text:
Please read this privacy policy (the "Privacy Policy") carefully to understand how Ekoma, LLC., its subsidiary and affiliate corporations, successors, and assigns (collectively, the "Company", "our", "us" or "we") uses and protects the information that we collect from visitors to ekoma.io, all other websites owned and operated by the Company that redirect to ekoma.io and all subdomains of ekoma.io, (collectively, the "Ekoma.io Site"), our clients ("Clients"), our Client's customers ("Customers") and other users ("Users") of the Ekoma.io Properties (as defined below).
We reserve the right to update its Privacy Policy at any time and such modifications shall be effective immediately, unless otherwise stated.
This Privacy Policy applies to information collected by us through the Ekoma.io Site, any Company computer software downloadable or otherwise available from the Ekoma.io Site ("Ekoma.io Software") and any of our services purchased or otherwise made available from the Ekoma.io Site ("Ekoma.io Services") (collectively, the "Ekoma.io Properties").
This Privacy Policy does not apply to the practices of any third party websites, applications or services that the we do not own or maintain (collectively, "Third Party Services"). Specifically, this Privacy Policy does not cover any information or other content you can view via the Ekoma.io Properties on integrated platforms or information you provide to Third Party Services accessed via the Ekoma.io Properties. As further detailed below, we cannot and do not take responsibility for the content or privacy policies of any Third Party Services. If you are a Customer, we encourage you to carefully review the privacy policies of the Client whose Content you view and the privacy policies of any integrated platforms or Third Party Services used by such Client which you may access via the Ekoma.io Properties.
By using a Service or otherwise providing us with your Personal Information, you are accepting the practices described in this Privacy Policy, as they may be amended by us from time to time, and agreeing to our collection and use of your information in accordance with this Privacy Policy. If you do not agree to the collection, use and disclosure of your information in this way, please do not use any of the Ekoma.io Properties or otherwise provide the Company with Personal Information (as defined below).
The Company collects only the information required to provide products and services to you. The amount of information provided by you and collected by the Company depends on the circumstances. The Company may collect two (2) types of information about you: Personal and Non-Personal.
"Personal Information"
Personal Information refers to any information about an identifiable individual (e.g. name, mailing address, telephone number and e-mail address), or an individual whose identity may be inferred or determined from such information. The Company may collect Personal Information when you use the Ekoma.io Properties including, without limitation, setting up account information, filling out surveys, corresponding with the Company, or otherwise volunteering information about yourself.
"Non-Personal Information"
Non-Personal Information refers to information that, by itself, does not identify you as a specific individual (e.g. demographic information or website visitations). The Company may collect Non-Personal Information through any of the methods discussed above as well as automatically through use of industry standard technologies described further below.
Prior to using one or more of the Ekoma.io Properties, the Company may require you to provide us with certain Personal Information and Non-Personal Information to create an account ("Account") or to enable features or functionality of the Ekoma.io Properties.
For Clients, the Company may gather Personal Information about organizational representatives via various methods (phone, email, online forms, in-person meetings) but only if such Personal Information is submitted voluntarily. The Company may use such Personal Information for sales, marketing, and support of the Ekoma.io Properties. This Personal Information is never shared with third parties other than Third Party Service Providers utilized by a Client in connection with Ekoma.io Services.
When you send email or other communications to us, we may retain those communications in order to process your inquiries, respond to your requests and improve the Ekoma.io Properties.
When creating an Account or making online purchases, you may be asked to provide information, which may include your payment instrument number (e.g., credit card), your name and billing address, the security code associated with your payment instrument (e.g., the CSV) and other financial data ("Payment Information"). We use Payment Information to complete transactions and for the detection and prevention of fraud. When provided, we will store Payment Information to help you complete future transactions. We do not, however, retain the security code associated with your payment instrument (e.g., the CSV). To remove or modify Payment Information, please contact us email@example.com. After you close your account or remove Payment Information, we may retain your Payment Information for as long as reasonably necessary to complete your existing transaction.Thereafter, your Payment Information will be deleted from our database.
The Company automatically collects and receives certain information from your computer or mobile device, including the activities you perform on the Ekoma.io Properties, the type of hardware and software you are using (e.g., , your operating system or browser), and information obtained from cookies (see below). If you have an Account, we may link this Non-Personal Information to your Account to better understand your needs and the needs of Users in the aggregate, diagnose problems, analyze trends, provide services, improve the features and usability of the Ekoma.io Properties and better understand and market to Clients and Users.
We use technology to automatically gather information by the following methods:
The Company may use cookies on the Ekoma.io Site and other aspects of the Ekoma.io Properties. Cookies, including local shared objects, are small pieces of information that are stored by your browser on your computer's hard drive which work by assigning to your computer a unique number that has no meaning outside of the Ekoma.io Properties. Cookies do not generally contain any Personal Information. Most web browsers automatically accept cookies, but you can usually configure your browser to prevent this. Not accepting cookies may make certain features of the Ekoma.io Properties unavailable to you. Prior to using cookies, the Company will obtain your consent to do so.
