Blog

  • We are centrally planned and we are vulnerable

    John Robb writes an excellent post arguing that the concentration of wealth in the United States has resulted in a centrally planned economy. I wanted to expand on his writing.

    After World War II, there was a widely held view that Nazi Germany was the result of failed capitalism. Economists and political scientists in the UK and across much of western Europe thought that Capitalism was a bad thing and the answer was socialism.

    A now famous economist called Fredreich von Hayek argued in The Road to Serfdom, published in the early 1940’s, that Nazi Germany was actually the result of central planning. He suggested that a centrally planned government is destined to become fragile and is easily seized and taken over by those that might not play by the rules.

    Hayek was based in England, but his book was far more popular in the United States and it may be the reason we ended up with a free market economy post WWII.

    John Robb’s idea is a new and useful lens to examine our political and economic decline: Through capitalism gone wild, we may have ended up with all the trappings of socialism after all.

     

     

  • The world is now paying the US government more to store their money.

    I ran across this page on the Treasury’s website via Marc Cuban’s blog. It shows the yield on US government treasury bonds, adjusted for inflation. If the yield on a bond is 3% and inflation is 2.5%, the real yield is 0.5%.

    So in inflation adjusted terms, anyone buying 5yr treasuries today is paying the US government 1.02% per year to store their money.

    Curiously, after the downgrade, the world is paying the US government even more to store their money.

     

    Treasury real yield curve

  • Why are people in London rioting? (video interview from the BBC)

    This is the other point of view. An interview the BBC probably won’t air again.

    I don’t condone violent demonstrations and I think the the looting of small businesses is sad and immoral. But you should understand that sometimes when people hit the streets en masse and make some noise, it has a purpose. It can’t be explained away by labeling them “rioters”.

    It happened during apartheid in South African where I grew up and it brought about a peaceful transition of power in the South African government.

    Back then we used to call Nelson Mandela a terrorist. Today he is Madiba, one of the most loved humans on Earth.

    If you’ve heard the music of Linton Kwesi Johnson (LKJ), you’ll recognize Darcus Howe’s sentiments. Powerful stuff.


    Update: Here is LKJ reciting Sonny’s Lettah, live.


  • Advanced WordPress: How to get Real WordPress Commenter IP Addresses behind your Nginx Proxy

    News [April 24th, 2012]: I’ve launched Wordfence to permanently fix your WordPress site’s security issues. Click here to learn more.

    If you run a reasonably high traffic blog on a small Linode server like this one, it’s a really good idea to set up an Nginx front-end proxy for your Apache server. It lets you handle relatively high traffic without running out of apache children while keeping keep-alive enabled.

    You can read more about how to set up Nginx and other tips on my Basic WordPress Speedup page.

    If you have set up Nginx, you’ll notice that your comments no longer have the real IP address of visitors to your site. They’re all 127.0.0.1 or something similar.

    The way I solved this was to edit my php.ini file. On my Ubuntu server this lives in /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

    I modifed the auto_prepend_file variable to look like this:

    auto_prepend_file = /etc/php5/apache2/mdm.php

    Then in the mdm.php file I put this:


    <?php
    $mdm_headers = apache_request_headers();
    $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] = $mdm_headers["X-Forwarded-For"];
    ?>

     

    This assumes you have the following line in your Nginx.conf to forward the real IP address:

    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;

     

  • Further update on TimThumb from Matt

    I just noticed Matt put a post up this morning giving a further update re TimThumb. You can read it here.

  • Now hold still honey while I rub this radioactive dirt on your face…

  • Watch the last 2 hours of trading live if you can

    I have a sinking feeling there will be blood. Right now Dow is down 4.45%, S&P down 5.69%, Nasdaq down 5.7%, Gold up 3.87% and rising. The DAX closed down 5% and the worst drops happend towards end of trading, so I’m expecting the same for US markets.

    Update: I hate to say I told you so. Ugh!

     



  • What physicists do for fun during a nuclear detonation

    During a test in the Nevada desert of a miniaturized nuke called Scorpion, theoretical physicist and weapons designer Ted Taylor used a parabolic mirror to light a cigarette. Ah the good old days.

    This is an extract from Under The Cloud by Richard Miller:

    Extract from Under The Cloud by Richard Miller
    Extract from Under The Cloud by Richard Miller

  • TimThumb users and WordPress Theme users using TimThumb, please upgrade

    News [April 24th, 2012]: I’ve launched Wordfence to permanently fix your WordPress site’s security issues. Click here to learn more.

    I’ve done a ton of work on TimThumb this weekend and there are a few great enhancements. E.g. if you have pngcrush or optipng installed, it will now use 66% less disk space and give you comparable quality images.

    Please grab the latest version of TimThumb on this page. Then let me know if you have any feature requests or find any bugs by reporting them here.

    Here’s the TimThumb changelog since I released 2.0 about 48 hours ago.

  • Poem: When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

    This is a wonderful poem by Walt Whitman where he explores how the formalization of science and nature robs it of it’s mystery and wonder. If you’re a programmer who has done any time at a University, you’ll recognize Whitman’s sentiment.

    It first appeared in the “By the Roadside” section of the standard 1892 edition of Leaves of Grass.

    When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
    When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
    When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and
    measure them;
    When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much
    applause in the lecture-room,
    How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
    Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
    In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
    Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.