Never been one to let the carrier drop

In my previous post, I explained a few things about my views surrounding money.. now I’m going to do a stream-of-consciousness on people with a high (>$10 million) net worth.

Please note this is based on my current understanding of the reality model I’m experiencing, which may be flawed.

We have a fixed amount of capitol in the system. We add too it sometimes, but not very much nor very fast, because whenever we add a lot, a bunch of people not in possession of all the facts think it means the capitol is worth less, instead of realizing that it’s because we’re actually generating wealth out of thin air all the time – new ideas, new intellectual property, new ways of getting things done – and new children who will grow up to create and build more wealth. Because we’re becoming more wealthy in real-world things, we need to print more money to match, or things are gonna break.

Because we have a fixed amount of capitol, it’s important to *keep it moving*. If it stops in one computer register (i.e. some billionare’s bank account or a stock in the market), it’s no longer a available resource in the system for facilitating getting things done. People can’t pay wages with money they don’t have. In addition, the value of money sitting in a bank account beyond a person’s conceivable personal needs is *negative*, because the reduced amount of money floating around ‘live’, migrating, making transactions happen will result in less of those transactions occuring and those transactions often generate value. (Think of the inventor who doesn’t have enough money for a lab vs. the one who does). Holding onto money beyond your personal needs *reduces it’s value* by a real-world, food-and-drink-and-housing-and-entertainment definition of value.

TL:DR=People are making decisions based on dollars when they should be considering the real value – concrete and steel and the like – involved.

I’m not really sure how to write this, so I’m just going to do a stream of conciousness writing and hopefully it will capture some of the ideas I have.

First of all, I have concluded that some of what the department of defense does is in essence a entitlement for people who like to hurt people. So, if you are one of those madly anti-entitlement people, you really should be upset about the DoD. There’s no way that we need the level of military technology we have. It’s a gift for the DoD contractors, pure and simple. Nor do we pay the actual people who put their lives on the line very well – so it’s not even a entitlement for the group of people who one could argue deserve it for putting themselves in harm’s way in the interest of implementing the decisions of our government. It’s pork for the people who want to make a bigger bomb, a better rifle, a larger aircraft carrier, even though we already have a vastly larger army than anyone who would conceivably want to pick a fight with us.

Now I must mention in all fairness that the DoD is not all bad. My father worked there for a while, and every project he ever chose to share with me that he had chosen to support was one that generated value for the human race, that made us all richer. But people who make bombs, and guns, are making tools for destroying value.

Beyond that, however, I think that our culture has a very sick idea about money. We think it’s worth something – that it’s more important than people. Money is our tool, but instead of us using it it has come to use us.

Money is not value. Value is what money buys – and what we want. No sane person really wants money – they want value. You can’t eat dollars, and they’d make a lousy house – but dollars buy food and shelter, which you can eat and live in. However, money can’t *accurately* abstract value, for a whole host of reasons:

1) Some types of value are forever and infinite. Once a great book is penned, or a song or movie is laid down on tape, that content is now ours, now and forever. With our current level of technology, distributing and copying it cost fractions of a penny. Using money to try and pay for that content is having a finite resource (dollars) try to chase a infinite one (content). In terms of real value – things like great movies and works of art and automation that works and whatnot – the human race is far, far, far wealthier than it ever has been. In terms of minds and hands to create amazing things, the human race is wealthy indeed. But the amount of money in the world has not kept pace with our wealth, and things in the economic world are coming unglued because of it.

2) Some types of value can be destroyed, but we do not attempt to match that with money. When a war happens, we should really take a bunch of money, and burn it, because we’re destroying the value that it represents. (Although, for some wars – WWII, for example – we also need to mint a bunch more for the scientific discoveries that were made by necessity to cope with the war). In a recent war, we burned one of the oldest libraries on the planet.. that ought to be a huge pile of bills thrown on a bonfire somewhere.

3) Some types of value are multiplicative – that is, they create other value. Automation is a great example. Once discovered, automation is in category #1, but it also enables us to get more resources for less man-hours. This makes us all wealthier, but it can also make that wealth inaccessible to the people who just lost their job to a perl script

We need to make sure we – and especially our children – see money not as value, but as a symbol that represents value – and understand that it can only work properly if it accurately maps to the amount of value our race has. (And probably not even then! ;-)). Deciding not to give health care to people – live minds and hands that create the value money is based on – because of our debt – is in essence increasing our debt. We’re destroying real value by letting those people suffer and die, and we ought to be destroying money to match the loss of value that results.

