I wanted a little Mail Transport Agent thing for the virtual server. Mostly just because the blogs need to send emails sometimes. I had postfix installed, but it used so much memory. I probably could have reduced that if I was clever, but I am not. I tried exim, but I didn't understand it. Exim4 seemed the same. I tried xmail because it sounded lightweight, but the installation didn't work. I wasn't even sure if I was installing the right things. I don't know which part of postfix actually does the sending. I think part of the problem is that I don't have a smarthost because it's hosted at a budget sort of place. So the server has to do all the work of sending mail itself. Postfix can do that because I've seen it do it, but I'm not sure that everything can.

Anyway, eventually I tried smail and it worked straight away. It doesn't even have a daemon. In theory it would probably try to do something if mail was ever sent to this server (with inetd), but they probably won't and smail would probably vomit if it happened anyway. But happily, I can send mail. It all works and I got a bunch of memory back (I only have a tiny bit). I'll have to keep a record of how many times smail offers friendly hackers root and see if it's worth it.

It's been interesting to watch the gradual demise of the IMF. Countries have gradually stopped borrowing money from it, presumably because they no longer want it to run the show. They've started building up foreign reserves of their own, which I think is the only real solution to the problem of financial stability. For me. the IMF highlighted what is wrong with spending other people's money. The lenders have a problem when you're unable to observe from the outside whether a policy is good or bad. Instead of trying to work this out (which probably would have failed anyway) they picked some academically appealing set of policies and decided that everyone would have the same ones. It punished good and bad leaders alike. Sometimes it was probably an improvement, but I suspect that in the countries with good leaders it made things worse and in the countries with bad leaders nothing changed at all. Financial policy doesn't exist in a vacuum.

I think countries are realising that if they have the money to pay back IMF loans, then they don't actually need IMF loans. IMF loans aren't intended to help a country develop (although that may have changed more recently), just to get countries through tough periods. Countries figure that if they can accumulate the more before the crisis instead of having to accumulate it after the crisis, they can cut the IMF out of the picture altogether. And the country receives interest on its reserves instead of paying interest on its loans.

The idea of poor countries hoarding foreign assets in a bank has always been unappealing because people thought that poor countries needed that wealth out in the economy, helping to develop the nation. I think that people have since realised that the theoretical potential for huge investment returns isn't the same thing as actually having huge investment returns. On the whole, money invested in poor nations doesn't ending up returning that much more than anywhere else. Which is encouraging in one sense because it means that it makes as much sense for poor countries to have reserves as for rich countries.

So the IMF is experiencing something of a crisis. It feels like all the sucker poor countries have finally realised they've been duped all along, and don't want to play anymore. The IMF is doing everything it can to persuade the world that it is still needed. Apparently IMF interest income is way way down from what it was 10 years ago and it can't afford the glittery lifestyle it once led. I wouldn't be surprised if IMF lenders are under enormous pressure to make loans wherever they can. The IMF is going to have to tighten its belt. The first thing I would recommend is eliminating all health insurance for IMF workers and lengthening the employee work day to 12 hours. It will be tough at first, but all those who suffer will surely be grateful in the long run.

Blogfeed now has it's own Atom Feed. Given that I just forgot (for a minute) how this post was different to my post a few days ago about Atom and Blogfeed, most of you will probably also wonder. Chris asked for this, but I'm certainly not convinced that it provides any value. Hopefully it does for Chris. At least I learnt about Atom.

Yesterday morning Jo was amazingly patient with me. We'd been planning to go for a run at Coogee at 9am. So when she woke me up at 10am I was already feeling a bit bad. I got dressed and made it out to the car. But then I decided I should come in and get my university work stuff so I could get dropped off on the way back. I was very speedy packing my bags, but a little too speedy running down the drive way. I tripped over the little gate lock hole in the middle of the driveway, sprained my ankle, did a funny roll across the footpath and wound up out on the road. I limped back to the house and Jo went off for a run by herself. I iced my ankle with frozen wedges. Which I later ate.

So last night, at about 1am, I was sitting quietly in my room, graphing away at some time series when this large owl crashes softly into my bedroom window. It hovered there for a moment and flapped away.

And now a pair of turtle doves are hanging out on my roof. Birds are awesome.

Beyond the finger on the trigger

Miranda Devine has a good article about the boy who shot those students in Virginia. His story is so familiar, and mostly me makes me wonder why attacks like his don't happen more often. I could have been him when I was younger. Leaving school was one of the best decisions I've made. I had a couple of other friends when I was 13, but my social experiences were predominantly at school. Students hide out in libraries and bathrooms to minimise the number of interactions they have with other students. I suppose I took that minimisation problem to the logical extreme.

