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Republicans say they have the votes! They're going to pass a massive tax reform bill Friday night that would permanently lower corporate tax rates and undo the Obamacare individual coverage mandate. And a bunch of other stuff. We're not exactly sure about everything it would do yet. Why? Because we haven't read the tax reform bill.

The Senate is about to vote on a tax bill it's still writing

Anna Soubry is a Conservative MP and opponent of Brexit. The Guardian has an interview with her when she talks about the abuse she's had from the mainstream British press, death threats and a lack of support from her own party.

What concerns her now is the deafening silence emanating from her own side on this matter. “The party has got to call this out. But yet again, I feel it will be weak. They will not take the sort of robust action they need to. My whip said, ‘Sorry to hear about this’, but there’ll be no further interest because at least one of them [those attacking her] is a Conservative himself: Tom Borwick [leading light of Vote Leave, the son of the former Conservative MP for Kensington Victoria Borwick, and one of those encouraging people on social media to tell their MPs face to face what they make of their so-called attempts to thwart Brexit]. He hasn’t issued death threats, but by calling us anti-democratic, he is stoking and fuelling the fire. There’s something about these hard Brexiters: it’s fascinating, actually. Look at the language some of them use. It’s not enough that you accept the result [of the referendum]; it’s not enough that you voted to trigger article 50. Now it’s, ‘Yeah, yeah, but do you believe?’ It’s like the counter-revolutionary forces of Chairman Mao or Joe Stalin. It’s not enough that you went against everything you ever believed in; you have to sign up in blood. It’s like Orwell’s thought police and the reign of terror combined.”

This is not democracy. This is not my UK.

Anna Soubry on Brexit: ‘History will condemn those who haven’t tried to stop all this nonsense’

Very eloquently put.

Meanwhile, some people experss their regret for voting to leave the EU.

Richard Cordray announced that Friday would be his last day leading the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and named one of his lieutenants to immediately take over as acting director, setting up a potential standoff with the Trump administration over the controversial agency’s leadership.

In a memo to the consumer watchdog’s employees, Cordray said his current chief of staff, Leandra English, would become deputy director and automatically rise to acting director when he leaves. English has held several leadership roles under Cordray, a Barack Obama appointee who was the CFPB’s first-ever director.

English’s surprise promotion could complicate President Donald Trump’s plans to start remaking the CFPB, an agency that Republican lawmakers say has burdened banks with unnecessary rules that have hurt lending. Cordray announced last week that he would step down at the end of November, prompting administration officials to consider temporarily installing White House budget director Mick Mulvaney atop the agency, people familiar with the discussions have said.

This is related to the huge reason the CFPB should be ended, namely, that it is a regulatory agency which isn't under the control of the president of the US or funded by Congress (it's funded by the Federal Reserve). "Consumer protection" is not a good excuse for bad law.

And let consider why Trump isn't pushing harder to reign this agency in. One possible reason is that he can play the same game at the end of his term(s) by having his future appointee throw roadblocks in the way of any future administration for years (since the position is for five years, that means two years through to 2022, if Trump serves only one term or three years through to 2027, if Trump gets reelected in 2020 through some brazen display of incompetence or worst on the part of his Democrat foe).

I see more spam journals are popping up. Maybe they're... bots... Oh no!

In response to SID22548, CID596405, regarding quick duplication of files onto external USB storage, I wrote a utility for this purpose. Buy some 10 port USB hubs or suchlike. Buy required storage. Run utility and mount first batch of USB storage units. Press return key. When prompted, unmount storage. Press return key. Repeat as required.

The utility makes several assumptions including where storage appears in a filing system, available storage on external volumes and handling of special filehandes (if any). For efficient use, it also assumes that disk buffers are sufficiently large for parallel copying to multiple volumes. (Copying may be exceptionally slow if available buffers are exceeded.) It also assumes that sync is a reliable checkpoint operation and this is known to be a fraught assumption.

