The Solutions Are Known

Economic Policy

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 20:59:14 -0400

Markets do useful things. They let people try ideas, discover demand, build businesses, and challenge the established way of doing something. Competition can reward better products and make failure less permanent. None of that requires believing that whatever makes the most money must be good for society.

The “greed is good” version of capitalism turns morality on its head. It says extracting more value for an owner is sufficient justification for a business decision, even when the costs land on workers, customers, communities, or the environment. Greed is instead a deadly sin, but you needn’t delve into Judeo-Christian ethics to discover how harmful it is. Competition drives people to do better for themselves and for society, but unregulated capitalism actually distorts competition and rewards rent-seeking behavior.

Healthcare

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 20:59:14 -0400

A healthcare system should help people stay well, catch problems early, and manage illness before it becomes a crisis. When serious illness does come, it should provide excellent treatment without making the illness a financial catastrophe. That seems like a modest expectation for a wealthy country.

Yet Americans regularly face a different set of questions. Is the doctor in the network? Will the insurer authorize the treatment? How much of the deductible is left? Can the appointment wait until the next paycheck? Is there still a hospital close enough in an emergency?

Money in Politics

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 20:59:14 -0400

Every citizen has one vote. We do not have the same ability to put an issue on the agenda, fund a campaign, or keep an argument in front of the public. Some of that is unavoidable. People have different skills, audiences, and commitments. But persuasion earned through public support is not the same as influence bought with a fortune, and a democracy ought to tell the difference.

We need to reverse the constitutional rule from Citizens United, along with broader campaign-finance reform. Of course, people must have the right to criticize government, organize, publish unpopular arguments, and challenge the people in office. The design problem is protecting those freedoms without treating unlimited money as an untouchable part of political liberty.

The Supreme Court

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 20:59:14 -0400

The Supreme Court needs independence. A justice has to be able to tell a president, Congress, or an angry majority that the law doesn’t allow what they want to do. It also needs legitimacy. People should be able to believe that cases are decided on legal judgment, not private favors, undisclosed relationships, or one party’s success at manipulating the appointment calendar.

We have too often treated those goals as opposites. Accountability gets described as an attack on independence, and lifetime tenure gets treated as proof of it. Neither of those is true.

Representation

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 08:15:55 -0400

The United States political system gives the people already in office considerable control over who can replace them. They write the election rules, and in most cases the party in power draws the electoral districts. Money is needed to run political campaigns (see money in politics), most prominently to market the candidate and his or her positions. For many reasons, the incumbent has advantages in raising money and generating free publicity. We then act surprised when the resulting legislature is difficult to dislodge. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has been in office since 1981. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has been in office since 1985. Representatives Hal Rogers (R-KY) and Chris Smith (R-NJ) have been in office since 1981. While the oldest, these are not outliers. A quick analysis of 2014 to 2024 found members were about twice as likely to leave on their own terms or die as to be voted out.

Quotes and Aphorisms

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 23:30:08 -0400

There are a number of quotes and aphorisms that I find myself revisiting, and I wanted to keep a list somewhere convenient. You can read along. Where I could, I have noted a source.

Aphorisms

Bad news doesn’t get better with age.
When you’re in a hole, stop digging.
It’s never the crime, it’s the cover-up.
The question is never “how do they get away with that,” the question is “how do I get in on that.”—a favorite of a former colleague of mine.
You can’t save people from themselves.
If you are not willing to learn, no one can help you. If you are determined to learn, no one can stop you.
Never wrestle with a pig: you both get dirty, and the pig likes it.—(Often credited to George Bernard Shaw, but I have not found a solid source. Shaw’s Wikiquote page tracks attribution questions.)
Great Britain and the United States are two nations devided by a common language.

