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I've been working for the same company for 13 years - 10 of which have been in my current role. I do application support for a highly customized, business critical application. I'm good at my job. I've automated most of the job away. I can fix any issue that comes up. It's easy.

A manager position has just opened up to manage the team I am currently a member of. I'm not sure if I should apply or not.

One one hand, I know the company well. I know the functions of the group intimately. I am familiar with the business processes and know most of the key people on the business side of the house and have good relationships with them. I'm good at fixing problems. I'm good at working with others to get a problem solved. I like running meetings (I like the showmanship). I've been doing the same thing for a long time. I'm comfortable.

On the other hand, I'm not all that organized. I don't like screwing around with excel. I hate powerpoint. Basically, I hate all of office. Managers at my organization tend not to last more than a couple years. I have a solid pension that if I can hang in here until I'm 55, I could retire. I'm also tired all the time from my baby. We are going to get pregnant again soon so I'm not going to be any less tired for the forseeable future. I don't know if I have the energy.

Should I give up a good cushy job that allows me to dick around on the Internet for most of the day? The management position would probably come with a raise, but it probably wouldn't be that much extra (I'd guess +15%ish, maybe). I'm bored of my current job and feel stagnant in life, but I'm also exhausted.

What do you say? Stay and keep my chair warm for another 20 years to retire with pension at 55, or try for the manager position and get some experience that I will need a couple years later after the next round of 'restructuring'?

Well, other than probably winning an argument with The MiBu,* I tried to convince khallow that it might be possible to replace someone's decision making power with a deterministic software simulation without them ever noticing any loss of freedom.

I think such a simulation could work but it couldn't just be a simple neural network. It would need to simulate the senses and the chemical neurotransmitters that the brain uses to represent things like emotions.

I think there's a fair chance that the person might never notice the exchange, unless of course you told them! In that case I suspect they would get extremely upset. You might think the decision-making software wouldn't allow them to decide to get upset about it, but I think it would. It just needs to be able to model what would happen if the person were to be told about the existence of such an experiment.

What you couldn't do is build a software simulation that could predict a human's actions many steps in advance. That's because you'd have to simulate not just the human but their external world as well. And if they discovered the prediction software, it would have to simulate itself as well, which would lead to it never being able to halt.

I suspect there are similar problems with attempts to predict economic events with algorithms. Once people learn the algorithms they can deliberately do the opposite of whatever the algorithm says people will do.

^{*This is satire. Ain't Poe's law a bitch? Of course I won it! ;)**
**Ah dammit -- just read he's gone outta town. He'll never take the bait now!}

A criminal complaint was unsealed today in the District of Columbia charging a Russian national with conspiracy to act as an agent of the Russian Federation within the United States without prior notification to the Attorney General.

The announcement was made by Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jessie K. Liu, and Nancy McNamara, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office.

Maria Butina, 29, a Russian citizen residing in Washington D.C., was arrested on July 15, 2018, in Washington, D.C., and made her initial appearance this afternoon before Magistrate Judge Deborah A. Robinson in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. She was ordered held pending a hearing set for July 18, 2018.

According to the affidavit in support of the complaint, from as early as 2015 and continuing through at least February 2017, Butina worked at the direction of a high-level official in the Russian government who was previously a member of the legislature of the Russian Federation and later became a top official at the Russian Central Bank. This Russian official was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control in April 2018.

The court filings detail the Russian official’s and Butina’s efforts for Butina to act as an agent of Russia inside the United States by developing relationships with U.S. persons and infiltrating organizations having influence in American politics, for the purpose of advancing the interests of the Russian Federation. The filings also describe certain actions taken by Butina to further this effort during multiple visits from Russia and, later, when she entered and resided in the United States on a student visa. The filings allege that she undertook her activities without officially disclosing the fact that she was acting as an agent of Russian government, as required by law.

Russian National Charged in Conspiracy to Act as an Agent of the Russian Federation Within the United States

To go really highbrow here in my journal.

Yo mama so fat that when she sits around the house, she sits around the house!

Yo mama so ugly that they need to tie a steak on to get the dog to play with her!

Yo mama so fat, she got her own zip code!

Yo mama so stank, she's her own superfund site!

Yo mama so stupid, when I told her I had to take a piss, she asked for it back!

Yo mama so ugly, she crashed Facebook's facial recognition software!

Yo mama so fat, her blood type is Ragu!

There's a good start. Please tell us more about 'Yo mama'!

