Am I the only one left who thinks that profit is good? That profit is an indication of how much you’ve served those around you? That profit is an indication of how much value you’ve provided to someone else who willingly paid you for the product you created?

I found this John Edwards ad to be disturbing. What exactly is Edwards trying to say? He seems to be saying, “This mill was no longer profitable so the owner decided to shut it down. The government should have taken money from some citizens (through taxation) and given it to the owners of the mill so they could keep an unprofitable venture going.”

This doesn’t help American workers. It delays the inevitable. In a free market economy some businesses fail. This is good and healthy. The longer governments prop up failing businesses the worse the eventual failure becomes. When will we realize that government meddling does more harm than good?

It sure would nice to have a president who truly understands economics.

So let’s get this straight. There’s an agency of the federal government that got caught staging a phony press conference by having employees pretend to be reporters asking questions. What on earth is going on?

I would love to know whose idea this was.

What are the consequences when a publicly traded company deceives the public? The market typically pummels them. What happens when a federal government agency does the same? I suspect they’ll get even more funding to clean up their act.

It seems to me that the more I learn about freedom, the more concerned I am about our future as a nation. I found this video to be quite alarming:

It’s a talk by Naomi Wolf, the author of The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. I just purchased her book.

I just read this ridiculous letter by Allen Wastler, the Managing Editor of CNBC.com. Writing about the CNBC poll taken after the most recent Republican debate, Wastler says

Our poll was either hacked or the target of a campaign. So we took the poll down.

Why on earth does he think so? What is the evidence for such a statement? CNBC’s poll had only 7,000 votes when the poll was taken down. Ron Paul typically gets over 1,000 supporters at in-person rallies. As of today, there are over 53,000 people who have joined Ron Paul meetups. That’s 53,000 people who care about Ron Paul’s candidacy. And yet, when the poll shows Ron Paul winning with 75% of the vote after only 7,000 votes, Wastler concludes that there must be foul play.

Why is it that every internet poll is treated with suspicion? Why is it that non-internet polls are seen as legitimate? I don’t get it.

Would Wastler have taken down the poll if Fred Thompson was winning by that margin? Or Romney? I doubt it because that would correspond to the conventional “wisdom” about who the front-runners are in this campaign.

After the debate on Fox, they had a poll in which you needed to use a cell phone to vote in the poll. When Ron Paul won that poll, Hannity concluded that it must be Ron Paul spammers calling over and over. The only thing Hannity missed was that the poll prevented that from happening using caller id. Oops.

I’m wondering at what point the “it must be spammers” nonsense will stop. When Ron Paul raises over $10 million in a quarter? When he wins New Hampshire?

Our property taxes here in Johnston County were just raised by 32%. The reason? Officials have determined that we need more convenience stores in the county. This is the first time that the county will own and operate convenience stores. Officials are promising fair prices and they say they won’t engage in price “gouging” tactics long practiced by the greedy capitalists currently running stores such as Circle K.

Some are arguing that this policy is crazy. Some say we should let the market participants compete with each other to provide the best value to consumers. Some argue that there are a ton of folks who don’t even shop in convenience stores. Why should they have to subsidize those who shop there? Some say this will hurt existing stores since they won’t be subsidized. Others say that government involvement in an industry brings down the quality of the entire industry simply because it becomes less competitive.

The truth of the matter is that the policy is crazy. In fact, I made the whole thing up. There are no plans for Johnston County to run convenience stores. Why the ruse? Why make up such a story?

Well, did you think the policy was crazy? For all the reasons I brought up? One of the reasons it seems crazy is that the government has never been involved in the convenience store business. Once a government gets involved, people get used to it and it starts to seem normal. Before you know it, we can’t imagine a world where the government wasn’t performing that function.

The whole point is this – aren’t most government functions like this? Let’s take government schools. If government involvement in convenience stores brings down the quality of the entire convenience store industry, wouldn’t it do the same to schools? What about the folks with no children? Why do we think it’s acceptable to forcibly take their money to pay for a school system they’re not using? Doesn’t a competitive market provide the most value to consumers? Have we already gotten to the point where we can’t imagine a world without government schools?

I know what some are thinking – what about the children? Don’t you care about the children? Yes, I do. That’s why I think government schools shouldn’t exist. I think that a truly market driven non-subsidized school system would do the most good for the most children.

I just read this interesting article by Johnny Kramer about the current presidential race. In it, there’s a fascinating quote:

Going back over the last generation, what was the urgent difference between George W. Bush and John Kerry, George W. Bush and Al Gore, Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, or George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis?

In reconsidering these races, don’t look back on them in terms of relatively trivial distractions like gay marriage, stem cell research or medical marijuana; think in terms of fundamental questions about the legitimacy and nature of the state:

For example, by what right does the state presume to tax your income at any level? Are you still a free person when you have a portion of your income confiscated as the price of making a living? If you believe you are still free now, at what level of (arbitrarily determined – but, of course, not by you) confiscation would you no longer consider yourself to be free?

By what right does the state presume to steal another 15% of your income, supposedly on the assumption that you’re too inept to save for your own retirement?

By what right does the state presume to tell you what you can put in your own body? Does the state have the right to protect you from harming yourself? If so, should it also prevent you from drinking too much alcohol, smoking cigarettes, eating fast food, or not exercising? If not, why should it try to stop you from ruining your life with heroin, but not with gambling, bourbon or cheeseburgers?

By what right does the state presume to tell you whom you can hire to perform a service for you, through things like licensing laws? If an unlicensed professional offers cheaper services and can provide evidence to reassure your doubts, what business is it of the state’s?

