Author: Carsten Agger

Økonomisk liberalisme for dummies

Markedet ordner det hele, hører vi ofte. Hvis bare man tager folks sygesikring og kontanthjælp fra dem, skal de nok finde et job, det virker jo så godt i USA og Indien. Er der andre end mig, der har svært ved at følge med i, hvordan det virker?

Så er det godt, vi har Bad Tux, der tilbyder et lynkursus:

Okay, first of all, economies are like magic zoos, see. There are lions and tigers and bulls and bears, oh my, and stuff goes in and stuff goes out and like everybody lives happily ever after and such. So how do these “economy” thingies work? Well, first of all, meet the Free Market Fairy:


Now, the first thing the Free Market Fairy does is, like, jizz magic free market fairy dust all over the place by waving her (his?) magic wand around. This free market fairy dust is then gathered together by the Invisible Hand (no picture, because the Invisible Hand is, like, invisible, like God and Dick Cheney’s conscience and stuff like that), which turns it into magical Competition Unicorns which then excrete magical substance called Choice that makes all goods cheap and widely available. Here is a picture of a Competition Unicorn:

Now, as you can see, the magical substance is excreted at the nether end and then consumers get all the benefit of this “Choice” thingy, which is, like, rainbows and sunshine and puppy dogs, oh my, and guarantees that you’ll always get great service at a great price, sort of like those TV preachers who guarantee that if you send them a million billion dollars you’ll go to a place where magic unicorns live and some hairy old dude has a lot of mansions for everybody to live in.So anyhow, these magic unicorns poop this “choice” stuff and then we get all the benefits of low prices and good service. Like, at my house, I have a lot of this Choice stuff when it comes to high speed Internet — I have Comcast, and I have, err, Comcast. Hmm. I must be wrong, because these magic Competition unicorns are EVERYWHERE, even though nobody’s ever seen them outside of narrow marketplaces for consumer baubles, and thus there’s ALWAYS a choice, just like my choice between Comcast and, err, Comcast, for high speed Internet. The Competition Unicorn *does* exist, like Santa Claus, magically bringing gifts to all the deserving people. And if you don’t get gifts from this magic competition unicorn, why, it just means you’re a bad person and probably deserve to get coal in your Christmas stocking, ho ho ho!

And that’s right wing economics in a nutshell.

Link: Right wing economics in a nutshell.

ETA R.I.P.

Den baskiske separatist- og terrorbevægelse ETA har opløst sig selv – besejret af den spanske stat, den bekæmpede, og en baskisk befolkning, der ikke vil vide af den.

Jeg har en masse meninger om dette, men ikke så meget igen at have dem i. Jeg vil i stedet citere Luistxo Fernández, der med base i Donostia (San Sebastián) er helt anderledes tæt på:

So, ETA ended its war. The ergative energy worked. Even Tony Blair had something prepared for the occasion, though he couldn’t come to town. Fresh air in the city. A sense of relief for almost everybody, that’s what I feel among the Basques. Lots of interesting analysis and posts have been written over the last days, and one feature in common among those that are most interesting (imho) is that they’ve been written from a personal point of view. I have some examples in Spanish at hand, if you can read the language: Juan Carlos Etxeberria, Mitxel Ezkiaga and Ander Iza. (3 journalists).

I feel like I could also write from that perspective, ’cause this also has affected my life (I’m 44). But I’m not in the mood. There will be pieces from our lives that won’t be written.

Will I or my two children see an independent Basque Country some day? I want that to happen. The defeat of ETA was a prerequisite for that, I believe.

https://i0.wp.com/29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lterqqAgVw1qion5qo1_500.jpg?w=840

Some newspapers, this friday. A photo that had to be taken long ago, by a fine Basque photographer, Juan González Andrés, El Humilde Fotero del Pánico.

Et paradoks, men Luistxo har uden tvivl ret: ETAs undergang var en forudsætning for, at Baskerlandet kan blive uafhængigt. Vil det så ske? Who knows – den form for nationalisme er måske lidt gammeldags i vores globaliserede verden, men det ser uden tvivl anderledes ud i en trængt kultur som den baskiske eller walisiske for at nævne to oplagte eksempler.

TV-folk: Vi laver en ny sæson af The Wire, hvis I legaliserer narkotika

Den amerikanske justitsminister Eric Holder appellerede i sidste uge til, at der bliver lavet en ny sæson af den fænomenale TV-serie The Wire.