Not for the first time, the thought has occurred to me that an empire, defined as any nation with an expansionist and/or colonialist system of existence, bears several striking resemblances to parasitic and parasitoid species. Beyond simple resource theft, I speak mostly of parallels to how these organisms often lose functions from their own genomes in favor of allowing the host to perform them instead...and their subsequent complete dependence on said host species. When the hosts either die out or move on, the parasite too withers and dies.

There has been a pattern throughout history of analogous processes taking place in imperialist nations. What chiefly concerns me here is the effective outsourcing of both manufacture and raw-material procurement, beyond what is necessary due to said resource not existing natively or lack of infrastructure at home. Rome, in its middle and latter days, relied on grain imports and slave labor. Britain's loss of India had much to do with its economic dependence on its colony, for textile manufacture for example. And I don't think I need to paint you a picture of the effects of globalization on the US's economy, specifically with regard to wage depression and overseas flight of production.

What all these have in common is that the people at the top are essentially trading the vitality and independent function of the nation they rule--and make no mistake, the golden rule, that the guys with the gold make the rules, is and has always been in full force--for their own personal enrichment. Whether it be kings or CEOs of multinational corporations with US headquarters, the end effect is the same, because the concentration of power is the same.

(Incidentally, this is why the Citizens United decision was such a complete disaster and why lobbying itself ought to be illegal: making money does not always coincide with the interests of the nation, and very often opposes them in a global society.)

So...where does this end? Eventually, the empire in question allocates more resources to maintaining its "interests" (read: colonies) overseas and across borders than it does internally. And the citizens of the empire, especially the poorer ones, suffer more and more over time. There grows, between the moneyed powers and the average citizen, a great, impassible chasm, a gap of not just material wealth but of anomie and hopelessness. The laws and law enforcement apparatus turn inward, protecting not citizens from criminals, but the haves from the have-nots. Long-term planning by the ruling class for the good of the nation becomes not just impossible, not just unthinkable, but outright mocked. The average citizen completely loses faith in the institutions of the nation, and with good reason, for they have become an enemy and they see the citizens as such.

Add to this that no empire ever truly got its power and resource base by above-board, honest, peaceful means--with the possible exception of the Marshall Plan, and even that struck me, all the way back in sixth grade, as a particularly cynical piece of international brinksmanship. Empires have terrible karma. They become ringed with enemies, many of whom may at one point have been allies. Foolish decisions regarding allies and trade and warfare are made. Eventually, the global order shifts...and the empire in question, overextended beyond endurance, demoralized from within, decadent and incompetent and decrepit from decades of internal misrule, is vulnerable and weak and *completely* unable even to see the coming seismic shift as it happens, let alone respond to it after the fact.

Time flows like a river. History does not repeat, but it does rhyme. Care to guess where the US is in this pattern?

...and the shop owner got invited to speak at GOP rallies?

Remembering when a baker turned away Joe Biden and received praise from conservatives

The Red Hen isn’t the first Virginia business to bake up controversy by rejecting a political figure’s business.

The owner of a cookie shop turned down the opportunity to serve Vice President Joe Biden in 2012 — and the right embraced him as their small business hero.

He made the decision “because of conviction and principle,” the shop owner told CBS affiliate WDBJ 7 at the time. “I have a difference of opinion of the folks in that campaign, that’s what it was. Also, taking a stance for my faith, my faith in God.”

McMurray’s story was thrust into the national spotlight with the help of conservative news sites, blogs and the wide-reaching Drudge Report. It eventually caught the eye of Paul Ryan, the Republican Party’s Vice Presidential nominee at the time, who requested that McMurray introduce him at rally in Roanoke a few weeks later.

Most of the regulars here probably know that I'm into the Bitcoin. I've been completely obsessed with it for just over 5 years now. I've mined, I've traded (usually unsuccessfully), I've held.

Bitcoin has changed, and not in a good way.

When I first got into bitcoin, there really wasn't much you could buy with it. There was that farm in Argentina(?) that would sell Alpaca socks, Bees Brothers Honey, Satoshi Dice (gambling), and that was pretty much it. The network was much smaller with less users and less transactions. 'Real' people still hadn't heard of bitcoin yet.

Back then, the energy was good. Communities valued differing opinions and being nerds, there was ample debate on every topic no matter how menial. Every time a new merchant accepted BTC, everyone was excited and would try to support that business. The motto wasn't 'HODL', but rather 'Spend and Replace'. Big business started accepting Bitcoin. Microsoft and Steam where huge victories. Buying games off steam with bitcoin was an amazing experience.

So what happened? Bitcoin stopped growing and started shrinking. Business that used to accept bitcoin stopped. Steam? They left. There are many other examples of companies that previously accepted bitcoin that no longer do.

