Friday night I took a few minutes while pies were baking to check a few additional sources for a branch of the family that I’d thought more or less completed. One of those sources is mylife.com. That’s what reunion.com has become. They charge an arm and a leg to reveal personal information for people. I won’t pay them, but just their teaser information provides clues.
For the person in question (still living, so I shan’t reveal names), they had a few people with the same last name as him that were attached as associated people. Two of those people were ones I didn’t have in my database. So I plugged those names into other sources, and they had lived at the same address as my first guy many years ago. Meaning they are very likely his children. I had two other children through a birth database, but the two additional people have earlier birth dates. I’m guessing they are his kids, born before he moved to the state that had public birth records.
Anyhow, the wonders of the internet have given me a current address for one of the kids. It’s in Sammamish. There are related, living Weisses around here! He’s a third cousin; we share the same second great grandfather. So I’m going to contact him for sure. But how? I have an address and a phone number. Do I write? Or do I call? Or ask someone at his employer (I know many) if they’ll forward an email to him (since I don’t have an actual work email address for him)?
So far, my experience with contacting people is that if I know they are doing genealogy stuff they’ll respond. That’s all been by email, and I’ve got half a dozen relatives I’m in contact with that way. I’ve contacted one person out of the blue, and got no response whatsoever.
This was one of the pies I made for last night’s Pie Night. It’s delicious. Recipe adapted from Icebox Pies, which Sharon gave me last year. It’s turned out to be quite the excellent pie book.
Ingredients
3 cups half and half
6 tablespoons sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 large egg yolks
3/4 cup couscous
1/2 cup dried apricots
1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 crumb crust
1/2 cup apricot preserves
lightly beat egg yolks
chop dried apricots finely
combine half and half, sugar, and salt in a medium saucepan
bring pot just to a boil, then reduce heat to medium-low
slowly drizzle about 1/2 cup of the half and half mixture into the egg yolks, whisking constantly
whisk the egg yolks into the saucepan
add the couscous, dried apricots, and nutmeg and stir to combine
simmer, whisking constantly, until the mixture thickens and almost all the liquid has been absorbed (about 5 to 7 minutes)
remove the pan from the heat
stir in the vanilla
scrape the mixture into the crumb crust
in a food processor, process the apricot preserves until smooth
spread the preserves over the pie with a spatula
wrap in plastic wrap
refrigerate at least 3 hours
No photos, because I didn’t have space on the memory card for my camera.
I bought myself a new toy on Monday, a Motorola Xoom. I got the 3G version rather than the WiFi only version. It’s possibly I could get by with the WiFi version, as my track record with my smart phone is that I rarely use much cell phone data with it, and I’ll be carrying the Xoom around less. I’ll be taking it with me to Madison at the end of the month, so we’ll see how much cellular data I use on the trip. If I don’t need it, I’ll cancel my wireless data plan. I paid full price, rather than the subsidized price, so that I wouldn’t get hit with an early termination fee if I ended up doing this.
Here’s some initial thoughts.
The form factor is mostly nice. It’s a little bit on the heavy side to hold up for extended periods of time. For reading, for instance, I’ll be propping it on my lap or something like that. It wouldn’t be so bad if there were a little stickum on the back to make gripping it easier.
I also bought the multimedia dock for it. The Xoom does not slide easily onto it like my Droid slides onto its dock. It usually takes me a bit of working it to get it to settle onto the USB and HDMI sockets.
The graphics are really crisp. The browser appears to be a limited version of Chrome, with way more features than the browser on Android smart phones. I really like the new Gmail application, which is good because K-9, which I use on the Droid, doesn’t work well in tablet size. The GMail application still lacks the ability to save attachments unless they can be opened by another application though. That really sucks. However, the web version of Gmail is accessible, and I can save files from it.
