I am a Rabid Cheetah

The U.S. Supreme Court rules unanimously against Grokster in MGM v. Grokster, despite Luis's presence. This is not the end, though: The case will be retried in the original lower court.

Flying back to Boston today.

Futile No More

Sweet justice, kstrdup() was finally merged into the kernel. Rusty, we can call off the flotilla.

Oh my God

Morten: The actual delivery and consumption of utilities is not internationally traded. They are almost akin to services rendered. Also, utilities are often provided by local monopolies. Anyhow, I'll happily rescind the word "international."

But I never, ever, said that no minimum wage would result in no unemployment. My graph--which had a fucking cat on it, for goodness sakes--implied that there was some amount of unemployment caused by a minimum wage. But of course even that relies on assumptions about the elasticity of labor. What is the relation of this, however, to anything?

And Reaganomics is politically loaded and not an economic term. Supply-side economics, an actual school of macroeconomic thought emphasizing the effects of marginal tax rates on potential output, is more fair.

Stevens lets us Down

Supreme Court rules 5-4 Imminent Domain may apply for private economic purposes.

I am unsure why the AP headline is "Supreme Court Rules Cities May Seize Homes." The government has always had that right for public projects, replacing condemned buildings, and so on. The Court ruled today that local government can also apply that right for private economic gain, if they feel it can generate tax revenue, improve the economy, and increase jobs.

I would normally be all for such improvements, but not flying in the face of property rights.

"Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random," O'Connor wrote in the dissent. "The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms."

I do not know how true that is--or, if true, how negative that actually is to the overall economy. But the essence is right. The value people place on their primary homes cannot be measured by an appraiser. What is the "fair market value" of a home that an elderly women bought during the post-war boom with her then-young husband, has lived in for the better part of a century, raised three children in, watched her husband die in, and now wants to live in in peace? And nevermind the affront to property rights.

NetworkManager's Connection Dialog

Morten: Utility costs are widely considered a non-traded input and not PPP-applicable. But I do not care if the Big Mac Index is tongue in cheek; the point of the post was the paper that I cited that showed case-in-point exactly how slow utility costs converge: 56 months.

Oh, and it does not matter how many renminbis a Big Mac costs on the moon. The interesting statistic is how many renminbis versus how many dollars. But the moon is a dumb example, for exactly the interesting points raised in the paper and admitted in my initial post.

Alkaline Trio tonight!

I Hate McDonalds Anyhow

Last week's Economist featured the latest rendition of the 'ol hamburger standard, the Big Mac Index. Assuming Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), the cost of a common good should equalize across currencies. The Economist informally measures exchange rates by applying PPP to Big Macs, determining whether or not currencies are over or undervalued with respect to the US dollar. This latest Index finds the Swiss Franc--a Big Mac costs $5.05 USD in Switzerland versus $3.06 in the United States--the most overvalued, at 65%. The Index finds, not surprising, China's yuan the most undervalued, at -59%. A Big Mac in China is only $1.27. Averaging the Euro area gives an average cost of $3.58, an overvalue of 17%--also not really surprising.

Of course, the price differences also convey costs that do not easily converge: labor, land, utilities. A possible significant chunk of the $2 difference between a Big Mac in the United States and Switzerland is such uneasily traded costs.

A paper cited in the article, A Prism into the PPP Puzzles: The Micro-foundations of Big Mac Real Exchange Rates, shows just how disparate cost inputs can be. The price of the components of a Big Mac that are internationally traded converge quickly: cheese in 18 months, bread in 14 months, onions in only 8. Non-traded components, however, converge much more slowly: wages converge in 27 months, rent in 55 months, and electricity in 56.

Cambridge has a lot of wireless networks

More NetworkManager hacking. Added a Connection Information dialog, ala Netapplet. And this evening I finished a first-pass at gnome-keyring support.

You call this spaetzle!?

Lost in Nuremberg

Latest inotify, hot off the diff.

Stetic

La la la, making NetworkManager stetic:

Even more Stetic:

The Fed isn't going to ease off on the rate hikes? Sounds familiar.

Oh, come on! 50F? 55F? So long, summer! It was a fun week.

NetworkManager

Kay Sievers and I have been playing with NetworkManager on SUSE.

You know, for the kids

So far, so good.

Hotdog in a Vending Machine

Recent chatter about the Fed ending its tightening of the money supply is premature. While the economic outlook is not as bearish as it was last year--and last month's manufacturing report did not absolve any such worries--we are not going to see a significantly slower third or fourth quarter. Spending is high and, well, there is still that housing market.

Yet some are writing that the Fed's "measured" rate hikes are nearing an end. I see little reason to doubt that the Fed, holed up in their meeting at the end of June, will raise rates another quarter point, bringing the overnight rate to 3.25. I, the most famed of Fed Watchers, suspect that the neutral rate is somewhere between 3.5 and 4.5 and that the Fed will end its hikes around the end of the year at 4.0 or 4.25 points. A lot, however, depends on the bond market.

The Chicago Board of Trade's Fed Funds Futures, always enthralling to peruse, seems to agree.

The Famed Porsche 959: Not street-legal in the US

Mr Welinder, you really need not make strtol(3) so complicated:

    long n;

    errno = 0;
    n = strtol (str, NULL, 0);
    if (errno != 0)
        perror ("strtol");

I know it is not functionally equivalent, but dude, let's not make mountains out of molehills.

The train, Kay and Nat

Also, sir, when would isdigit(signed char) segfault but not isdigit(unsigned char)? Neither should ever crash.

Somehow, fifty EUR ended up on a sushi conveyer built

Bastien definitely wins the award for looking the least like his hackergotchi. (Photo courtesy of Ross, who has made a replacement hackergotchi).

Flying back to Boston tomorrow. Germany has been wonderfully fun, but it is time to fly back across the pond. Monday will find me in New York.

I think that my right tonsil is inflamed or infected or just really mad at me. I am having problems eating all of this delicious German chocolate.

Dutch say No

Kay Sievers is a Wunderhacker.

Meeting at SUSE

Being six hours ahead of Boston--and waking up rather early--I have been reading these things called "Pre-Market Reports."

Who would of known? Before the markets open they do reports on what the markets might do. This sure beats my current tactic, which is waking up at some random time to a groggy holy shit, a rally! as I stumble into E*TRADE.

Nuremberg has castles

One of the points of my GUADEC talk was that, despite all of the horrid things I said about the performance implications of our design decisions, a big blame is the total, utter lack of good tools.

Brian Nitz, who was in attendance, blogged about some of the nice tools that Solaris has. We are seriously lacking in this department.

I've been hacking on a few tools over the last couple of days, including some disk I/O statistics stuff for Beagle and some pmap(1) hacks. I wrote stack detection awhile ago for pmap(1); I would also like to detect the heap and other ELF regions. Also, you know, a better debugger, profiler, performance analyzer, so on and so forth.

Somewhere, Sometime

The weather in Nuremberg is really nice.

Nuremberg

I am in Nuremberg today meeting with friends and colleagues at SUSE. If anyone in the area wants to get together for dinner tonight, mail me.

On the train from Stuttgart to Nuremberg

On the last day of GUADEC, Bryan and I went to Zuffenhausen to see Porsche. It was a religious experience.

A fresh 997 leaving the factory

Today's news is surprising. I would have bet a Pulitzer that Deep Throat was Bernstein playing a joke on Woodward.