Rebane's Ruminations

AtPac Lawsuit – the Greg Diaz Deposition (updated 5sep2011)

George Rebane

Regular RR readers are familiar with the lawsuit filed by local software company AtPac naming as defendants Nevada County, NC Clerk-Recorder Greg Diaz, and Aptitude Solutions, a Florida software company.  For months the community has been asking the county’s Board of Supervisors to reveal the whys and wherefores of what led to the lawsuit that was settled out of court earlier this summer at a TBD cost that has to date exceeded $2.5M.

A key piece of peeling back the layers of the Rood Center onion is the long-awaited deposition given last May by Mr Diaz.  This deposition has now become available, and is accessible to RR readers here Download Diaz, Gregory ATPAC v. Aptitude.  The deposition, along with the attendant video of Mr Diaz being deposed, is even more revealing as to how business was (is?) being conducted by our county government.  I and others will have more to say about this after digesting the document.

Readers wishing to review some of the background may want to read ‘County Dodges AtPac Bullet, but ...’ and its predecessors.  These can be found by searching RR (upper left panel) with the keyword 'AtPac'.

[1sep2011 update]  Barry Pruett's occasional blog Inside Nevada County Politics makes available (here) some of the Greg Diaz videos mentioned above.

[5sep2011 update]  As promised, my thoughts after reading the Diaz deposition are found here.

California Insanities #41,657 – Baby sitting bill (addended)

George Rebane

If it weren’t really happening, no one would believe it.  Well, actually a progressive would readily believe and promote it since they’re doing it now.  According to our Senator Doug LaMalfa, the idiots in Sacramento are pushing through a law (AB889) that would essentially do away with another job category in California, and further restrict liberty in a state that is already at the bottom of the US individual liberties pile.  The good senator reports –

Under AB 889, household “employers” (aka “parents”) who hire a babysitter on a Friday night will be legally obligated to pay at least minimum wage to any sitter over the age of 18 (unless it is a family member), provide a substitute caregiver every two hours to cover rest and meal breaks, in addition to workers’ compensation coverage, overtime pay, and a meticulously calculated timecard/paycheck. Failure to abide by any of these provisions may result in a legal cause of action against the employer including cumulative penalties, attorneys’ fees, legal costs and expenses associated with hiring expert witnesses, an unprecedented measure of legal recourse provided no other class of workers – from agricultural laborers to garment manufacturers. (On the bright side, language requiring an hour of paid vacation time for every 30 hours worked was amended out of the bill in the Senate.)

[Addendum]  Lest the real point of AB889 is lost, let me add that this new law will criminalize a large family of economic behaviors that have benefitted households since time immemorial.  The law will apply to all household help where a paid non-family member provides personal services to another person.  Babysitting is just the tip of this insane iceberg.

The major impact will be on families that have care-needy members who are ill, disabled, aged, and/or demented.  No longer will tens of thousands of such families be able to afford to have a trusted person come in for a few hours to help or relieve a family care-giver.  The entire employment situation will now have to be treated as if one was running a business with all the attendant worker dispensations, benefits, and payroll overheads added on.

IMHO this bill is simply evil for what devastation it will wreak in the lives of people already burdened by the natural infirmities that will visit all of us.  And here we come to another example of the extreme stupidity that lies at the heart of any socialistic nanny state.

Islamophobia – a rational response? (updated 1sep2011)

                        Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.  R. Clay Reynolds

George Rebane

As these pages long attest, for me the answer to the title question is a resounding YES.  And our western governments aid and abet that as being the reasonable response.  The progressive tsunami of proscribing anyone who evinces fear of Islam ranges from Mayor Bloomberg banning any and all inclusion of religion in the upcoming commemoration of 9/11 at Ground Zero, to Canadian police giving Muslims a pass on physically assaulting non-Muslims in public.  (Read this piece in the 2aug11 Toronto Sun by David Menzies)

A more compelling and terrible look into the mind of Islam is the tragic story of a young Palestinian woman who lived in Gaza.  She was severely burned in a propane cooking accident about a year ago.  Requiring more treatment than available in Gaza, she and her care givers pleaded with Israeli officials at the border checkpoint to be allowed to seek help at a nearby Israeli hospital.  She was given a compassionate pass, proceeded to the hospital where she received treatment for her burns, and after recuperating she was released to return home.

