What's this ZFS thing?  Why would I want it on my computer?

ZFS is, bar none, the best file system ever invented.  It's better than ext4, better than XFS, and better than btrfs (which is, to date, the most advanced file system included in the Linux kernel).

If you want high reliability, data integrity and ease of administration for your computer, then you want to install Fedora atop ZFS.

I'll help you do exactly that.

Gather what you'll need

This guide should take about 25 to 30 minutes of your time, unless you're making a speed run.  You will need:

1. A computer with a hard disk (or SSD, same thing).  Conceivably, you could install on an USB drive too.  We'll stick to the hard disk in this case.
2. A USB drive or CD-ROM with Fedora 16 Live booting from it.  You can record a CD or use liveusb-creator to afford your USB the Live CD.

Install Fedora

We are going to install a Fedora copy on your computer.

Boot Fedora Live

Tell your computer that you want to boot from the USB drive or CD-ROM containing the Fedora Live installation you have at hand.  For this, the instructions will vary from computer to computer, so we won't say much about that.

Start the installation program

Now run the Install to Hard Disk program in the System tools menu.

You can use the installation program as usual.  We'll just have to make a quick stop on the partitioning part, where we'll hold your hands.  Select Create custom layout from the options:

Partition your disk correctly

OK, now that you're you're here, continue and create the following partition layout:

1. A BIOS boot partition, 2 MB in size
2. A /boot partition (ext4 or ext2, whatever you prefer) around 500 MB in size
3. A swap partition, probably twice as big as the RAM memory in your system.
4. An ext4 partition, mounted nowhere.  You must select Fill to maximum available size
5. Another ext4 partition, mounted nowhere.  You must select the same Fill option as before.
6. Once you have done this, select the very last partition, and change it so it mounts on /.

In sum: it's very important that the last partition on disk is the / partition, and that the swap partition be at the beginning of the disk.  This is how it will look like in the end:

Now hit Next.

Continue the installation after rebooting

You can continue the installation as normal.  When the installation is done, eject the CD or USB drive, and reboot.  After rebooting, complete the Fedora post-install wizard.  Here's the product of your work:

Disable SELinux

As root, edit /etc/selinux/config and disable SELinux by changing SELINUX to disabled.  Save the file.

Then disable enforcement for the duration of your current session by running the command:

setenforce 0

Note: yes, SELinux is important.  We know.  For the time being, however, your system will require that you disable SELinux until all issues preventing the use of SELinux with ZFS are ironed out.  Maybe you can help us fix them.

Install ZFS

Since the installation of ZFS is a bit involved, we'll give you a few steps to run by hand and then a script that will take care of ZFS just fine.  The following steps you will need to run as root, so open a terminal window and run the following commands as root.

Install dependencies first

You'll need to a series of dependencies to compile ZFS, so install them first:

yum install -y git patch kernel-devel gcc zlib-devel libuuid-devel libtool automake autoconf

Clone ZFS

OK, after doing this, clone the ZFS repositories:

cd /usr/src
git clone https://github.com/zfsonlinux/spl
git clone https://github.com/Rudd-O/zfs

This should net you two directories in /usr/src containing these sources.

Add the compile script

You will need to run the following script soon.  Save the contents of that file as /usr/src/deploy-zfs:  Don't forget to make it executable.

Patch GRUB to accept ZFS root file systems

OK, now it's time to patch GRUB.  Do the following steps:

cp /sbin/grub2-mkconfig /usr/src/grub-mkconfig.in
patch -p2 < /usr/src/zfs/grub2/grub-mkconfig-zfs-support.diff
mv /usr/src/grub-mkconfig.in /usr/src/grub2-mkconfig

Tell the system to run deploy-zfs on every kernel installation

To get this step done, do the following:

mkdir -p /etc/kernel/postinst.d
ln -s /usr/src/deploy-zfs /etc/kernel/postinst.d/

Run deploy-zfs

At this point, you're ready to install ZFS.  Run it:

/usr/src/deploy-zfs

Reboot

Since the kernel-devel package is only available for the latest kernel, the ZFS modules are only going to be available on the latest kernel.  So you are now going to reboot using the latest kernel.

Reboot your machine.  When it reboots, select the latest kernel.  After boot is done, confirm that you're using the latest kernel using the commands rpm -q kernel and uname -r.

Prepare the​ ZFS pool and file systems

OK.  You have rebooted.  Good.

Remember when we created a partition that was empty initially during the installation?  Excellent.  We're going to create a pool right there.  In the following example, we assume that your root file system is mounted in /dev/sda5 and the empty space is mounted in /dev/sda4.  It would be a good idea to check this fact with the mount and parted commands before you proceed.

Create the storage pool

Run the following commands:

zpool create pool -m none -o ashift=12 /dev/sda4

The -m none parameter tells the pool to not mount itself anywhere.  The -o ashift=12 parameter is optional, but it will make your pool perform better on advanced-format 4K sector disks (like SSDs and big hard disks).

If you did it right, you should be able to do the following and see a screen similar to this:

Create the root file system, along with other file systems

Strictly speaking, this step is optional.  You could use your pool exactly as it was when it was created.  However, it's a good idea to follow the next step because it allows you to carry multiple operating systems and system directories in your pool more easily, so it's recommended.

zfs create pool/ROOT
zfs create pool/ROOT/fedora

You should see something like this, after listing them:

pool/ROOT/fedora will be your root file system.  Feel free to create as many file systems underneath it as you would like, now.  pool/ROOT/fedora/home, pool/ROOT/fedora/var, go wild like this:

zfs create pool/ROOT/fedora/home
zfs create pool/ROOT/fedora/var

Note: there is an exception to this.  Remember that /usr cannot be an independent file system for now -- you can create it and set its canmount property to no, then create child file systems with canmount=yes within /usr, but you cannot directly mount any file system on /usr without your system breaking completely.  This issue will be addressed in the future by the ZFS team.  In the meantime. /usr must be available as part of the root file system.

Set optional properties on the pool

This is an optional step.  Now is the best time to set properties like compression or no access time updates on your pool.  If you have a decent CPU, compression will give you higher performance, especially with slower disks.  Disabling access time recording gives an extra boost.  This is the moment to set them:

zfs set compression=on pool
zfs set atime=off pool

OK.  Now every byte hitting your pool will be compressed.  Nice space savings!

Export the pool and reimport it with an alternate root

Run the following commands:

zpool export pool
zpool import -o altroot=/sysroot pool

This will make the ZFS system mount any file systems within the pool in /sysroot.

Mount the file system that will be the destination for your operating system

Set the mountpoint property on the root file system for your operating system:

zfs set mountpoint=/ root/POOL/fedora

Your file systems will now look like this:

Migrate and configure the operating system

Copy the operating system to /sysroot

The next step is straightforward and it only requires waiting a bit:

rsync -axv / /sysroot/

Note the slash in the end of /sysroot/!

Populate /dev

You'll need the device files too:

rsync -axv /dev/ /sysroot/dev/

Chroot into the /sysroot file system

That's it.  Use chroot to enter that directory as if it was the root.

Mount /boot, /sys and /proc

mount -t proc proc /proc
mount -t sysfs sys /sys
mount /boot

This is how your system should look like after mounting these file systems.

Edit fstab to fix the root file system

Now you'll be editng the root file system entry in fstab.  Edit the file /etc/fstab, and change the line that mounts / as follows:

pool/ROOT/fedora / zfs defaults 0 0

You may want to replace defaults with noatime for higher performance.  This is how it should look like:

Redo GRUB configuration

We will be using the special grub2-mkconfig that we patched earlier for this.  Run the following command:

/usr/src/grub2-mkconfig | tee /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Your screen should look a bit like this.  Note the root=pool/ROOT/fedora parameter!

Regenerate the initial RAM disk

OK, now it's time to regenerate the initial RAM disk.  The following command accomplishes that:

dracut -f /boot/initramfs-`uname -r`.img `uname -r`

Ignore the errors it gives you about no such dataset.  These are temporary error messages because you are in a chroot.

Unmount mounted file systems inside the chroot, and exit the chroot

Clean up your chroot, and exit it.

umount /boot
umount /sys
umount /proc
exit

Export the pool

To ensure a clean system, export the pool now.

zpool export pool

If this process hangs, just wait thirty seconds, and then hard power off your machine.  ZFS won't lose a bit because of this.

Reboot

Reboot your operating system.  The system should boot normally.

Confirm that your system is now using ZFS as the root file system

Run the mount command.  It should show you the following, confirming that ZFS is now your root file system, and everything works normally:

Enlarge the pool to take the unused space up

The last and final step is short and sweet.  It involves nuking the ext4 partition and enlarging the ZFS partition to take up the empty space.  We'll show you how to do that right now.

Nuke the ext4 partition

Open parted on a terminal as root.  Follow these steps:

• Remove partition 5: rm 4
  This is the ext4 partition we created earlier that was mounted on /.
• Resize partition 4 to take up the newly freed space:
  • Change to sectors unit: unit s
  • Show the list of partitions: p
  • Make a note of the starting size of partition 4, and the total size of the disk.
  • Remove partition 4: rm 4
    Ignore any errors.
  • Create a new partition: mkpart.
    • Give it no name.
    • Set its type to ext4 (doesn't matter, really).
    • Set its starting point to the old partition 4's starting point.
    • Set its ending point to the size of the disk in sectors minus 1.
    • Ignore all errors.

