Real World Economics

Few Americans would profess much understanding of economics. In fact, they understand economics perfectly. It is the arcane mumbo-jumbo of econometrics and finance that confounds them. As former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan testified, he doesn't really understand those disciplines either.

The traditional definition of economics is: the study of the allocation of scarce resources. These are the everyday "kitchen table" issues we all deal with on a daily basis. I think people understand well enough that if you spend money on one thing, it's no longer available to spend on something else. If you endlessly pour $10 billion a month into an ill-advised and tragically mismanaged war, you don't have it for other projects that just might possibly be more beneficial.

Moreover, most people understand something the Wall Street "geniuses" have missed -- that all the money in the world won't do you much good if the planet becomes uninhabitable. When the above definintion was posited, certain resources seemed limitless, and therefore were not considered economic commodities. How could anyone charge for clean air and water? They were freely available to all. I think it's high time that definition was ammended to read the study of the allocation of finite resources.

Just as current government economic models failed to forsee the entirely predictable housing bubble, they completely ignore The Tragedy of Commons, as described in the influential 1968 Science article by that name. The problem is that economic models are only attempts to describe the aggregate behavior of real people. When they work, they're valid. When they don't work they're B.S. Thinking that The Laffer Curve, or other complicated equations can replace common sense is the most profound lack of understanding of economics of all.

Rescinding the plutocratic Bush tax cuts isn't "class warfare," or "socialism" -- its the same progressive income tax we've had since the beginning. The notion that increasing rampant income inequality is somehow "good for the economy" is another big lie designed to scare the disenfranchised into accepting exploitation by the investor class.

Unless you reject capitalism altogether, the idea of investment is reasonable. You entrust your savings to a business in exchange for a proportional share of their profit (or loss). Some of the most successful investors, like Warren Buffet approach investing just that way. But when trading becomes an end in itself, it's no longer investment -- it's gambling. I have no moral objections to gambling, but I know this: when you lose you pay up. You don't whine to the Department of the Treasury that the mortgages you've been hawking are worthless, and therefore it's up to the taxpayers to bail you out.

Here again, the beltway brain trust has a lot of complicated explanations why this unprecedented greed and incompetence should be rewarded, while the man on the street understands perfectly -- he's being robbed blind. Never forget this lesson: The Republican Party as it exists today is the party of privelege and irresponsibility. There may be a few honorable men in that group (Chuck Hagel comes to mind), but in general they are beneath contempt and should be thrown out of office wholesale. The Democrats aren't perfect, but you can say this about them: They're not Republicans.

The proposed economic stimulus plan isn't out of committee yet, but we know two things about it. It includes investment in roads, utilities, schools, and other economic goods that people can use -- and the Republicans have suddenly come to Jesus about deficit spending. "Why invest in America? Look at all the wonderful things deregulation and sloth have produced." Don't buy it. You can tell they are lying because their mouths move.

We'll come out of this recession or depression or whatever it is just as we always do: people will tighten their belts and concentrate on necessities. People need food, but they don't need delicacies. They need clothing, but they don't need fashion. Shelter is a necessity, but ostentatious mansions are not.

In hard times, people spend less on entertainment, and more on do-it yourself activities, whether that means auto repairs, starting a nice vegetable garden, or just doing some chores for a neighbor, perhaps in exchange for a home-cooked meal.

One way or another, people find a way to be productive whether they have a job or not. Despite of the fact that most of this activity is "off the books," (or maybe because of it) eventually things begin to turn around. If Hollywood or professional sports suffer, do you really think they will suffer very much?

Hydraulic Valve Lifters

Hydraulic valve lifters are a wonderful invention introduced by Pierce-Arrow in 1933. Briefly, this is what they do:

Four-cycle engines have a camshaft which opens and closes the intake and exhaust valves through connecting parts that comprise the rest of the valvetrain. Because the optimum valve opening is relatively precise, and because the valvetrain parts are subject to thermal expansion and contraction, a specific amount of space known as valve lash must be provided on a cold engine.