begin 644 duplicate.pl.gz
M'XL(`'_L%%H"`ZU4WV_;-A!^UU]Q<;1(6AI3\I*UBZ-T6S,,`88^)-WV$&<`
M+=$Q$8G42*J.T;I_^X[4S[@;5F#SB\6[[[X['K^[PP-2:T667)"*J0).?O>\
M0[@U4M$'!E=U5?",&BX%W&:*5P:=7!@F<I;#2BK(N3:*+VL'D2M8\8)IP.]?
M;W\$W=)0#3G3&+_$*"Y@;4RESPG1<ELP803;Z*E4#R2398EG/:V*UYKGZ6QV
M=OKJ*,.OL^^^/8W/#EO`1M$*"PG?1+,X>0GOU@S>2*&E,KPNI_8"UIXDR2LL
M@2KC>;I>0D45+>&#!U`IO`/<OKOZZ>8&)GY\#K7&.L_!CX%4U*R)D5A<K3)&
M<JY8AO?8PEWOHK61I:R%&;SW"S&9(S5[XB:<17-OUR3-UBQ[=$E]Q*9ZS5?&
MXO@J/#AASA@Y=U?5Q":!P#H"R"4V4TAC:;69MCG:+-]$]K#KR/)_(^,-55_R
M'MWI<SKUA72*T9PN"[;'=M:S*69J)?J&+&GV:'C7DZS,AY[X"$V#P'[*BHGP
M^FW\8F(A\'$2=8!I>H'V2WO,"JF91?7.]),F=PNQ4/?'/B%2/[/#PC0N`JVK
M*2VTB.;%\.8ZHP55X?<_W/S\6W21-`TX<MH)'<C7*DM]Z[Z+[^<VQ%D^D3\6
M)^1S^#[EY>P+,&D+\G-MVES)?2L;9QMG&W/9EN^`%9HU\55!TZ.NY6%0"UHR
M.-%!U)$A`-B?$/S"1?T4=(0^[H1QW&8M:<F;J+:J"2E9SBFQT/;A>TUKTQ&U
MX*`!!PW.JF)49*\NII14YX`E&5PM)=3B4<B-F**%403KBF5\M855713@I&@D
M4`']./ZCMN.GY&77'>_(S:1[-;1U)UOTW/,V:UQ@8?OL7]G:F[9:02)[>'5]
M$[]HP0`-.F<K+E@>^JQ@<6H'HD-&4=]1#/G@`+LTZ4;#";C'SOO--&EOP[3A
MHMF^[V51E[@,S)H)1#&M6_5V-[W`=7;]ULV%OY(R3N/_HVS[I#UNN$(T>E],
MEC3)[&^4,'$)IP$)IBXJZC"?IT_&Z9-H1-^HU$(.K.:G.+EC9YO_^'C>FW;>
M\_]QDY.^!LMJ(R_C,5W;_J;9=M%I0USM0;.%R\IL47&Y?0;%4*0HRD=>55P\
M#(K;$_>(-Y/5%J&P4K)$=A0@^3JP(AYG&A,!Z*TVK`PG604G%>YD%P,#?!(-
M6/?N0RMVP[!Y/5&@MR(;QM\I)8WWUCS>=6WKQ'HYR[N"_FYD&X2]@J/J9-J'
3#)*NQ7\1->[FOP#Q>W/<J@@`````
`
end

(Usual instructions for uudecode process.)

COACHELLA, Calif. – When Cesar Garcia pulled the letter out of his mailbox, he immediately recognized the name of the law firm on the envelope – Silver & Wright. Eighteen months ago, they had dragged him to court, called him a criminal, cost him thousands of dollars and made his life hell. What did they want now?

Garcia opened the letter, prepared for the worst, but was still shocked by what he found inside.

The law firm had sent him a bill for $26,000.

When he protested, the price climbed to $31,000.

[...]

Garcia’s case may sound strange, but in the low-income cities of the eastern Coachella Valley, it is not. Empowered by the city councils in Coachella and Indio, the law firm Silver & Wright has repeatedly filed criminal charges against residents and businesses for public nuisance crimes – like overgrown weeds, a junk-filled yard or selling popsicles without a business license – then billed them thousands of dollars to recoup expenses. Coachella leaders said this week they will reconsider the criminal prosecutions strategy, but the change only came after defense attorneys challenged the city in court, saying the privatized prosecutors are forcing exorbitant costs on unsuspecting residents.

“Fixing his house was just a side effect. Collecting this money was always their goal,” said attorney Shaun Sullivan, who represents Garcia in a lawsuit seeking to erase his $31,000 bill from Silver & Wright.

