I now have definitive proof that Microsoft tech support is evil. I haven’t decided what authorities to contact yet, perhaps I can find a good TIPS informant to help me out. We must smite this evil!
Category Archives: Books
Short Marx Notes
If you read a biography of Karl Marx you have to wonder if he didn’t like capitalism simply because he was terrible at it—he lived his entire life in debt. Marx was descended from eminent lines of rabbis, but harsh anti-semitic laws convinced his father to convert, and all of Marx’s life his venomous tongue was quick to utter some horrifying maxims about Judaism.
Marx looked at history, discarded philosophy, religion, ethics, nationalism, and said to look at the people. Each of society’s movements from slavery to feudalism to capitalism can be traced to a ruling class extracting wealth from the people, be it a slave, serf, or factory worker. Even though all the ‘wealth’ was coming from the workers, they were still at the mercy of hte ruling class because they didn’t control any of the means of production. In Marx’s view religion (“opium of the people” ), patriotism, laws, culture, and morality all are merely means of keeping the worker in his place and support the production process. This superstructure ties everyone to material thinking and desires, therefore perpetuating the cycle of exploitation of the working class. Revolutions happen as a result of new technology, and a conflict of the classes occurs whenever society switches to new means of production, but the workers always end up at the bottom of the totem pole because they are in, by definition, a class society. Marx postulated that because capitalism rested on a class system, revolution and victory by the workers was inevitable, because only in a classless society could said revolution be avoided. Because capitalism produces so much, it is a necessary precursor for socialism to occur. Marx did not consider Russia or Germany for his revolution, because they didn’t have sufficient industrial resources, he thought Communism would take place in England and France first. Here’s what has to happen for the revolution to take place:
- Falling profit rates and accumulation of capital
- Increasing concentration of economic power
- deepening crises and depressions
- High unemployment (“industrial reserve army” )
- Increasing misery of the proletariat
(from Todd Buchholz). Marx’s biggest flaw comes from the assumption that all value comes from the worker, or labor. He ignores entrepreneurship, land, capitol. Profits that Marx dubbed exploitation are actually crucial in insuring future investment and growth. The revolution never came because, however bad this economic slowdown is or how slow gigs come in the summer, workers are orders of magnitude better off than they were before. The rich get richer and the poor get richer; productivity enables total output to rise and benefit everyone. Also the worker is no longer completely separated from th emeans of production, and through things like stocks and bonds can indirectly own means of production.
Court orders ICANN to open books!
Court orders ICANN to open books – I had the privledge of hearing Karl Auerbach speak at the Senate hearing on the issue of ICANN and he was both eloquent and well–informed. This is a big step for him and an important first one for fixing the organization. This is an issue which touches every single site on the net.
Breadcrumb Script
I just hacked out this bit of PHP to make nice titles and header URLs throughout the site. It needs some customization specific to this site, but before I do that I wanted to post it just in case anyone wants to use it on their site:
Sorry, this code has been depreceated because it has a few known bugs and I don’t have time right now to go back and fix it up. Sorry!
Alternate History
I just read a chilling outline for a story based around computers and the net assuming Hilter had won WWII. Makes you think about CBDTPA and other proposed legislation in a different light.
Good Vibrations
Inspired by Textism, I have decided to personally abandon all–capital acronyms and words. It really breaks up the flow of the line to have a word that stands above everything else and hinders readability, so through the beauty of CSS I have approximated SMALL CAPS, an underused typographical tool. I’m also taking this oppurtunity to make better use of the <acronym> tag, which I use occasionally but not nearly enough, this time inspired by Mark Pilgrim’s excellent series on accesibility. An acronym will look like this, HSPVA, and when you hold your mouse over it should tell you what the acronym stands for. Tonight I’ll go through client sites I’ve designed and apply these concepts there as well. I hope you appreciate it, and now you know what it is so you won’t be like Julie and think it’s “tiny shouting.” 🙂
In other meta–news a new toy review (first draft) is up, and an FAQ
Parens Bows to DMCA
Well it looks like Bruce Parens decided not to break the law at his Friday presentation. Apparently it was not of his own concern, but chiefly that of his employer. In his position I believe I would have done the same thing, as a whole he can contribute more to open–source through his work at HP than in jail, even if it does prove a point. You can read more about the DMCA here.
The Dark Side of Hacking Bill
Wired — The Dark Side of Hacking Bill
“Contrary to widespread, if uninformed speculation, our legislation is narrowly crafted, with strict bounds on acceptable behavior by the copyright owner,” Berman said in a statement. “It gives copyright creators a very limited safe harbor from liability when they use technological tools for the narrow purpose of thwarting P2P piracy. It does not allow copyright owners to send viruses through P2P networks, destroy files, hack into the personal files of P2P users, or indiscriminately block lawful file-trading.”
. . .“Will having a firewall — or implementing strong system security practices or being a good system administrator — become illegal and prosecuted as circumventing copyright controls under the existing Digital Millennium Copyright Act?”
