Displaced Programmer Support for Ron Paul

Posted by James Bowery on Friday, 28 September 2007 16:13.

The following letter was submitted to VDARE and published there in edited form today:

As one of the builders of the computer industry who saw his 35 year career destroyed by H-1b visas, I appreciate the irony of the fact that I just got back from the Ron Paul rally in Seattle, making this the first chance I’ve had to comment on on Peter Brimelow’s important interview with Ron Paul. I’m a firm, if skeptical, supporter of Ron Paul for the simple reason that he really is the best hope for peaceful solutions to our fundamental problems. As harsh as the loss of my career has been, on me and all those like me who built the information industry to see its fruits reaped by foreigners with arranged marriages and intact clan support structures, the public choice rent seekers Paul opposes, create greater problems for all of us.

It’s good that Brimelow got Paul to answer some tough questions; particularly regarding H-1b visas, but the bigger problem is illustrated by what I experienced during my trip to Seattle, in its suburbs where I spent 2 days. I spent the weekend touring the coast of Puget Sound south of Seattle, through Tacoma. At one point I was having trouble believing what I was seeing, so I started counting cars as they went by. Out of the 20 cars, NOT ONE had a white male in it and white females were no more frequent than one would expect in east LA: Not exactly the original intent of what the preamble of the United States Constitution referred to as “our posterity”.

So you see, I’ve got bigger concerns than the loss of my livelihood to some hundreds of thousands of H-1b visa holders wielding questionable diplomas from Indian paper mills in jobs frequently handed to them out of ethnic nepotism. That is small potatoes compared to what has happened to places like the suburbs of Seattle. As much as I appreciate Brimelow’s accurate emphasis on the impact of H-1b visas on people like me, his failure to talk about Randall Burns’ idea of auctioning off citizenship and/or visas to discover the value of residence was the most glaring omission of the interview—particularly to the more faithful and thoughtful readers of VDARE.

Ron Paul is, after all, a market ideologue. Paul’s failure to understand that the value of residence, from whatever source—be it the welfare state, as Paul contends, or liquidation of more general social capital as seems to be the case, can be determined by the market (at least within some reasonable approximations given widely held assumptions that Paul shares) is Paul’s most glaring intellectual failure but it isn’t his worst intellectual failure. Paul’s worst intellectual failure is his failure to recognize that public choice rent seeking has a private counterpart. Specifically, property rights beyond subsistence property rights, are made possible by government. Hence use fees for property rights beyond subsistence should be under a use fee for that governmental service. Note, this use fee is not a “tax” in the normal sense due to the reciprocal nature. We can argue over the amount exempted as “subsistence” and the rate of the fee, but we should have the correct argument! If such use fees were paid, incompetents like Bill Gates would not simply hire tens of thousands of ever cheaper programmers to write more software that doesn’t work in ever more convoluted ways. He would simply go out of business due to a more level playing field created by the removal of subsidy of Microsoft’s monopoly property rights.

But as I said, this is small potatoes compared to what the government is doing by collecting taxes to create a huge political football for special interest rent streams. As “the least of evils” goes, Ron Paul is the closest thing many of us have seen to a “good” candidate in our lifetimes—even if he further damages some of us.

James Bowery fixes computers for his neighbors and does odd jobs in the rural Pacific Northwest. Until the H-1b invasion, he was a leader in computer networking starting in 1974 at the PLATO network where he developed many firsts. During that time he also provided the first iterative solution to the Tower of Hanoi problem when in 1977, helping his then friend, Ray Ozzie, with his homework assignment. Ray had thought the professor said “iterative” rather than “recursive”. Ray’s professor was rather surprised at Ray’s presentation of an iterative solution. Mr. Bowery’s father, Robert W. Bowery, won first place in the National Clean Plowing Championships 2 years running in the late 1940s.

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Comments:

Posted by voice on Fri, 28 Sep 2007 19:20 | #

From a fellow Iowan, nice job! I finally understand the property rights issue too!