Through an extensive review of public records, The Desert Sun has identified 18 cases in which Indio and Coachella charged defendants more than $122,000 in “prosecution fees” since the cities hired Silver & Wright as prosecutors a few years ago. With the addition of code enforcement fees, administration fees, abatement fees, litigation fees and appeal fees, the total price tag rises to more than $200,000.

Here's a sample of some of the cases:

For example, a Coachella family with a busted garage door and an overgrown yard filled with trash and junk was billed $18,500.

An Indio man who sold parking on his land without a business license was billed $3,200.

And an Indio woman who strung a Halloween decoration across the street in front of her home – then pleaded guilty to a crime no more serious than a speeding ticket at her first court appearance – was billed $2,700.

Each of the examples above contested their billing in court. The amount billed then went up to $25,200, $5,100, and $4,200 respectively.

There are some other features of note. The two cities in question are unusual for taking these sorts of cases, called "nuisance property abatement" routinely to criminal court. The other cities in the area take cases to civil court because it is lower cost for the city.

We have new law passed to enable the business model:

Indio contracted Silver & Wright in 2014, then Coachella followed in 2015. Within a year of hiring the firm, both city councils created new nuisance property ordinances empowering the cities to seek prosecution fees without needing approval from a judge. Then Silver & Wright started taking east valley property owners to criminal court.

And the bills for these prosecution fees come six months later, after the window for withdrawing the plea deal has expired. It's quite the operation.

Whereas I have zero faith that the West has any capability, much less will, to solve its problems.

I believe my reply is instructive:

Let's take a tour of the problems that the West not only has the capability or will to solve, but actually has done so:

1. Wars -solved.
2. Pollution - solved.
3. Poverty - partially solved. Note the current economic systems of the West have also partially solved poverty in China as well through global trade.
4. Habitat destruction - partially solved with conservation and setting aside green space and wilderness.
5. Population growth - solved.
6. Mass education -solved.
7. Mass, global communication - solved.
8. Global trade system - solved.
9. Authoritarian clowns telling you what to do - partially solved for now.
10. Feeding the world - solved for now.

While I won't discuss all of these, I want to discuss the first three: wars, pollution, and poverty, the last along with population growth because the two problems are intertwined. These are the most stereotyped and the most often wrong when discussing problems and solutions.

So let's start with the problem of wars. Everyone knows that wars continue to happen. We even have a rather bloody one going on in Syria right now. Here, I claim that wars are "solved", yet we still have them. What gives? The first observation here is that wars are between multiple parties, states or significant sub-state actors (guerillas, paramilitary groups, terrorists, freedom fighters, etc). A single entity can't fix all wars. If party A and party B want to fight, party C is limited in what they can do to keep the two parties from fighting, even if they have legal police power over one or both groups. So a solution to war is merely the cessation of war between parties, not the ability of a third party to prevent war.

The key is to look at the developed world countries and conflicts since the end of the Second World War. If one looks at the list of the top 16 (all those with a Human Development Index of above 0.900), one sees that these countries, while often in conflict, particularly the US and UK, are never in conflict with each other. The only real conflict with any sort of involvement between these countries is the paramilitary activity in Northern Ireland which involved the UK directly and had significant private support from Ireland and the US citizens (though zero official support).

Otherwise, conflicts reduce to fishing boats bumping each other on the high seas and fall far short of any serious definition of war.

The lower tier (HDI between 0.800 and 0.899) still show remarkably low levels of conflict between members. Russia (as the controlling state of the USSR) has been in military conflict with other members (putting down revolt in Hungary in 1968, for example). Argentina with the UK in the Falkland War. In excess of a billion people, yet with only a handful of minor wars to point to.

Yes, these developed world countries often wage a fair bit of war, but not on those in the same economic class. This indicates a way to solve in the real sense, war. Elevate all countries to developed world status.

It's also worth noting that the number of deaths from wars has gone down over the past few decades globally as well. Everyone is partially benefiting from fewer and less bloody wars, not just the rich countries.