After all the changes, parted should look like this:

Reboot your machine now.  As long as the starting sector of the ZFS partition remains unchanged, ZFS will be unfazed by this change in partitions.

Enlarge the pool

After the reboot, run the command:

zpool online -e pool /dev/sda4

Once you have done that, the pool will have gobbled up the new space in the bigger partition.  Look:

That's it!

And that is it.  That is really the end.  You have a system that runs ZFS and boots from it.  Great job!

From now on, every time you update the kernel, the deploy-zfs script will be run right after the new kernel is deployed into place, allowing you to boot updated kernels with ZFS just fine.  In the future, the ZFS on Linux project will release more enhancements to get your system up and running with the latest version of ZFS without compilation.  For the moment, your system is going to do fine.  Make sure you update with git pull the spl and zfs source trees from time to time!

Good luck, and happy hacking!

Huge thanks to @shiinee for helping me with test-driving the entire process and documenting each step!

This article was culled from How to install Fedora on top of ZFS.

The reality is that, today, ZFS is way better than btrfs in a number of areas, in very concrete ways that make using ZFS a joy and make using btrfs a pain, and make ZFS the only choice for many workloads.  Even in single-disk laptop or desktop configurations, ZFS has a number of advantages over btrfs that will make your life much easier.

Here, I will examine in detail all the ways in which ZFS is better than btrfs.  Fundamentally, all of these advantages are practical consequences of user-centered design decisions that -- while technically possible to implement in btrfs -- were completely absent during the conception of btrfs.  We can only hope that, with a bit of luck, the btrfs developers will eventually fix these problems and produce a superior file system.

For the record, everything I've discussed here is available for Linux, both as the ZFS on Linux project and the ZFS-FUSE project as well.

ZFS organizes file systems as a flexible tree

btrfs does not allow you to organize subvolumes.  Subvolumes appear where you created them (whether through creation or snapshotting), and you can't move or rename them.  That's it.

ZFS organizes file systems within a pool as a flexible tree.  Of course -- just like with btrfs -- when you create a file system, the file system you created is always a child file system of another file system.  But you can rename and move them around freely, and you can reconfigure how they attach to your VFS anywhere, including points outside of the mount point where the pool was attached originally.  Also, snapshots do not attach themselves to the VFS automatically.

What do these facts allow you to do?

• You can organize your ZFS file systems in a tree, separate from snapshots themselves.  This comes more naturally because the VFS is already a tree.  You can't do that with btrfs.
• You can mount a ZFS file system without mounting its children.  What's more, mounting a ZFS file system with its children, whether they are file systems or snapshots, doesn't force you to see the children mounted underneath -- you can have the children be mounted somewhere else.  With ZFS, you choose where a file system is attached to the VFS tree; the initial mount point of the file system does not bind your wishes in any way.
• You can apply operations to an entire tree of file systems at once.  You have to apply those operations separately to each btrfs subvolume.
• You can set policy for an entire subtree of file systems at once.  You have to manually set policy for each btrfs subvolume.
• You can manage usage of disk space hierarchically.  You can't even view per-subvolume disk space usage on btrfs.
• You can view the entire tree of all active pools on your system with a single command.  With btrfs, you have to first discover which btrfs file systems are mounted, and then use one command per tree, which may not show you the entire tree (e.g. if you have mounted a subvolume rather than the root subvolume).

At first glance, these may sound like whining about "the way btrfs does things".  But all we have to do to understand they really are not, is ask ourselves: hy are these ZFS affordances important?

Because they allow you to discover, manage and tune data storage and organization with very little effort.  Sure, if you have two subvolumes vs. two ZFS file systems, it's not that important to have them organized in a tree, but if you have two hundred, then suddenly the ability to operate on whole swaths of file systems becomes vital.  And there are very good reasons you might want to have lots of file systems:

• Separating data according to security policies.
• Giving different quotas depending on the directory.
• Segregating data according to policy, churn, backup lifecycle, et cetera.
• Giving each user his own home directory.

These are all things you might want to do, but you'd have to ponder whether it is worth doing given the added effort to do them.  ZFS makes it effortless to use these features, without adding any additional work for you.  Thus, ZFS makes it possible to do what you want, whereas before with btrfs you would have said "naaah, that's too much work for very little benefit".  In this sense, ZFS offers advantages that make btrfs look as cumbersome as LVM in some scenarios.

File system operations in ZFS can apply recursively

Want to snapshot a ZFS file system and all its children together?  It's one command.  You can snapshot fifty or five thousand file systems this way.  Not possible with btrfs -- the snapshot operation applies exclusively to the file system you snapshotted.  If you have / and /var is a subvolume of /, snapshotting of / does not snapshot /var with it.

Want to relocate a subtree of twenty file systems into a new mountpoint?  Again, one command changing one property accomplishes it.   Not possible with btrfs.

Want to backup a specific subtree or mirror it to another machine?  No problem.  Again, one command.

You can't do any of these things with btrfs.  Which means you will think twice about creating many btrfs subvolumes.  Which means you won't benefit from the advantages of btrfs subvolumes as much.

Policy set on ZFS file systems is inherited by their children

One powerful feature of ZFS file systems is that any property set on it -- including the mount point -- will inherit to its children by default.

Say you want compression on all your file systems but a specific one.   No problem -- enable it on the root and disable it on the one you don't want to compress data.  You can even set different compression algorithms, and the policy will inherit properly.  You can't do any of that with btrfs.

You want to relocate a specific subtree of file systems somewhere else?  No problem -- change the mountpoint property on the parent of all those file systems, and ZFS will remount the parent in the new location, and all its children inside the new location too.

ZFS auto-mounts file systems by default

btrfs does not automatically mount file systems.  For each subvolume you create, you have to register it in the fstab so it is mounted on boot, unless it's a direct child of a mounted subvolume -- in which case you can't change its mount point!

This is not needed with ZFS.  ZFS automatically mounts each file system based on the mountpoint property assigned to it.  Since the mountpoint property is inherited too (but overridable), all child file systems are mounted at the right place as well.

This means you can forget about having to change fstab with ZFS, if you so choose.  Creating a file system?  No problem, ZFS will mount it in the right place.  Destroying a file system or a whole subtree?  No problem, ZFS will unmount them for you.  Relocating a file system subtree to another graft point in your VFS?  Easy peasy -- change one property in one file system and you're good to go.  At no point will you be required to change fstab or issue many mount and umount commands.

Of course, you can override that.  You can relocate specific portions of your ZFS tree of file systems to a different mountpoint.  Simply adjust the mountpoint property on the file system you want to move, and ZFS will unmount it and remount it in the new destination directory.  If the file system has any children, they will also be unmounted and remounted as subdirectories of the new location.

Heck, with the built-in dracut and systemd support in ZFS (my tree contains it), you can even boot your operating system on a ZFS file system root, and you won't have to register any file system (except perhaps for the root one) in fstab.  Using my tree, systemd will automatically take care of discovering all pools and mounting all file systems on boot, in the correct order (even if you have other file systems in fstab) and in parallel.  And yes, root file system on ZFS works fine.  You can kiss maintenance of fstab goodbye.  I have written a guide to do exactly this.

And, if you don't like this, you can even tell ZFS that certain file systems are legacy and should not be mounted automatically, then use fstab for them.

Not having the auto-mount feature or inheritable mountpoint properties in btrfs, again, means that managing many subvolumes is cumbersome at best.  Which means you won't take advantage of subvolumes in practice.

ZFS tracks used space per file system

btrfs cannot show you how much disk space is being referred to by each subvolume, as its used and free space tracking is only per pool.  The only way to see how much space a particular subvolume is taking is to use du, which gets slower the bigger the subvolume gets.

ZFS can, and it will do so instantaneously, regardless of the size or amount of your filesystems.  The command zfs list will show you how much disk space is being referred to by each dataset, by its snapshots, and by all child snapshots of the dataset.

This is good because you can designate different areas or categories, mounted at different points of the VFS structure, and then rapidly see which ones are taking the most space and how intensive is the "churn" (change in time), simply by visually comparing the used space with the used space of previous snapshots of your datasets.  Want to know how much space your /var is taking?  As long as you created it as a ZFS file system, no problem -- it will be instantaneous.  Want to know how much its data has changed since the last snapshot?  zfs list will tell you that.

Suppose you have:

pool/shared
pool/shared/Movies
pool/shared/Music
pool/shared/TV shows

A single zfs list command will let you know, instantaneously:

• How much disk space you have free
• How much disk space Movies, Music and TV shows take
• How much disk space the whole of pool/shared takes
• How much disk space is being used exclusively by pool/shared but not by any of its children
• How much disk space the snapshots of each one of those file systems are taking

In a very easy to read list.

This is made possible because of the "virtual memory-like" DMU abstraction layer in ZFS.

Oh, I almost forgot: df actually does work properly with ZFS file systems.