David Simon’s og Ed Burns’ svar? Ja, hvis I standser “krigen mod narkotika”:

“I want to speak directly to [Co-creator Ed] Burns and Mr. Simon: Do another season of The Wire,” Holder said, adding, “I have a lot of power Mr. Burns and Mr. Simon.”Late last week, Simon replied with a counteroffer:

The Attorney-General’s kind remarks are noted and appreciated. I’ve spoken to Ed Burns and we are prepared to go to work on season six of The Wire if the Department of Justice is equally ready to reconsider and address its continuing prosecution of our misguided, destructive and dehumanising drug prohibition.

Hvilket selvfølgelig får én til at tænke på miseren i sæson 3, hvor en enkelt politichef beslutter sig for at afkriminalisere stoffer i et enkelt område, Hamsterdam. Og naturligvis endte med at blive fyret og degraderet, for det går jo ikke. Heller ikke selv, om kriminaliteten i området nærmest forsvandt.

Palæstinensiske aktivister tager “whites-only”-busser til Jerusalem, bliver anholdt

Hvad gør myndighederne i “Mellemøstens eneste demokrati”, når medlemmer af den forkerte etniske gruppe vil tage bosætternes busser fra Vestbredden til Jerusalem?

De slår ned, præcis som myndighederne i de amerikanske Sydstater gjorde i 60erne:

Six Palestinians seeking to emulate the “freedom rides” in the segregated southern United States of the 1960s by travelling in a West Bank-to-Jerusalem bus alongside Jewish settlers were arrested by Israeli police yesterday.

The Palestinian activists managed to board a number 148 bus outside the West Bank settlement of Psagot, near Ramallah, but the bus was halted and the activists taken off near the Hizma entry terminal to Jerusalem.

Three walked off the bus under police escort but another three, including one woman, Huwaida Arraf, resisted and were dragged off it by force amid shouts of “Stop the apartheid”, and “I have the right to go to Jerusalem”.

Police had earlier boarded the bus at the checkpoint to persuade the activists to leave of their own accord as supporters waved banners, including one – in an echo of the famous speech by civil rights activist Martin Luther King – proclaiming: “We have a dream.”

Two of the activists were told by a police officer: “You are detained. Please get off the bus. If not we will have to use force.” One of the Palestinians, Nadim Sharabati, a 33-year-old blacksmith from Hebron, told the officer: “This is racial discrimination between me and the settlers. Why don’t you take permits from the settlers when they come to us?”

When the police officer told the men: “I am asking in a civilised way, with respect,” the other man, Badiya Dweik, replied: “If you respected us you would treat us like [you treat] the settlers.” When the officer asked if he had a permit, Mr Dweik replied: “Why do you not ask the settlers for a permit?”

Another of the Palestinian activists, Fadi Quran from El Bireh adjacent to Ramallah, asked the officers, in an apparent reference to the settlers: “Why are you protecting the Klu Klux Klan?”

Link: Palestinians board settler’s bus

Fængslingen af Alaa er et angreb på hele den egyptiske revolution

Den egyptiske forfatter Ahdaf Soueif i The Guardian:

Alaa is a techie, a programmer of note. He and Manal, his wife and colleague, work in developing open-source software platforms and in linguistic exchange. They terminated contracts abroad and flew home to join the revolution. In Tahrir he moved between groups; listening, facilitating, making peace when necessary, defending the square physically when he had to.

He started the TweetNadwa series – the corporeal meetings of the Twitter community. In one of those, in Tahrir, I understood the remarkable role he played. We sat on the ground, a screen displaying rolling tweets, discussing the restructuring of Mubarak’s brutal security apparatus. Comments and questions could only use two minutes. If you liked what you heard you fluttered your raised hand. Passersby stopped and, intrigued, they stayed and contributed. The numbers grew to over a thousand from every background: enabled, together, working out ways forward, and Alaa in the middle, facilitating, directing, articulating, engaged, and passionate. (…)

He was to enter a major confrontation with the military when, on 9 October, a peaceful (mainly Coptic) protest was attacked by the army and, worried, Alaa went looking for his friend, the activist Mina Daniel. He found him in the Coptic hospital, among the dead.

Alaa and his friends then did something remarkable; from the morgue they took on the entire system. In the face of the hospital issuing death certificates from “natural causes” they persuaded the stricken families to demand autopsies. Activist lawyers pressured the public prosecutor to order them. They fetched the coroner and his staff and persuaded them to carry out the autopsies in the presence of physicians whom they trusted. And then they sat them individually with the families to explain the reports to them.

