I’ve been overwhelmingly busy with trying to start an open-source focused IT company with literally zero financing (yeah, “fat chance” right?) so haven’t had much time to pay to elections lately.

Anyone familiar with my thoughts on geopolitics, economics and political philosophy can probably guess that I perceive a significant separation between the way that establishment political parties portray themselves and the actual policies they adhere to, the way people think and the available menu of parties to choose from, and the way Americanism as a political philosophy is taught through history and the way the situation stands today.

For those who aren’t familiar with my thoughts, or aren’t able to infer just where I believe these political divides to be, you can simply read them directly. Two or three years ago I laid out how the American political landscape is removed from the current menu provided by establishment politics. The basic problem is one of uncomfortable couplings of incompatible principles.

These weird couplings lead to incoherent policies, inventive ways to sell such incompatibilities in elections and then even more inventive ways for supporters of this or that politician to justify just why they favor this or that candidate, having been robbed of any logical foundation for decision.

The mental and even emotional agility required to follow, say, Mitt Romney’s (just to pick someone who is current and known) statements on just about anything tire me, and I’ve got a company to try to establish. And I’m not even in the US right now (Japan, currently).

A close friend of mine from my Special Forces days (which I may be returning to soon in the event my company fails… wahahaha!) met with me the other day and asked me what I thought of Ron Paul. I hadn’t heard of him, so I did what everyone does and asked the internet about it.

It turns out that while the media consciously tries to avoid Ron Paul, he’s all over the internet. Actually, looking at poll numbers, it is amazing he doesn’t get more media time, until you consider what he talks about. (The link is fascinating if you consider that it has been subtitled in German, and contemplate the way a German may interpret this story.)

The man is too correct and too sincere. He is also far too consistent to even sound like a candidate. I found myself disagreeing with him on two areas, but not at all on principles. So implementation arguments I might have with the guy, but all the big stuff I believe him to be dead right about. So I’m endorsing him and I will vote for him if he winds up on the ballot.

Where do I disagree?

Hard VS Soft currency

I subscribe to soft currency Chicago/Friedmanist style economics, Ron Paul is an Austrianist who believes in removing the Federal Reserve completely and returning to the gold standard. I believe the gold standard to be literally impossible to properly implement across the board, and since gold is a major economic commodity today I don’t find it reasonable to base a currency on it. From a practical perspective I don’t see the sense in taking it out of the ground in California at incredible expense only to put it back in the ground in New York or Kentucky. Or London or Tokyo for that matter. People need to trade, so they will trade. A soft currency provides a vehicle through which a farmer can trade cows for soccerballs without having to chop the cow into tiny pieces to buy a single soccer ball. Its a representative wealth vehicle. But it can be mismanaged. Bad management of fiscal policy, whether soft or hard, or even improper regulation of a derivative or certificate market system, can accelerate a boom-bust cycle which I perceive as somewhat inevitable, but exacerbated by mismanagement of policy (and absolutely, unsurvivably catastrophic when linked by society-wide regulatory systems like socialism or fascism).

The problem I see is that hard currencies can be just as easily mismanaged by government as soft currencies, and there is simply no silver bullet (no pun intended) to that situation other than simply removing government from the economic equation as much as possible — and this is the lynchpin of both my ideas and Ron Paul’s. Hard currencies have been abused throughout the ages, and soft currencies have as well. So I see hard VS soft as an issue of practicality and nothing more. I can argue convincingly that abuse of the system — whatever system that is — by government interference is the core problem and that must be the focus even more than any focus on a specific method of wealth conveyance.

Isolationism VS Non-Interventionism

Ron Paul is not an isolationist. He says so himself and he clearly doesn’t believe in that by its purest definition. I don’t believe in isolationism, either. I do believe in a slightly higher level of intervention and martial preparation than he may, however. In particular, he hasn’t had a chance to fully explain his position on recalling all foreign military bases, or even whether that’s what he really means. I don’t think a 100% elemination of all US bases from overseas is wise, specifically with regard to maintaining a global naval capacity. Maintaining a truly open maritime trade environment is what I’m really concerned about, not whether or not we continue to keep forward deployed American armor units in Germany, Poland or Turkey. There are other ways to maintain forward readiness that are cheaper and perhaps more responsible than what we’re doing today, and from a strict security-only perspective a strong navy is the only really critical part of our strategic posture (and I’m an ex-Army Green Beret saying that, not an ex-Navy whatever). When we go beyond that we start getting into really fuzzy discussions (“Well, if this one base in Japan is too important to do away with, why aren’t bases X, Y, and Z in Korea, Germany and England?” &tc.).