You may visit many areas of the Ekoma.io Site anonymously without the need to become a registered User. Even in such cases, the Company will collect IP addresses automatically. An IP address is a number that is automatically assigned to your computer whenever you begin services with an Internet services provider. Each time you access Site and each time you request one of the pages of the Ekoma.io Site, the server logs your IP address. This information is kept for 24 months.
Web beacons are small pieces of data that are embedded in web pages and e-mails. The Company may use these technical methods in HTML e-mails that the Company sends to Users to determine whether they have opened those e-mails and/or clicked on links in those e-mails. The information from use of these technical methods may be collected in a form that is Personal Information.
If you use the Ekoma.io Services and you post any materials, information and/or intellectual property (collectively, "Content") to your website or to a third party website, the Company tracks and captures Non-Personal Information associated with User accounts and the use of Content by those that access your Content.
You may have the opportunity to communicate with others from the Ekoma.io Properties, such as by sending an invitation to a third party. If you choose to take advantage of this functionality, we may ask you to provide us with certain information about the person with whom you wish to communicate (e.g., name, e-mail address, etc.). The Company collects such information for the purposes of facilitating the requested communication, which may contain a specific promotional message from you. Unless we explicitly say otherwise, the Company will not use this information for other marketing purposes without first obtaining consent from the person to whom the relevant information pertains. Please be aware that when you use any invitation functionality on the Ekoma.io Properties, your e-mail address, name or username and message may be included in the communication sent to your addressee(s).
The Company identifies the purpose for which your Personal Information is collected and will be used, stored or disclosed. If that purpose is not listed below, we will identify any additional purposes for which we will collect your Personal Information before or at the time of collection and we will obtain your prior consent to collect, use, store or disclose your Personal Information for such additional purpose(s).
By using the Ekoma.io Properties, you will be deemed to consent to our use of your Personal Information for the purposes of:
Clients utilize Ekoma.io Properties to manage and deliver Content to Customers. As part of this process the Company may collect from you Personal Information. Otherwise, we will obtain your express consent (by verbal, written or electronic agreement) to collect, use or disclose your Personal Information. You can change your consent preferences at any time by contacting us (see the "How to Access and Change Your Personal Information" section below).
The Company may also use other information that you provide or that we collect from you for the following purposes:
System Administration: The Company may use other information that you provide or that we collect from you for the purposes of system administration, assisting in diagnosing problems with the Company servers, monitoring the Company's system performance and traffic on the Ekoma.io Properties and to gather broad demographic information about Clients and Customers.
Personalization: The Company may use Cookies or collect your IP Addresses to track features such as delivering Content specific to your interests and informing you of new, relevant services or certain third party offerings. When collecting such information or installing cookies, the Company will obtain your prior consent.
Advertising: The Company may use other information you provide or that we collect from you to assist in optimizing the delivery of advertisements to viewers of your Content.
Upon request, the Company shall allow Users to update or correct Personal Information previously submitted, but only to the extent such activities will not compromise privacy. Additionally, upon request, the Company shall delete Personal Information from the database where such information is stored; however, it may be impossible to entirely delete a User's entry without some residual information being retained due to the manner in which data backups are maintained. Requests to delete Personal Information may be submitted to email@example.com.
Where you have provided consent, the Company may use your Personal Information to send you e-mails periodically listing promotions or events relating to the Ekoma.io Properties or from the Company's marketing partners or sponsors. You have the choice to opt-out of receiving such promotional e-mails by sending an e-mail to firstname.lastname@example.com and/or following the instructions in such correspondence. Once the Company has processed your opt-out request, the Company will no longer send you promotional e-mails unless you opt back in to receiving such communications.
Except as described below, we do not sell, transfer or otherwise disclose your Personal Information to outside parties. This statement does not include trusted third party service providers who assist us in administering and providing the Ekoma.io Properties or provide services to us. Examples include storing and managing Content, analyzing data, providing marketing assistance, integrations of Third Party Services such as CRM and MAP services, processing credit card payments and providing customer service. These third party service providers will have access to Personal Information needed to perform their functions and will not be permitted to use it for other purposes. These trusted third parties will be required to ensure the integrity and security of the Personal Information provided to them. We may use service providers located outside of Canada and, if applicable, your Personal Information may be processed and stored in other countries and may be subject to disclosure under the laws of those countries.
We may share Payment Information with third parties for purposes of fraud prevention or to process payment transactions.
