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Okay, yeah, bla bla bla bla...

But why does everybody's report link to the paywalled Rupert Murdoch Rag? I thought single sources were supposed to be a bad thing.

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.

Weather forecast: expect strong liberal bias with 80% chants of politics

The Weather has a strong liberal bias

When the weather contradicts the president, that is disloyalty. The weather should swear an oath of loyalty.

When a political party has created a climate of fear that even reporting true facts about the weather could get you fired -- because OMG!! contradicting the orange jackass!!!

When that kind of climate of fear exists, it sounds like the environment in North Korea or other dictatorships.

Aren't we on our third NOAA director during Trump . . . because . . . OMG . . . science has a strong liberal bias!

No other president could turn a minor ooops into a week of news coverage with threats of people getting fired for reporting true facts that contradict the president. Quite a remarkable achievement.

The university of Toronto has funded the world's first scholarship for anti-psychiatry. This isn't what it sounds - it's not a crunchy-granola crystals-and-faith thing, but a way to look at psychiatry from a different perspective, less reliant on the DSM, because modern psychiatry has been shown to do more damage than good.

One example is anti-depressants. Before their introduction, most cases of major depression resolved themselves within a year and the person rarely had a relapse.

Now, even placebos perform better than pills long-term, and relapses are the norm for antidepressant users. The latest published study shows that the evidence doesn't back up the use of antidepressants

Of course, the usual suspects are doing everything they can to try to connect anti-psychiatry with quacks such as scientology because it seriously threatens the established way of doing things, which is profitable and guarantees repeat business.

Still, even the UN has been saying that it's time to stop medicalizing moods. Don't take my word for it - look it up.

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

Look up yesterday's shit... It is funny/tragic.

I can only ask why 95% of the people keep voting for it. That's the real insanity/tragedy. The psychosis is real. Just take a drive down the Strip

And now, to welcome the torrent of denial...

We have the dreaded Polycom 4xx phones and equally dreaded Plantronics headsets.

It's all neatly integrated with the PC, Outlook, Skype, VOIP etc. Make a call from the computer mouse / screen and use the headset, or even handset on the phone. Set up favorite contacts in skype and they are the contacts on the tiny screen of your phone desk set. Just as Outlook and Skype show green, yellow, red or blank indicators of whether someone is present, away from desk for xx minutes, in a meeting or not logged in, the phone screen shows these same colors around the icon of each person on the directory listing on the desk set's screen.

When it all works it's neat.

Sometimes you have to log your phone in to your corporate account. Using the phone's ten key pad. This is a horrible life altering experience suitable only as an enhanced interrogation technique.

But there is the BToE (better together over ethernet) software you can add to the computer so that the computer logs the phone into the account of whoever is using the computer. Nifty. But this software is hard to find. Even for IT departments apparently. But with sufficient Google-fu and multiple tries, I found it.

Last I would mention that both the Polycom and Plantronics units each come with an AC adapter. Similar looking barrel connectors from the AC adapter to the respective desk units. But one unit is 9 volts and the other (phone) is 48 volts. I'm just waiting until someone, in one of the numerous offices in US / Canada, who happens to use this particular equipment, mixes up which power supply goes with which unit.

When I started writing this, I experienced a power flicker. Maybe use a battery-backed power strip so you don't get a taste of Afghanistan. Keep in mind that the shape of the official USB-C power supply is awkward and could take up more than one outlet on a strip.

Overall, Pi4 4GB with Raspbian works well as a desktop. Performance is reasonable and compares well to my 2011 laptop. RAM usage of Raspbian is very low. You may want to tweak it to use more of your RAM to reduce activity on the microSD card.

Ethernet and USB boot aren't available yet, but you don't necessarily need an SSD for boot/files. I'm using cheap 32 GB microSD cards, not the ones with A1 or A2 "Application class" IOPS, and it works great most of the time. The speed of the microSD interface was doubled, so that helps. Some things may suck. For example, I tried to download a 1 GB file from Mega, and it was in the ballpark of 100 times slower than the HDD laptop for no apparent reason. I don't know if that is a problem with sustained speeds or the browser-based encryption scheme Mega uses not being accelerated correctly.

I used the Pi4 in open air for a while, but switched to a Kodi FLIRC case. Temperatures now stay around 48-52°C during light use, or closer to 55°C under heavier use. It will never throttle in this case unless I start to look at overclocking it.

One person I gave a Pi4 to can't display video with LibreELEC even though it works fine on the displays I tested. However, LibreELEC for Pi4 is an alpha version and hasn't been updated since July 25. Kodi (Debian) within Raspbian does work, although it crashes when I exit it.

I have LibreELEC running on a Pi4 2GB and it is pretty snappy. Here is a short review of LibreELEC on Pi4. The 1GB model should be fine for LibreELEC, 2GB is regarded as a better choice than 1GB for 4K resolution, while 4GB is probably completely unnecessary.

In Chromium on Raspbian, video playback is still done using the CPU AFAIK, which will be fixed later. Aside from complaints others have had about video playback, I think I've noticed a weird lack of picture quality at 720p on YouTube, which I'm hoping will go away once hardware acceleration is switched on. I have seen some screen tearing, for which there is an explanation. I also hear weird clickiness/pops on some audio playback over headphones, but I need to pin down the cause.