Having spent a lot of time in Congress and having heard deep national strategy discussions from time to time, I suspect Dr. Paul probably thinks the same things I do about foreign policy and simply doesn’t have time to get into it during political debates in campaign season. The fact that he could argue reason based on a studied position on these issues, however, defines a significant separation between him and the rest of the politicians from all parties — and that is what scares me a bit.

And that brings me to why the media is shutting him out — including the people who should love this guy at first look: Fox News. The problem with Ron Paul is that he’s really frightening to the establishment. Any establishment. Once an establishment gets large enough it magically gets in bed with government in America, and that is more representative of the fact that we don’t quite really have capitalism in America; not nearly how it was intended to work anyway. The amount of money that is wrapped up in ties to government is only increasing, and that means that large establishments tend to be more reliant on government as time passes, which means that any and all large establishments, whether politically Right or Left (which I don’t believe to be accurate labels any longer) are threatened by ideas like Ron Paul’s. When you hear “the budget went up” it went somewhere, usually to contracted arrangements to federal employee budgets, most of which are not specifically authorized by the Constitution.

Dr. Paul is right about nearly everything I’ve heard him speak on, and the other candidates aren’t really saying much of anything. Its almost like George Friedman, Milton Friedman (no relation), and Ayn Rand got together to run for President — but its just one guy.

If you haven’t made the time to pay attention to the elections because they “just don’t matter” (which is the attitude I was taking until last week) please look Ron Paul up. Listen to some of the things he has to say and the things he has written over the last several decades in office. He knows what he’s talking about and hasn’t changed his story since he was initially elected 12 terms ago. That’s truly amazing in politics in any era.

If my friend happens to read this, I suppose he’ll know what I wound up thinking about Ron Paul.

The wiki was originally closed to public edits because we were really concerned about spam being a problem. Since we weren’t really going to announce the wiki anywhere until we had a decent manual already written (or at least the promising beginnings of one) I didn’t expect any traffic to the wiki — and it doesn’t require much imagination to understand what happens to low-traffic, open-edit wikis tucked in the dusty corners of the web. So I had account creation locked and public edits disallowed.

Well, I was wrong. There has been an enormous amount of traffic to the wiki site, and not primarily by spam bots (which amazes me). There is a huge amount of traffic from people who are looking for a “librecad manual”, a “librecad wiki”, “librecad howto” and “librecad”, in that order. I feel bad about not providing a polished manual already (well, only a little bad, its not like I’m being paid anything for this), and considering the traffic situation it seems that maybe opening edits to the public isn’t as dangerous as I had originally thought.

So I opened things up today and we’ll see where this leads. In the event that spam fighting gets to be too time consuming I’ll just close it off again. That would be a pity, but its the nature of dealing with anything “pubic”.

The reasons for that are pretty basic. On the one hand every business is pretty different from any other business, and the use cases for an ERP system are so varied that there is almost no way the same ERP solution would ever fit everybody. On the other hand, some of the design decisions embodied in Tryton seem to conspire at times to make default/raw deployments of Tryton particularly user unfriendly even for basic use cases like double-entry accounting or just organizing customer contact information.

But again, Tryton never claimed to be anything other than a framework — the canonical modules provided at the centrol Tryton repo were never purported to be anything more than a free, example-oriented fleshing out of the underlying bones.

And that brings me to what I’m about this month. I have a semi-urgent need to get some major time sinks my customer is experiencing to go away and Tryton is not just a good way to do this in the short-term, it is also a great way to start them on the road to solving a lot of time-wasting, ankle-biter problems across the long-term as well because of the way data work can be centralized in a single system this way.

I mentioned above that there are a few awkward-seeming design features to Tryton. That is true for nearly every project, particularly open source ones where it isn’t very unusual for too many cooks to be spoiling many versions of the same family of broth willy-nilly (and occasionally producing masterpieces in the chaos — which is the real point).

But there is a different set of unfortunate situations surrounding Tryton development, problems that cause Tryton to be a little bit confusing to bugtrack, follow development, contribute to, etc. The first problem is the choice of version control system.

Most projects, including the Linux kernel and LibreCAD are developed using Git, and a huge number of such projects either are fully hosted on sites such as GitHub or SourceForge or at least show their face one of the two places (or both). But Tryton uses Mercurial for version control, which drives some developers away (it would have driven me away as well if Tryton weren’t as perfect a fit for my client).

The big issue here is that Mercurial does nearly exactly the same things as Git, in nearly exactly the same way, but colors its nearly identical commands in slighly incompatible ways in an attempt to appear to not be a Git clone and the documentation is laced with (inaccurate) FUD on Git and SVN, which just makes reading it try my patience (and if the comments on the site are any indication I’m not alone). The functional differences between the two being minimal, the presence of two similar, competing systems makes learning the otherwise trivial differences between the two irritating and merely a pain in the ass rather than being something forward and productive to do.

