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The sausage is made. You may now officially commence the bitching that you prepared long before you knew what was in the bill.

The USA just decided apparently to abolish "Net Neutrality" making the public Internet beholden to large, established corporations. This is bad news for individuals and small businesses.

What we need is a new internet, a grass-roots one, ad-hoc, created by volunteers.

Many years ago when WiFi was new, there was one such attempt I seem to remember called "Consume the Net." I never had the money to buy the hardware at the time, but it sounded like a great idea. The problem in those days was getting any sort of broadband connection was difficult and expensive. You could get a 56kbps POTS modem, sometimes ISDN (64k * 2) or cable (500-600kbps) if you were very lucky and ADSL was just coming out. WiFi was already running at megabits.

Now we have a different set of problems to work around, but the technology is ubiquitous, cheap and mature.

It would we cool to have the equivalent of open access points on this new co-operative internet that you could scan for and join if you promised to behave.

Any ideas?

The Guardian has a story about some Harry Potter stories written by Botnki's predictive text keyboard (complete with link to github).

        “He saw Harry and immediately began to eat Hermione’s family. Ron’s Ron shirt was just as bad as Ron himself.

        ‘If you two can’t clump happily, I’m going to get aggressive,’ confessed the reasonable Hermione.”

So not much worse that the original.

CNN ran an article yesterday full of butthurt that Cheeto Jesus has been keeping too many of his campaign promises. I figured I'd share it with you lot so the regressive progtards among you could share in the butthurt too.

A politician who actually does what he told voters he would do seems almost unfathomable in Washington, a town of broken promises. For Donald Trump, being a president who delivers is especially crucial, since it's one of the golden keys to his so far unbreakable bond with supporters.

The need to live up to that image helps explain why Trump, who is under ever-increasing pressure from the Russia investigation, on Wednesday recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital despite the widely acknowledged risks.

It was just the latest instance of the President obstinately honoring the bumper-sticker vows he made to his ultra-loyal supporters -- even those that horrify the political and foreign policy establishment, media critics and allied leaders.

Have a nice weekend argument. I may or may not have time to step in and egg things on further, we'll just have to wait and see.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro looked to the world of digital currency to circumvent U.S.-led financial sanctions, announcing on Sunday the launch of the “petro” backed by oil reserves to shore up a collapsed economy.

The leftist leader offered few specifics about the currency launch or how the struggling OPEC member would pull off such a feat, but he declared to cheers that “the 21st century has arrived!”

“Venezuela will create a cryptocurrency,” backed by oil, gas, gold and diamond reserves, Maduro said in his regular Sunday televised broadcast, a five-hour showcase of Christmas songs and dancing.

Didn't Venezuela used to have a fiat currency backed by oil? Why would anyone believe that this new fiat currency, despite having cryptocurrency cooties, will fare any better? I bet that the public nature of the block chain is a significant part of the reason they went with this scheme. You know to prevent the people of Venezuela from buying the things they need on the black market. Like anyone would use the "petro" for that anyway.

And we may also have a sign that the bubble of cryptocurrencies is reaching an unsustainable high, if we have deadbeat dictators grasping at this particular bit of straw.

The BBC has a story about the discovery of a diary left by an Auschwitz victim.

Marcel Nadjari was a Greek Jew interned at Auschwitz and forced by the Nazis to escort fellow Jews to the gas chambers, burn the bodies, collect gold fillings, women's hair and to dispose of their ashes in a nearby river.

Realising that their own murder was only a matter of time, the Jewish slaves of the Sonderkommando documented their experiences secretly. Nadjari put his manuscripts in a thermos flask in a leather pouch and buried it near Crematorium III.

The flask was discovered by a Polish forestry student 36 years after it was buried.

Nadjari survived Auschwitz, but his parents and sister were murdered in another camp.

The "wisdom" I've learned, is that ethanol has 90% of the stored energy that gasoline has. That is, a gallon of pure ethanol contains 10% less energy than a gallon of gasoline.

Since most of our ethanol is blended, 10%eth/90%gas, then a gallon of fuel at the pump has 1% less efficiency.

Now, I've always kept track of my fuel mileage, since about 1976. Back then, I kept a notebook in the car - now I use fuelly.com to record all my purchases. Recently, I bought another vehicle - a 2002 Chevy Trailblazer. I started out putting ethanol free into it, because the previous owner told me that it gets better fuel mileage with ethanol free. I guess I put about six tanks of gas into it, before making purchases at random stations, whenever I needed fuel. (It is a minor inconvenience timing my fillup when I'll be close to the ethanol free stuff.)

Anyway, this vehicle is charted on fuelly.com as ranging from 10 to 33 mpg, with the bulk of them between 16 and 18 mpg. I was happy as could be to find that my ride was routinely getting about 21 mpg, and as high as 22 mpg. But then - ethanol. After a series of about 6 ethanol fillups, my mileage had dropped off to about 17 mpg. Hmmmmm . . . that's a much greater decrease than the advertised 1%!

A guy at work told me not to worry about it - the gas companies had switched to winter blend gasoline, and fuel mileage always dropped with that. I couldn't argue with him - yeah, it IS time for winter blend.

All the same, I went out of my way to fill with ethanol free. And, BANG!! I'm right back up to ~21 mpg again.

Something ain't right here. I'm sure there are some minor inaccuracies in my fillups. One time, I may squeeze the last drop into the tank possible, and maybe the next time a get a cup and a half less in the tank. That is almost certainly what happened with the one tank that shows 21.98 mpg - I just didn't get it filled exactly like always.

I'm wondering how much further my fuel mileage might have fallen, if I didn't switch BACK to ethanol free? And, where do all those lost miles per gallon go?

http://www.fuelly.com/car/chevrolet/trailblazer/2002/runaway1956/645719

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.

Growing up, check cashing policy was always one of the following. Cash it at your bank, cash it at the bank it was drawn on, or pay someone to cash it for you. This arrangement worked well enough for me for several decades.

Fast forward to my move a few years ago to TN. Now you'd expect that banks are banks and they're really not going to change all that much, yeah? Turns out banks in TN (at least some of them) will charge you to cash a check drawn on an account with them. You heard that right; they literally refuse to honor checks written by their account holders for the full amount.

Now me, I don't do the whole banking thing, so I can't go up and chew them a new ass as an account holder. I think I'm instead going to have The Roomie write me a check for twenty bucks and call the police when they refuse to honor it in full then take them to small claims court when the police ask me to leave. Repeating that once a week sound about right?

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).