Politics

For those following this blog, note that I’ve changed the canonical site name from blog.hecker.org to frankhecker.com. Any links and feed URLs referencing the previous domain name will still work for the foreseeable future, but if and when you have time you may want to update your bookmark list, RSS newsreaders, and related information to reflect the new name. A little history by way of background: I was around when the Internet was first being commercialized, and I had the opportunity to register hecker.com for myself if I really wanted to. However I passed because I didn’t have a server to associate with it and I thought I needed to be running an actual server in order to register the name (though I’m not sure that was the case even then). When I finally got around to having a personal server in the late 1990s I found that hecker.com had already been taken by a company that registered thousands of surname domains so that they could offer a shared domain service in which multiple people could have their own personal subdomains under a top-level domain: jane.smith.com, john.smith.com, and so on. So I settled on the next best thing and registered hecker.org instead for use as my primary domain, at the same time registering frankhecker.com (as well as the .org and .net variants) to prevent anyone else from getting it. ...

For some time now I’ve been posting links I find interesting at hecker.tumblr.com. This is mainly for personal reference, but I thought it might be useful to collect those every week or two in case anyone else is interested. Some of these inspire blog posts, others I use as reference for various projects. This week was a political philosophy week. “Occupy Wall Street, Social Unrest and Income Inequality” This is an interesting riff on John Rawls and the “veil of ignorance,” starting with the following assumption that “[absent] a policy of income redistribution, capitalism plus stability leads to income disparities.” I wrote a blog post based on this. ...

How can Maryland promote job growth and the well-being of its citizens as the economy languishes and Federal spending shows every sign of declining, never to rise again? Should Maryland seek to model itself on its next-door rival, Virginia, or even on Texas and other states in the south touting themselves as “business-friendly” destinations? Or is there another way to grow Maryland and make it a better place to live and work, one that takes into account Maryland’s own characteristics and doesn’t try to make it into something it’s not and never could be? ...

Is the US too stable for its own good? You’d think that stability would be a welcome thing, especially for a country in the midst of an economic downturn making life unstable for millions of Americans. But in a recent post, “Occupy Wall Street, Social Unrest and Income Inequality” (which I found via the Twitter feed of venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky), SEC official (and former financial industry insider) Rick Bookstaber makes the case that stability isn’t an unalloyed blessing when it comes to a capitalist society. I was interested in posting on this general topic, and commenting on Bookstaber’s post is as good a way to begin doing that as any. ...

In part 18 of this series Republicans overcame the disadvantage imposed on them by the recently-adopted redistricting plan and gained a majority on the county council in the general election of 1994. We now review how the council tried to avoid a replay of the redistricting battle of 1991–1993: July 1996. The Howard County Council considers a proposal to establish a separate commission to devise council redistricting plans, as opposed to having the council create plans itself. The proposal envisions a seven-member commission with three members appointed by the Democratic and Republican Central Committees and a “tie-breaker” member appointed by the council. The commission’s plan would be presented to the council, which could adopt it as-is, modify it, or create a new plan; however the commission plan would automatically go into effect in the event of a council stalemate. ...