The McCarthy period was a long time ago. Most people who were in the radical left in the 60s in the US didn't even suffer mild embarassment. Most of the people I'm talking about were only children in the 60s, and not even born in the McCarthy period. Furthermore, the people I'm talking about are mostly best described as social democrats -- what in Europe is understood to be the moderate left.
I wouldn't be inclined to point out that I'm a socialist during a job interview, and I certainly don't want to mention that I support labor unions to an employer. I've known a few economics grad students who went through contortions to avoid directly referring to Marx, and there are doubtless a handful of other professions that are so dominated by the right wing that it would trouble one's career to admit being a socialist. But aside from that, I don't think open socialists in the US have more to worry about than raised eyebrows, and even that's not as common as people seem to think.
Furthermore, even before McCarthyism, the US Communist Party was criticized by other parts of Comintern for having its members go "underground" with little justification. During McCarthyism, CP members made things worse by denying their politics, then being shown to be liars, thus confirming one of the McCarthyite accusations and reducing the potential for public sympathy. On top of that, they left the few people who stood up at first to HUAC exposed and vulnerable.
There are lessons to be learned from the Gay Rights movement and "coming out."
I remember Noam Chomsky, in a lecture, commenting that in the US, people avoided taking political action because they feared even the possibility of persecution, whereas in Latin America, leftists assume they will be persecuted, and take action anyway.
Back when I was a member of a radical left group, I remember talking to a woman from (I think) Sweden, who told me she supported the right-of-center party in her native country. I had just come back from an organizing meeting for an anti-death penalty group, and she was appalled the US had the death penalty. I ran through the major issues our group was working on at the time, and she agreed with all of them, with the notable exception of our long-term goal of a social revolution. (And come to think of it, that's the subject on which I've most changed my political views since then, anyway).
One thing that irritates me about most of the US left is that many members are exceedingly paranoid about admitting their actual political beliefs. On a lot of occasions, I'd talk to several people, each whispering that she or he is really a socialist, but doesn't want anyone else to know, for fear of being politically ostracized. And these people would be standing right next to each other. There's a real, longstanding problem with cowardice in the US left.
As someone with a community college certificate and limited experience, who's never made more than $30K/year, I have a hard time working out what I should ask. The usual advice is to avoid answering the question directly, yet in each interview, and most applications, I am asked to provide a specific figure, with no fudging.
I have trouble finding plausible numbers -- the numbers I find seem wildly exaggerated. For instance, according to salary.com, the bottom of the pay scale for Linux system administrators is about $65K/year, and in the San Francisco area, $85K/year. However, the jobs I've found advertised are only for senior-level positions, and they tend to range from $50-$70K/year.
On the other hand, I (finally) got a short term job moving computers around, for $15/hour. Half the people I'm working with are engineers, and from what the people I'm working with have said, that's all they were paid for full-time work at permanent jobs.
If you can't or won't get a college degree, go into plumbing, carpenting or another trade.
The skilled trades require college coursework -- the courses are offered by community colleges and specialized trade schools, but just as those professions are socially undervalued, so are those schools. I had a roommate who was in an apprentice plasterer, and I remember looking through his textbooks -- they were more dense and challenging than most of the IT-related textbooks I've seen.
I try to hold back from outright cynicism about higher education, but my experience at UC Berkeley in the 90s suggested to me that only a minority of students were paying attention. In the last few years, I've been taking tech classes at a community college; in the classes primarily aimed at students preparing to transfer to four-year programs, only a minority are really participating in the class, but in the classes primarily aimed at vocational and professional students, the majority are participating.
There are other issues in play, most especially that the community college courses are much smaller, and the instructors are generally much better teachers, than was the case at UC Berkeley.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, spent more than $200 million to build a 16th century Japanese emperor's countryside home in Woodside. Yet such a home suffers from "significant functional obsolescence," according to an Ellison filing — that is, not too many rich folks would buy it — and so Ellison was granted a $3 million tax break. The local school district will reportedly lose some $330,000 in tax revenue. Whack! Take that kiddies.
That's the conventional account of why independent third parties are a bad idea. There are several shortcomings with that account, however.
First, while elections are important, they aren't the beginning or ending of politics -- not even in the conventional civics class account of US politics. Politicians don't simply enact the policies they campaigned upon. Federal affirmative action policies were implemented, and a national minimum income policy was proposed, by the Nixon administration. Nixon was a racist bigot and a fiscally conservative anti-Communist. However, his administration was during a seismic shift to the left among people in the US, and the legitimacy of the federal government was under attack; thus, a conservative Republican put forth policies to the left of anything we've seen from the Democrats elected since.
