A few final thoughts on libertarianism. One: read David Friedman's brilliant book The Machinery of Freedom. Two: the "free market" is often distorted because deep-pocketed corporations and organizations can change the rules of the game by buying cooperative legislators and politicians, which is hardly news, but it argues against Bill Gates's notion of "frictionless capitalism". Sure, it's frictionless if you have several billion dollars to spend on grease. Three: if I were a standard-issue libertarian, I'd indulge a knee-jerk impulse to blame the recession on violations of the free market, but free market violations don't appear to me to be playing a big role here.

The other day I stumbled across this rather fascinating essay by one of my favorite authors on Buddhism, Geoffrey DeGraff, who was ordained in the Thai forest tradition under the name Thanissaro Bhikkhu ("bhikkhu" meaning "monk"). Some other of his really interesting writings are Wings to Awakening and The Mind Like Fire Unbound, the latter being an exploration of the use of fire imagery in early Buddhist literature. Really fascinating stuff. I find his writing to be both accessible (unlike a lot of over-mystified Buddhist lit) and intellectually engaging.

A lot of Buddhism is quite self-evident. Impermanence (anicca) is logical, especially to an old fart like me. My body and my world are burning and crumbling before my eyes, and my mortality towers before me now. The notion of selflessness (anatta) makes sense too: I am a temporary assembly of pieces, imagining itself to be a monolithic whole, and hoping that the monolithic wholeness will enjoy some kind of mystic permanence after the pieces have fallen apart. (DeGraff addresses the interesting question of whether Buddha intended us to regard anatta as a metaphysical truth or as a teaching aid to help us attain the goal of nibbana.)

As an old fart, getting older all the time, I am of course keenly interested in the question of what lies beyond. On this point Buddha was notoriously murky; I can find only one translation of one conversation where he addressed the question straightforwardly. The Buddha describes a life-to-life continuity that I think I could be happy with, if it's for real.

DeGraff offers his own take on the matter: ...one of the important stages of meditation is when you discover within the mind a knowing core that does not die at the death of the body. If you can reach this point in your meditation, then death poses no problem at all. That's great for those who can attain such levels of meditation, but I doubt I'll ever get there myself. DeGraff and other writers variously refer to this as the Deathless or the Unconditioned, by contrast to the "conditioned things" that suffer impermanence and deterioration, like this old body of mine.

But going back to the rather fascinating essay that I first mentioned -- here DeGraff discusses the plight of Buddhist practice in Thai society. While it's a nominally profoundly Buddhist country, there are societal forces there that work to limit the accomplishments of innovators in meditation. An interesting read, check it out. And imagine a time and place in human history where the very best of human ingenuity went not into computers or electronics or software, but into the study and training of the human mind. I first got a glimpse of this myself at a weekend retreat at Kripalu, a yoga center here in Massachusetts.

Here in Massachusetts we are in the midst of an election for the state governor. One candidate, Carla Howell, is running as a libertarian. We have had four or five candidate debates lately, of which I believe Miss Howell has participated in two. I watched one of them.

I am of generally libertarian inclinations myself, and even have a Carla Howell bumper sticker on my car. But I confess disappointment in her performance in the debate I watched. Regardless what question she was asked, she hammered on two or three catchphrases. She was more contentious with the other candidates than I thought necessary. I'm not sure she presented libertarianism in a favorable light. She's unlikely to win in Massachusetts but I'd like to see her use this as an opportunity to demonstrate why a reasonable thinking person would choose to be a libertarian.

Libertarianism is an intellectually defensible position. The rationale is grounded in microeconomics. When people are free to exchange goods and services as they choose, they will generally engage in an exchange only if it is beneficial to both parties. Fraud can mitigate benefit, but fraudulent people will tend to become known as such, and people will stop trading with them. Also, fraud watchdogs will emerge (like Consumer Reports). So that's the idyllic vision of the free market.

Big government mucks up the free market with taxes (a transaction that is not freely chosen by all concerned) and by restricting peoples' freedoms to engage in other transactions. The premise of big government is that strangers can spend your money better than you can. Libertarians believe that everybody is best off if each person makes his or her own decisions.

