Installing Virtual Box Guest Additions for Ubuntu Server

This guide should work for other OSs as well, but was written for and tested on Ubuntu Server. The information was collected from here and here, but I figured it prudent to host it here as well, in case those blogs come down some day.

To make use of the additions we must 1) mount the additions iso and 2) run its contents. This assumes that you have configured the virtual machine to have access to the iso.

1. mkdir /media/cdrom
   mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom
2. apt-get install dkms build-essential
   reboot
   /media/cdrom/VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run

As a bonus, we'll use the newly installed additions to access folders shared with the host. This assumes you've used the virtual box settings to make a folder named `Google_Drive` available at `~/host/Google_Drive` in the guest OS.

We need to 1) mount the shared folder. That's it!

1. mkdir ~/host/Google_Drive
   mount -t vboxsf Google_Drive ~/host/Google_Drive

Silicon Valley Showed Me Why I Want Scrum

I've been looking through the wikipedia page of software development methods for the last 3 hours, trying to figure out how to maximize my production. But I figured something out- I don't want a software development method.

Governments are Companies?

"We need the government to prevent monopolies from hurting the little guy!"
~ every progressive ever

--/u/Throwahoymatie

When I encountered this comment, I was initially confused. I don't normally consider governments to be monopolies. I asked /u/ThrowAhoyMatie to elaborate his complaint and was offered this video. Unfortunately, it only brought up more questions.

I regularly shift back and forth often between wanting small and big governments. I mentioned in my last post that not having a government banking system makes me mad. I should probably mention that I mean the part of the system that allows for debit cards- I understand why letting government run loans and credit would be an awful choice. But just as often as I want a big government to swoop in and fix problems, I curse the gradual conglomeration of state governments operating under federal rules. I'm a big fan of states legalizing THC for that reason primarily. States were designed to be united but independent, isolated experiments to find out if X or Y was the better way to Z. Now their just arbitrary lines that don't really differentiate for the most part.

So for me, it's a toss up whether federal government is a good thing. But government having competition? That's a totally unconsidered concept for me. It's possible, of course, this poster was trying to stir up trouble. But it wouldn't be the first time that stirring up trouble becomes something much greater than the undisturbed thing it came from. So I thought about it.

Funny enough, existing competition wasn't my first thought. We all agree our democracy is broken, whatever internal competition we might have had between candidates has evaporated in favor of parties and the businesses who fund them. External competition exists, but less and less. To have a high standard of living you basically have to live in America or a place America thinks (knows) it has the right to punch people in the nose.

No, my first thought was that government was designed to mitigate a problem, and that problem persists. Monopolies would still exist without government and would continue to hurt the little guy. Isn't the little guy worth protecting? The video was compelling, though. It clearly elaborated that the government is, by any measure, a monopoly with nukes. It even implied, reasonably, that the "true" purpose of government was to gain wealth. I have no doubt, based on the people I've worked with, my own emotions, and what I've seen of people who contribute to the world, that some people really do want to "reduce worldsuck". I can't argue and don't think, however, that government is filled with only these people.

So, accepting that governments are localized monopolies that use violence to gain wealth, I still can't see a better tool to protect citizens from other monopolies. In fact, that's a core principle of a government: Provide for the defense of its people from foreign powers, which have been established as monopolies. While I have many good reasons to choose this government over a country run by wal-mart, I remain more interested in what a better solution could be.

Some people believe that privatizing everything would make the world a better place. Like any generalization or extreme view, it's easy to poke fun at that, but the truth is private companies do a hell of a lot of good. Charities are all private and very often there are companies that go above and beyond what government requires to the benefit of everyone except the top of the food chain. It's hard for me to imagine Apple or Winn Dixie arming employees to fend off impending armies, but it's not nearly as hard to imagine Google doing it.

On the other hand, I don't think it's hard to imagine a government that ran smoother than ours. I don't think the federal government should be the model for the good a government can do. There are plenty of places enforcing things that should be enforced and disregarding what they should. Presidents like FDR and Truman make me optimistic about giving the right people money and watching them go. Which is, basically, the same as privatization.

So maybe we should be calling governments companies. They have a mission statement, internal organization, and a business model. The only real difference is that a government assumes you to be a citizen and forces you to play by its rules while they provide for you just because you're born there. But some companies are halfway there already.

