Re: Palo Alto School Bond Debate

Your questions below are good ones.  For 1-3, the short answer is in this language I've proposed to the LPUS Platform Committee as an Education plank:

Parents, not government, should have the responsibility and the authority to decide what moral values their children develop through education. Government should not dictate to schools, teachers, or parents how or what children should be taught. Consumer choice, not government, should decide which schools and teachers are succeeding or failing, and thus which schools and teachers should get more resources or less. Parents should be free to choose who educates their children, and any funds for a child's education should follow the child to the chosen school or teacher. We advocate the government returning both control of and responsibility for education funding to parents. The government should no more own and operate schools than it should own and operate grocery stores.

The longer answer is in this 2006 blog posting.

 

For question 4, the answer is:  I'm a parent who is doing what he can to make sure his three little girls enjoy both a better education and more freedom than what the current nanny state provides.  I'm doing what I can both to reform our local schools and to reform the national Libertarian Party.  I might not accomplish much toward either goal, but I'm guaranteed to accomplish neither if I don't try, and my conscience doesn't really allow me any other choice.

-----Original Message-----

Brian,

Not to put you on the spot, but, out of curiousity:

How will you rebut:

1) It's for the children, and
2) We need this investment in our schools, and
3) Only the mean-spirited would oppose supporting children and maintaining schools, and
4) You, sir, are a libertarian, which we all know is little short of being an anarchist.  Who are you to even get involved in this?

Home Security and Automation

I'm taking another look at home security/automation, and wondering what you would recommend.

 

For security, almost any decent multi-zone system with callout to a monitoring service (like SmartHome's $9/mo service) would satisfy Melisse.  I've got some tougher requirements though, as I want:

• >20 zones with per-zone speech announcements e.g. "motion in basement", "motion at north gate"
• Volume-adjustable speakers in multiple rooms to play the announcements
• Ability to separately set any zone to 1) silent, 2) event announcement, 3) alarm
• Multiple wall/bedside keypads to do the above setting

http://www.smarthome.com/73903w.html comes close to handling the above, except for playing announcements in multiple rooms.  A gold-plated solution would be to include whole-property audio as part of the requirements, but it would add thousands of dollars to hardwire speakers into the required rooms (LR, 2 bedrooms, basement), especially if you add more bedrooms and intercom capability (because it would be silly to wire half the bedrooms with speakers, and none with microphones).  And once we're running new conduits, we'd want to pull ethernet and maybe coax to many of them too.

 

But I already have a decent whole-property audio hack: my FM pirate radio station.  I could allocate one of my $100 FM stations to broadcast the security announcements throughout the property, which would even tell us when someone's at the door while we're out playing in the back yard.

 

And for an intercom system, I think the best answer is to wait until something like http://www.engenius-durafon.com/ becomes available as a home system.  Uniden's phones are almost there, except they can only do a voice announcement to all handsets from the base, and not from an arbitrary handset.

 

We'll also be wanting to upgrade our exterior security lighting, but I don't have a hard requirement that the security lighting has to be integrated with the security system.   Similarly, I want to change about half of our interior light switches to have a motion-sensing option, but I don't require scripting or central control of them.  It sounds like Insteon would be the best technology for such integration, but I worry that our 1963-vintage wiring would just lead to flakiness that would frustrate Melisse.

 

Speaking of Insteon, an alternative approach to a consumer security console would be to use a software package like Girder or ECS on a PC.  That would be cheaper, more flexible, more fun for me to tweak, and more future-proof, but it probably wouldn't be as Melisse-friendly in terms of easy-to-use keypads and keychain fobs.

 

As much as I hate looking at all the old sensors and four consoles from our 20-year-old dead unsalvageable inherited security system, I can't justify giving $4000 to an installer guy to replace it with one that will end up the same way in a decade or two.  I think wireless is the way to go in a house this old and with such inadequate crawl spaces.

 

Any advice?

A Libertarian Safety Net

Geolibertarianism includes an excellent solution here. Geolibertarianism points out that in the state of nature there is always marginal but productive land available for use, and that observation of the Lockean proviso (leaving "as much and as good") should have ensured that this remained the case. To the extent that it is no longer the case, excluding people from access to the natural productive opportunities on what used to be the commons is unjust. Therefore, the "ground rent" of land should be considered part of the commons, with each individual having an equal claim on it. Technically, ground rent is is the excess production obtained by using a site in its most productive use, compared to the production obtained by applying equivalent inputs of labor and capital at the most productive site where the application doesn't require (additional) payments for use of the site. In other words, ground rent is the advantage you get from exclusive use of a site compared to the most productive available site that is not in use.