The other major problem with Mercurial is that while it does provide built-in features to make serving private repositories via Apache or other webservers realtively easy, almost nobody does this in practice — and when people do serve their own getting access to actually push to the project is a much more convoluted process than simply doing it on a content management site such as SourceForge or GitHub which already have well understood, well documented and easily discoverable mechanisms for publicly forking, pulling, branching and pushing branches and changes around wherever one likes. People get more antcy about hosting everyone’s forks publicly when its their own “private” repo they are hosting on their own hardware. That is just human nature, but it really makes open source projects turn very closed in a sense.

There is, sort of, a place to do this at mercurial.intuxication.org, but despite the benefit of a cool name, the site itself is rather opaque and weird to use — and breaks down (today, for example, even the FAQ/help page gave me 403 errors). As is somewhat normal for open source projects, the existence of Tryton as a project extends way beyond intuxication. The problem, though, is that Tryton is abnormally nebulous in nature and to a newcomer is very difficult to track — actually, it extends to far that finding all of it across the web is a sub-task of its own — and there is no bounce page maintained anywhere I could find that explains the situation, and much of the existing wiki documentation is not very up to date (part of this being because the wiki is maintained at google and seems to have a very limited set of eligible editors, a pain I fully sympathize with…).

So all of this sucks.

Without spending any more time getting into details I am simply going to state that for the above reasons and others related to the difficulty/complexity of contributing directly to Tryton as a project and getting modules included in the central repo I am putting up a Tryton repo on GitHub, based on the changes I need to make for my client. This is not a fork of Tryton, however. I am not proposing to hack on core Tryton code, or even make big changes to existing key modules (I was originally intending to, but Udo Spallek graciously showed me that this is not as necessary as I originally thought it to be).

So my GitHub goals are not to fork the project, but rather to provide a public window into my otherwise private Tryton module customization and development in a way that is easier to access, understand and contribute to than the current canonical Tryton project. By the end of my project I intend to have a working set of features that include a pass management module (“pass” as in access and vehicle passes/badges for access to restricted areas that expire on a set timeline), contract management module that links to projects, a way for heirarchal groups of parties to relate to one another in a customer -> prime -> super -> sub-contractor sort of relationship (strongly tied to the functionality necessary for contracts and projects to work correctly), and new features to handle the quirks inherent in Japanese language environments where up to four spellings of the same name are correct and should be uniformly searchable.

That’s a lot of work. Its a lot of testing. I don’t have all year to discuss this with a committee, either. So I’m putting this on GitHub as a public window into my private efforts against this problem set, again, not as an actual fork of Tryton. Hopefully once the dust settles I’ll have a set of features that is workable enough to push for inclusion back into the central Tryton project. Of course, GitHub being what it is it wouldn’t be unusual at all for others to fork things on their own and play around — but that’s the beauty of a place like GitHub.

This is, in a sense, what must be done when designing general functions, or correct object design, or deciding what utilities and handy tools should be considered to be “system utilities” and what other are just niche applications or personal tools. The concept of classification implies description, and at a certain level specifying a problem implies the ready resolution of the same problem (pretty neat!). But many times we get the identification of the problem wrong. More correctly, we inadequetely or incorrectly specify a problem and then develop whatever solution naturally follows from this mistaken version of the problem as we (wrongly) understand it.

As I was driving home in the rain today I was thinking about this — both the nature of the specific problems my ERP system needs to solve for the customer and the nature of problem classification itself. This led to a thought on how the precise, yet incorrect understanding of problems can lead to silly things like the widely misquoted statement “mathematics/physics states that bees can’t fly.” But quite clearly they do — which means neither mathematics nor physics is what says bees can’t fly, but rather an inaccurate mathematical model of flight predicts that bees can’t fly. But the misquote above is the more popular concept (its more fun, anyway, because it leaves the door open to magical thinking and the world of foolish mystery). The problem with this thinking is not just that it misleads people into thinking that math and physics don’t work — it also personifies math and physics (as in, creates the idea that “they” are beings of some sort who would attempt to prevent bees from flying as if the “can’t” in the misquote relates to the idea of permission) in a way that is weird and leads to more wrong thinking later. That idea led me down a mental journey into physics and I recalled an article I read recently about M-theory, gravity and General Relativity — and, specifically, the parts in the article that relate to the idea that gravity might be repulsive at great distances.

