SoylentNews

Remember how he wasn't going to be beholden to Wall Street's interests?

Treasury Department sides with Wall Street, against federal consumer watchdog agency on arbitration rule

I get paid when my driver reaches beta, but I do not know yet when that will be. I'm taking quite a lot longer than I originally estimated because I didn't write any device drivers during my madness and my homelessness. I was eventually able to recover my 1337-ness in the last month.

GoFundMe so far enables me to pay my chiropractor for November, to cover the copays for my happy pills, and groceries for two weeks. I still need to cover can now cover my telephone and Internet.

My dental insurance is just $18.00 dental insurance. Dental is required by ObamaCare. Were I not a contract programmer I could do without the phone and net for a little while, but since I _am_ a contract programmer I need them.

(AC just donated $100 on GoFund Me. :-) )

My chiropractor is treating Cervical Radiculopathy - a pinched nerve in my neck that causes excruciating pain in my left arm. Nine "adjustments" so far have greatly reduced the pain, but he said I would require eight weeks, three adjustments per week.

I was looking into surgery when a spinal surgeon advised me to exhaust all other treatments first. He - the spinal surgeon - specifically recommend chiropractic.

Someone requested I accept BitCoin. I also set up LiteCoin and Ethereum:

• BTC: 1J5UybX7A69Nkc8hoaXJkVDyD5Z7nFXAat
• ETH: 0x85c281E0de06bBD58Ae72aACA5677b51C4353397
• LTC: LYk2fX9Yjnaro5aCQchqY9PjXH6eEDswnX

PayPal

I'll sign up for Amazon's competitor to PayPal after I post this.

I mostly appeared sane online the last few years, but really I was totally out of my tree. One day I told a couple of complete strangers that I was a Secret Service Agent. I really did believe that at the time. They at least pretended they believed me.

There is always some tiny speck of truth from which grows my delusions and hallucinations: I have a friend who knows Jimmy Carter. Somehow that speck sprouted all over my yard.

Remember when Republicans cared about the deficit? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

U.S. Posts Its Largest Budget Deficit Since 2013

GOP Congress Presides Over Highest Spending Since Obama’s Stimulus

This is a reminder for me (or you) to check back in a week, assuming it is overshadowed by other news:

The JFK Document Dump Could Be a Fiasco

Trump, no stranger to conspiracy theories, including totally unsubstantiated theories about a link between Ted Cruz’s father and JFK’s death, has not yet revealed his plans for the documents. His friend and political adviser Roger Stone, the Republican consultant who is the author of a book claiming that President Lyndon Johnson was the mastermind of the Kennedy assassination, said last week that he has been informed authoritatively that the CIA is urging Trump to delay the release of some of the JFK documents for another 25 years. “They must reflect badly on the CIA even though virtually everyone involved is long dead,” Stone said in a statement on his website.

The CIA has not confirmed or denied reports that it has appealed to Trump to block the release of some of the files on grounds that the documents might still somehow endanger national security if made public. In a cryptic statement last week, the spy agency said only that it “continues to engage in the process to determine the appropriate next steps with respect to any previously unreleased CIA information.”

As it stands now, the document release this month will be a logistical nightmare, with the public suddenly flooded with a huge online library of documents—tens of thousands in total—that will be, at first, mostly incomprehensible even to experienced students of the assassination. The National Archives, abandoning its plans to release the documents in batches over the course of several months, said this week that it will instead release everything at once—all on the same day—sometime between now and the deadline on October 26.

I'd sub but it's pre-news again.

• Donald Trump’s Unseemly Condolence-Call Bragging Game
• The Memo: Gold Star controversy consumes White House
• Five reasons Trump's widow story stings
• Trump’s Condolence Call to Soldier’s Widow Ignites an Imbroglio
• Today in Conservative Media: Trump’s Gold Star Comments Might Be the Stupidest Controversy Yet
• How did consoling Gold Star families become political?
• Trump's Unforced Error
• Gold Star father: Trump's words misconstrued
• Making a military widow cry: that is a classic Trump move
• https://twitter.com/AlyssaMastro44/status/919988497976582144

I get a big check when my code goes to beta, but there are some serious bugs that I must fix first.

I have a pinched nerve in my neck that causes great pain in my left arm and shoulder. A chiropractor has reduced the pain quite a lot, but I'm going to need to see him through November. He's expecting me to pay for a month in advance. That's $325. The condition is called Cervical Radiculopathy.

