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Sanders campaign wracked by dissension

Elizabeth Warren just won an endorsement that’s making Bernie Sanders’s world really mad

According to polls, Warren needs a little more to fully absorb Sanders.

• Can one at least consider past failures and unintended consequences before advocating yet again for a policy with that terrible track record?
• Does it actually work in the first place or does it make the problems you're trying to fix worse?
• Is the loss of freedom and the harm caused to others justified by the results (even when it does work)?
• Are you even trying for an improvement or just trying to punish parties you don't like?
• Would you be for this policy, if it were in control of your worst enemies?
• How hard is it to evade, undermine, or otherwise corrupt this policy?

I find it amazing how people cab advocate for the same policies over and over again, even they have been shown to be utter failures or easily circumvented by the parties that are supposed to be affected. I guess it's not your hand which gets burned when the stove is touched collectively.

I saw these two Maruchan ramen packets next to each other at a Walmart, and decided to taste test them.

Bring back Mushroom flavor, you fucks!

And so after another disastrous attempt at soldering together a hat for my Orange Pi Zero I decided to find out whether the fault was in my hands or in my tools. There are two electronics shops I go to around here for simple components, tools, and such, and I decided to look at the other place for a new soldering iron tip. They had one last in stock, and when I tried to use it, it worked like a damn charm. The old soldering tips the other store sold me would only heat on the sides of the iron, the tip was not hot enough to melt the lead. Probably those tips are truly rated for a more powerful soldering iron than the cheap 30W one I have, despite the store people telling me that it was for a 30 W. One of these days I'll shell out the US$20 equivalent for what looks like a reasonably decent soldering kit that one of the online stores I've seen is selling. I'm not blowing hundreds of dollars on a serious soldering station though.

And so with my better soldering tip I set out to build a hat with a true random number generator based on Julien Thomas's XR232-USB. I first built a mock-up of the XR232-USB circuit on a breadboard with an actual ATTiny85 using Mr. Thomas's firmware and an FTDI cable, and it indeed produces very good random numbers based on rngtest's FIPS 140-2 and Dieharder, though it is slow, at about 400-500 bits per second at most.

Then I soldered together the LM393 circuit as on the XR232, sending the digital noise from the LM393's pin 1 (going to pin 3 of the ATTiny85 in the XR232 circuit diagram) with a 4.7kΩ pullup resistor to one of the GPIO pins on the Orange Pi Zero. I wrote a small C program to read the GPIO pin and do some simple debiasing using the same algorithms (as far as I could tell) that Mr. Thomas used in his firmware. I'm getting an average rate of 16 kilobits/second from the random circuit using the GPIO pin. I suppose that's the most I can expect from the hardware. It's still much faster than XR232-USB, which seems to top out at 400-500 bits/second. The random stream seems comparable in quality to that of XR232-USB in general. However, when I plugged the OPi into my wired network, using a network cable close to my Wi-Fi router, the performance of the random circuit dropped like a stone, with more than 99% of FIPS 140-2 tests failed. Repeating the test such that the OPi was again far away from the router (but connecting to it wirelessly), produced much better results, with around 1% failure rate as before. I'm guessing it must have been getting scads of interference as it was quite literally sitting on top of the router.

I suppose I'll have to figure out some way to shield the random circuit from such interference. Possibly the copper tape which I bought but hasn't yet arrived will help, or maybe I can do some experiments with aluminium foil. I've never actually had to actually deal with EMF shielding for my circuits that much before. A simple Google search about it yields a lot of results from literal tin foil hat conspiracy theorist types (some of whom seem to try to cover their houses in EMF shielding), in between serious results about electromagnetic shielding for electronics.

Once I'm able to figure out how best to shield the circuit from my own Wi-Fi router's interference, I'll start working on a module to make a /dev/hwrng device for this so it can feed the Linux kernel randomness pool.

Yesterday was my birthday, and since I work every day, I am usually busy when members of my family call to wish me "happy birthday" and chat for a bit. For many years I've always sent their calls to voicemail, then texted them later saying I'd be available to chat after dark-thirty. (BTW this is a term I use all the time, and they know it means "a few minutes after sunset" and not the same as 0-dark-thirty).

However, for some reason yesterday morning I decided that, if I happened to be near my phone when one of them called, I'd answer. So when I was pulling into the gas station and my brother called, I answered, and we talked while I was filling my tank.

Later in the day I discovered my wallet was missing. The last place I used it was when I fueled up. It seems that, while fumbling w/ my phone and pumping gas, I got distracted and drove off w/ the wallet on top of my car. Surveillance footage from the gas station confirmed this happened. Who knows where it fell off. If someone found it it hasn't made its way back to me yet.

No good deed goes unpunished, I suppose...

This is a fairly simple concept. Economies, of any sort, thrive on the flow of goods and services, for which money is an abstraction. Money (currency) may be thought of as something like electrical current or water; it does useful work only when it's moving ("velocity of money"), because it's a proxy for the movements of goods, resources, and services.