There aren’t a lot of tablet sized applications for it it yet. A few of my applications that I use on my Droid don’t resize at all. Some resize, but badly. Most of them are set to use the standard Droid application buttons. Those buttons don’t exist on the Xoom. Instead, they are put inside some on-screen menu spots. Those spots are not convenient to my thumbs when holding the tablet by the side. In particular, the Google Reader application is cumbersome to use because of this. If it had gesture controls, it would work much better. Applications really need to have gesture/swipe controls on a tablet.
When applications for the tablet do not auto-rotate, it’s even more of a pain than when they don’t for a smart phone. The application market only works in landscape mode. Some of my applications only work in portrait.
I installed the Flash plugin. Most web site flash stuff is a pain with a touch screen. It’s also not very responsive on the Xoom hardware. Provided I can press a button or something like that in a Flash application, the computer won’t respond to that press for several seconds at least. Luckily, even with the plugin installed, I can set the browser to only run Flash applications I click on.
Battery life is really pretty good so far. I can read news with Google Reader and my standard web sites for about 90 minutes, and the battery level drops from 100% to 87%. Flash sucks the battery, even when it’s just a container to play video. Supposedly video actually doesn’t kill the battery when viewed in a native application, but I haven’t tried that yet other than a couple of short Youtube videos.
Even though it’s on the Verizon cellular network and it nominally uses a phone number, I can’t use it for phone calls (not surprising) or even text messaging (a little surprised by that). I can’t even install the Google Voice application only to listen to my voice mails. I can use the Google Voice web site at least. The lack of text messaging means I can’t install Mobile Defense, which is the application I put on my Droid that lets me track it remotely (and control it remotely too).
I have installed six different book applications on it. This was the reason I bought the thing. My Nook died hard after Guinevere knocked it off the shelf. Rather than stick with one book platform, I could use all of them and buy a book wherever it was cheapest. Or even available. So I have the Nook and Kindle applications. The Nook application uses gestures for reading, so I’m happy there. I haven’t tried the Kindle application yet. It also comes standard with the Google Books application, which I haven’t yet tried either. I also installed the Aldiko reader for reading epubs and the occasional Adobe Digital Editions format. I’ve used it on my phone. Maybe the Nook or Google Books applications can be side loaded, but I didn’t bother to look.
Additionally, I installed the Overdrive and Audible applications for audio books. I’ve used Overdrive’s desktop platform to get audio books from the Seattle Public Library before, but I couldn’t transfer many of them to my Droid due to DRM. I hadn’t realized they’d finally gotten an Overdrive Android application until I ran into it this time. I will likely add it to my Droid too. I haven’t used the Audible application yet.
I may install the Kobo books application if I ever find a book there that I want and can’t get anywhere else.
I plan on leaving my laptop at home on my upcoming trip to Madison. Going to see if the Xoom and Droid will be sufficient for my needs on trips. I even got a Bluetooth keyboard for the Xoom so I could take notes quickly.
One of the myths that the Cato Institute and the right wing in general likes to push is that taxes are too high in the United States. That we’re on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve. Have you heard of the Laffer Curve? Pardon me while I do a quick explanation.
The Laffer Curve (courtesy of Lawrence Khoo)
The theory is based on the idea that if people are taxed at 100% of their income, they won’t work any more than required because they don’t see any additional benefit to their work. Because of that, tax revenue is $0. If you lower the tax rate, then people have some incentive, and tax revenue goes up significantly.
If not used properly, the logic leads to the absurd proposition that the government lowers the tax rate to 0%, then government revenue is maximized. This is obviously not true either. Where the tipping point is can’t be determined exactly, but the best current research puts the optimal (for government revenue) tax rate at somewhere between 60% and 80%. If tax rates are lower than that, lowering them even more results in less revenue to pay for government programs.
This argument was actually made and a big part of pushing through the Bush tax cuts in the early part of the last decade. If we cut our tax rate, we’ll actually have more tax revenue because it will spur the economy so much that people will be working hard and making so much more money that the taxes on that extra growth will make up for the money we would have gotten in higher taxes.
