Covetousness Is Evil

I was talking to Kemp, the fellow who did the trailer for Finding Time, and I mentioned Amanda Palmer's TED talk on "The art of asking."My daughter was within earshot and she asked in disbelief, "How do you know Amanda Palmer?" And I said, "She did the TED talk. How do you know Amanda Palmer?" And she named a band I'd never heard of that made "angsty" music.

The entire exchange had this weird vibe. Like she thought I ought not know who Amanda Palmer is, and that she thought I ought not know that my daughter knows who Amanda Palmer is. So, maybe there was something more than generational going on here.

My daughter knows my music tastes run more toward Southern Guitar Rock and away from angsty oughts alternative/punk/folk. Ms. Palmer says her music is not for everybody after all. So, I'm comfortable being part of that not-everybody.

After I saw the TED talk, I got to remembering that I'd heard about the "Kickstarter Scandal" of last fall. The TED talk was the perfect response. Someone says something nasty and snarky about what you're doing and you can articulate a response in a TED talk that more people will see than read The Newyorker.

I suspect that the Kickstarter Scandal was a faux flap caused by jealous people who didn't get a piece of the action. Or that was intentional obtuseness by people who prefer the current model of record companies, record promoters, etc. and would like to ape Microsoft's FUD strategy for fighting Linux. If you have a healthy income that comes from the status quo, any innovation that threatens to disintermediate you is a scary, scary thing. I think we saw that last year with the campaign of hate against Linda Chorney.

(The Microsoft FUD campaign against Linux was to hire the now-defunct SCO to bring a nuisance copyright-suit against various Linux vendors in hopes of scaring potential Linux customers to use Microsoft instead.)

I think Ms. Palmer's Kickstarter scandal has something to say about humanity as a species and the USA in particular. In response to the flap, Ms. Palmer issued an apology. Not the "I'm sorry" kind of apology you normally associate with the word, but the "Socrates" kind of apology that consists of a reasoned explanation of one's actions. (I certainly hope she is not about to be force-fed hemlock.)

It seems that when you run a Kickstarter campaign that grosses almost 1.2 megabucks people think you convert it into gold coins and dive into it like Scrooge McDuck. Or that somehow having that kind of responsibility turns you into Mr. Monopoly with an affinity for wearing striped pants. The Occupy Movement is somehow involved and the entire question of "the rich" paying their "fair share" comes to mind.

The Scarlet Letter that many want to sew onto Ms. Palmer's breast stands for "avarice." And they think she's earned this letter because she invites local artists on-stage to play with her. Doing so means that she is not paying union scale, nor FICA taxes, either. In her defense she said those exploited artists "like" doing it.

In her defense, I say, nobody holds a gun to anybody's head. Except the taxman.

When I was a child, evil, godless Commies had nukes aimed at us. We feared they would corrupt our precious bodily fluids. Happily, now I drink fluoridated water, those nukes are rusting in their silos, and the hammer and sickle flies over Pennsylvania avenue.

The godless aspect of Communism stems from an inherent contradiction between the Judeo-Christian ethic and Communism. When you hear people talk about redistributive economic justice, you are witnessing a violation of the 10th Commandment. Moses came down from the Mount carrying two tablets of the law and the second finished with, "Thou Shalt Not Covet."

The advocate for redistributive economic justice covets the stuff of the 1%. S/he/it need not covet it for himself/herself/itself--as much as to buy goodies for the downtrodden. This helps buy the votes of the downtrodden, so everybody wins except the 1% who are moving to Singapore. The covetousness of the Socialist is insatiable as Monty Python observed decades ago with lupins.

The 10th Commandment is why Christianity and Socialism are contradictory. Try to remember this next time you're voting for Santa Claus.

And when Moses came down from that Mount the other tablet said, "Thou Shalt Not Steal." Stealing used to be easy to understand. You take one of Moses' stone tablets and he doesn't have it any more. He'd have to laboriously carve words into a replacement. This is stealing.

But what if Moses had the law on two CDs, and you illegally copied one. He'd still be able to boot up Judaism. Would that be stealing? No, it is not stealing. It's a violation of US Copyright law. It's an amazing thing that corporations have managed to confuse the two notions.

Part of Ms. Palmer's $1.2M went into the production of CDs. If you take one of those CDs from her, she no longer possesses it. But if you make a copy from your friend, your friend still possesses the CD.

When you violate US Copyright law, you diminish a bit of scarcity from this world. Publishing companies would prefer that you fill the silence of your life with music, ebooks, and software that they sell. As these things are scarce & in demand, you are inclined to pay more. As they are not-scarce or not-in-demand, you are inclined to pay less. Therefore, your violation of US Copyright law takes bread from the mouths of publishing companies.