ZFS distinguishes snapshots from file systems

btrfs pollutes the file system namespace by keeping snapshots and file systems in the same location.  A snapshot appears as a "copy-on-write" (and writable!) directory which is a sibling of the directory containing the subvolume you just snapshotted.  What happens if you don't like that, or you would like the snapshot to be invisible to users?  What happens is that you're screwed -- you can't prevent that from happening.  Cue ten /home directories!

In contrast, ZFS intelligently separates snapshots from file systems, which makes it possible for ZFS not to list them by default, or to list them separately from file systems.  The name of the snapshot is distinct and separate from the name of the file system that was snapshotted.  ZFS also doesn't auto-mount snapshots or allow modifications to it, unless you request otherwise.  To get the snapshot to be writable (which you presumably might want in certain circumstances), you have to explicitly clone it into the file system namespace.

This lack of clutter makes ZFS more efficacious for you to manage large numbers of snapshots with large numbers of file systems, and less likely for you to touch data you snapshotted for backup purposes.

ZFS lets you specify compression and other properties per file system subtree

btrfs only lets you specify compression for the whole pool, or for individual files, or for specific file systems (and only as a mount option).  ZFS lets you specify compression as an intrinsic property of a file system.  Of course, coupled with property inheritance, this means you can compress a whole subtree, or compress the entire pool but for a specific subtree, with one or two commands.

Same goes for every other file system tuning option, like the block size for I/O or mount options like noatime.

ZFS is more stable

ZFS has simply had orders of magnitude more testing.  It was written as a user-space program to begin with, and it's runnable for testing purposes as a user-space program, which means that fast automated testing was there from day one.

ZFS has RAIDZ

btrfs has nothing equivalent to RAID5.  You can only do RAID10, RAID1 and RAID0.  ZFS has them all plus a RAID5 implementation called RAIDZ that is invulnerable to the write hole problem (which will make you lose your entire array under certain circumstances).

ZFS has send and receive

ZFS lets you mirror an entire pool or subtrees of that pool by incrementally transferring changed data between snapshots.  btrfs does not have that yet, though it's in the works.  It remains to be seen if btrfs's implementation of send and receive will be as easy to use as ZFS's implementation is -- judging from current facts, it is unlikely.

ZFS is better documented

There is a wealth of documentation on ZFS.  Its man pages are impeccable and explain very well what ZFS is, the core concepts, how they relate with each other, and details on the behavior of each command.  The documentation is written in such a way that you don't have to piece facts together to get a comprehensive view of the whole subsystem, and you won't have as many doubts as to the effect of each action you take.

ZFS uses atomic writes and barriers

Every write in ZFS is an atomic transaction, because ZFS makes use of barriers to complete transactions.  This prevents reordering of writes that might cause inconsistencies due to incomplete writes.  This also makes it unnecessary to disable the disk write cache, an operation that would reduce your disk subsystem write performance substantially.

You can yank the power cord of your machine -- you will never lose a single byte of anything committed to the disk.  ZFS is always consistent on disk, and never trusts any faulty data (that might have become damaged because of hardware issues).  This is why people say ZFS requires no fsck to check for consistency, and faulty data never causes kernel panics.

We do not yet know with certainity if that is the case with btrfs, but -- unlike with ZFS -- we do know of many btrfs pools that have gone bad, and of btrfs inconsistencies that have caused kernel panics.

ZFS will actually tell you what went bad in no uncertain terms, and help you fix it

ZFS includes an administrative function in zpool status, that will let you check the status of your pool and its component devices.

This command will list any damage that your pool has sustained, the type of damage (read, write or checksum error), and which device suffered the damage.  In addition to that, ZFS will tell you if you actually lost any data due to the damage, and which files were lost.  If no data was lost as a consequence of the damage, because ZFS managed to repair the damage, ZFS will tell you "everything is okay, I have repaired the data, but this device is still faulty".

The same command will also tell you which devices are online, offline, faulted, and spares for your pool.  If any device is offline or faulted, ZFS will explain why (because of absence of the device, deadlock, or too many errors detected from the device).

Finally, ZFS will give you helpful hints right there in the command line, informing you of the best course of action and linking you to an extended explanation of what happened.

btrfs has nothing of the sort.  You are forced to stalk the kernel ring buffer if you want to find out about such things.

ZFS increases random read performance with advanced memory and disk caches

Unlike btrfs, which is limited to the system's cache, ZFS will take advantage of fast SSDs or other fast memory technology devices, as a second level cache (L2ARC).  This cache is very effective because it is geared toward serving random reads at very high performance (so large streaming reads won't evict or trash other hot objects in the cache).

The L2ARC also cooperates with the very effective ARC (adaptive replacement cache) in main memory, to prevent unnecessary data duplication and to keep the hottest data in the fastest location.  Finally, the L2ARC won't destroy your cache device with unlimited writes -- write speeds to the L2ARC are judiciously limited so the memory cells in your cache device won't sustain inordinate wear.

btrfs has nothing even remotely close to this.  You want to cache a large working set being consumed by random reads, but you don't have a machine that will accept 256 GB RAM?  Sorry, you're out of luck.

ZFS increases random and synchronous write performance with log devices

ZFS has the ability to designate a fast SSD as a SLOG device.  This SLOG device lets clients complete synchronous writes instantaneously and return to the clients immediately, without bogging down the main disks (which would be slow under any copy-on-write file system because of random seeks).  After a short period, the transactions committed to the SLOG device are committed to the rotating disks in streaming fashion.  The SLOG device is, effectively, a very effective mechanism to commit a huge volume of small synchronous transactions, which would destroy IOPS performance, in a sequentialized fashion.

btrfs?  Nothing like that there, move along.

ZFS supports thin-provisioned virtual block devices

Virtualizing a large number of machines?  Testing other file systems?  Consolidating many machines in a single storage unit?

No problem.  ZFS (in its ZFS on Linux incarnation) lets you allocate block devices called ZVOLs backed by portions of your pool.  ZVOLs are thin-provisioned, so you can create any number of them, and create any kind of file systems on top of them.  TRIM commands from clients using those volumes release unused space on the ZVOLs back to the pool, so you can continue enjoying the advantages of thin provisioning.  What's even better, ZFS will let you share ZVOLs using iSCSI, no extra configuration or mucking around with configuration files required.

Of course, all of the benefits of ZFS (including deduplication, snapshotting, and incremental send/receive) are available to be used with ZVOLs.  A client of a ZVOL writes a sector -- whether iSCSI, or a VM, or a local file system created on top of the volume -- and that sector will get compressed, deduplicated, and backed up using your established snapshot and send / receive policy.

To even come close to this kind of thing on btrfs, you would have to create big-ass qcow or other block storage backing files, then turn them into block devices using iSCSI or other technologies like qemu.  Which means that every disk read or write incurs an extra 2 context switches.  And don't forget the editing of configuration files...

ZFS helps you share

Sharing data?

No matter the mechanism, ZFS will help you there.  ZFS will share, upon your request, file systems over CIFS (SAMBA), NFS or iSCSI without any special kind of configuration:

zfs set sharesmb=on pool/shared/Movies
zfs set sharenfs=on pool/shared/Movies
zfs set shareiscsi=on pool/virtualmachines/fedorarootfilesystem

btrfs can't do that.  You must manually alter daemon configuration and reload services if you want to share something.  ZFS does it automatically for you.

Don't be a misanthrope.  Share!

ZFS can save you terabytes by deduplicating your data

Yes, it's memory-hungry, and yes, it can reduce your write performance a bit.  But at least you can use it.

btrfs?  Nope.

Some of this information was culled from the ZFS Gentoo overlay FAQ.  Many thanks to Richard Yao.

This article was culled from How ZFS continues to be better than btrfs.

We went to a Burmese restaurant and had a lot of great conversation. Richard is flat out a very brilliant man, and he kept us entertained.

However, I think after that dinner I found a philosophical problem with the free software movement that makes it partially incompatible with voluntaryism. It took me a few days to figure out what it was, but now I know. Let me explain.

Richard is against abolishing copyrights because, to his view, without copyright, enforcing copyleft would be impossible. This, of course, I see as a mistake in two different ways.

The first error is practical and should be obvious: it is clearly possible to enforce copyleft solely using contracts -- one only needs to rewrite a license like the GPL as a contract, then any signers can be held to its letter at the nearest judicial / dispute resolution organization. Other people have written extensively about the topic, so I won't elaborate on this.

The second error is of an ethical nature, and I believe it shows the reactionary and inconsistent nature of Richard's ethos. On this error, I will most definitely elaborate now.

In Richard's view, having copyright available as a tool to support copyleft is not enough. His stated goal goes way beyond that.

According to Richard, every piece of software ought to be copyleft. That implies, peaceful people willing to exchange software under certain non-copyleft terms -- for example, "I give you money, you give me a compiled binary" -- are behaving unethically (and therefore they ought to be punished, and such transactions prohibited). In a "fully copylefted" world, only copyleft software transactions would be accepted as "ethical" (and therefore free of punishment).

Richard defines this fundamental ethos as the foundation of the free software movement. Interestingly, it is also the core distinction between Eric S. Raymond's open source movement and free software itself ("free software is good, but one should have the freedom to choose unfree software" vs. "no unfree software is ethical").