The argument didn’t hold water then, and it doesn’t now. That’s because effective tax rates were well on the left side of that curve, and are even more on the left side of it now. Sometimes in debates, Republicans put out scare figures that we have the highest taxes in the world. It’s just not true. The United States is a low tax country already. We’re not a tax haven, like the Grand Caymans, but taxes are pretty damn low.
As a share of GDP, we’re near the bottom of industrialized countries in total taxes:
General Government Receipts as a Share of GDP (chart from CBPP.org)
The taxes of the people subject to the highest tax rates are effectively very very low.
Effective federal tax rates on wealthy people (chart from CBPP.org)
Here’s the nominal tax rates the wealthiest pay. Even the highest rates that a person could pay on a part of their income are lower than at any time since the 1930s.
Top Marginal Tax Rates, 1916-2010 (graph from VisualizingEconomics.com)
I’m not arguing here that rich people don’t pay their fair share. That’s for another rant. The point of this is that those rates are way to the left of the peak of the Laffer Curve. Now there’s possibly an argument that rich people will spur more economic activity with the money than the government would, but I don’t think that’s proven.
The next time a Republican tells you taxes are too high, ask them some questions. Ask them to define too high. Ask them what the criteria are for too high. Ask them what the economic goal is for lowering taxes. Because it looks to me like our taxes are pretty lenient.
I haven’t really watched television in a while, but my cousin had a viewing party for Game of Thrones and I’ve heard a lot of hype, so I decided to go and see.
Short verdict: The characters are well-written, and the story is reasonably interesting though kind of unoriginal. Haven’t we seen the rough and tumble northmen and the Calormen in the south before? There’s more boobs and head chopping than in the Narnia tales though. It also got in some of the requirements for medieval movies too: the band of horsemen riding through the narrow walled passages scene, and the drunken debauchedness feast scene. Casting was decent. Really liked the opening credits, though the steampunk ethic doesn’t seem to fit with the story.
Haven’t read the books, by the way. Definitely won’t until he’s done with the series, and I’m not likely to make that kind of investment anyway given that I am not a huge fan of swords and sorcery fantasy.
Last summer after I decided against using Geni or Ancestry.com as primary storage for my genealogical data, I had to figure out what I was going to use. There’s a number of desktop applications, some free or shareware, and some paid. I looked at a couple, and decided against them. They might have been good, but I wanted a web solution so my data would be in the cloud so to speak.
My main reasoning for that was simply for crash protection reasons. Making sure my local hard drive is backed up has always been a pain in the ass, and with every crash I invariably don’t have something backed up. The secondary reason is that I could work on my genealogy from any computer, rather than having to bring my laptop with me, or having to bring data back to a desktop.
I eventually settled on PhpGedView as the software I’d use on the web site. It’s open source, I can fix broken things if I want. I doubt I would ever do a major overhaul, but little changes here and there I can do. PhpGedView is pretty mature, but hasn’t had any major developers pushing new features for a couple of years. Unless someone takes it up, that does mean I’ll probably eventually switch to something else.
I’ve figured out an additional benefit in the last couple of months though: Google Analytics. I’ve used Google Analytics for years to track visitors and pageviews on my blogs. I added a profile for the genealogy site and started tracking there too. I can see the keywords that bring people to the site. I can see what people and families in my tree people are looking at.
The thing is, if you are looking for someone in my tree, you are probably related. That’s not a guarantee, because my tree includes in-laws as well. But I can filter those out.
A couple of examples: Last month, I started seeing a lot of hits on the Troeller branch of the tree from computers in Alaska. I had a good guess as to who they were because I’d entered in that branch just a few weeks earlier. A couple of days later, I got email from them asking if I would give them full access (information about living people is blocked unless the viewer has an account), which I did. They’ve since fleshed out a few of the details I didn’t have for that branch.
