The mutualist perspective:
Internalization of costs and benefits of decisions is further hampered by the fact that administrative authority is separated from the actual performance of productive work. As a result, labor is likely to bear all the costs and inconveniences of increased efficiency, while owners and senior management recieve the rewards. A speedup or layoff, or combination of attrition and added workloads for the surviving employees, is likely to be followed by a big bonus to the CEO for "increasing productivity." The workers on the shop floor, on the other hand, are likely know the most about how to improve the work process. But they have no authority to restructure it on their own, and no reason to do so when somebody else will benefit at their expense.
And the flow of information within a hierarchy means that senior managent receives distorted or falsified information, and as a result the people doing the work receive irrational orders from above. As Kenneth Boulding put it, those at the tops of large hierarchies live in almost completely imaginary worlds.
The Dilbert perspective:
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Written on Monday, August 07, 2006
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Since it seems like DreamHost is a pretty popular hosting solution for people who are getting into Ruby on Rails programming, I thought I'd try to give some advice on how to avoid the headaches. It took me 4 or 5 days to successfully deploy the most basic of web apps just because following the advice of kind strangers simply doesn't always work. So, I thought I'd provide some more kind stranger advice. This may be a little roundabout but it's a very predictable way to deploy, at least for me. Your milage may vary.
Let's walk through the easy way to set up a rails app at example.com - note that whereever I use example.com you should substitute your domain name. Double check that you have a directory in your file area that matches the domain name you're using (/home/username/example.com). Also, if you're a little rusty on Unix like I am, remember that whenever I use ~/ that means /home/username/ (where username is your DH username, of course).
- Make sure you're starting completely from scratch. We should have a vanilla domain setup in the DH control panel under "Domains > Domain Manager", and no files whatsoever in
~/example.com/
- Login to SSH and
cd ~/
- Type
rails example.com This will create a rails app at example.com which is setup up to run on the server, so it will know where ruby is installed, for instance, and what version of Rails is installed without you having to research it. Currently, DH runs Rails 1.1.2.
- Return to the Domain Manager and make sure FastCGI support is checked. Also, change the web directory path so that the entire path reads:
/home/username/example.com/public/
- Wait a few minutes, then navigate in your browser to example.com. You should see the Rails welcome page.
- Return to SSH, and copy the
app directory of your application into ~/example.com/app/
- Set up your databases in MySQL if you haven't already. Go to the DH control panel and navigate on the sidebar to "Goodies > Manage MySQL". Then create your database and also create a new hostname ("mysql.example.com"). Note the username (create a new one) and password you use. Go ahead and create a development, test, and production database so that your migration will work (you are using migrations, right?).
- Amend
~/example.com/config/database.yml to reflect your database setup. Make sure you change the host to mysql.example.com.If the database gives you problems and you're sure this file correctly reflects your database's account setup, you may find taking out the adapter line and putting in port: 3306 might help. It didn't for me, so try it without these changes first.
- Amend
~/example.com/config/environment.rb to ensure that there's a line like this at the top:
ENV['RAILS_ENV'] = 'production'
- Check to make sure you have a route for the webroot in
~/example.com/config/routes.rb If not, uncomment this line:
# map.connect '', :controller => "welcome"
and fill in the controller which you want to handle any visits to https://example.com
- Modify all instances of dispatch.cgi in the
~/example.com/public/.htaccess file to dispatch.fcgi. In the current version of rails, there is only one line to change, on line 32:From:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.cgi [QSA,L]
to:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi [QSA,L]
- Dreamhost regularly kills off sleeping processes with their watchdog. This will kill your dispatch.fcgi processes, leading to Error 500s from time to time. You'll need to make dispatch.fcgi ignore all TERM requests by changing how it responds to them.After
require 'fcgi_handler', change the rest of ~/example.com/public/dispatch.fcgi to read:
class RailsFCGIHandler
private
def frao_handler(signal)
dispatcher_log :info, "asked to terminate immediately"
dispatcher_log :info, "frao handler working its magic!"
restart_handler(signal)
end
alias_method :exit_now_handler, :frao_handler
end
RailsFCGIHandler.process!
And save the file.
- At SSH,
cd ~/example.com/chmod -R u+rwX,go-w public log- Now run your migration, which will bring your database schema up to date:
rake migrate
rm ~/example.com/public/index.html
- You should be running!