Whenever a hardworking immigrant walks “illegally” over our borders, our nation becomes wealthier by the value that person can create, be it fixin’ cars or pickin’ strawberries.. and we ought to be printing money to match. Whenever someone leaves, we ought to be burning money to match the loss of their creative power and energy.

What’s most important is that the people making decisions.. the presidents, and kings, and governers, and senators.. understand that money isn’t value, but a symbol that abstracts it. Whenever we make a decision that reduces the amount of value in the world in order to increase the amount of money in it, we are demonstrating stupidity on a colossal scale, and the tool is using us instead of us using the tool.

What scares me is that NO WHERE in the recent government budget discussions did I hear anyone talk about this! And I see many people – mostly conservatives – who seem to be under the delusion that the money *is* the value, and use this argument to justify treating their neighbors and friends horribly for the sake of dollars. This to me is the ultimate in fiscal irresponsibility – letting the tool use you, instead of you using the tool.

Similarly, I see liberals who think that enough money can somehow will a resource that’s scarce into existence, without having to come up with some way to get it. While I talk about giving everyone everything, I do in fact have concrete plans (more on this later) on how we would do that. But I have heard liberals talk about shutting down all oil pipelines – right now – without considering how we would then get food given that our transit network runs on oil.

For some of my evolving thoughts beyond this, read http://www.sheer.us/weblogs/?cat=13

For more about this, read http://www.sheer.us/weblogs/?p=2346

NOTE: If you got here via http://valuenotmoney.sheer.us, please note that is a series of essays – please follow the link at http://www.sheer.us/weblogs/?p=2346 for the next one.

Happy birthday, 8088!

I use this a lot when writing a simple perl script that I want to take args like –flag and –database=this and –comment=”This is a comment with spaces”

while($arg = shift) { 
        if(($s1,$s2) = $arg =~ /–(.*)=(.*)/) {

                $l1 = lc $s1;

                $s2 = $a if(($a) = $s2 =~ /^\”(.*)\”$/);

                $arg{$l1} = $s2;

        } elsif(($s1) = $arg =~ /–(.*)/) {

                $l1 = lc $s1;

                $arg{$l1} = 1;

        }

}

Stick it in the top of the script, and you can then just use

if($arg{‘flag’}) {

}

$comment = $arg{‘comment’};

and so on and so forth.

So, I recently found a fun bug in Windows 2012.

If you are attempting to add features like HTTP Activation, Application Server w/ IIS support, or other web-related features and roles to 2012 and you have shared hosting configuration enabled in IIS, they will fail with the extremely cryptic error code 0x800F0922. What you need to do is DISABLE shared configuration, install your features or roles, and then re-enable shared configuration. The WPI will tell you if you try to install something while shared config is enabled that you can’t do that, but the Add Features / Add Roles bits won’t.

When I worked at OnAir, I had a boss who will remain nameless (I’ll call him PHB) because this story is a bit embarrassing for him. We had been sent to PAIX in northern CA to install a Sun enterprise server 1000. After uncrating and racking it, we turned it on and watched as the boot console scrolled through various things, finally ending at a repeated attempt to BOOTP.

Now, at this point, I was all set to sit down at the keyboard and start hacking away at the firmware settings, because obviously the unit had no idea it had a hard drive, much less a operating system. However, PHB was utterly convinced that if we just waited long enough, the thing would boot. Really. Honest. He made me wait a hour, repeatedly telling me not to touch the keyboard.

I went to the hotel room that night and looked up the relevant page of the sun hardware guide. Then, the next day when we returned to the data center, I went straight to the machine, told it to list devices attached to it, then told it where it’s boot disk was. After which, no big surprise, it booted right up.

The thing that really annoyed me was that he wouldn’t listen to me, and I think the problem was, he had no idea what I was saying. Concepts like BOOTP and DHCP and network booting and boot device and whatnot were entirely foreign to him. So, when we got home, I printed out the sun firmware console guide and left a copy on his desk.

People have from time to time done this to me – I remember getting a copy of the Sendmail guide with a post-it saying “see page 53”, for example. I don’t remember ever being upset by it, and neither was he. However, it’s a lot trickier in a interactive face to face setting to figure out, how do I clue this guy in to the fact that he has no idea what I’m talking about and what he’s suggesting is never going to work – I’ve never figured out a really good answer.

I remember when I was at ASP repairing people’s houses, one woman’s water pump got hit by lightning. Now, in fact, all it had done is blown a hole in the metal piece that attached it to the feed pipe, but we didn’t know that. Anyway, we pooled up our ice cream money and bought her a pump (ASP disavowed all knowledge of anything relating to replacing a water pump), dug up her wellhead, and pulled out the old pump. I did some cut&splice&whatnot, and put the new pump where the old one was, and we lowered it back down. Of course, when the pump hit the top of the water, that was the end of lowering.