Notable Personalities

“Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”—Mark Twain, attributed; see Wikiquote page.
“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”—Frequently attributed to Twain, but not found it in his writing; see the misattributed list on his Wikiquote page.
“Never argue with a fool; onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.”—Most often attributed to Twain, and also commonly disputed. The sentiment goes back at least to Proverbs 26:4.
“I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be.”—Commonly attributed to Albert Einstein
“Do not put off until tomorrow what can be put off till day-after-tomorrow just as well.”—Mark Twain
“Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason,”—Definitely not Mark Twain
“War is the province of uncertainty; three-fourths of the things on which action in war is based lie hidden in the fog of uncertainty.”—Carl von Clausewitz
“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”—Ernest Hemingway, “Treasury of the Free World”. Book by Ben Raeburn. Introduction to the book, 1946.
“Don’t hit at all if it is honorably possible to avoid hitting; but never hit softly”—Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: an Autobiography (1913)
“Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.”—Winston Churchill

Literature and Television

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886), aphorism 146.
“Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.”—Gildor, in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 1.
“The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.”—Kosh, in “Believers” (Babylon 5, season 1), written by David Gerrold.
“There comes a time when you look into the mirror and realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. Then you accept it, or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking into mirrors.”—Londo, in “Chrysalis” (Babylon 5, season 1).
“You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.”—Marcus Cole to Dr. Franklin, in “A Late Delivery from Avalon” (Babylon 5, season 3).
“Decisions are made by those who show up.”—President Bartlett, The West Wing (written by Aaron Sorkin)
“Just stand there in your wrongness and be wrong and get used to it.”—President Bartlett, The West Wing (written by Aaron Sorkin)
“There’s literally no one in the world that I don’t hate right now.”—Toby Zigler, The West Wing (written by Aaron Sorkin)
“A day can really slip by when you’re deliberately avoiding what you’re supposed to do.”—Bill Watterson, There’s Treasure Everywhere (Calvin and Hobbes, #10)

Music

The sun is the same in a relative way
But you’re older
Shorter of breath
And one day closer to death
Every year is getting shorter
Never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught
Or half a page of scribbled lines.—Pink Floyd, Time
Be more heart, and less attack—NEEDTOBREATHE, More Heart, Less Attack
Did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage—Pink Floyd Wish You Were Here

History

We can succeed only by concert. It is not “can any of us imagine better?” but, “can we all do better?” The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise — with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.—Abraham Lincoln, Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862
“I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”—Thomas Jefferson

Comparing MiniMed Pumps

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 23:32:15 -0400

I have used MiniMed insulin pumps for many years. I recently upgraded from a MiniMed 780G to a MiniMed Flex. Overall the Flex is an improvement, but there are some things I wish were different.

Both systems pair with a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) and use its readings to adjust basal insulin and deliver correction boluses automatically. The algorithm is currently the same on both pumps, although I believe some future algorithm updates may be available only for the Flex.

BreadSched

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 15:32:15 -0400

GNUcash is Great for Many Things

For a long while I have used GnuCash and some spreadsheets to manage my finances. GnuCash has excellent features for tracking income, expeses, assets, liabilities as well as business accounting features (invoices, receivables, and so on) that would be useful for an LLC but that I do not need for my household. It is not especially helpful, though, for projecting cash flow or making long-term projections. So I kept spreadsheets for that, plus a dashboard-style spreadsheet to track my overall current financial picture.

Decrypting Disks without Passwords on Reboot

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:05:01 -0400

Like many tech hobbyists, I run a fair number of servers and VMs at home, and a lot of them hold data I would rather keep encrypted. Drives and SSDs eventually fail (you should have backups, but that is an entry for another day) and sometimes get stolen. If the data is encrypted, both are far less stressful events.

The catch is that encrypted data has to be decrypted before it is useful. The usual model, typical of Linux’s LUKS encryption, is that someone types a passphrase at boot after every power failure or maintenance window. LUKS can instead tie the key to the machine’s TPM, much as Windows BitLocker does, but that is less effective for VMs and does little if the TPM is stolen along with the drive. A passphrase at boot has real security advantages. Its serious disadvantage is that a person has to be present to type it, every time.