Largely, I think I'm okay with that. It doesn't change what they've done or how they're organized. Up until now, no company has ever been as close as Disney and Google are to being governments. We haven't needed to differentiate companies by size- a company is a company is a company, unless it's a government. Then it's a company++. The same rules that applied before apply when you think of a government as a company. Maybe "company" is just so flexible a term that it is bound to be meaningless. It can describe PMCs, hospitals, entertainers, individuals, conglomerates, and global coalitions. Kind of a stretch to fit them all under one umbrella.

Like Day and Night

This post spawns from the following reddit thread: reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/29qfnm/

"It's 3 PM," she said.
I said, "You're crazy"
She said, "Get out of bed.
Why are you so lazy?
Why waste the day away?"
I said, "Because I'm tired."

--Wake Up Call, Relient K

I don't think that there's any argument that there are a lot of people who stay up late or sleep in that are lazy. Obviously there's a very high statistical probability that there is overlap between the groups. I won't argue against that. What I am arguing, though, is that there are lots of hardworking people who 'do their thing' at night and there are people who, unfairly, label them lazy and, unknowingly, discriminate against them.

I think the root cause of this (and many things) is the considerable generational gap on this issue, magnified by the Baby Boom. It's very easy to create a collective impression, share/spread it, and feel confident in it because it's popular. This means that when a Baby Boomer feels a certain way, the reasons they feel that way are probably shared by almost a third of America. So suddenly, every third person agrees with you. And that third person is probably a successful one. And those two people might be an old fart or some young punk. Clearly you're right, right?

Once confirmation bias slips into the mix, the largest and most powerful single faction in our country- divided as they may be about gun control, health care, and gay marriage, are united on the things they grew up believing. They're also willing to ignore proof of the contrary. Whatever they learned as a group, whatever they suffered in common, whatever they saw as successful at one time is stuck that way, until the confirmation bias stops. One of those things they can't seem to shake is this premise that being asleep in daylight is a bad thing.

There are good reasons they would have learned not to do this. Fifty years ago the average boomer was 14 and looking to be successful for the first time, trying to figure out what that meant. Working at night was a non-starter. The biggest issue was that no one else was doing it. The people who would end up with money and power were the managers waking up at the crack of dawn to go to work. Jobs like construction, farming, and manufacturing required sunlight, and the real money was in service jobs, feeding, managing, or protecting those people. I don't have data on the rate of daylight dependent jobs or service jobs that depended on that group. The best I could find was data recording the employment by sector for that time period. That has the numbers, so maybe I'll come back to it and make a pie chart. Even without that data, though, I don't think there's an argument. Some jobs depend on sunlight (construction, surveying), more jobs depend on people employed in jobs that depend on sunlight (food service, transportation), and very few jobs were even possible without rest of the labor force being awake (writers, researchers).

So, naturally, infrastructure did more for people in the day than in the night. Buses had last stops, government offices closed in the afternoon, and doctors went home at night. This was done with the reasonable expectation that there was simply less to do at night- that makes it prime time for sleeping. Even emergency services, like firefighters and nurses, who sleep at shift's end generally have less to do at night. Shops open 24/7 get obvious periods during which, admittedly, a lazy person could excel- the graveyard shift.

But something has been happening lately- very recently in fact. Today, 24/7 stores do not have graveyard shifts. They aren't as busy, but Wal-Mart workers, for example, need to be as attentive at 3am as they would be at 3pm. Stock traders who work in markets across the globe need to work and sleep in the timezone their clients are in, regardless of the Earth's position in the Sun's orbit. Some jobs require the night- roadwork, guards, entertainment jobs. Plenty of jobs consider the time of day irrelevant and require night shifts to be filled- 24 hour food service and shops, IT. So there are more and more people walking around at 4am, looking for a bite to eat.

The other trend happening now (and for a long time, actually) is that jobs that actually require daylight are getting fewer and fewer. Factories are being run 24/7. Farming is being automated (no really, with robots and GPS and computers, Oh My!). So we, the working population, have to be open to working at night. Infrastructure has started to respond, and business were quick to catch on. The same reasons to provide service during banking hours are motivating businesses to provide service at night.

But not everyone has caught up.

Baby Boomers live in their own, confirmation bias supported, world. It's filled with the bankers, doctors, lawyers, business owners, judges, accountants, and government workers who all decided that 9-5 was right for them- and it was when they decided it. Today they have so much momentum that they are even almost right to a degree. Since they have the power and clout, it really is hard to be successful when they're asleep. Remember, we're talking about a third of the country here- one out of every three mouths to feed, people to transport, citizens to govern. Plus, everyone who has to fall in line; the students they teach, the secretaries they hire, people trying to make money off of them. Almost all of those people, though, could be working at night if they had business to do then.

