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PITTSBURGH — There is a battle going on here within the Allegheny County Democratic Committee, a formidable force of centrist, conservative, and liberal Democrats whose backgrounds range from union halls in the city to the businessmen and women who have spread out into the leafy suburbs that hug the city limits.

A key figure in the battle is committeewoman Heather Kass, who is running for the state House. Several years ago, Kass's social media posts criticized Obamacare and the distribution of free Narcan for addicts — and insinuated support for President Trump.

Fortunately for Kass, she received 49 votes from the committee to secure its endorsement. Her opponent, liberal activist Jess Benham, received just 19.

That’s when things got interesting. Darrin Kelly, an influential local labor leader, issued a statement blasting Kass’s previous statements. The party hierarchy followed that up by saying her social media history was disqualifying.

The fight soon unraveled in many different directions and tested a party that has comfortably come together and built a force that helped keep a Democrat as the chief executive officer for five consecutive terms and the majority of the county council seats.

Now, accusations of disloyalty and closet Trumpism are being tossed around by the liberal wing of the party. The factions that once worked together well enough to enjoy a healthy coalition are splintering.

Party Chairwoman Eileen Kelly held a press conference defending the endorsement process and encouraging forgiveness of Kass’s past social media posts. But in response, local elected Democrats demanded her resignation, including two of the county’s congressmen, Rep. Mike Doyle and Rep. Conor Lamb.

        There's a reason why people listen when @Darrinkellypgh speaks. He tells it like it is.

        I agree. It's time for the Chairwoman to step aside. https://t.co/v1Dr9z730f
        — Conor Lamb (@ConorLambPA) February 21, 2020

Two things are worth watching: The chairwoman is probably going nowhere, and the April 28 Democratic primaries in Pennsylvania are going to be a spectacle. This county isn’t the only one in the commonwealth with fractures within the party. Roughly 250 miles due east along the Lincoln Highway, Lancaster County is also experiencing some serious turmoil within its party ranks.

Unlike Allegheny, Lancaster is considered a red county. Yet despite giving Trump a majority of its votes in 2016, Democrats (under Chairwoman JoAnn Hertz) fought and flipped traditionally Republican-held suburbs in the 2017 and 2019 local elections.

As thanks, Hertz was given the choice of either facing public criticisms from within the party ranks or resigning.

Forced out, Hertz was replaced in a committee election by Diane Topakian, a retired Service Employees International Union political organizer who is from the most liberal side of the party.

Places such as Allegheny and Lancaster counties have made strides in elections with Democratic candidates who ran and won as centrists. Once they are elected, however, local party apparatuses start to demand more fidelity to liberalism, and the national party stresses it in messaging. But these are the kinds of places where any gains that were made since Trump was elected may start to fall apart.

The ideological balance in this country remains firmly center-right. Yearlong 2019 Gallup poll numbers based on combined data from 21 of its telephone surveys show 37% of the country, on average, identifies as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 24% as liberal.

It also found that Republicans tend to be less fractured. They have their differences, but in the end, they conform around conservatism.

Democrats are more fractured. Survey results strikingly reflected what happened in Allegheny and Lancaster counties. As Gallup said, "Even though liberalism has been on the rise among Democrats, it is not yet the clear majority position, perhaps leading to the strong intraparty clashes." This has been seen at the local level in Allegheny and Lancaster counties, as well as the national level, in Democratic Party presidential debates.

A Democratic presidential candidate is not going to win or lose based on how fractured his or her party is. That will depend on how well the candidate can coalesce the party and motivate people to show up for him or her.

What is happening in Allegheny and Lancaster counties and countless other counties across the country shouldn’t surprise anyone. It has been reflected in every single Democratic debate of this presidential cycle.

This didn’t start yesterday, last week, or in reaction to Trump or Hillary Clinton. This party has been trying to shed its centrist members since the presidential campaign of Al Gore, and it tipped the scales with President Barack Obama — who waited until his second term to dismantle the New Deal coalition in favor of the ascendant coalition of young people, minorities, women, and just enough white, working-class voters.

Clinton failed to include the working class in her coalition and lost. If these smaller county parties mimic that in 2020, and if the Democratic National Committee and its presidential nominee follow suit, Democrats will struggle locally and nationally. The result will be fewer locally elected Democrats, a slim-to-none congressional majority, and four more years of Trump.

What I find interesting is, how this echoes the 2016 election. Democrats around the country told the party that "We want this" or "We want that". But, the party rejected all of that, and tried to ramrod Hillary into office.