I've raised $125 so far. That's enough to buy me food until the middle of November. It will cover my medicine copays as well.

Besides the above, early in November I'll be billed for my Internet, my phone and my dental insurance. (I've already paid my health insurance.)

If you cannot or do not want to, please don't be dismayed.

Help Mike Survive For A Month

Your Unindicted Co-Conspirator,

Misha

Some shit you just can't make up. I'd say more but I'm too busy laughing.

Regional Indicator Symbol

I am adding some flag emoji to the Soylent Upgrade extension. It seems to work although they don't render as anything other than letters or boxes on my main system. I'm sure that 95% of them will work on my Chromebook, however.

I don't want to include every possible flag on the list (sorry Lesotho, New Caledonia, Svalbard and Jan Mayen...). I included the ten that were proposed as part of a draft standard in 2007, flags of the ten most populous countries (Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Indonesia OMG), the EU flag, Puerto Rico, and a number of other territories that are in the news often or are amusing.

Fun fact, separate emoji for England, Scotland, and Wales were added to Unicode in 2017. Good timing! I added England to my list below, but it renders very differently from the other symbols, showing up as one box instead of two boxes, "GBENG", or whatever.

Should the flag of Antarctica be orange?

Here's what I have included so far:

🇦🇫 - \uD83C\uDDE6\uD83C\uDDEB - AF / Afghanistan
🇦🇶 - \uD83C\uDDE6\uD83C\uDDF6 - AQ / Antarctica
🇦🇺 - \uD83C\uDDE6\uD83C\uDDFA - AU / Australia
🇧🇩 - \uD83C\uDDE7\uD83C\uDDE9 - BD / Bangladesh
🇧🇷 - \uD83C\uDDE7\uD83C\uDDF7 - BR / Brazil
🇨🇦 - \uD83C\uDDE8\uD83C\uDDE6 - CA / Canada
🇨🇳 - \uD83C\uDDE8\uD83C\uDDF3 - CN / China
🇨🇺 - \uD83C\uDDE8\uD83C\uDDFA - CU / Cuba
🇩🇪 - \uD83C\uDDE9\uD83C\uDDEA - DE / Germany
🇪🇬 - \uD83C\uDDEA\uD83C\uDDEC - EG / Egypt
🇪🇸 - \uD83C\uDDEA\uD83C\uDDF8 - ES / Spain
🇪🇺 - \uD83C\uDDEA\uD83C\uDDFA - EU / European Union
🇫🇷 - \uD83C\uDDEB\uD83C\uDDF7 - FR / France
🇬🇧 - \uD83C\uDDEC\uD83C\uDDE7 - GB / United Kingdom
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 - \uD83C\uDFF4\uDB40\uDC67\uDB40\uDC62\uDB40\uDC65\uDB40\uDC6E\uDB40\uDC67\uDB40\uDC7F - GB-ENG / England
🇮🇩 - \uD83C\uDDEE\uD83C\uDDE9 - ID / Indonesia
🇮🇪 - \uD83C\uDDEE\uD83C\uDDEA - IE / Ireland
🇮🇱 - \uD83C\uDDEE\uD83C\uDDF1 - IL / Israel
🇮🇳 - \uD83C\uDDEE\uD83C\uDDF3 - IN / India
🇮🇶 - \uD83C\uDDEE\uD83C\uDDF6 - IQ / Iraq
🇮🇷 - \uD83C\uDDEE\uD83C\uDDF7 - IR / Iran
🇮🇹 - \uD83C\uDDEE\uD83C\uDDF9 - IT / Italy
🇯🇵 - \uD83C\uDDEF\uD83C\uDDF5 - JP / Japan
🇰🇵 - \uD83C\uDDF0\uD83C\uDDF5 - KP / North Korea
🇰🇷 - \uD83C\uDDF0\uD83C\uDDF7 - KR / South Korea
🇲🇽 - \uD83C\uDDF2\uD83C\uDDFD - MX / Mexico
🇳🇬 - \uD83C\uDDF3\uD83C\uDDEC - NG / Nigeria
🇵🇰 - \uD83C\uDDF5\uD83C\uDDF0 - PK / Pakistan
🇵🇷 - \uD83C\uDDF5\uD83C\uDDF7 - PR / Puerto Rico
🇵🇸 - \uD83C\uDDF5\uD83C\uDDF8 - PS / Palestinian Territory
🇷🇺 - \uD83C\uDDF7\uD83C\uDDFA - RU / Russia
🇸🇦 - \uD83C\uDDF8\uD83C\uDDE6 - SA / Saudi Arabia
🇸🇪 - \uD83C\uDDF8\uD83C\uDDEA - SE / Sweden
🇹🇷 - \uD83C\uDDF9\uD83C\uDDF7 - TR / Turkey
🇺🇸 - \uD83C\uDDFA\uD83C\uDDF8 - US / United States
🇻🇦 - \uD83C\uDDFB\uD83C\uDDE6 - VA / Vatican City
🇻🇪 - \uD83C\uDDFB\uD83C\uDDEA - VE / Venezuela
🇿🇦 - \uD83C\uDDFF\uD83C\uDDE6 - ZA / South Africa