Second, there's more to an election than who wins. It's been speculated that Ross Perot's candidacy was successful enough that the Republican Party had to adapt its platform to attract Perot supporters. Contrast that with the 2004 election, in which many anti-war activists supported John Kerry, the Democrat who loudly proclaimed his status as a Vietnam veteran and who campaigned to escalate the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
As a thought experiment, imagine what would happen if in a presidential election, the Republican candidate got 40% of the popular vote, the Democrat 35%, and the Green 25%. By the rules, the Republican would win the White House. However, the Democrats would know they lost, and the Republicans would know they won, because there'd been a large turnout for a left wing candidate. Under those circumstances, wouldn't the Democrats see a need to move left in order to reclaim support? Would the Republicans be confident in charging ahead with conservative policies, knowing that 60% of the electorate openly opposes them?
To be clear, I'm not afraid of a Republican being elected president, if the Republican president is weak and intimidated by the left.
So who was really the Lesser Evil in 1964? The point is that it is the question which is a disaster, not the answer. In setups where the choice is between one capitalist politician and another, the defeat comes in accepting the limitation to this choice.
The US has a radical left, and from what I can make out, it's similar in scale to the radical left in European countries and elsewhere. However, there's not a significant social democratic left party in the US -- so the radical left has an even harder time getting a hearing in the US than elsewhere. Most people who would support a social democratic party grudgingly support the Democratic Party, a party of the center which routinely squelches its left-of-center wing. It's routinely said (I think Obama said this, for instance) that the Democrats need not pay any attention to the left, since the left will either vote Democratic or not vote at all.
The most likely candidate for a social democratic party in the US is the Green Party, which does have one thing going for it: whereas in most countries, there is a split in the left between the social democratic and green parties, there's the potential to unite both in one party in the US. However, the Green Party was rather viciously attacked in the 2004 presidential election, and while on paper the Green Party has become more coherent, in practice the Greens have been almost passive.
One thing I find frustrating in much of the Microsoft-bashing from FLOSS advocates is that I think they're not clearly thinking about what the goal really is, and what success looks like. Victory isn't the destruction of Microsoft; victory is the dominance of the FLOSS model over the proprietary model of software development. Somewhere in the middle, there's going to be a period in which the big players in proprietary software realize they're either going to have to move to an open source model, or their businesses will fail. That's going to be a transition; they won't leap into it all at once, and they won't make public appearances, weeping and begging for forgiveness for having advocated closed-source software.
And, since we're talking about big institutions, during a transition, there's going to be some executives who didn't get the memo. I think that's what this is about.
Stewart and Colbert are pretty clearly liberals, but they are willing to criticize Democrats, liberals, and others on the left, including those they generally support. That's something that's impressed me about them; during the Clinton administration, I was quite critical of Clinton from the left, and I found the way that liberals uncritically supported Clinton, even when he was directly attacking liberals, to be quite frustrating.
I tried using my browser with NoScript for a few months. In practice, I found that every Web site I visited had scripting -- the only exception to that rule was a simple Web page I'd written to test whether a Web server was working. So, visiting a Web page always involved temporarily enabling scripting, then reloading the page.
In effect, Web pages are now frameworks for scripts. No scripts means no Web use.
The thing that does surprise me is that the same desktop users who will call the helpdesk every 15 minutes with a Linux desktop will almost certainly not object anywhere near so vocally when they're put onto Windows 7 and an upgraded Office suite. Part of me wonders if you'd see different results if you took Ubuntu, changed the boot and login screen to say "Microsoft Windows 8", re-branded OpenOffice as "Microsoft Office 2009" but left everything else as a normal Ubuntu install.
That's the thing that gets me. From an end-user's perspective, migrating from Windows XP to Ubuntu 10.04 or Fedora 13 or the like would be a dramatic transition -- but so would migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7, and so was migrating from Windows 95/98 to Windows XP. Migrating from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 was a much more profound transition; migrating from MS-DOS to Windows 3.1 was a profound transition; and all of these were dwarfed by the migration from electric typewriters to PCs running MS-DOS.
All-in-all, I'd expect the transition from a relatively modern proprietary operating system to a relatively modern FLOSS operating system to be much easier for an end-user than many of the transitions an experienced office worker has already gone through.
I had, without planning it, followed that migration path myself. I'm guessing the note about problems with presentations means that they were still producing presentations in Microsoft Powerpoint, and the presentations didn't port into OpenOffice.org Impress cleanly.