Carla Howell wants to eliminate the state income tax and greatly reduce the size and complexity of the state government. Some people fear that the free market only works for the wealthy - that without a big state government their kids won't be able to go to school and they won't get the medical help they need. Miss Howell needs to take a little time off from repeating her two or three slogans, and demonstrate to people that government functions can safely be privatized without plunging the poor into a Dickensian nightmare.

Do we have any evidence one way or the other? Is there a model for Massachusetts with Carla Howell as governor? The closest I can find is Jesse Ventura, the governor of Minnesota. Libertarians feel that he falls short of being a REAL libertarian, but he did look for opportunities to shrink taxes and government, as Miss Howell would. And Minnesota is not worse off for his governorship.

I lost my job in March (which is OK because it was sucking pretty hard) and got a new job in late July. The work is interesting but the schedules are a bit too hectic for my taste, and there's a lot to learn.

I have always had a mental block with CVS. Now I actually understand why: there are no books, very little good documentation, and whatever people may tell you, CVS really does have some non-trivial complexities to it. So I had always been one of these people who could never quite figure out what's going on at Sourceforge. But now that I'm in a culture of heavy CVS users, and I'm connected to the oral tradition, I'm finding that I really admire CVS and cvsweb.

At one place I worked, there was a very good source code repository system that was also connected to the bug log in a rather elegant way, so that if you did a check-in with a comment that it fixed a bug, the bug log was automatically updated to reflect that. I don't know if it's possible to connect CVS to a bug log in that way.

I've set up a CVS server at home, and thrown several stupid little projects on there, instead of dumping them on alt.sources all the time. Though I gotta say, the benefit of alt.sources is that if my machine crashes, they're still there on Google. Maybe I should adopt a reasonable backup policy.

I stopped into our neighborhood Mexican place last night to pick up some chow. It's a beautiful authentic little place that, if you've ever visited Mexico or the Caribbean, looks like you've just stepped a thousand miles south. Very small, a counter but no tables, mostly take-out, but the food is fantastic. I chatted a bit with the owner, asking about some new convenience-store stuff that had appeared. I was concerned that this perhaps signaled a bout of misfortune. He said he'd picked it up from a convenience store that closed a couple doors up the road, but didn't like the fact it was all junk food and his kitchen prepares only healthy stuff. He said that after some nearby layoffs in the wake of September 11th, the lunch crowd is way down and he's in pretty tough shape. I've decided to give an ad for him in my Slashdot sig, because I really don't want him to go out of business. Being it's Slashdot and I don't like spam any more than anybody else, I wanted to make the ad tasteful, so it just gives GPS coordinates (42.3243 N 71.3994 W). Enough to find the place, a momentary amusement for anybody of nerdly inclinations, but not too in-your-face. If you're lazy, just look here.

People have often talked about supporting their own local economy in the context of helping the economy overall. There are even folks who like the idea of creating a local currency. I think these are good ideas.

The recession is like a bunch of dominoes. Each domino has continuous inputs and internal state variables (orientation and momentum), and a discrete output (falling over), so each domino amplifies the pervasive phenomenon of falling over. A company's discrete output is the decision to lay people off. So there's a thing here of amplifying the bad karma and passing it along to others. One preventive measure would be to avoid needing to pass along bad karma: a company with better financials can sustain more troublesome inputs before it is forced to lay people off. In the domain of human relations, some people can take a lot more crap than others before snapping at somebody else. So this amounts to good management.

Maybe supporting the local economy is a form of good management? Maybe a local currency can better represent values that are cherished locally but dissed by the wider economy? Maybe it doesn't matter where the money goes, as long as it keeps moving around? Maybe keeping the money local prevents it getting sucked into some value-sink in Washington or Wall Street?

Supposing I can absorb abuse for a longer time before passing along bad karma, this may reduce the net intensity of bad karma but it lengthens its total lifetime. In a perfect world one could hope to reduce both the intensity and the total lifetime of bad karma. This reminds me of an interesting result from control theory: if there is any frequency for which the system's gain is exactly -1, you end up with instability, or persistent oscillations. This is called the Bode stability criterion. Here's another link.