We may also release your information when we believe release is appropriate to comply with the law, enforce our policies, or protect our or others' rights, property or for safety. We may also provide Non-Personal Information to other parties for marketing, advertising or other uses. Information, including Personal Information, which we collect from Clients, Customers and other Users, is considered to be a business asset. As a result, in the unlikely event that we go out of business, enter bankruptcy or if we are acquired as a result of a transaction such as a merger, acquisition or asset sale, your Personal Information may be disclosed or transferred to the third-party acquirer in connection with the transaction.
Lastly, we may provide Clients with certain identifiable usage information directly related to the viewed or accessed Content that they make available through the Ekoma.io Properties. Such information may include how many and which Content of a particular Client was watched by a particular Customer, from where a particular Content was viewed or accessed by a particular Customer and how many times a particular Content was viewed or accessed by a particular Customer. In addition, if you, as a Customer, provide Personal Information (e.g. e-mail address) as part of accessing and viewing Content, that Personal Information may be collected by us, a provider of Third Party Services or an integrated platform on behalf of the Client who owns the Content and shared with that Client or Third Party Service providers to that Client, as we and others are their service provider. The use of such information will be subject to the information and privacy practices and policies of such Clients and the Company will not be responsible or liable or the use of any information by such Clients and will not be responsible for their use of your information.
Under certain exceptional circumstances, the Company may have a legal duty or right to collect, use or disclose your Personal Information without your knowledge or consent. In accordance with applicable laws, we will not disclose any consumer information (which may include Personal Information) without your written consent, except where consumer information is required to be disclosed: (i) for billing or market operation purposes; (ii) for law enforcement purposes; or (iii) for the purpose of complying with a legal requirement.
You are deemed to consent to disclosure of your information for the above purposes. If your Personal Information is shared with third parties other than Clients, those third parties may be, but are not always, subject to appropriate agreements with the Company and/or its Clients to secure and protect the confidentiality of your Personal Information.
The Company takes appropriate security measures to protect against unauthorized access, alteration, disclosure or destruction of Personal Information. These include, but are not limited to, internal reviews of: (a) the Company's data collection; (b) storage and processing practices; (c) electronic security measures; and (d) physical security measures to guard against unauthorized access to systems where the Company stores Personal Information.
Unfortunately, no data transmission over the Internet can be guaranteed to be secure. As a result, while we are committed to protecting your Personal Information, we cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information you provide to us.
All Company employees, contractors and agents who access Personal Information are bound by confidentiality obligations and may be subject to discipline, including termination and criminal prosecution or unauthorized use or disclosure of Personal Information.
Some or all of the Personal Information we collect may be stored or processed on servers located outside your jurisdiction of residence, whose data protection laws may differ from the jurisdiction in which you live. As a result, this information may be subject to access requests from governments, courts or law enforcement in those jurisdictions according to laws in those jurisdictions.
Protecting the safety of children when they use the Internet is very important to us. The Ekoma.io Properties should only be accessed by individuals of Minimum Age. "Minimum Age" may mean different ages in different countries, depending on where the individual accesses the services. For reference, "Minimum Age" shall mean (a) 14 years old for the United States, Canada, Germany, Spain, Australia, and South Korea; and (b) 13 years old for all other countries. However, if applicable law requires that you must be older than such ages in order for the Company to lawfully provide the Ekoma.io Properties to you (including the collection, storage, and use of your information in accordance with this Privacy Policy), and then the Minimum Age would be such older age. The Ekoma.io Properties are not designed nor intended for use by children or anyone else under the age of 13.
The Ekoma.io Properties may contain links to third party websites or services, including Third Party Services, (collectively, "Third Party Sources") who may collect Personal Information and Non-Personal Information directly from you. Links to Third Party Sources are intended for convenience only. Third Party Sources are wholly independent from the Company. Third Party Sources may have separate privacy policies and data collection practices, independent of the Company. The Company: (a) has no responsibility or liability for these independent policies or actions; (b) is not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of such websites; and (c) does not make any warranties or representations about the contents, products or services offered on such websites or the security of any information you provide to them.
We reserve the right, at any time, to modify or replace the Privacy Policy. The most recent version of the Privacy Policy is available at https://ekoma.io/privacy-policy. Please check the Privacy Policy periodically for changes, though we may also notify you via email or other direct electronic communication method of any changes that, in our sole discretion, materially impact your use of the Ekoma.io Properties or the treatment of your Personal Information. Your use of the Ekoma.io Properties following the posting of any changes to the Privacy Policy constitutes acceptance of those changes.
If you are located in a country in the European Union (EU) and utilize our Services which are offered to EU residents, or if we collect, track, use or process in some other way your Personal Information collected from you or through your use of our Website, or we transfer that personal information, we will do so in accordance with this Privacy Policy, the applicable Website Terms of Use, and in compliance with applicable requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (EU 2016/679) (GDPR).