Schools suck and I wouldn't argue with anyone who thought that spending 22 hours a day in their bedroom by themselves was less harmful to their psyche than going to school.

I really love Robert Altman. I just watched A Prairie Home Companion (with Jo until she went to bed). Nothing happened in the film at all. It was just a movie about a radio show. But it was wonderful. It was funny, and gentle and so friendly.

Blogfeed is now Atom-enabled. SimplePie is approximately four billion times better than PEAR fricking XML Feed Parser. And after a brief romance, I've concluded that PHP date() is much, much better than PEAR Date. If only PEAR wasn't so neatly integrated and standardised I'd abandon it altogether.

If anyone is wondering what all this means, it is that Tom, Steve and Anmol can now all come to the Blogfeed party.

Are there any arguments for selling soft drinks in school tuckshops (or have drink machines)? In theory, I would say that tuckshops are there to make life easier for the parents rather than to cater to children's demand for food. School is probably the place where children have the most control over what they eat. They are given money to buy lunch, but can spend it on whatever they want. Especially for young children, in other situations disposable income is likely to be low and often there will be an adult present. You could argue that an adult is present at the tuckshop, but if they are selling soft drinks they obviously aren't going to prevent children from buying them.

I'd be interested if anyone can think of a reason to have soft drinks at school.

A bizarre sort of a winner of a film. I can't imagine anyone fully liking it. Very little about the whole thing wasn't weird, random or disturbing. But unlike Tom and Emily, I had a good time watching it. Helen Mirren was great, and so was Cuba. Even Stephen Dorff was pretty nifty. Not particularly likeable though.

Yahoo Pipes is a thing of beauty. So tastily intuitive and flexible and practical.

R is really quite a lovely piece of software. Compared to Stata and Eviews, which both do try very hard, R makes you feel quite happy inside.

I stuck up an Irrepressible page a while ago, but forgot to link it. This is mostly just for Google I guess.

I'd be inclined to support a worldwide ban on PHP content management systems that aren't called Drupal. Everything else is kind of shite.

It strikes me that I have only ever heard capable, wealthy people talk about the virtues of libertarianism. This does not invalidate the theory, but does call into question that value of their opinion. If you assume that there are "good" and "bad" outcomes for society, and we must pick an economic/social system which obtains the "best" outcome, then how do you choose it? You probably ask people what they think and what they themselves would prefer. In practice, no one really knows what the impact of most policies is on social welfare, so it is a difficult problem to test. So we tend to rely on the intuitive appeal of different ideas.

How much do you discount the opinion of someone recommending a policy that dramatically improves their own welfare? In most cases you discount the value of something someone says if it serves their own interests. However, if you have different people saying the same thing you are more likely to listen. The class of people recommending libertarian economics is very narrow. Mostly white, mostly male, mostly rich, mostly educated, mostly very capable of fending for themselves. Typically people who would do quite well in a tax-free, government-free utopia.

People recommending income equality and government intervention come from many different backgrounds. The majority of the poor. Many capable, wealthy individuals. Men and women. White and not. My question is do you put more weight on the opinions of 100 people from a diverse backgrounds (many of whom will be harmed by their recommendation) than the opinions of 100 people from the same background (all of whom will benefit from their recommendation)?

Let's say you set up an experiment. You ask people how much redistribution there should be. They can pick a number between 1 and 5 where 5 is complete income equality, and 1 is complete inequality. My intuition would be is that the people picking 1 and 2 would be far more homogeneous than the people up the other end. I suspect it would something like 95% high-income individuals.

Can you devise a weighting scheme that discounts votes based on the mean personal benefit of an option to the people choosing that option? Does mean personal benefit serve as a good proxy for the mean contribution of selfishness to a vote? Probably not, but maybe it is good enough to use. Of course, the wealthy would say the idea is foolish. It's a coincidence that the policies they support happen to benefit them personally. They don't support them because they are rich, but because they are clever. It's an unfortunate outcome that the correlation between cleverness the income makes them look self-seeking. If you could educate the poor, then they too would see the virtues of economic liberalism. Sadly, the poor are probably too stupid to ever understand. Perhaps we could develop a weighting system where high IQ led to higher weights. We could use income as a proxy for IQ. Or even the amount of land you own.