Yesterday, I noticed a big spike in traffic to the Nordvall portion of the tree, starting with my great-grandmother’s brother Fritz Arvid Nord (he shortened the name from Nordvall). That traffic is coming from Marysville. I’m willing to bet that whoever is doing the looking is a grandchild or great-grandchild of Fritz’. I’m really hoping they contact me as well, because I don’t actually have a lot of information on Fritz’ kids.
But the thing is, now I know that someone out there is descended from him, and is local. That’s actually a pretty big help.
It also means I really should make a point of calling my grandmother’s cousin in Shoreline to pump her for information. For all I know, she may continue to be in contact with that branch of the family.
Pardon me, but I’m about to go on kind of a wonky rant. I’ve been mulling a post on the Federal budget for a few days, but something just sent me over the edge to righteous pissed off about it. The following article from the A.P. is what got me riled up:
Much will be revealed at midweek, when the House and Senate are expected to vote on a budget for the remainder of this fiscal year and Obama reveals his plan to reduce the deficit, in part by scaling back programs for seniors and the poor.
The A.P. item is based on an appearance by David Plouffe on Meet The Press this morning. David Plouffe is an advisor to the President, and his appearance is to grease the wheels for President Obama’s budget proposal later this week. The A.P. may be making a bit more of Plouffe’s words than ought to be taken. Here’s the relevant part:
Video:
Transcript:
So we’ve had a lot of savings in health care, we have to do more. So you’re going to have to look at Medicare and Medicaid and see what kind of savings you can get. First, squeezing them out of the system before you squeeze seniors. Secondly, on Social Security, what he said is that is not a driver right now of significant costs, but in the process of sitting down and talking about our spending and our programs, if there can be a discussion about how to strengthen Social Security in the future, he’s eager to have that discussion.
I really hope this doesn’t mean what the A.P. thinks it means. Sadly, they may be right.
The problem with the federal budget is actually really small right now, though it gets bigger down the road. You may have heard that the deficit is the largest it’s ever been. That’s only correct if inflation is not taken into account. A better measure is the deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product, a figure that currently is about 10%. We ran a much bigger deficit during World War II, and we’re currently only running a deficit about twice as high as when Ronald Reagan was in office. ( I am not going to get into whether Bush or Obama is responsible for this level, but the answer is George W. Bush.)
US Deficit as a Percentage of GDP
Now, even that 10% of GDP may seem high because the U.S. has only exceeded that twice before, but we also have to consider interest rates. The Prime Rate was 15.25% when Reagan took office, and 8.75% when he left office. It got as high as 21.5% and dropped as low as 8% in 1987, but during the Reagan administration it was usually well above 10%. This rate was 7.25% when Obama took office, and now stands at 3.25%. That’s not what the government pays in interest, but it does show the general idea. The current cost to borrow money is less than half what it was at the lowest point during the Reagan administration. It is amazingly cheap to borrow money right now.
That’s why the current deficit is really not much of a problem.
Long term, we do have a problem with our deficits. No, not with Social Security. That actually doesn’t have an issue until the late 2030s, and will require a fairly small change to fix. Our long term problem is with Medicare and Medicaid. And the problem isn’t that we have too generous of benefits. The problem is that health care is too expensive in the U.S. Western Europe has much better health outcomes than we do, for about half the cost and much less hassle.
Health Care Costs as a percentage of GDP
If we paid the same as other developed countries, we wouldn’t have a long term deficit. The problem is that we’re spending recklessly. The problem is that we give too much money to doctors, insurance companies, drug companies, and the like. That’s why the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. RomneyCare or ObamaCare), even without a public option, was good for us. It has a number of controls that bring down costs. It doesn’t eliminate the problem, but it does remove a big chunk of our future deficit.
The Republicans introduced a budget plan last week that goes the wrong way. It repeals the A.C.A. and pretty much also eliminates Medicare and Medicaid. It eliminates the deficit long term by shifting health care costs to individuals. That would be fine, and in fact preferable, if health care costs were predictable for individuals. But they aren’t, so when you get sick, or A.L.S., you have to pay for everything yourself or hope that your insurance company will. Remember, health insurance companies make money by not insuring people with health problems.