Hydraulic valve lifters or tappets are also known as hydraulic lash adjusters, because that is what they do. When a valve is closed oil can enter the lifter pushing a cylinder within it until the rocker arm (in the case of overhead valve engines) contacts the valve stem, producing zero valve lash. When the camshaft pushes on the tappet its fill port is blocked, so it functions as a solid lifter would. This process is automatic, and does away with the need for periodic valve adjustment.

This makes for a very quiet valvetrain. Except in rare conditions where the tappet "pumps up," it also prevents serious damage to valves and even pistons that can occur when the valve lash is set too tight. Other things being equal engines equipped with hydraulic lifters tend to be durable, since the pitfalls of improper valve adjustment are avoided.

Of course, hydraulic lifters do wear out. How long they will last depends on engine design, maintainence, and conditions of use. As a general rule of thumb auto engines with 75-100 K miles are candidates for valve lifter replacement. When you begin to hear valve noises, you should inspect the entire valvetrain, replacing parts as needed. There is no reason most engines won't go 400 K miles if this is done.

This is a surprisingly easy process with inline engines, although it's a bit more complicated than changing spark plugs or oil filters. With a V-6 or V-8 engine, you may have to remove the intake manifold, in which case you should be familiar with the operation of a torque wrench. Depending upon your specific engine, you may have to remove a number of parts to gain access to the valve cover and pushrod cover. Consult your repair manual for details.

On a typical OHV engine, removing the valve cover will reveal the rocker arms, the pushrods, and the valvestems with their associated springs and keepers. These will be filthy, so it's a great benefit to clean them now using aerosol carburetor cleaner for starters. Since carb cleaner tends to be corrosive, I like to follow that with a thin coating of Marvel Mystery Oil.

Much is made of the importance of keeping the pushrods in their original positions and alignments. This is because small differences in wear patterns will only work against you if you mix them up. It's probably a good idea to just replace the lot of them. Pushrods are pretty cheap compared to the labor involved in getting to them, and they are likely to be filthy inside and out. You want your valvetrain to wind up at the tight end of the specified valve lash range -- wear will tend to make it looser over time.

Once you've removed and either catalogued or discarded your pushrods, you can access the tappets by reaching down through the cylinder head, preferably with a tappet remover, but you can't get them out. To do that, you have to remove the pushrod cover. This will also be filthy, and needs a thorough cleaning. Oil lubricates the entire valvetrain, as well as acting as the hydraulic fluid in the tappets, so cleanliness is essential to a lasting repair.

Pull the old tappets, and replace them with new ones. Coat the new tappet with engine assembly lube or regular oil. You may want to coat the bottom where the tappet contacts the cam with a bit of axle grease. You don't want any excessive friction or galling from a dry start, so apply lube generously wherever new parts contact anything. Reassemble the engine in the opposite order you dismantled it.

This is only intended as a general guide, but you can see that depending on your specific engine, there are relatively few steps to this whole procedure, and you should be able to manage it if you take your time and address any unforseen "bumps in the road" as they occur. Given that your beloved car or truck might last longer than you do it's a pretty worthy project.

PC-BSD 7.0.2

I'm not easily embarassed, but I should have looked around the FreeBSD Site a little more before my last post. I was so thrilled to see changes in FreeBSD 7.0 that would help me to finally get my MySQL server set up "right," that I completely overlooked PC-BSD. I assumed that it was yet another branch in the BSD code tree, and that since it was new, it couldn't amount to much yet. Wrong!

One of the biggest challenges in building a *NIX network is to get all the component programs and their dependencies sorted out to build a useable desktop environment. This is one area where Linux distros have outpaced the BSDs. PC-BSD, it turns out is not a new BSD branch, but simply a distribution of the current STABLE FreeBSD release.

The distro includes a selection of software packages and its own PBI (Push-Button Installer) utility. Together, these constitute a desktop operating system that is easy to install and use, while preserving FreeBSD's full range of configuration options "under the hood." I'm juggling boxes now to get something Pentium Threeish to test this on!

