I've been thinking about my own views on capitalism lately. It makes sense, I suppose when you consider that I'm co-founding a for-profit company with an intent to build something so useful that my shares in it would be worth a great deal of money. Add to that the fact that I've been re-negotiating my employment contract with Work [at] Play so that I might better apply my time & energy to this new venture and how I view capitalism becomes pretty important.

Basically, I see my role in a capitalist system as one of maintaining fairness for those involved. In other words, I don't want to make millions of dollars (honestly, what would I do with it?) Rather, I just want to be sure that the profits generated from my work aren't being disproportionately distributed.

To me, any capitalist model should be founded on the understanding that all parties involved stand to profit from their work equally based on the risk endured and the effort applied. In an employer-employee situation, wages are more than the trading of time for money (though they're that too). Wages are also a statement that the employer acknowledges that they wouldn't have a company without the employee and that in recognition of this fact, a reasonable portion of the profits are allocated to them.

I think that a lot of people share my views on this, but don't realise it. They're bitter that person X is paid more or less than person Y but can't explain why. In a co-venture, a lack of understanding can kill the partnership, so knowing the motivation behind those involved is always a good idea. My partner and I are on the same page on this, and I honestly think that it relieves a lot of potential tension.

On a related note, I found this link today that I thought I'd share. It's loosely related, titled "How to Fix Capitalism".

Every year in November, a group gets together to raise money for the fight against prostate cancer -- and they do this by getting everyone to grow ridiculous moustaches. The more embarassing the "mo", the more money usually raised... or so that's the theory.

My "mospace" page is here, complete with pictures of the progress to date. I'll be shaving it off as of December 1st, so if you're curious as to the "progress" so far, you'll have to look there ;-)

I wrote something like this some time ago, but this version is much better, if only because it's in python. Basically, it's a script that highlights standard input based on arguments passed to it.

But how is that useful? Well imagine that you've dumped the contents of a file to standard output, maybe even piped it through grep, and/or sed etc. Oftentimes you're still left with a lot of text and it's hard to find what you're looking for. If only there was a way to highlight arbitrary portions of the text with some colour...

Here's what you do:

$ cat somefile | highlight.py some strings

You'll be presented with the same body of text, but with the word "some" highlighted everywhere in light blue and "strings" highlighted in light green. The script can support up to nine arguments which will show up in different colours. I hope someone finds it useful.

#!/usr/bin/env python3
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import sys,re

colours = [
    "\033[1;34m", # light blue
    "\033[1;32m", # light green
    "\033[1;36m", # light cyan
    "\033[1;31m", # light red
    "\033[1;33m", # yellow
    "\033[0;32m", # green
    "\033[0;36m", # cyan
    "\033[0;33m", # brown
    "\033[1;35m", # pink
    "\033[0m"     # none
]

args = sys.argv[1:]

# Strip out arguments exceeding the maximum
if len(args) > 9:
    print("\n%sWARNING: This script only allows for a maximum of 9 arguments.%s\n\n" % (colours[4], colours[9]), file=sys.stderr)
    args = args[0:8]

while True:
    line = sys.stdin.readline()
    colour = 0
    for arg in args:
        line = re.sub(
            r"(%s)" % (arg),
            "%s%s%s" % (colours[colour], "\g<1>", colours[9]),
            line
        )
        colour = colour + 1
    if line == '':
        break
    try:
        print(line.rstrip("\n"))
    except:
        pass

I'm tagging this one as "Employment" for lack of a better word, but frankly, that's not really accurate. My work life appears to be rapidly branching away from the employer/employee relationship and into running the show myself. The question is becoming one of "how much time do I have?" rather than "with whom can I find work?"

That's right, I'm bringing back the old-school "don't start a sentence with a preposition thing. You're just going to have to deal ;-)

The details: three months ago I was just working at Work [at] Play as a senior software developer, and for all the griping I do about the neighbourhood and the office, it's really a pretty cool place to work. The truth of it though is that I felt like I was stagnating, not doing anything useful with my life, and what's worse, I was rotting like this in Vancouver. I was ready to get the hell out of here at the drop of a hat -- to go anywhere really, just as long as it was sufficiently urban, interesting and wasn't here.

That all changed when Melanie forwarded an interesting "job" posting my way. A young, local entrepreneur was looking for a technical co-founder for a new company wanting to encourage business to do the Right thing by making it profitable to do so. To use an idea from Paul Hawken, our company would help other companies grow like trees, with deep roots, rather than like grass with no sustainable future. The details are complicated, and still a little secret, so I can't share them here, but the point is that I've signed on to make this thing happen. It may implode, but I don't think it will, and in the mean time, I'll have the opportunity to Use My Powers For Good... and that's all I've ever really wanted anyway.

But now things are getting crazy. Less than a week since I've entered into this partnership, I've been contacted by two separate parties wanting me to serve in a senior technical capacity for their enterprises as well. All three ideas sound promising, two of them are Good companies, the third, while run by a good, honest, person I trust, is more about the money and less about Making the World Better. All three are offering very little if any money to start.

The truth is, I can't do all three and keep my job at Work [at] Play. I probably can't even do two, though it'd be nice since one of the other two can pay a little. As it is, I've talked to the brass at my current employer and asked them to figure out a way that I might be able to work 4days/week for them so I can devote two days each week to my new partnership, and while they're currently mulling it over, I'm reasonably confident that they'll find that it's good for everyone if we can make it work.

But for now? things are CRAZY. I honestly don't know what my situation will be in a few weeks. And strangely enough... I like it this way. Who knew?