The poor are probably no less selfish than the rich, but the poor don't have the luxury of supporting ideals and policies that harm them. The many wealthy who support greater redistribution do have the luxury and they are the ones who bring down the mean personal benefit in the high redistribution categories.

I obviously support income redistribution. But that isn't evidence-based. I'm not completely sure that redistribution doesn't harm the poor. Sometimes I come up with ideas that would benefit me personally. I discount them a lot for that. Because I know how my mind works. Policies that are good and make my life better are far more appealing to me than policies which are good and make my life worse. Given that it's almost impossible to tell the difference between good and bad policies, I'm inclined to think that selfishness weighs in pretty heavily in most decisions. I doubt that this effect is much less for other people than it is for me. If I ever start recommending that we send old people to aged-care homes in Nauru for their own good, I hope someone will remind me that I've probably pulled the idea out of my arse.

This rant has all the hallmarks of the logical fallacy, except that I'm suggesting this in the absence of empirical arguments. If you're only data is the opinions of voters, then it might be reasonable to "attack the person". Committing the "fallacy" might result in better outcomes. If you're a benevolent alien dictator choosing between socialism and capitalism and your only data were people's preference and their incomes, you'd probably choose socialism.

All that can by summarised by the thought that there are capable and not so capable socialists but only capable capitalists. More importantly, I think that this is significant and not just interesting.

When I was in Cambodia I riding along on a motorcycle and I saw a truck that had driven off the side of the road and flipped over. The violence of it made me assume the driver had probably died, although it's possible he hadn't. There were people milling about and moving the cargo from the overturned truck to a number of other smaller vehicles.

I tend to think about the likelihood of various things happening when I'm overseas. I tried to work out the likelihood of being kidnapped in Colombia. I tried to work out the likelihood of my truck falling into the river on that hairy mountain trip from Peru to Bolivia. Or the likelihood of my five hours on a motorcycle containing a fatal accident. These things are hard to figure out. You can't really extrapolate from one event. I could look at the one month in Cambodia before the crash as a sample size of one. In that sample there was one bad car crash. Maybe that is a lot, but maybe it isn't. In one sense, it is definitely a lot, but it doesn't really tell you anything definitive about Cambodia. I have been in Australia my whole life, and have never seen a truck on it's back on the side of the road. How do I compare one crash in one month, to zero crashes in 24 years? You could multiply that one crash by the right proportion to have a guess at how many crashes there would be in 24 years. But you're not really supposed to.

Most people would look at that crash and get a bit worried. Statisticians would look at it and dismiss it because the sample size is too small. People are probably right to be worried, even though they don't have maths on their side. Although the only reason I think they're right to be worried is because I have a whole lot of other associations in my head about car crashes and third world countries.

If I try to ignore all the other associations there probably aren't any useful conclusions I could have made about that one bad crash. So when I saw another bad crash a couple of days later I felt a bit more confident. Two deadly crashes in four days had to mean something. Surely my fears were concretely justified. But they still aren't. Two crashes, even in one day, doesn't really count for anything. Statistically speaking, I reckon I'd have to spend many months on the backs of motorcycles scouting around for truck crashes before I could be confident about anything.

It all does make me wonder how much more likely statisticians are to die in violent crashes. Someone should do a paper on that. I'm obviously not very good at statistics, so I'd probably stuff it up.

I get annoyed at the way the left always puts inverted commas around the word "peacekeeper" when they're talking about UN peacekeepers. Sure, going off to keep the peace with a Steyr has as element of contradiction, but it's not so different to lots of other things we do. In theory, police officers carry guns to enable them to keep society safe. A lot of violent offenders are arrested violently. People generally accept the idea that it's possible to use violence to prevent violence. Or more constructively, that the threat of violence can prevent violence. I suspect that UN peacekeepers actually haven't killed that many people in the past few decades. But I reckon they've still discouraged a lot of other people from doing so.

Perhaps you don't believe that it's possible for someone with a gun to foster peace. It is possible that peacekeepers are only making things worse. But I don't think the evidence is so strong (if there is any at all) that the idea of an armed peacekeeper deserves the sneers and ridicule that it often gets.

This article is from the Border Mail. I don't like to point fingers at newspapers because they are all equally crap, but this is really crap. The title is crap. The photo is crap and meaningless. The whole idea that parents are basically to blame for child obesity is not well supported and in my opinion also crap.

Update: I just noticed that the government report was called "Weight of Opinion". What is it with obesity researchers and smug word plays in their titles?

