Month: June 2012

more than you can afford to lose

I honestly don’t know why some links seem more appropriate in a blog; as compared to my freakishly huge bookmark list.

  • Getting Started with NoSQL – I tell my students that much of the support development they do in the future will be on MySQL and much of the new development they do themselves will be with NoSQL.  Good into to CouchDB, my current favorite.
  • Fedora Packing Guidelines for cpanspec – I started writing a script like cpanspec almost 8 years ago, but never finished because the complexity of figuring out CPAN dependencies was taking too much time away from actual development.  This thing is an absolute MUST for Perl developers using RPM based systems.
  • Renaming a Git repository stored in gitolite – You know a technology is a game changer when it not only solves problems you have but solves problems you didn’t even realize were problems.  Git is like that and gitolite is how I manage my git repositories.  After having to do a Google search on this… twice, I figure I better save the link.
  • Moving files from one git repository to another while preserving history – Title says it all.  The only thing to add is that this post includes a link to Linus’ “greatest git merge ever” post, which was not only a cool post (if you a total nut-job computer geek) but started a pretty amazing thread about “cool” git merges.
  • Using git archive – I use something like  git archive –prefix=proname-1.1/ 1.1 |bzip2 > proname-1.1.tar.bz2 to create my deployment packages on Linux. This is a nice document listing examples and use cases for git archive.  This only works if 1.1 is a branch or has been tagged via something like git tag -a 1.1 -m ‘Message about tag.’
  • Telling Linux to ignore a bad part of memory – Is memtest freaking out about some bad memory?  How about simply telling the Linux kernel not to use that chuck?  This modifies the grub options so the Linux kernel knows which part of memory not to use before it actually loads itself up.

We have been betrayed by both

I know this is basically a rant but, there seems to be a fundamental disconnect between people’s understanding of economics and reality.

Just to be absolutely clear, undue political influence by corporations is directly related to the power, breadth, and size of the government they work to influence. This means that, by its very nature, the enlargement (and especially centralization) of government works as an agent for the expansion of corporate influence and NOT, as many progressives hope, a counterbalance to it.

Corporatism is a symptom of the problem, not the cause. Any regulatory attempt to alleviate the pain caused by that symptom only acts, ultimately, to aggravate the problem.  While attention and public outcry may temporarily hide the influence of business; capital never looses attention and will quickly take over when politics has moved on.

Before some conservatives start yelling hallelujah from the roof-tops, understand the implications of this.  The opposite of supporting government is NOT support business because being pro business is effectually the same as being pro government. Ultimately business will work to extend its competitive advantage at the cost of consumer independence and there is no better way to extend a business advantage than to legislate one.  Remember, every monopoly throughout history was created by an act of government legislated preference.

The only solution to corporatism and socialism is capitalism, a real free market.  The free market is not just the only way to limit government influence, but it is the only way to limit corporate influence as well.