***

In 2014, a number of the Bitcoin Core Developers created BlockStream. Blockstream was one of the early 'companies' to actually receive funding in bitcoinland. The initial announcement was generally well received (after all, if someone wants to spend money on dev work, that's great). Some people expressed concern about this new company. Blockstream's stated goal was to enhance the bitcoin ecosystem using something called sidechains. This concept was completely new at the time and everyone was pretty unsure what a sidechain even was and how it worked.

The basic idea of a sidechain is that you can send bitcoin to a script address that would lock up the bitcoin until a set of conditions are met. While the bitcoin is locked up in that script address, you can then reference the locked-up bitcoin in another blockchain and transact on this other blockchain referencing the 'value' of the locked up bitcoin. This new sidechain could offer additional functionality (like faster blocks, bigger blocks, additional scripting features, etc). When the transaction is complete, the sidechain could signal back to the original chain to release the funds (and possibly redistribute them if value was transferred on the sidechain).

One of the first examples (I think it actually /was/ the first) of a working sidechain was from a company called 21inc. This company received a pretty good chunk of cash to develop a little chip that was going to be installed everywhere. This chip was capable of mining as well as performing transactions. The idea was that one of these chips would be installed in pretty much every powered appliance. Your fridge, your washing machine, your cell phone, etc. All these devices would be mining and earning a small amount of bitcoin. 21inc would collect 75% and the 'owner' of the device would get the remaining 25% of mining revenue. So, your fridge would be mining away earning you a small amount of bitcoin. This bitcoin could then be used to pay for services. Your fridge could buy food or electricity or whatever. Your washing machine could buy water. Your phone could pay for stuff. There was a lot of excitement, but unfortunately 21inc never really went anywhere beyond a dev kit that you could purchase.

Back to Blockstream. While the initial response to Blockstream's incorporation and funding was positive, eventually people started to question their motives. Blockstream's stated business model was to create sidechains and profit off them. 6 months after Blockstreams founding, Lightning was announced. Lightning was kind of like a sidechain but not quite... The initial response to the announcement was overwhelmingly positive. Lightning promised quick, cheap transactions using bitcoin as the value backing the transaction.

Not everyone was a fan of Blockstream. Some people looked into where the funding had come from and found that AXA Venture Partners (a subsidvision of AXA insurance) was a major contributor to the initial seed funding. Many of the investors of Blockstream had some pretty heavy traditional banking background and that worried some people. Blockstream starting hiring Bitcoin Core developers in 2015. It wasn't long before ~50% of the core developers (the ones that actually committed code) where on Blockstream's payroll. And around this time, the narrative started changing.

At the time, there were two main communities that people would discuss Bitcoin: reddit/r/bitcoin and bitcointalk.com. Both of these communities were run be the same person, Michael Marquardt, who went by the handle 'Theymos'. Discussion was generally open and unmoderated until some time in 2015. The block size debate had resurfaced again. This debate had been going on for years and until this point it was pretty much assumed that when transaction volume warranted it, that there would be an update to increase the block size. There were several proposals on the table, but the proposal that had the most traction was an 8MB block size.

Gavin Andreson (former lead developer for Bitcoin and the man that Satoshi left in charge when he mysteriously left), coded up a fully functional bitcoin client that would accept these larger blocks. The client was called BitcoinXT and would enable a block size increase if 750 of the last 1000 blocks signaled for the increase (75% threshold).

Meanwhile, on reddit (where all the bitcoiners would congregate), Theymos was no longer taking a light handed approach to moderation. Any post that promoted BitconXT was 'offtopic' or 'alt-coin discussion' and those posts would be removed. Comments would be removed, and Theymos went so far as to modify the custom CSS for the bitcoin subreddit so that deleted comments wouldn't show up at all hiding the extent of moderation. It was around this time that I noticed that some threads would be sorted weirdly. Instead of the normal sort order of 'new' or 'best', many threads were being sorted by 'controversial'. Sorting in this way would allow Theymon to bury comments and mislead the discussion. This sorting manipulation was not just on a few threads, I would see quite a few examples of this every day and it was an obvious attempt to quell and mislead actual discussion.

As BitcoinXT started gaining support, someone or some group started attacking nodes running the XT nodes. THey would be DDoSed into oblivion. Core developers under the payroll of Blockstream even condoned these attackes and suggested other possible attack vectors, such as faking support to cross the activation threshold only to pull support at the last moment. Anyone that would publicly support a block size increase would be publicy smeared and attacked. Many people and companies continue to be smeared and attacked to this day. (One recent example is coinbase being removed from the bitcoin.org website because they added Bitcoin Cash support).

