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Face masks can't go on forever. What we need is a vaccine to get this under control.

But then how do you know whether someone you're interacting with (and no face mask) has been vaccinated? Simple! Have an obvious mark on the right hand or forehead proving the person is safe. You can be sure of who they are. That they were vaccinated. And that they don't have any wrongthink.

Seeing anyone without the mark would be a huge indicator to distance yourself from them. Report them to authorities. Certainly not to do business with them. [Rev 13:16-18]

Fear will drive people to take the mark and report those who don't have it. And it will seem to be the wise thing to do. Even if it is actually a fatal mistake. [Rev 14:9-11] Thanks to the dear leader who made it all happen to keep us safe. Think of the children! Etc.

Such a mandatory vaccine, required for every person on Earth, would definitely not have any undesirable side effects. [Rev 16:2]

Disclaimer: I have not started any "Don't take the mark" messages prior to this journal entry. And certainly would not do so anonymously. The preceding is merely an opinion about how things might go. But I'll just say this:

Don't take the mark! It will cost you to refuse. It won't be easy to refuse.

More, if you find yourself in this situation and are reading this.

The IRS hasn't finished sending stimulus payments for up to $1,200 per person to millions of Americans, and already some are wondering if those checks will do enough and if there will be a second coronavirus relief bill. The "economic impact payments" being issued by the IRS by checks in the mail and via direct deposit to banks were introduced as a one-time payment designed to help curb the financial blow caused by the outbreak of COVID-19.

With more than 33 million people filing first-time unemployment claims since mid-March, the unemployment rate reaching 14.7% and the country barreling toward a recession that economists predict globally could be the worst since the Great Depression, talk of a second 2020 stimulus check to keep people afloat is already starting in Washington.

Today, while there is not broad enough support in Congress to pass a second stimulus package for individuals -- which some are calling the "CARES 2 Act" -- a handful of ideas from members of Congress are being discussed and gaining traction. Here's what we know about a second round of stimulus payments in 2020 for individuals.

https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/will-there-be-a-second-round-for-coronavirus-stimulus-checks-heres-what-were-hearing/

IMO, money should be reserved for those most in need. Corporations are out. I should be out. I haven't missed a payday since this whole thing started, FFS. People in need should be targeted. Yeah, it was nice getting some "free money", but I didn't "need" it.

Small businesses, and people out of work should come first. Everyone else can stand in line, and make their cases, one by one. And, again, the large corporations don't even need to get in line. Any company with overseas subsidiaries, offshore banking, and questionable tax filing practices is definitely out. Such companies are not "American", they are international and global. (I'm looking at you, Apple, Microsoft, Google, WalMart, and a boatload more.)

Thoughts?