Capitalism has the potential, realized repeatedly, to produce staggering amounts of goods and services, and to keep the flow of same in motion. However, the profit motive is a concentrating tendency. In particular, it tends to accumulate both money and the goods/services/resources represented by money in fewer and fewer hands over time, and this effect is a positive feedback loop, i.e., the longer it goes on the more it potentiates and reinforces and accelerates itself.

The problem here is that this accumulation stagnates the economy. When money and the things it abstracts away stop circulating, useful work is not done. The knock of effects are economic malaise, increase in rent-seeking behaviors, and widening disparities between the rich and poor (which, again, are self-catalyzing). Bluntly, a consumer economy grinds to a halt when people can't buy stuff.

When this reaches its logical conclusion, we find the vast majority of resources, goods, money, land, and political power in the hands of a wealthy few, with the huge mass of the people as impoverished slave laborers or serfs. In a word: *feudalism.* Without proper regulations to make sure wealth keeps circulating, then, capitalism will inevitably degenerate into feudalism. Which is, ironically, the very state it was created to oppose ideologically! The reason this happens is because the drives behind both systems are the same: greed.

This seems to be an inevitable consequence of unrestrained human nature. I am told a slur against progressives is that they believe humans and human nature are perfectible; this is not something I have actually heard from any of them, so it's probably another stupid slur and can be safely disregarded. That said, if we don't make some serious changes to how we think about economic activity and the reasons for engaging in it, we're going to end up in a dystopian nightmare. Some could argue we already have, and others might say we never left it.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1170983609492103168

https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=16126&cid=417654#commentwrap

Ceres

Being the largest body in the asteroid belt, Ceres could become the main base and transport hub for future asteroid mining infrastructure, allowing mineral resources to be transported to Mars, the Moon, and Earth. Because of its small escape velocity combined with large amounts of water ice, it also could serve as a source of water, fuel, and oxygen for ships going through and beyond the asteroid belt. Transportation from Mars or the Moon to Ceres would be even more energy-efficient than transportation from Earth to the Moon.

Callisto

In 2003 NASA conducted a conceptual study called Human Outer Planets Exploration (HOPE) regarding the future human exploration of the outer Solar System. The target chosen to consider in detail was Callisto.

The study proposed a possible surface base on Callisto that would produce rocket propellant for further exploration of the Solar System. Advantages of a base on Callisto include low radiation (due to its distance from Jupiter) and geological stability. Such a base could facilitate remote exploration of Europa, or be an ideal location for a Jovian system waystation servicing spacecraft heading farther into the outer Solar System, using a gravity assist from a close flyby of Jupiter after departing Callisto.

In December 2003, NASA reported that a manned mission to Callisto might be possible in the 2040s.

Ganymede

Ganymede is the largest moon in the Solar System. Ganymede is the only moon with a magnetosphere, but it is overshadowed by Jupiter's magnetic field. Ganymede receives about 8 rem of radiation per day.

Compare to Europa at 540 rem per day, or Io at 3,600 rem per day and no water.

Titan

The American aerospace engineer and author Robert Zubrin identified Saturn as the most important and valuable of the four gas giants in the Solar System, because of its relative proximity, low radiation, and excellent system of moons. He also named Titan as the most important moon on which to establish a base to develop the resources of the Saturn system.

Robert Zubrin has pointed out that Titan possesses an abundance of all the elements necessary to support life, saying "In certain ways, Titan is the most hospitable extraterrestrial world within our solar system for human colonization." The atmosphere contains plentiful oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and methane. Additional to this, strong evidence indicates that liquid methane exists on the surface. Evidence also indicates the presence of liquid water and ammonia under the surface, which are delivered to the surface by volcanic activity. While this water can be used to generate breathable oxygen, more is blown into Titan's atmosphere from the geysers on the icy moon of Enceladus (also a moon of Saturn), as they start as water molecules and evolve into oxygen and hydrogen. Nitrogen is ideal to add buffer gas partial pressure to breathable air (it forms about 78% of Earth's atmosphere). Nitrogen, methane and ammonia can all be used to produce fertilizer for growing food.

Weather forecast: expect strong liberal bias with 80% chants of politics

The Weather has a strong liberal bias

When the weather contradicts the president, that is disloyalty. The weather should swear an oath of loyalty.

When a political party has created a climate of fear that even reporting true facts about the weather could get you fired -- because OMG!! contradicting the orange jackass!!!

When that kind of climate of fear exists, it sounds like the environment in North Korea or other dictatorships.

Aren't we on our third NOAA director during Trump . . . because . . . OMG . . . science has a strong liberal bias!

No other president could turn a minor ooops into a week of news coverage with threats of people getting fired for reporting true facts that contradict the president. Quite a remarkable achievement.