Again with the Linux and Windows

I know, I know; Linux users are zealots, minds eternally closed to anything good about their enemy operating systems. But really, would it be possible for Windows to be any dumber?

I was inspired to contemplate this again, for the first time in a while, while trying to make a v1.1 release of the dozenal computer suite. It’s available for Linux and Windows (and any other system that can compile standard C). I knew the Windows release would be a royal pain in the…uh, ear, so I didn’t think much about it at first and just started slogging through. Then I noticed something.

The Windows release is binaries only. No source code, no test files, no makefiles, nothing but binaries. (If you’re trapped in Windows-land, that means “.exe files”.) These binary files are stuck in a directory and then zipped with the usual Windows “zip” format. Total size of Windows release? 102 kilobytes.

Tiny, right? Right; they’re simple programs, so they’re small. But total size of comparable Linux binary release, compressed with gzip? 45 kilobytes.

And here’s the kicker. Total size of Linux source release? 69 kilobytes. That’s right; the Windows binaries weigh in at nearly twice the Linux source release.

This isn’t particularly diagnostic; indeed, it’s totally unscientific. The compression of gzip is much better than the basic zip I used for the Windows binaries. The vagaries of the compilers could make a big difference in the size of the binaries. But it still highlights the fact that Windows is a crippled system.

Windows is crippled because:

• Windows comes with no standard compression utilities. None. I had to go and download GNU tar and gzip; and even then, I had to download something called 7Zip because I knew the vast majority of Windows users wouldn’t have those two excellent tools on their machine, nor any easy way to put them there. bzip2, lzma, xz compression? Forget it. It’s probably available, and it probably costs a ton, and don’t you dare try to share it with anyone, either.
• The shell sucks. It sucks, and it sucks hard. It’s so completely and thoroughly crippled that only the most basic scripting is possible. It’s got input and output redirection these days, and even pipes, which is certainly good; but its scripting capabilities are minimal. Anyone who’s used to a real shell like bash will constantly feel hampered by its limitations. I’m told that something called “PowerShell” answers this massive deficiency; if so, it’s great that they finally managed in 2008 to provide functionality that every other system had standard in the 1980s.
• Windows comes with no standard build tools. Really, none! There is not a single compiler on the system, for any language! If you want them, you have to go fetch them yourself; and they’re not put somewhere convenient in a repository for you, either! No, sir! You’ve got to either buy some expensive compiler (probably from Microsoft, as I’m sure you’ll be surprised to learn), or you’ve got to fiddle with your system to get a real compiler like gcc on it. Forget about tools like GNU make. It’s certainly possible, but the fact that one has to go through all this rigamarole to get a simple compiler seems a bit much in 2010.

And on and on and on, really. If you use nothing but Windows, you might never notice these things. But once you’ve become accustomed to a better system, it’s like repeatedly banging your head against a brick wall. This isn’t simply familiarity; I’m not elaborately stating, “I’m used to Linux, so it’s better than Windows.” Really, if you get a computer

• without any compression tools,
• without a really functional shell,
• without any build tools whatsoever,

what are you getting? A computer, or a television with a keyboard? Windows makes a computer less a tool than an appliance. I’d like my computer to remain a tool, so I’ll continue using something else.

Praise be to Christ the King!

The dozenal Suite

I’m delighted to announce the release of v0.96 of the dozenal computer suite!

This set of programs provides a complete environment for working in dozenal. You can download source or binaries workable with Linux (x86_64 and x86) and Windows (x86). It includes:

• dec: a program which converts dozenal numbers into decimal ones. Arbitrary precision.
• doz: a program which converts decimal numbers into dozenal ones. Arbitrary precision.
• dozdc: a complete scientific calculator, with treats from simple arithmetic functions all the way to trig functions (along with their inverses), hyperbolic trig functions, logs (in dozenal, decimal, base 2, natural base, and arbitrary bases), and more. Even supports arbitrarily-named variables!
• tgmconv: Converts measurements in customary/imperial to TGM, and vice versa. Includes just about all units that could be useful. Also supports composite units of arbitrary complexity, like S*m2/s.