In the first part, someone suggested an outboard sound card. I've actually had one for about fifteen years, but can't find the power supply; I haven't needed it in a decade.
        At any rate, the next morning I realized that I actually already had Broadcomm Bluetooth drivers, in the dongle’s install CD, so I uninstalled the Bluetooth drivers that were installed, and installed drivers from the disk; or rather, the network drive I had copied them to.
        Apparently the old Bluetooth chip doesn’t support the new drivers. So I again uninstalled the Bluetooth drivers, disabled the Bluetooth chip, plugged the dongle in, and installed the drivers yet again, rebooted, and...
        It was worse than before, as if it had no Bluetooth whatever. A look at the device manager showed why—it only showed the disabled internal chip, and not the dongle. Stupid Windows!
        Time for Linux. I went to the Kubuntu site and downloaded the ISO. As it was downloading I scrolled through Facebook and discovered a post from Lulu saying that they had just done a huge site redesign and there may be trouble.
        Half of my books seemed to be missing. I wasn’t going to be installing Linux today!
        A couple of hardcover books were listed as paperback, and with the hardcover’s prices. A couple led to 404s. I did a search on Lulu’s site for one missing book, searching for its ISBN, and was led to some book by someone else.
        Fortunately they were still for sale at Barnes & Noble and Amazon, so I simply changed the “buy” URL on the books’ pages.
        By then I had forgotten all about Linux, running across a magazine article about the Roman Plague Emperor, who was a philosopher. “Hmm,” I thought, “I haven’t added any new books to my site in a while, and a philosopher’s musings about a plague Rome was enduring was pretty timely,” so I went to Gutenberg; it should only take a few hours or so to format it for the site.
        There was a problem: it was almost unreadable. Darmok at Galadra. It was translated a few hundred years ago, and the language was more archaic and obscure than the King James Bible. And it got worse; each page was littered with archaic words, many of which I needed to look up in more than one dictionary because it was missing from Webster’s and OED. One word Google couldn’t even find. On top of that it appeared that whoever scanned it left all the OCR errors in. There were a lot of words starting sentences that weren’t capitalized, and words that were that shouldn’t have been. And every speck of dirt on the scanned page became a comma, making it sound like William Shatner playing James Kirk, and far less readable; “The koala eats, shoots, and leaves.”
        I decided to edit it and make it my own, making the unreadable prose readable, understandable, and if I do it right, maybe a pleasant read. I’ve been working on it all week, and am about halfway through the first pass.
        But yesterday I remembered the Bluetooth/plug problem again when it annoyed me trying to find some music among all the commercials every radio station was playing, so I burned the ISO on a DVD and started the Linux installation.
        Or thought I was. I couldn’t find the right key to get to the BIOS; I’ve seen F2, F9, F10, and F12. So I looked it up on Google. I changed the boot sequence to start with the DVD and exited. Windows started booting. WTF??
        My bad, the DVD tray was open.
        When it got to the part where it was ready to write to disk, there were only two options: try Kubuntu, or wipe the drive and install it. This was really unusual. I started using Linux when Mandrake came out a couple of decades ago, installing different distros on different computers, but every single time I could either use the whole disk, or dual boot.
        I shut off the power, opened the DVD drive and rebooted, just to make sure that I hadn’t trashed Windows, and it came up all right. So I closed the drive bay and rebooted. Half an hour later when it had only been at the opening Kubuntu screen, it reverted to text mode and displayed an error message that seemed to indicate that it couldn’t read the DVD.
        Maybe it just got too hot to read, I’ve seen that before. I hope so, if the DVD has gone bad it will be hard as hell to install Linux, since it will have to be from a thumb drive, and I’m not sure it’s possible on this machine; I saw no external drives in the BIOS’ drive list.
        At any rate I shut it off to let it all cool and decided to watch Star Trek, so I went to “Movies” on the TV, went through to the directory where the movies are stored, and Star Trek was gone.
        Damn. Star Wars was there, but not Star Trek. So I got on the computer, since the TV sometimes misses things, and it really was gone. So I plugged in my backup drive, which now has four full-system backups. The most recent backup was missing Star Trek. I finally found it on the oldest backup, started the HP back up since it has a network jack, the Dell only has Wi-fi.
        It will take days to copy all those movies and TV shows. So it will be a while before I start the next attempt at getting Linux on the HP.

How much use do these things get before they go on the trash heap? Or do they get incinerated as bio-hazard waste?

Will this new product cycle nullify the gains from bans on plastic bags?

From ArsTechnica:
US projects 200,000 new COVID-19 cases per day, 3,000 daily deaths by June

Leaked gov’t document predicts rise in deaths as Trump aims to “open up America.”

The United States is expected to see about 200,000 new COVID-19 cases per day by June 1, with daily deaths hitting 3,000, a leaked Trump administration document shows.

I'm feebly trying to think of a way to put that risk into perspective.

According to the Google, There are a total of 13,843 McDonald's locations in the United States as of April 07, 2020.

So let's suppose each day there would be 1 death in your community for every 4 McDonald's locations. That sounds about right.

Suppose the following happens once per day. For every four McDonald's locations in a county, a single BigMac drops out of the sky into a random location. Wherever that BigMac lands is where a death occurs in that county. Every day. What are the odds of you coming into contact with one of these BigMac biological death bombs?

How safe would you feel from being killed by a BigMac? Every day.

How likely is it you would have come into contact with a BigMac while it was still contagious? Are you protected enough from the BigMac? Maybe a full body hazmat suit if you venture out in public?

Stay at home. Bored up the doors and windows. Eat the same fine food the president eats. Standard order:

• 2 Big Mac
• 2 Filet O' Fish (yuk! and double yuk!)
• Chocolate Shake

Stock up on these items. They last forever without refrigeration.

