housekeeping

Not that anyone will notice but I had to remove all the old comments (after dumping the database to preserve them). They had become linked to different posts than the ones they had been associated with and no longer made any sense. I suspect I broke all that when I cleared out a raft of automagically-saved drafts and revisions and then — stupidly — renumbered the remaining posts. Hmm, those post numbers must be important…

Goes to show how much attention I have been paying to this almost 10 year old wossname.

private equity firms as rag and bone merchants

While I can agree that some businesses run their useful course and should be allowed to fail, do we really think private equity firms are the ones to make that call?

I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation. … The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors.

Romney Economics | Mitt Romney’s private sector record.
Romney’s most recent call was to let GM and Chrysler die, rather than invest in them and keep those companies and their networks of suppliers in business. I’d say he’s 0 for 1, as GM seems to be doing well, was never at risk of being nationalized and is back in public hands, with the government retaining a minority stake in hopes of making a little something something. The irony of his father being a successful CEO of long-defunct AMC wasn’t lost: a smarter politician would have found something else to talk about.

Private equity mavens don’t see businesses as businesses or markets as markets: they see everything as a salable asset. You could see that in Romney’s claim that JPMorgan losing $3B meant someone made $3B. Does he really think the economy is a zero-sum game, not a dynamic complex system that expands contracts? Is this the value of a Harvard MBA?

The old saw about the cynic knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing comes to mind. The private equity mindset sees a steel mill as a building, land, and some equipment to be sold off or used up, not as a revenue-generator or the primary income source for families in a town or region. The old school patriarchal capitalists who built towns and schools for their workers, who understood the tension between capital and labor, might not have been so bad in comparison to these rag and bone merchants.

Can anyone cite a business that customer-facing business, a retailer or service provider, that Romney had a hand in creating or managing? Not something funded by Bain or but some evidence that he or his people saw an opportunity and built something to meet it, then ran it successfully.

Maybe we need organizations like Bain to prune the deadwood but I’m not so sure he knows how to decide what needs cutting back. Let’s not allow Romney to spin his experience at breaking things up and selling them off as some kind of visionary leadership.

experiments in IPv6

I have been hearing that a new version of the TCP/IP addressing system is “imminent” since 1994. 18 years later, I have been moved to look into it, to see what it offers or requires. I found more requirements than benefits, some of which are noted below.

The argument is the old addressing scheme doesn’t have enough addresses to go around and it’s design subdivides it inefficiently. There are probably other more technical arguments but those are the reasons more often cites in favor of migrating to it: more address space, less waste. From Wikipedia:

In IPv4 an address consists of 32 bits which limits the address space to 4294967296 (232) possible unique addresses.

You’d think 4 billion addresses would be enough. Maybe so but then some people have been (mis)quoted as claiming the global market for computers was less than 10 or that no one would need a computer in their home. They could not have imagined either the network of today or the devices people use to access it.

IPv6 expands the pool a bit:

Mathematically, the new address space provides the potential for a maximum of 2128, or about 3.403×1038 unique addresses.

I self-host a couple of domains, complete with internet-connected email and web service so this may not apply to a lot of people.

The first thing I needed was access to the IPv6 internet. This doesn’t mean a new ISP so much as either having one that supports it already or using a tunnel service that encapsulates IPv6 packets in innocuous IPv4 packets, allowing them to be unpacked upon receipt. I have CenturyLink (née Qwest) and they don’t do IPv6 yet. So I went with Hurricane Electric and now have free access to services on IPv6. The folks at Hurricane have been doing this for quite some time and have probably answered your questions already. And there is an active forum community as well.

A handful of large public sites offer their content to both varieties — www.ipv6.apple.com, ipv6.google.com, ipv6.cnn.com, to name a couple. Lots of resources in the free/open source software world, as well. Microsoft requires it to be installed in some of its server products, even if you have no plans to use it.

So that’s all good. The equipment here all understands IPv6, from iMacs and MacBooks to a FreeBSD server and a Time Capsule used as a network interface to the ISP we use. So I set up the Time Capsule with the options I got from Hurricane Electric: you’ll need to use an older version of Airport Utility, as of this writing, since 6.0 doesn’t allow access to the IPv6 settings. Their setup page has the options you need for each dialog field:

In your network settings (here’s the Preference Pane in OS X Lion), turn on IPv6 and let it work it’s magic with auto discovery/autoconfig:
Apply those changes and you should be good to go.