So… Gravity, at great distances, is it repulsive? Does this make sense? Or is there, perhaps, a misconception of the problem space here? There quite definitely is a miconception of the problem — that is evident in our inability to describe gravity in a mathematically consistent way that reconciles relativity with quantum physics. But what sort of misconception? I’m not part of the physics community, but from the way articles written for the layman put things (which is highly suspect) it seems as though people are personifying gravity a bit much. In other words, they are looking for what gravity “does” and from that trying to derive an accurate model of how gravity does that instead of thinking about what gravitiy “is” and then following the path of consequences to its existence.

The four basic forces (weak atomic, strong atomic, electromagnetic and gravity) are fairly well established. Interactions of things (space/matter/energy) those forces have to explain all phenomena — and so far pretty much do, which indicates that this is likely a correctish concept of the way things are. There doesn’t seem to be room for a fifth basic force, though there may be room for more things or types of things with which they might interact or ways they might interact (that is, unthought of dimensions, unobserved particles, etc, but not new forces themselves).

So… Gravity. It a sense it is a side effect of what happens when you concentrate mass in a single place. We say it “curves” space, though the way I tend to picture this in my mind is more of compression that bending, because bending can only happen to things that are truly unbounded, and space seems to be bounded by itself. The most common demonstration is to take a taught, suspended sheet and place something heavy on it, and then say “like this, it bends the surface down” and then the path of a marble on the sheet when rolled across tends towards the heavy thing. But this is a massive oversimplification.

If we take the suspended sheet as a 2D object then the downward direction that it bends to when something is placed on it represents a third dimension for that thing to bend “to” — hence it is bendable because it is unbounded in a new direction. The situation with space and gravity doesn’t seem to be the same because while we are fairly certain there are far more than 3 simple dimensions, we’re not being told to imagine that space itself bends in a 4th extra direction due to the influence of gravity/the presence of mass.

Another problem is the reason for the bending. Space is being directly influenced by the presence of matter via gravity, wheras the sheet is being influenced by something pressing on it. In other words, to get something to bend in an extra direction/new dimension it must be pushed, not contracted. So space under the influence of gravity behaves more the way that a wet cotton sheet contracts towards a spot that warm, dry air is applied to while the wet remainder stays lose and stretched out than the way that a sheet with something heavy on gets forced down in a single spot by the heavy thing.

And another problem with this sheet example is the rolling of the marble in an attempt to explain how things get drawn toward “gravity wells” in the same way the marble gets drawn to the lower points of the sheet. In the case of gravity the path of something under the influence of inertia is to continue moving in a straight line. But the straightness of that line is through space and gravity has contracted space into a smaller area than it normally would have been (or at least it appears so) and so the “straight” line is now curved relative to things that aren’t as local to the mass as the moving thing is. With the sheet example the path of the marble is actually longer than the original path, so this is a mis-example.

So this explanation and concepts derived from it are wrong. Now let’s return to the 2D sheet, because the number of dimensions really isn’t important here. If we were to draw a straight grid on it (or just a bunch of uniformly even or uniformly random dots), get it wet and then apply a hairdryer to a single part of it, we would start to see a subtle warping of the lines on the sheet, though over the whole sheet the size and general shape of things would remain the same. Now if we traced a line from one side to the other we would continue on that line just fine, but our path would bend toward the point we applied the hairdryer (interestingly, using a bounded space/area the path bends, but the medium itself does not, it just contracts in an area).

A more extreme example (and the one that came to mine while driving) was the shrink wrap we used to use when I was a teenager working at a video store. We would put items for sale into a polymer bag, and then blow hot air on the bag to make it shrink down. Being michievious kids we would sometimes experiment on down times with the stuff, and found that you could really make some weird things happen by blasting select spots of a large, flat sheet of the wrap material when spread out against the wall or floor. We were forcing local contractions on a self-bound 2D plane when we did this on material that was stretched out flat.

What does this have to do with gravity and localized attraction vs distant repulsion? Everything. If we blow hot air at points opposite one another on the same stretched out sheet the wrap material in between the two sheets get stretched tigher. Anything point that is closer to one point than another is pulled away from the center and toward the opposite point — relatively speaking this means that a point that is distant enough from one spot is traveling away from it. And this happens despite the fact that our actual influence on the sheet is constrictive in nature — all pull and no push. If space behaves in anything approaching this, then gravity can easily have a secondary effect of causing points beyond a certain distance from one another to grow further apart and yet not have any properties of repulsion at all. This increasing distance of points beyond a certain distance also does not require that the sheet continues to expand overall, either. That the universe itself likely is expanding just confuses the issue a bit more.

