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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Feudalism, where economic power comes from control of the land and familial connection to the conquerors of the land, was broadly supplanted by capitalism, where economic power comes from control of commercial and industrial capital, which are traded openly in capital markets.

    Capitalism has several features that feudalism does not:

    • The most productive property in capitalism is industrial and commercial capital: the means of industrial production and trade. While land remains profitable, it is no longer the center of economic productivity; and ownership of the land does not convey the sort of dominion over its use that it did in feudalism. (Nobody thinks it’s weird to build a factory on leased land, for instance: the ownership of the industrial capital does not follow the ownership of the underlying land.)
    • Shares of productive property (capital) can be freely bought and sold in capital markets. In feudalism, productive property (land) changes hands through warfare, political processes such as the elevation of new lords by a king, and familial processes such as marriage and inheritance.
    • Contract law becomes supremely important in capitalism, as capitalist firms are largely creatures of contract law rather than traditional rights.
    • The capitalist managerial class by and large does not arise out of the families of the feudal aristocracy, and does not conduct itself according to the social rituals of the feudal aristocracy. For instance, corporate mergers are not arranged through marriage of the heirs of CEOs.
    • Although this is not fully true of early capitalism, in modern capitalism workers are typically free to leave their jobs, and employers are broadly free to fire them if they are not productive. In most forms of feudalism, serfs are bound to the land and may not lawfully leave their lord’s service.

    On that last point — Capitalism emerged out of colonialism. Many of the first firms traded on capital markets were colonial enterprises such as the Dutch East India Company (VOC). These firms employed slave labor and enjoyed legal monopolies on trade. This puts the lie to the libertarian claim that capitalism requires free labor and free trade. Capitalism is perfectly compatible with slavery and monopoly. For later examples see the United Fruit Company and other American colonial ventures.













  • But if someone creates a file called HEAD, should it overwrite a file called head?

    That shouldn’t matter to the “nontechnical” end-user at all. To the nontechnical user, even the abstraction of “creating a file” has largely gone away. You create a document, and changes you make to it are automatically persisted to storage, either local or cloud.

    Only the technical command-line user cares about whether /usr/bin/HEAD and /usr/bin/head are the same path. And only in a specific circumstance — such as the early days of Mac OS X, where the Macintosh and Unix cultures collided — could the bug that I described emerge.


  • I recall a case-insensitivity bug from the early days of Mac OS X.

    There are three command-line utilities that are distributed as part of the Perl HTTP library: GET, HEAD, and POST. These are for performing the HTTP operations of those names from the command line.

    But there’s also a POSIX-standard utility for extracting the first few lines of a text file. It’s called head.

    I think you see where I’m going with this. HEAD and head are the same name in a case-insensitive filesystem such as the classic Mac filesystem. They are different names on a Unix-style filesystem.

    Installing /usr/bin/HEAD from libwww-perl onto a Mac with the classic filesystem overwrote /usr/bin/head and broke various things.