The hospital morgue only had three drawers, so all the while they treated the bodies of their comrades with ice and fans, and they treated the anger, grief and suspicion of the families with tears and embraces and explanations. Thus they foiled the attempt to cause sectarian violence, and to get rid of the evidence of the bodies, and they mobilised the families to demand an investigation.

Og nu er han i fængsel, fængslet af en af de illegitime militærdomstole for at have “opfordret til vold mod militæret”. Soueif skriver: No one believes that the military believe the charges they’ve levelled against Alaa; in attacking this central, charismatic figure they appear to be openly mounting an attack on the very spirit of the revolution.

Det er i alle tilfælde i disse måneder, at det afgøres, om oprøret i Egypten skal ende med at gøre en permanent forskel – eller om militæret med trofast støtte fra Vesten vil fortsætte deres egen udgave af Mubaraks terror.

Overophedning af bærbar med Ubuntu 11.04

Jeg har en i grunden ret god bærbar computer (en Acer Aspire S740), der dog det sidste halve års tid har lidt under, at den bliver ganske umanerligt varm. Batteriet holder heller ikke længere så lang tid, som det burde. I nogle måneder har jeg troet, at det var fordi der samles støv ved blæseren, så den ikke ventilerer ordentligt. Men så kom jeg til at zappe ind på OMGUbuntu, hvor det fremgår, at det handler om en fejl i den måde, hvorpå Linux-kernen håndterer strømstyringen for Intel-CPU’er   og indbyggede Intel-grafikkort:

As of kernel 2.6.38 up until 3.1 (still present) there has been a problem of power regression but besides this I had slight problem with overheating. Regarding overheating in beginning I tried reporting bugs, tried different Thinkfan configurations, blamed proprietary software such as Adobe Flash for spiking up CPU temperature, however this problem was somewhat solved. After numerous battery calibrations and as these didn’t work in the end for battery life getting poorer with each day, I just blamed the factor that notebook  was getting pretty old (~3 years).

Then the consumer woke up inside of me and I thought it was time to get new notebook. I laid my eyes upon ThinkPad X1 thing of beauty except one mayor drawback, its price. I did some reading on X1 and interesting enough, X300 comes with Core Duo 2 L7100 but overheating + power regression was still present even on latest Intel Core I* series. Reading this killed the consumer and woke up the hacker side.

Den korte og ikke-tekniske forklaring er, at der i Ubuntu 11.04 blev introduceret en fejl i kernens måde at håndtere strømstyring for Intel-CPU’er. Denne fejl betyder, at computeren bruger for meget strøm og derfor bliver for varm. Dette betyder selvfølgelig også, at batteriet holder kortere tid pr. opladning. Men hvad kan man gøre ved det?

Det korte svar er, at der er lavet en rettelse i Linux-kernen, som formentlig vil komme med i Ubuntu 12.04, og som løser problemet.

Det lidt længere og mere tekniske svar er, at man kan tvinge kernen til at styre strømmen korrekt ved at introducere nogle parametre til kernen i opstartsmenuen. Hvis du har Ubuntu 11.04 og du har en bærbar med dette problem, kan du gøre som følger:

  • Åbn en terminal og åbn filen “/etc/default/grub” i din favorit-editor: 
    sudo gedit /etc/default/grub
  • Erstat den linje, der begynder med GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT med denne: 
    GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash pcie_aspm=force i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 i915.lvds_downclock=1"

    Det, som denne linje gør, er at tvinge systemet til at bruge  strømstyring (pcie_aspm=force) og får grafikkortet til at bruge mindre strøm.

  • Når du har gjort dette og har gemt filen, kan du i terminalen skrive: 
    sudo update-grub

Alt. hvad du nu behøver at gøre er at genstarte, og problemet med overophedning vil være løst. På min egen computer faldt det gennemsnitlige strømforbrug i “tomgang” (blank skærm som pauseskærm) fra ca. 17W til ca. 12W, hvilket er en reduktion på mere end  30%. Her et par timer efter mærkes det meget tydeligt: Computeren er overhovedet ikke varm.  Og ja, det er lidt en skam at man som forbruger stadig er nødt til at forholde sig til den slags, men det har meget at gøre med den fart, hvormed GNU/Linux-systemerne og især Linux-kernen bevæger sig i disse år.