To a tiny observer on a whirling rock out in deep cold space this effect could definitely look forbiddingly like an unfriendly “push” effect to gravity. If that observer were prone to personify elements of existence (in other words, assign blame for effects on them) then it would be very natural to blame the observed possible increasing rate of expansion of the universe on a property of gravity rather than on an indirect effect or condition that it causes. One effect per force makes more sense than having a magical force that somehow exhibits one behavior in one place and yet another in another place.

Of course, the mental idea above that space doesn’t “bend” is going to probably bother people who carry with them a mental model of space as a bendy thing, and of blackholes as places where space “folds back on itself” when contraction is really the issue. The mental picture of a black hole just gets all screwy then — but this is probably more correct, not less. Anyway, with teeny tiny dimensions apparently being all over yet so small in scale, yet so universal because they represent entire dimensional planes that have been prevented from much direct interaction with our normal Euclidian(ish) selves, it seems likely that perhaps the folded up space stuff that makes up matter and energy might just be manifestations of tiny black holes compressed in directions that are just not a part of our 3 spacial dimensions, and all those black holes bubbling in and out of existence could have a lot to do with the basics of why/how all subatomics are unstable, yet predictably so. But that is a whole different discussion.

I am completely unqualified to make any statements about physics anyway, but these were the thoughts that went through my mind as I drove home in the rain. Unfortunately I’ll probably never have the time to really study physics, so the common crap written in the press for the layman (this includes most “science magazines” as well) are all I’ll likely ever get a chance to read and be mislead into dumb mental models like the ones above by.

[Google obviously does plug its own services as if they were search results -- and plugging the Chrome browser is one of the most important things the company could do to exert direct control over what information users see and use over the longer term.]

This would not be legal for a few reasons — one of which is that Google would be able to grant itself an unfair advantage. Hordes of unsavvy internet users who don’t know much about how computers or the internet work would never be able to find things without Google because very often in the minds of millions of lay users Google search equates to the gateway to the internet, and things they click on from the main Google search page are, in their mind, already linked to Google. So Google favoring its own services in search equates to users simply never learning about anything other than Google services. The problem with this is that as hordes of lay users gravitate to one or another online services the network effect comes into play, making which ever service takes an early lead overwhelmingly more important in the market than any other. Evidence of this is everywhere, and for good or ill, the fact is that most data service markets predict a monopoly almost out of necessity.

Google is obviously aware of this, and so are consumer protection groups. The creepy thing about this is that Google is not just offering search and online services, it is trying to offer everything online. Including all of your data. So under the Google model (actually, under all cloud models — which are all dangerously stupid) every bit of your computing data — personal photos, music files, blog posts, document files for work, document files for not work… everything — would be hosted on Google servers and saved on Google Inc.’s hard disks and nothing would be stored on your own disk. In other words, nothing would in any practical way be your own property because you won’t have any actual control over anything. And heaven forbid that an earthquake knocks your internet service out or anything else happens that disconnects you from the internet.

If one can’t see the danger here, one simply doesn’t have their thinking cap on. Anyway, this being a dangerously stupid way to handle your personal data is beside the point — the majority of internet users do not understand the issues well enough to know that its not a good idea to not manage their own data storage. But then again, most people don’t even recognize that their entire existence is merely a specific reordering of pre-existing matter, and therefore by definition simply a specific set of data. The information a person generates or intersects with in their life is the sum total of what they are — and this, of course, goes quite beyond being important somewhere on the web and as technology advances over the next few decades will increase in importance as the very nature of who and what we are increasingly mingles with automated data processes.

This is the real goal — extend monopoly to information as a general concept, and thereby generate a monopoly on modern existence (and I’m not simply talking about some ephemeral concept of what it is to be “modern” — in concrete terms we really are just masses of information). If there ever was a brilliant business plan, this is it. And it is a bit scary to think things might go that way. Google’s “Don’t be evil” theme is just words — as I have written elsewhere on this blog about how geopolitics works, power is about capability not about intent. Muslims may adhere to a religion based entirely on absolute social and political dominance of the planet, but being incapable of actually achieving it makes them a geopolitical nuisance over history instead of the driving force of history. On the other hand America’s intention is absolutely not to actually colonize and take over the world, but the fact that it is actually capable of doing this makes lots of people (even some Americans) panic and/or kick and scream about what they perceive as “American Imperialism” even though this is in no way the actual case.

So what about Google? That Google actually is developing the situation to make a drive at information monopoly is one thing. Their intent to not be evil is merely an intent. The capability expressed by a realized information monopoly would be of much more importance to the 1st world than even an American capability to successfully invade Skandinavia, for example, and is therefore something that should be guarded against.