Just because I say this is not stealing, I don't want to give you the impression that US Copyright law is in any way illegitimate. Copyrights are mentioned in the Constitution. So some form of copyrights are legitimate intellectual property. In its current form, US Copyright law is the best law money can buy. Try to remember this next time you're voting Republican. Or Democrat.

Amanda Palmer has gone from being a musician with a record deal (from whom each violation of US Copyright law cost her money) to a musician with no record deal who encourages everyone to copy and share her tunes. But she asks her fans for help.

Only 25,000 people provided the money for Amanda Palmer's Kickstarter campaign. The people wanting to pin the scarlet letter on her chest are different people. I hold that unless you were one of the Kickstarter supporters, you have no standing to complain about how that money gets spent.

Ms. Palmer is comfortable with giving away value to her audience and asking for help. There's a sense in which she's like the waitress who quits the job where an 18% gratuity is added to every bill and taken another job where she earns tips on the basis of grace and not law.

I hopes she does well and I hope more people follow her example.

Living In The Future

Just got back from the Apple store.

When I bought my MacBook Air, I knew I was spending a lot more than I would for an ultrabook computer running, say, Linux. I take a great deal of pride in my geek status and that makes the Linux alternative seductive.

I also like the total control Linux gives me.

Nevertheless, I bought my MacBook just so I could make an appointment, stroll into the Genius Bar and make pointing motions and grunting sounds whereupon a pleasant young person (when you're my age, everyone's a young person) will discern my intent and then do something marvelous like reformat the laptop's drive, wipe out all my personal data, and reinstall the operating system for the low, low cost of FREE. Which is what the guy just did. Bravo.

Granted, I could have dropped in on the Grand Rapids Linux User's Group and found a pleasant True Believer in Linux who'd do the same thing. But if I were to do that, I'd have to learn a lot more about what we were doing. And because the process has a lot more visibility into what's going on, I'd likely see something questionable to make me worry that I'd Done Something Wrong. And since we don't do this sort of thing every day, that would be much more likely. A lot more anxiety, sturm und drang!

Total control does have its disadvantages.

No. I paid a few hundred bucks more up front to get some predictable, reliable hardware, and FROM THEN ON I can visit the Apple Store, feign ignorance, (It's getting so I don't have to pretend as much nowadays.) and they make the software Just Work.

Steve Jobs set up systems that Just Work and whenever I deal with Apple, or when I use their products, I may be paying more, but when I do I'm living in the future. I like living in the future.

Will Raspberry Pi Destroy Civilization?

My Raspberry Pi arrived in the mail today. I anxiously waited until work was done and then started hooking it up.

To make it go, you download a Linux distribution, then burn it onto a SD chip. I followed instructions, installed the Raspberry variant of Debian and it worked. I typed startx at the command line and it was just like 1989 again running X windows.

After I remembered how little I got done in 1989, I looked at installing the XBMC package on it.

Well, the way you install XBMC onto a Raspberry Pi is just download another Linux distribution, then overwrite the SD chip you just got done working on. Well, OK. Did that.

Now, please don't get the false impression that I didn't overlook something obvious and do something stupid that is at the root of the badness I'm about to recount.

You run the Rasbmc and the first thing it does is download the latest-greatest version of itself. I don't think it's completely stable. Or maybe something is flaky in the hardware. It had to restart about three times. After it got installed, the video started cutting out, then starting again, then cutting out over and over again.

Maybe it's got a thermal problem. So, I propped the thing up and set a fan blowing on it. No joy.

Maybe it's got a power problem. So, I unhooked the radio-keyboard-mouse dongle scrounged up a USB hub and plugged the dongle into it.

After another cycle of reboots and redownloads, I got XBMC running stable enough to set things up. This took a while--a long while. Most of the problem was the sluggishness of XBMC running on the Raspberry Pi. And this might be explained by the fact that a lot of network traffic was going on as it was adding my terabyte library of videos in the basement to its database.

But the result was a lot slower than anything I'd experience with any other computer.

At $35, the Raspberry Pi is a lot cheaper than the reasonably priced Apple TV $99. And the Raspberry Pi is a wide open system whereas the Apple TV 3 is locked down and there's no jailbreak available at present. It was just like 2002 configuring Red Hat.

The bottom line is that I've managed to waste the entire evening messing with a computer the size of a cassette tape. If that is not what you want to do, buy an Apple TV, but get an older version you can Jail break.