Forwarding to Gmail via API

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 23:05:01 -0400

Google is deprecating, and will soon turn off, Gmail’s ability to fetch mail from other servers via POP. (Despite what you may have thought, Gmail has apparently never supported fetching over IMAP.) In an update, covered in the link above, Google has extended this deprecation to it’s send-as feature as well. So while this tool will still work, it won’t be possible to use your Gmail account as your primary interface to reading and responding to email at another domain. Forwarding by SMTP is not a good substitute: forwarded messages commonly fail SPF, DKIM, and DMARC checks, because the forwarding server is no longer an authorized sender for the original domain. (The ARC protocol exists to soften this, but it depends on the receiving side trusting you.) So I turned to Gmail’s API, and after a little more research than I wanted, I wrote a modest Python script.

Constructing this Site

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 12:49:08 -0400

I had been considering a blog for a while, mostly to hold what I have learned about various things. I did not want to relearn those hard-won bits of knowledge the next time I needed them, so I kept a private collection of notes. I also believe sharing is a good thing, and I wanted to make those notes available to anyone who might find them useful.

Choosing Hugo

While working with Gramps, I became aware of one of its developers, David Straub. When he revamped his personal website, I learned of Hugo, which met my list of criteria for a blog system and was similar to what he described.

Tether iPhone to OPNsense

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 14:30:06 -0400

Last updated for OPNsense 26.7.3_11.

If you have an OPNsense firewall and a spare iPhone on a cell plan that allows tethering, you can use the phone as the firewall’s WAN connection to the cell network. This is handy in a long outage, for example a hurricane taking down your cable provider for more than a week. (Just an example.)

There are some hurdles, and it is best to configure all of this before you need it. During an outage it is hard to download the things you need.

Local Fedora Mirror

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 01:50:01 -0400

If you maintain more than a few Fedora systems, having each machine download the same updates through your internet connection can waste time and bandwidth. A local repository mirror lets you download those packages once to your network and reuse them. It can also serve any locally produced packages to your systems although that is not implemented in the script below.

Planning

This script is a deliberately simple setup, not the Fedora MirrorManager Mirror Management System which may be more appropriate depending on what you are doing. This script can be hosted on a physical or virtual server. Mirroring the actively updated repositories can take upwards of 550 GiB as configured below, so it is probably worth giving it its own drive. Whether that is part of the root filesystem or a dedicated mount, the script and steps below assume that storage is at /opt/mirror.

Gmail Enshittification

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 01:35:21 -0400

Google long ago dropped “Don’t be evil” from its code of conduct, which I take to mean it no longer pretends to avoid it. We have watched Google enshittify its search engine, and now it is working on Gmail.

The way things were

It was (and for the moment still is) possible to set up a Gmail account to fetch mail periodically from a remote POP server and to “send as” a particular identity through a remote SMTP server. You could run a mail server for your.example.com, read what it received from your Gmail account, and reply from Gmail with the message originating from your domain’s server, so SPF, DKIM, and DMARC all worked correctly.

Using Gramps Web Sync on Fedora

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 01:20:21 -0400

When using Gramps Web Sync on Fedora’s GNOME desktop to keep Gramps and a Gramps Web tree in sync, it helps to let the GNOME password manager remember the password. That is not entirely straightforward. You need the Python keyring library to save the sync password, but it defaults to the KWallet backend even when GNOME is the default desktop. This is tracked in this bug.

The workaround:

Install python3-keyring and python3-secretstorage.
Create ~/.config/python_keyring/keyringrc.cfg to make the Secret Service backend (which GNOME Keyring implements) the default, as described in the keyring documentation on configuring a backend.

sudo dnf --refresh install python3-secretstorage python3-keyring
mkdir -p ~/.config/python_keyring
cat > ~/.config/python_keyring/keyringrc.cfg <<'CFG'
[backend]
default-keyring=keyring.backends.SecretService.Keyring
CFG

Run the mkdir and cat commands as your own user, not with sudo, since the file belongs in your home directory.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Howard complaining about solutions existing but not being used.

Who am I

I am by profession a (mostly retired now) cybersecurity professional. I created this site mostly for myself. I sincerely hope that others can find some value in something here, but that’s really secondary to this being a place where I can leave notes to myself. There are primarily three categories of things here:

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