Company is a data controller and responsible for your Personal Information, which We may process and store in Canada. The European Commission has decided that Canada ensures an adequate level of protection of individuals' Personal Information. Company may use the following safeguards when transferring your personal information to a country, other than Canada, that is not within the EEA:
(a) Only transfer your Personal Information to countries that have been deemed by the European Commission to provide an adequate level of protection for personal information;
(b) Where we use certain service providers, we may use specific contracts approved by the European Commission which give Personal Information the same protection it has in the EU.
If you are an EU resident, we may only collect your data using cookies and similar devices, and then track and use your personal information where you have first consented to that. We will not automatically collect personal information from you as described above unless you have consented to us doing so. If you consent to our use of cookies and similar devices, you may at a later date disable them (please see above).
Under certain circumstances, you may have rights under the data protection laws in relation to your personal information, including the right to:
If you wish to exercise any of these rights, please contact our Privacy Officer at the coordinates provided in the section below.
You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal information (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we my charge a reasonable fee if your request is clearly unfounded, repetitive or excessive. Alternatively, we may refuse to comply with your request in these circumstances.
We may need to request specific information from you to help us to confirm your identity and ensure your right to access your personal data (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is a security measure to ensure that personal information is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it. We may also contact you to ask you for further information in relation to your request to speed up our response.
We try to respond to all legitimate requests within [one] month. Occasionally it may take us longer than [a] month if your request is particularly complex or you have made a number of requests. In this case, we will notify you and keep you updated.
If you have any questions or concerns about our privacy policy or privacy practices, you may contact us directly as follows:
Email us: firstname.lastname@example.com
Ekoma, LLC
Attention: Data Protection Officer
2020 Diamond St, #8
San Diego, CA


text:
Holstein Association USA recognizes the importance of identifying heritable, sometimes undesirable, unique genes in Holstein cattle, to provide breeders with the tools they need to make informed breeding decisions. Hoard's has dedicated a page in the May 25, 2011, issue to Brachyspina, but, more recently, specific bulls have been identified.
Brachyspina syndrome is a congenital inherited lethal defect in Holsteins that causes embryonic death, stillbirth, and other deformities. Calves are generally stillborn and have severely reduced body weight despite having a normal or prolonged gestation period. When evaluating a stillborn calf, you will notice a shortening of the spine, and the limbs are long and thin.
Brachyspina is a recessive trait, and, to be an affected calf, both sire and dam must have passed the recessive gene to their offspring. If only one parent transmits the recessive gene, the resulting calf will be just a carrier and will show no outward signs of being a carrier. While gaining attention, it is estimated that only 6 percent of the Holstein population are carriers. Carriers are identified with *BY, while those identified as non-carriers are labeled as *TY.
The Holstein Association USA board of directors voted at its March 2011 meeting to label Brachyspina as an undesirable recessive trait in the Holsteins. Labeling of carrier sires can aid Holstein breeders by avoiding mating carrier animals to each other. Holstein sires that are carriers that were used quite heavily include Bis-May Tradition Cleitus, Ramos, Rothrock Tradition Leadman, Sandy-Valley Bolton-ET, Silky Gibson-ET, and Wa-Del Convincer-ET.
Registered Holstein bulls have been reported as carriers (BY) or tested non-carriers (TY) for Brachyspina. We have included several files. The first one lists all tested bulls that are carriers of Brachyspina (BY). This list will continue to grow as results on new bulls are added. The next file lists all bulls tested, with the carriers, listed first. Click here to download all bulls tested. It is broken into groups alphabetically, 39 pages). If a bull is not on this list, he has not been tested or tests are pending.
Holsteins have the lowest incidence of inbreeding in relation to the other dairy breeds, but that does not protect the breed from undesirable recessives like Brachyspina from surfacing and affecting several bloodlines. While no one likes to see pregnancy loss or a stillborn calf, at least we may be able to take some consolation in knowing that genetics and not management could have been the culprit.
If you want to test your animal, (male or female) the cost is $100 per animal. A list of frequently asked questions prepared by the Holstein Association can be downloaded here. For more information, call Holstein Association USA customer service at 800.952.5200.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Fifty years. It seems like a long time. But if you pick up Jacques Barzuns searching analysis of modern education, The House of Intellect , the half century melts away.
Barzun points out the way in which our egalitarian ethos encourages an amiable stupidity. The best man for a committee is someone who is cheerful, optimistic, and incapable of disturbing others with critical thoughts. The trend continues. These days the single most important qualification for academic administration is the ability to project an empowering and inclusive style of leadership.
He foresees the soft relativism of our day, noticing the way in which people take all the edges off conversations. Well-socialized people begin their sentences with I feel, or I may be wrong but, or Im only thinking aloud. The lexicon of pussyfooting, he observes, is familiar. Things have only gotten worse.
