Leaner and Meaner America

We now know the game is rigged. Beyond any shadow of a doubt, when the incoming leader of the Senate announces that his first major objective is the dismantling of the Federal Elections Committee, when the dishonest drumbeat of Social Security insolvency goes on and on, when the most popular news channel on the air is the one where rich people convince middle class people that poor people  you know, the ones with no money, influence, or authority  are the real problem, the game is rigged.

And it's not just here. There's no reason for the UK to privatize the NHS, other than that some small but powerfully rich sector of the marketplace can't stand to see money moving without extracting their rent. The same is true in Australia, where the conservative government has decided that health care is a "moral hazard" so dire citizens that cutting its medical care insurance entirely seems to be the objective of the current conservative government.

We also know now that the middle class hasn't benefited from the rise in the stock market, or world valuation, at all in the past 40 years. Ever since Reagan's "trickle down" theories became mainstream, the mainstream has ceased to benefit at all from the supposed rising tide. The US lower middle class has been caught in what economists are now calling

the valley of despond since 1988, and it doesn't look like it's going to get any better any time soon.

As conservative policies trap us all in a vicious cycle of cutting taxes, which benefit the rich for more than anyone else, which in turn lead to fewer services, which lead to more despair, which lead conservatives to conclude more taxes must be cut, and as long as we continue down a path whereby the vast majority of Americans understand that the game is rigged against them, they also believe that any benefit to one group must come at the expense of another group. If they themselves, whatever tribal identification they hold, is not benefiting, then they are being used. And that, in turn, contributes to the viciousness.

For most of our civilization, we lived in a zero-sum world. Our culture evolved to perceive a zero-sum world.

And that sad fact is, we've allowed our cultural leaders to re-create it.

2014 In Review

Being a professional developer really takes some of the wind out of your non-professional sails.  Last year, I had exactly two new repositories added to Github: git-wc and mp-suggest.  The first was a simple wordcount handler for git that would calculate the difference between your current repository and your work in progress, and tell you how much you’d written that day.  I wrote is as a tool for NaNoWriMo.  The second is a fairly straightforward tool for taking apart a directory full of MP3 files and, depending upon the command line flags provided, prints out a bash script for making the contents of the directory consistent: same genre, same album, (possibly) same artist, and some heavy lifting to clean-up the titles, or to derive the titles from the filenames.  It’s not rocket science, but it was fun, it’s a tool I use regularly, and it’s written in Hy, a lisp written for the Python VM.

What did I do in 2014?  Well, mostly I worked for my employer, Splunk, on a pair of projects: first a window manager for data panels associated with the Splunk server; and more recently with the latest revision of the Splunk for Microsoft Exchange application.  I mastered the fine art of managing Splunk configuration files via its REST API, which is absolutely no fun (and the ACL API is a nightmare).

I also read a megafrackton of articles about two distinctly different technologies: Lisp and Haskell.  Lisp’s homoiconicity appeals to me much more than Haskell’s mathematical underpinnings, and I’m assured that there are uniformities between them.  The problem with these technologies is that my employer isn’t really interested in either; since I work with the applications group, what I write has to be comprehensible to third-party developers, they have to be showcases of what’s possible using Splunk with a Python back-end and a Javascript front.  So although I love Hy and ClojureScript, it’s unlikely that I’ll be working in them professionally anytime soon.  Sad, but true.

I’m still not sure what a Monad is.