Paul M. Jones

[Paul Ryan's] genuinely radical plan goes where Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich never did by terminating the entitlement status of Medicare and Medicaid. (It doesn't touch the third major entitlement, Social Security, though Ryan has elsewhere argued for extending its life by gradually raising the retirement age to 70.) Ryan changes Medicare into a voucher, which would be used to purchase private health insurance. He turns Medicaid into a block grant for states to spend as they choose. Though his budget committee isn't responsible for taxes, Ryan includes the boldest tax reform proposal since the 1980s, proposing to lower top individual and corporate rates to 25 percent and end deductions. While he's at it, Ryan caps domestic spending, repeals Obamacare, slashes farm subsidies, and more.

...

But more than anyone else in politics, Rep. Ryan has made a serious attempt to grapple with the long-term fiscal issue the country faces. He has a largely coherent, workable set of answers. If you don't like them, now you need to come up with something better.

via Paul Ryan's budget proposal and Medicare: The Republican's plan is brave, radical, and smart. - By Jacob Weisberg - Slate Magazine.

"Fat is not the problem," says Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. "If Americans could eliminate sugary beverages, potatoes, white bread, pasta, white rice and sugary snacks, we would wipe out almost all the problems we have with weight and diabetes and other metabolic diseases."

via FuturePundit: Deep Fat Is Not The Problem.

It turns out that free markets are not just an absence of government intervention, or even a simple and clear set of rules. Liberal market economies require a huge amount of what you might call "software" to run: not just a good legal system, but respect for the law; not just a central bank, but consensus about the central banker's role; not just unrestrained trade, but a shared set of assumptions about what sorts of trades are fair; not just penalties but trust; not just anti-corruption laws, but a society that demands corruption cease, rather than attempting to use it to get around inconvenient but necessary rules.

via Doing Business In Iraq - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic.

... Thomas Jefferson wrote that the Virginia statute protecting religious freedom, which he drafted, deliberately covered “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination,” and that a proposal to mention Christ in the bill “was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend” all religions.

Which is as it should be. Read the whole thing. Via The Volokh Conspiracy » Islam and the First Amendment.

In spite of our having the second-highest nominal corporate-income tax rate in the developed world (Hello, Japan!), the rates actually paid by businesses vary wildly according to their political clout. Progressives look at that and see the evidence of businesses’ having undue influence on Washington; I look at that and see evidence of Washington’s undue influence on business. But it’s a two-way street, and the end product smells the same.

There are many arguments for a flat tax: Compliance costs are lower, it’s easier to understand, it doesn’t create a divide-and-conquer dynamic with regard to the tax brackets, it aligns taxpayers’ incentives, etc. But there’s a practical moral argument, too: The tax code is corrupt. Using the tax code as a cookie jar full of special favors for friends and supporters is corrupt. It does not matter that it’s legal, it is immoral. The purpose of taxes is to raise revenue for the government, not to repay political favors or to bribe voters with their own money. I do not think our tax system probably is really salvageable: Obamacare is not the only thing that should be repealed and replaced.

via Our Tax Code Is Corrupt - By Kevin D. Williamson - Exchequer - National Review Online.

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits -- self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. -- that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

via Reynolds’ Law « The View from Alexandria.

Twitter and identi.ca are fine for what they are: immediate distribution of small pieces of information that are connected primarily by a timeframe and a shared experience. However, they are unsuitable for extended, nuanced dialogue on any topic requiring thoughtful consideration. Commentary in such locations disappears too quickly into the ether. I said back in May 2009 that Twitter is too "constrained and ephemeral" and I stand by that assessment. You want to create something that lasts (as much as anything lasts in a digital ecology)? Blog it.

This is a topic I describe at length in my Organizing talk, but I would like to give the idea a home on my blog for easy reference.

Include-Based

Typical PHP uses what I call an include-based architecture. By this, I mean that the mere fact of including or requiring a file causes the execution of program code or business logic.

<?php
include 'config.php';
include 'header.php';

// ...
// do some work, probably including other files
// ...

include 'footer.php';

The application is composed of files that the user browses to directly. Those included files may include other files for additional business logic. This is the basic structure of most PHP applications.

At some point, the PHP programmer starts writing his own functions to encasulate repeated behaviors, and starts including a file of those functions. As a follow-on, the programmer may begin to adopt object-oriented programming and start to collect his functions into classes along with related data structures.

The functions and classes do not end up changing the basic structure of the include-based application. The programmer still has a series of pages that users will browse to directly. Those pages load up classes and functions and use them as helpers to perform business logic that is mostly still in the page script.

Class-Based

By contrast, a class-based architecture is what we generally see in the MVC frameworks of the past 10 years or so. The user browses to a bootstrap script (the only “page” in the whole system). That script then reads the request and picks out a business-logic class to instantiate, and calls a method on that object instance to make it run. From that point on, all behaviors are contained in class methods, not in page scripts. This is what I mean by a class-based architecture; that is, all of the main program logic is embedded in classes, not in page scripts.

In talking about the distinction between include-based and class-based architectures, one programmer I know said, “There’s no real difference between include-based and class-based. You still need to include the class file, after all.” Yes, you do need to load the class file. The difference is that no program logic is executed at loading time with a class file. Loading the class file makes it available for use, but the programmer has to instantiate it and then call methods on it for anything else to happen. With include-based architectures, merely loading the file will execute program logic.

OpenID has never really caught on in a major way. I use it pretty much only on StackOverflow and 37signals products, and I really like it. Regular (non-web-building) users find it puzzling, and don’t have a good understanding of URLs, let alone ownership of them. So it works for geeks, but not for the general populous, and therefore isn’t a good viable solution for most sites.

via OpenID Has Failed. So What's Next? -- All in the head. The quote is from a conversation with David Sklar.