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China is slick, there's no getting around that. They have a maturity that all Western nations lack. It comes with their 5000 years of history.

http://www.apfn.org/THEWINDS/1997/05/favored_china.html

Most Favored Nation (MFN) status was granted to the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1979 and has been renewed on a yearly basis ever since. MFN allows the PRC access to U.S. markets at tariff rates that average six percent. Nations without the designation face a forty-four percent tariff. Most nations have MFN with the exception of six including Vietnam, Cuba and North Korea. Clinton has until June 3 to formally notify Congress of his decision. From that point, Congress has 90 days to reverse his decision. (The Washington Post, 5-20-97).

"I am moving, therefore, to de-link human rights from the annual extension of Most Favored Nation trading status for China." --President Bill Clinton, announcing MFN status for China, White House, 5-26-94.

I have wondered, from to time, where that term came from. "Most Favored Nation". What does that even mean?

I stumbled over an explanation, in a seemingly unrelated article.

https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/opium-war-1857.htm

The agreements reached between the Western powers and China following the Opium Wars came to be known as the "unequal treaties" because in practice they gave foreigners privileged status and extracted concessions from the Chinese. Ironically, the Qing Government had fully supported the clauses on extraterritoriality and most-favored nation status in the first treaties in order to keep the foreigners in line.

WTF? MFN, or Most Favored Nation was forced upon China, by the US and UK, almost 150 years ago. We fought the First Opium War, and then the Second Opium War to establish that we can trade wherever we want, in whatever manner suits us. China was required to grant MFN status to the US and the UK, and then later, to any European nation requesting said status.

So - a status that was forced down China's throat, at the point of a sword, we grant to China more than a hundred years later.

For such an intelligent son of a bitch, Clinton was pretty damned stupid. Not only did he give military tech to China, for free, but he kowtowed to the Chinese leadership with the choice of terms. Most Favored Nation.

I wonder if Clinton and Obama are related? Both like to grovel at the feet of foreign rulers . . .

In effect, that title validates any demands, any claims, that China might make upon the US. We GAVE a foreign power privileged status, and we GAVE them concessions, repeatedly. And, they didn't even have to bring a sword to the negotiations, because Bill Clinton was so eager to betray the United States of America.

I'll get right to the point: libertarianism's fatal flaw is that it commits a fallacy, the name of which I do not know, in assuming that the fewest up-front restrictions on personal freedoms necessarily and inevitably translates into the most freedom for the most people into the indefinite future.

The BSD vs GPL licensing example is perhaps the single best illustration of this I've seen in the tech world to date. Debate, and I use the term charitably, rages on still about the merits of each license, with the BSD partisans making almost verbatim the exact same argument just laid out above: that the BSD license is morally, ethically, and pragmatically superior because it places fewer restrictions on who may do what with the code.

By contrast, they say, the GPL is infectious, inserting itself like a retrovirus into the replication machinery of any code licensed with it and forcing certain behaviors (redistribution of source) the BSD types disagree with. As I understand it, the reason they give explicitly for disliking this is that it means fewer people will use the GPL compared to the BSD license, which theoretically therefore translates into BSD-licensed code both proliferating and persisting more than its GPL'd siblings.

What this *actually* means, on the psychological and perhaps subconscious level, is "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me." Sorry guys, but it's the truth: dress it up however you like, but the underlying principle here is "I don't wanna share."

It also betrays an almost stunning naivete about human nature, the very same one that small-L-libertarianism itself seems predicated on. There is a sort of ceteris paribus assumption at work here, one which assumes that the wide world of coding is meritocratic (it is not), equal-access (it is not), and measures worth solely on quality, correctness, usefulness, etc., of code (it does not). It is the Just World Fallacy writ small and in C, you might say.

It *completely* fails to take into account human nature, and such wholly non-technical yet pervasive and powerful human engines of corruption as the corporation. Witness Theo de Raadt's anger, entirely justified morally but also entirely his own fault, over the lack of gratitude from corporations who took OpenSSH and OpenBSD itself for their own use and contributed back, perhaps, a single laptop, which took over a year to arrive.

From the outside, this makes perfect sense. I mean, if you leave a plate of cookies out with a sign that says "free cookies," you don't have a right to complain when someone comes by and takes the entire plate for him/herself. But somehow this simple and obvious line of thought seems to elude the BSD-license partisans, or maybe they quash it for ideological reasons, such as faith (and it *is* a faith position...) in the idea that their code will conquer by virtue of spreading far and wide and continuing to evolve.

In addition to being an oddly r-type strategy for the kind of people who, well, think in terms of r-type and K-type to begin with, they neglect to reckon with the fact that entities with larger resource bases than they do can close the source. Oh, yes, you still have the original code and can fork it, but de facto, the original code *becomes* the fork, due to lack of reach and distribution. Hobbyist coders, who are mostly the ones who use the license, simply cannot compete with BigCorp Inc's programmers, not on time, not on money, and in some cases not on talent, at least not collectively. The world does not work like a cartoon (there's that Just World Fallacy again!); the plucky underdog usually gets beaten nine ways from Sunday and loses everything.