Moving on, let's consider pollution. It's long been a trite cliche to speak of pollution as if it's just as bad as it's ever been (particularly when complaining that no one will do anything about the environmental cause du jour until it's too late). For example, here's a study of ambient levels of smog components in Los Angeles air from 1960 through to near present (2014 I believe). Ozone (O3) and nitrogen oxides ("NOx") dropped by a factor of four over the time period despite an increase in fuel use of a factor of three! That's an order of magnitude drop in pollution per unit of fuel (and keep in mind that vehicles became moderately more fuel efficient over this time period even with SUVs in the mix). More complex organics, volatile hydrocarbons (VOC) and peroxyacyl nitrates (PAN) dropped much faster with at least two orders of magnitude drop in concentrations of each.

There has been many environmental regulations over the decades, and these have had an effect. There's no more rivers catching on fire in Ohio. There's no more killer smogs in London. Yet it is frequent to see people to speak as if these problems were still among us, undiminished. You know, because we never solve problems.

The final one, poverty is the biggest problem of all, for not only does it cause immense suffering on its own, but it is a driver for many other social problems, most particularly overpopulation and a low regard for human life.

While I've hinted before at myopic interpretations of these problem, it's far more pronounced here both with the introduction of deceptive measures of poverty that both don't measure poverty and measure relative quantities that can never really go away. For example, there's a lot of talk of wealth and income inequality rather than more legitimate measures of absolute poverty (which actually measure a problem!). And sometimes those measures are used deceptively (such as a recent story which The convenient aspects of inequality is that it can never go away, and there's no obvious level which is good or bad. Then you get the conflations with real poverty even though it doesn't even remotely measure that (keep also in mind a tendency to declare that poverty is routinely declared to be people with the lowest percentage of wealth).

Let's take a cursory look at how inequality gets abused:

What I think is wrong with society is that, while I'm just barely on the comfortable side of the wealth divide, the gap is growing at a crazy pace. Prices I learned growing up in the 1970s have mostly inflated 10x, as has my income, meanwhile the bottom end of the income scale (virtually anyone below me on the job-value ladder) has only grown maybe 3-4x, it's pretty sad for the majority of the population.

Reality:

What evidence exists for this? I grant that there is wealth inequality and it has appeared to grow somewhat over the past 40 years. But there is no "crazy pace" to it. For example, we have a Pew Study that shows by their measure, the Middle Class shrinking from 61% in 1971 to 50% in 2015. Roughly, 20% shrinkage in 44 years. That's your "crazy pace". Even worse for your narrative, the upper classes grew more than the lower ones as a fraction of total population. So two thirds of the fraction that were no longer middle class were now upper class.

A particularly dishonest metric claiming an increase in global wealth inequality can be found in this story.

Wealth inequality stands at its highest since the turn of the 20th century - the so-called 'Gilded Age' - as the proportion of capital held by the world's 1,542 dollar billionaires swells yet higher.

The problems with that? 1) not actually measuring wealth inequality. What of the wealth of the 7.4 billion people who aren't billionaires? 2) downplayed that most of the increase in wealth (+17%) can be explained by the pool of billionaires increasing by 10% (145 new billionaires)! 3) Ignores that billionaire wealth is not equal value to those who aren't billionaires and thus, their wealth is exaggerated. Can't eat credit default swaps or even sell them easily for market price. But it made for a great tale of the "second" Gilded Age.

Here's another example from a linked essay rationalizing why the USSR didn't work in typical Marxist fashion:

The United States enacted an income tax in 1913, falling mainly on rentier income, not on the working population. Capital gains (the main source of rising wealth today) were taxed at the same rate as other income. But the vested interests campaigned to reverse this spirit, slashing capital gains taxes and making tax policy much more regressive. The result is that today, most wealth is not gained by capital investment for profits. Instead, asset-price gains have been financed by a debt-leveraged inflation of real estate, stock and bond prices.

Many middle-class families owe most of their net worth to rising prices for their homes. But by far the lion’s share of the real estate and stock market gains have accrued to just One Percent of the population. And while bank credit has enabled buyers to bid up housing prices, the price has been to siphon off more and more of labor’s income to pay mortgage loans or rents. As a result, finance today is what is has been throughout history: the main force polarizing economies between debtors and creditors.

So first paragraph is a work of art that slams the wealthy for having inordinate gains revenue (which simultaneously downplaying the wealth as mere "debt-leveraged inflation"). So why should we care about gains inequality? Who wants more "debt-leveraged inflation"? Yet it is portrayed as a bad thing even though the argument is sheer nonsense.