At this point, I made a suggestion. Let’s turn the power on to the pump, and it will lift water up the column and thereby pull itself down. However, the adults (I was about 16 at the time) decided that was too dangerous and radical, so instead they tried to force the pump into the hole.

Not suprisingly, this was not easy. In addition, grinding the pump’s power wiring against the side of the shaft cut the power wiring, and so once the pump was in place, it didn’t work. We pulled it back out, I patched the cut power wiring, and the second time it was decided we would try my way, which worked. (I bet it’s what all the installers do.)

Again, I don’t know what to do in situations like that. It’s obvious the other person is not in possession of all the facts, but it’s also obvious that they think I’m not either. I don’t want to say things that make them think I think they’re a moron, but I also don’t really want to sit and watch while they demonstrate why their technique is not going to work.

The other question, of course, is how to accept the reverse situation – when someone has to clue me in that my airspeed really shouldn’t be 110 knots at touchdown, or that .net console apps use a connection pool and so it really is okay to throw away a database connection after each query (well, it’s not the most optimized thing in the world to do, but it doesn’t involve reconnecting to the server) – without having my feelings be hurt by the fact that I’m apparently clueless.

As I get older I’m finding it easier and easier to accept being wrong without there being any judgement on my value as a person or my skills or anything being involved. This is sort of the opposite of what I would have expected to have happened.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpS1_Z0SJeA

I also enjoyed their stint on the West Wing, which I recently saw for the first time. 😉

So, like many programmers of my generation, I grew up reading usenet posts like the Story of Mel. I had always assumed it was apocryphal, because the idea of a computer made by the Royal McBee typewriter company sounds unlikely.

Except that it’s all true. Here is the beast in question, complete with a lovely 50’s control panel that reminds me of a metal vacuum cleaner I had when I was young: LGP-30

Recently, Vinnie made me aware of a student who has been suspended for writing somewhat dark poetry (http://dailycaller.com/2012/12/31/san-francisco-high-school-senior-suspended-over-grim-poem-about-conn-shooting/.

I think that if we proceed down this path, we are doing our children a grave disservice.

My suspicions are that people who write about the dark things going on in their mind.. suicide, violence.. are the people who don’t act on those thoughts. Getting things out on paper actually helps some of us clear them from our minds, and also gives us the ability to see them in context. That’s not even going into the freedom of speech issues involved. I think it would be very unhealthy for us to insist that high school students not talk or write about the darker sides of the things they think, especially since they are immersed in a culture of violence. [It still angers me that you can show someone getting blown into tiny pieces in a PG-13 movie, but not people having sex – even though pretty much all healthy people have some sexuality in their lives and normally it is a happy thing that does not hurt people, whereas very few of us are gunning people down and whenever it does happen it’s certain to be a tragedy]

I don’t have anything but intuition to go on but I’m thinking that people who bottle up their dark thoughts instead of facing them (possibly by writing about them) are far more likely to go postal.

I no longer believe in evolution as the sole force that created my genome.

Now wait. I am not necessarily saying that I believe that some aliens or God has swept down and created my DNA by compiling a few libraries (although I do think the reuse of code in DNA is suspiciously library-like) – I think that there’s a viewpoint that we’re not hearing from in defense of intelligent design.

The most likely source of intelligent design that I see is the organism that is running the code.

No, I’m not aware of any way I can edit my DNA. On the other hand, I’m not aware of any way that I can do any number of things that my body does and I take for granted, and I certainly don’t know what the limitations of individual cells in my body are. A cell is a very complex thing, far more powerful than I think we usually give it credit for.

I really have to wonder why we find it more believable that we were either created by a external force or evolved by flipping bits at random and seeing what happens than that we – a species who has shown the ability to understand machine language, write and debug programs, and research the world around us and use that information to make decisions – have been improving ourselves.

The idea of being evolved by flipping bits at random sounds kind of awful to me. What happens when you have a design implementation that accidentally sets the gain too high on pain receptors? One can imagine all sorts of random bits one would rather not experience being flipped. On the other hand, if we were designed, that brings the question up of who designed us? Some religious adherents would say we were created by God and God was, is, and always will be but we’re different somehow – okay, but how did God get to the lofty position of knowing how to code? (Face it, writing DNA and writing code are not that different..)

Lately, I think that I miss out on a lot because I don’t believe it’s possible. I have experimentally verified that what you believe controls what you experience. I have a feeling that if you have a completely unshakable faith in *anything*, you’ll experience it as true.