For more information see The PC-BSD Quick Start Guide.

FreeBSD 7.0

BSD is the best kept secret in the world of desktop operating systems. And by "secret," I mean not the least bit secret, completely out in the open, freely available to all, and entirely open source. Talk about hiding in plain sight! So what is it?

Let's begin with a little history: UNIX is a multi-user multitasking operating system developed in 1969 by AT&T employees at Bell Labs. The name is reference to an even earlier OS Multics, so it's ironic that the copyrighted name UNIX® has been so jealously guarded for all these years. Almost as soon as UNIX appeared, various organizations began to create their own software around the same general framework, most notably UC Berkeley with their Berkeley Standard Distribution -- BSD for short.

With so many versions of *nix floating around, it was inevitable that the POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface) API would be formulated to ensure interoperability. So all the flavors of BSD, Linux, SunOS, Irix, HP/UX, etc. can now be called simply "POSIX-compliant UNIX-like Operating Systems" (or just *NIX). All this development occurred in the realm of big iron, since Intel's first multi-tasking CPU (80386) didn't arrive until 1986, followed by POSIX in 1988.

The Regents of the University of California released the BSD code into the public domain in 1990, and the first x86 architecture port of BSD -- 386BSD followed in 1992. So, if there's been a perfectly serviceable network-ready clone PC operating system freely available since well before Windows 95, why are so few people using (or even aware) of it?

One reason is that it's free. A lot of people automatically distrust freeware. There is also no particular incentive to promote or advertise FreeBSD and its variants, although some enthusiasts (like me) do what they can in terms of advocacy. Then there is the question of suitability for a given task. *NIX is much better adapted to network server applications than to stand-alone desktop use. Finally, Windows and *NIX are very different in their general philosophy.

Windows requires relatively little expertise to successfully install and operate. Everything is done automagically by wizards. BSD is vastly more configurable, but that versatility comes at a price: You need answers where you didn't even know there were questions. That isn't an insurmountable problem -- BSD has some of the most extensive and complete documentation available for any software. Unfortunately, accessing that information can be a bit overwhelming -- like taking a drink from a fire hose.

Here's what to do: the next time you replace a computer (or see one being discarded), use it for your BSD project box. There's no substitute for diving right in and getting your feet wet. If you've already tried this in the past, try again. The 7.0 Release is a big improvement over previous releases in terms of ease of installation and configuration. Don't worry if you can't get everything you could possibly want up and running in an afternoon, that would be an unrealistic expectation. Just fiddle with it when you can and before long you'll be amazed at what that old "piece of junk" computer can do unencumbered by an operating system so "advanced" that you need a new computer for every new OS version.

Now I'm not even going to attempt to tell you how to use BSD in you particular circumstances, or even which flavor is best for you, but I will point you to some significant resources:

• The FreeBSD Handbook (volume I) This users manual will take you step by step through the process of installing FreeBSD on a PC-clone and setting up a graphic user interface, which should be a more comfortable environment if you are accustomed to Windows.
• The FreeBSD Handbook (volume II) This administrators guide focusses on network server tasks.

Like the OS itself, these resources are available online, but sometimes a hard-copy edition is much handier. Even if you are installing a version of BSD other than FreeBSD, this documentation will be helpful.

You may want to get installation CDs, but if you have broadband internet, I recommend that you try installing from an FTP server first. It's surprisingly easy and (sort of) fast. All you need to do is follow directions to prepare 5 floppy disks, then the rest of the distribution will be downloaded as needed during the installation process. (Try that with Microsoft!)

After you have installed BSD you will have access to the manual pages accessed by the command "man <command>". Start with "man man" to learn more about the man command itself, and since you probably can't read fast enough to absorb the whole page as it flashes by use the pipe (|) character to redirect output to "more," a simple utility that displays one page at a time. So you'll type "man man | more" (without the quotes) then press enter.

Like Perl, *NIX make easy things easy and hard thing possible. Enjoy.