Total cost of ownership is a tricky calculation, but my sense is that with Windows, you pay more for the software but less for support, with Linux, the software is free but the support is costly, and in the long run, as Linux is more flexible and reliable, it works out to be cheaper, as long as you don't skimp on support.
The number of viruses that have ever directly affected *nix systems is very small. This is directly due to the model of authentication and limited privileges that has been present in Unix and its derivatives from the beginning.
When I said "effectively immune," I did not mean completely immune. I meant, the odds of infection are negligible, as there have been very few *nix viruses, and those have exploited security holes which have been patched.
Also, I was distinguishing between viruses and other forms of malware, specifically for making the point that one should have a firewall in operation for Linux servers.
Would you care to tender an explanation why it's almost unheard of for Linux boxes to become infected by viruses, given that the world's Internet traffic flows through Linux servers, including countless billions of dollars in financial transactions, making them incredibly valuable targets?
Most Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, include almost all known drivers on the install discs. Since Ubuntu had a partnership with Dell for a while, they would doubtless have most of the Dell-related drivers available.
Missing device drivers is much rarer than it used to be. The only device I have that I haven't been able to get to work with Ubuntu is an extremely cheap digital camera (capacity: ten low-res photos) that was included as a premium from an office supply store.
Every so often, there's talk of issuing a national ID card in the US, which ends up portrayed as some sort of move towards a police state. I've never fully understood the reasoning on that -- among other things, given the lack of such a national ID, other documents are used in its place.
For instance, when one is officially hired for a job in the US, one is required to present their "I-9 documents", to demonstrate that they are legally privileged to work in the US. That requirement is usually met with the combination of a state government-issued driver's license and a Social Security card. Drivers' licenses are used as ID in many circumstances; so states also issue official state IDs through their Departments of Motor Vehicles, and the state IDs are very similar to drivers' licenses.
That last, by the way, reminds me of what part of the issue may be. According to the US Constitution, citizenship is determined by the state governments, and a US citizen is a citizen of a US state. That goes back to the idea hinted at in the early history of the US, that the states were national governments, and the federal government was just a loose association of the different states. That broke down quickly, but was still an issue in the American Civil War; a lot of conservatives still raise a fuss over states' rights, from time to time. This was particularly the case during the Civil Rights movement; thus, a lot of liberals interpret any talk of states' rights as coded language for segregation -- which it frequently is, but not always.
Social Security cards are simply black print on light blue card stock -- anyone could make a passable forgery with standard office equipment -- so it would normally be absurd to rely on just that card for identification. Drivers' licenses and state IDs have some security built into the cards -- holograms and so forth -- so they're much harder to forge.
One thing that bugs me about the use of Social Security numbers for identification is that, "for security purposes," many institutions will refrain from asking for your full SSN, just the last four digits, paired with some easily verified personal information like your street address or your mother's "maiden name." How that's more secure, I don't know, as it makes it easier to steal someone's identity, not harder.
Supposedly, URL shorteners were originally invented in order to allow adding URLs to email without the email clients adding line breaks and messing up the URLs. I remember that being a nuisance, but I haven't tested a long URL in an email in a while. Wouldn't it be easier to just fix clients so they'd handle long URLs properly?
Orwell's politics involved not shooting people who dissent. It follows from that, that a regime he criticized, that shot at him and his friends for their dissent, was not aligned with his politics.
While I'm not exactly a fan of home schooling, there's more to it than the caricatures.
Well before I joined the family, my wife had home-schooled her first son, and although he went on to classroom schooling, he still keeps in touch with his friends from that time. Home schoolers form networks, share educational resources, organize joint activities for their kids, and otherwise make sure their children are well educated and well socialized. The group my wife was connected to includes research scientists and professionals, and most of the members were politically progressive. They were definitely not the stereotypical science-hating backwoods Christian fundamentalists.
I do prefer the idea of professional teaching, and professional teachers with good resources can do marvelous things. Home-schooling, to be done right, requires a lot of resources on the part of parents that most parents don't have. Finally, I think the idea of a collective commitment to quality public education is important, for reasons similar to the reasons to support vaccination. But, I do think the bad reputation that home-schooling has gotten is mistaken and undeserved.
Slashdot Mirror
The McCarthy period was a long time ago. Most people who were in the radical left in the 60s in the US didn't even suffer mild embarassment. Most of the people I'm talking about were only children in the 60s, and not even born in the McCarthy period. Furthermore, the people I'm talking about are mostly best described as social democrats -- what in Europe is understood to be the moderate left.