The problem with the free software ethos, as should be obvious now, is that punishing peaceful people for engaging in certain types of relationships is as far from free as it could possibly be. These principles are at odds with the most fundamental voluntaryist principle of non-aggression, and its logical consequences of freedom of association and commerce. It is, in effect, a preference for "free software" and against the real freedom of Men to interact peacefully between them as they see fit. This ethos clearly does not make sense from a voluntaryist perspective. In fact, I would be willing to say that the free software ethos has strong similarities with the wage slavery argument, insofar as a particular type of peaceful activity is incorrectly perceived to be "exploitative" and its detractors seek to prohibit it.

I must conclude that the free software ethos, as expressed by Richard, was clearly not derived from any first principles but rather was created after the fact as an ad hoc set of principles assumed to be true on their face.

So, if that's the case, how can we explain the free software ethos then?

Well, I happen to think this ethos can be explained quite easily, in my opinion.

If you look at his own statements about the creation of the GNU project and the free software movement, he started the free software movement out of mostly emotional reasons. He had lost his tightly-knit community at the hands of copyright. One natural human reaction would be to reinterpret this (admittedly sucky) reality as a "moral wrong", identify oneself as a "wronged victim", and then form a reactionary ethos to that. Maybe that sounds awful, but we've all been there, so I understand.

Still, the ethos does make some form of sense, in the frame of a reaction against the salvo fired by the copyright monopolists.

So what are Richard's views on statism?

Well, Richard's statism shows. He's very honest about being a statist (he even said something very humorous: "I'm a statist. I have a pro-state gland."). Richard refused to talk about voluntary solutions to social problems. I even tried to ask him "What would it take for you to be persuaded to change your mind about the state?" and he cut me off.

Which kind of sucks. I really wanted Richard to not be a statist. In every single evil he fights for, it's painfully obvious that the root cause for that evil is the State. How a very brilliant person can fight for 60 years against all the evils of the State, and not notice that the common thread in all these fights (most of them hopelessly lost) is the God Damn State... it sincerely puzzles me.

To his credit, he saw evil where others saw none (namely the evil of copyrights that destroyed his and many other communities) and then he attempted to solve it. I commend him for that; in the process, he has given us an extremely valuable tool to fight evil too. The only exception I take to it, is that his solution took the form of a flawed "patch" (statist copyright-dependent copyleft as a reaction) that attempts to "subvert the code base" for his own goals. And that will ultimately fail: one does not simply infiltrate a Mafia and turn it into a charity organization.

Richard's a man, and he's a well-intentioned, good man. He is brilliant, but he is human after all, so he is not immune to the biases that plague everyone else. I have to judge the man for his principles, for his principles will ultimately dictate the results of his efforts... but I'm also willing to judge him on his persistence and sheer accomplishments, and for that he gets nothing but respect from me.

Richard, may we have you around for very, very long.

This article was culled from Richard Stallman, free software and voluntaryism: thoughts after dinner.

Bitcoin is money. People give stuff to you, and you give them Bitcoins. You give stuff to people, and they give you Bitcoins. That is: you can buy and sell things using Bitcoins.

How does Bitcoin work?

It's actually pretty simple. Let's say you want to buy a banana from a farmer's market, using Bitcoins instead of dollars.

You have a Bitcoin wallet. You carry some Bitcoins in it. The farmer also has a Bitcoin wallet. His wallet has an address (or more) tied to it. Bitcoins sent to that address appear in his wallet.

You ask the farmer to buy one of the bananas. The farmer says, "Sure, it'll be 1 Bitcoin" and hands his wallet address to you. You give 1 Bitcoin from your wallet to that address; this transfers your Bitcoin from your wallet to his wallet. He gives you the banana. That's it. Now you have your banana, and the farmer has his Bitcoin.

If you want to get paid, this works exactly the same but in reverse. You give your address to the other guy, and he sends Bitcoins to that address. You can even give a different address to each person. This is usually a good idea.

Isn't that a bit complicated?

At a glance, Bitcoin does sound more difficult to use than cash.

But in practice, the farmer won't actually give you a long number in a paper card. What he'll do is he'll show you a barcode. You'll take a picture of it with your Bitcoin wallet in your phone, key in a number of Bitcoins to send, then tap "Send".

As you can see, this is faster than opening the register and making change for cash. It's also faster than keying in your debit card PIN, if you pay with a card.

So, what if you're buying things with your computer? Then you will copy the address of the sender to your clipboard, and paste it on the Send box of your Bitcoin wallet.

And what if you don't have your computer with you? No problem. There are several Web sites that can keep your Bitcoins stored in "online wallets". With them, you can send and receive Bitcoins to other people and between your other wallets too.

And if you don't have a phone or a computer with you, you can pay with physical Bitcoins too.

How do I get one of these Bitcoin wallets? Are they expensive?

Bitcoin wallets are usually free. You get a wallet by:

• Installing a computer program in your computer.
• Getting an app for your phone.
• Opening an online account in any of the Web sites offering wallets.

You can have more than one wallet. You can freely move your money between your wallets, just as easily as you can send money to someone else.

There are also companies that sell physical Bitcoins. These are actual coins with a redeemable Bitcoin address inside them, good for as many Bitcoins as you choose. You do have to pay a bit of a premium for them, but they work if there's no electricity where you are.

Why not just use a credit or debit card?

Two reasons:

• Cards involve a middle man called a "credit card processor". This middle man complicates everything for everyone.
• Bitcoins work worldwide, without currency conversion or international payment fees.

If you're selling stuff: you have to pay the middle man a very high fee (~3%) on every sale you make. You also need special equipment. This agreement limits what you can sell, and how you can sell it. You also have to prepare for people who dispute payments, especially from stolen cards.

If you're buying stuff: you end up paying extra money because of the difficulty added by the middle man.

If you want to just send or receive money: you simply can't do that with a credit card. You could "give" money to a friend by buying him dinner. But what if you want to, say, sell a computer to him? Now he has to withdraw cash from an ATM (inconvenient), or use PayPal (and pay a fee)... it's a mess. "I'll pay you later" turns into "meh, I'll buy it from the store".

And if you're abroad: your card will usually let you buy stuff, but you will be paying through the nose in middle man fees.

If you use and accept Bitcoin, none of this is a problem. All you need is a Bitcoin wallet, and presto. It works everywhere.

So why involve a middle man at all?

Isn't cash safer? What about credit cards?

Bitcoin is safer than cash and cards. Let's compare.

A thief who steals your regular wallet can ruin your credit statements and spend your cash freely.

Not so with Bitcoin. Bitcoin wallets can be protected by a password; the thief can't pry your Bitcoin wallet open, and your Bitcoins can be recovered if you backed up your wallet. Why would a thief steal something he can't use?

This is especially true of PayPass ("wireless" or "no-swipe") credit cards. Clever thieves can wirelessly swipe everything from those, just by walking near you. Name, home address, card number, expiration date and security code. This can't be done to Bitcoin wallets.

About the only thing that someone could steal from you and then spend, is physical Bitcoins. They are like cash in that sense.

Why should I use Bitcoin rather than, say, dollars or Euros?

You don't have to choose one or the other.

For example, you can buy or sell some things using dollars, and other things using Bitcoins. You can buy and sell Bitcoins for dollars too. In fact, you can trade Bitcoins using practically any major currency out there.

Also, you can "top up" your Bitcoin wallet at many online places.

But the best reason to buy and use Bitcoins is actually unique to Bitcoin: they cannot be "made up" by punching numbers on a computer or a printer, and they cannot be counterfeited either. Thus, Bitcoin protects your money much better than any other currency.

See, with any other national currency in the world, the Central Bank of that country can (and often does) arbitrarily "make up" more and more money.

This means that the money you saved is worth less and less as time goes by. Remember that $50 supermarket bill last year? Today, you're either paying $80 or getting less food. Tell me it ain't true.

This gradual but terrible tragedy simply can't happen with Bitcoin. Bitcoin has a hard mathematical limit. This limit cannot be fooled by any means. Not by a Central Bank, and not by a private counterfeiter either.

I have some Bitcoins now. How were they made?

Bitcoins aren't made by anyone. They are "mined" (like gold in the real world, or diamond in Minecraft).

"Mining" is a mathematical race. It's about randomly guessing big numbers and doing calculations with them. Whoever gets to an undiscovered number first, "wins" the race. Everybody else in the race uses the same math to verify the win. Then the winning miner gets some confirmed Bitcoins.

As you might have guessed, numbers games are best played with computers, and lots of people (called "miners") happily play it. They play it for two reasons:

1. To win newly "mined" Bitcoins.
2. To confirm and profit from Bitcoin transfers that pay (very small) fees.

As time goes by, "mining" gets harder and gives miners fewer coins. The Bitcoin system does this to prevent newer and faster computers from mining too many coins at once.

Why can't anyone just "invent" their own Bitcoins and throw them into the world?

The short answer is:

Because Bitcoins must be "mined". Mining involves very hard math that cannot be faked.

The somewhat longer answer is:

Bitcoins mined with one computer are checked by millions of other computers to see if they are genuine. The mined Bitcoins are only valid after several computers confirm "yes, these Bitcoins are genuine".

