Atlas Shrugged Essay Topic #2: In Atlas Shrugged, the heroes want to “make” money while the villains want, on the surface at least, to “have” money. What is the difference between these two views of money? Explain your answer by reference to actual events in the novel.

Distinguishing between “making” money and “having” money is a key insight highlighted by Ayn Rand, however despite the rational selfishness that the main characters put forward, their view of making money necessarily requires the considerations of other people—that one person’s new idea has value only if someone else thinks it has value—whereas the view of having money pits one man against his neighbor where invariably the only way to have is to take. How ironic that the villains in the book who decry selfish ambition are actually embracing the more selfish of the two views of money.

Making money implies that one can increase wealth by work and mental effort. Strictly speaking this is not making money exactly, and Midas Mulligan even reverts to a gold standard for representing money in the Colorado mountains. In this sense the protagonists actually embrace the “having” money point of view, but Hank Rearden acknowledges that it is wealth that is made, and that is the meaning taken here. Gold becomes a means for value exchange enabling wealth to be “made.”

With the notion that wealth can be made comes hope, opportunity, and achievement. One can think of what no one has done or of doing something better, and this creates a value difference between what is currently available and what one proposes. Despite the main characters’ insistence that they follow a selfish path, their philosophy depends on other people and how one’s ideas and actions improve the lives of others. Regarding the desparately-needed new rails for the Rio Norte line, Hank tells Dagny Taggart, “I intend to make you pay for it,” and Dagny gladly does.

New ideas may also benefit the creator directly. John Galt explains to Dagny that such innovations give the inventor time, not money, and time can be redeemed to pursue what one desires. In this sense time is a sort of gold standard with oneself. One cannot pay oneself with gold for a new idea, but time—the ultimate limited resource—can be “saved” by innovation.

The value of a new idea is based on the improvement that it provides another person. It is the recognition of one person’s achievement by another, but it is not a hollow recognition for the benefit of the creator. It is the acknowledgement of one person’s genuine contribution to another. Richard Halley’s fifth concerto, John Galt’s motor, even Hugh Akston’s cooking—these have value because they improve someone else’s life, not necessarily that of the creator. Without this understanding, Hank’s wife Lillian cannot appreciate the significance to the world of the first pouring of Rearden Metal. Instead she offers sarcastically, “Shall we declare it a national holiday, darling?”

Allowing individuals to develop their ideas may lead to more good ideas, such as when Hank proposes his new bridge structure to Dagny. She asks if he invented the bridge in the last two days, and he replies, “I `invented’ it long before I had Rearden Metal. I figured it out while I was making steel for bridges. I wanted a metal with which one would be able to do this, among other things.” His desire to build a better bridge drove him to invent a better metal.

This view of money provides stability and correction because value can be verified, tempered, adjusted not by a single creator but by the people. In its selfishness, it gives power to the consumers to negotiate their futures and demand something better, but these demands come not in the form of declaring a right but proposing a counter-offer: “We will pay you more money for something better.” It respects the creator and creates a lasting relationship among people where respect, not force, is the key ingredient. Everyone benefits, and here the best way to maximize the common good and provide a positive future is to allow individuals to achieve and submit their efforts for peer valuation. In contrast when one views money as something to have, then one must necessarily look around for existing wealth and think of ways to get it, for unless more can be made, the only way to get more of something is to take it.

While it is possible to take money peaceably as with the case of selling goods and services, one might start looking enviously at another person with more money and quickly realize that it is much more efficient to take it by force. One might easily justify it as well, assuming that the person with more money must have in turn gotten it by taking it from someone else.

Without the insight to make money, some characters in the book apply their creativity to inventing ways to take money. Inevitably this leads them to force their ideas on others by law, a common theme among people with this view. Balph Eubanks’s negative view of humanity convinces him that, “We ought to place a limit upon their material greed,” and he suggests that no more than 10,000 copies of a book should be permitted to be sold. James Taggart pushes through the Anti-dog-eat-dog Rule in order to remove the “destructive competition” of Dan Conway’s Phoenix-Durango line. Orren Boyle uses Directive 10-289 and blackmail to force Rearden Metal into the government’s hands.