To test it, use the Terminal/console app of your choice:

# ping6 ipv6.google.com
PING6(56=40+8+8 bytes) 2001:470:b:839:230:1bff:feaf:42c8 -->; 2001:4860:8005::69
16 bytes from 2001:4860:8005::69, icmp_seq=0 hlim=55 time=88.143 ms
16 bytes from 2001:4860:8005::69, icmp_seq=1 hlim=55 time=84.827 ms
^C?--- ipv6.l.google.com ping6 statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 2 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/std-dev = 84.827/86.485/88.143/1.658 ms

So you can now ride out on IPv6. Check out the sites listed up top and see if they work. Or try http://ipv6-test.com/ .
But what if you want to host services for an IPv6-enabled public? That’s a little trickier, with some previously undocumented gotchas.

Our daily bread

Makes one 21 oz loaf.

1# bread flour (Gold Medal or whatever you prefer)
1/3 cup dry milk powder
1 tsp yeast
1 tsp honey
1 tsp salt
1 cup warm water

Mix as straight dough (combine dry ingredients except salt) until combined. Add salt, knead/mix until smooth dough is formed. Check for adequate gluten development with the windowpane test.

Allow to double in a buttered bowl, form into a loaf in a 9×3 pan until doubled. Bake at 350 for 30 minutes, remove for pan to cool.

The milk powder adds sweetness and color to the crust. Yields a nice crumb and a nice sandwich bread, suitable for toasting or just as it is.20120430-000401.jpg20120430-000428.jpg

The Thing

Idea for a comic book/graphic novel for kids with anxiety, depression, OCD, whatever (when we take mental health as seriously and non-judgmentally as physical health, we’ll be better people living in a better society).

The Thing is the disorder or problem and the idea is that the kid (or adult) has to overcome the power of The Thing. It wants you to hide behind it and blame it for problems or mistakes, as a way of keeping you in it’s power: you can’t let it. It wants to tell you what you can’t do, but you have to fight it off, ignore it, tell it to shut up and stop bothering you.

It could be funny, could be creepy, or all of the above. I should get a list of common disorders or issues and see what physical representations work for them: small, simpering creatures or large imposing things, distorted versions of the sufferer, etc.

Pioneer

I read an article recently about a cosmonaut who was lost in the early 60s and was reportedly close to existing the solar system (at the publication date). What if he was found by some civilization that could reboot his consciousness. What would he tell them? Where would loyalties lie? To the old USSR? To humanity as a whole? Would he want to return? Would he permitted to and what would be his reception?

Surplus as the basis for modern society

When people bring up the fact that everyone in the US is in the global 1%, it’s kind of hollow. We didn’t earn it, most of us. We were born to it. And it’s not like the guy making $1 a day in Wherever is living the way we do. He doesn’t have the same choices as we do but he also doesn’t have to meet the same requirements. Clothing and what it costs to buy and maintain, hygiene and the water and products it requires, transportation to get to a job, meals are purchased either as ingredients or as finished goods, not gathered or grown… these are all things that are encumbrances, for lack of a better word. Obligations we have to fulfill that our man (or woman) in Wherever doesn’t have to.

And then there is the notion of buying power. How much of our daily/weekly needs are met by our daily/weekly income? The folks at the Economist offer the Big Mac Index [http://www.economist.com/node/21542808] as a handy way of mapping currency values and buying power across the overlaid continent of McDonaldstan. But what of places where that isn’t useful?

The basis of a complex society is the surplus, the bit left over when we left hunting and gathering behind in favor of agriculture and livestock. I would define buying power as the amount of time we exchange, what part of a day’s labor, for the wages that sustain us. At what point in our day could we knock off and go fishing?

For many of us, the first hour or two of a $500/hour attorney’s day might seem like enough. But what costs does he have to meet? Suitable office space with staff, either hired for himself or managed as part of of a partnership; clothes and personal grooming; entertainment/social obligations, business licenses and insurance — many of us don’t deal with any of that. Our workplaces are arranged by others, our appearance is not tied to the billing rate we command, etc.