The checker computers verify that the mined Bitcoins:

1. didn't re-use previously discovered numbers
2. didn't use fraudulent or faulty calculations

Checking Bitcoins for authenticity is much, much faster than mining. It's much like checking a password -- it's also much faster than trying to guess it.

How many Bitcoins are there?

Right now, about 8 million Bitcoins have been mined. The hard limit is 21 million. 99% of it will be mined by 2036, according to estimates.

Only 21 million? Bah, that's not nearly enough for the entire world!

Unlike dollars (with 100 cents to a dollar), Bitcoins can be divided beyond millionths. The smallest amount of money you can make with Bitcoins goes down to 8 decimal places. There's no practical reason why a pack of gum can't cost 5 microBitcoins (μBTC).

If 1¢ was equivalent to 0.01 μBTC, then:

• $1 would be worth $1 μBTC,
• $1,000 would be 1 mBTC (milliBitcoins),
• a million dollars would be 1 Bitcoin,
• a billion would be 1,000 Bitcoins (U.S. "billions" here, sorry for that),
• a trillion would be 1,000,000 Bitcoins,
• 21 trillions would be 21,000,000 Bitcoins (the total carrying capacity of Bitcoins),

And that's just for Bitcoins themselves. The amount of debts and promises to pay Bitcoins has no limit, just like it doesn't have any limit with any currency today.

Now that you know this... 1 Bitcoin sounds like a helluva lot of money to pay for a banana, right?

This article was culled from What is Bitcoin?.

Who were the Blues and the Greens?  They were sports fans—the partisans of the blue and green chariot-racing teams.

Imagine a future society that flees into a vast underground network of caverns and seals the entrances.  We shall not specify whether they flee disease, war, or radiation; we shall suppose the first Undergrounders manage to grow food, find water, recycle air, make light, and survive, and that their descendants thrive and eventually form cities.  Of the world above, there are only legends written on scraps of paper; and one of these scraps of paper describes the sky, a vast open space of air above a great unbounded floor.  The sky is cerulean in color, and contains strange floating objects like enormous tufts of white cotton.  But the meaning of the word "cerulean" is controversial; some say that it refers to the color known as "blue", and others that it refers to the color known as "green".

In the early days of the underground society, the Blues and Greens contested with open violence; but today, truce prevails—a peace born of a growing sense of pointlessness.  Cultural mores have changed; there is a large and prosperous middle class that has grown up with effective law enforcement and become unaccustomed to violence.  The schools provide some sense of historical perspective; how long the battle between Blues and Greens continued, how many died, how little changed as a result.  Minds have been laid open to the strange new philosophy that people are people, whether they be Blue or Green.

The conflict has not vanished.  Society is still divided along Blue and Green lines, and there is a "Blue" and a "Green" position on almost every contemporary issue of political or cultural importance.  The Blues advocate taxes on individual incomes, the Greens advocate taxes on merchant sales; the Blues advocate stricter marriage laws, while the Greens wish to make it easier to obtain divorces; the Blues take their support from the heart of city areas, while the more distant farmers and watersellers tend to be Green; the Blues believe that the Earth is a huge spherical rock at the center of the universe, the Greens that it is a huge flat rock circling some other object called a Sun.  Not every Blue or every Green citizen takes the "Blue" or "Green" position on every issue, but it would be rare to find a city merchant who believed the sky was blue, and yet advocated an individual tax and freer marriage laws.

The Underground is still polarized; an uneasy peace.  A few folk genuinely think that Blues and Greens should be friends, and it is now common for a Green to patronize a Blue shop, or for a Blue to visit a Green tavern.  Yet from a truce originally born of exhaustion, there is a quietly growing spirit of tolerance, even friendship.

One day, the Underground is shaken by a minor earthquake.  A sightseeing party of six is caught in the tremblor while looking at the ruins of ancient dwellings in the upper caverns.  They feel the brief movement of the rock under their feet, and one of the tourists trips and scrapes her knee.  The party decides to turn back, fearing further earthquakes.  On their way back, one person catches a whiff of something strange in the air, a scent coming from a long-unused passageway.  Ignoring the well-meant cautions of fellow travellers, the person borrows a powered lantern and walks into the passageway.  The stone corridor wends upward... and upward... and finally terminates in a hole carved out of the world, a place where all stone ends.  Distance, endless distance, stretches away into forever; a gathering space to hold a thousand cities.  Unimaginably far above, too bright to look at directly, a searing spark casts light over all visible space, the naked filament of some huge light bulb.  In the air, hanging unsupported, are great incomprehensible tufts of white cotton.  And the vast glowing ceiling above... the color... is...

Now history branches, depending on which member of the sightseeing party decided to follow the corridor to the surface.

Aditya the Blue stood under the blue forever, and slowly smiled.  It was not a pleasant smile.  There was hatred, and wounded pride; it recalled every argument she'd ever had with a Green, every rivalry, every contested promotion.  "You were right all along," the sky whispered down at her, "and now you can prove it."  For a moment Aditya stood there, absorbing the message, glorying in it, and then she turned back to the stone corridor to tell the world.  As Aditya walked, she curled her hand into a clenched fist.  "The truce," she said, "is over."

Barron the Green stared incomprehendingly at the chaos of colors for long seconds.  Understanding, when it came, drove a pile-driver punch into the pit of his stomach.  Tears started from his eyes.  Barron thought of the Massacre of Cathay, where a Blue army had massacred every citizen of a Green town, including children; he thought of the ancient Blue general, Annas Rell, who had declared Greens "a pit of disease; a pestilence to be cleansed"; he thought of the glints of hatred he'd seen in Blue eyes and something inside him cracked.  "How can you be on their side?" Barron screamed at the sky, and then he began to weep; because he knew, standing under the malevolent blue glare, that the universe had always been a place of evil.

Charles the Blue considered the blue ceiling, taken aback.  As a professor in a mixed college, Charles had carefully emphasized that Blue and Green viewpoints were equally valid and deserving of tolerance:  The sky was a metaphysical construct, and cerulean a color that could be seen in more than one way.  Briefly, Charles wondered whether a Green, standing in this place, might not see a green ceiling above; or if perhaps the ceiling would be green at this time tomorrow; but he couldn't stake the continued survival of civilization on that.  This was merely a natural phenomenon of some kind, having nothing to do with moral philosophy or society... but one that might be readily misinterpreted, Charles feared.  Charles sighed, and turned to go back into the corridor.  Tomorrow he would come back alone and block off the passageway.

Daria, once Green, tried to breathe amid the ashes of her world.  I will not flinch, Daria told herself, I will not look away.  She had been Green all her life, and now she must be Blue.  Her friends, her family, would turn from her.  Speak the truth, even if your voice trembles, her father had told her; but her father was dead now, and her mother would never understand.  Daria stared down the calm blue gaze of the sky, trying to accept it, and finally her breathing quietened.  I was wrong, she said to herself mournfully; it's not so complicated, after all.  She would find new friends, and perhaps her family would forgive her... or, she wondered with a tinge of hope, rise to this same test, standing underneath this same sky?  "The sky is blue," Daria said experimentally, and nothing dire happened to her; but she couldn't bring herself to smile.  Daria the Blue exhaled sadly, and went back into the world, wondering what she would say.

Eddin, a Green, looked up at the blue sky and began to laugh cynically.  The course of his world's history came clear at last; even he couldn't believe they'd been such fools.  "Stupid," Eddin said, "stupid, stupid, and all the time it was right here."  Hatred, murders, wars, and all along it was just a thing somewhere, that someone had written about like they'd write about any other thing.  No poetry, no beauty, nothing that any sane person would ever care about, just one pointless thing that had been blown out of all proportion.  Eddin leaned against the cave mouth wearily, trying to think of a way to prevent this information from blowing up the world, and wondering if they didn't all deserve it.

Ferris gasped involuntarily, frozen by sheer wonder and delight.  Ferris's eyes darted hungrily about, fastening on each sight in turn before moving reluctantly to the next; the blue sky, the white clouds, the vast unknown outside, full of places and things (and people?) that no Undergrounder had ever seen.  "Oh, so that's what color it is," Ferris said, and went exploring.

This fable was taken from here.

This article was culled from A fable of science and politics.

Fucking wow, right? That's some beautiful (if malevolent) sophistry right there, isn't it?

Let's start the usual smackdown.

Susanne Sheehy, totalitarian shill par excellence, has a problem: she can't find enough volunteers to test vaccines. People just aren't that keen on injecting unknown substances in their bodies, just because someone else wants them to. No surprises there.

OK then, so she asks "how do we solve that problem"? As far as anyone can see, the only other way to get people to do what they don't want to do (in this case, "participate" in his experiments) is to threaten them into compliance, and to punish resistors so that the threat carries weight.

A reasonable, decent, non-totalitarian person would stop at that point. Case closed, we all go home.

Not our totalitarian Shilly, no siree. She sees, in principle, no ethical problem with violently forcing people to be assaulted against their will. Violence against peaceful people who refuse to cooperate is, you see, firmly on the table for her.