A year later, she arrives with three small children at the same checkpoint in hijab (nearby picture), looking obviously pregnant, and requesting to revisit the hospital to be checked for how her healing has progressed.  The Israeli border guards sensed that something didn’t add up, and took her into custody.  She was placed into a now standard interrogation/isolation compound nearby and asked to disrobe.  Thereupon and in great distress, she confessed that she was a suicide bomber with a mission to go into the same crowded ward where she received her treatment, and then, surrounded by medical personnel and patients, she would detonate herself.

The Israeli video here shows the last moments of her interrogation and her detonating the twenty pounds of high explosive she had strapped to her belly.  It is a devastating record of a dedicated and determined servant of Allah willing to kill without mercy the very people who showed her kindness and compassion, and all for the sole purpose that they were the most proximal infidels that in her zeal she could reach.  That consideration overarched everything else in her life.

Ruminations – 28aug2011 (updated)

George Rebane

Irene, our second politicized hurricane, has failed to deliver on its pre-show publicity.  With the President rushing back to the White House situation room (shades of 'Dr Strangelove') to direct the national response to the advertised Armageddon Minus One, meanwhile the damn thing up and turns into a big rainstorm.  So there he sits wearing his 'FEMA One' jacket, pondering how many votes can still be salvaged before it all settles into just another tropical depression.

In California the redistricting effort has turned into a fraudulent fiasco that now promises to give Democrats the super-majority they need to totally ignore Republicans in their eminently and imminently successful drive to turn our already federalized state into a vast wasteland of coastal welfare ghettos, parched agricultural valleys, and fleeing businesses.  Assemblyman Dan Logue reports that this year’s corporate exit rate is five times last year’s.   In the rear view mirror the tipping point is receding fast as CARB drives us forward in search of the promised green jobs, which, it turns out, are rarer than the delta smelt.

The Digital Divide (remember the Clinton era) has been sighted again from the hallowed halls of UC Berkeley.  A recent study from their (where else?) sociology department laments that the Internet does not correctly represent the sentiments of all Americans since 25% of us have never been online.  Dr Jen Schradie, the study’s author, concludes, “What this means is that relying on the Internet for either a pulse of opinion or data is inaccurate at best and unjust at worst.” (emphasis mine)  Can anyone catch an early whiff of yet another federal program to impose one more layer of social justice across the land?

[update]  I knew it; Russ Steele could not stay away from the political side of things.  Too much will happen in our county between now and November 2012 for him to sit idly by and only comment on RR and other local blogs.  So he just informed us that 'Is It 2012 in Nevada County Yet?' has launched.  It would be an unkind cut to muse that, dressed in new duds, NCMW has just been exhumed and given at least one more year of life.  So I won't do it.

Epiphany at Trinity

George Rebane

It was our first solo trip with our ‘new’ trailer.  Jo Ann and I got back from Trinity Lake yesterday afternoon after spending a few days under the trees at Pinewood Cove RV Park.  We are lifelong dirt campers, so talking us into upgrading to a starter trailer wasn’t all that difficult.  It only took Russ and Ellen Steele about five years to help us switch from a ripstop tent to an aluminum box on wheels.  Memories of weeds poking into our undercarriage were a definite goad to less surprising twilight head calls.

So there we were, practically lakeside and under a thick canopy of tall pineys with our little toyless toy hauler all properly hooked up and canopy deployed.   The RV park grounds sit on, what else, scoured red dirt.  You know, the kind we have right here in Nevada County.  Our little  camping chairs and tables were all set up in the stuff.  Our puppy took no never mind to it, and, rejecting her nice clean bed, stretched herself out on the dustiest parts, being careful to change sides regularly so as to apply an even coating.

Meals were fun because Jo Ann could use the kitchen to prepare some really special vittles for eating around the campfire.  We brought along our own firewood - cured digger pine which makes and maintains a beautifully tight flame mass for hours (contrary to popular local myths, I have yet to burn a bad piece of madrone or digger pine).