The educational establishment attracts a great deal of Barzuns icy criticism. Anyone who thinks multicultural education is a recent perversion should read his chapters on education. He states a plain fact that remains true: Those who formulate the ideologies for primary and secondary education in America are almost universally anti-intellectual. They think of schools primarily as institutions devoted to socializing rather than teaching. The young need to be prepared for real life, to be encouraged to become creative, inclusive, and empathetic. When attention turns to academic topics, emphasis falls on technique (engaging the students) rather than content.
Barzun also makes some pointed observations about the university. He has nothing good to say about the role of graduate teaching assistants as educational surrogates. But there is no solution to this ongoing problem. After all, what is the strange goal sought by the most accomplished academics? Like clergy of old, the professorial superheroes scramble for sinecures. The highest prize of the teaching profession is: no teaching. For the first time in history, apparently, scholars want no disciples.
His observations about grant applications are as true today as they were in 1959. He sees the way in which everybody champions everybody in glowing letters of recommendation (more amiable stupidity). Foundation executives show their true colors. In their own mind, they are providing the venture capital of social change, a cliche that sounds like it was minted yesterday. Therefore, applicants hampered by sober ideas must impart to them an apocalyptic glow. As a friend of mine once advised me: Before writing a grant application, have a couple of drinks, and then write a proposal with the following basic message: This project will redeem the world, and Im the only one who can do it. Revise in the morning.
The particular criticisms are astute (and entertaining), but the lasting value of The House of Intellect rests in a deeper diagnosis. As a historian of culture, Barzun was the opposite of a Marxist. Instead of thinking that our mental attitudes reflect changes in social and economic conditions, Barzun recognized that shifts in our sensibilities midwife important social changes.
Barzun saw that the intellectual scene in the 1950s was filled with misgivings and anxious worries. The very people who inherited new and prominent roles"vastly expanded university faculties, foundation-funded scholars, academic experts consulted by business and government"had become more and more pessimistic about the benefits of disciplined reflection. He observed a consensus: Our inherited disciplines of thought and sentiment are opposed to the immediacy and fullness of life.
Barzuns interpretation of a popular book of art photography from the late 1950s, The Family of Man , suggests the depth of the turn against Western culture. He sees an implicit principle guiding the selection of photographs:
Whatever is formed and constituted (the work seems to say) whatever is adult, whatever exerts power, whatever is characteristically Western, whatever is unique or has a name, or embodies complexity of thought, is of less interest and worth than what is native, common, and sensual; what is weak and confused; what is unhappy, anonymous, and elemental.
The reading is prescient. Norman O. Brown, Norman Mailer, and the Summer of Love were just around the corner. Measured, cool reflection was on its way out; committed, hot activism was on its way in. The complexity of ideas and arguments were giving way to urgent feelings and primal desires.
As a cultural historian, Barzun knew that this shift in sentiment would be decisive for the West. It signaled the triumph of the Bohemian ideal, and the end of what John Lukacs has called the Bourgeois Era.
In a Europe shattered by religious division, divine truths no longer shaped life directly, and the central bourgeois imperative was to find and reanimate the sacred order. It was not enough to comply. The bourgeois imperative was to find and articulate truths strong enough to compel an inner and spiritual obedience. Christian books and ideas played a very important role, but as the modern era unfolded, each generation placed old notions of sacred order into an increasingly wider range of reading, conversation, and considered judgment. According to Barzun, this bourgeois project of discernment built the modern House of Intellect , one he saw being abandoned (and vandalized) in his own day.
Certain images recur: abdication, desire for release, and exhausted impotence. The adult world of achieved self-discipline abdicates to an adolescent world of spontaneity and desire. Among those charged with responsibility for cultural standards, Barzun sees a strong desire for a release from responsibility. People idealize youth and hope that youth will bring to the conduct of life an energy that manners have sapped in their elders. The really smart and ambitious intellectuals read the signs of the times and strike poses accordingly: Nowadays it is assumed that all attacks on culture are equal in virtue, and that attacking society, because it is society, is the one aim and test of genius.
Because these words were written in the late 1950s, they help us see that the 1960s was not the result of a youth movement. It is best understood as an abdication of the elders, a renunciation of responsibility by the adults. The Bourgeois Era ended because its intellectual project crumbled. The guardians of Western culture determined that they were custodians of inhumanity. Barzun pictures for us the forward-thinking man of the late 1950s, wearing a suit, going to the tastefully decorated offices of the Ford or Rockefeller Foundations. He may be a minor foundation official living rather comfortably off some dead tycoon, but he talks like Baudelaire.
This image of the foundation official circa 1957 tells the tale. The children and grandchildren of the old bourgeois elite decided to throw their lot with the bohemian project. We are to live as we wish, and the primary intellectual project these days is to beat down whatever remains of the old bourgeois forms of sacred order. Repressive! Patriarchal! Logocentric!