But she has a tiny pesky problem to deal with first. She's not dumb -- she understands the practical problem thatany sane person would immediately spit in her face "Well, that's fucking wrong, bitch, fuck you, and if you touch even a single hair of my or my child's head, I will break every bone in your face and have you thrown in a cage for assault" in response to her Macchiavellian plan.

So, the only way she can get her way (without any significant resistance from decent human beings), is if she (a) convinces a large group of thugs to carry out her plan, and (b) she persuades a majority of society to believe in the corrupt idea that anyone who resists her totalitarian plan is "malevolent, dangerous and criminal".

Thus, the next logical step in her malevolent plan is to persuade others that her malevolent intentions are "benevolent". Fortunately for this sociopath, humanity has thousands of years of experience manufacturing magical spells to transform "evil" into "good", so the only difficult task here is to assemble a moral sophism using well-known fallacies and lies, readily available off the government shelf.

To achieve this goal, this cunt constructs a straw man, a false ethical justification, to piece together a bunch of abstract noble-sounding platitudes, that allows her to falsely conclude "See? For all these good and noble reasons, it is okay to force people to enroll in my experiment and, of course, to assault or extort those who resist."

Is it any surprise that she invokes other already-established organized crimes (such as "conscription") as excuses? Why else would she say "well, my plan is fairly similar to conscription", if not to make the reader falsely conclude "since we already tolerate military slavery, surely we can accommodate Shilly's totalitarian plan"?

And so, the shill vomits fecal pearls like this:

But relying on altruism alone to facilitate clinical trials is potentially unsustainable and ethically contentious.

LOL. Seriously? What about the alternative she is proposing? Is it somehow not "ethically contentious" to perform medical procedures on people against their will? Apparently not, not if she manages to make us think of this mass assault as something "noble and good". She wants to keep you distracted with a made-up "ethical contention", while people are used as guinea pigs against their will.

Watch this brilliant anchoring trick she uses:

A more palatable and realistic option is a policy of “mandated choice.” In this case individuals would be required by law to state in advance their willingness to participate in vaccine trials

See? The "more palatable and realistic" option requires a lesser form of threat against people, but it still uses organized violence. So she's saying "we can go with violence against those who refuse to be vaccinated, or we can just use violence against those who object to answering sensitive questions asked by my thugs". You will note how, entirely absent from the false "choices", is any form of voluntary choice.

Anyway. I won't bother deconstructing any more specific fallacious tactics she uses, as you can see they're tweaked versions of the same old corrupt justifications for government aggression. Of course, just like in civics class, the violence is not spelled out in the mission statement... but, given the historical examples she uses to support her totalitarian plan, we all know very well what the violent implications are. Less freedom, more aggression.

And so, having analyzed some of the sophistry in that propaganda piece, we come to the final question. What does Susanne Shilly want to be true? Here it is, verbatim:

If a concerted effort were made to increase public awareness of the success of vaccination, the potential of novel vaccines to improve global health drastically, and the important contribution that individuals can make by volunteering for studies, perhaps mandatory enrollment would not even need to be considered.

Translation: "Give us more funding for 'concerted efforts', or we'll just have to resort to Global Tuskeegee sooner or later."

Did anyone notice what organization carries this puff piece? In case you didn't: it's the American Medical Association journal of ethics.

People: this is exactly how the biggest crimes are always perpetrated. Every master con artist always resorts to manipulative and false ethics to get his way.

This article was culled from The American Medical Association Journal of Ethics wants more guinea pigs.

Think about this the next time you see a policeman kidnapping a peaceful person.

This article was culled from Violent abusers experience orgasmic pleasure.

What property is

Property, at its most basic, means the moral claim to control things exclusively, with the obvious corollary that it's morally permissible to defend the things one controls with force (otherwise the concept of property would be pointless like, say, freedom of speech without a mouth or fingers). Colloquially, when we say "this object X is my property", what we are saying means "I am the only person who may morally decide who gets to use X, anyone else who uses subterfuge or violence to control X is morally wrong, and violent punishment of that person is morally legitimate."

Property arises because of scarcity and rivalrousness, attributes of the physical world par excellence. These features of the world mean that deadly conflict is inevitable without objective rules to arbitrate who gets to use what, as no two people can use the same thing at the same time (for the most part -- some things are shareable, but even in that case, whoever uses the thing wears it out).

To arbitrate this conflict, human beings have come up with the concept of property -- a set of rules to determine who gets to exclusively control what things at what time. There are various sets of rules of property (Hoppean property being the only one that I consider logically consistent), but the point here is that property is just a set of ethical rules of behavior.

The notion of applying these rules (whatever they are) is tens of thousands of years old, and it predates all governments and all law; as unimportant as this may sound, this means that property is an ethical concept, rather than a legal one.

Living in a world where things are infinite

Imagine a world where everything other people have, you can have with zero effort; by just looking at it, it is insta-copied with zero resource expenditure, and the copy is 100% indistinguishable from the original. The only cost in this world, is the cost of coming up with new ideas to build -- the ideas would literally materialize as soon as they are wished. Imagine the implications of such a world.

Would it make sense, in a world like this, to say "this is my lawnmower"? No, of course not. The concept of property would be alien in such a world, because there is no conflict over scarce things. (Interestingly, you couldn't even say "this is my body", because long before you say "please don't rape me", a would-be "rapist" could have already wish-materialized a fully-functional duplicate of you, only with an insatiable lust for the "rapist". But I digress.)

The world of intangibles

Now what does that world remind you of?

Well, it's probably familiar to you because it exactly describes the realm of intangibles. Intangibles are not rivalrous, and today we can perfectly replicate an intangible at zero (marginal) cost. The only cost is the cost of coming up with new intangibles, and human beings do that every day already (they did before intellectual poverty, and they will continue to do so until intellectual poverty is a nightmare long abandoned). There is no conflict with intangibles, because when I come up with an intangible X, you can copy X to make X' (and store it in your head or your computer) without demerit or without depriving me of the use of my X. Thus, the rules of property can't apply -- there is no need to grant a specific person a monopoly over the use of an intangible.

So this is the very reality of the world, telling you that the concept of property is only valid when applied to scarce resources. In other words, to say "this intangible is my property" or "you have stolen this intangible" is an oxymoronic use of words not unlike saying "bad door! bad door!" if you stub your toe on the door edge.

So, if duplicating intangibles is not theft, then it is not unethical / not immoral. And, if duplicating intangibles is done peacefully, without breaching any promises consensually made to anyone, again, the act is not unethical / not immoral. We're simply drawing from common sense ethics here -- that which is not immoral, is perfectly permissible.

The ethics of intangibles

What does that mean for the ethics of duplicating intangibles? It means that duplicating intangibles (provided that the circumstances I just explained are true) must be either morally neutral or morally good.

What does that mean for the ethics of prosecuting people who duplicate intangibles? In a single sentence: it means that those who punish duplicators are aggressors, thus they are immoral, because prosecution involves the use of violence or threats to punish resistors. Yes, that is right, the act of punishing someone for the made-up sin of "copyright infringement" or "patent infringement" is clearly unethical. Again, drawing from common sense ethics here -- if a person threatens another person for a peaceful and consensual act, that's immoral, and that includes people who persecute peaceful duplicators.

The propaganda about intangibles

So why is the previous conclusion not universally acknowledged?

Little-known fact: corrupt people who benefit from intellectual poverty have waged a propaganda campaign and law-purchasing spree that borders on the billions of dollars of expenditure. The whole purpose of this campaign is to spread the lie that intangibles are scarce and that one ought to feel morally outraged when one witnesses someone peacefullly duplicating an intangible. This is not new -- it has been going on for centuries (search for Candlemakers' Plea and you will see for yourself).

Note how the propagandists never say falsehoods outright. They use framing and compounding. Thus, the lies are implied, so that they can make statements that assume the falsehoods that they want to be "true". They compound their lies like this, because they understand the power of the subconscious intellect -- how people subconsciously deduce the implicit premises from the explicit message. By repeating "Has X stopped beating his wife yet?" often enough, the assumption that X beats his wife gets cemented in the public's consciousness, and a lot of false ideas are spread this way. By framing the conversation in terms of "how much punishment should we inflict on duplicators?", they successfully elbow out attempts to question whether duplication is wrong at all, because that idea becomes a given in their narrative.

Oftentimes this propaganda will exploit ambiguity in terms. Let's take the example of the expression "It's mine!". It has two meanings: "This is my property" vis a vis "This I created". By conflating the two meanings, the propaganda makes it seem as if whatever you create is actually yours, when that's clearly not the case for the vast majority of the things you created; think of yourself building a chair with someone else's wood: whom does the chair belong to?

Needless to say, anyone who has seen this propaganda has noticed how violent and manipulative imagery and metaphors are used all the time to spread the beliefs of intellectual poverty. Quick question: since when did the truth require to be propagated using manipulative and violent imagery? Answer: since never -- the truth does not need propaganda to thrive, only lies do. You don't see people playing anti-rape or anti-murder ads, do you?

If abiding by intellectual poverty is so "ethical", why do intellectual povertarians need to spend billions of dollars drilling it into people's brains? If you think people are mostly good, then it stands to reason that they wouldn't need this propaganda constantly drilled into their brains -- they would just know not to "infringe" (which is the opposite of what you observe people doing). If you think people are mostly bad, then why are you making an ethical argument to begin with?