Join us.

Runaway,

You've been hearing a lot about the importance of campaign fundraising recently, and I wanted to take a second to explain more about a big piece of that: Our opponents' massive fundraising lead.

Donald Trump and the RNC have more than $240 million in the bank for the general election. That's a historically unparalleled number -- in huge part because of when they started. At every turn, Trump has used his office as an opportunity to campaign instead of lead, and he's already begun to spend his war chest on attack ads against Joe Biden. We’ve always known that Democrats don’t need to match Trump’s fundraising numbers dollar for dollar, but we can’t afford to fall further behind and let our candidates face Republican attacks without our full support.

We’ve built an incredibly strong Democratic Party infrastructure in the last three years, and we’re in a good position to capitalize on these efforts as we get closer to November. That said, our financial disadvantage puts us in a tough position. A lack of resources means we’re less able to plan ahead and act strategically, and that could have major consequences for our presidential nominee and Democrats down the ballot. That's why I'm asking you to do something important today:

Will you make a $7 donation to the DNC today to close the gap on Trump's fundraising lead and help Joe Biden and Democrats in competitive races fight back? Every bit helps.

DONATE: $7
DONATE: $10
DONATE: $25
DONATE: $50
DONATE: $100
Donate another amount

Since Tom Perez took over as chair in early 2017, the DNC has made unprecedented investments in organizing, data and technology infrastructure, and voter protection efforts. We know that the presidential election is likely to be an incredibly close race, and with so many House and Senate seats up for grabs, we can’t risk not fully funding these critical programs.

That’s where you come in, Runaway. Grassroots supporters like you are the lifeblood of the Democratic Party, and victories up and down the ballot this November require your early support.

With just 184 days until the most consequential election of our lifetimes, we need Democrats like you to commit to our shared goals now, while there’s still time to make a difference. Can I count on your $7 today?

Thanks and stay safe,

Patrick

Patrick Stevenson
Chief Mobilization Officer
Democratic National Committee

P.S. Trump’s fundraising advantage is arguably the single biggest reason he could be reelected. The good news: You can fight back, Runaway. Make a $7 donation and help close the gap today.

If you no longer wish to receive emails from the DNC, submit this form to unsubscribe. If you’d only like to receive our most important messages, sign up to receive less email.

If you’re ready to elect Democrats in all 50 states, make a contribution today.

Contributions or gifts to the Democratic National Committee are not tax deductible. Paid for by the Democratic National Committee, www.Democrats.org, and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Runaway

2:56 AM (2 minutes ago)

to feedback
I've heard a lot about campaign fund raising, yes. I haven't heard a lot about any candidates that I can support. Is Creepy Joe lucid today?

_________________________________________________________

I've been sending similar replies for more than a month now, to two or more emails each day. You would think they might figure things out.

Gun-carrying protesters have been a common sight at some demonstrations calling for coronavirus-related restrictions to be lifted. But an armed militia’s involvement in an angry protest in the Michigan statehouse Thursday marked an escalation that drew condemnation and shone a spotlight on the practice of bringing weapons to protest.

The “American Patriot Rally” started on the statehouse steps, where members of the Michigan Liberty Militia stood guard with weapons and tactical gear, their faces partially covered. They later moved inside the Capitol along with several hundred protesters, who demanded to be let onto the House floor, which is prohibited. Some protesters with guns — which are allowed in the statehouse — went to the Senate gallery, where a senator said some armed men shouted at her, and some senators wore bulletproof vests.

For some observers, the images of armed men in tactical gear at a state Capitol were an unsettling symbol of rising tensions in a nation grappling with crisis. Others saw evidence of racial bias in the way the protesters were treated by police.

For some politicians, there was fresh evidence of the risk of aligning with a movement with clear ties to far-right groups.

Prominent Michigan Republicans on Friday criticized the showing, with the GOP leader of the state Senate referring to some protesters as “a bunch of jackasses” who “used intimidation and the threat of physical harm to stir up fear and feed rancor.”

President Donald Trump, who has been criticized in the past for condoning extremist views, called the protesters “very good people” and urged Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to “make a deal.”