I’m wondering when Americans will start to ask these fundamental questions about the role of our government. One would think that free citizens would protest when confronted with losing some of their freedoms. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. The erosion of our freedoms has happened over such a long period of time that folks don’t seem to realize that they’re no longer free.

I don’t think so. I can’t remember an angry, screaming, strident candidate ever getting elected. Has there been one?

I watched the Values Voters Debate and I came away thinking that many of the candidates appear to be just that – angry, screaming lunatics. I kept thinking that Alan Keyes’ head might explode. The only candidate that seemed calm and relaxed was Huckabee. Even Ron Paul seemed strident. As a supporter of Ron Paul, I’m hoping we’ll get to see the Ron Paul we saw in the first debate and the Ron Paul who was interviewed at Google – the calm statesman whose principles and logic attracted such a huge following.

I found the debate difficult to watch. It seemed like it was a bunch of Christians talking about how they want to use the power of the federal government to force everyone else to act like Christians. Don’t they realize that the goverment they’re advocating would then have the power to dictate how we live in the opposite direction? Don’t they see that liberty will be lost? Do they really think that forcing people to act a certain way will change the moral character of this country?

I’m personally sick and tired of the government trying to be our mommy and trying to tell us how to live our lives. Isn’t it time to get the governemnt out of our lives? Isn’t it time for freedom in America?

For the past year and a half or so, I decided to spend less time consulting and more time creating businesses. For a long time I knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I wasn’t really spending any time doing it. It took me a few years actually to make the realization that if you want something to happen, you need to spend some time working toward the goal in a disciplined way.

So I had decided to spend about 30 hours consulting per week rather than the typical 40. I would spend the other 10 hours creating businesses. Now that I’ve been doing this for awhile, I’ve come to some conclusions.

It’s amazing what can be accomplished in about 10 hours per week. I’ve been quite surprised about it. Here’s what I mean. Let’s say I have a project that I think will take about a month to complete if I were working on it full time. At the normal 40 hours per week that would work out to be about 160 hours for this project. If I only worked on it for 10 hours per week, I would have thought that it would take me 16 weeks to complete the project.

It turns that it’s been taking me much less time than I anticipated. I would have thought that because I was working 1/4 of the time, I would only accomplish 1/4 of the work. Instead, it seems as though I’m accomplishing much more than 1/4 of the work in that time. How is that possible? Why is it that I feel so productive for those 10 hours?

I think it’s because there’s a whole bunch of time during the week that I’m not working the project. By the time I’m ready to do some actual work on it, I’ve spent a ton of time mulling over things and making determinations about what the next steps should be. These determinations are often not even conscious thoughts. But by the time I’m ready to pick up that project again, I feel like I’m ready to code like the wind.

UPDATE: This plugin has been updated.

I created a rails plugin to help me keep clients up to date on the status of projects. I use it in 2 instances – whenever I deploy a site, and whenever I send a weekly status report. For a deployment this is what I type at the command line:

rake svn:messages r=70

70 is the oldest subversion revision I care about. This gives me the following output:

* Started adding user registration system. (domelia)
* Now translating validation errors and their attribute names. (domelia)
* Reorganized views a bit. (domelia)
* Now sending activation email when user signs up. (domelia)
* Added support for "remember me" when logging in. (domelia)

For my deployment report, I typically remove the svn messages that aren’t immediately visible in the site or that don’t matter too much to the client. So, I’d remove “reorganized views a bit”.

For a weekly status report, I only care about the svn commits that I personally made. In that case, I’d say something like:

rake svn:messages r=32 u=domelia

This would give me similar output, except it will only show me the commits made by the domelia user.

I like the plugin because I can keep clients up to date and spend very little time doing it.

To install:

svn export https://terralien.devguard.com/svn/projects/plugins/svn_messages vendor/plugins/svn_messages

Government is quite good at creating monopolies and stifling competition.

Should the government be responsible for trash pickup? Many people today would say yes. Many of those same people would argue that if the government doesn’t provide the service, how would poorer folks pay for it? Others would say that a competitive market always produces a better result for more people than a coercive monopoly.

When we lived in Apex, North Carolina, our town provided garbage pickup as a service. Everyone in the town was forced to pay the town fees every month. They could raise rates whenever they wanted, and the provider wasn’t exactly keen on making the residents that happy because they already owned the market by virtue of the coercive monopoly instituted by the town of Apex.

Now, we’re living in Johnston County, North Carolina. No government entity has mandated that we use a particular trash service. What does this mean for our neighborhood? Companies are competing with each other! They care about the customers! I’ve forgotten to put my trash out on the street a few times. The driver actually walked up my driveway and took my trash for me! That would never happen in Apex. When my can fell over in big storm and broke, they brought out a new can.

People in the neighborhood have chosen different service providers depending on the services they provide. So now, a whole bunch of things matter: their prices, their customer service, the size of their cans, their pickup schedules, their promptness, and their willingness to exceed customer expectations. It’s an outstanding example of the free market and how much better it works than some bureaucrat deciding what’s best for people. One of my neighbors wants to save the money entirely and drops his garbage off at the dump. He can actually opt out of the whole system.

I recently received a letter in the mail from a competitor saying they’d like to be the pickup service of choice in our neighborhood. They’re willing to go down to $45 per quarter to win my business. I’m currently delighted with my pickup service (Waste Industries). I’m paying $67 per quarter. So I call them up and ask if they’d be interested in matching the price of their competitor. Of course they would!