The "I worked for it, therefore I own it" argument

What about the common pseudo-argument "these thieves are depriving hard-working people of their hard-earned value / potential profits"? Well:

1. You don't see a butter maker claiming "theft" when other butter makers make butter. There is no provable ethical theory that says "whatever idea you came up with, can only be exercised by you, and everyone else who attempts to compete by copying your idea, is evil". The only thing remotely close to this, is law (which dim-witted people use to fabricate their own pseudo-ethics). As you already know, laws are bought and sold to the highest bidder.
2. Peaceful duplicators really aren't depriving anyone of "value". Value is subjective -- the value of an item is not contained in the item, but contained in the mind of the person who has it. Giving someone else a copy of an intangible doesn't affect the value of your copy, because the value of your copy is between you and your item only. The only thing that is lost with duplication is the perception of exclusivity of the item, which, in a world where everybody drives cookie-cutter cars (in no small part because of intellectual poverty), matters not. In sum: you do not have a moral claim to control others' minds and property.
3. The ethical theory "using threats or violence to protect potential profits is morally good" is not valid. In fact, such a theory would necessarily contradict with your moral claim to use your own property peacefully and to protect it (a theory you already accept if you are in favor of intellectual poverty). In other words: since intangibles (including potential profits) are not property, you have no moral claim to prosecute or threaten anyone for the loss of profits.
4. The "loss" of whatever profits you expected to recoup from your monopoly on an intangible, is substantially different from, say, the loss of a bounced paycheck. The first is an expectation set by a corrupt unilateral imposition, while the second is an expectation set by a mutual and consensual understanding (a contract) which is fraudulent (thus unethical) to break. Thus, allegations of fraud against duplicators have no basis. (See below for examples of contractual forms of intellectual agreements.)

Scarcity is a factor, yes. So what intellectual povertarians perceive when someone duplicates an intangible, is a decrease in the value they expected to extract from others. Which (a) is totally unfounded, as numerous economics studies and trials have proven, and (b) is a matter entirely in their own heads, so it doesn't justify punishment of others. Now, I don't fault them. Perhaps they worked very hard because of the promise that they would get a monopoly. However, that doesn't mean they have a right to increase their profits by threatening duplicators -- it only means that monopolizing ideas create false and immoral expectations, that make people invest their efforts in inefficient endeavors.

In a world without intellectual poverty, you wouldn't have people chasing monopolies and being sour grapes when someone threatens this corrupt promise. Musicians would understand that making a song is not a guarantee of perpetual income (just as making a chair isn't). Drug companies would try thousands of medicines that they have left by the wayside because they couldn't get a monopoly on those drugs anymore. And so on, and so forth, people would continue to live their lives, except without the greed-generating, rent-seeking, corrupt, and destructive influence that intellectual poverty has on them.

Intellectual monopolies without copyright

So what about "conditional intellectual property"? Sure. If you buy something, and during the purchase you are clearly informed that the purchase is conditional to you not sharing that which you are buying, of course you are obligated to fulfill that contract, and you are in violation of said contract if you share it.

Now, if you break the contract, of course, the third party who received it is not liable (unless it can be demonstrated he was aware that he was being an accomplice of breach of contract). So this means that you might need to brand your sold unshareable intangibles with unique identifiers. Nothing new -- iTunes does that already.

I love this concept, because it means that people actually get told what the cost of sharing is -- maybe a couple extra dollars per purchase? -- rather than some politicians retroactively inventing new punishments won a whim and fully paid-off. You have the option to opt-in to sharing or not sharing, and you decide whether the extra price of the permission to share is worth your trouble.

Conclusion

As my girlfriend said (and Jeffrey Tucker confirms), an intellectual povertarian is the proverbial middle-school girl who doesn't want anybody else to wear the same dresses, thinking that her value is created by her uniqueness, and is consequently reduced when someone else wears the same dresses. People who evolve past intellectual poverty see this middle-school event, not as an affront, but as a marvelous example of how a human being can leave his mark in the world, and influence it for the better.

If you made it to here, I have a reward for you: :-D

This article was culled from Intellectual monopolies are not property, and duplicating them is not theft, part 2.

This article was culled from The largest street gang in America.

This article was culled from No one is "illegal".

Savings: If you pick a bowl full of apples and carry them into your house, a strange thing has happened. You have performed labor and generated a good, (apples in the bowl and apples on the tree are two different goods, as they are considered to have a different value by individuals) but you haven't fully benefited from that labor yet. As you eat the apples you produced, you are consuming your savings. Savings are production that hasn't been consumed yet.

Debt: If you take a bowl full of apples from a neighbor with a promise to repay, you are in debt. You have consumed the apples today but have to do the labor in the future. Debt is consumption that hasn't been produced yet.

Money: Money is whatever the market determines to be the most marketable good. In a lot of ways it's still just barter, only it offers a lot of advantages over the direct exchange of goods. We don’t value money for its own sake, we value money for what we can exchange it for. Let's say you are offered the most marketable good in return for your apples, in this case we’ll say salt, which has been money in many markets around the world and still is in a few places. Salt is okay at being money, it is somewhat durable; it doesn't rot, rust or decay (don't get it wet though!). It is easily divisible; you can offer a little more salt or a little less salt. It is scarce enough that you don't need to carry a tonne of it but abundant enough that you don't need to conduct trade in individual grains of salt. Salt already has value (seasoning, curing) but will take on more value if the market determines it to be the most marketable good.

Banking and Credit: All of that salt! But let's not forget what a lot of that salt represents. All of that unconsumed production! All the apples picked, cows milked, bread baked and eggs gathered, and the people that did it haven't consumed as much value as they have produced. This is why savings is a sign of a healthy economy, society in general is producing more wealth than it is consuming. A banker, hoping to profit from access to all this salt, offers consumption now in return for a greater value of production later, or interest. A banker can't lend out all the salt as his customers need it for their day to day transactions, as his salt reserves get low he raises interest rates which encourages less consumption, more saving and discourages consumption now at the cost of greater production in the future.

Banks eventually (I'm guessing) get frustrated by this limit to their ability to lend, after all, lending is profits. Banks start throwing sand in to the salt inflating the supply of salt. Or they start gold plating tin, or they start printing far more salt notes than they should. Then they lower interest rates. Dun dun dun dunnnnnnn. You, whose previous labor is deposited as salt, receive ever more sandy salt in return when you make a withdrawal. Or looked at another way, if you deposited ten apples at an apple bank you might receive an apple in interest but when you go to withdraw your apples you'd find that you receive eleven apples with chunks taken out of them that are greater than the sum of one apple. It looks like more apples than you deposited but really it's nine apples. No wonder they love inflation so much down at The Fed, they take our apples and we thank them for it.

In our history, when we were on the gold standard, $35 would buy you an ounce of gold. PERIOD. But the Fed printed too much - they printed more dollars than we could redeem in gold, the most marketable good, the value of our labor. Everything but gold was going up in price, foreign countries stopped buying our goods and started exchanging their abundant dollars for gold and trading this wonderfully cheap gold for goods from other countries. We had been exchanging goods from other countries with ever more sand in the salt, eventually they started exchanging our sand/salt notes for actual salt. One solution to this problem would have been to take our taxes and then burn the dollars received in revenue. Wait...what? You have to keep in mind that because of inflation and low interest rates caused by the Fed we were consuming more than we were actually producing for a lot longer than we should have. We ate the apples, now we had to pick them, and somebody always pays. In this example the taxes would have reduced our consumption until we had destroyed all the surplus apple notes. I'd love to see a politician campaigning to raise taxes so they can burn the money - that would appeal to voters. Instead, they severed the link between gold and the dollar, releasing the pressure that had been holding up the value of the dollar. Hellooo 1970's inflation, I'm telling you guys, somebody, somewhere, sometime always pays.

Bear with me guys, we'll get there.

We have an inflationary monetary policy, and our wise overseers in the Fed assure us that prices dropping is a bad thing. We can tell it's true because of how horrible it has been to witness televisions, smart phones and computers get better and better for less and less money (sarcasm). Deflation in the cost of technology tells us that our ability to produce the same goods at a lower cost is improving faster than the Fed is inflating the dollar. If you are interested in buying a big television or a nice smart phone, you might decide that it's better to save your money now and forgo consumption until later. We can all look forward to larger, cheaper solid state drives as companies invest in the capital needed to produce them faster and more efficiently.

Finally I can get to foreign labor. If we were still using gold (labor and production) for money it would all long ago have been spent. All the gold would have been sent to China or Japan and caused the other deflation, the deflation that results from an ever scarcer currency instead of increased production. Eventually there would be no commercial benefit to employing cheap foreign labor as it wouldn't be any cheaper than hiring labor right here. The Chinese and other countries would be benefiting from our investments in capital in their countries as now the flow of goods would go both ways, we would benefit from their labor and they would benefit from ours (they do somewhat benefit already but not as much as they should). As things stand today we aren't sending them our apples for their oranges, we are making sure that no matter how hard they labor, no matter how much of that labor we benefit from we will always have more dollars than they do. They are subsidizing our lives through sixteen hour days and subsistence wages with no hope of ever reaching a level playing field.