If at first you get errors, give it a while. I had a problem where I followed these steps and couldn't get the webroot to route correctly (https://example.com was not being routed to my controller even though I specified it in routes.rb). I went to bed after messing with it for hours, woke up and tried it, and it was fine. So make sure that you give things time to fix themselves. Also, check the DreamHost Rails Deployment Wiki page for more tips and help.
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I added a little chat client in the sidebar. Feel free to ping me if you want.
I've been meaning to do more music blogging, but since I have little to say about music, I'm just going to list what I'm listening to:
- Belle and Sebastian: I'm obsessed with The Life Pursuit, and If You're Feeling Sinister is great as well. I don't care if that makes me gay. The former album is absolutely stunningly done from a production, songwriting, and orchestration standpoint.
- Gravenhurst: a mix of touching folk and electric trash... their Fires in Distant Buildings is amazing, and Flashlights is a great album as well (though not as sprawling sound-wise).
- Band of Horses: Everything All the Time is a great album chock full of modern rock anthems. This album will lodge itself squarely in your noggin.
- Keane: Again, I'm a little embarrassed by this, but Hopes and Fears is far too catchy and well produced. It might be too pop, but oh well - I guess that makes me a bubble gummer.
What are you listening to? I'm constantly on the lookout for new tunes, so lemme know!
The P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act and indefinite detentions of enemy combatants are two of the many "tools" the government claims it needs to combat terrorism. Maybe they should pass a law having something to do with another tool - e-mail:
An Arabic-speaking FBI agent had requested information about a Jan. 5, 2000, Al Qaeda meeting in Malaysia, but the CIA never turned it over, The New Yorker reported.
The ambitious FBI detective, Ali Soufan, was so upset when he eventually got the information - after 9/11 - that he vomited.
Let's get one thing straight: 9/11 happened not due to a lack of laws but due to a CIA and FBI who fucked it up. They had everything they needed and they botched it. Suck it up, but don't make the us citizens pay for your mistakes.
And don't patronize us by calling expansions of unchecked governmental authority "tools". We know who the tools are.
Over at Catallarchy, Johnathan Goff makes a great point about the ongoing war between Israel and Hezbollah, and the innocent Lebanese caught in the cross fire:
...one of the key things you (and almost everyone else I hear who brings up this exact same argument over and over again, ad naseum) is that it's pretty clear to almost everyone that none of Israel's enemies really could push it into the sea. None of them are anywhere close. Hezbollah has fired off almost 1500 rockets at Israel since hostilities flared up again--over 10% of their arsenal, and they've killed less than 30 civilians? Hardly the stuff existential threats are made out of.
I think Israel would be a lot better off if they realized this. If they stop treating every small incident as though the fate of their very nation depended on immediate and overwhelming action, they would be a lot better off. Even in the best cases the law of unintended consequences makes it really tough to get good long-term results. Acting before you've had a time to think because you treat everything as a life-and-death crisis is a sure way to keep muddling things up over and over.
I'm not saying that Israel is always wrong or that Hezbollah is right, just that hyperventilating that if Israel doesn't bomb the crap out of an innocent country that Hezbollah happens to occupy a small chunk of, that Israel is going to be shoved back into the sea….it all seems rather counterproductive actually.
This analysis certainly applies to the U.S. "War on Terror" as well, since 9/11 was invoked as the (direct or indirect) justification for the invasions and occupations of both Afghanistan and Iraq. These activities have only made our country safer from terrorism the same way past U.S. interventions in Middle Eastern countries have maintained stability: by causing long-running distrust and resentment, offsetting the threat to the future rather than neutralizing it in any lasting manner.
Instead of treating the terrorist threat as some sort of existential armageddon, the U.S. government should proportionally address the problem. The ability of Al Qaeda to destroy the country utterly is non-existent. That doesn't mean the government should refrain from responding to attacks and threats. Rather, it should aim for a solution to this problem that addresses the realistic threat.
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My Rails project, dubbed ThreadSpinner, is coming along - slowly but surely. I was worried that my current assignment at my day job would hamper my enthusiasm to code in my free time. I just came off a very interesting Rails project for a client and I'm not sure I would have ever learned Ruby or the Rails framework as quickly on my own. Getting paid to learn a fun language is quite a motivation. However, I'm finding that coding is becoming a cool pasttime, and now that I've cleaned up my office I'm energized about making ThreadSpinner something interesting and exciting!