Even the fair exchange of money can be warped when one has the wrong view. Consider Hank’s mother and his brother Philip who decide it is not right that Philip exist only on Hank’s charity. Her solution is to have Hank give Philip a job instead, “but a nice clean job, of course, with a desk and an office and a decent salary.” Hank’s reply: “But he knows nothing about the steel business!”

The two views of making money and having money ultimately affect the value you place on other people. If you believe that you can make money, then you inherently acknowledge that other people have value and that your positive impact on their lives is what makes money, but if you believe that money can only be had, then other people become an impediment to your happiness, and you will seek ways to take from them as the “looters” in the book often did.

How To

For this example, we will create an animated GIF of us typing some text into a text editor. Preview sets the interframe delay to 0.1 seconds, and I have not seen a way to change that. That is a reasonable typing speed for this effect.

Open a text editor such as TextEdit, TextMate, BBEdit, etc. Resize the window so that it’s a nice, tight size that will look good on a web page.

The first thing you might notice between the screenshot above and the animated GIF at the beginning is that the shadow looks better on this screenshot. That’s because GIF images can only contain 256 different colors, and that’s not enough to see the subtle changes in the shadow.

Save this opening shot by typing Command-Shift-4. Release those keys and type Space. Now click on the text editor window. That creates a screen capture of just the window you clicked and saves it to the desktop.

Open that file in Preview. Choose Save As from the File menu. Select GIF as the file type. Name the file something meaningful like animation.gif. You can now delete the original screen capture image so you don’t accidentally duplicate it during the next steps.

We’ll want to see the sidebar so we can add images to the GIF sequence. Click the Sidebar button in the toolbar.

Let’s just add one character ‘A’ to the text editor, and add that to the sequence.

1. Type ‘A’ in the text editor window.
2. Type Command-Shift-4.
3. Type Space.
4. Click on the text editor window.
5. Find the captured image on your Desktop, and drag it onto the Preview window, directly over the “animation.gif” image in the sidebar.

Your Preview window should look something like this now:

Now let’s capture several frames at once to speed this along. After each character that we type in the text editor, we’ll type Command-Shift-4, Space, and click on the text editor window, creating many screenshots saved to the desktop.

Select all of these new screenshots on the desktop, and drag them to the Preview window as shown below so that you tell Preview to add the images to the sequence you began (as opposed to simply opening more files, which it will do if you drag too low on the sidebar).

You’ve got it now. Continue with more frames, and save your GIF. Drag the GIF image to Safari or other animated GIF-enabled viewer, and enjoy. Unfortunately I haven’t found a way to loop the animation in Preview.

#!/bin/sh
dns-sd -P "Home iTunes" _daap._tcp local 3689 localhost.local. 127.0.0.1 "Arbitrary text record" &
PID=$!
ssh -C -N -L 3689:localhost:3689 myusername@blahblahblah.dyndns.org
kill $PID

Multicast DNS (mDNS) and DNS Service Discovery (DNS-SD) Test Tool

We need to trick iTunes into thinking our home computer is on our local network, because if you’re sitting in Starbucks, then your home computer is not on your local network (and if it is, then you need to address your caffeine addiction). For that we use a tool quietly sitting at /usr/bin/dns-sd that provides a command line interface to the DNS-SD libraries which is normally accessible to programmers via /usr/include/dns_sd.h. Like all good libraries, it helps to have a command line reference tool for scripters, and dns-sd works great for us.

iTunes uses Multicast DNS (mDNS) and DNS Service Discovery (DNS-SD) to announce its presence and to look for other iTunes instances. Apple calls this technology Bonjour (formerly Rendezvous), but it is also known as Zero Configuration Networking (www.zeroconf.org).

The dns-sd man page only gives a few of the many options available. Typing dns-sd at the command line shows you more options but without much explanation.