The Republican plan, which thankfully doesn’t have a chance of passing in anything like it’s current form, has all sorts of problems that I may blog about later. But how it handles Medicare is its defining set of terms.
So now Barack Obama has agreed to find ways to save money in Medicare and Medicaid. The problem with that is that the only way to save money and not hurt individuals is to double down on the A.C.A. Introduce the public option or nationalize health care or the like. In other words, more not less socialized medicine. I’d be fine with that personally. But you know that hasn’t a chance of passing either. Obama loves compromise, and since the direction of compromise is the wrong direction on this issue, it means more health care costs will be shifted to individuals.
None of either of those plans (the Republican one or the possible Obama one) will affect health care costs overall. Just that born by the government. The Market works to control costs in many goods, but not health care. If it did, we wouldn’t have health care inflation outpacing regular inflation for the last 30 years. There’s many reasons for this, such as health insurance adverse selection, lack of bargaining power, inability to control health care needs, and more.
The upshot of all this is that it looks like we’re going to do something we don’t need to do right now, reduce the deficit, in a way that hurts everyone but the really rich and that doesn’t actually solve the underlying problem. We’ve got a center-right President moving rightward when he should be getting more progressive. And the Obama-istas wonder why the base that gave him the nomination in 2008 isn’t so thrilled with him. Sure he’s better than McCain would have been. But it’s hard to stay excited for someone who’s selling point is well, you could have that idiot over there.
I’ll probably write more about the budget compromise that was passed last week for 2011. It moved the wrong direction too.
Yes, it’s time for Pie Night again. Come to Voxx Coffee on Eastlake Ave on May 7th at 7:30 p.m. for a pie extravaganza!
The concept for Pie Night is simple. I make lots of pie (10 pies for the last pie night, plus another dozen brought by others) and people eat pie. There is no charge for Pie Night.
Pie Night starts at 7:30 p.m. sharp and ends at 10:00 p.m. Please arrive promptly. I will not save pie for you. As noted, Pie Night itself is free. Beverages, including beer and wine, are available from Voxx Coffee for reasonable prices. Pie Night welcomes your pies if you have made them yourself; no store-purchased pies please. Pie accessories such as whipped or iced cream are welcome. Children are welcome so long as you don’t mind them listening to adult conversations.
For those who have dietary restrictions, let me know when you R.S.V.P. so that I may accommodate you. I’m quite happy to make dairy-free and gluten-free pies and can likely deal with other issues as well.
Please invite your friends or forward this invite. I started Pie Night to meet people!
[Staffan de Mistura, the top U.N. envoy in Afghanistan,] spoke in a somber tone as he described how three U.N. staff members and four Nepalese guards were killed Friday when the protesters stormed their compound in the normally peaceful city of Mazar-i-Sharif. He placed direct blame on those who burned a copy of the Muslim holy book in Gainesville, Florida, last month, stoking anti-foreign sentiment that already was on the rise after nearly a decade of war in Afghanistan.
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President Hamid Karzai publicly condemned the March 20 Quran burning, leading some to blame him for triggering the protests. De Mistura, however, blamed the person who torched the holy book.
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“Freedom of speech does not mean freedom of offending culture, religion or traditions,” de Mistura said. “Those who entered our building were actually furiously angry about the issue about the Quran. There was nothing political there.”
I beg to differ Mr. de Mistura, that’s exactly what freedom of speech is. It is the right to piss people off by opening my mouth. It is the right to gore sacred cows. It is legal sanction to disagree about anything. Every day I run across speech that pisses me off. Every day I run into speech that offends me. Some of it is religious. Listening to Oral Roberts, or Jimmy Swaggart, or any number of other preachers, dead and alive, offends me. People proclaiming that I must have a personal relationship with a great sky-father offends me greatly. Seeing people write screeds about hippy-dippy Chinese herbs curing cancer offends me. Some of it is political. I get pissed off every day listening to the lies that the Republican/Tea Party spews. It’s not just that I disagree. Listening to Glen Beck offends me. Seeing someone write about their admiration for Glen Beck makes me want to lock people up for our own good.