Michiganhas been the epicenter of the political showdownover how to contain the spread of the deadly virus without decimating the economy. About a quarter of the state’s workforce has filed for unemployment and nearly 4,000 people have died.

for the rest of the story click spoiler or click the link

It's an AP story, several sites are carrying it, I chose to use https://www.bigcountryhomepage.com/news/us-politics/michigan-militia-puts-armed-protest-in-the-spotlight/

But the “extraordinary” measures we are seeing are not all that extraordinary. Powerful forces were pushing toward greater censorship and surveillance of digital networks long before the coronavirus jumped out of the wet markets in Wuhan, China, and they will continue to do so once the crisis passes. The practices that American tech platforms have undertaken during the pandemic represent not a break from prior developments, but an acceleration of them.

As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China. Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices, which further values and address threats different from those in China. But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.

In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.

and

Apple and Google have told critics that their partnership will end once the pandemic subsides. Facebook has said that its aggressive censorship practices will cease when the crisis does. But when COVID-19 is behind us, we will still live in a world where private firms vacuum up huge amounts of personal data and collaborate with government officials who want access to that data. We will continue to opt in to private digital surveillance because of the benefits and conveniences that result. Firms and governments will continue to use the masses of collected data for various private and social ends.

The harms from digital speech will also continue to grow, as will speech controls on these networks. And invariably, government involvement will grow. At the moment, the private sector is making most of the important decisions, though often under government pressure. But as Zuckerberg has pleaded, the firms may not be able to regulate speech legitimately without heavier government guidance and involvement. It is also unclear whether, for example, the companies can adequately contain foreign misinformation and prevent digital tampering with voting mechanisms without more government surveillance.

The First and Fourth Amendments as currently interpreted, and the American aversion to excessive government-private-sector collaboration, have stood as barriers to greater government involvement. Americans’ understanding of these laws, and the cultural norms they spawned, will be tested as the social costs of a relatively open internet multiply.

COVID-19 is a window into these future struggles. At the moment, activists are pressuring Google and Apple to build greater privacy safeguards into their contact-tracing program. Yet the legal commentator Stewart Baker has argued that the companies are being too protective—that existing privacy accommodations will produce “a design that raises far too many barriers to effectively tracking infections.” Even some ordinarily privacy-loving European governments seem to agree with the need to ease restrictions for the sake of public health, but the extent to which the platforms will accommodate these concerns remains unclear.

We are about to find out how this trade-off will be managed in the United States. The surveillance and speech-control responses to COVID-19, and the private sector’s collaboration with the government in these efforts, are a historic and very public experiment about how our constitutional culture will adjust to our digital future.

What's bizarre about the article is that the authors come up with numerous examples of censorship gone wrong and government abuse of power (the massive Chinese censorship apparatus, Snowden revelations, ubiquitous digital monitoring, and Russian government propaganda concerning US elections), and then speak vaguely of the harm of digital speech. Somehow from that, they argue that growing censorship of free speech is better than the alternative. Are they listening to themselves?

While one can argue that a private platform has a legal right to censor any way that it feels like (ignoring that for years, most of these platforms presented themselves as free speech communities and are now bait-and-switching hard), this article above illustrates one of the big ways that fall afoul of free speech law. The authors advocate for government getting involved in the censorship, both regulating it and helping the censors find the right targets to censor. They're basically calling for a Fascist-style government-lead effort to censor. That falls in First Amendment territory in the US.

And they don't seem to get that they'll probably be first against the wall when the coming tyranny needs to get rid of its formerly useful idiots.