In modern industrial society, we don’t have the freedom a hunter and gatherer would of taking it easy when the herds are at hand or the fruit is ripe. At the same time, we don’t have the stress of looking for food when it’s scarce. So what value is the surplus? I wonder if we don’t have the stress of the competitive hunter/gatherer without the downtime of nature’s harvest.

This should be on our minds as we look at the financial crises around the world and the job situation for many, where there are too few jobs or the wrong sort of jobs or where jobs have migrated to cheaper labor, leaving behind unemployed or unemployable people and stripping knowledge and intellectual capital from whole nations. I think we need every kind of job and every kind of worker but we don’t need to fit them to a 40 hour/week model. We need to value workers and the work they do for both work performed and the potential or promise of work to come.

Repurposed from https://m.google.com/app/plus/mp/433/#~loop:aid=z13fgnqycwewtjroa04ch1wgyrintj5wlqc0k&view=activity

Who stood their ground?

The Trayvon Martin story has now developed into two narratives: one, that neighborhood watch captain trigger-happy goon George Zimmerman shot and killed an unarmed 17 year old for being in the wrong place (at any time) or two, that Zimmerman, by carrying a gun in unlawful pursuit of an unarmed 17 year old, provoked the youth and killed him for being in the wrong place (at any time). 

In both of these narratives, who Stood Their Ground? The youth who refused to run? Or the chickenshit vigilante with the gun? The youth who fought back after being unlawfully harassed? Or a grown man with delusions of adequacy — and a gun?

The moral of this story is Stand Your Ground but Be Armed. We’re back full-circle to the Black Panthers enforcing their 2nd Amendment rights and the state of California (under Sainted Ronnie Reagan) signing gun control laws.

hey, I wrote some code

This is a shell script wrapped around a line of AppleScript that I can to put an OS X machine to sleep. I used at(1) to generate all the housekeeping stuff (paths and variables): the actual command is the very last line. 

#!/bin/sh
MANPATH=:/opt/local/share/man; export MANPATH
TERM_PROGRAM=Apple_Terminal; export TERM_PROGRAM
GPG_AGENT_INFO=/Users/paul/.gnupg/S.gpg-agent:776:1; export GPG_AGENT_INFO
TERM=xterm-color; export TERM
SHELL=/bin/bash; export SHELL
CLICOLOR=1; export CLICOLOR
TMPDIR=/var/folders/js/82lhv5lh8xn_1r006s6qx0g80000gn/T/; export TMPDIR
Apple_PubSub_Socket_Render=/tmp/launch-vpi61E/Render; export Apple_PubSub_Socket_Render
HTML_TIDY=/Users/paul/.tidyrc; export HTML_TIDY
TERM_PROGRAM_VERSION=303; export TERM_PROGRAM_VERSION
TERM_SESSION_ID=A236A172-44B1-4955-8B2D-3EEB9C1E2D52; export TERM_SESSION_ID
USER=paul; export USER
COMMAND_MODE=unix2003; export COMMAND_MODE
SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/launch-kZWH3Y/Listeners; export SSH_AUTH_SOCK
__CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING=0x1F5:0:0; export __CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING
Apple_Ubiquity_Message=/tmp/launch-q0RW5z/Apple_Ubiquity_Message; export Apple_Ubiquity_Message
LSCOLORS=ExFxCxDxBxegedabagacad; export LSCOLORS
PATH=/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/Current/bin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/Current/bin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/Current/bin:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/bin:/usr/local/mysql/bin; export PATH
PWD=/Users/paul; export PWD
EDITOR=/usr/bin/vim; export EDITOR
LANG=en_US.UTF-8; export LANG
SHLVL=1; export SHLVL
HOME=/Users/paul; export HOME
LOGNAME=paul; export LOGNAME
DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=launchd:env=DBUS_LAUNCHD_SESSION_BUS_SOCKET; export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8; export LC_CTYPE
INFOPATH=:/opt/local/share/info; export INFOPATH
DISPLAY=/tmp/launch-LrbuQi/org.x:0; export DISPLAY
SECURITYSESSIONID=186a5; export SECURITYSESSIONID
_=/usr/bin/at; export _
osascript -e 'tell app "Finder" to sleep'