And then the author whines about how unfair it is that people actually have to borrow money for a house rather than just have one given to them on a silver platter.

Related to that is the common observation that the wealthiest X people have far more wealth than the poorest Y fraction of the population. As indicated here, there's a couple of enormous flaws with that thinking.

To see the problem, here's another version of the same number: the combined wealth of my two nephews is already more than the bottom 30 percent of the world combined. And they don't have jobs, or inheritances. They just have a piggy bank and no debt.

[...]

The chart [2014 regional wealth distribution, Credit Suisse] shows China has basically no one in the bottom 10 percent of the global wealth distribution. At the same time, if you dig into the country-by-country data (page 107 in the Databook), it shows that America has more than 7 percent of the world's poorest inhabitants — second only to India. That is, to put it lightly, nuts.

Anyway, let me trot out some counterexamples for your consideration. First, let's consider those living in extreme poverty. The fraction of people who live in such extreme poverty (here, using the metric of at most $1.90 per day in "international $", adjusted both for standard of living price changes between countries and inflation) has been declining ever since 1820, the start of the graph in the link (that's almost 200 years of such decline). The absolute number of people in such extreme poverty has been declining, despite population growth heavily biased towards the poorest of the world, since 1970! It currently is around 700 million after peaking at 2.2 billion. Over the same time period, the fraction of people living in extreme poverty dropped from just over 60% in 1970 to under 10% in 2015.

Then there's my favorite example of reduction of global income equality. Over a twenty year period (1988-2008), two thirds of humanity (that's everyone in the world) saw at least a 30% increase in their income with the median increasing by over 60%. While the richest got richer, that still means a decline in overall wealth inequality due to the nearing of developed world and developing world incomes.

I'll note that poverty is a huge correlation with population growth (the other big factor being the fraction of women not in the workforce). In 1970, the global population growth rate was 2.1% per year. It has now dropped to 1.1% per year with the developed world showing negative rates before immigration (among everyone who is not first or second generation immigrants).

To summarize, there has long been a narrative about humanity that emphasizes our inability to solve problems. This narrative is grossly in error with the developed world demonstrating a number of solved or partially solved problems in war, environmental problems, and poverty and overpopulation. These solutions have come to the point that extreme poverty, which until 1980 was the usual condition of most of humanity, now afflicts less than a tenth. We are in the midst of the biggest improvement of the human condition ever.

Yet the games continue. This enormous boon is concealed between a web of selective statistics. Critics peer intently at various dubious versions of wealth inequality (often while simultaneously downplaying the value of the wealth they are comparing) because absolute measures of poverty don't give the right answers any more. Would-be environmentalists complain because poisons are poisons (look at the replies which ignore dosage and proper usage) while completely ignoring whether current regulation solves the problems they claim to care about and whether the role of the poison is necessary.

And for some people, it no longer matters how many people die in wars any more. Wars are equally bad no matter how many die. Very convenient for the peacenik who needs a cause that never goes away.

My view is that part of the problem is that we have a case of bad ideology which needs to invent exaggerated or even fake problems in order to act out showing concern. Partly, it's that we're going to worry, even if we don't enough to worry about. Whatever the case, I think it would be nice here to wake up and see what's being done right rather than bumble on into some idiotic and dreadful societal theater because of the Chicken Littles of the world.

There’s now a lot more nerds in elected office. Seventeen candidates with STEM-backgrounds ran their respective races Tuesday, from Virginia governor-elect Ralph Northam—a doctor—to Tiffany Hodgson, a neuroscientist who won a seat on the Wissahickon School Board in eastern Pennsylvania.

Many candidates decided to run only after President Donald Trump ushered in one of the most anti-science administrations in history. And a number of the campaigns sprung out of meetings with 314 Action, a political advocacy group that is helping scientists run for office.

“Voters are ready for candidates who are going to use their STEM training to base policy on evidence rather than intuition,” Shaughnessy Naughton, the founder of 314 Action, said in a press release. “Science will not be silenced.”

17 STEM Politicians Won Elections Tuesday

An early draft of former FBI Director James Comey's statement closing out the Hillary Clinton email case accused the former secretary of State of having been "grossly negligent" in handling classified information, newly reported memos to Congress show.