All in all, I hope these programs will go a long way to making dozenal a first-class citizen, as it deserves to be. Happy mathing!

Praise be to Christ the King!

Our Disastrous Debt Economy

I’m pretty old-fashioned economically, really. I put a relatively new name on my economic opinions (I call them “distributism,” a term derived from “distributive justice” and only in existence for less than a hundred years), but it’s really a set of pretty conservative principles, some of which even Republicans and libertarians will agree with. A few of my fundamental principles:

• An economy, like all parts of society, exists to help its members proceed away from vice and toward virtue. The provision of sufficient quantities of material goods, however it may be done, is a necessary part of this.
• Because economics deals with the distribution of material goods in a society, distributive justice is its fundamental principle. This distinguishes it from, say, criminal law, in which retributive justice is the fundamental principle.
• The bedrock of any economy is production of useful goods for human consumption. We cannot consume what has not first been made. Putting consumption before production is putting the cart before the horse.
• At least considered in the abstract, local is better than remote. The perfection of a society comes in part from possessing the greatest possible degree of self-sufficiency. Thus, encouraging reliance on remote, or even foreign, sources of goods when such goods can be produced locally is a Bad Idea.
• Debt is a burden on an economy; too much debt will cripple or kill it. My grandmother once told me, “If you can’t afford it until tomorrow, wait until tomorrow to buy it.” But she is a child of a different age, with saner principles in her mind.

That last is my topic today. We’re awash in debt. The primary issue most businesses have had during our current “economic crisis” is the inability to acquire more debt quickly enough. Our federal government, even, is in the hole nearly twelve trillion dollars, and that crushing debt is increasing at a record pace while our government lives out to its fullest Dick Cheney’s idiotic principle that “deficits don’t matter“.

The average American’s credit card debt is $8,329. That’s just credit card debt alone; that doesn’t include pesky little things like mortgages, car payments, student loans, hospital bills, and the million other things that people need to take out credit for. Indeed, in 2007 14.7 percent of U.S. families had debt exceeding 40 percent of their income. And then they still had to pay their mortgages, pediatricians, and so on.

Can anyone seriously look at this situation and claim it represents a healthy government and a healthy economy? At first, of course, it seems great; that’s why the Fed “stimulates” the economy by lowering interest rates to encourage people to borrow more. People are flush with cash with which they buy lots of stuff that they otherwise couldn’t afford; this makes car dealers and television salesmen very, very happy, which makes stocks go up, which means people borrow even more because they feel that things are only getting better, and so on. But this is a very limited boost to the economy.

Because, of course, it can only last so long. Eventually, the people lending this money out do actually want it back. With interest. And people begin struggling to make their payments. Many of them default; many of those who do not are forced to forego many purchases which they would otherwise make in order to pay off those bills. Businesses which might have hired one more person with real money, rather than three with debt, have to fire their three debt employees and hire nobody instead while they pay it back. It’s clearly a loss from the individual perspective; but for a while, the economy manages to cancel out those negatives and continue apace, building itself on ever-increasing piles of debt.

Too bad it’s bad debt. Eventually, those individual financial disasters begin to accumulate. They start as a trickle, increase into a flow, and finally crest as a tidal wave. And here we are, at the beginning of the tidal wave, right now, while our years and years of living beyond our means by borrowing for things that we couldn’t afford finally, at long last, catch up to us.

Who’s responsible for this situation? Facially, of course, it’s citizens and businesses who engaged in very risky credit behavior. Namely, it’s almost everybody in the country. But most of these people were relying on advice and on policies from higher up, coming from everywhere from the banks to the Fed itself. I myself, when buying my house, had to deal with constant encouragement from mortgage lenders to spend more than I had, despite my repeated insistence, and provision of a specific maximum figure, that I would spend only this much and no more. Those with less control or knowledge over their financial situation are surely much more likely to succumb.

