But it turns out that I don’t have the moral profile of either a traditional liberal/Democrat or conservative/Republican. I was raised more-or-less as a liberal, which I gave up at some point in my teens, and drifted in a conservative direction until I realized I didn’t fit in with them either.

Realizing that my politics were truly independent, I felt briefly proud of myself until I discovered that what it actually means to be independent is to have no political friends. Democrats view me as a not-Democrat and therefore Republican, and Republicans view me as a squish — that is — as a liberal who doesn’t really want to admit he’s a liberal and therefore pretends to be a moderate or a Republican.

Later I discovered that apparently I had succeeded it making it to the advanced age of 36 without realizing that politics is essentially a tribal exercise — kind of like war. And by not belonging to either major tribe I don’t get the status of noncombatant. Rather, I am treated as a Quisling, fifth columnist, or, at best, as an enemy civilian whose death or injury is regarded as collateral damage — regrettable, but unimportant as long as the greater goal of defeating the main enemy is achieved.

I’m almost embarrassed to admit it, but up until this year I genuinely believed that the purpose of politics was to choose the best course of action for government. I also have a very weird view, specifically, that governments in general should not spend more than they take in in taxes.

So this is by way of an announcement and a test post, that from now on, for Sam’s Political Ranting you should check out sambal.org (though announcements will still be posted here).

These days toothpaste tubes are made out of soft plastic and even kids have no trouble squeezing them.

First:

 int lookup( int nKey )
 {
   m_qLookup.Reset();
   m_qLookup.Bind( 1, nKey );
   int rc = m_qLookup.Step();
   if( rc != SQLITE_ROW )
     return 0;

   int n = m_qLookup.GetColumnInt(0);

   // some more processing on n

   return n;
 }
 

Second:

 int lookup( int nKey )
 {
   int n = 0;

   m_qLookup.Bind( 1, nKey );
   int rc = m_qLookup.Step();
   if( rc == SQLITE_ROW )
   {
     n = m_qLookup.GetColumnInt(0);

     // some more processing on n
   }
   m_qLookup.Reset();

   return n;
 }
 

Yeah, they’re logically equivalent. It’s no error to Reset() a query before it’s been used, and it’s fine for a query to be in-progress when you Finalize() it at the end of processing. The first way has an early return, which some people find ugly. Personally I think that indenting the extra processing (line 11 in example 2) is uglier, especially when it’s more than a few lines.

Except for the one big difference — that is, that the first version, once called, makes it impossible to drop any table, even a temp table, from the database.

I just ran into this. Apparently having any query in progress (after the first Step() and before any Reset()) creates a lock on the schema which prevents certain schema changes. In particular, adds are OK but drops are not. And the apparent action is non-local — shall I say, spooky action at a distance? In my case the query that was un-Reset was in one module and the code that created, used, and dropped (or rather, failed to drop) the temp table was in another module entirely.

Fortunately for me, I had not merged in anybody else’s code yet, so I knew that the the problem had been caused by something I did recently, and it only took a little while to track down. More fortunately, the code was trivially transformed into something that didn’t leave the query open.

Two reasons:
1. Poke Japan and the US in the eye, possibly contaminate a US carrier battle group (or two!);
2. Remind everyone that unlike Khadafy, he has not given up his WMD and therefore it’s not safe to play him like Saddam

Besides, what’s he got to lose? The dude’s dying anyway.

On the other hand, who’s to say that the CVBG Reagan isn’t there in part to make dumb moves by North Koreans less likely? That was the underlying purpose of their original mission to South Korea, right? I mean.. to take part in “war games”, which basically means the same thing – don’t shoot at SK Navy ships when you might miss and hit the Americans, okay guys?

And who’s to say that the Reagan hasn’t detached an Aegis cruiser and a couple of escorts and sent them to the Sea of Japan (oops I mean East Sea) to discourage any NK funny business while Japan is busy responding to natural disasters?

But what really makes me wonder is, where are the other carriers? Washington and Reagan are in Japan; Enterprise and Vinson are around the Arabian peninsula, and Lincoln is in the South China Sea.

So: two in Japan, two near the Persian gulf, and one in between. None of them are supporting current operations against Libya, oddly.

But they’re ideally positioned in case Neo-bama had decided, say, to preemptively decapitate or defang (by removing WMD capabilities) Iran and North Korea — the remaining two members of W’s “Axis of Evil.” And who’s gonna stop him if he wants to? We can see that even anti-war Democrats like Boxer and Pelosi are completely supine when it’s a member of their own party starting an undeclared war. And could Republicans really complain if the current administration started taking, what, 31 years of hawkish rhetoric seriously?

And if it worked out, Obama might even get another peace prize.

(Admonishments to RAH ID card issuees; sadly, most of these must be from experience…)

This startup — promoting Kellog’s All-Bran cereal — had the motto “breakfast and move things”.

What if we took this advice? Let’s imagine expropriating some of the wealth of the richest man in America, William Gates III. Forbes says he’s worth about $54 billion, of which $16 billion is his Microsoft stock. Let’s start by taking that.

OK, so now we’ve seized about 7% of Microsoft’s stock. That’s the largest single block of stock, which should give us some privileges like picking a board member or two. Unfortunately we don’t have actual control of the company because, well, the other 93% could easily outvote us. So we have to sell the stock in order to get cash.

MSFT is trading at $25.91 right now. If we dump shares on the market the price will drop somewhat – say ten percent. So we’ll clear about $14.5 billion dollars during our sellout, driving the MSFT share price to $23.32. (Incidentally, this will reduce the wealth of everyone else who holds MSFT stock by a total of about $22 billion.)

OK! Now we’ve got $14.5 billion in cash for “we the people”. That’s, uh, $50 per person. OK, here you go. Fifty bucks. That really helped a lot.

What were the secondary effects? Well, I’d guess for starters that any publicly-traded company which has substantial ownership by a billionaire will suffer a hit in stock prices: that would be Berkshire Hathaway, Oracle, Microsoft again (Paul Allen), Wal-Mart, Koch Industries (privately held), Bloomberg (privately held), Google, Facebook (limited trading), Apple… After all, if the government (we the people!) demonstrates a willingness to take Bill Gates’s stock and sell it, why would these others be safe?

Ding! What’s that I hear? It’s another delicious running-dog treat from my friends at Koch Industries. Gotta go, I’m already salivating!

Non-consumption tax. Video game tax. Sitting around tax. Doing nothing tax. Mental activity tax.

Oh wait, that last one is basically thoughtcrime. What, did the US suddenly get Canada envy?