Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself

Somehow the Chicago Boyz have decided to seriously lower their standards and allow me to stop flitting about and join in their fun.

I’m TM Lutas, your local Romanian, Byzantine Catholic, minarchist, Windows, Mac, Linux, and visionary blogger. And I intend to defend this blogging niche against all comers. B-)

Seriously, it’s a real joy to gain exposure to the wider audience of the Chicago Boyz group blog and to have a place where I can talk about local and economics issues. My general rants will continue to be exposed over at my main blog Flit(TM) hosted by Bruce Rolston of Flit (and I’ve never really figured out why he gave me a blogging platform either).

17 thoughts on “Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself”

  1. TM, we are honored. Welcome.

    You have solved the ancient mystery of TrackBack. We shall therefore in your case waive our traditional requirement for new contributors to participate in terrifying secret initiation rites.

  2. Not only do they still make Macintosh computers, they’ve turned into the laptop for hard core geeks. They’re Unix machines nowadays. In fact, Apple’s got a very nice SAN solution in beta right now, their 1U rack servers kick butt and their RAID stuff is generally as reliable and much cheaper than their competitors. In a SAN solution, the price difference is staggering.

  3. Hmm, Linux already has a SAN solution (or several). Come to think of it, Linux will run on just about any machine more sophisticated than a toaster oven, so the OS X embrace of Unix strikes me as somewhat after the fact. I run a dual boot desktop myself (I hate laptops), so I can run Linux, Windows, or Windows inside Linux. RAID is available on my cheapo motherboard (Asus A7V600), but I haven’t bothered with it yet. I like Macs, but have never used my own money on one, for the same reason I haven’t spent $5,000 on a stereo system — the law of diminishing marginal utility makes the performance increase not worth the bank account decrease.

    Network architecture is not my field, but doesn’t Windows Server 2003 already have SAN support, too? I think the .NET server app will go further when released. Anyway, I’ll concede all the server territory to you, as I don’t know much about it, but Apple competing on price seems counterintuitive.

  4. If you look at the video production field, you’ll see a prime example of Apple not only competing on price but collapsing the entire field. It is, after all, a hardware company. $40k Avid setups were replaced with $10k Final Cut Pro setups. Apple got to own a nice vertical market and it’s obviously hunting for others.

    Linux is nice for what it is but there are certain things it’s just not good at. The prime value added that Apple is provided is a bunch of very … retentive people who care very much about user experience and making everything fit together. You end up with a lot more efficiency in terms of getting stuff done.

    Apple’s SAN solution isn’t green code. Just like their web browser they surveyed the scene, picked out the best package they liked, and incorporated it while making it very easy to manage. In browsing the package was KHTML and the browser was Safari. for their Xsan stuff they’re incorporating StorNext from ADIC. So far they’re estimating that a total SAN solution would run about $30k with a similar system from a competitor running about $150k.

    Yeah, I think Apple’s competing on price.

  5. Hi TM,

    Just last week I discovered the pleasures of the Chicago Boyz blog. Now that you are on board I have an added reason to come back!

    Best,

    Anita Campbell
    Small Business Trends

  6. OK, I give up. A hobbyist should never take on a pro. I have been routed, sir, routed — horse, foot, and dragoons, and my guns and baggage train all captured.

  7. We’re flush with MACs in our video-editing department and our computer graphics department.

    I look forward to your posts…I hope you throw some Romanian and Byzantine stuff in here every now and then.

    –s

  8. If I throw Romanian and Byzantine Catholic stuff around it will be Chicago based like how illegal immigrants segregate by nationality and by job. For some reason, in Chicago we’re specialized in hardwood flooring, for instance. Why hardwood flooring? Why did the Hmong specialize in doughnuts?

  9. “Why did the Hmong specialize in doughnuts?”

    A “map” of Chicago by which ethnic and cultural groups do which jobs would be interesting. There would be many nodes which would be very recognizable. Greeks in restaurants stereotypically. Filipinas in nursing. The messengers at all major law firms downtown seem to always be black men. Pakistanis driving cabs. Effeminate men in catering.

    My sense is this pattern derives from path dependency, based on an initial random assignment. Some Hmong guys got into donuts by happenstance, were reasonably successful, and they got all their friends and relatives into it. This created a more and more Hmong-friendly industry which reinforced the pattern. There may be some initial aptitude, which influences the initial assignment. It seems like Eastern Europeans all went into building trades at one time, say 10-20 years ago, though that seems to be less true now. I figure everybody in the old Warsaw Pact had to be able to fix everything themselves, so they were all amateur carpenters, plumbers, etc. when they got here.

    Anyway, ethnic sorting into job niches is a fascinating topic, and I’d like very much to see your thoughts on it.

  10. In Boston, most of the parking garages are managed by Ethiopians, probably through sponsoring and hiring their friends and relations. The Patel clan from Gujarat is famous for operating motels nationwide, and they seem to have done it by training their family in the business and bootstrapping each other’s acquisitions. Here’s an article from the BBC on the phenomenon, complete with anti-US remarks. The EPA sends out newsletters on dry cleaning in Korean, and Korean operators have their own industry association. My take is that it is an outgrowth of the informal hiring network and other kinds of “friends and family” business relationships.

  11. A minarchist is somebody who wants the least government we can possibly get away with. If there’s a practical way to cut a piece of government and get the problem solved in the private sector (if there is a problem at all) then I’m for fixing things using private solutions.

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