I wouldn't be inclined to point out that I'm a socialist during a job interview, and I certainly don't want to mention that I support labor unions to an employer. I've known a few economics grad students who went through contortions to avoid directly referring to Marx, and there are doubtless a handful of other professions that are so dominated by the right wing that it would trouble one's career to admit being a socialist. But aside from that, I don't think open socialists in the US have more to worry about than raised eyebrows, and even that's not as common as people seem to think.
Furthermore, even before McCarthyism, the US Communist Party was criticized by other parts of Comintern for having its members go "underground" with little justification. During McCarthyism, CP members made things worse by denying their politics, then being shown to be liars, thus confirming one of the McCarthyite accusations and reducing the potential for public sympathy. On top of that, they left the few people who stood up at first to HUAC exposed and vulnerable.
There are lessons to be learned from the Gay Rights movement and "coming out."
I remember Noam Chomsky, in a lecture, commenting that in the US, people avoided taking political action because they feared even the possibility of persecution, whereas in Latin America, leftists assume they will be persecuted, and take action anyway.
There's a public portal to the US Defense Department's open source clearing house:
http://www.forge.mil/
I gather there's discussion to broadening the program to the US Federal Government in general.
Back when I was a member of a radical left group, I remember talking to a woman from (I think) Sweden, who told me she supported the right-of-center party in her native country. I had just come back from an organizing meeting for an anti-death penalty group, and she was appalled the US had the death penalty. I ran through the major issues our group was working on at the time, and she agreed with all of them, with the notable exception of our long-term goal of a social revolution. (And come to think of it, that's the subject on which I've most changed my political views since then, anyway).
One thing that irritates me about most of the US left is that many members are exceedingly paranoid about admitting their actual political beliefs. On a lot of occasions, I'd talk to several people, each whispering that she or he is really a socialist, but doesn't want anyone else to know, for fear of being politically ostracized. And these people would be standing right next to each other. There's a real, longstanding problem with cowardice in the US left.
As someone with a community college certificate and limited experience, who's never made more than $30K/year, I have a hard time working out what I should ask. The usual advice is to avoid answering the question directly, yet in each interview, and most applications, I am asked to provide a specific figure, with no fudging.
I have trouble finding plausible numbers -- the numbers I find seem wildly exaggerated. For instance, according to salary.com, the bottom of the pay scale for Linux system administrators is about $65K/year, and in the San Francisco area, $85K/year. However, the jobs I've found advertised are only for senior-level positions, and they tend to range from $50-$70K/year.
On the other hand, I (finally) got a short term job moving computers around, for $15/hour. Half the people I'm working with are engineers, and from what the people I'm working with have said, that's all they were paid for full-time work at permanent jobs.
If you can't or won't get a college degree, go into plumbing, carpenting or another trade.
The skilled trades require college coursework -- the courses are offered by community colleges and specialized trade schools, but just as those professions are socially undervalued, so are those schools. I had a roommate who was in an apprentice plasterer, and I remember looking through his textbooks -- they were more dense and challenging than most of the IT-related textbooks I've seen.
I try to hold back from outright cynicism about higher education, but my experience at UC Berkeley in the 90s suggested to me that only a minority of students were paying attention. In the last few years, I've been taking tech classes at a community college; in the classes primarily aimed at students preparing to transfer to four-year programs, only a minority are really participating in the class, but in the classes primarily aimed at vocational and professional students, the majority are participating.
There are other issues in play, most especially that the community college courses are much smaller, and the instructors are generally much better teachers, than was the case at UC Berkeley.
If you don't like upgrades every six months, don't use them. Use the LTS distributions.
If you don't like it when developers keep changing the interface, don't use a distribution that prioritizes development work on the interface.
And removing the meta-package leaves the dependent packages in place.
It does mean the loss of a convenience for upgrades, though.
I live in San Francisco, and in our best year, my wife and I together made $60,000. By our standards, $200,000 per year is definitely rich.
(Someone pointed this out in another /. thread.)
Ellison: The Last Samurai in Woodside
Imagine a flat tax of 10%. One person has $1 million, and pays $100,000. Another person has $100, and pays $10. Who will feel the greater loss?
That's the conventional account of why independent third parties are a bad idea. There are several shortcomings with that account, however.
