The Daily Parker

The email migration I did over the weekend so far has made my email experience better, in part because the server rack temperatures have dipped a full degree C (despite really hot weather outside). More details about the migration will follow this weekend.

Since 10th Magnitude has become a 100% Azure shop, Microsoft has invited us to participate in an all-day summit here in Chicago about the Azure cloud-computing platform. I'm leaving for it anon; I'll report this, too, weekend.

What do you call a system in which:

• Massive and increasing private wealth;
• Increasing inheritance of that wealth, reducing social mobility;
• Private control over traditionally public resources;
• Debts to private interests that persists after death, sometimes burdening families for generations;
• Increasing economic growth in non-productive ("rentier") sectors with declines in productive sectors, like manufacturing;
• Public officeholders continuing to use their former titles of office long after leaving service;
• Economic policies guaranteed to lengthen an economic catastrophe;
• Increasing authoritarianism and mixing religion and politics;
• Increasing separation of military and civilian societies as the military derives its membership from a narrower sub-set of people;
• Systematic efforts to remove people from the political process; and
• Judges, even at the highest level, making unabashedly partisan decisions that tend to perpetuate the above?

In short, what do you call a system that concentrates wealth—mainly derived from investments, not from production—in a few hands, keeps it there, and makes it difficult if not impossible for everyone else to better his own condition?

Feudalism.

The United States isn't a feudal country, obviously, but a good chunk of the political and economic elite clearly want it to become one. It's still in our power to prevent this. But I'm less and less confident.

The view from my office window:

The Affordable Care Act has helped 3.1 million people get health insurance:

As a result of the law, the proportion of insured adults ages 19 through 25 has increased to nearly 75 percent.

The Affordable Care Act requires insurers to allow young adults to remain on their parents' family plans until their 26th birthday, even if they move away from home or graduate from school. This policy took effect on September 23, 2010.

"Today, because of the health care law, more than 3 million more young adults have health insurance," said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. "This policy doesn’t just give young adults and their families peace of mind, it also gives them freedom. It means that as they begin their careers, they will be free to make choices based on what they want to do, not on where they can get health insurance."

And the Republicans want to kill it:

The central pillars of the health care reform law — guaranteed coverage regardless of health status, an individual mandate to buy insurance and subsidies delivered via exchanges — were originally crafted by moderate conservatives and have long enjoyed support in the GOP. But after Obama embraced the template, Republicans ran to the right and abandoned it in an effort to undermine him politically. Now, as they try to sneak back closer to the center, the hard-right base that they’ve empowered is giving them hell.

First came the warning shots from activist groups like FreedomWorks and Club For Growth, which most recently purged the longest serving Republican senator for taking moderate positions in the past. Then came the cries of opposition from conservative legislators in the party. The anger is reflected among high-profile conservative activists who are actively confronting party leaders for straying — and apparently making them nervous.

This is going to be a long 139 days...and I can't wait until the Supreme Court fires off the ACA decision due any day now.

A few months ago, when Chicago finished its 10th warmest winter (followed by its warmest spring ever), I predicted a warm summer. Actually, the state climatologist predicted a warm summer, and I repeated this prediction.

Regardless, the mechanics are simple. Warm winters and springs keep Lake Michigan warm, which means come summer the lake can't absorb as much heat on hot days. This means, all things equal, a warm spring leads to a warm summer. (Oddly, though, warm summers have no effect on winter temperatures.)

How accurate was the prediction? Well, so far, this summer is worse than 1988:

The brutally hot and often bone-dry summer of 1988, serves as a benchmark for hot summers in the Chicago area. That year produced more 32°C and 38°C temperatures than any other on the record books here—47 and 7 respectively.

By June 19, the 1988 season had logged 10 days of 32°C temperatures. The long-term average of 90s [Fahrenheit] by June 19 has been just three. That means this year has been producing 90-degree days faster than one of the most prolific heat-generating summers in the Chicago area's history.

Someday I'll have a summer house in northern Saskatchewan. For the next three months, though, I expect to be uncomfortable.

Before coming to 10th Magnitude, I was an independent consultant, mostly writing software but occasionally configuring networks. I hate configuring networks. And yet, since 2008, I've had a 48U server rack in my apartment.*

A “U” is 25mm, so this means I have a 1.2 m steel rack behind an antique dressing screen in my living room home office, which sits between my dining room and my bedroom in a compact apartment in Chicago:

It looks modest enough, yes?

On the server rack are three 2U and one 1U rack servers. Behind the server rack is an old desktop box that got drafted for server duties. All of these machines have cooling fans that whirr constantly. Under the servers are the routers, uninterruptible power sources, and wires that connect the servers with the rest of the world:

I spent about $10,000 on the servers and the rack in the last decade. All of the servers are nearing the ends of their lives—the newest is from 2008—and need replacing soon. Plus, every month since then they've used about $90 per month in electricity. They need air conditioning, too, which costs another $30 or so in the summer beyond what I'd spend on my own comfort, because the bastards create a lot of heat.

Imagine my glee when, about two weeks ago, Microsoft began offering a new configuration for its cloud-based Azure platform that dropped the price of moving (most) websites into the cloud under $15 per month. That, combined with the onset of summer in Chicago, pushed me over the edge. I am now committed to getting the server rack out of my house by the end of September. This will accomplish three things:

• It will cost less;
• It will be quieter; and
• Someone else can deal with the hardware and network maintenance.

I’ve already started. Over the weekend I moved my email to Microsoft Exchange Online, which costs $4 per month per mailbox, and so far works better than my old Exchange server. As just one example, if the power goes out in my apartment while I’m traveling, I won’t lose email connectivity.

Tomorrow I’ll describe the process in detail. Spoiler: the only thing that made me swear was getting my mobile phone connected.

* Before 2008, the rack was in my office in Evanston. I didn’t want to keep the office when I moved to Lincoln Park, so the servers moved in with me "just to save money." Never a good idea.

As promised, Parker's birthday photo from yesterday:

1/250 at f/5.6, ISO-3200, 116mm

Parker turns six today:

That was then (September 2006, when he was about 11 weeks old). The "now" picture will come tomorrow.

...and only four blocks from my house:

The Dept. of Homeland Security announced today that most undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children will not be deported:

Those who demonstrate that they meet the criteria will be eligible to receive deferred action for a period of two years, subject to renewal, and will be eligible to apply for work authorization.

“Our nation’s immigration laws must be enforced in a firm and sensible manner,” said [Homeland Security] Secretary [Janet] Napolitano. “But they are not designed to be blindly enforced without consideration given to the individual circumstances of each case. Nor are they designed to remove productive young people to countries where they may not have lived or even speak the language. Discretion, which is used in so many other areas, is especially justified here.”

The order affects people who arrived before turning 16, are still under 30, have lived here for at least 5 years, and have demonstrated through school or military service and staying out of jail that they're the kind of people we want to keep.

I'd like to see Congress actually pass comprehensive immigration reform that grants citizenship to military veterans and grants permanent residence to people who finish two years of college, but that's crazy talk. The GOP doesn't want poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free, whether they come from Mexico or Mississippi.

Update: Brian Buetler at TPM points out, "for Republicans, embracing Obama’s move carries the same risk with their base as rejecting it does with immigrants — the voting bloc they’re most concerned about alienating. A hunch: prepare yourself for a deluge of condemnations of executive-branch overreach, paired with real reluctance to say anything meaningful about what the directive actually accomplishes."

That sounds about right.