$ dns-sd
dns-sd -E                  (Enumerate recommended registration domains)
dns-sd -F                      (Enumerate recommended browsing domains)
dns-sd -B        <Type> <Domain>        (Browse for services instances)
dns-sd -L <Name> <Type> <Domain>           (Look up a service instance)
dns-sd -R <Name> <Type> <Domain> <Port> [<TXT>...] (Register a service)
dns-sd -P <Name> <Type> <Domain> <Port> <Host> <IP> [<TXT>...]  (Proxy)
dns-sd -Z        <Type> <Domain>   (Output results in Zone File format)
dns-sd -Q <FQDN> <rrtype> <rrclass> (Generic query for any record type)
dns-sd -C <FQDN> <rrtype> <rrclass>   (Query; reconfirming each result)
dns-sd -X udp/tcp/udptcp <IntPort> <ExtPort> <TTL>   (NAT Port Mapping)
dns-sd -G v4/v6/v4v6 <Hostname>  (Get address information for hostname)
dns-sd -V    (Get version of currently running daemon / system service)
dns-sd -A                      (Test Adding/Updating/Deleting a record)
dns-sd -U                                  (Test updating a TXT record)
dns-sd -N                             (Test adding a large NULL record)
dns-sd -T                            (Test creating a large TXT record)
dns-sd -M      (Test creating a registration with multiple TXT records)
dns-sd -I   (Test registering and then immediately updating TXT record)
dns-sd -S                 (Test multiple operations on a shared socket)

We’ll use the Proxy option -P to indicate that the service we’re advertising will be rerouted, in our case through an SSH tunnel.

dns-sd -P <Name> <Type> <Domain> <Port> <Host> <IP> [<TXT>...]  (Proxy)

Looking at the relevant line in our script we see how we match up the fields.

dns-sd -P "Home iTunes" _daap._tcp local 3689 localhost.local. 127.0.0.1 "Arbitrary text record" &
  PID=$!

Note: Some people need “localhost” and others need “localhost.local.” for this to work. Not sure what’s different about people’s systems. Try both. Updated 1 Sept 2010

The Name parameter will show up in iTunes as the name of the iTunes library we’re sharing. It doesn’t have to be the actual name of the library, so we’ll just use Home iTunes as a convenient placeholder.

Port 3689 is the port used by iTunes for sharing music.

The “Arbitrary text record” is just that—an arbitrary chunk of text that’s required for dns-sd to properly process the command.

The next line of our command, PID=$! saves the process id of the command we just executed into a variable $PID which we’ll need in order to neatly shutdown the proxy when our SSH tunnel closes.

The SSH Tunnel

We use SSH to connect to our home machine and forward connections from our remote machine’s port 3689 (in Starbucks) to our home machine’s port 3689, where you left iTunes up and running before you left this morning (right?).

ssh -C -N -L 3689:localhost:3689 myusername@blahblahblah.dyndns.org

The -C option turns on compression, which may not do much good for streaming MP3′s but a) it doesn’t hurt, and processors are much, much faster than your bandwidth, and b) don’t forget that you’ll be receiving a description of your home iTunes library, which is probably a rather sizable XML file.

The -N option says we’re not executing an SSH command but rather just sitting here port forwarding until the connection is broken (like when you leave Starbucks).

The -L “listen” option is covered extensively in tutorials all over the Internet, but in short it says, “listen for local connections to port 3689 and forward them to the other end and try connecting to localhost on its port 3689.”

The myusername@blahblahblah.dyndns.org portion will be dependent on how you connect to your home computer over SSH. Again, that’s covered in detail all over the Internet. If your remote computer is secured, you might consider using SSH keys to allow automatic login. Then you can put this script in ~/Library/Scripts and launch it from the global scripts menu, if you have that activated.

Cleanup

When the SSH connection eventually closes, such as when you close your laptop or disconnect from the network, the ssh command will exit, and kill $PID will run which closes down the dns-sd proxy, so you won’t see it in iTunes anymore.

Packaging

I find it helpful to put this script in ~/Library/Scripts so that I can execute from my global Scripts menu in my menubar, but it’s up to you how you want to launch it. Good luck.

At some point Apple introduced QTKit, a new and oh-so-welcome abstraction bringing QuickTime programming into the 21st century. Nothing against die-hard ANSI C programming, but it fits awkwardly into what are otherwise clean Objective-C Cocoa programs.

Rather than provide a detailed tutorial about using QTKit (sorry if you wanted one), I’ll just point you to the ImageSnap code so you can take a look at a few useful things like starting a QTCaptureSession, capturing output with QTCaptureDecompressedVideoOutput, and saving an NSImage to disk.