And I suck it up because that’s the price I pay for being able to say the opposite. If I get to say that science is true, then someone else gets to be an idiot. If I get to say that Glen Beck is an idiot, then he gets the right to deny reality and say he’s not an idiot. Even if I’m offended. Even if it pains me to know something is misfiring between people’s ears and there’s no known medical cure. I have to live with it. That’s exactly what freedom of speech is.
The cure for bad speech (however one defines it) is not closing it down, but speaking. Tell people the truth. Convince them. Get grand rallies of people who agree. Be angry! Stomp your feet! Burn people in effigy. Be offensive with your own speech if you want. I fully support the right of abortion protesters to hoist posters of bloody fetuses and for people to march with signs that say God Hates Fags!. Go for it! If someone else’s speech convinces people and mine doesn’t then either I have an incorrect position, or I am not a convincing speaker.
What isn’t a moral response to speech is to torch a building and kill people. Period.
The people who should be blamed for the killings are the people who torched and killed.
Honey with a Honey Bee Beard (CC By-Nd Writ3Click Fotos)
The pastor, the Rev. Terry Jones, had threatened to destroy a copy of Islam’s holy book last year but initially backed down. On Friday he said Islam and its followers, not his church’s burning of the Quran, were responsible for the killings.
And you sir, are an idiot. Just because you have the right to burn something that someone else considers sacred, doesn’t mean it’s not offensive. Common human decency means that I do not walk up to every Christian I meet and tell them they are an idiot for believing in fairy tales. I don’t wander the streets with signs proclaiming that blacks are drug users, because it’s wrong and offensive.
I still have a moral obligation to speak correctly. The law cannot and should not judge speech. Your god, or your sense of morality, should. If your god tells you that burning other god’s books will elevate your god, then perhaps you have an over-controlling thin-skinned god who’s about as worthless as your average Republican. Seriously, if I can take being contradicted in public, then your supposedly all-powerful god will survive it.
I still have a social obligation to speak civilly though sometimes civility can or should be abrogated in order to speak effectively. When a speaker crosses the line to disrespect, speakers ought not disclaim responsibility for the effects of that speech, when those effects were what the speaker was specifically trying to create. Deliberately offending people, then saying it’s their fault they were offended is douchebaggery. You have a part in this. Own up to it. You broke your social obligation, and perhaps it was necessary. Nevertheless, you are not an innocent bystander.
Responsibility is not an either/or proposition. Neither is responsibility a pie that gets cut into pieces and apportioned out. Both killers and speakers were links in the chain that resulted in a number of dead people. Mr. Jones is responsible for a piece in the chain from bad speech, and should be punished in the way that bad speech is punished, with more speech. Denouncements. Protests. Being attributed an idiot. The people who conducted the executions should be punished with prison because they killed. But all of them are responsible.
That’s an obituary that appeared on 27 December 1972 in the Wisconsin State Journal of Madison for my father. It had to have been passed along from someone who knew my aunt Jane, who lived in Van Nuys California at the time. There were a few Weisses still around in Madison at the time (there’s only one now), so I don’t know who got everything garbled. It could easily have been someone who got it from one of my great aunts who got the info from my aunt.
For such a short piece, it got at least six items incorrect:
George hadn’t lived in Madison.
He hadn’t lived in Van Nuys either.
He didn’t die in Van Nuys.
The funeral was not in Van Nuys.
His son is named Philip, not Phillips.
His mother was no longer Mrs. George Weiss (they divorced in the 1960s).
I’ve run into a fair number of sources of information that were wrong. So far, this one is the wrongest. It’s a damn good thing I already knew the correct information, otherwise I might be searching all over Van Nuys for additional information. And for all I know, some of my current dead ends are wrong for the similarly bad information.