First, while elections are important, they aren't the beginning or ending of politics -- not even in the conventional civics class account of US politics. Politicians don't simply enact the policies they campaigned upon. Federal affirmative action policies were implemented, and a national minimum income policy was proposed, by the Nixon administration. Nixon was a racist bigot and a fiscally conservative anti-Communist. However, his administration was during a seismic shift to the left among people in the US, and the legitimacy of the federal government was under attack; thus, a conservative Republican put forth policies to the left of anything we've seen from the Democrats elected since.
Second, there's more to an election than who wins. It's been speculated that Ross Perot's candidacy was successful enough that the Republican Party had to adapt its platform to attract Perot supporters. Contrast that with the 2004 election, in which many anti-war activists supported John Kerry, the Democrat who loudly proclaimed his status as a Vietnam veteran and who campaigned to escalate the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
As a thought experiment, imagine what would happen if in a presidential election, the Republican candidate got 40% of the popular vote, the Democrat 35%, and the Green 25%. By the rules, the Republican would win the White House. However, the Democrats would know they lost, and the Republicans would know they won, because there'd been a large turnout for a left wing candidate. Under those circumstances, wouldn't the Democrats see a need to move left in order to reclaim support? Would the Republicans be confident in charging ahead with conservative policies, knowing that 60% of the electorate openly opposes them?
To be clear, I'm not afraid of a Republican being elected president, if the Republican president is weak and intimidated by the left.
Finally, there's this essay, by the Marxist Hal Draper, Who’s going to be the lesser-evil in 1968?. The key point of that essay:
The US has a radical left, and from what I can make out, it's similar in scale to the radical left in European countries and elsewhere. However, there's not a significant social democratic left party in the US -- so the radical left has an even harder time getting a hearing in the US than elsewhere. Most people who would support a social democratic party grudgingly support the Democratic Party, a party of the center which routinely squelches its left-of-center wing. It's routinely said (I think Obama said this, for instance) that the Democrats need not pay any attention to the left, since the left will either vote Democratic or not vote at all.
The most likely candidate for a social democratic party in the US is the Green Party, which does have one thing going for it: whereas in most countries, there is a split in the left between the social democratic and green parties, there's the potential to unite both in one party in the US. However, the Green Party was rather viciously attacked in the 2004 presidential election, and while on paper the Green Party has become more coherent, in practice the Greens have been almost passive.
One thing I find frustrating in much of the Microsoft-bashing from FLOSS advocates is that I think they're not clearly thinking about what the goal really is, and what success looks like. Victory isn't the destruction of Microsoft; victory is the dominance of the FLOSS model over the proprietary model of software development. Somewhere in the middle, there's going to be a period in which the big players in proprietary software realize they're either going to have to move to an open source model, or their businesses will fail. That's going to be a transition; they won't leap into it all at once, and they won't make public appearances, weeping and begging for forgiveness for having advocated closed-source software.
And, since we're talking about big institutions, during a transition, there's going to be some executives who didn't get the memo. I think that's what this is about.
Stewart and Colbert are pretty clearly liberals, but they are willing to criticize Democrats, liberals, and others on the left, including those they generally support. That's something that's impressed me about them; during the Clinton administration, I was quite critical of Clinton from the left, and I found the way that liberals uncritically supported Clinton, even when he was directly attacking liberals, to be quite frustrating.
I tried using my browser with NoScript for a few months. In practice, I found that every Web site I visited had scripting -- the only exception to that rule was a simple Web page I'd written to test whether a Web server was working. So, visiting a Web page always involved temporarily enabling scripting, then reloading the page.
In effect, Web pages are now frameworks for scripts. No scripts means no Web use.
The thing that does surprise me is that the same desktop users who will call the helpdesk every 15 minutes with a Linux desktop will almost certainly not object anywhere near so vocally when they're put onto Windows 7 and an upgraded Office suite. Part of me wonders if you'd see different results if you took Ubuntu, changed the boot and login screen to say "Microsoft Windows 8", re-branded OpenOffice as "Microsoft Office 2009" but left everything else as a normal Ubuntu install.
That's the thing that gets me. From an end-user's perspective, migrating from Windows XP to Ubuntu 10.04 or Fedora 13 or the like would be a dramatic transition -- but so would migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7, and so was migrating from Windows 95/98 to Windows XP. Migrating from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 was a much more profound transition; migrating from MS-DOS to Windows 3.1 was a profound transition; and all of these were dwarfed by the migration from electric typewriters to PCs running MS-DOS.
All-in-all, I'd expect the transition from a relatively modern proprietary operating system to a relatively modern FLOSS operating system to be much easier for an end-user than many of the transitions an experienced office worker has already gone through.