Same thing here - toe the party line, or you're out.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/centrists-flirt-with-democrats-and-the-party-rebuffs-them

U.S. Signs Peace Deal With Taliban After Nearly 2 Decades Of War In Afghanistan

The U.S. and the Taliban have struck a deal that paves the way for eventual peace in Afghanistan. U.S. Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad and the head of the militant Islamist group, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, signed the potentially historic agreement Saturday in Doha, Qatar, where the two sides spent months hashing out its details.

Under the terms of the deal, the U.S. commits to withdrawing all of its military forces and supporting civilian personnel, as well as those of its allies, within 14 months. The drawdown process will begin with the U.S. reducing its troop levels to 8,600 in the first 135 days and pulling its forces from five bases.

The rest of its forces, according to the agreement, will leave "within the remaining nine and a half months."

The Afghan government also will release up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners as a gesture of goodwill, in exchange for 1,000 Afghan security forces held by the Taliban.

Every weekday morning, I get up and bus to work for my development job at the little startup with 4 other employees counting the boss. It's a decent job, I like the people there. There's frequent disagreements with the other developer that can get very stressful due to the scope of the disagreements, but other than that, it's decent.

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I usually have to force myself to shower. I usually manage, but not always. Then I put on one of my three pairs of semi-respectable functioning pants, one of my 10 shirts, briefly brush my disgusting steel wool Shirley Temple mop of hair, step over the 2 month old pizza boxes on the way to the front door, and walk out to the bus stop. Honestly, brushing my teeth is optional most days.

The rest of the 1.5hr trip, it's autopilot. I don't pay much attention to the people around me or the scenery through the bus window. I've fallen asleep on the bus and woken up in another city once in the last year, and pissed off bus drivers with my airheadedness countless times. Not noticing them gesturing me to get up for a wheelchair seat until they tap my shoulder, repeatedly not hearing them say "it's broken" as I try and scan my bus card, freaking out and thinking I passed my stop and pulling the cord a stop or two too early, etc.

Passengers too, some things that make me feel really bad. Today this old woman was trying to get off the bus with her walker, and she had to *ask* me to help even though I was right next to her because I was too absorbed in the TV static in my head to notice her attempting to leave. Don't get me started on the times I was standing in the way and didn't notice.

When I get to work, I sound like a fumbling idiot who can't form his thoughts to save his life. Long pauses, stroke/bondulance words coming out, etc, constantly. Multiple times in a single sentence. It's a miracle anyone understands anything I say at all. I manage to do good development work, which still baffles me considering all the aforementioned, but then fail pathetically at communicating what I did or why I did it. I am literally constantly drinking black ice coffee all day at work, probably the only thing that gets me halfway intelligible on any day.

Then I go home, rinse and repeat the bus drama on the way. Finally I eat something unhealthy, probably came dehydrated in a bag or in a can, and give my cat her whole can of dinner. Many days I'll order pizza or a tofu dish from my local pizza place, if I have money that is.

I dick around on the internet for a bit, and fall asleep at 8 or 9pm.

I never do the things I need to, like basic errands, house cleaning, calling friends. Oh the friends. Most are convinced I don't care about them, when the truth is I just don't have the strength for a phone call. I want to reply to their texts, I want to talk to them, and I type a text out, and then I don't hit send because I know the moment they read it, the first thing they will do is call me on the phone, and that is excruciating for me no matter who it is anymore.

Most of my friends are the type who will not understand "keep it short", or even if they understand it, it always ends up a 2hr phone call anyways, no matter what. I'm sure they think much less of me, often I really can't blame them. I feel an enormous amount of guilt for hiding from everyone as much as I do, but I can't bring myself to do better no matter how hard I try.

That's the weekdays.
On the weekends, I sleep. I sleep a lot. I never have any fun plans or ideas, I just... sleep.
Maybe one day, I won't wake up. I can hope so.