That momentum can be a problem for people who aren't "with the program".

Discrimination is almost never an intent. Few people wake up and think "What's the most efficient way to be racist today?". So when I say that, for lack of a better term, day shift workers discriminate against night shift workers, I'm not trying to accuse anyone of thinking about ways to hurt people. I'm talking about people that can't see the effect of what they're doing- probably because they're asleep when it happens. Mostly, the discrimination comes in the form of closing up shop. That's a logically motivated decision, though, and one I won't admonish. No one opens a restaurant trying to satisfy some moral imperative to feed these people in this place at this time, so I won't argue that they should feed those people in that place at night. Especially because, without the coordination of their community, it would be a very bad business decision.

Some businesses, however, do have a moral imperative. Emergency services do work at night, but banks don't. And it has become impossible to function without a bank- many employers will only pay into an account and often times a credit or debit card is the only accepted payment at a given place. Banks should be staying open at night, or at least past 5, or at least open during the weekend. Not because it will net them more money, but because we depend on them just as much as we depend on medical, police, and firefighting services. Frankly, I'm pissed off that we don't have a government run bank. It's only logical and would give us power in the decisions it made.

Some discrimination I find hard to call discrimination. It's not even about inconveniencing people by mistake or ignorance- there's simply no time to satisfy everyone. A jackhammer outside your building is going to make it hard to sleep. It's not a bad thing to do it at a time when the majority of people are awake. But people who aren't following the nine to five clock are still the ones bearing the burden- everywhere. Maybe some day we'll figure out a way to fix that, but not today. Today too many people just don't care.

Finally, there's confrontational discrimination. People who won't do business with someone who keeps odd hours (see that, we even have linguistic discrimination- the hours are just different, nothing odd about them). People who require workers to be present at a particular time and place when studies confirm that they do better work at their own home and own hours. People who judge their friends, families, and neighbors based on the hours they choose to sleep.

But pretty soon, the children of Baby Boomers are going to be picking up the mantle and finding the day workers less and less important to consider when deciding when to do what. And pretty soon, they'll be finding the concerns of the night shift worker every bit as important as his day shift counterpart. I really hope to see the complete disconnect from the sun we have fully realized. We already work in environmentally controlled and artificially lit spaces isolated from nature. There's no good reason to keep that day oriented momentum. We can end it.

Missed a Day

It's not that I didn't do anything important, I did plenty of good work. But I didn't post something here. So, as punishment, I'll be writing three posts: The one I missed, today's regularly scheduled, and one punitive. This one is, technically, a post. But it isn't sufficiently punitive and wouldn't have come up without me missing a day so I guess that makes four posts tonight. Here we go.

You should listen to: https://soundcloud.com/coins-3/sets/coins-daft-science/

Yes, I WILL Have a Diet Soda, Thank You

I don't know where this joke started, but it usually follows thusly:

And then this great fat fool gets up, orders the worst on the menu, and a Diet Coke. I don't think that's gonna do you any favors, bub.

For whatever reason, people find this situation funny, like there's some great irony to it all. In my experience, the people who think this (probably you, if I've sent you this link) are woefully uneducated about nutrition, or if they do know some things, it's information useful for healthy people that has no weight (pun not intended) on the butt of this joke.

So rather than make fun of people in just the least sensible way possible, let's look at the facts, courtesy of http://nutrition.mcdonalds.com/getnutrition/nutritionfacts.pdf

Item	Calories	Sodium	Carbohydrates	Sugars
Large Diet Coke	0	35	0	0
Large Coca-Cola	280	5	76	76
Hamburger	250	480	31	6
Large Fries	510	290	67	0
Chicken Club	670	1410	58	11
Big Breakfast	1150	2260	116	17

Sodium is listed to show that, while Diet Coke is saltier, sodium isn't a health concern here because any food item far surpasses both drinks.

From this data, you should be able to immediately see that the Diet Coke is, without (reasonable) argument, a healthier option. If you choose to believe that boogeyman chemicals will give you cancer if you drink Diet Coke, I have another post coming up for you, stay tuned. Just know that for a lot of people, a sugar based death is three or four years away if they drink sugared sodas and cancer is far further than that. If you want to be not an idiot, drink water and keep your nose out of other people's cups.