Barzun is not happy about the change. By his reckoning, the modern bourgeois form of intellectual self-discipline and honesty is a broom with which to clear the mind of cant. This tradition of reflection helps us avoid trumpery art, ideological drugs, facile enthusiasms, and a simple-minded worship of science. Intellect encourages what Barzun calls fineness and virtuosity. One does not just have opinions or commitments. One has a fabric of considered views that are woven from the threads of inherited traditions. They are nuanced, tenuous, and shaded with all manner of uncertainty, but even so, for the bourgeois intellectual, considered views have the serious weight of truth, a weight that gives shape to ones sense of self.
And the bohemian project? It retails itself as the royal road to self-discovery through the alchemy of self-expression. It promises a more real, more authentic, and more individual existence. As Barzun suggests, the claims are hollow. The emerging Bohemian Era will be anti-intellectual: characterized by an externalized and collective sense of purpose (politics über alles) and an undifferentiated, amorphous inner life (the empire of desire).
Barzun was right to view the future with foreboding. Our Bohemian Era is and will be crude and thoughtless. All you need to do is go to P.S. 1, the contemporary gallery run by the Museum of Modern Art in Long Island City. It is full of flat, ideological gestures and great gushers of the id. But Barzun was also naive. The Bourgeois Era ended because so many came to feel it as a lifeless, artificial posture. Fineness and virtuosity? They seem awfully thin and precious. And what, exactly, do they serve? Without the commanding voice of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, perhaps it was only a matter of time before Western culture lost is ability to claim our loyalty. A soul-shaping demand shorn of divine sanction can easily come to be seen as an inhumane invasion.
R.R. Reno is Editor of First Things . He is the general editor of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible and author of the volume on Genesis . His previous On the Square articles can be found here .
Become a fan of First Things on Facebook , subscribe to First Things via RSS , and follow First Things on Twitter .


text:
Ryan's budget cuts would cost jobs
All budget proposals should be evaluated first and foremost by how they address the most important problems facing the nation. Today that problem is joblessness. Unemployment is still elevated at 8.3 percent, the highest in a generation, while the average duration of unemployment is still at peak levels (about 40 weeks). Poverty rates for young children (under the age of 6) are at their highest recorded levels, while the number of households in extreme poverty (earning incomes of less than $2 per day) has doubled since the mid-1990s. Although the economy has added 735,000 jobs in the last three months, even at this rate it would still take five years before the labor market fully recovered. In short, any policy that fails to address job creation—or at least fails to extend the economic provisions that we've already put in place—should be rejected.
Paul Ryan's latest budget doesn't just fail to address job creation, it aggressively slows job growth. Against a current policy baseline, the budget cuts discretionary programs by about $120 billion over the next two years and mandatory programs by $284 billion, sucking demand out of the economy when it most needs it and leading to job loss. Using a standard macroeconomic model that is consistent with that used by private- and public-sector forecasters, the shock to aggregate demand from near-term spending cuts would result in roughly 1.3 million jobs lost in 2013 and 2.8 million jobs lost in 2014, or 4.1 million jobs through 2014.*
Of course, this leaves out taxes. Ryan's proposal involves cutting taxes on corporations, eliminating the Alternative Minimum Tax, maintaining the Bush tax cuts and preferential rates on capital gains and dividends, and consolidating the rate structure into two brackets, 10 percent and 25 percent. He says he'll pay for these tax cuts (excluding the Bush tax cuts, which are already currently in effect) by eliminating tax expenditures, so it won't result in revenue loss.
Now, temporary tax cuts can create jobs because they pump more money into the economy and boost consumer and business spending. The payroll tax holiday is one such example. But the fact that Ryan's tax proposal won't change net revenue levels in the near-term means that its economic effects will be minimal – and it will certainly not materially offset the job declines stemming from spending cuts. Worse, the composition of Ryan's tax-shift means that it will likely result in a small job loss because it shifts the tax burden from high-earners to middle-class households. Low-income households will also face higher taxes because Ryan would allow certain tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit, Child Tax Credit, and the American Opportunity Tax Credit to fall from their current levels. Redistributing money away from people who spend more of each marginal dollar of disposable income (low- and moderate-income households) to those with much higher savings rates (high-income households) is broadly recognized as leading to a decline in aggregate demand.
*2-year figure in job-years
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text:
Things not
to say to a cop when you're pulled over...
I only had one officer Mr. Keg..
Back off Barney,
I've got a piece.
Want to race to the station, Sparky?
I know I was weaving, but I can't find the
Honeycomb Hideout!
On the way to the station let's get a twelve
You'll never get those cuffs on me...You Pussy!
Come on write the damn ticket, the bars close in
20 minutes!
Hey, wasn't your daughter a pork queen?
How long is this going to take? Your wife is
expecting me.