In practice, this could be implemented with a land value tax that funds a citizen's dividend. My site http://ecolibertarian.org/ gives more references, and my draft EcoLibertarian manifesto is an attempt to use geolibertarianism to find common ground (literally) between greens and libertarians. It can be summarized as:

Outlaw only fraud and force initiation. Tax only land rent and polluting/ congesting/ consuming the commons. Provide only network natural monopolies and protection of life and liberty. Do it all decentrally, democratically, with due process and never discrimination.

Alas, Deleted From Wikipedia

Wikipedia just keeps getting better and better.  A couple years ago an Internet Christian apologist created a Wikipedia entry for me as he set about to somewhat systematically answer my criticisms of Christianity.  It seems that in January the Wikicops finally caught up to him, and deleted the article due to my blatant lack of "notability".   Here is how my entry looked, as currently mirrored on answers.com:

Brian Holtz is an American software engineer, blogger, webmaster, and was the Libertarian running for the United States Congress on November 7, 2006 against eight-term incumbent Anna Eshoo in Silicon Valley. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science (University of S. Mississippi Honors College, 1987) and M.S. in Computer Science (University of Michigan, 1990). He worked with Sun Microsystems for 11 years and is now employed by Yahoo.

Views

Politically, Holtz espouses a view called Market Liberalism, which in his words “says the government should prevent coercion and fraud, provide a safety net for the poor, protect the environment, regulate basic infrastructure; but otherwise recognize the freedom and responsibility of peaceful honest adults to control their own bodies, actions, speech, and property, and work and play together as they see fit.”

Holtz, an anti-Christian atheist who was once Roman Catholic, is sympathetic to autocosmology. Autocosmology is a synthesis of metaphysical naturalism, ontological materialism, epistemological empiricism and positivism, mental functionalism, theological atheism, axiological extropianism, political libertarianism, economic capitalism, constitutional federalism, biological evolutionism, evolutionary psychology, and technological optimism.

Works

Holtz is the author of ‘‘Human Knowledge: Foundations and Limits’’, an extensive paper which attempts to answer life’s big questions regarding philosophy (ontology, theology, axiology), mathematics, natural science (physics, astronomy, biology, chemistry, and geoscience), technology, social science, and futurology, among other fields. Holtz wrote two distributed editors: ShrEdit and CoEd. In addition, he designed an artificial life simulator called Vita. Holtz also participates in debates on theism, politics, the Iraq War, futurology, and more. He has contributed several articles to Internet Infidels.

External links

• Holtz.org
• Human Knowledge
• Holtz for Congress
• Internet Infidels: Brian Holtz

Healthcare entitlements, stupid

At http://thirdpartywatch.com/2008/03/07/can-raimondo-come-out-for-bob-barr/ Justin Raimondo is quoted: "We simply can’t afford to police the world, and we’re going bankrupt in the attempt."

What is annual federal spending on Homeland Security and the so-called "War on Terror" (including Iraq)? $170 billion.

How much does that figure go up if one claims that fully half of the REST of the DoD budget is for "policing the world"? $240 billion.

What is annual federal spending on entitlements and "human services"? $1.6 trillion. (Apportioning federal debt service only tilts the needle more toward the welfare state and away from the warfare state, given the recent spike in world-policing costs.)

What is the unfunded liability for the current path of federal entitlement spending? $50 to $100 TRILLION dollars.

So who does Raimondo say is the remaining candidate who can save America from going "bankrupt"? Why, the one who advocates making our healthcare system even more socialized than it already is.

Healthcare entitlements will still be pushing America toward bankruptcy in 10, 20, and 30 years, but in that timeframe our spending on Bush's wars will be comparable to the current levels of spending on Clinton's Balkan war (remember it?) that Raimondo founded antiwar.com to oppose. Justin needs a t-shirt that says: "I surfed an antiwar movement that crested with the Sunni-Shia fighting of 2006, and all I got was socialized medicine."

American public finance over the next few decades will be about one issue: healthcare entitlements, stupid.