinge design is really neat. If you’ve used old Windows tablets you’ve experienced the terrible world of monitors that flip around and fold down over the keyboard. None of that bullshit is present with the Surface Book. Instead the monitor bends around the body of the laptop to lay behind it. The weakest point of tablet computers, the rotating hinge the monitor sat on, has been replaced by something that looks pretty robust.

More interesting to me though was the new line of phones. Specifically the Display Dock. Microsoft has delivered what Ubuntu has been promising with its phone line and has yet to deliver, the ability to plug the phone into a dock and have it work as a full computer. This is something I’ve wanted since smartphones became a thing and nobody has delivered it until now. The Display Dock is the big payoff for Microsoft’s unifying strategy with its operating system. If Windows only had the software I need I would actually consider a Windows-based phone now. One device to do it all, or at least do most of it all, really appeals to me.

Getting rid of the old guard was the right strategy for Microsoft. It seems the company is no longer willing to rest on its laurels while companies like Apple eat its lunch. Due to that the market again has another decent competitor.

Reducing Violence

Because no tragedy can be allowed to go to waste, almost immediately after the recent shooting in Oregon Mr. Obama stepped behind is podium and demanded his fellow politicians further restricting legal firearm ownership. He did this under the guise of reducing violence. Not too long afterwards the United States bombed a hospital:

Jason Cone, the executive director of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) U.S., disclosed the updated casualty figures on his Twitter feed, where he also said that the bombing went on for longer than 30 minutes “after American & Afghan military officials in Kabul & Washington first informed of proximity to hospital.”

He added that the precise location of the hospital had been communicated to all parties to the conflict “multiple times” in the past few months. He said MSF was “urgently seeking clarity,” on how the bombing took place.

In a statement, the organization said that it “condemns in the strongest possible terms the horrific bombing of its hospital in Kunduz full of staff and patients.” Of the 37 wounded, 19 are Doctors Without Borders Staff.

What Mr. Obama purports to be addressing are the approximate 11,000 homicides committed with firearms. Setting aside the absurd belief that disarming the general population will somehow reduce homicides let’s consider the grand scheme of things, namely the number of people murdered by governments.

By far the largest murderers in human history have been governments. This is true today. Only an organization with the means and will to involve itself in outright wars with out such entities can rack up a body country in the thousands or millions. Hell, Operation Enduring Freedom killed somewhere between 1,000 and 1,300 civilians in three months alone. And that’s just one operation in one country out of the known seven the United States is actively bombing.

I’m not condoning the actions of the shooter in Oregon, he was a piece of shit murderer after all, or trying to make his crimes seem less than what they are. What I am pointing out is the hypocrisy of a butcher like Obama talking about reducing violence. We’re talking about a man whose only notable achievement has been maintaining a continuous state of war throughout his entire presidency. He even manages to keep bombing countries he’s said we’re no longer at war with. So you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t take any statements he makes about reducing violence seriously.

Brew Up Some Agorism

One of the hardest questions for a new agorist to answer is, “What kind of agorist business can I start?” Coming from a society that has very little entrepreneurial spirit left, which isn’t surprising when children are told their highest aspiration in life is to get a college education so they can work for somebody else, it’s not surprising that this question is so commonly asked. Hell, I still ask it (although I’ve finally got some solid ideas). In my experience the first step in answering that question is identifying a market with relatively high demand, a low entry fee, and an abundance of regulatory burden.

Beer is a good example. Drinking is a common pastime for people, getting into home brewing is affordable for people of even modest means, and there’s a massive amount of regulatory burden:

In a video posted in September by the group Learn Liberty, two college professors break down the cost of a brew to reveal who and what is responsible for that price tag.

According to Peter Jaworski of Georgetown University and Christopher Koopman of George Mason University School of Law, the answer is simple: taxes.

Koopman says that up to 44% of the cost of a beer can be attributed to federal, state, and local taxes. Furthermore, Koopman says that beer is “one the most highly regulated industries across the country,” which causes additional problems for craft breweries.

Any market where 44 percent of the cost comes from taxes is a good place to start when you’re not interested in collecting taxes. The real barrier to entry in the beer market is learning how to brew a halfway decent beer. Fortunately we’re living in a renaissance period for home brew. Information on getting start is not only widely available but the people who already know how to do it are usually happy to teach newcomers (especially if they’re selling brewing equipment or otherwise profiting from teaching).

Some may be concerned that the home brew market is saturated at this point. If everybody who brewed beer sold their creation under the table for profit that might be the case. In my experience most of the people who brew beer, like most people in general, are overly concerned with being a good law-abiding citizen and therefore do not sell their beer or sell so little that it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Because of this beer is still, in my opinion, a good market for a budding agorist to dip their toes into.

You Keep Using That Word: Rights Edition

There are a few pages on Facebook I enjoy reading. Occupy Democrats is one of them. Obviously I don’t agree with the philosophy of the page but the administrators running it are either amazing trolls or incredible idiots.

Case in point, they posted this image after last week’s shooting:

What do firearms and healthcare have in common? Almost nothing, which is why this image is so good! First, it tries to tie two unrelated things together. Why? Probably because the creator thought he was being clever by taking a swipe a gun owners and jerking themselves off about how awesome Obamacare has been. Second, it misses the boat by a wide margin.

Are ascetically offensive firearms (what the image creator calls “assault weapons”) a human right? Is healthcare a human right? The answer to both is yes, but not in the way the image creator was implying. Everybody has a right to acquire any firearm they choose just as they have a right to acquire whatever healthcare they choose. But nobody is entitled to either. We return once again to age old negative rights versus idiocy, err, positive rights.

Negative rights mean individuals should be free from interference from other individuals. Positive rights mean individuals should be given whatever is considered a right. The latter is nonsense because giving individuals goods and services necessarily requires enslaving others to make and provide them. If you have a right to healthcare then somebody has to provide it. On the other hand, if you have a right to acquire healthcare that simply means nobody should be allowed to interfere with you entering an exchange with a healthcare provider.

So, yes, firearms and healthcare are human rights so long as you use a sane definition of rights. Anybody who believes the State, or anybody else, should interfere with individuals acquiring either is an asshole.

Monday Metal: Fatal Illusion By Megadeth

Megadeth has a new album coming out. I have to say that I haven’t been terribly impressed with Megadeth’s latest albums. They usually contained a couple of good songs along with a bunch of filler. Needless to say I’m not super hyped about this new album but the first song they’ve released from it, Fatal Illusion, is pretty decent. I’m not sure why Mustaine decided to add heavy effects to his voice and I really hope it doesn’t appear in every song but otherwise it has a pretty good sound. Have a listen and judge for yourself.