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 28 Sep 2007 22:14 | #

A lot of censorship there, though, James. I am quite surprised at that.

Posted by Frank McGuckin on Fri, 28 Sep 2007 22:27 | #

James

Why, Why, Why? Let the goddam bulldyke Hillary realize her testosterone fueled dreams. Let the goddam bulldyke destroy the country. Worse is better. A lot more White Americans need to have their families destroyed.There is no other way comrade Bowery.

Posted by James Bowery on Fri, 28 Sep 2007 23:20 | #

GW: I did exceed the requested length limit so its reasonable for them to edit it down. Moreover they suggested I submit the edited-out content within another letter—which may or may not be published. We’ll see. This topic is difficult to address within the space of just a few words.

Frank: First, if Ron Paul does by some miracle become the next President or significantly influence public policy during the next presidency, the impact will, according to Machiavelli’s rule, be very disruptive to the current tyranny. If he is ignored it will radicalize an already very angry and sizeable segment of society.

Posted by Riley DeWiley on Sat, 29 Sep 2007 04:00 | #

Ron Paul is either a hardcore property-rights ideologue, or he is running a very Machiavellian White Nationalist campaign. I tend to think he is in earnest, but notice his platform advances white causes, and opposes Zionism, without touching any of the ideological tripwires that would automatically “disqualify” him from the Presidency.

We already have one David Duke, and I am glad we do. But we don’t need two of them. Whether or not Paul is running with a hidden White Nationalist agenda, every step forward for Ron Paul is a step forward for whites.

We can deal with the details after he wins.

Riley

Posted by onetwothree on Sat, 29 Sep 2007 06:17 | #

Umm. Did Ray Ozzie really have trouble with “Towers of Hanoi?”

Posted by James Bowery on Sat, 29 Sep 2007 06:36 | #

RDW, I’m aware of the arguments that Ron Paul is a crypto “white nationalist” politician but I don’t believe it, nor is he anti-Zionist. Hell, I’m not anti-Zionist either. Being against slavish committment to Zionism isn’t the same as being anti-Zionist if you accept the possibility that Zionism, as agreed to under the Oslo Accords, is essentially separatist. My read on Ron Paul is that he’s basically just a Judeo-“libertarian” who has “gone off the reservation” somewhat in that he’s not an “open borders first” vectorist. He may or may not be willing to go so far as to support State sovereignty to the point that the founders would have—which certainly would include allowing there to exist racially exclusive States within the Union. Even Lincoln supported sovereign racial separatism. I suspect he would support the repeal of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

As far as Ray Ozzie and the Towers of Hanoi: Ozzie of course had no problem with the Towers of Hanoi as normally posed—as a recursive problem. His problem was that he mistook the homework assignment and was trying to solve it iteratively—which, to the best of my knowledge now, was a previously unsolved problem. He came to my office and asked me to help him and over the next 15 minutes or so I ran through some binary patterns on my blackboard (noticing that it was always a power of 2 number of moves to solve it). I don’t recall the solution now exactly but I believe it was basically the “gray code” solution to the iterative Tower of Hanoi problem.

I threw that comment in there for the obvious reason that if Gates thinks, as he says he does, that Ozzie is one of the top 3 programmers in the world, and guys like me are being thrown away by the software industry in favor of guys from India who have diplomas despite never having laid finger to keyboard prior to entry to the US (yes, I witnessed that while at Hewlett Packard) then there seems to be something of a problem here.

Posted by Frank McGuckin on Sat, 29 Sep 2007 15:46 | #

James

There are 16 year-even younger- old White American male teenagers in 2007 who have more natural talent and programming skill than Gates ever had(this is not to say that Gates was a no-talent) Bill Gates will completely de-skill them by the time they hit thirty.

Gates was very lucky. Nothing more than that.

Posted by James Bowery on Sat, 29 Sep 2007 23:07 | #

What Gates “got”, and what some guys, such as Gary Kildall, should have but didn’t, was the network externality represented by ownership of the dominant operating system to sit atop the first widely distributed personal computer with an open hardware architecture, ie: The IBM PC.

