Yes, the individual mandate is legal...

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, That each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who is or shall be of age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years shall, within six months, provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch, with a box therein, to contain not less than twenty four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball; or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch, and powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder. - The Second Militia Act of 1792.

If an individual mandate was legal for George Washington, it's legal for Barack Obama.

About that rat and High Fructose Corn Syrup study.

Ars Technica has an awesome takedown of the methodology, leading to the conclusion that the study is "suggestive" but hardly definitive. I have to agree with the reporter that the photo of the lab students looking "sciency" was indeed awesome, however.

I'm reminded of this comic, only backward.

An awesome truth!

From twitter: TheOnion.com has migrated to Django. If you don’t understand this, please register with your local unemployment office.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.com

Loading a dev database in Django and MySQL

We all know the drill with MySQL and Django.  You have a dev database, probably compressed, and you need to roll it out so your server’s in a “pristine” state before you start running migrations and adding stuff.  And the routine typically looks something like this: gzip -dc dev_database.gz | mysql -u djanguser -p djangodb.  It is also perfectly legitimate (and less error-prone) with Django to do this instead: gzip -dc dev_database.gz | ./manage.py dbshell.

Yes, that’s painfully obvious. But sometimes, we miss the painfully obvious.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.com

Absolutely the best writing advice available today.

David Mamet to the writers of The Unit:

Our friends, the penguins, think that we, therefore, are employed to communicate information — and, so, at times, it seems to us.

But note: the audience will not tune in to watch information. You wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. No one would or will. The audience will only tune in and stay tuned to watch drama.

Question: what is drama? Drama, again, is the quest of the hero to overcome those things which prevent him from achieving a specific, acute goal.

I suspect “the penguins” is Mamet’s way of writing “the suits.”  There’s much more, and I recommend you read it all.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.