Free Market and Snow Plows

Its snowing here in Chicago. I was driving the other day and saw a snow plow driving on the street with it's plow up. It drove for a while like that on the slippery snowy street until it pulled into a strip mall parking lot.

"That's incredibly annoying", I thought.

The businesses payed private plowing companies to plow their parking lots while the city clearly pays plowing companies to plow the streets. So you end up with snow plows that are supposed to plow a parking lot not plow the streets when they go to their destinations.

This may be efficient in terms of speed. Businesses get their lots plowed fast. Often faster than the city can plow the roads. Which is funny because people can't get to those nice clean parking lots.

However this setup is not efficient in terms of resources. In reality the total cost for an area is larger for the community as a whole. The city I live in already employs bus drivers. How hard it be to equip some city trucks with plows. I am sure the bus drivers would love to get some more hours of work in.

I see the snow plows as an example in the inherent inefficiency in the free market. The free market does not consider externalities (Is that a word?). Two parties interacting don't think about the third. Stores don't consider the idea that they might be putting more plows on the road than necessary. To the point of perversion where nobody can get to their clean parking lots.

Spinning Wheels and Heat Sink Fans

My little big old new server went down over the weekend. Me and my wife were in the guest bedroom where the server lives under the bed, ready to scare guests. She was knitting and I was on my laptop. Then a terrible noise came from under the bed. The noise of high pitch squeaking that scared our dog.

I immediately knew it was a fan from within the machine. Opening it up I found the heat sink fan over the CPU struggling to turn. So I turned the machine off.

In a moment of inspiration I thought about using my wife's spinning wheel oil on the fan. After unscrewing the fan and cleaning off the thick layer of dust I simply had to pull back a sticker on the back of the fan to reveal the motor. A simple cleaning and oiling using the spinning wheel oil was all that was needed to get the fan purring like a Mercedes Benz.

I don't think it will bother my mother in law now who is coming to stay over the weekend. She will refuse to sleep on our bed so inevitably will end up sleeping in the guest bedroom, on top the server. All I have to do now is setup festival text to speech for some weekend prankster fun ;-)

Little Big Old New Server

I have setup an old machine (AMD 1.2GHZ) a friend gave me as my source code repository last night. I use darcs for all my source code because it is easy to use and is based on some solid principles. I setup darcsweb on the machine so that you can easily browse around my code and see my changes. I added a link to Personal Projects on the left side column. Most of my code uses the MIT license so feel free to give and take.