Capitalism is a force for good, if restrained. Unrestrained capitalism is a force for evil. In the middle of the twentieth century unrestrained capitalism led to the German Nazis and the Italian fascists.
        The fascists in Italy and the communists in the USSR claimed their governments to be socialist, despite the fact that under communism, government controls industry, while a fascist government is controlled by industry.
        In a socialist government, like some European nations, capital works for society, which controls government and regulates industry so that it benefits society. In a capitalist country, like the USA (which keeps creeping farther away from socialism and closer and closer to Fascism), society works for capital, to the benefit of the rich and the detriment to everything and everyone else.
        It pollutes the planet, but capitalism as practiced in America doesn’t care. It impoverishes people, but capitalists don’t care. It causes crime and violence, but capitalists don’t care. Capitalists only care about money.
        Capitalism worships money. Many capitalists claim to be Christian, or Jewish, or Muslim, or Hindu, but none of them really are; as the Christian Bible says, no one can serve two masters; he will love the one and hate the other; and the love of money is the root of all evil.
        Many Christians think capitalism is good, and socialism is evil, because so many socialists are humanist, atheist, or even Satanists. But socialism is neither humanist (although it is good for humans), atheist, nor Satanic. It has nothing to do with any religion, or lack of one. It says society should control government and industry, not the other way around.
        The capitalists have caused American minds to be really twisted. They have not only made socialism to sound like heresy (which it is, to one who worships money), but the word liberal, as well. But look what those words really mean: liberal and generous are synonyms, as are conservative and stingy. If you call yourself a conservative, you’re saying you’re stingy and will refuse to share.
        Do you want a stingy America or a generous America?

The Alt-Wrong have got themselves an Anti-Greta by the name of Naomi Seibt.

The 19-year-old German is a Climate Change Denier and Islamophobe. She is also apparently a member of and speaks to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, an organisation associated with Brexit's very own Nigel Farage.

Apparently Seibt will be addressing the conservative CPAC this week in the USA along side Trump and Pence.

A journal entry that simply restates a comment I just wrote.

Memory closely integrated with processors at the chip level makes sense. You would upgrade memory and processing power together.

Another thing I think will eventually happen, but that will be controversial.

Hardware assisted GC

Note that all modern languages in the last 2 freaking decades have garbage collection. Remember "lisp machines" from the 1980's? Like Symbollics? Their systems didn't execute Lisp especially fast, but what they did was provide hardware level assistance for GC which made GC amazingly fast.

I look at the amazing things JVM (Java Virtual Machine) has done with GC. If only the JVM's GC could benefit all other languages (Python, JavaScript, Go, Lisps, etc). Of course, those languages could use JVM as a runtime. And GraalVM _might_ make something like that happen where lots of different languages run in the same runtime and can transparently call each others functions and classes and have a common set of underlying data types. Red Hat's Shenandoah and Oracle's open source ZGC are amazing garbage collector technology. Terabytes of memory with 1 ms GC pause times. Now imagine if you had hardware assistance for GC. (btw, why is Red Hat investing so much into Java development? I thought they were a Linux company? Could Red Hat, which is a publicly tiraded company, have some economic reason Java is making them lots of money?)

Rationale: GC is an economic reality. Ignore the whining of he C programmers in the peanut gallery for a moment. They'll jump up and down and accuse other professionals of not knowing how to manage memory. Ignore it. Why do we use high level languages (like C) instead of assembly language? Answer: human productivity! Our code would be so much more efficient if we wrote EVERYTHING including this SN board directly in assembly language!!! So why don't we??? Because, as C programmers are simply unwilling to admit, the economic reality is that programmers are vastly more productive in higher and ever higher level languages. Sure there is an efficiency cost to this. But we're optimizing for dollars not for bytes and cpu cycles. Hardware is cheap, developer time is expensive.

Slight aside: ARM processors already have some hardware provision for executing JVM bytecodes (gasp! omg!).

I'm surprised that modern Intel or AMD designs haven't introduced some hardware assistance for GC.

Symbollics hardware, IIRC, had extra bits in each memory word (36 bit words I think) to "tag" the type of information in every word. Then a way to efficiently find all words that happened to be a "pointer". A way to tag all words that were "reachable" or "marked" from the root set, etc.

Maybe this can happen if memory and processing elements become highly integrated and interconnected. Hardware design will follow the money just as programming languages and technology stacks do.

Others will believe that system design will stand still to conform to a romantic idealism that was the major economic reality once upon a time.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Nobody's crystal ball is perfect. But I did expect in the early 90's that most new languages would start having GC, and that did begin to happen about 2000.

Senile Senior software developers look at the business case beyond how personally amusing all this fun technology is.

The other soup recipe. Electricity required.

1. Get an Instant Pot.
2. Add 2 cups of dried beans (such as black, pinto, etc.) and 8 cups of water. Manually pressure cook (High) for 5 minutes and leave it for 10 minutes before releasing the pressure. This eliminates the need to soak the beans for hours.
3. Drain, return beans into the pot, add a 15 oz can of diced tomatoes, and whatever spices you want (get bulk granulated garlic). Add 2 cups of water or broth (or water with bouillon).
4. Manually pressure cook (High) for 10 minutes. Release the pressure after ~20 minutes.
5. Mash the beans a bit with a potato masher. Add iodized salt or spices to taste.

