Guan’s blog

UPDATE: The LBJ Book Club starts December 1.

Fans of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Robert A. Caro’s magisterial biography of LBJ, will be happy to learn that the fourth installment, The Passage of Power (1958–1964), will be published on May 1, 2012. The fifth, and most likely final, volume will take another two to three years.

Caro has conducted countless interviews, but now he seeks survivors. So many have passed away. Just since “Master of the Senate,” such family members and top officials as Valenti, Sen. Edward Kennedy, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Theodore Sorensen have died.

“Every time I walk home at night, that hits me in the face. My apartment is on Central Park West and my office is in Columbus Circle, so on my way home I pass Ted Sorensen’s house,” Caro says. “I used to be able to pick up the phone and call (LBJ aide) Horace Busby and ask him, ‘Where was Johnson sitting? On the sofa or the rocking chair?’ So often I reach for the phone these days and there’s nobody to call.”

In other Caro news, The Path to Power and Means of Ascent will be available as e-books tomorrow and Audible now has an unabridged audiobook of The Power Broker.

Ari Kelman and Eric Rauchway:

Americans have known for decades it is both immoral and ineffective to meet nonviolence with violence. UC Berkeley and its Chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, provided us a reminder of this lesson last week. But we forget nothing and learn nothing. Ronald Reagan, after all, met UC protesters with tear gas. Which can help you get attention so you can run for higher office. But it is no way to run a campus.

Matthew Yglesias:

If people think the ECB won’t rescue a country from panics and bank runs, then Finland and Austria and the Netherlands are just as vulnerable as Spain and Portugal and Italy.

It turns out that Denmark is the only other country in the world to have a fixed, numerical debt limit on the government’s debt. I had never heard of this and decided to check this out.

Article 43 of the Danish constitution states that

Ingen skat kan pålægges, forandres eller ophæves uden ved lov; ej heller kan noget mandskab udskrives eller noget statslån optages uden ifølge lov.

No taxes shall be imposed, altered, or repealed except by statute; nor shall any man be conscripted or any public loan be raised except by statute.

The current borrowing authority is very simple:

§ 1. Finansministeren kan optage lån inden for et samlet gældsmaksimum på 2.000 mia. kr.

The Minister of Finance may borrow within a combined maximum debt of 2,000 billion kroner.

2,000 billion kr. is about 115% of GDP in 2010. Total government debt (gross of the government’s deposit at Danmarks Nationalbank, which is how the debt ceiling is applied) is currently 762.6 billion kr., so 38% of the debt ceiling has been used. The highest it’s been in modern times was 808.3 billion kr. at the end of June 1997. (Net debt is currently 22% of GDP and was 53% of GDP in 1997.)

The debt ceiling was last raised in October 2010. Before that it stood at 950 billion kr. since 1993. When the bill was introduced, the Minister of Finance estimated that if the debt ceiling were not raised, we would reach 83% utilization by 2011.

The debt ceiling was first introduced in 1993 as a way of simplifying and combining all the laws authorizing public debt, instead of the previous method of passing laws that authorized new debt issue. It was also the first time that authority for domestic and foreign borrowing was combined. When the bill was passed in December 1993, 76.6% of the debt ceiling was used.

Before 1993, the Minister of Finance would regularly receive authority to borrow certain amounts of money, without an overall debt ceiling. The earliest such authorization I could find is from 1984, when he was authorized to issue 75 billion kr. in domestic bonds. At the same time, previous domestic borrowing authority from 1982 was cancelled. This law from 1993 allows him to borrow 50 billion kr. abroad.

My computer was recently destroyed from water damage in a thunderstorm, so I had to recover my backups. In addition to my Time Machine and SuperDuper! backups, I use Backblaze for online backup. I wanted to make sure I have all my backups in order, which meant restoring my Backblaze backup too.

I have about 215 GB of data on Backblaze. For sizes up to 400 GB, they offer to mail you a USB hard drive for $199, but I didn’t want to pay that much when downloading a Zip file is much cheaper. They recommend splitting your restores up into chunks of about 20 GB, but that’s a big hassle because you can only have 2 active restores at a time, and I didn't want to risk missing anything in my manual splitting procedure. This means actually downloading a 215 GB file from them.

Backblaze cannot reliably serve you files larger than 60 GB or so. I’ve tried it: the connection is always dropped after a few hours. So you will need the Backblaze Downloader, a truly shitty Windows program that is able to resume downloads. (I wasn't able to resume in any other way, they don’t seem to accept HTTP byte ranges.) Which means downloading on a Windows machine.

I don’t happen to have a Windows box on a fast internet connection with enough disk space, so I set up an Amazon EC2 instance for this. After much experimenting with multiple regions and settings, here is my advice:

1. Start a large instance with the ami-67095822 image (Windows Server 2003, instance storage), in the US West region. Your instance will be closer to Backblaze in the Bay Area and the instances there offer gigabit connections. Large instances are expensive but will download your files much faster.
2. In your security group, allow all ICMP.
3. Install Backblaze Downloader and start downloading into either the D: or E: drive. Monitor the download frequently, it’s not smart enough to resume after a disconnection. Backblaze Downloader is too slow. Just download in a regular browser like Chrome Firefox, and pray. You should be able to get speeds of at least 4 MB/s. If not, terminate your instance and start a new large instance.
4. Optional: Install VNC (remember to open up port 5900 in the firewall settings, preferably limited to your IP address). You will want to log in frequently and monitor the download, and VNC usually connects faster than RDP.
5. Inbound traffic to EC2 is free, but outbound is expensive. Test the archive with 7-Zip before you transfer, it will go through all the checksums. This shouldn’t take too long on a large instance.