News from the front

Barack Obama will be the next president of the USA. People, let’s get optimistic again and get the economy going.

On a side note, life is imitating 24:! Quick, get Jack Bauer on speeddial!

Parece que Marx tinha razão. O mundo convergiu natural para o comunismo.
O presidente dos USA é comunista, a FED é comunista, os chefes de estado europeus são comunistas. Depois desta onda de nacionalizações restam poucas bolsas de resistência capitalista no hemisfério ocidental.

Esperamos que o PREC seja calmo e sereno.

Sinfest++

As an habit, Open Source as been equaled to communism, particularly on the USA where “communist” seems to be an insult. Let’s deconstruct that and see who the real communists are.

Communism is characterized by monopolistic entities controlled by a single head. Everyone buys from and works for the entity. There are no alternatives.
The goal of a capitalist company is maximizing shareholder return. This simply means minimizing expenses and maximizing income to yield more profit. Maximizing income means selling more at higher prices which means end game for a capitalist venture is achieving 100% market quota and staying there. Once The Company is the sole employer and raw materials buyer in that market the minimizing costs problem solves itself. Also, without competition quality isn’t an issue which also helps lowering the cost.
Sounds familiar ? It should. The end game for a capitalist company is creating a communist market where The State is The Company. All aspects of the market are dictated by The Head of The Company and competition is kept out of the market through a number of mechanisms from dumping to unnecessary incompatibility. For a case-study of nearly all the mechanisms see the history of Microsoft. If you join Apple’s story you get basically all the mechanisms, probably except murder.

Now lets look at the Open Source market. By definition, there is no monopolist entity because property must be licensed to everyone and noone can turn it back into a closed monopoly. There are no artificial technological barriers so it’s a level market. In fact it’s not much of a market at all. So where’s the market ?
In the Open Source market software is a commodity and services are the actual traded good. In the monopolist model services are also traded goods but secondary and tied by the monopoly. In the Open Source economy services, be them support, custom development or whatever the market requires, are the unique scarce resource. Scarcity isn’t generated artificially as the tools and knowledge to create services are readily available. It’s natural as service interactions are singular.
Since there are no barriers to entry the Open Source service market is a truly open market where price is regulated only by quality of work and delivery capacity.

So turns out the end goal of the software capitalist enterprise is to create a communist market and the end goal of Open Source is to create a capitalist market.
All the western states have laws in regulations in place to keep capitalist enterprises from reaching their end goal but none have laws to keep Open Source from reaching its end goal.
So, who’s the real Stalin ?

Peak oil is definitely here to stay. Oil states have figured out they need to milk their resources for all they’re worth as opposed to keeping price controlled for the sake of USA internal politik.
While there’s some very interesting analysis out there on how we got here and where we’re heading in the near future some insta-pundits are doing forecasts on the 30 to 40 year range which is idiotic and in some cases down right funny.

Around one week ago I caught a debate on BBC Prime (or was it World ?) about the oil crisis where a commenter declared the oil would keep rising in the 40 year scale, there was no way out of it and and there was no way technology could save us.
That’s it, people are declaring on TeeVee there’s no way technology will rid us of oil based economy in the 30 to 40 year time frame.
Luckily there was someone with some sense on the show who pointed out the peak blubber oil crisis 100 years ago where everybody was worried about how they would be able to light and warm their homes given the rising price of (blubber) oil. So, you don’t need to be a technologist, engineer or scientist to figure out there will probably be a technology way out of all this. All you really need is a brain!

More about this in /green

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