The Obama administration has been claiming that the stimulus “created or saved” jobs. But there have been some significant factual problems in the numbers reported.

From the Columbus Dispatch article:

Of the 212.5 full-time equivalent jobs the district said were funded with part of the $64 million in stimulus it expects to receive, about 65 percent were “saved,” including 36 principals and assistant principals.

So was the district on the verge of laying off 36 school administrators?

“No,” Dannemiller said, explaining that the reporting choices were “created” and “saved.”

“They weren’t ‘created,’ obviously, so our only other choice was ’saved.’ “

… So if these jobs weren’t in danger, what was the money used for? Apparently, raises and bonuses. From the AP article:

About two-thirds of the 14,506 jobs claimed to be saved under one federal office, the Administration for Children and Families at Health and Human Services, actually weren’t saved at all, according to a review of the latest data by The Associated Press. Instead, that figure includes more than 9,300 existing employees in hundreds of local agencies who received pay raises and benefits and whose jobs weren’t saved.

And further down in the AP article, there’s this spectacular demonstration of innumeracy:

At Southwest Georgia Community Action Council in Moultrie, Ga., director Myrtis Mulkey-Ndawula said she followed the guidelines the Obama administration provided. She said she multiplied the 508 employees by 1.84 — the percentage pay raise they received — and came up with 935 jobs saved.

The innumeracy on display by Ms. Mulkey-Ndawula is staggering. She multiplied by 1.84 when she should have multipled by 0.0184 — throwing her results off by a factor of a hundred. Leaving aside how ridiculous it is to claim that a raise is a “fraction of a job saved” (if the job was truly in danger, why would there be any raises?), that means that instead of reporting 9.35 jobs “saved” as a result of those raises, she reported 935 jobs “saved”.

Innumeracy. It’s a real problem, folks.

And while Ms. Mulkey-Ndawula’s innumeracy may not be widespread, the false reporting of raises and other uses of stimulus money as “saved jobs” is indeed widespread. Near the close of the AP article closes, we find:

More than 250 other community agencies in the U.S. similarly reported saving jobs when using the money to give pay raises, to pay for training and continuing education, to extend employee work hours or to buy equipment, according to their spending reports.

The next sentence tells us that “[o]ther agencies didn’t count the raises as jobs saved, reporting zero jobs,” but this fails to reassure, since we aren’t told how many. Since counting raises as partial “saved jobs” was done on direct instructions from the administration, I’m guessing most of the other agencies counted things this way as well. Which means there are some massive problems underlying the claim of X number of jobs saved by the stimulus.

$1,200.00 check from Wachovia bank - what's the catch?

Now, I wasn’t born yesterday. If banks handed out $1,200 to random people all the time, they’d soon go out of business. There must be a catch. So I looked at the accompanying letter, and saw this:

Header of the Wachovia letter

Sure enough, this wasn’t a gift, but a loan. And what were the finance terms? I turned the letter over and looked at the other side:

$600 interest on a $1,200 loan? Do they think I'm stupid?

An APR of more than 50%? Almost $600 in interest… on a $1,200 loan? Do they think I’m stupid? Those are finance terms more commonly associated with loan sharks than with respectable financial institutions. I can only conclude that Wachovia Bank has decided they no longer want to be a respectable financial institution.

Furthermore, who do they think is going to fall for this? The answer, clearly, “people with more greed than sense.” And do they really believe such people are going to repay their loans? I mean, come on, this is the subprime mortgage fiasco all over again! It would seem that the Wachovia Bank lending people have not learned from history.

Finally, it’s my opinion that a bank that has so little respect for people as to offer loan-shark interest rates wouldn’t hesitate to take advantage of them in other ways as well. Therefore, I will avoid doing any business with Wachovia Bank, and would urge you to follow my example.

def walk_descendants(root):
    """
    Walk through a tree of this object's children, their own children,
    and so on, yielding each object in depth-first order.
    """
    yield root
    if not hasattr(root, 'get_children'):
        return # No children, so we're done
    children = root.get_children()
    if not children:
        return # No children, so we're done
    for child in children:
        for widget in walk_descendants(child):
            yield widget

I use this function to build a dict listing all the widgets in my dialog box, keyed by their names. Then when I need to do something with the OK button, I can use something like self.widgets['button_OK'] and no matter where it is in the hierarchy, even nested inside several VBoxes and HBoxes, it’s easy to use.