Hey officer, is that your nightstick or are you
just glad to see me?
I'm surprised you stopped me, Dunkin Donuts has
a 3 for 1 special!
Yeah you can
see my license and registration, officer, but
could you hold my beer for a minute?
Hey, you
must've been doing' about 125mph (200km/h) to
keep up with me! Good job!
Sorry, Officer, I didn't realize my radar
detector wasn't plugged in.
I thought you had to be in relatively good
physical condition to be a Police Officer.
Excuse me. Is "stick up" hyphenated?
You know, I was going to be cop, but I decided
to finish high school instead.
"Bad Cop! No Donut!"
I was trying to keep up with traffic. Yes, I
know there are cars around, that's how far I am
behind the other cars.
You're NOT gonna check the trunk, are you?
"Lets do it different this time... I will give
you the breathalyzer test, now stick this in
your mouth and blow"
Didn't I see you get your ass kicked on "COPS"
last week on TV?
Wow, You look just like the guy in the picture
next to my girlfriend's bed.
I bet I could grab that gun before you finish
writing my ticket
So, uh, you "on the take", or what?
Gee, officer! That's terrific. The police
officer yesterday only gave me a warning too!
Do you know why you pulled me over? Good, at
least one of us does.
So, are you still crabby because your mamma
didn't let you play with your gun when you were
Hey is that a 9 mm? That's nothing compared to
this .44 magnum.
When you smack the crap outta me, make sure you
smile for the video camcorder.
Is it true that people become policemen because
they are too dumb to work at McDonalds?
Hey, you look
like that girl I fucked a few days ago...
Aren't you one
of the Village People?
Hey officer,
want to see a trick? Look at your wife!


text:
As you may know, I wrote JavaScript in ten days. JS was born under the shadow of Java, and in spite of support by marca and Bill Joy, JS in 1995 was essentially a one-man show.
I had a bit of help, even at the start, that I'd like to acknowledge again. Ken Smith, a Netscape acquiree from Borland, ported JDK 1.0-era java.util.Date (we both just drafted off of the Java truck, per management orders; we did not demur from the Y2K bugs in that Java class). My thanks also to Netscape 2's front-end hackers, chouck, atotic, and garrett for their support. EDIT: can't forget spence on the X front end!
That was 1995. Engine prototype took ten days in May. Bytecode compiler and interpreter from the start, because Netscape had a server-side JS product in the works. The rest of the year was browser integration, mainly what became known as "DOM level 0". Only now standardized in HTML 5 and Anne's wg. Sentence fragments here show my PTSD from that sprint :-/.
In 1996 I finally received some needed assistance from RRJ, who helped port David M. Gay and Guy Steele's dtoa.c and fix date/time bugs.
Also in summer 1996, nix interned at Netscape while a grad student at CMU, and wrote the first LiveConnect. I am still grateful for his generous contributions in wide-ranging design discussions and code-level interactions.
At some point in late summer or early fall 1996, it became clear to me that JS was going to be standardized. Bill Gates was bitching about us changing JS all the time (some truth to it; but hello! Pot meet Kettle…). We had a standards guru, Carl Cargill, who knew Jan van den Beld, then the Secretary-General of ECMA (now Ecma). Carl steered our standardization of JS to ECMA.
Joining ECMA and participating in the first JS standards meeting was an eye-opener. Microsoft sent a B-team, and Borland and a company called NOMBAS also attended. "Success has many fathers" was the theme. The NOMBAS founder greeted me by saying "oh, we've been doing JavaScript for *years*". I did not see how that could be the case, unless JS meant any scripting language with C-based syntax. I had not heard of NOMBAS before then.
At that first meeting, I think I did well enough in meta-debate against the Microsoft team that they sent their A-team to the next meeting. This was all to the good, and Microsoft in full-blooded compete mode, but also with individual initiative beyond the call of corporate duty by Shon Katzenberger, materially helped create ES1. Sun contributed Guy Steele, who is composed of pure awesome. Guy even brought RPG for fun to a few meetings (Richard contributed ES1 Clause 4).
Meanwhile, in fall 1996, I was under some pressure from Netscape management to write a proto-spec for JS, but that was not something I could do while also maintaining the "Mocha" engine all by myself in both shipping and future Netscape releases, along with all of the DOM code.
This was a ton of work, and on top of it I had to pay off substantial technical debt that I had willingly taken on in the first year. So I actually stayed home for two weeks to rewrite Mocha as the codebase that became known as SpiderMonkey, mainly to get it done (no other way), also to go on a bit of a strike against the Netscape management team that was still underinvesting in JS. This entailed garbage collection and tagged values instead of slower reference-counting and fat discriminated union values.