I had the same insight a few years earlier which is why Steve Freyder and I were writing an OS for the 8086 before the first silicon was etched, based on preliminary specs for the instruction set—using the COMPASS macro assembler for Seymour Cray’s CDC Cybers at the PLATO lab. Ray Ozzie may even recall the project, although he wasn’t involved. The only reason I abandoned the project was that CDC offered me a position with the promise that I could bring PLATO to the mass market—which would have leapfrogged the personal computer era straight to the network—with the kind of network externalities we now see pursued via all these “Web 2.0” social networking businesses.

I’ve gone into that history elsewhere but suffice to say the real “genius” of Gates was to be born into a family that put him in a position to capitalize on this insight when IBM deployed an open hardware architecture PC (including an open source BIOS). It was the perfect opportunity to exploit the “bug” in civilization I described as Ron Paul’s worst intellectual failure—and which “bug” I hypothesize is promoted by an extended phenotype of Jews as a group entity so as to virulently centralize wealth in hyper-urbanization.

As horrible as the resulting software systems were, it wasn’t as horrifying as the potential I saw looming which was the capture of the real network externalities (not just the personal computer era network externalities) by the old media corporate interests. Things might have turned out a lot worse than Gates being “the one”, as nasty as M$ has been for the industry. Nevertheless, I do hold Gates responsible for being the richest man in the world and not advocating policies that level the playing field—particularly for network externalities with which he is intimately familiar—against the virulent centralization of wealth that corrupts the powerful and vitiates the human spirit.

Posted by VLC on Wed, 03 Oct 2007 05:09 | #

you haven’t been able to get a job in the computer industry despite your resume? the difference in salaries between an H-1B dothead and a white american must be in the tens of thousands, right?

Posted by pdj on Thu, 18 Oct 2007 04:37 | #

1. Finding an iterative solution to ToH is about the level of a high school challenge puzzle. If that’s the mathematical highlight of your career, it’s no wonder you can’t get a job.

2. You don’t seem to be credited in any of your projects (besides in your resume). Either you’re using a pseudonym now or you had a tiff with one of the higher-ups or you are being marginalized for being white or you were a clerk fixing syntax errors, with major entitlement issues.

3. For the Hutter Prize to not look like such a joke, you need to identify the fine line between compression and pattern recognition. Shouldn’t be hard for a scientist of your stature.

4. I’m bored. You’re boring.

Posted by James Bowery on Thu, 18 Oct 2007 09:21 | #

1) Of course, the point of bringing up my doing a homework assignment for Ray Ozzie wasn’t to claim that the iterative ToH solution was a great breakthrough in computer science, nor the high point of my career. It should be obvious why I brought it up in the context of H-1b visas. Moreover it was “mathematical” only in the sense that algorithms are a branch of mathematics. Anyone with a good grasp of the computer industry and its science would surmise these things.

2) Many of the projects I worked on are so early they are scarcely documented, but they do have plenty of living witnesses. Which ones would you like to verify?

3) The mathematics behind the Hutter Prize are so well established by now that it is pretty obvious that your academic knowledge of computer science, and even your ability to use such cheats as Wikipedia and Google is a joke.

4) I bore you? Good. Go watch a TV sitcom instead of writing inane insults.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sun, 21 Oct 2007 17:55 | #

Race Replacement. Don’t leave home without it.

Posted by James Bowery on Thu, 26 Mar 2015 21:58 | #

My 1978 gray-code solution to the Tower of Hanoi problem was actually deemed worthy of publication by an academic journal (Information Processing Letters):

Buneman, Peter, and Leon Levy. “The towers of Hanoi problem.” Information Processing Letters 10.4 (1980): 243-244.

This problem may have been worthy of no more than a high school computer programming assignment but if so it is interesting that it got Buneman and Levy even a minor place in computer science history.