Kevin's Weblog

The true motivations of the administration become clear when you compare how they are approaching Social Security vs. Medicare

By any rational estimation, Medicare is is far, far worse shape than Social Security. It is the real crisis. However, Bush isn’t saying a thing about it.

On the other hand, Social Security is in decent shape and could be fixed with a couple minor course corrections. But, Bush want to radically overhaul the system, piling a huge amount of debt on it and removing the whole “security” part.

Clearly, the goal is to completely dismantle both systems. Medicare will implode on its own in a little more than a decade, so there is no need to intervene there. Social Security is fully solvent for another 45 years and the long-term solutions are obvious, so action must be taken to subvert and drive it out of existence.

Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state. If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state.

-- Stephen Moore, former president of the Club for Growth, in the New York Times

Well, I did say that I would submit a talk to OSCON this year. And, the CFP is out. And, I don’t really doubt that I could talk intelligently for half-an-hour about high performance systems.

And yet, I just can’t manage to sit down and write up an abstract. Of course, part of the problem is that it’s really hard to write an abstract before you’ve written the paper / talk. But, I’m also just going through a bit of a slump where I’m just not really excited about much of anything, and it’s really hard to work up enthusiasm for something over 6 months in the future. Plus, every sentence I write just seems to come out as lame marketing-speak.

Can you spot the bug in this code?

use strict;
use constants { STATE_A => 0,
                STATE_B => 1,
                STATE_C => 2,
              };

...

if ($state == STATE_A) {
  do_a();
} elsif ($state == STATE_B) {
  do_b();
} elsif ($state == STATE_C) {
  do_c();
} else {
  die("bad state: $state");
}

Okay, actually there are a couple bugs:

• The code doesn’t use warnings. This might not seem like a bug to some except...
• Perl numifies undef to 0, so the first condition passes when $state is undefined, instead of dying. And, since you weren’t using warnings it’s not clear that this code is the culprit when other code starts subtly misbehaving.

So people don’t think I only pick on other people’s code, I’ll disclose that I wrote the state-handling code. However, I was not the person who failed to turn on warnings.