The tough language was changed to the much softer accusation that Clinton had been "extremely careless" in her handling of classified information when Comey announced in July 2016 there would be no charges against her.

The change is significant, since federal law states that gross negligence in handling the nation's intelligence can be punished criminally with prison time or fines.

[...]

The draft, written weeks before the announcement of no charges, was described by multiple sources who saw the document both before and after it was sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee this past weekend.

"There is evidence to support a conclusion that Secretary Clinton, and others, used the email server in a manner that was grossly negligent with respect to the handling of classified information," reads the statement, one of Comey's earliest drafts from May 2, 2016.

The sources who had seen the early draft, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, said the draft statement was subsequently changed in red-line edits on or around June 10 to conclude that the handling of 110 emails containing classified information that were transmitted by Clinton and her aides over her insecure personal email server was "extremely careless."

So... former FBI Director Comey apparently did at one point use the legally significant phrase "grossly negligent" which then somehow morphed to the legally insignificant phrase, "extremely careless" after draft changes by the Senate Judiciary Committee to Comey's statement. I wonder if Clinton apologists care any more.

(This is the 53rd of many promised articles which explain an idea in isolation. It is hoped that ideas may be adapted, linked together and implemented.)

I've been working on a video encoder and decoder which divides frames of video into square tiles and then sub-divides those tiles and applies a specified short-list of matching and compression algorithms to tiles of 256×256 pixels or significantly smaller. What real-time conferencing? Stick to MJPEG tile-types. Want lossless video? Avoid affine tile-types. Want maximum resilience? Minimize use of key-frames. Want best compression? Use everything.

In addition to viewing real-time or pre-recorded video, this arrangement can be used to display contemporary or legacy software which is running elsewhere. Indeed, it is likely to be used extensively for remoting LibreOffice Writer, Calc and Draw.

So, the video codec is likely to be used in scenarios where the majority of a window is plain white and the exceptions have a hard edge. I presumed that the patent-just-expired texture compression algorithms would handle this with ease. However, an ex-housemate suggested inclusion of the simplest historial method. Well, I'm not a complete misanthropic curmudgeon and I do listen to my friends so implemented a Run Length Encoding tile-type. Although, I wish that I hadn't.

Run length encoding schemes differ significantly and, in the case of the Amiga's IFF picture compression, may be defined ambiguously. A typical byte encoding would allow up to 128 repetitions of a following value or up to 128 literal values to follow. However, the cut could be defined anywhere. So, it could define 240 repetitions and 16 literal values. Or the opposite. There's no point defining one repetition and one literal because that's the same thing. Likewise for zero. So, definitions may be shifted by one or two values.

Should Run Length Encoding start afresh on each line? Implementations vary. The next problem is more pernicious. What is a repetition? If there is sequence of pixels and two pixels are the same, should an encoder algorithm cease encoding literals, encode a repetition of two values and then continue encoding literals? For 24 bit color, yes. For 8 bit monochrome, no. For 16 bit data, it depends. So, a dumb Run Length Encoder has to look ahead by one pixel. In some circumstances, a smart Run Length Encoder may have to look further ahead.

Stuff like this caused me to implement an assertion system inside my buffer structures. Specifically, there is a compilation directive which enables a shadow buffer with a type system. Arguably, it should be enabled by default but with intended usage of 3840×2160 pixel video divided into 64×64 pixel tiles and each of the 2040 tiles requiring multiple 4KB buffers, data-types on buffers would require a large amount of extra memory.

However, I've yet to get to the best part. I remember exactly why I didn't implement a Run Length Encoding tile-type. The RMS [Root Mean Square] error (or smarter variant) for Run Length Encoding is always zero. Therefore, when I include Run Length Encoding, the encoder invariantly chooses Run Length Encoding for every part of a video frame. Even if the choice metric is set to error divided by encode length, the result remains zero.

Run Length Encoding greatly improves quality but, also, it greatly increased encoding size. Attempts to restrict matches have been mixed. I've tried setting a minimum tile size and a maximum number of tokens per tile. However, it is easier to exclude it from the encoding process. This experience has made me slightly more of a misanthropic curmudgeon and I'm less inclined to take advice from people who know very little about codecs.