In case others might find this useful, I hereby release this function into the public domain. Use it however you like.

• Packaging session from Ubuntu Open Week (and part 2)
• PackagingBasics from Ubuntu wiki
• PbuilderHowto from Ubuntu wiki

• First, download the certificate you’re interested in, e.g. “wget http://www.cacert.org/certs/class1.crt”. I suggest storing it in /etc/ssl/certs with an appropriate name, such as “cacert-root-ca.crt”. You’ll need to have root privileges (use “sudo”) to get write access to the /etc/ssl/certs directory.
• Run “openssl md5 /etc/ssl/certs/cacert-root-ca.crt” and/or “openssl sha1 /etc/ssl/certs/cacert-root-ca.crt” and compare the results against the certificate fingerprint given on the website. The website you’re downloading this certificate from does give you its MD5 and/or SHA1 fingerprints, right? (If not, what the heck are you doing trusting a certificate you haven’t verified?!?)
• Run “openssl x509 -text -in /etc/ssl/certs/cacert-root-ca.crt” to verify that the certificate’s data (company name and so on) looks correct.
• If the above fails, add “-inform der” to the command above: maybe you accidentally downloaded the DER-encoded certificate instead of the PEM-encoded certificate.
• If you have the DER version, you’ll need to convert it to PEM. Run “sudo openssl x509 -inform der -outform pem -in /etc/ssl/certs/cacert-root-ca.crt -out /etc/ssl/certs/cacert-root-ca.pem”. Note the “sudo” in front of that command: you’re writing to the /etc/ssl/certs directory, so you need to be root.
• Now that you’ve got a certificate in PEM format and verified it, it’s time to edit your “~/.subversion/servers” file. In the “[globals]” section, add the line “ssl-authority-files = /etc/ssl/certs/cacert-root-ca.crt”. The “ssl-authority-files” option is a colon-delimited list, so if you already have something there and are adding the second certificate to it, use a colon to separate the two paths. If you’re adding a third certificate to the list, then you should already see the colon and be able to figure it out. :-)

I mostly figured this out from the “SSL Certificate Management” section of the Subversion book. Which I highly recommend reading, BTW.

I hope this helps someone else spend a little less time on Google figuring out how to trust a new root CA.

Nevertheless, it might be useful to someone, so I put it up anyway.

This makes Christianity a very interesting thing indeed, because it’s a faith that could be utterly destroyed if one specific event was proven to have never taken place. If someone could prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that Jesus was not raised from the dead, if archaeologists found a two-thousand-year-old body in a tomb near Jerusalem that could somehow be proven to be Jesus’ body, then the foundation on which the entire edifice of Christian doctrine rests would be destroyed. Because if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead as He promised He would, then He cannot truly be God, and thus cannot save anyone from their sins. Even the Bible even says so — look at 1 Corinthians 15:12-19.

But Jesus Christ did rise from the dead, and therefore we do have a hope that does not deceive us (1 Corinthians 15:20-22). We do not simply follow the teachings of a great religious leader, passed on after his death. Rather, we worship the Lord Jesus, who is alive today and forever! He has promised never to leave us nor forsake us, and that He will be with us always, even to the end of time. (Matthew 28:18-20).

Halleluyah! He is risen!

Just down the street from where I work, there’s an American Recreation Center that, among other things, has a softball field, and hosts a weekly game of softball on Saturday afternoons. So on my first weekend here, I went down to the “Rec” to join in the game. Midway through the game, a large turtle stumped onto the field, heading for the grassy infield. When I called attention to it, someone said, “Oh, that’s just George. He shows up often enough that he’s been written into the field rules — if the ball hits the turtle, it’s still considered in play.”

Where else would you find a baseball field with a turtle (actually it’s a tortoise, but everyone here seems to call it a turtle) that pays a visit regularly enough to have a local rule devoted to him?

That’s not what I want this blog to be about. I want it to be a place where I can record my thoughts, write interesting tidbits about my life, and talk about what it’s like living one’s life for God.

So I’m picking up the keyboard again. I’ll be posting a lot more frequently now, and on a wider variety of subjects. I have a lot of good stories waiting to be written, so stay tuned.