m3mnoch

the thing that drives me the most crazy about all this bickering is that we know what works — it’s not hard.  it’s been numerically, mathematically and historically shown over and over again.  MATH DOESN’T HAVE TO INVENT STUPID RED HERRING CONSPIRACIES TO POINT OUT SO-CALLED “TRUTH”.  

no.  not at all.  

1 + 1 = 2.  

period.

it’s math, people!  the science of economics is math, folks.  when economists say “you’re doing it wrong” and non-qualified talking heads say “no, you’re just a liberal!”, math must just have a liberal bias then.  in fact, education has a liberal bias.  we don’t need any stinking education!  dismantle the department of education!

…btw, that’s probably why so many students at our top universities are foreigners. 

anyway.  

that being said, i just wanted to throw out some funny (if they weren’t so sad) links that are unfortunately grounded in reality and thus, obviously liberally biased.

here we go with some super-sweet links:

• congress is out of touch with what the marketplace wants.  go figure.  key quote?  ”Our recovery has slowed” — thanks new congress!
  
  
• watch the long, but quite good video of al franken completely and totally destroying the myth of republican economic theory.  or, if you don’t have time, you can just read the highlights here.
  
  
• and finally, a heaping dose of math, statistics and taxes.  yes, you lower-and-middle-income, red state dwellers — accounting for inflation, you are poorer since 1980!  trickle down economics ftl!

so, no.  no, mr. random right-wing person — i do NOT agree with you because you are WRONG and ruining this country.  STOP IT!

m3mnoch.

for all those folks who are interested, here’s a whole bunch of photos from our trip to italy with our friends karen and shawn.

o.m.g. — FUN!

• Getting there and Rome
• Florence
• Verona (my second favorite place we went)
• Venice
• Sardinia (lookit the water!)
• Sorrento (the most awesome place in all of Italy)

it was two weeks of awesome, but i’m glad to be back in the land of hamburgers and caesar salads!  (funny enough, there wasn’t a caesar salad to be had in italy…)

m3mnoch.

you’ll pardon me if some economist or technologist has already thunk or disproved this.  i’m famous for reinventing the wheel…

here’s the thought that just occurred to me:

1. technology greatly increases the commoditization of goods and services.
   
   
2. thanks to gossen’s laws, we know that as commodity consumption rises, marginal utility eventually falls to zero and reaches maximum total utility.
   
   
3. if total utility is zero (or even close to zero) amongst all things, there is no differentiation between similar goods and services.
   
   
4. with no differentiation and the ability to consume goods and services ulitmately limited by time (the one, true finite resource), demand is also finite.
   
   
5. supply-side economics is broken because it relies on temporary increases in total utility when total utility is already maximized.

whew…  that’s about all the economic brain cells i have right now.  tho, feel free to point out weird missing strawman holes.

m3mnoch.

there’s been a lot of interest in how we’ve gone about acquiring our solar panels we installed last fall. i figured rather than write the same email over and over and such, i’d write up a quick post that might be helpful to other folks too.

going in, we had (and met) three goals:

1. No added expense - we didn’t want to be saddled with any extra payments and we assuredly didn’t want to trade liquid cash for a non-liquid asset. there was no way we wanted to wait forever for our investment to recoup. to avoid that, we calculated how many solar panels we’d need to leave our total monthly energy payment unchanged. so, the total of our loan payment added to the new power bill ($10 to $30 a month, depending) is less than or equal to our old power bill.

2. adding equity to our home - talk about instant equity!  ”here person buying our house, i hope you like your $15 a month electric bill!”  over the course of 30 years, that’s $54,000 in savings if energy prices stay the same.

3. saving money long term - speaking of energy prices staying the same. did you know that power rates in 1990 out here were 9.9 cents per kilowatt hour? now, they’re 15.38 cents. yeah… that’s a 50% increase. and next year, they’re going up to 15.57 and the year after that, the power company is saying they’re going to be 15.61. for those keeping track at home, that’s about a 2% increase per year. not for us!

you’ll notice i didn’t say “being green”, tho, that’s a nice side effect, it certainly wasn’t the driving reason. it’s funny how many people think we did it because we’re crazy californian hippies. makes me laugh. no, it has nothing to do with that at all. i mean, have you looked at your power bill lately?

joc did tons and tons of research prior to the install and we ended up choosing marie phillip at herca solar here in san diego (http://www.hercasolar.com) — they were awesome and are highly recommended by us to anyone interested. just tell them joc and i sent you.

so, to recap: our monthly power budget at worst (until the loan is paid off) is a little less than before the panels, we added a ton of equity to the house and we’ve insulated ourselves from future power rate increases. win, win and win.

hell, all we need now is an electric car and we’ll be the hippies with the $15 power bill to your $200 one and our $0.00 a month fuel bill to your $200 one.

tho, i suppose at least you won’t be called a hippy.

m3mnoch.

git sucks.

yes.  it sucks like nothing on the planet has ever sucked ever.  period.  end of story.

let’s see…  what are the things you want to be able to do in a version control system?

add files.  check!

commit changes.  check!

revert to a previous version.  uh oh…  you can’t do that!!!  

it just screws up your checkout.  but, thank god i can stream in partial branches and merge all fancy across checkouts and all kinds of “neat” shit 99% of the people don’t use.

seriously.  

all i want to do is revert my code back 2 versions ago.  i manage to get it that far…  good.  now, just commit it back.

uh oh!

$ git commit

# On branch master

# Your branch is behind ‘origin/master’ by 2 commits.

#

nothing to commit (working directory clean)

what the FUCK do you mean nothing to commit.  you just told me it’s FUCKING DIFFERENT two minutes ago when i rest it to a previous version!

it keeps trying to fast-forward or something — like i might want to do that?

NO!

if i wanted to be at the head version, i wouldn’t have reset it to two versions ago!  if i wanted to fast-forward any of the damn files, i’d say “fast-fucking-forward!”

no.  i’m saying “motherfucking commit what i tell you to goddamn commit!”

so, i’m like “fine! i’ll just re-pull the files.”  i delete the files on the file system and do this:

$ git pull

Enter passphrase for key ‘/c/Users/Chris/.ssh/id_rsa’:

Already up-to-date.

i’m sorry, but, WTF?!?!?

i just fucking deleted half the files in the checkout!  THEY ARE NOT THERE!  HOW CAN THEY BE UP TO DATE?

bottom line?  

after an hour of futzing around trying to figure out how stupid git thinks, i’m having to completely delete and re-checkout the entire repo — all 300 mb of it.  great…

twice now, i’ve done that.

tonight.

which is why i have this time to write this.  because i’m waiting for fucking git to fucking download a bunch of shit when i only wanted to update — excuse me — “pull” about 30kb of files.

you know how you do this in svn?

svn revert -r1234

svn commit

done.

end of story.

oh, by the way… git sucks.

m3mnoch.