I had, without planning it, followed that migration path myself. I'm guessing the note about problems with presentations means that they were still producing presentations in Microsoft Powerpoint, and the presentations didn't port into OpenOffice.org Impress cleanly.
Total cost of ownership is a tricky calculation, but my sense is that with Windows, you pay more for the software but less for support, with Linux, the software is free but the support is costly, and in the long run, as Linux is more flexible and reliable, it works out to be cheaper, as long as you don't skimp on support.
The number of viruses that have ever directly affected *nix systems is very small. This is directly due to the model of authentication and limited privileges that has been present in Unix and its derivatives from the beginning.
When I said "effectively immune," I did not mean completely immune. I meant, the odds of infection are negligible, as there have been very few *nix viruses, and those have exploited security holes which have been patched.
Also, I was distinguishing between viruses and other forms of malware, specifically for making the point that one should have a firewall in operation for Linux servers.
Would you care to tender an explanation why it's almost unheard of for Linux boxes to become infected by viruses, given that the world's Internet traffic flows through Linux servers, including countless billions of dollars in financial transactions, making them incredibly valuable targets?
You really should have a firewall.
*nix machines are effectively immune to viruses. However, that's not the only security problem to worry about.
Most Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, include almost all known drivers on the install discs. Since Ubuntu had a partnership with Dell for a while, they would doubtless have most of the Dell-related drivers available.
Missing device drivers is much rarer than it used to be. The only device I have that I haven't been able to get to work with Ubuntu is an extremely cheap digital camera (capacity: ten low-res photos) that was included as a premium from an office supply store.
Every so often, there's talk of issuing a national ID card in the US, which ends up portrayed as some sort of move towards a police state. I've never fully understood the reasoning on that -- among other things, given the lack of such a national ID, other documents are used in its place.
For instance, when one is officially hired for a job in the US, one is required to present their "I-9 documents", to demonstrate that they are legally privileged to work in the US. That requirement is usually met with the combination of a state government-issued driver's license and a Social Security card. Drivers' licenses are used as ID in many circumstances; so states also issue official state IDs through their Departments of Motor Vehicles, and the state IDs are very similar to drivers' licenses.
That last, by the way, reminds me of what part of the issue may be. According to the US Constitution, citizenship is determined by the state governments, and a US citizen is a citizen of a US state. That goes back to the idea hinted at in the early history of the US, that the states were national governments, and the federal government was just a loose association of the different states. That broke down quickly, but was still an issue in the American Civil War; a lot of conservatives still raise a fuss over states' rights, from time to time. This was particularly the case during the Civil Rights movement; thus, a lot of liberals interpret any talk of states' rights as coded language for segregation -- which it frequently is, but not always.
Social Security cards are simply black print on light blue card stock -- anyone could make a passable forgery with standard office equipment -- so it would normally be absurd to rely on just that card for identification. Drivers' licenses and state IDs have some security built into the cards -- holograms and so forth -- so they're much harder to forge.
One thing that bugs me about the use of Social Security numbers for identification is that, "for security purposes," many institutions will refrain from asking for your full SSN, just the last four digits, paired with some easily verified personal information like your street address or your mother's "maiden name." How that's more secure, I don't know, as it makes it easier to steal someone's identity, not harder.
Supposedly, URL shorteners were originally invented in order to allow adding URLs to email without the email clients adding line breaks and messing up the URLs. I remember that being a nuisance, but I haven't tested a long URL in an email in a while. Wouldn't it be easier to just fix clients so they'd handle long URLs properly?
Orwell's politics involved not shooting people who dissent. It follows from that, that a regime he criticized, that shot at him and his friends for their dissent, was not aligned with his politics.
While I'm not exactly a fan of home schooling, there's more to it than the caricatures.
Well before I joined the family, my wife had home-schooled her first son, and although he went on to classroom schooling, he still keeps in touch with his friends from that time. Home schoolers form networks, share educational resources, organize joint activities for their kids, and otherwise make sure their children are well educated and well socialized. The group my wife was connected to includes research scientists and professionals, and most of the members were politically progressive. They were definitely not the stereotypical science-hating backwoods Christian fundamentalists.
I do prefer the idea of professional teaching, and professional teachers with good resources can do marvelous things. Home-schooling, to be done right, requires a lot of resources on the part of parents that most parents don't have. Finally, I think the idea of a collective commitment to quality public education is important, for reasons similar to the reasons to support vaccination. But, I do think the bad reputation that home-schooling has gotten is mistaken and undeserved.