Category Archives: General

Stuff I’m reading (weekly)

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Multicast filtering on UW wireless networks?

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Sitting with an idle laptop on a UW wireless network here at the Evans School, I typically see a constant 40-50kb/sec of traffic flowing into my machine.  At first I thought it was somebody attempting to hack or DDOS my laptop, but digging into the network packets with LittleSnitch showed me that all of this traffic was due to mDNS (Bonjour) broadcast traffic from other Apple machines on the network.

This seems like a huge waste of bandwidth and battery life to allow these network broadcasts.  Apparently other university IT administrators agree; Princeton University filters mDNS traffic from its wireless networks.  It would be nice to see UWIT do the same.

WSDOT traffic data: missing in action

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With the recent start of tolling on SR-520 here in Seattle, the public’s attention is suddenly on traffic volumes on 520 and I-90.  So, this morning, I went over to the WSDOT website to see if I could find a simple listing of traffic volumes for the past few weeks.  Nothing, just a few random numbers sprinkled in their press releases.

Obviously, WSDOT is collecting this data.  It’s ridiculous that it’s not being published in formats that would make it easy to read and analyze.  What a huge open government data fail.

Stuff I’m reading (weekly)

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Managing money for social change agents

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I’m hardly a financial wiz, nor am I fabulously wealthy.  But I’ve managed to do a reasonably decent job of saving and managing money over 15 years as an underpaid social change activist.  Here’s some big-picture advice:

1) Live beneath your means, even if you’re not making a lot of money.  If expenses > income, you are screwed.

2) Have a credit card. Use it. Pay it off every month. Never, never, never run a balance. This helps you build a credit history, which will matter when you want to buy a home.

3) Start saving. Compound interest is your friend. But if you’re not-so-young, start saving anyway.  15% of your income is a good, aggressive target.

4) First savings priority: an emergency fund with 6-9 months’ living expenses. Keep it in cash or a money-market fund. This is your “oh no, I just lost my job” fund, or the “gosh, that was an unexpected car repair bill” fund.

5) Next priority: retirement. Take advantage of any 401k or 403b matching that your employer offers–that’s free money. Saving is easier when it comes directly out of your paycheck and you never get the chance to spend it.  Invest in low-cost index funds or ETFs. David Swensen’s “Unconventional Success” is a fantastic guide to asset allocation that will help you avoid the traps of the mutual fund industry.

Stuff I’m reading (weekly)

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

If we’re going to fix Washington State’s initiative system, let’s really fix it

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It’s difficult to tell whether the recent proposal to amend the Washington State Constitution to fix our savagely broken initiative system is serious or just election-year posturing.  I’m all in favor of requiring initiatives to pay for themselves, but if we’re going to go to the trouble of amending the Constitution, let’s talk about the reform that will really fix the initiative system: banning paid signature gatherers.

The problem with our initiative system isn’t “unfunded mandates”–that’s a symptom.  The problem is that it’s too easy for organized money to put absolutely terrible policies on the ballot.  Banning paid signature gatherers would ensure that only measures with real grassroots support could get on the ballot, and once again make the initiative the people’s check-and-balance it was intended to be.

If you’re interested in more, David Broder, no raging leftist, writes about this at length in Democracy Derailed.

Game-changer for low-cost Plone hosting

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Wow. Long-time Python community hosting favorites WebFaction just upped the memory on their low-end hosting plan to 256MB (not including OS memory) for $5.50/month.  You can bump it to 512MB for another $7/month.  That’s more than enough memory to comfortably run a modest Plone site, and when you combine it with WebFaction’s solid support reputation, suddenly you’ve got a fantastic low-end Plone hosting option.  Nice.

Truth from power

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Bravo Reuven.  This hits the nail on the head.  I’m proud to have you as my representative in Olympia.

I do this to attempt to genuinely educate the public about the true cost of asking for disproportionately higher public spending in education, health care, transportation, capital budgets and so much more all the while sending legislators to Olympia who prioritize anti-tax pledges to Washington, D.C.-based anti-government organizations. If, as some argue, we have a massive state budget deficit because spending from Olympia is out of control, we have that deficit in large because we can no longer sustain an unbalanced status quo by which only 6 primarily urban counties are ‘net contributor’ of taxes while 33 primarily rural are ‘net recipient’ counties. Our rural communities are part of the soul of our state’s glorious history and residents deserve the same quality education and health care that urban communities receive. I am not troubled by the massively unbalanced subsidy of tax dollars from state government to rural areas, I am troubled by the disingenuous political arguments of those who pretend those subsidies don’t exist and prioritize anti-tax pledges above all else.

Stuff I’m reading (weekly)

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Re-appreciating Abraham Lincoln

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One of the unexpected intellectual delights of grad school thus far has been the opportunity to re-engage with Abraham Lincoln.  We’ve been spending a bit of time with his speeches, most importantly the Gettysburg Address.  (Feel free to take five for a quick re-read.)

We’ve been reading Garry Wills’ masterful book “Lincoln at Gettysburg” which had just been published when I last took an American history class in 1992.  It’s a masterful analysis and contextualization of the speech, worth reading for so many reasons, but the insight I like the best is Wills’ analysis of how Lincoln uses the Gettysburg Address to literally redefine the fundamental notion of what America is and where it grounds its political and moral legitimacy.

What Lincoln did in the Gettysburg Address was to ground the idea of America not in the Constitution, a necessarily flawed and incomplete set of rules, but in the Declaration of Independence, a document that lays out a forward-looking vision of human rights grounded in the inherent dignity of each individual.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” This is a transcending and universal statement of ideals, and the task of succeeding generations (Lincoln’s and ours) is to ever more closely align reality with that bold ambition.