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Government spending
Greg Mankiw, a well known economist, has a nice picture of projected U.S. government spending in 2020. Refer to this when you hear somebody say that we can balance the budget by eliminating waste. I believe that this picture does not cover things like the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which the Bush administration funded through…
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When Titans Clash
I didn’t expect to like the recent remake of Clash of the Titans much, but I was pleasantly surprised. Most movies of this sort have a simple underlying theme. For this movie the theme was going to be that humans could stand on their own and did not need help from the gods. But, due…
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Blackberry
I spent several hours this weekend pruning back the blackberry bushes in our back yard. It’s not really a yard, as our house backs onto a hillside too steep to build on. We hardly ever go there ourselves, so it’s covered by plants fighting for their little bit of sun, nature green in thorn and…
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Container Models
A long time ago a friend of mine pointed out a sign of trouble in any program: defining a new container model. If you are working in a language that provides containers in the standard library, then use them. If you need a container with specific behaviour, then make it look like the standard containers.…
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Elder Con
A friend (I’ll call him John) recently told me about a con that was run on his parents. The con artist called his parents home and pretended to be John. This was apparently done with a little social engineering: “Hello?” “Hi, Mom?” “Is this John?” “Yes, it’s John.” The caller excused the fact that he…