The pictured idyllic little scene was made possible following a six hour drive that involved some very curvy roads after we headed west from Redding on State 299.  While there, the major entertainment consisted of driving down to Weaverville to celebrate our 49th, and watching RVs occupy neighboring sites.  From this educational spectator sport one learns a little bit each time as vacationers of various skill levels maneuver their rigs into place and go through the set-up chores – the Germans also call this shadenfreude.  It’s especially relaxing after you are already comfortably ensconced with martooni in hand, and covered with red dirt beyond caring.

What’s Really ‘Eating the World’?

George Rebane

Web browser pioneer Marc Andreesen writes ‘Why Software is Eating the World’ in the 20aug11 WSJ.  It is a well written compendium of the commercial sectors that have grown in recent years, and promise to really grow more because of cheap and ubiquitous computing power.  Andreesen, whom I much admire, outlines how such computing has literally transformed all those sectors – manufacturing, medicine, merchandizing, communications, finance, transportation, … - and is now creating new enterprise sectors yet undreamed.  But he makes a fundamental error in his main premise – that it is “software companies” that are ascendant in this transformation.  They are not.  Please let me explain.

Today, most information technology (IT) based businesses develop, market, maintain, and consume software.  But the software is just the medium through which the plethora of unique and powerful functions required of the business are first computed and then implemented by humans or other energy/mass moving machines.

Andreesen goes on to a long list of companies populating the business sectors that he identifies as really being “software companies”.  He could just as well have made the argument that ‘processors are eating the world’, or that ‘silicon is eating the world’.  In a former day he could have said that ‘metal machining is eating the world’, or ‘printed paper is eating the world’.  Of course, none of these have eaten the world nor will they do so in the future.

Each of these world eaters did nothing more or less than serve as the medium for products that required more than, say, machinists or printers to create and purpose them for use in a society.  The creators and developers, who saw an existing need that could be filled better by a configuration of newly bent and/or machined pieces of metal, it is they who ate the world and are still doing so.  It is they who summoned the machinists to make the stuff, and printers to print the information that changed the world in their day.

Andreesen attributes to computer programmers all the wondrous systems that today make modern life the affordable convenience that it is, and the more so what it promises to be tomorrow.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Today computer programmers provide the important final step to implement an algorithm or to generate a functional module that fits into a more comprehensive system design, whether that be interpreting geophone signals to map out possible oil fields or managing inventory in a robotized warehouse.

'The Next Grand Minimum' Launches

George Rebane

Russ Steele, Nevada County blogger extraordinaire, closed down his long running NC Media Watch blog.  He has moved his blogging enterprise to a new blog - 'The Next Grand Minimum' - that was launched today.  In this research and publishing effort he will focus on real climate change backed by science that is yet to be tainted by politics.  Specifically, he will present ongoing scientific evidence - imported and generated - that will validate or falsify the advent of the next grand minimum (NGM) in earth's ever changing climate.

Grand minima in precipitation and temperature have occurred cyclically throughout the millenia, and the next one appears due in the lifetime of those of us here now.  Russ will collect, develop, and present evidence that is relative to the advent of this civilization impacting event.

I and most RR readers wish Russ the best in his new and important endeavor.  RR has installed a permanent link to the blog in the 'Our Links' section in the right panel.  We expect many points to the published work on that site.

Break a leg Russ!

Singularity Signposts – Cognitive Computing Milestone

George Rebane

Yesterday IBM announced the first fruits of its cognitive computing initiative.  It’s a processor chip with an architecture that mimics some of the neural net topology (how neurons hook up to other neurons) of a human brain.  The cognitive computing chip (CCC) from IBM Research shown here is not to be programmed in the traditional sense of programmers writing code that computer scientists have designed (more here). 

Instead, CCCs will be hooked into an array called a cognitive computer - one that we may think of as a ‘mini-brain’ - and it will be fed data comprised of observations of, say, a process like the progress of a disease revealed through symptoms and tests.  The mini-brain is then prompted to learn and label the process (disease) in essentially the same manner that critters learn processes. They observe, detect repeatable patterns, and test their knowledge by attempting to predict what comes next in the process.  If they predict correctly, then that positive feedback reinforces the pattern (i.e. model of the process).  Otherwise, their prediction errors become the negative feedback which prompts them to try something else.

