Monday, February 19, 2018

Post #2: 2/19/18

It's President's Day. Not one of my favorite holidays, given the growth of the imperial Presidency. We should be celebrating liberty, not some overrated authority figure. But give props to Grover Cleveland and Calvin Coolidge.

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Coolidge was not a saint; he signed an abominable restrictive immigration bill. I have to wonder what would have happened if Coolidge had run for reelection in 1928. Hoover was no Coolidge.

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During Coolidge’s tenure American debt fell by one-third, the tax rate by half and unemployment collapsed.
The journey to the White House, which began when Warren Harding asked him to be vice-president on the Republican ticket in 1920, enjoyed strong support. By the summer of that administration’s first year, though, the stock market had fallen by 47.8% from its peak in 1919, further than it would fall in 1929. The country was awash in debt left over from the first world war; unemployment was high. The new administration responded with austerity.
“It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones,” he said. “Let administration catch up with legislation.” Coolidge opposed the dams and power projects beloved by his successors, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt. He also objected to public ownership of the Post Office, tax exemptions for municipal debt and farm subsidies, all of which have produced costs that still hang heavily over America.
To read more, see The Economist.

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I recently bought a Seagate 6-TB drive/USB hub on Amazon for roughly $115 (plus sales tax and/or shipping (free with Prime membership); h/t CNET Cheapskate). Note that I do not plug commercial products and vendors for my personal benefit; you are free to search other vendors for comparably or better priced alternatives. As a professional DBA, I'm obsessed with backups, and I can remember working for what is now an Equifax company, over 20-odd years back a privately-held company which did marketing research studies using Oracle databases on a Unix platform. We used to buy 4 GB Seagate BarraCuda drives to the point there were supply backlogs; in fact, company leadership tasked me with getting developer and DBA usage of storage under control. I used to develop 25-GB databases from scratch in less than a week at a time most DBA's worked on several megabytes. It is simply astounding to think I could store many of the databases I've worked on in my professional career for just over $100.  (Of course, I have other external drives, some big thumb drives, a cloud drive, and multiple backup PC's.) Not to nag my readers, but at these prices, you need to backup your stuff regularly, whether it's your software, password files , workfiles, etc. (I maintain copies of all my critical documents, like my passport, auto insurance proof, social security number, birth certificate, PhD diploma, resume, curriculum vita (professor's resume), in encrypted vaults (e.g., here). Some examples of backup software are listed here.)