Far from being the unwashed moon-unit closet Communists they are accused of being, the GPL's partisans understand human nature all too well, and in particular have come to grips with the fact that we are not angels. They understand that sometimes a couple of well-placed extra regulations can end up preventing a lot of real restrictions on freedom later on.

Mandating that the source be redistributed while allowing charge for the distribution of binaries is actually much more free-market in the long term, in that it ensures that should the distributing entity get greedy and stupid, current, relevant source is available for immediate forkage. Now this doesn't solve the problem with the gap in power and reach between the underdog and BigCorp Inc, but it *does* mean that the value and hard work put into the original code is not lost to the greater community, i.e., the barrier to entry is *lower* in this case since one need not attempt to reverse-engineer everything that happened since BigCorp Inc acquired and closed the source after forking it.

The real point to all this is that this BSD/GPL dust-up is a microcosm of small-L-libertarian thinking and the central fallacy therein. In life, as in coding, the smallest up-front number of restrictions on personal freedom does *not* translate into the most freedom for the most people for the greatest amount of time. In fact, it doesn't take too much brainwork even from a purely deductive standpoint, with no empirical observation whatsoever needing to be done, to see that this is so: game theory and the iterated prisoners' dilemma, for example.

We have a number of such posters on this board who are frankly completely round the twist on this, as religious as any suicide bomber, and I'm *not* just talking about the "violently-imposed monopoly" spammer. Worse still, they consider themselves some sort of original, enlightened, superior thinkers, as if they're the first ones to do the ideological equivalent of dropping trou and pissing an Anarchy symbol into the snow, reality and human nature and empirical observation be damned. Dunning-Krugeritis affects this crowd badly, and prevents them from having the humility to examine their beliefs critically. Worse still, they act as if they're morally as well as intellectually superior.

Well, libertarians, I leave you this thought: two wrongs might not make a right, but sometimes they can prevent a third, fourth, fifth, or hundredth wrong, or much worse wrongs. Your misplaced purity obsession leads to far worse in the medium and long term, and you're too full of yourselves to see it, or even open your eyes to look. The world is not just, humans are not angels, there are other shades besides #000000 and #FFFFFF, and emergent behavior is a thing.

For the love of Stallman, THINK. As the point of code is not code for code's sake, the point of the economy is not making money for money's sake. Do not let the tools become the masters of the craftsmen (and women) using them. Remember than money was made for humans, not humans for money. The root of all evil is treating people like things and things like people.

Mexico says round-the-world cyclists were murdered

Mexican investigators say two European cyclists did not die in an accident as first claimed - they were murdered. The bodies of Holger Hagenbusch, from Germany, and Krzysztof Chmielewski, from Poland, were found at the bottom of a cliff in Chiapas state.

Local authorities had said the pair appeared to have fallen after losing control. However, relatives and fellow cyclists suspected it was more sinister, and had called for a deeper investigation.

The newly appointed special prosecutor, Luis Alberto Sánchez, said, on Friday, that they were killed in what appears to have been a robbery. "Our investigations up to now indicate this was an intentional homicide," he said.

[...] After travelling to Mexico to identify his brother's body, [Reiner] also found out information about the Polish biker. "The Polish cyclist was decapitated and had a foot missing," he wrote on Facebook.

[...] Chmielewski sustained a head injury that may be a gunshot wound, said Mr Sánchez. His body was found next to a bike - but it was not his own. It belonged to his German companion, which aroused suspicions.

There was a post on reddit recently about small events that changed your life. I was wondering if I had any events like that in my life, and realized I did.

I'm sure it's not that uncommon for people to find their partners based on a chance meeting or a simple thing like that.

This story starts in the fall of 2001. I had recently been hired at Future Shop as a salesperson. For you that don't live in Canada, or don't rememeber Future Shop was essentially a Best Buy (Best Buy would end up buying Future Shop a year later). One of the first days on the new job, I saw one of the most beautiful girls working at the customer service desk. She had dyed red hair in a pixie type cut, and bit of a nouveau hippie vibe.

I worked at Future shop for about a year and a half. During that time, we would have many friendly work conversations, but I never received any signals that she had any interest in me at all. There were a couple of times where I tried to ask her out, and she brushed me off with lame excuses (She would say she was busy), but never gave me a hard rejection, so I remained hopeful that one day she would say yes. I ended up working there for about a year and a half. I worked through 2 Christmas seasons, and after the second Christmas was all wrapped up, I was let go in early January as part of the spring purge.

That Christmas, my mom and her partner had gotten us a DVD player as a Christmas present. My brothers and I were REALLY hoping that the DVD player that was under the tree was really a PS2. We were slightly disappointed that it was not, but we came up with a plan to return the DVD player and pitch in some money and upgrade that DVD player to a PS2.

