Unblocking the chain
I've just been listening to a podcast by someone I very much respect, in which she's being sold snake oil by a crypto bro. It's in the nature of good people that they are trusting, and there's enough appearance of complexity around blockchain to bedazzle the credulous.
But essentially blockchain is a very simple idea, and once you understand it, you understand why it's a very bad idea.
The properties of the system, and their values
Lisp is the list processing language; that is what its name means. It processes data structures built of lists — which may be lists of lists, or lists of numbers, or lists of any other sort of data item provided for by the designers of the system.
But how is a list, in a computer, actually implemented?
Blog IV
I've been blogging moderately systematically since 2004. My first blog was an exercise in 'eating my own dogfood'; I used PRES, a (rather nice) content management system I wrote in 1997 for Alasdair Morgan MP's website. However, two decades ago, web technology was changing rapidly, and by 2011 it got to the point where PRES was no longer worth the effort required to keep it up to date (and I was no longer well enough to cope with running my own infrastructure).
So I switched to Google's Blogger platform. In those days, Google still had the motto don't be evil; sadly, since then, they've dropped the first word from it.
I made the decision a year ago to eat my own dogfood again, and switched to Smeagol, a little wiki engine I wrote ten years ago which is actually quite good and I'm quite proud of; but I've been having problems keeping it running, and you don't need anything that heavyweight to run a blog.
On Money
I've been listening to an interview with Joe Ament on the Economics for Rebels podcast. In it, Joe claims that the origin of money cannot be in barter, because a fisher cannot catch fish until they have a fishing pole, and so, to obtain the fishing pole (Joe, being from the United States, calls it a 'fishing pole', and so, for the purposes of this essay, shall I) they must incur debt. Thus primitive economics is not quid pro quo, but a complex and precise but undenominated system of accounting of debts.
This is obvious nonsense, but it got me thinking: what is money?
Final thoughts before committing to buy a sawmill
Having sold some of my cattle, I now have a small amount of capital I can use. It is a very small amount — £3,000 — and it would be very easy to fritter it away.
There are, essentially, four priority projects it could be used for.
- An electric bicycle. My fitness has degraded substantially, either due to Covid or to age (or both), and cycling up the hill home on an unassisted bike is now such hard work that I am deterred from doing it. So, an electric bike of my own would make life easier. But I can hire one of the village fleet of electric bikes for £20/month, and while they're not what I'd personally choose, they're OK.
- Guest accommodation. This is very much a one-person, and certainly a one bedroom, house. I have long wanted somewhere for guests to stay, and that essentially means a separate cabin. But to achieve a new cabin for £3,000 or anywhere near it, I'd need to build it myself. And most of that cost would be timber. If I had my own sawmill, new cabins would be inexpensive to build — all I'd need to buy would be fastenings, glazing and possibly roof cladding.
- A tractor shed. My tractor doesn't benefit from being left out in the rain, especially in winter. My tractor is a really important asset, which makes so many jobs around the croft easier. I need it to last. But again, having my own sawmill would greatly reduce the cost of a tractor shed.
- The sawmill, which is what this document is all about.