My Quiet Life

I have been pretty hard on Rep. Hard Ford in the past for basically being a republican in sheep's clothing, but it appears that he may have grown a spine, with respect to social security, at least. Good for him.

This is an excellent article on the current state of higher education

Marcos Acosta Jr. has swapped out the Renesis for a 3-rotor 20B with a Garrett T76 dual ball bearing turbocharger which, with many other modifications, makes a monster out of a Mazda RX-8:

Once all the parts were bolted together and screws tightened and double checked, the Acosta Racing crew set out for the automotive equivalent of the lie detector test – the dyno. With the turbo boost restricted to a mild 12 psi, the rollers on the dyno spun to a reported 640 hp. According to Acosta Jr., it didn’t take long before Acosta Sr. had the 3 rotors humming along to the tune of 950 hp on VP C16 race fuel and at 28 lbs of boost.

I'll take two, please.

A good collection of the best reading material for understanding the manufactured social security crisis that I've found, for my reference, and yours:

• WHAT CRISIS? - the Washington Post weighs in.
• A Question of Numbers - a good history of the attacks on Social Security by the NYT. (article is now behind a wall of pay -- here is a mirror, for now.
• EPI's Facts at a Glance - just the facts, ma'am.
• Galbraith on SS
• Would Borrowing $2 Trillion for Individual Accounts Eliminate $10 Trillion In Social Security Liabilities? - The CBPP says "Sadly, No", and also provides the Only Fact You Need to Know about social security's solvency:
  

  In other words, if the tax cuts are made permanent, their cost will be three to five times larger over the next 75 years than the size of the Social Security shortfall. Furthermore, just the cost of the tax cuts for the top one percent of the population — a group whose annual incomes average about $1 million — is roughly the same size as the Social Security shortfall (0.6 percent of GDP).

• Paul Krugman (whose book Fuzzy Math is a good intro to Social Security, taxes, and our government's budget in general) has an excellent series of op-eds on Social Security: Start at 12-07-04 and keep reading.
• Josh Marshall has a good commentary on social security from the perspective of national debt, as well as a summary of the issue.
• Kevin Drum highlights Alan Greenspan's role in prescribing a tax increase on the lower/middle class to fund social security and then subsequently advocating its giveaway in tax cuts to the wealthy, leaving SS out to dry. Billmon quotes an interview that gets into the details.

Tom Sherman has some thoughts on the growing problem of referrer spam, which you've seen me rant about here before. He's got some good ideas, and he's certainly right that simply blacklisting domains or IPs via .htaccess or even firewalling is a losing battle. He does have one suggestion I disagree with, though:

Referer spam is a problem because spammers can improve their sites' Google PageRank by getting listed on popular sites through spoofing of the HTTP_REFERER field in an HTTP request.

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If bloggers (and other website maintainers) did not publish this information, spammers would not bother to send these spoofed requests to blogs -- it would be pointless.

I don't agree. This logic is attractive, particularly when you are thinking like a reasonable member of polite society. The problem is, you have to think like a spammer. Trying to get spammers to stop referrer-spamming by convincing people to stop posting referrer info is like thinking that e-mail spam could be stopped if most people would just ignore it. Of course we know that most people do ignore spam (and filter/delete it with extreme prejudice).

The problem here is the same as it is in the world of e-mail. The cost of sending spam is low. When faced with a decrease in results, spammers won't stop spamming, they will spam more, to make sure they hit the one or two people out there still publishing their referer data.

Anyways, that said, using the various anti-spam blacklists out there seems like a good idea and is one I've been meaning to follow up on for some time, so I finally have. Blars has written a great module, mod_access_rbl, for Apache, which is a replacement for the default mod_access that also lets you use DNS RBLs to limit access to your website.

Below are the instructions for doing so in debian -stable as I have done tonight:

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