One day, during some 'Who is Satoshi?' drama, Gaven Andresen posted a tweet saying that he believed that Craig Wright was satoshi. This was after Gavin had met with Craig in person and had allegedly watched Craig sign a message with an original Satoshi private key. When Gavin posted this tweet, the Core developers claimed that was evidence that he had been hacked and revoked his commit access to the github bitcoin repo. That access was never reinstated. The original developer that was chosen by satoshi had been kicked out.

The scaling argument continued to rage on. Users of reddit/bitcoin that supported a block size increase would find themselves banned from the sub. These big blockers would find a new home in reddit/btc and stop posting in reddit/bitcoin. The community was split -- big blockers lived on reddit/btc and small blockers lived on reddit/bitcoin.

More proposals would be offered. Bitcoin Unlimited was released sometime around early 2017, again with the goal of increasing block sizes using a new signaling technique. Another idea was 'SegWit'. In the spring of 2017 segwit had ~30% support while Bitcoin Unlimited was at times approaching 50%. However, bitcoin was at a stalemate.

Some bitcoin industry leaders met in NY to create what would become the New York Agreement. This agreement would accept SegWit, and a block size would be enabled 90 (?) days after that. The block size would be 2MB, the smallest increase possible, but an increase nonetheless. As per the agreement, miners started signaling, and Segwit was enabled on mainnet. However, after Segwit was enabled, a massive campaign was launched called NO2x. This campaign was ultimately successful, and is why Bitcoin only has 1MB blocks.

Since then, bitcoin hasn't been growing like it did prior to that time. Instead of features being added, features were being removed. Things were getting more complex instead of simpler and more accessable. Bitcoin used to be 'Build it and they Will Come', but now bitcoin actually discourages people from using it. That is not the bitcoin I signed up for.

Fortunately, just prior to Segwit activating on mainnet, Bitcoin ABC was created to split the bitcoin chain, and on August 1, 2017 Bitcon Cash was born. Unlike bitcoin, Bitcoin cash is growing. Bitcoin cash has many of the 'old-timer' working on it. These people helped make bitcoin what it was, but many now fight for Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin Cash has nearly caught up with Bitcoin in terms of acceptance in less than one year.

This is really just the very, very tip of the iceburg. There is so much more that I have left out. In short, I feel that Bitcoin has been hijacked and no longer represents the bitcoin described in the whitepaper. It no longer follows the formula that made it successful initially. Bitcoin Cash is now the closest thing to the original vision, and that's why I am a Bitcoin Cash Supporter.

Welp...just got back from a doctor's appointment for some routine bloodwork. Good news is I'm down to 159 lb--this in all clothes less shoes and with a big meal in me. Bad news is, somehow, I've *shrunk* about 2 inches, and can no longer use the phrase "six-foot dyke in steel-toed work boots." I mean, "five-foot-ten dyke in steel-toed work boots" doesn't have quite the same punch to it, you know? But the measure doesn't lie: 178cm, 5'10" on the dot.

And no one can tell me WTF happened there. If my mother's any indication there's almost 20 years still to go to menopause, and I haven't lost any bone or muscle mass. A co-worker about my age says she lost an inch a couple of years ago and the doctor told her it was bad posture, but I don't slouch, so...who knows?

Odd. This bugs me more than it ought to to be honest.

First it was a deterrent. Then it wasn’t.

It was a new Justice Department policy. Then it wasn’t.

The Trump administration was simply following the law. Then it said separations weren’t required by law.

It could not be reversed by executive order. Then it was.

President Trump’s political gambit to force an immigration bill through Congress backfired Wednesday amid a series of wildly contradictory statements — which you can see for yourself in the video above — from a White House that has been without a communications director since Hope Hicks left in March.

The Trump administration changed its story on family separation no fewer than 14 times before ending the policy

Man.....if only someone had pointed that out, repeatedly, over the last few days only to have posters swear up and down that Trump was telling the truth. You all willing to admit you were wrong yet?

On World Refugee Day, we join the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and our international partners in commemorating the strength, courage, and resilience of millions of refugees worldwide who have been forced to flee their homes due to persecution and conflict.

As global displacement has reached record levels, it is vital that new actors – including governments, international financial institutions, and the private sector – come to the table to assist in the global response to address it. The United States will continue to be a world leader in providing humanitarian assistance and working to forge political solutions to the underlying conflicts that drive displacement.

I mean, sure, we'll send your children to an internment camp for the crime of applying for asylum. But, other than that, the US is totally down to help!

United States Commemorates World Refugee Day [www.state.gov]