The banks are really responsible, taking their cue from the Federal Reserve, who encouraged their reckless lending behavior with obscenely low interest rates. (Rates which remain obscenely low even as we speak.) And so, naturally, the banks ended up holding the biggest and heaviest bag when the debt hit the fan. But the banks also had the most money, even if it was funny money. They asked their friends at the Fed and the Treasury to help. And those friends moved heaven and earth to ensure that these banks would never, under any circumstances, face the consequences of their own actions, even as the poor in this great country literally lose house and home for following the advice that the Fed and these banks gave them.

So the banks are the truest of capitalists. Profit is privatized, as they made billions of dollars thanks to the government’s easy-lending policies. But costs are publicized, as the taxpayers of this generation and of countless generations to come pay the price when those policies finally run up against the inevitable wall. This is wrongdoing in the extreme. We have become a country run not by the people, nor even by a despot. We are an oligarchy, in which our very richest get whatever they want, taking the profits of the public largesse while forcing the hoi polloi to stomach the losses.

MSNBC, of all places, put up an interesting monologue which prompted me to return to this topic:

What is said in this video is true. The “Troubled Asset Relief Program,” which sprayed seven hundred billion dollars in free money all over the big banks like a fire hose, is just a drop in the bucket. TARP, combined with other federal programs bailing out the already rich and powerful, comes to 23.7 trillion dollars. This figure comes from our government itself, surely not given to inflating its estimates of its own reckless expenditures.[1] For comparison, the combined GDP of the entire world is only about sixty trillion dollars.

I mentioned earlier my grandmother’s statement, which I’ll go ahead and call Nana’s Principle: if you can’t afford it until tomorrow, don’t buy it until tomorrow. Reactionary advice, indeed. This seemed perfectly natural common sense to her generation; bred in the roaring twenties, matured in the Depression, steeled in the furnace of the Second World War. She and my grandfather, a combat veteran of that war and a sometime coal-miner, were much alike in that way; they grew up growing their own potatoes and shooting a lot of their own meat, and even in their adulthoods didn’t buy what they couldn’t afford. My own mother spent her infancy sleeping in an opened dresser drawer because they couldn’t afford a cradle.

It appears, though, that the apparatus of our government, much of which is only a decade or so younger than that heroic woman from whom I’m honored to be descended, appears incapable of digesting even in its maturity the lessons that she understood by the time she was ten years old. Nana’s Principle, so simple as to seem obvious, is completely beyond it. Its dependency on rich and powerful interests is so pervasive and so complete that it simply cannot contemplate not giving those interests everything they desire, up to and including indebting their country in the amount of over a third of the global gross domestic product to make sure that those interests remain ever rich and ever powerful, and leaving the poor, the workers, and the middle class to foot the enormous bill, in this generation and in the generations hereafter.

As I mentioned earlier, my economic opinions are pretty old-fashioned, though they go by a fancy name. That name is derived from an ancient concept, one hallowed in the annals of philosophy and politics for thousands of years: distributive justice, the giving to each what is his due. That is what distributism is, at its core: the implementation of distributive justice within an economic system. But this bailout system is the exact opposite of distributive justice. It gives profit to recklessness and costs to frugality; it gives benefit to fiscal incompetence, and even to fiscal malice, while thrusting its costs onto the complicit but largely innocent, and certainly less responsible, public. It’s an injustice, pure and simple, a violation of the principles which should guide all economic activity.

We must all pray that our nation recovers from and remedies this idiocy soon.

Praise be to Christ the King!

1. July 2009 Quarterly Report to Congress 137-38 appears to be its first acknowledgment in governmental literature. It appeared in some subsequent quarterly reports, as well; in the January 2010 report, however, it and the entire section it represented appears to be completely missing, without any explanation for the omission that I have uncovered.