If you think a country should be included, comment and make your case.

South American representation is looking particularly bad.

Antarctica, England, and Puerto Rico and others should probably be removed if they just don't render anywhere.

One stupid thing is that there is currently no way for me to add a tooltip that identifies the flag your are hovering over. I will think about the best way to add this.

-----

New ordered list buttons will be added. Now the type attribute can be changed (discussed here). Clicking the "1. List" button will output <ol type="1">. "A. List" adds type="A", and "I. List" adds type="I" (Roman numerals). I could make two more buttons for the lowercase versions, but that seems excessive. Having the two new options should be a good enough reminder that you can change the look of your ordered list.

Too bad we can't access the incredible variety added by CSS3 and later's list-style-type.

Also on the agenda:

• Title case fix(es) such as "IPhone" to "iPhone".
• Fix so the title case button appears even after you have previewed a journal.
• Recognize the poll results/comments page so commenting features are added. The URL in question is https://soylentnews.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=110&aid=-1 where QID is the number of the poll.
• Take a look at *New* comment cycling. The button appears on some individual thread pages where there are no actual new comments (but there were new comments on the overall story).

These are just ideas:

Maybe a "Now" button on admin.pl?op=edit so editors can set the story release time to the current time. Not sure about this, would entertain other ideas about the release time field, such as manipulation of the time using [+60m] and [+90m] buttons (including correct handling of the date change). The only thing the extension currently does with this field is add a check to make sure whether or not you want to post a story in the past (typically because you forgot to add a day).

If I missed anything or you have any ideas, let me know.

So I was browsing around and stumbled upon this very interesting IoT platform: https://www.grisp.org/. Not into IoT but as an embedded platform it sounds cool as hell.

From what I gather, GRiSP is the Erlang VM ported to run on bare metal using the RTEMS RTOS which is a library that makes your program look like a Unix process that runs on bare metal. So you have an open source POSIX RTOS which runs on military hardware and space based systems with a high reliability concurrent functional language VM designed to run on communications systems on a cheap Atmel Arm CPU. I like the balance of a high level language running close to metal without miles of OS in between needing hundreds of megs of RAM. This video is a good intro and shows the hardware in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0P-l7dBGJk&feature=youtu.be

Speaking of Erlang, I've yet to look into functional languages so here I am, learning me some Erlang while listening to some newer Polish Black Metal from a few different bands. Anyone else work with Erlang? What are your thoughts on the language and it's BEAM VM alternative, Elixr (which can also run on GRiSP).

And does anyone else listen to this racket while coding or doing other engineering work? Few great finds (sorry all youtube links) Enjoy:

Odraza - Esperalem tkane (Warning! NSFW cover art) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZHb0yAPHyI
MOROWE - Piekło.Labirynty.Diabły https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsmLo1VN5Zg
Kriegsmaschine - Enemy of Man https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iY5RxusESg&t=13s
Batushka - Litourgiya https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgfa5UlZAL8
Biesy - Noc lekkich obyczajów https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9JDs4GDJsg&t=1887s
Medico Peste - א: Tremendum et Fascinatio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MevYwfa_pvg&t=1736s

Just what is this abomination, "nom nom?" Where has it come from and why is it on my television? "Yum yum," surely?

One doesn't say, "Goody goody nom nom." When was that last time that you declared that meal was, "Nommy?"

Yummy. Food is yummy. When one eats one goes, "Yum yum."