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For a long time now I've been for increased legal immigration and ease of legal immigration and just as strongly against illegal immigration. So you can see how I would be pretty big on border patrol being relatively heavy handed. That ended this afternoon.

I'm still just as strongly against illegal immigration but the border patrol being too aggressive is infringing on one of the most fundamental rights of the Mexican folks. Which is to say, catching the bigass flathead catfish that live in the Rio Grande. There's a lot of things I'm willing to allow for a solid border and rule of law but fucking with the pursuit of huge, delicious flathead is not among them. I'm going to have to revisit my views on river policy.

For them of you what ain't aware, most catfish over five pounds start getting unfortunate amounts of yellow, fatty meat that is other than the light, flaky, delicious meat that you expect to enjoy when experienced on a dinner plate. Now you can cut it out but that always seems wasteful, which is part of why a lot of catfish folks throw back anything over a certain size. Flatheads taste better than blues and channels (what you eat if you order catfish at a restaurant) to start with because they eat live bait almost exclusively and hardly have the yellow fat issue at all; if you catch an eighty pound flathead, you can expect to enjoy every bit of meat on it. They're also the most challenging to catch of the catfish in the US.

In less than three years, President Donald Trump has named more former lobbyists to Cabinet-level posts than his most recent predecessors did in eight, putting a substantial amount of oversight in the hands of people with ties to the industries they're regulating.

The Cabinet choices are another sign that Trump's populist pledge to "drain the swamp" is a catchy campaign slogan but not a serious attempt to change the way Washington works. Instead of staring down "the unholy alliance of lobbyists and donors and special interests" as Trump recently declared, the influence industry has flourished during his administration.

"An administration staffed by former industry lobbyists will almost certainly favor industry over the general public, because that's the outlook they're bringing to the job," said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the political reform program at the think tank New America and author of the book "The Business of America is Lobbying."

Former lobbyists run the Defense and Interior departments, Environmental Protection Agency and office of the U.S. Trade Representative. The acting Labor secretary, Pat Pizzella, is a former lobbyist and Trump's pick to run the department, Eugene Scalia, also is an ex-lobbyist. Scalia's confirmation hearing before a GOP-controlled Senate committee is scheduled for Thursday and Democrats are expected to grill him on his long record of opposing federal regulations.

A seventh ex-lobbyist, Dan Coats, resigned as Trump's intelligence chief in August.

Trump, so far, has named more lobbyists to his Cabinet than Bush, Obama did in 8 years

Sanders campaign wracked by dissension

Elizabeth Warren just won an endorsement that’s making Bernie Sanders’s world really mad

According to polls, Warren needs a little more to fully absorb Sanders.

I saw these two Maruchan ramen packets next to each other at a Walmart, and decided to taste test them.

Bring back Mushroom flavor, you fucks!

Seems we have acquired a lameness filter. It is lame. How many Soylentils have been impacted by this heavy handed attempt at censorship? Have you ever been blocked from posting? Share your story here! Remember, Buck Feta!

(Or, does this possibly have something to do with the APK trill?)

I'll go first, My handle is aristarchus (notice, no caps), and I am a Soylentil. Have been lameness filtered three times in the past three days. Standard counter filter practices like intentionally missp3lling w0rds are effective. Evidently, we cannot call each other names any more. So much for free speech. Lame speech is free speech! #Freearistarchus!!!!

Your turn, my estimable Soylentils! Even Sulla may comment.

And so after another disastrous attempt at soldering together a hat for my Orange Pi Zero I decided to find out whether the fault was in my hands or in my tools. There are two electronics shops I go to around here for simple components, tools, and such, and I decided to look at the other place for a new soldering iron tip. They had one last in stock, and when I tried to use it, it worked like a damn charm. The old soldering tips the other store sold me would only heat on the sides of the iron, the tip was not hot enough to melt the lead. Probably those tips are truly rated for a more powerful soldering iron than the cheap 30W one I have, despite the store people telling me that it was for a 30 W. One of these days I'll shell out the US$20 equivalent for what looks like a reasonably decent soldering kit that one of the online stores I've seen is selling. I'm not blowing hundreds of dollars on a serious soldering station though.