It reminds me of a presentation a couple of years ago about contraceptive usage. It wasn't a wordplay, but it was called "A Rising Tide?" The final punchline of the presentation was "... and the data shows that the tide will rise." It managed to make safe sex practices sound quite frightening.

I think Vista is possibly even worse than WebCT. I don't remember WebCT requiring Java to run. And the sessions in Vista are so fragile. It's the only think I ever use that makes me restart the browser.

And it's damn ugly. Everything about it is ugly. It's messy and ugly. The URLs are ugly. The colours are ugly. The layout is ugly and impractical. It uses Javascript to break stuff in random places. There isn't a single component or idea that isn't substantially worse than average or what you'd expect.

And it doesn't actually do anything. I feel like I've written applications in a week that do more than Vista. Maybe there is a whole lot of fancy stuff going on behind the scenes which means the stuff we actually use has to suck, but I doubt it.

Vista lives up to every stereotype of the kind of bloated software favoured by large institutions. It pains me to use it. And I'm not being melodramatic.

The NSW Minister for Energy, Ian Macdonald, says he prefers to let the market decide which types of renewable fuels to use, "rather than the Government picking winners".

How solar ran out of puff

This might be a good example of neoliberal dogma resulting in naive decisions. Or perhaps by saying they don't want to support any particular energy source over another, it makes it easier not to support any of them. I doubt anyone cares which non-polluting energy source we end up with. No one is insisting that solar be the one we go with. But it's probably the one that would take off with some government help. The government needn't even help solar directly. A carbon-tax would probably be more than enough to make solar flourish, and isn't really even government aid because it's only levelling the playing field.

In this case, it isn't about the government picking a winner. As a society, we need an alternative to what we have and the government needs to find the best way of getting it. At the moment, the best way doesn't appear to be leaving it all to the markets. There is a reason we normally let markets do things. Normally they do a good job of things. It isn't just some rule we have to follow. But the government tends to treat it like there is a rule.

Sometimes I wonder if the current government is more interested in impressing foreign economics celebrities than actually solving problems.

I think the government should subsidise renewable energy far more. I even think using tax money to research solar might be good. It would be money very constructively down the drain even if something else better comes along. Risking a few billion dollars on it seems like a small price to pay for the chance that the research discovers something nifty.

I couldn't have you treated you better You couldn't have treated me worse

Ben Harper

I could almost imagine John spouting trollop like this. This sort of self-pity would make the world's most pitiful chump look stupid, but it's far sadder to hear it falling from the mouths of fabulously famous celebrities. If Ben and John kept their mouths shut more often and didn't have such narcissistic swaggers, they'd be awesome. Or maybe I'm just bitter. Or probably both.

I set the Party Shuffle in iTunes to only play songs from the "Least Played" smart playlist. So far this morning has been a John Mayer extravaganza.

Tonight at Rough Edges was really brilliant. We were a bit sneaky and gave away free tea and coffee for the first half hour. I had lobbied for it to be all night, but I had to defer to Emily because she was technically in charge. I was partly curious about what would happen to demand if drinks were suddenly free, and partly looking forward to doing some damage to the institution. As it turns out the price elasticity of demand for tea and coffee amongst the homeless seems to be quite low. We only made 5 pots of coffee tonight, which is fairly normal for a Sunday night. Although it was a quiet night, so it must have had some impact. Possibly if we'd yelled out on the street about our new prices things would have been different. As it was, however, things were very quiet. No one came up asking for seven coffees at once. We'd already agreed to say no to that sort of mischief, but it's always nicer when you don't have to. In fact, I so dislike saying no to people that I've started offering free coffees to people I suspect are going to ask for one.

It was nice too, because I took quite a lot of drinks out to people at their tables. That's one of the things I'd really love to do at Rough Edges. There are quite a few things actually, but that is definitely one of them. Having a standardised cordial strength would also be at the top of the list. There's no dignity in drinking weak cordial or in strong cordial. You feel like a chump. Properly made cordial, on the other hand, is an profoundly pleasant experience, especially when it's cold right out of the fridge.

I had some nice chats with some fellows. People really are quite good.

Sometimes when I read the judgements for seriously messed up crimes, I wonder how judges manage to be so reasonable. They might describe gang rape as demonstrating "a callous disregard of the young lady's integrity." It's kind of like the defendants are praised with feint damnation. I'm not sure what else the judge could say instead. Calling them evil little fuckers is probably a touch unjudgemanly. But the processing of the details and analysis is so cold and in sentencing they seem to add on some moderate number for each particularly evil behaviour, and take some time off for slightly less anti-social behaviour. So maybe you get an extra five years for torturing someone before you assault them, but you get three years taken off because you gave the victim a blanket after it was over.