No Man Is an Island
Contrary to About a Boy, and despite the quite fine gadgets that were in that movie, the conclusion that everyone comes to that no man is an island also rings true in an economic sense. I just read a clever passage in a book by P.J. O’Rourke, which I’ll post more about later:
A pencil is a simple object, but there’s not a single person in the world who can make one. That person would need to be a miner to get the graphite, a chemical engineer to turn graphite into pencil lead, a lumberjacj to cut the cedar trees, and a carpenter to shape the pencil casing. He’d need to know how to make yellow paint, how to spray it on, and how to make a paint sprayer. He’d have to go back to the mines to get the ore to make the metal for the thingy that holds the eraser, then build a smelter, a rolling plant, and a michine-tool factory to produce equipment to crimp the thingy in place. And he’d have to grow a rubber tree in his backyard. All this would take a lot of money. Yet a pencil sells for nine cents
Obviously he becomes more frivilous as it goes on, but I thought it was a nice take on Milton Friedman’s pencil example in illustrating the importance of division of labor. Now I need to go get back to something I’m good at.
Vulgar Monetarism
Brad Delong has a nice write-up of modern frustration with the monetary aggregates called Vulgar Monetarism. It addresses a number of important points, and its main flaw is in ignoring the more modern (this decade) measures of the money supply. If anyone in further reading I just found a good paper called How Should We Define the Money Supply ? – Austrian Versus Monetarist Approach.
Gunaway Bride
Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction: Bride shoots truck thief hours before wedding. What’s funny is that he actually got away, albiet wounded and with a broken truck. I wouldn’t want to mess with this lady.
Growing
You may (or may not) have noticed some new widgets on the site. First, I’m working on the JazzQuotes system. Right now all it does is echo a random quote, but eventually as the database becomes more inclusive it’ll have more features, including being able to browse by author (jazzer) and the ability to submit your own favorite quote. Also there is work being done on the toy section of the site, and I’m coding out a little script that will show what I’m listening to on my computer right now.
Stock options and Congress
There is a huge argument on Wall Street and Capital hill right about what’s the proper way to account for stock options, and the whole thing is muddied further by the fact that neither side understands the whole thing. The Republicans actually have a very nice argument, but none of them can seem to articulate it.
On one side of the fence you have Greenspan and, surprisingly, the democrats. Greenspan has said that all the serious analysts have already factored in the dilution of stock options into their analysis, so releasing the data publicly should have no real effect on the markets. This is a very potent argument because if it’s not going to make a difference, what do you have to hide? Basically this falls in line with Greenspan�s drift towards transparency. The democrats are suggesting that stock options be shown in the bottom line. Republicans argue that it’s hard to accurately value stock options, but the dems are quick to counter that if it’s not worth anything, employees wouldn’t accept it as a form of compensation and if it is worth something than it should be reflected in the company’s books when they give it out. Wall Street, whose opinions are influenced more from the frenzy following Enron than anything else, also follows this line.
On the other side of the aisle, there is incredulity that people are suggesting that the books are tainted with something that cannot, as things stand, be accurately valued. There is a duality in options in that they are both income and remuneration. What it all really comes down to though is that options don’t cost the company money. The FASB almost mandated subtracting options from the bottom line but after an uproar from Silicon Valley and the Senate banking committee (most notable Phil Gramm) the proposal was reduced to a footnote, and with good reason. If my company has 5 million in profits from selling widgets, and I’ve given employees a million dollars worth of options, the company has still made 5 million dollars from widgets, there’s no reason that I should subtract a million dollars from my reported profits when it doesn’t accurately reflect my business.
There are a number of ways to account for options out there, most notable the Black-Schoals model that the most common, however not because it is good, but it’s simply the best out there. There are also guidelines for reporting options in taxes, and many have suggested that these should simply be applied to accounting. There are several problems with this, but the most serious is that tax laws are written to encourage and discourage businesses from doing certain things, and by definition accounting should be neutral, so if these suggested methods are introduced as accounting standards then suddenly there are very persuasive elements in the books that are going to change the way companies do business, and not necessarily for the better. Also, the minute that congress starts telling accountants what to do; accounting will become the only federally regulated profession out there. Doctors, lawyers, brokers, all exercise the right of self-regulation. You don’t see anyone suggesting that congress go create mandates for lawyers after Enron, even though arguably their law firm (whose name escapes me at the moment) is just as responsible for the situation as their creative accountants.
While I’m on this tangent I would like to suggest that the long term solution to the problems in the accounting business is to introduce competition into the field. Among large corporations there is a monopoly among the “Big Four” that now dominate the field, and there is really no incentive for them to rock the boat too much. If meaningful competition exists for the big accounts, such as GE and Fannie Mae, I think we’ll start to see the market forces drive accounting like they drive nearly every other profession.
Anyway, reporting stock options in the manner that the democrats and the more liberal media are suggesting will ultimately stifle the way business is done and hinder productivity, and therefore growth, in the long-term. Options give firms the oppurtunity to attract talent to the company that they could otherwise not afford, and give the employees’s of a stake in the company and interest in seeing that the company does well. A conversation earlier today Wayne Abernathi really clarified many of the things I’d been reading on the subject, and offered many of the insights here. He’s a really great staffer on the Senate Banking committee who deserves more recognition. He was one of the driving forces behind the Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill that revolutionize, amoung other things, banking regulation