I've got a basic threaded forum working (thanks to Bob Silva) so the fundamental structure of what I want to do is now there. At this point the real work begins: I need to rework this structure and functionality into something that allows "posts" to be flexible based on what the user wants to do with the content. That's the idea behind my application: blurring the line between essays and conversations, promoting dynamic collaboration spaces as well as individual content "ownership".
I want to see people doing things with their writing that move outside the rigid domain of "this is a blog", "this is a comment", etc. That's not how ideas work in real life. Is it possible to create a domain model that encourages not only blogs to cross-pollenate through ubiquitous dicusssions but also ensures that the surrounding discussions remain substantive and that new ideas grow as a result of the pollenation? Do we have to draw lines and say, "that's your idea, this is mine"? This is the idea behind ThreadSpinner - get people to use each others' content creatively while strengthening the personal investment in content creation.
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A while back, my friend Matt directed me to an article about managing geeks. I posted some comments on the ensuing thread which reflected my recent reading of Studies in Mutualist Political Economy as well as other left libertarian and mutualist thinkers. Kevin Carson, the author of the aforementioned book, saw fit to draw attention to the conversation surrounding the original post, and even got the original contributors to respond.
It's nice when you get acknowledged for thoughts you've had outside the narrow scope of your personal blog. Thanks Kevin and Alexander! And I'd like to also note that I now appreciate much more Cityzen Jane's points about intrinsic enjoyment and motivation involved with geek work. I think that makes our domain of technical competency exceptional only in the sense that geeks have not yet been "deskilled". Once management thinks they've found the "formula" for doing IT work, though, we're in the same boat as most humans, striving to preserve the product of our labor.
Anarchy: A Hard Sell
In one of my earlier posts, I commented on the barriers to the wider popular acceptance of anarchy. Most people doubt it's achievability or pragmatism. To a certain extent, I sympathize: it's difficult to model a world free of privilege and rulers in our minds. I can't disagree with their suspicion that such an experience would hardly be recognizable devoid of such overbearing features as police, taxes, corporations, nation states, etc. As manipulative and constricting as these institutions are, they at least provide a structure on which to rely. And most people just want to live their fucking lives.
As an alternative to the never-ending snake oil sales of mainstream statist politics, there's little anarchy can provide to fill that gap save theories and predictions. We want humanity to self-manage, organize in an unencumbered manner, and come up with solutions in a decentralized fashion. That necessarily precludes having "one plan" to rule them all. Accordingly, anarchy is often criticized as having no standard to which it can be held and fairly compared with other statist systems.
When people want answers to questions about how anarchy would look, we can't assume the disingenuous confidence of statists. We feel dirty rambling on wide-eyed about grand plans, complex schemes, and utopian goals - as if somehow this time our leaders will finally get it right somehow. Anarchy rejects top down management as a less efficient way of running things by definition, and people are so used to being sold this magic bullet that they've come to rely on it.
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Readers here know that I've given Feedlounge props in the past, and they were well deserved. Alex King has done a fabulous job creating a feed aggregator that soars above the competition on usability. I love tagging feeds; I love having access to an OPML on the fly; I love the snappiness of the interface. It's clear that Alex put a hell of a lot of pride, sweat, and thought into this application, and I admire him for it.
That's why it's such a shame that customer support is chasing me and others away. It hasn't been the technical problems, though those have been many. Rather, it is the way Alex and company choose to address them.
Feedlounge has experienced intermittent availability issues. I halfway expected this when I came on, seeing as how this was a small team with a potentially monsterous user base. When I signed up, therefore, I expected issues to be handled with competence. I have no way of knowing whether or not they were.
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Just started a new project at work, and it looks pretty intense. I may not be blogging as regularly. I'll try and write on the weekends at the very least.
On the upside, this will give me a great first hand look at organizational behavior in business. I don't plan on drawing any immediate conclusions, but in particular I'm interested in the problems of large scale, centralized business operations. I'm hoping that this will give me a fair glimpse into a dynamic and powerful market player from which I can draw conclusions in the future. But in addition to on the job experience I want to consult some literature on the subject in order to better articulate the mechanisms in play.
The RSS feed for Radley Balko's blog The Agitator is receiving the coveted 1st_priority tag in my Feedlounge. He consistently cranks out some thoughtful writing - most often about vice crimes and paramilitary police activities, but he does venture into some other interesting areas. For instance, he has been covering the sad and disturbing case of Cory Maye, and he reflects on why the mainstream media never got it:
The Associated Press wrote the story up the day happened, and again on the day of Maye's conviction. Nobody thought to follow-up. And Prentiss, Mississippi actually made the front page of the New York Times in 2004. Part of that article touched on the Maye case, too. But the reporter who wrote it had come to the story from a decidedly different angle than I had, and I'd argue consequently missed the story because of it. That's because the reporter, Fox Butterfield, found the Maye case while writing a larger story on how the drug trade was ravaging America's rural communities. When that's your angle, it isn't suprising to see how you might fail to look skeptically at a story about a poor black kid on Death Row for shooting a white cop during a drug raid.