My brother and I went back to future shop to return the DVD player, and as we were nearing the front of the line, my future wife said hi, and then made sure that she was the CSR that ended up helping us. (She just wanted to talk about me getting let go). We did the return, and at the end I tried asking er out again, and she actually said yes and gave me her number. It was a busy day with lots of people returning Christmas gifts, and I caught her in a moment of weakness. She would tell me years later that she didn't really know what had happened until later in the day when she clued in that she had agreed to a date.

We ended up going on that date a couple days later. Me, being the classy guy that I am, I took her to Pizza Hut. We shared a pizza, unlimited refill drinks, and I even splurged for the dessert bar -- so basically the perfect first date. I asked if she wanted to come back home with me (to my mom's basement) and 'watch a movie'. She did. We watched Dazed and Confused (I still have that VHS in my sentimental things collection), and fooled around.

Things progressed quickly. We were almost immediately spending all our free time together. Her roommate had moved out recently and she needed someone to help pay rent, so I moved in. I was 19 and we had been dating for something like 4 months. My parents were not all that impressed.

Months turned into years and now we are married with a toddler. It all started with receiving a DVD player instead of a PS2 for Christmas.

*****

On a side note, my little girl is such a cutie now. She's walking really good now and walks like a quick little penguin around the house. She is still a terrible sleeper though. She loves going to the park now that the weather is good and swinging in the swing. She's also starting to do the slide.

Her vocabulary is growing so quickly. She doesn't do sentences yet, but says quite a few words -- probably around 500. She has the most beautiful red curly hair and a smile that melts my heart.

She understands quite a lot of things you tell her. I'm sure she understands more than I realize. Yesterday I was pretty excited when I asked her to get the cat treats and she found them and brought them to me.

Right now, her favorite thing to eat is probably blueberries. We go though a couple packages a week.

This weekend I'm taking her to a nearby amusement park. We'll ride some of the kiddie rides together. I'm really exited for that!

-- Snow

So far in May 2018 I'm averaging 2400 hits per day, 350 of which are for http://soggy.jobs/.

I'm going to set up a Tor Hidden Service for Soggy Jobs just so the Gestapo your boss figures your just hanging out on a pr0n throughout your workdays.

Those figures include both live humans and robots. I have some code at home that will remove most of the bots. I expect to sell the code but supporting IE log files just makes my head spin.

So I'm going to release it as Free Software, with the ReadMe.txt file advising the user to change their log file format to Apache's "LogFormat combined". That's a popular format; it would be straightforward to configure other servers to use it, and whadda ya expect? It will be Free As In Freedom!

Real Soon Now I'm going to write some Python code that informs me when a Soggy Jobs listing needs revision.

"Real Soon Now".

To my great delight, someone from a company that I list requested that I hyphenate their domain name. I just did.

I speculated that she didn't know about HTTP Permanent Redirects so I advised her to install one in their old domain's Apache config file - or perhaps an .htaccess file in their website's top level directory:

      Redirect permanent / http://ex-ample.com

The folks at WebmasterWord were leery of losing their PageRank this way so "Google Guy" redirected his entire domain, let it sit there for a while then verified that his SEO was unaffected.

I don't know how to configure redirects for the other HTTP servers.

Boy Scouts are dropping the word 'Boy' from flagship program; Girl Scouts shrug

Mormon church to cut ties with Boy Scouts and start its own gospel-driven youth program

Mormon church to sever its 105-year-old ties to the Boy Scouts at end of 2019

Who's afraid of girls in the Boy Scouts? | Perspective

Presently I list only a few companies in the Germany section of The Global Computer Industry Index.

Yet my web server log files give me the insight that most of my visitors are from Germany. Clearly I'm not serving their needs yet.

Can you suggest some small- to medium-sized Software or Hardware companies for me to list?

It's easy for me to find publicly-traded companies as well as multinationals but even so it's OK if you want to point some others out to me.

At your option, mail your suggestions top incoming@soggy.jobs or alternatively post them in a comment herein.

I Am Eternally In Your Debt.

But I don't feel the need to go to the Emergency Room.

I'm going to ask my Primary Care Physician to refer me to a Neurologist.

I'm making the same kinds of mistakes that brain-damaged people do.

I was brutally beaten by two police officers in 2012. I was unconscious for three days.

When I woke up, while I could correctly visualize the spelling of my own name when I thought about it, I was incapable of spelling it right when I tried to write it on paper with a pencil.

#!/bin/sh

id_addr=10.74.105.207

sudo chown -R root:wheel FL2000.kext/

tar cvfz FL2000.tgz ./FL2000.kext/

scp FL2000.tgz labuser@$ip_addr:Desktop/

sudo rm -r FL2000.kext FL2000.tgz

How white women use strategic tears to avoid accountability

What We Know (And Don't Know) About 'Missing White Women Syndrome' (i.e. you don't even need to see the tears to weaponize them)