This isn’t that surprising, given that we really live in a world of information. Us I.T. guys understand intuitively that a arbitrary string of data could turn into a sound or a image – it’s not a big leap to see that it could also turn into a touch, or a smell, or a taste. Even the kinesthetic ability to know what position our bodies are in can be looked at as the exchange of information. While the physicists talk about matter and energy and the quantum guys talk about particles, to a I.T. guy it soon starts to sound like the most fundamental thing in the universe is not matter or energy, but information. This may just be a case of “to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail..” – but I don’t think so.

We are in Plato’s cave. Our minds have sets of rules that turn information streams into things we can map into our higher experience, like a blue ball or a furry puppy. Some sources of information behave like objects (like a blue ball) while others clearly have minds of their own (your coworker who keeps beating you at Quake). I can’t speak for anyone else here, but I have no way to know how that information is being mapped into the experience of anyone but me. For all I know, I might look like a dog in your view. Or the sky might be green. Or any number of similar things. All I can experience is my own reality. I don’t think this is built entirely out of my mind (I’m not a extreme solipsist) but I do think that my mind takes the data coming in and puts a spin on it based on my beliefs in order to build the experience I’m having in the “real world”.

In defense of my earlier comment, whether or not our genome is being edited by us to improve upon our current situation – and I have no reason to think it’s not – clearly the evolution of the way our minds think is something that is under our conscious control. When I was just coasting, doing whatever it seemed to make sense to do at the time, my life either stayed the same or got worse. Now that I’m constantly trying to improve the functioning of my mind and my experience, my life has been improving in all sorts of measurable ways.

Now, I’d like to bring out a side point here. We’ve all had the experience of seeing someone ignore data that did not agree with their personal beliefs. I think that at times there are things that are happening that we just can’t experience because we don’t believe in them. I am sure that the adherents to top-down creationism and to evolution find all sorts of data to back up their beliefs. I’m sure I’ve said before on this blog that every adherent to every religion finds data to validate their choice of religion – experiences it as being true. This explains why so many religions are convinced they are the one truth and everyone else is going to hell. You are deluded, but I am perfectly correct.

In my particular case, what I have is a meta-religion. I think that what I believe affects how I experience the world, and I’m in search of the best things to believe. I do not want to put my own experience above the happiness of others, so I don’t want to believe I’m the only person that matters – so I need a belief system that successfully integrates with the world I’m experiencing while giving me the flexibility to have the experiences I want to have.

Now, at times parts of me – especially the parts of me programmed from childhood with Christianity – argue with this view. However, it seems to me that if I am a top-down creation by God (and I’m not ruling that out, it’s just not my current working hypothesis) God granted me the freedom and handed me the experiences to learn all this, so *e must approve of the idea of me figuring out what I need to believe in order to have the life I want to have. *e has all sorts of opportunities to communicate with me the error of my ways and I am open to communication. However, I am skeptical that any message that appears in front of my eyes or in my mind comes from God – God is going to have to authenticate *self pretty carefully, because I have lived for a while in a universe that appears to have beings with hostile intent, not all of which are immediately visible and apparent.

What I find improbable in the extreme is that God created me to be *s slave. If you do postulate a top-down creator with omnipotence and omnicience in this frame, that creator would have any number of ways of communicating that concept to me, and *e does not seem to have done so. I do not see any signs that I am being discouraged from my current lines of spiritual inquiry. (This is not inviting all you out there to join in the fray by trying to convince me that I am – please, let’s keep this simple. Trust that if God does exist, *e can communicate with me without needing you, whoever you might be who are inclined to do so, quoting scripture of various religions at me.)

Looking at the Bible, it does not stand up for me as a source of sole spiritual enlightenment. There is signal there, but there’s also a awful lot of noise. I’m convinced one needs to be somewhat crazy to read it as the word of a supreme being. (Not that I’m saying I’m not crazy, because clearly from time to time I am)

If we were a top down creation, there’s one thing that stands out: Whoever created us must have been *very* patient. Even assuming that DNA is a compiled (binary) output and we are written in a high level language, *e still would have had to find or create the compiler for it. And whether we’re creating ourselves, or a top down creation, I hope we can all agree we are a work in progress. If you can’t imagine a life much better than this one (or much worse, for that matter), your imagination’s broken from lack of use.

Anyway, back to my original thesis. I think we are a product of intelligent design – and the intelligent designers were our progenitors, and are us. This does not mean I don’t believe in some sort of diety – the model I favor for this at the moment is that life sums – that together you and me are more than we are separately. But I’m also open to the idea that there are other types of beings than us humans and cats and dogs and dolphins, and that some of them might be much more powerful – both in a affecting-reality and a information-processing sort of way – than we are.