Just how much healthier is Diet Coke than Coca-Cola? There's a difference of 280 calories- more than a hamburger. This should be more than enough to establish that a sugar soda is the worst thing to have at a McDonald's- or anywhere else.

But Crow, no one eats just a hamburger! This isn't a fair comparison.
Excellent point. Let's compare one Large Coca-Cola to my favorite McD's meal, then- A Chicken Club Sandwich (Crispy, of course) and Large Fries. As you correctly predicted, the caloric content of the sandwich alone far outpaces that of the soda. If all you care about is calories, congrats. Obviously you should still be choosing the Diet Coke, but you can (and will) argue that, after a Chicken Club and Large Fries, a Large Coke only increases the caloric content by a quarter (23.7%). But suppose you care about more than calories- what then?

Assume someone wants to burn fat. Any nutritionist can tell you that the only real way to accomplish this is to reduce carbohydrate intake. So how does Coca-Cola fare to someone avoiding carbs? Uh oh. The drink now accounts for more than half of the carbs (60%) in this meal- this disastrous, unhealthy meal. Focusing on carbohydrates, you would actually be better off having two orders of the food than having one and a Large Coca-Cola.

Try and put that in perspective. Throw an order of fries and a sandwich into a blender and put that alongside the Coca-Cola. Exercise can pretty effectively remove calories, but there isn't much it can do for sugars. You're voluntarily putting the equivalent of an extra meal in your body. For what?

Eww. That's gross. But what about balancing nutrients and whatnot? Wouldn't it be worse to have all those fats?
Yes, very probably. But the worst part about Coca-Cola is that, aside from sugar and salt, there's nothing in it. No redeeming value. No nutrients, no protein, and none of the (arguable) benefits of fats. And remember, suggesting to double up on food was to underline the carbohydrate cost. What I'm really advocating is drinking Diet Coke (Or Diet anything, or water). So to check the score, we have 125 carbohydrates while drinking Diet Coke, 201 while drinking Coca-Cola, and no redeeming value in between (except, for some, taste).

Woah woah woah- what do you mean 'for some'? Coca-Cola tastes objectively better than that Diet crap. No, actually, that's not objective at all. For a whole lot of people, Diet Coke tastes better. You'll just have to take our word for it, though. Besides, even for people that do prefer the taste, foregoing it has huge benefits here. Anyways, about this Coca-Cola? It gets worse.

No way. It can't be worse than doubling carbs. What could be worse than a blended McMeal? Sugars- sugars can be worse than doubling your carbs. To most pseudo fitness gurus, carbs are sugars and sugars are carbs. Sciencey people have unimportant sciencey reasons for using a different word. The truth is, however, that not all sugars are created equal. For losing weight, they're close enough to ignore the difference, just don't have any. But some people have diabetes. And to them, the difference between carbs and sugars is a big freaking deal. 125 carbs versus 125 sugars could mean the difference between uncomfortable gas and a coma. Sugars debilitate in a lot of ways; they can illicit emotional and hunger responses that make people want more sugar which makes the problem worse, they can make people with poor glucose control irritable, ill, and capable of very bad decisions very quickly, and they can create latent effects like neuropathy (which feels like your toes are being cut off and there's nothing you can do about it except actually cut it off).

For these people, sugars must be avoided at all costs.

Okay, but isn't McDonald's the last place you want to be if you're avoiding sugar? Surprisingly, no. But before I explain why, let's tally our order.

The Diet Coke option has 11 sugars. The Coca-Cola option has 87 (800% increase).

It is ABSOLUTELY INEXCUSABLE for a diabetic, insulin resistant, or prediabetic person to consume that much sugar. Funny thing about prediabetics though- while the medical term technically refers to subjects with various risk factors, George Carlin reminds us that you're either diabetic or on your way. There is no in-between. This makes it inexcusable for anyone to have a sugar soda.

So, why are these people even entering a McDonald's at all? Because McDonald's has meticulously documented and readily available nutritional information, their products have the same content at every location, and there's a location nearby no matter where you are. This gives a diabetic a lot of advantages on top of the advantages everyone already enjoys- cheap, fast, hot. And even though there are some bad things there- dangerous, even- there are things that are not too bad. And even the worst non-beverage option available, the Big Breakfast w/Hotcakes & a Large Biscuit, (truly a terrible option) has just over a fifth as many sugars as one Large Coca-Cola. That's five breakfasts to one soda.