Also in fall 1996, chouck decided to join me as the second full-time JS team-mate. He and I did some work targeting the (ultimately ill-fated) Netscape 4 release. This work was ahead of its time. We put the JS engine in a separate thread from the "main thread" in Netscape (still in Mozilla). This allowed us to better overlap JS and HTML/CSS/image computations, years ahead of multicore. You could run an iloop in JS and the "slow script dialog" seamlessly floated above it, allowing you to stop the loop or permit it to continue.
After summer 1996 and the start of ECMA-262 standardization, Netscape finally invested more in JS. Clayton Lewis joined as manager, and hired Norris Boyd, who ended up creating Rhino from SpiderMonkey's DNA transcoded to Java. This was ostensibly because Netscape was investing in Java on the server, in particular in an AppServer that wanted JS scripting.
I met shaver for the first time in October 1996 at Netscape's NY-based Developer Conference, where he nimbly nerd-blocked some Netscape plugin API fanboys and saved me from having to digress from the main thing, which was increasingly JS.
Some time in 1997, shaver contributed "LiveConnect 2", based on more mature Java reflection APIs not available to nix in 1996. Clayton hired shaver and the JS team grew large by end of 1997, when I decided to take a break from JavaScript (having delivered ES1 and ES2) and join the nascent mozilla.org.
I handed the keys to the JS kingdom to Waldemar Horwat, now of Google, in late 1997. Waldemar did much of the work on ES3, and threw his considerable intellect into JS2/ES4 afterwards, but without overcoming the market power and stalling tactics of Microsoft.
True story: Waldemar's Microsoft nemesis on TC39 back then, at the time a static language fan who hated JS, has come around and now endorses JS and dynamic languages.
Throughout all of this, I maintained module ownership of SpiderMonkey.
Fast-forward to 2008. After a great (at the time) Firefox 3 release where @shaver and I donned the aging super-hero suits one more time to compete successfully on interpreter performance against JavaScriptCore in WebKit, Andreas Gal joined us for the summer in which we hacked TraceMonkey, which we launched ahead of Chrome and V8.
A note on V8: I'd learned of it in 2006, when I believe it was just starting. At that point there was talk about open-sourcing it, and I welcomed the idea, encouraging any of: hosting on code.google.com, hosting without any pressure to integrate into Firefox on mozilla.org (just like Rhino), or hosting with an integration plan to replace SpiderMonkey in Firefox. I had to disclose that another company was about to release their derived-from-JS engine to Mozilla, but my words included "the more the merrier". It was early days as far as JS JITs were concerned.
V8 never open-sourced in 2006, and stealthed its way to release in September 2008. This may have been a prudent move by Google to avoid exciting Microsoft. Clearly, in 1995, the "Netscape + Java kills Windows" talk from Netscape antagonized Microsoft. I have it on good authority that a Microsoft board member wrote marca at the end of 1995 warning "you've waved the cape in the bull's face — prepare to get the horns!" One could argue that Chrome in 2008 was the new red cape in the bull's face, which begot IE9 and Chakra.
Whatever Google's reasoning, keeping V8 closed-source for over two years hurt JS in this sense: it meant Apple and Mozilla had to climb the JIT learning curves on their own (at first; then finally with the benefit of being able to inspect V8 sources). Sure, the Anamorphic work on Self and Smalltalk was somewhat documented, and I had learned it in the '90s, in part with a stint on loan from Netscape to Sun when they were doing due dliigence in preparation for acquiring Anamorphic. But the opportunity to build on a common engine codebase was lost to path dependence.
On the upside, different competing open source engines have demonstrably explored a larger design space than one engine codebase could under consolidated management.
In any event, the roads not taken in JS's past still give me pause, because similar roads lie ahead. But the past is done, and once we had launched TraceMonkey, and Apple had launched SquirrelFish Extreme, the world had multiple proofs along with the V8 release that JS was no longer consigned to be "slow" or "a toy", as one referee dismissed it in rejecting a PLDI submission from Andreas in 2006.
You know the rest: JS performance has grown an order of magnitude over the last several years. Indeed, JS still has upside undreamed of in the Java world where 1% performance win is remarkable. And, we are still at an early stage in studying web workloads, in order to synthesize credible benchmarks. On top of all this, the web is still evolving rapidly, so there are no stable workloads as far as I can tell.
Around the time TraceMonkey launched, Mozilla was lucky enough to hire Dave Mandelin, fresh from PhD work at UCB under Ras Bodik.
The distributed, open source Mozilla JS team delivered the goods in Firefox 4, and credit goes to all the contributors. I single Dave out here because of his technical and personal leadership skills. Dave is even-tempered, super-smart, and a true empirical/skeptical scientist in the spirit of my hero, Richard Feynman.
So it is with gratitude and more than a bit of relief, after a very long 16 years in full, 13 years open source, that I'm announcing the transfer of SpiderMonkey's module ownership to @dmandelin.