Writing about tech and social issues mainly.
If you follow my work much, you’ll know I’m working on Basis, a project with the end goal of supporting a post-capitalist economy. I recently decided to move from the theory of the project into a more concrete implementation. But how? A few years back, I would have reached for blockchain tech but I’ve recently become increasingly suspicious of blockchains as a means for building distributed…
It was getting dark, and starting to rain. You needed a place to stay. Not just for the night, but a place to call your own after living under other people’s roofs for so long. You’re tired of moving, tired of the journey. You want to put down roots. By strange coincidence, a stranger approaches you and says “See that house over there? I’ll sell you the house and the property it’s on for $50K.”…
As an opening note, I’d like to mention that while I came to the conclusions discussed in this post while researching what a “socialist mode of production” would look like, I’m attempting to the best of my abilities to not argue for one system or another. Rather, my goal is to share my findings on how economics can be broken down. It was December 2018. I had recently read through a forum…
Pricing is an important economic tool. How much things cost, and how much things should cost , has been a subject of debate between economists for a long time. However, there’s one part of pricing I’d like to dissect. It’s the aspect of mystification. When I buy a product, it sends a signal. It’s essentially an economic feedback mechanism that says “I value this product as much or more than the…
I’d like to talk about wealth. I’ve heard many times from many different people that “wealth is not a zero-sum game.” I disagree. Wealth is (mostly) a zero-sum game. I will argue that most “creations” of wealth are not actually creations, but instead diversions, and when someone talks of “creating” wealth, they usually mean diverting wealth. Firstly, let’s distinguish wealth from money. I will…
Net Neutrality is a hot topic in the United States. On the one hand, you have people claiming that government should stay out of the internet. On the other hand, you have people claiming that the internet is much too important to leave in the hands of a few immense telecoms. What is Net Neutrality? Net Neutrality is fairly simple. There are many people who will tell you it’s the “government…
A lot of times when I’m programming, I need to write a few lines of code that test what I’m working on. This can be a top-level function call, a few log entries, etc. Much to my dismay, I tended to end up with this debug code committed to git. I decided I wasn’t going to take it anymore . Git’s pre-commit hook to the rescue Now, whenever I add one of these lines, I mark it with a special comment:…
I’ll keep this short. I recently installed Ansible 2.0 to manage the Turtl servers. However, once I ran some of the roles I used in the old version, my handlers were not running. For instance: # roles/rethinkdb/tasks/main.yml - name : copy rethinkdb monitrc file template : src=monit.j2 dest=/etc/monit.d/rethinkdb notify : restart monit # roles/rethinkdb/handlers/main.yml - include…
This is a post in a series of spam responses I’m doing after creating a new domain for my website. After receiving a flood of sales calls and emails, I’m deciding to have some fun. Finally, someone who knows what they’re doing . Hi, Would you be interested in building your website? We are a professional web design company based in India. We are expert in the following :- Joomla Websites Word press…