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Taking a stroll down Wikipedia Lane this fine Saturday afternoon (having unfortunately missed what I hear will be a kick ass birthday party for my good friend Andrew, complete with a moon bounce and a keg of Yuengling), I found this interesting paragraph in the article on planned economies:
Taken as a whole, a centrally planned economy would attempt to substitute a number of firms with a single firm for an entire economy. As such, the stability of a planned economy has implications with the Theory of the firm. After all, most corporations are essentially 'centrally planned economies', aside from some token intra-corporate pricing (not to mention that the politics in some corporations resemble that of the Soviet Politburo). That is, corporations are essentially miniature centrally planned economies and seem to do just fine in a free market. As pointed out by Kenneth Arrow and others, the existence of firms in free markets shows that there is a need for firms in free markets; opponents of planned economies would simply argue that there is no need for a sole firm for the entire economy. (My emphasis)
The above excerpt contains several interesting points (the Politburo comparison is delicious!), but I emphasized the idea I find most central and far-reaching. I'm not familiar with Arrow's work, but I plan to look into it. The observation that firms exist in free markets, after all, begs the question about whether what we have now is actually a free market.
As I and many others have remarked before, corporations do resemble little planned economies. Within their own internal domains they have the same problems of allocation, cost accounting, and informational distortion that plague any communist bureaucracy. However, whether or not the corporation is the most economically efficient mechanisms for doing business is not at all clear, given the extent of forcible state intervention on their behalf. It may be that in an actual free market, no central planning of any kind is needed!
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The Molinari Insitute has a fair amount of resources for individualist anarchists, and their new journal The Industrial Radical promises to be an excellent source for digesting anarchist writing by subject matter.
The title "Industrial Radical" honors the libertarian and individualist anarchist thinkers and activists of the 19th century, who were "industrial" in the sense of championing what they called the industrial mode of social organization, based on voluntary cooperation and mutual benefit, over the militant mode, based on hierarchy, regimentation, and violence; and who were "radical" in the sense of recognizing that social problems are embedded in sustaining networks of institutions and practices, and so can be addressed only via thoroughgoing social change. Their approach informs our vision.
If you're interested in taking anarchism - the authentic free market - seriously, I urge you to support this journal and the institute.
Via Radley Balko, another update on the tragedy that is Hudson v. Michigan. Justice Antonin Scalia cited a book, Taming the System: The Control of Discretion in American Criminal Justice, by academic Sam Walker to justify his opinion castrating the exclusionary rule. This rule bars evidence from a trial collected when police do not conduct themselves properly; in this case, executing a no-knock search without cause. The citation used by Scalia referred to "increasing professionalism" in law enforcement as a reason to use evidence obtained in violation of rules and standards. Walker is not happy about the citation, as he explains in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times:
First, I learned that Justice Antonin Scalia cited me to support a terrible decision, holding that the exclusionary rule - which for decades prevented evidence obtained illegally by police from being used at trial - no longer applies when cops enter your home without knocking.
Even worse, he twisted my main argument to reach a conclusion the exact opposite of what I spelled out in this and other studies.
The misuse of evidence is a serious offense - in academia as well as in the courts. When it's your work being manipulated, it is a violation of your intellectual integrity. Since the issue at stake in the Hudson case is extremely important - what role the Supreme Court should play in policing the police - I feel obligated to set the record straight.
...
Scalia's opinion suggests that the results I highlighted have sufficiently removed the need for an exclusionary rule to act as a judicial-branch watchdog over the police. I have never said or even suggested such a thing. To the contrary, I have argued that the results reinforce the Supreme Court's continuing importance in defining constitutional protections for individual rights and requiring the appropriate remedies for violations, including the exclusion of evidence.
I argued about this at length a few weeks ago, and supporters of the ruling made a big deal about the "increasing professionalism" argument. But because of the changing roles of law enforcement, talking about "professionalism" misses the point anyway. Again, Balko:
And there's more analysis and evidence of paramilitary police operations at The Agitator.
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