I am thoroughly opposed to immoderate forms of justice and sentencing, but the moderate sorts are so dissatisfying.

Mean Girls is a great film. I kept hearing little rumours about it being good, but I never took them seriously. It was, perhaps a little too uplifting for my taste, but very funny when it wasn't taking itself seriously. I think most people would enjoy it, which isn't something you can say very often.

There is a neat car sharing company in Newtown. You pay a monthly fee and an hourly fee and can pick up cars all over the city. If I needed a car more often, I'd join for sure. It would actually be handy to go visit Ma, but I don't know if it's $15 a month handy.

Tom and I, just for a change, when to see a film together last night. We had the choice between 300 and Sunshine but ended up choosing 300 because we thought our other friends would be less likely to want to see it.

I thought it was a pretty fun film. I like Frank Miller a lot. Sin City was one of the coolest films ever, even though I felt quite ill for hours after it. 300 was more like a piece of art than a film. Every shot looked like it had been dragged through a bunch of digital filters. The colours were tweaked all over the place and the textures twisted and pummelled. But I think it was all in good ways. Aesthetically, it was all rather beautiful. The violence was only visceral in the comic book sense. Most of it was beautifully choreographed. So although it was violent, I was never really made aware of it. Or would have had to think about it to label it violence. Violent is not the most relevant label you can apply to the film. Perhaps that is the worst sort of stylisation, but I didn't mind it. Oddly, I didn't even feel like it glorified violence. It glorified strength, athleticism, wit and courage but I felt like violence itself was only a means to an end. Everyone involved would have been quite happy to go home given the opportunity. The soldiers didn't seem angry at each other. Whenever the other side was considered, it was mutual pity that seemed to dominate.

It wasn't an especially thoughtful film, although I suppose that would have been a lot to ask. The director and actors had unflinching courage in the delivery of agonising clichés. They certainly packed them in from start to finish. None of the dialogue was good. But that didn't matter. It felt like the script was trying to create a complementary aesthetic as well, and it did that well. In action and word there are a few "simple truths", and the film hammered those home. They have no relevance to today (if they ever contained any truth at all), and it never felt like we were been shown this society to better emulate it in any way. It was just a story about an interesting civilisation. The film absorbed their moral perspective without actually advocating it.

I didn't think that Persians were unfairly represented either. No one came out of it looking good, and I think that to believe the Spartans were meant to look "good" is missing the point of the film. The Spartans were far more brutal and unreasonable than the Persians. The Persians weren't even evil. They were all slaves forced to fight against their will. Even Xerxes, the Persian leader was made to look entirely reasonable. And he was an immortalish divinity.

However, I think most people will find it unpleasant. But if you're the sort of person who likes watching artfully choreographed decapitations or even the sort that doesn't mind watching artfully choreographed decapitations then you should try and see it.

Update: I found a great review of it from LRB, who have something interesting to say about pretty much everything.

The novelist and the moviemakers are not fascists; only in love with a fascist fantasy, and perhaps even in love only with its picture possibilities.

There is a whole lot of crowing going on in the right-wing media about how the left-wing media seems to think that David Hicks is more innocent than Hicks himself does. A lot of people certainly complained about the validity of his guilty plea, but you can complain about that without believing he is innocent. If you think that torture is bad and say so but then someone confesses to something serious under torture, nothing has occurred to validate torture. Nor to invalidate an opposition to torture. Torture is a kind of self-validating technique, because it can extract everything it desires. You can torture someone into signing a document claiming it was only right and reasonable that they be tortured.

Mock trials are rather similar because they can dictate terms to the extent that outcomes are predetermined. America's legal system was carefully crafted to deny the powerful the outcomes they might desire. If you're going to bias a legal system you're probably better to err on the side of powerless rather than the powerful. In one sense, that is very dissatisfying - which I think is why the neocons have changed it for Guantanamo Bay - but the old way seems to have proven pretty effective and stable.

I've still never heard anyone claim Hicks is completely innocent or is a nice person. People were just confused about how the US expected to get an unbiased outcome given the system that had been constructed. They're not even content to weight the system against the defendent. They're so scared of a single bad guy being set free, that any path by which an accused might be found innocent has been removed. That, to me, is what is most silly about the whole thing. In principle, I doubt many people are opposed to the idea of David Hicks going to prison for a while. But I think you do probably have to work a bit at persuading people it's the right thing to do.