I have an old HP laptop that’s too big for a lap, but that doesn’t matter because the battery’s dead and won’t take a charge. I use it to record KSHE on Sundays, and to play the thousands of songs on my network drive in Winamp.
        However, there are two problems with it: one is that it’s still running Windows 7. The biggest problem, though, is the headphone jack has worn to the point that you have to fiddle with it to make it stop humming from a bad ground, and it keeps getting worse. I used to build desktops, but my attempts to disassemble a laptop a few years ago were futile, so I took it to a repair shop. They couldn’t find a replacement jack.
        A few weeks ago it was really nice weather, so I sat outside on the porch with the door open and the stereo cranked. It wasn’t loud enough. I missed the old Kenwood 200 watt stereo I used to have that could wake up folks in the next block. It died, but I’m still using the three way JBL speakers.
        It wasn’t nearly loud enough, so I went inside, unplugged the little Dell I bought last year (I have a bluetooth mouse and keyboard and use the TV as a monitor, only not when I’m doing commerce) and went to Amazon for a new two hundred watt amplifier.
        I had been at war with Sony since they vandalized my computer with XCP when my then teenaged daughter played a CD she had bought from the record store she worked at, until I bought a Sony TV by accident. Then bought a PS4 on purpose, and when I saw that the TV remote worked the Playstation, I was happy to find a Sony receiver advertised at 100 watts per channel RMS, like the old Kenwood.
        It came a week or two ago. I’ll write a review of it later, but for now the important part was that it had Bluetooth, and I found that it played both my phone and my tablet with no problem. It occurred to me that if that old HP had Bluetooth it would solve the problem of its worn jack.
        My ancient Acer that I replaced with the Dell had a marked key combination to turn Bluetooth on or off, but not the HP, so I did a little internet research, which indicated that it didn’t have Bluetooth. Okay, I’ll just buy a dongle. I thought I’d just run up to Walgreens and get a dongle and a couple of phone memory chips. I bought the chips, but they didn’t have the dongle.
        I knew Walmart had them, because I’d seen them there. But not today, I searched for twenty minutes, found someone who worked there, who looked where they usually were: they were out.
        So I ordered one from Amazon. It came yesterday, as did a charity Covid-19 KSHE t-shirt I had ordered at the beginning of April. The dongle came with a driver CD, and a URL for where you could get the drivers from the internet, and actually had a small sheet of paper with printed instructions written by someone who was obviously a foreigner who didn’t know English very well, but it was still readable and unnecessary.
        I followed the directions, installing the drivers, and was informed there would now be a Bluetooth icon by the clock icon. It was there. Clicking it gave a menu, one item was to add a device.
        Leave it to Microsoft to not follow standards, even if it means doing some things ass backwards. Anything else calls it “Pairing”, which I turned on on the receiver. The computer then started loading drivers and other Bluetooth tools, and the stereo timed out before it finished. I never could get it to pair. I struggled with it for hours before discovering that it already had Bluetooth when I was digging around in Control Panel. It had been disabled; I had no idea why, I bought the computer second hand and hadn’t needed Bluetooth until then.
        So I unplugged the dongle, did a system restore to get rid of what I had just installed, went back in the control panel to enable the built-in Bluetooth, waited for its drivers and stuff to install, and tried again to pair it with the receiver. And failed again.
        I gave up last night. I’m pretty sure it’s a Windows problem, so I’ll just solve both of that computer’s problems by installing Linux.
        I hope.

Someone mentioned Circus City and Divx. I was going to reply, but I thought I'd write a journal entry instead.

Ah Divx. Cloudy. Broken business models.

Remember Circuit City's Netpliance iOpener ?

This was about the year 2000. The iOpener was a Linux computer with monitor and dial up modem, for $99. (A steal of a price, at that time, except . . .) it was tied to a dial up internet service subscription. The idea was that you would buy the iOpener at an insanely cheap price, and they would make their profits on the required service subscription to get online. The "i" in iOpener probably meant intarwebs.

Of course, what happened was hilarious. Evil hackers intent on destroying the very fabric of society published online information about how one could:
1. buy an iOpener at Circut City for $99, without signing anything, and walk out of the store
2. hack, modify or reflash (sorry don't remember which) Linux on the device
3. have a useful computer that was worth at least four times what you paid for it
4. without paying Netpliance a single cent more
5. Profit!

Netpliance was upset. Circus City was upset. Something must be done! Some law must have been broken! It is a violation of the agreement!

Runner up: Radio Shack's Cue Cat free bar code scanner with serial port connector. The R/S sales droids would run up to you shoving these free Cue Cat scanner packages in your face! It's FREE!!! The package had the scanner and a disk of software. The scanner would be used to scan bar codes on ads or something to get grate fantastical dealz! Of course, to most of us here it was a free barcode scanner worth about $35 at the time, IIRC.

Any other great broken business models you can think of?