Switching from Coca-Cola to Diet Coke can McDonald's place eight times better to be at if you have my favorite meal. Even if it wasn't a good idea to begin with, it very readily becomes reasonable. Especially if you're ordering smaller, like a hamburger.

On Originality

I recently heard an installment of Ted Radio Hour that asks "Is anything original". Speakers included professionals in the music and fashion industry as well as historians. I appreciated the selection and felt it must have been intentional to include various angles. But I feel that the piece would benefit from one more field in particular. I think math has a lot to say on the subject of originality.

In common language it seems like original and origin have been divorced. I think this is the origin (pun intended) of many of the problems surrounding big 'O' Originality. Problems like copyrighting music with sampling in it, awarding bad patents, or publishing fan fiction based on copyrighted work. These problems are real and can be fixed by using simple middle school math.

The origin of a Cartesian plane is, without argument, original. Things that are origins must be original. (0,0) is the origin of a plane not because (0,0) is special. It is because the people using math choose to orient that plane about that point. It ensures that when they draw a graph a stranger can understand it. There are numbers before zero, naturally, and zero may have interesting properties, but so do many numbers. Zero is the origin because people make the choice to look at other numbers in perspective to it, NOT the other way around.

Something is the original if and when we use it as an origin- When we measure other points in relation that point. That means it's the consumers of content that decide what is original, NOT the creators, nor the lawyers, nor nature itself.

The other edge to this sword is that an origin requires a population, one that we may disagree with. Like so many other things an origin can be forgotten. And when it is it ceases to be original. So no, for many people The Odyssey is not the original epic, they've 'forgotten' about it. An origin cannot exist without an observer and other points to describe, so let's say people are comparing epic stories with Trapped in the Closet. For those people, Trapped in the Closet is the the origin of the epic story. Not because it precedes or is better than other epics, but because it defines the landscape of what they will talk about. It's a social phenomenon, and it requires study and acceptance of the society in which it is measured.

This can be hard to swallow for many people. It takes power from people who studied a craft and proved themselves- historians, musicians, and lawyers- and gives that power to literally anyone. That uneducated buffoon that never read the Odyssey and uses Trapped in the Closet as their origin for epics is right, and that's kind of terrible. There are plenty of people who think that buffoon shouldn't be right about anything. The problem gets compounded when we offer so many rights and protections to originals. Now these people might grant these to something utterly undeserving!

Relax- there are still some origins that are better than others for describing certain planes. It's handy then, that we can reorient ourselves, placing a better fitting origin at the center of our plane, number line, or genre. I do believe that using the Odyssey as the original epic is a better idea than the alternative, but I believe that because the Odyssey has a couple of important things going for it:

• Popularity- saying you're the Facebook of Porn(SFW) only works if people know what Facebook is. YMMV in any given crowd, but chances are high that whomever you're talking to knows about The Odyssey.
• Typical- Some things are not good descriptors of their field. For example, Game of Thrones is an excellent dramatic fantasy, but if I used it as the origin of fantasy I'd have a long list of 'excepts'; The Odyssey is like Game of Thrones except the protagonists win, it's centered around one and only one hero, and the protagonists are unambiguously moral. And I'd have those exceptions when describing majority of fantasies. A better origin would be more typical fantasy.

This is why, for so many people, Star Wars is original and Akira Kurosawa's work is not. Star Wars is far more popular among these people. The fact that George Lucas referred to Kurosawa's work so often is irrelevant, because both works were typical of their field and Star Wars was more accessible. This doesn't mean Star Wars was the first coming of age story, nor the best, and it certainly doesn't mean that Lucas invented that type of story. All it means is that most people would compare the two works by saying "The Hidden Fortress is like Star Wars, but in Japan", and not the other way around.

Does this really solve the problem though? No, not really. But it does something better. Keeping all this in mind makes it clear that originality is not that important- patents, royalties, and similar payments shouldn't necessarily be paid to the original. If anyone deserves that money or protection, it's the predecessor. In my opinion, being original should actually invalidate claims to copyright and similar. Originality proves that this thing will be credited as long as it is relevant and that if there's money to be made this thing's creator is getting the lion's share.

So while doesn't solve anything immediately, but I think it brings us closer to the Truth on the issue. That in turn means that whatever solution we come up with will fit better than the ones we have now. Hopefully there comes a day when these issues are not problematic, but that day won't come as long as we try to contort words to fit our systems instead of the other way around.