And so with my better soldering tip I set out to build a hat with a true random number generator based on Julien Thomas's XR232-USB. I first built a mock-up of the XR232-USB circuit on a breadboard with an actual ATTiny85 using Mr. Thomas's firmware and an FTDI cable, and it indeed produces very good random numbers based on rngtest's FIPS 140-2 and Dieharder, though it is slow, at about 400-500 bits per second at most.

Then I soldered together the LM393 circuit as on the XR232, sending the digital noise from the LM393's pin 1 (going to pin 3 of the ATTiny85 in the XR232 circuit diagram) with a 4.7kΩ pullup resistor to one of the GPIO pins on the Orange Pi Zero. I wrote a small C program to read the GPIO pin and do some simple debiasing using the same algorithms (as far as I could tell) that Mr. Thomas used in his firmware. I'm getting an average rate of 16 kilobits/second from the random circuit using the GPIO pin. I suppose that's the most I can expect from the hardware. It's still much faster than XR232-USB, which seems to top out at 400-500 bits/second. The random stream seems comparable in quality to that of XR232-USB in general. However, when I plugged the OPi into my wired network, using a network cable close to my Wi-Fi router, the performance of the random circuit dropped like a stone, with more than 99% of FIPS 140-2 tests failed. Repeating the test such that the OPi was again far away from the router (but connecting to it wirelessly), produced much better results, with around 1% failure rate as before. I'm guessing it must have been getting scads of interference as it was quite literally sitting on top of the router.

I suppose I'll have to figure out some way to shield the random circuit from such interference. Possibly the copper tape which I bought but hasn't yet arrived will help, or maybe I can do some experiments with aluminium foil. I've never actually had to actually deal with EMF shielding for my circuits that much before. A simple Google search about it yields a lot of results from literal tin foil hat conspiracy theorist types (some of whom seem to try to cover their houses in EMF shielding), in between serious results about electromagnetic shielding for electronics.

Once I'm able to figure out how best to shield the circuit from my own Wi-Fi router's interference, I'll start working on a module to make a /dev/hwrng device for this so it can feed the Linux kernel randomness pool.

This is a fairly simple concept. Economies, of any sort, thrive on the flow of goods and services, for which money is an abstraction. Money (currency) may be thought of as something like electrical current or water; it does useful work only when it's moving ("velocity of money"), because it's a proxy for the movements of goods, resources, and services.

Capitalism has the potential, realized repeatedly, to produce staggering amounts of goods and services, and to keep the flow of same in motion. However, the profit motive is a concentrating tendency. In particular, it tends to accumulate both money and the goods/services/resources represented by money in fewer and fewer hands over time, and this effect is a positive feedback loop, i.e., the longer it goes on the more it potentiates and reinforces and accelerates itself.

The problem here is that this accumulation stagnates the economy. When money and the things it abstracts away stop circulating, useful work is not done. The knock of effects are economic malaise, increase in rent-seeking behaviors, and widening disparities between the rich and poor (which, again, are self-catalyzing). Bluntly, a consumer economy grinds to a halt when people can't buy stuff.

When this reaches its logical conclusion, we find the vast majority of resources, goods, money, land, and political power in the hands of a wealthy few, with the huge mass of the people as impoverished slave laborers or serfs. In a word: *feudalism.* Without proper regulations to make sure wealth keeps circulating, then, capitalism will inevitably degenerate into feudalism. Which is, ironically, the very state it was created to oppose ideologically! The reason this happens is because the drives behind both systems are the same: greed.