We Occupy Wall St. with iPhones and designer jeans, we scream at the symptom but are blind to the disease, meanwhile the false compassion of the Democratic Party endorses a monetary policy that allows the Fed to lend money to Wall St. at 0% so they can buy government bonds (more of our apples) at 3%. The false compassion of the Democratic Party decries the state of education and healthcare while continuing to drop bombs on foreign brown people and steal the labor of foreign yellow people. The false fear and rage of the Republican Party wants to turn our apples in to even more bombs, no matter how much evil we spread around the world because "we are a nation of good people".

I, the cold, heartless, selfish libertarian reject false compassion for compassion, I reject fear and rage for peace and I reject any appeal to government to "save us, help us, save them, help them". They've had their chance and everything they've touched has turned to shit, banking, healthcare, education, energy, retirement, housing...

If we want to do something right, we have to do it ourselves. We're better at it than our planners are; we're more efficient, we're faster. We're not a few people trying to solve very large problems all over the world; we're millions of people that see a small part of the problem, right in front of our faces. If only we would stop asking the government to solve everything and would tell it to get out of our way instead.

Reprinted from here.

This article was culled from How the Federal Reserve causes exploitation of foreign low-wage labor.

You're playing forward in a football game. Standard rules - 11 v. 11, you can use any part of your body except for your hands, etc., etc.

Suddenly, someone on the opposing team approaches one of the referees. "Hey," he asks the official, "I know it's technically 'cheating', but do you think you could make an exception for me and let me use my hands for the next half? Nobody else, just me... okay, and maybe a couple of my buddies - my center forward and left back. We'll treat you and the linesmen to some corn dogs after the game in exchange, fair trade?"

The noble zebra decides to play along, and the players who can now use their hands absolutely demolish the opposing players who aren't afforded the same privilege - effectively ruining and rigging the game.  It would not be surprising if you agreed with me that this situation is rotten for you, right?

So who's to blame here for your loss?

Certainly, the player who first approached the referees is a colossal prick. Him asking for such an underhanded (no pun intended) advantage is a huge dick move, or at least it is in my book. He's somewhat responsible for your loss.

But he's not the only one responsiible, nor is he the most responsible either.  Ask yourself: how did he acquire that advantage over you? He didn't just individually decide "I'm gonna cheat and get away with it". No, he decided "I'm gonna cheat, but I need help to get away with it, because I don't have the power to pull this shit off on my own."

And there you see it.  The referee gave him the unfair advantage. The official arbiters, those who make the rules and enforces them, is the one who actually rigged the game.

Now, you can probably expect the referee to make excuses for his behavior.  It doesn't matter what the referee's excuse is. "Oh, it was raining and we didn't want anyone to get sick so we wanted to wrap up the match early", or "But the players we let use their hands weren't as skilled as the players on the other team, they wouldn't have stood a chance otherwise!".  Whatever they say, they are still stuffing their faces with those ill-gotten corn dogs behind the bleachers; when it's all said and done, the reality is that they twisted the rules, perverted the rules, broke the rules.

Now apply this to businesses and government, with businesses playing as your opponent and the referees' roles being played by legislators, judges, bureaucrats.  If you believe in government, then you can probably understand that the government's only role should be to facilitate fair play, not to disregard the rules (like, say, the Constitution) and make up their own sui generis rules.

I'm no economist or political scientist, just an average schmuck making a quick observation.  Think about that for a second.  If an average schmuck like me, can figure out that political corruption starts with government, you can figure it out too.

So, next time you hear people supplicating the government for protection from the corporations, remember what you just read, and you will understand how those supplications couldn't possibly ever work.  Government and bad businesses work together behind closed doors; the evildoers in corporations can only ever obtain their overwhelming influence and political power through government.

Taken from here.

This article was culled from It's not about the corrupt corporations. It's about the corruption that is government..

This article was culled from People naturally help each other.

If we look at an ethical system like communism, which was responsible for the murders of 170 million people, we can clearly see that the real danger to individuals was not random criminals, but false moral theories. Similarly, the Spanish Inquisition relied not on thieves and pickpockets, but rather priests and torturers filled with the desire to save the souls of others. Nazism also relied on particular ethical theories regarding the relationship between the individual and the collective, and the moral imperative to serve those in power, as well as theories “proving” the innate virtues of the Aryan race.

Over and over again, throughout human history, we see that the most dangerous instruments in the hands of men are not guns, or bombs, or knives, or poisons, but rather moral theories. From the “divine right of kings” to the endlessly legitimized mob rule of modern democracies, from the ancestor worship of certain Oriental cultures to the modern deference to the nation-state as personified by a political leader, to those who pledge their children to the service of particular religious ideologies, it is clear that by far the most dangerous tool that men possess is morality. Unlike science, which merely describes what is, and what is to be, moral theories exert a near-bottomless influence over the hearts and minds of men by telling them what ought to be.

When our leaders ask for our obedience, it is never to themselves as individuals, they claim, but rather to “the good” in the abstract. JFK did not say: “Ask not what I can do for you, but rather what you can do for me...” Instead, he substituted the words “your country” for himself. Service to “the country” is considered a virtue – although the net beneficiaries of that service are always those who rule citizens by force. In the past (and sometimes even into the present), leaders identified themselves with God, rather than with geography, but the principle remains the same. For Communists, the abstract mechanism that justifies the power of the leaders is class; for fascists it is the nation; for Nazis it is the race; for democrats it is “the will of the people”; for priests it is “the will of God” and so on.

Ruling classes inevitably use ethical theories to justify their power for the simple reason that human beings have an implacable desire to act in accordance to what they believe to be “the good.” If service to the Fatherland can be defined as “the good,” then such service will inevitably be provided. If obedience to military superiors can be defined as “virtue” and “courage,” then such violent slavery will be endlessly praised and performed.

Propaganda

The more false the moral theory is, the earlier that it must be inflicted upon children. We do not see the children of scientifically minded people being sent to “logic school” from the tender age of three or four onwards. We do not see the children of free market advocates being sent to “Capitalism Camp” when they are five years old. We do not see the children of philosophers being sent to a Rational Empiricism Theme Park in order to be indoctrinated into the value of trusting their own senses and using their own minds.

No, wherever ethical theories are corrupt, self-contradictory and destructive, they must be inflicted upon the helpless minds of dependent children. The Jesuits are credited with the proverb: “Give me a child until he is nine and he will be mine for life,” but that is only because the Jesuits were teaching superstitious and destructive lies. You could never imagine a modern scientist hungering to imprint his falsehoods on a newborn consciousness. Picture somebody like Richard Dawkins saying the above, just to see how ridiculous it would be.

Any ethicist, then, who focuses on mere criminality, rather than the institutional crimes supported by ethical theories, is missing the picture almost entirely, and serving mankind up to the slaughterhouse. A doctor who, in the middle of a universal and deadly plague, focused his entire efforts on communicating about the possible health consequences of being slightly overweight, would be considered rather deranged, and scarcely a reliable guide in medical matters. If your house is on fire, mulling over the colors you might want to paint your walls might well be considered a sub-optimal prioritization.

Private criminals exist, of course, but have almost no impact on our lives comparable to those who rule us on the basis of false moral theories.

Once, when I was 11, another boy stole a few dollars from me. Another time, when I was 26, I left my ATM card in a bank machine, and someone stole a few hundred dollars from my account.

On the other hand, I have had hundreds of thousands of dollars taken from me by force through the moral theory of “taxation is good.” I was forced to sit in the grim and brain-destroying mental gulags of public schools for 14 years, based on the moral theory that “state education is a virtue.” (Or, rather: “forced education is a virtue” – my parents were compelled to pay through taxes, and I was compelled to attend.)

The boy (and the man) who stole my money doubtless used it for some personal pleasure or need. The government that steals my money, on the other hand, uses it to oppress the poor, to fund wars, to pay the rich, to borrow money and so impoverish my children – and to pay the salaries of those who steal from me.

If I were a doctor in the middle of a great city struck down by a terrible plague, and I discovered that that plague was being transmitted through the water pipes, what should my rational response be – if I claimed to truly care about the health of my fellow citizens?

Surely I should cry from the very rooftops that their drinking water was causing the plague. Surely I should take every measure possible to get people to understand the true source of the illness that struck them down.

Surely, in the knowledge of such universal and preventable poisoning, I should not waste my time arguing that the true danger you faced was the tiny possibility that some random individual might decide to poison you at some point in the future.

Thus, as a philosopher concerned with violence and immorality, should I focus on private criminals, or public criminals?

The violations that I experienced at the hands of private criminals fade to insignificance relative to even one day under the tender mercies of my “virtuous and good masters.”

If, then, the greatest dangers to mankind are false ethical theories, then our highest prioritization should be the discovery, communication and refinement of a valid, rational, empirical and consistent ethical theory. If we discover that most plague victims are dying from impure water, then surely telling them to purify their water should be our first and highest priority.

Copied from here.

This article was culled from The beast.

 -Thomas E Woods.

What a coincidence that the textbook contains only "government"-approved "facts", eh?

This article was culled from Never underestimate the power of politics.