I am looking into RetroPie for another user I am gifting a Pi4 to. No officially working version for Pi4 is available yet, but the expectation is that the newest consoles that Pi4 could emulate with acceptable performance are Nintendo 64, PS1, etc. N64 is probably a milestone in terms of emulation desirability. People are already testing GameCube on Pi4, but with generally bad performance. Part of the puzzle is that Pi4 supports OpenGL ES 3.0, up from 2.0 of the Pi3B+. But OpenGL ES 3.2 or Vulkan support will be needed to get performance closer to competing ARM platforms like the Nvidia Shield TV and add more graphics features that something like Dolphin would need. Improving the graphics driver is on the Pi Foundation agenda, with OpenGL ES 3.1 being worked on, but who knows when that will be done.

One interesting note is that contrary to initial announcements, Pi4 has LPDDR4-3200 SDRAM, not LPDDR4-2400. That fact was corrected on this page after yours truly pointed it out. Bragging aside, that incorrect info was copied endlessly by news outlets reporting the announcement. Wikipedia also has the incorrect speed. So yeah, that's pretty silly. The memory speed is up massively from previous gen, which was LPDDR2-800 (overclocked to 900 MHz), AFAIK.

Since the Raspberry Pi forums hates wishlists, I'll put one here for fun. My assumption is that Pi5 would come out in 2022, Pi6 in 2025:

802.11ax support: This standard offers a number of improvements over 802.11ac. I think it uses some spectrum closer to 1 GHz (an expanded 2.4 GHz band), which should improve range and wall penetration.

Better/actual Bluetooth 5 support: The Pi3B+ and Pi4B both use the same wireless chip. Bluetooth 5 "support" can be added to the older model with a firmware update. But it does not support the new BT5 modes which allow doubled speed at short range or quadrupled range at 1/8 speed. This is a problem with many more products than the Pi, because the Bluetooth SIG sucks and labels too many features as optional. It makes the USB standards look sane. They also need to adopt Opus.

Displays: Without overclocking, you are limited to a 4K display @ 60 Hz and a 4K display @ 30 Hz at the same time. Obviously, that could be improved. Given that Broadcom's SoC GPUs appear to be aimed primarily at TVs, it's inevitable that a future iteration of Pi will get the 8K display support that almost nobody needs.

Codecs: AV1 hardware decoding support would be great for the next iteration. It's unfortunate that there is basically zero support for AV1 in 2019 consumer products, but the situation could be improved by 2022. Maybe AV2 support is on the table (before Google switched to AV1, they were planning on releasing VP10 and future versions at an aggressive 18 month pace). H.266 could also be a thing at that point, although I'd rather see MPEG get brutalized in the market. There are concerns that patent trolling will slow down AV1 adoption or kill it, so expect that to happen in the worst timeline.

eMMC storage: I don't care, but a lot of people seem to. I have no problem swapping microSD cards (don't sneeze), and if I wanted better I would use an attached SSD which are getting very cheap. The Compute Module versions do have eMMC.

Memory: 4 GB is very adequate, but any desktop-oriented system could benefit from more (including to the the point of universal memory where your storage = RAM and you have hundreds of gigabytes of it). Word is that 64-bit Raspbian will likely be released before a Pi5. Pi4's SoC can technically address up to 16 GB of LPDDR4 memory. State-of-the-art is currently 12 GB LPDDR(4X|5), with 16 GB expected next year. We may finally be at a point where memory prices continue to decline instead of shooting back up. If there is any change at all from this generation, I would expect to see Pi5 with 2/4/8 GB versions. 2 GB would be adequate for many use cases, but 8 GB as a flagship would be nice. I doubt they would bother with a 6 GB model. Also, rumors of a Pi4 8GB were denied and attributed to a misprint in the user manual.

Better performance, but with lower heat: I think the Pi Foundation has heard enough complaints by now to understand that the heat issue is a bad meme for them, and there needs to be a reversal from using more power at higher heat every generation. Worst of all is that the official plastic case will cause the SoC to throttle under light/normal use. Now that Cortex-A72 cores are in use, any successor core designs used should allow higher performance with better efficiency (although they might want to skip A73: "In reviews, the Cortex-A73 showed improved integer instructions per clock (IPC), though lower floating point IPC, relative to the Cortex-A72."). There's also many nodes under "28nm". People seem to think that it will be stuck on "28nm" for a decade but I think "20nm" and "14nm" are possible (GlobalFoundries is stuck at "14nm" and a Chinese foundry is going to be at "14nm" soon, so there will be a lot of competition on that node). More efficient FinFETs could also be available.

Every iteration of Pi (2/3/4) has delivered massively improved performance over previous models. That might slow down for version 5... unless they bump up the core count. 6 or 8 cores may be coming. I'm not sure if a die shrink is needed first. I doubt that a future Pi will adopt big.LITTLE, but maybe it should. Maybe that is a way to ensure compatibility with older models, if done right.

3DSoC: This DARPA/SkyWater Technology Foundry project has the potential to increase performance to/beyond current HEDT levels while lowering power consumption back to Raspberry Pi Zero levels. It *could* revolutionize personal computing and create a situation where almost all people would be satisifed using a Pi or other single board computer at all times. While 3DSoC would be able to use larger, older nodes like "90nm", costs for "90nm" 3DSoC are projected to be comparable to conventional "7nm". If this does materialize on schedule, Pi Foundation and Broadcom will have to respond eventually or they risk being rendered utterly obsolete by faster-moving competitors. There have been plenty of Pi clones, but nothing 3+ orders of magnitude faster in the same footprint.