Is there a way to bypass this nonsense yet? Some proxy application or even a hardware LAN interposer that can fake the latest version of papers-please and just let me connect to boring web pages without getting "Unable to complete secure transaction" ?? I don't even care if it routes all my traffic through China or the NSA. I just want a workaround for these arbitrary blocks.

Just now I modified a utility to spam HTTP requests with a custom user agent containing a few choice words. See, I can act like a dick too. But soon the entertainment value of this will wear off. And I would like to again be allowed to choose what browser I use.

As many of you are likely aware, the Houston Astros (an American Major League Baseball (MLB) team) have been embroiled in a cheating scandal first publicized in November, 2019.

The allegations include the use of cameras to steal signs in real time.

Sign stealing has a long tradition in baseball. For those of you who aren't familiar with baseball, the "signs" referred to are the communications between pitcher (akin to a bowler for you cricketeers) and catcher preceding the delivery of the ball.

This is generally accomplished through signals from the catcher, which the pitcher must negate or acknowledge.

Historically, sign stealing is accomplished by a base-runner (generally on second base, where he can *see* the signs being displayed), and relaying information about what type of pitch is about to be thrown to the batter. As a general rule, this is *not* an easy thing to do. in this simple form (the runner's field of vision and some sort of physical signal), sign stealing is an accepted form of gamesmanship in baseball.

However, using *any* form of technology to steal and/or relay signs is, and has always been, strictly forbidden. However, that hasn't stopped people from doing so in the past.

The Houston Astros took this to another level during the 2017 season, which was almost certainly a contributing factor in winning the championship that year. According to published reports and an investigation by MLB, cameras used for instant replay were re-purposed by players to steal signs and several methods were used to relay those signs to batters.

As a result of this scandal, the manager (A.J. Hinch) and the general manager (Jeff Luhnow) of the team were both suspended by the league from working in baseball for a year, and subsequently fired by the Astros.

In addition, the Astros bench coach in 2017, Alex Cora who, from 2018 until details of the scandal were revealed, was the manager of the Boston Red Sox. He was fired by the Red Sox when this came to light, and is still under investigation by Major League Baseball (MLB) for additional electronic sign stealing activities with the Red Sox in 2018.

While coaches and management staff have been disciplined for condoning the cheating by Astros players, only one player was mentioned in the MLB report [PDF] about the cheating

The player mentioned in MLB's report was Carlos Beltran, who subsequent to his retirement after the 2017 season, was hired to be the manager of the New York Mets after the end of the 2019 season. Once the details of the scandal were revealed, Beltran and the Mets "mutually agreed to part ways." Beltran, whose long and storied career (one of the top five outfielders of his generation, in my estimation) included his unusual knack for stealing signs while on base, was noted as one of the architects of the cheating scheme.

To this point, no Astros player (aside from Beltran) has seen any repercussions, penalties or consequences for their scheme to cheat. MLB declined to sanction any players and promised immunity in exchange for cooperation in investigating this stain on the game, despite the fact that MLB's report makes it clear that this scheme and its execution were driven by the players and for their benefit.

Historically, players have taken matters into their own hands when other players have been caught or suspected of attempting to steal signs or gain other unfair advantage.

This usually involves hitting those players (in the back or in the ass) with a pitch to point up the displeasure of other players.

Given that the Astros' cheating negatively impacts every other MLB player (in that enhanced performance from cheating can lead to championships as well as higher remuneration based on that performance), and many players have been quite vocal about their displeasure with Astros players, it seems likely that retaliation against them is inevitable.

So. What say you, Soylentils? Do the Astros players who cheated during the 2017 season deserve to be plunked in the ass with pitches on a regular basis this season? Should they be officially sanctioned by MLB?

Personally, I'm hoping that each and every one of those cheaters ends up bruised from 90+ mph fastballs in the ass every single day.

First Mac to Use Apple’s Custom ARM-Based Processor Said to Arrive in H2 2021

Apple has made some very powerful ARM processors, and they will be among the first to get "5nm" from TSMC. 8 cores? I guess iPad Pro is the sneak preview of what the experience would be like.

Alleged AMD Next-Gen Flagship Navi ‘Radeon RX’ GPU Specifications Leaked – 5120 Cores, 24 GB HBM2e Memory, 2 TB/s Bandwidth

24 GB of VRAM would match what has been rumored to be the shared GDDR6 RAM pool of next-gen Xbox or PS5.

Some games already use over 10 GB at 4K, and machine learning workloads could use all of it.

As for the rest, they can dethrone the RTX 2080 Ti, but Nvidia will strike back with Ampere at some point. All product launches mentioned could be delayed by the coronavirus.