This seems to be an inevitable consequence of unrestrained human nature. I am told a slur against progressives is that they believe humans and human nature are perfectible; this is not something I have actually heard from any of them, so it's probably another stupid slur and can be safely disregarded. That said, if we don't make some serious changes to how we think about economic activity and the reasons for engaging in it, we're going to end up in a dystopian nightmare. Some could argue we already have, and others might say we never left it.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1170983609492103168

https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=16126&cid=417654#commentwrap

Ceres

Being the largest body in the asteroid belt, Ceres could become the main base and transport hub for future asteroid mining infrastructure, allowing mineral resources to be transported to Mars, the Moon, and Earth. Because of its small escape velocity combined with large amounts of water ice, it also could serve as a source of water, fuel, and oxygen for ships going through and beyond the asteroid belt. Transportation from Mars or the Moon to Ceres would be even more energy-efficient than transportation from Earth to the Moon.

Callisto

In 2003 NASA conducted a conceptual study called Human Outer Planets Exploration (HOPE) regarding the future human exploration of the outer Solar System. The target chosen to consider in detail was Callisto.

The study proposed a possible surface base on Callisto that would produce rocket propellant for further exploration of the Solar System. Advantages of a base on Callisto include low radiation (due to its distance from Jupiter) and geological stability. Such a base could facilitate remote exploration of Europa, or be an ideal location for a Jovian system waystation servicing spacecraft heading farther into the outer Solar System, using a gravity assist from a close flyby of Jupiter after departing Callisto.

In December 2003, NASA reported that a manned mission to Callisto might be possible in the 2040s.

Ganymede

Ganymede is the largest moon in the Solar System. Ganymede is the only moon with a magnetosphere, but it is overshadowed by Jupiter's magnetic field. Ganymede receives about 8 rem of radiation per day.

Compare to Europa at 540 rem per day, or Io at 3,600 rem per day and no water.

Titan

The American aerospace engineer and author Robert Zubrin identified Saturn as the most important and valuable of the four gas giants in the Solar System, because of its relative proximity, low radiation, and excellent system of moons. He also named Titan as the most important moon on which to establish a base to develop the resources of the Saturn system.

Robert Zubrin has pointed out that Titan possesses an abundance of all the elements necessary to support life, saying "In certain ways, Titan is the most hospitable extraterrestrial world within our solar system for human colonization." The atmosphere contains plentiful oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and methane. Additional to this, strong evidence indicates that liquid methane exists on the surface. Evidence also indicates the presence of liquid water and ammonia under the surface, which are delivered to the surface by volcanic activity. While this water can be used to generate breathable oxygen, more is blown into Titan's atmosphere from the geysers on the icy moon of Enceladus (also a moon of Saturn), as they start as water molecules and evolve into oxygen and hydrogen. Nitrogen is ideal to add buffer gas partial pressure to breathable air (it forms about 78% of Earth's atmosphere). Nitrogen, methane and ammonia can all be used to produce fertilizer for growing food.

The report this week that the US extracted a top spy from Russia in 2017 after President Donald Trump revealed classified information to two Russian officials landed with a bang in the national security apparatus.

On the one hand, the news wasn't surprising. The president has a long record of disavowing the intel community's findings, distorting its conclusions to suit his narrative, and publicly siding with hostile foreign powers over the US.

On the other hand, the stark implications of this development, first reported by CNN — that a US spy was extracted in part because the president could not be trusted to protect the person's identity — floored intelligence veterans because it confirmed some of the worst fears about Trump.

'You actually have to give a s--- about your spies': Intel veterans are floored by report that an asset was extracted from Russia in part because of Trump

Four states are poised to cancel their 2020 GOP presidential primaries and caucuses, a move that would cut off oxygen to Donald Trump’s long-shot primary challengers.

Republican parties in South Carolina, Nevada, Arizona and Kansas are expected to finalize the cancellations in meetings this weekend, according to three GOP officials who are familiar with the plans.

The moves are the latest illustration of Trump’s takeover of the entire Republican Party apparatus. They underscore the extent to which his allies are determined to snuff out any potential nuisance en route to his renomination — or even to deny Republican critics a platform to embarrass him.

Republicans to scrap primaries and caucuses as Trump challengers cry foul