The structure of the new CCC is such that it promotes more facile and rapid learning.  And the equally important benefit that CCC structures provide is much lower power consumption than conventional (cf. von Neuman computer) processing chips demand.  To assemble the brain’s processing power from conventional chips would require an enormous computer system that may consume as much electricity as a town.  Clearly, critter brainbones are much more efficient - none of us run around with smoke coming out of our ears.

Do Our Schools Really Suck? (Working Title)

George Rebane

I don’t know whether that overstates the case, but in any event it’s not that far off.  Reading this morning’s lead piece ‘STAR tests’  in the 18aug11 Union, I was a little put off by the reporter’s opening attempt at logic.

Despite efforts across western Nevada County to improve student test scores, money still matters in the realm of student achievement.

Districts where property values and household income tend to be higher — and where affordable housing is less available — did the best in results of California's Standardized Testing and Reporting program, or STAR, which were released this week.

Since the government can't make more well-to-do parents, the implication here is that we need to continue increasing the per student spending to improve the learning levels of our students.  This policy, of course, has not helped during the last forty years, but then it is the only progressive answer – ‘stasis is good’.  The correlation of household income to student performance has been explained in countless studies - in the aggregate, better earning parents are better educated and therefore support their chidren's education more, which yields better students.

Just so you don’t misunderstand my stand on this, let me say it straight out – we don’t have a student learning crisis, we have a long standing teacher crisis; it is time to get the dummies out of our classrooms, and attract good teaching talent into our schools.  And for icing on the cake, I really do believe that it has been the agenda and accomplishment of this country’s progressives to get unqualified teachers into the profession and keep them there through support of the teachers’ unions.  It's called voter development.

After reading the article I was going to launch into an extended harangue about how Nevada County schools are screwing up.  Family matters intervened and we had to take our last grandkid to the airport to conclude what has been an extended week of enjoying some of our own arrows into the future.  By the time we got back, most of my points had been co-opted pretty well by readers in the wild comment stream to ‘An Evening with the Tea Party Patriots'.  The points there made are worth their own focus and discussion, so I am including here below a few selected and unedited comments (please go to the linked post to see other related comments).

An Evening with the Tea Party Patriots

George Rebane

Mr Paul Emery - KVMR news director, musical personage extraordinaire, bringer of arts, and erudite RR discussant – and I have been invited by the Nevada County TPP to engage in a moderated ‘civil discourse’ on issues of current interest as their featured special program for September.  The event will be held on the eve of 27 September in the Horseman’s Club lodge off Brunswick Road.

As readers may be aware, I am both a member of the NC TPP and a regular KVMR commentator.  However, both of us will be speaking as private individuals, neither claiming to represent the views of KVMR or the NC TPP.

The intent of the discussion and Q&A is to provide and explore today’s perspectives held by people of conservative and liberal persuasions in these contentious times.  (Paul and I are a self-declared ‘green libertarian’ and ‘conservetarian’ respectively.)  There will be no intent to make the exchange into a debate, but to keep it simply at the level of a comparative explication.

As a footnote of interest to this event, I want to draw your attention to the reaction of the local left after NC TPP announced the event and invited its attendance.  I was made aware by a regular reader that my participation in such an undertaking caused quite a dust-up on the blog of our former Union editor, Mr Jeff Pelline (here).  My correspondent supplied a copy of a comment stream from that blog which is faithfully replicated herein below.

Furthermore, I was also informed that progressives of many stripes presented themselves last week at the NC TPP’s fair booth to protest that the likes of me would be allowed to share a stage with Paul Emery.

Now what I find most interesting is that such people, who are virulently opposed to the very existence of the tea party movement and consider organizations like the NC TPP to be ‘terrorists’ and ‘hijackers’ of good governance, deign to publicly inject themselves as juries and judges of how the NC TPP may properly compose and undertake its gatherings.  Don’t get me wrong, such attempts to assess and control what is 'good, correct, and proper' in society is of a piece in the public implementation of progressive ideology.  Nevertheless, it is an illuminating confirmation to see it also being played out right here in Nevada County.

And below is the view from Mr Pelline’s blog, a left-shoulder venue that often and ardently proclaims its residence in the middle of the road.  The verbiage and vituperation is by Mr Steven Frisch, CEO of the Sierra Business Council, leading light of the county's left, and RR commenter.  The reader is, of course, invited to validate from these pages Mr Frisch’s vitriolic allegations.