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Is it a Crime?
I really do love that song.
But that's not what this journal is about. Although you may want to listen to it while you read it. Did I mention that I really love that song?
Anyway, here's a piece by Richard Hasen on Slate:
Donald Trump Should Be Prosecuted for His Shakedown of Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger
President Donald Trump likely broke both federal and state law in a Saturday phone call during which he encouraged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn the state’s election results. The president certainly committed an impeachable offense that is grounds for removing him from the office he will be vacating in less than three weeks or disqualifying him from future elected office. His tumultuous term will end as it began, with questions as to the legality of conduct connected to manipulating American elections, and a defense based squarely on the idea that Trump’s mind is so warped that he actually believes the nonsense he spews. Trump may never be put on trial for what he did, but a failure to prosecute him may lead to a further deterioration of American democracy.
The Washington Post’s bombshell report and audio recording of a Saturday conversation among Trump; his chief of staff, Mark Meadows; Republican election attorney Cleta Mitchell; and Georgia election officials featured a litany of unproven and debunked claims of voter fraud in Georgia. Trump claimed he had actually won the state by hundreds of thousands of votes and suggested Raffensperger could face criminal liability for not going after this phantom fraud.
In the course of describing such fraud, Trump attempted fraud of his own, asking Raffensperger to engage in belated ballot box–stuffing to benefit him. (Never mind that Georgia certified its vote totals weeks ago and has submitted its Electoral College votes for counting by Congress on Wednesday.) Among the most damning things Trump said was the following:
It is more illegal for you than it is for [election officials] because, you know, what they did and you’re not reporting it. That’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan [Germany], your lawyer. And that’s a big risk. But they are shredding ballots, in my opinion, based on what I’ve heard. And they are removing machinery, and they’re moving it as fast as they can, both of which are criminal finds. And you can’t let it happen, and you are letting it happen. You know, I mean, I’m notifying you that you’re letting it happen. So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.
Make no mistake: In that last sentence, Trump was asking Raffensperger to manufacture enough votes to overturn the results in Georgia based upon nothing but Trump’s false accusations of fraud and irregularities. In the previous passage, it sounded very much as though he was threatening Raffensperger with some sort of criminal offense if he did not do as Trump commanded. (No evidence has emerged that, in ensuring that Georgia’s election results were counted properly, Raffensperger has committed any crime.) This request is easily the kind of corrupt conduct that could serve as a “high crime and misdemeanor” subjecting him to removal from office, though with his departure imminent it seems unlikely that Congress would take up the case. The conduct, though, is much more egregious than the Ukraine threats that got Trump impeached one year ago, conduct that was also aimed at manipulating the election by pressuring Ukrainian officials to come up with fake dirt on Joe Biden. Trump, of course, also entered office under a cloud of suspicion over his campaign’s links to Russia and Vladimir Putin’s successful efforts to manipulate the 2016 election on his behalf. In the unlikely event that Congress were to make him the first president ever to be impeached twice—impeachments can happen even after elected officials leave office—then he could be disqualified from running for high office again in the future. It has been reported that, when not attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Trump has been planning a possible third run for president in 2024.
Aside from being impeachable conduct, Trump’s actions likely violate federal and Georgia law. A federal statute makes it a crime when one “knowingly and willfully … attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a State of a fair and impartially conducted election process, by … the procurement, casting, or tabulation of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held.” A Georgia statute similarly provides that a “person commits the offense of criminal solicitation to commit election fraud in the first degree when, with intent that another person engage in conduct constituting a felony under this article, he or she solicits, requests, commands, importunes, or otherwise attempts to cause the other person to engage in such conduct.”
For both statutes, the easy part for prosecutors would be proving that there was no basis in fact for Georgia election officials to flip the lead in Georgia to Trump by adding 11,780 votes to his totals, giving him one more vote than Biden’s margin of victory. The ballots in that state have been counted, and recounted both by hand and by machine, and Biden’s victory is certain. And as Raffensperger pointed out repeatedly on the call, every court that has investigated Trump’s fraud claims has found them to be completely spurious. Adding 11,780 votes to Trump’s column—or removing legal Biden ballots—would defraud Georgia voters of the actual outcome they chose. Counting fake ballots or removing lawful ones would deprive Georgia voters of a fair and impartially conducted election process. That is the definition of election fraud.
The hard part for prosecutors would be proving Trump’s state of mind, because the statutes require proof of knowledge and intent. Prosecutors would have to show that Trump knew that Biden fairly won the election, and Trump was asking for Georgia officials to commit election fraud. And it’s not clear prosecutors could make that case.
As with so many things in this presidency and president, the question is whether Trump is drinking his own Kool-Aid. Reading the entire one-hour, rambling call transcript, it is hard to know if Trump actually believes the fever swamp of debunked conspiracy theories about the election or whether he’s just using the false claims as a cover to get the political results he wants. It’s not much different than Trump’s statements denying Russian election hacking in 2016, his professed ignorance of the aims of QAnon and the Proud Boys, and his speculation about whether ingesting bleach can protect against the coronavirus. And during the Ukraine impeachment saga, of course, nearly every Republican senator voted to acquit the president on the implausible basis that Trump was merely asking Ukraine to legitimately investigate Joe Biden for possible criminal conduct rather than seeking to corruptly advance his own electoral interests. In all of these cases, Trump’s conspiratorial rantings display either profound ignorance, deep cynicism, or both.
Trump is the rare potential criminal defendant to have plausible deniability about whether he accepts truths as clear as gravity, making any prosecution difficult. Add onto that concerns of prosecutorial discretion for both the new Biden administration and Georgia officials, possible claims of legal immunity, a presidential self-pardon that could relieve Trump of liability under federal law, and other political hurdles, and a prosecution of Trump is unlikely.
Despite the long odds, I would hope at least Georgia prosecutors will consider going after Trump, or that the House of Representatives might impeach him again with the goal of disqualifying him from running in 2024. Lack of prosecution or investigation demonstrates that there’s little to deter the next would-be authoritarian—perhaps a more competent one—from trying to steal an election. Trump came a lot closer than he should have this time, and next time we may not be so lucky.
Did I mention that I *really* love that song?
Where have all the old coders gone?
Before I get to the question of the old coders, I have some observations. If you're impatient, just scroll down to the last topic.
(typos, etc? What do you expect. I can't see shit)
The big story for 2020 was sars-cov2
China screwed the world over by trying to control the story.
The World Health Organization screwed the world over by refusing to call a pandemic for political and financial reasons (didn't want to offend China or trigger payouts on pandemic bonds they had sold investors). If this had been an outbreak of h1n1 flu it would have been called much earlier.
Governments screwed the world over by lying to people about the fact that masks protect the wearer, something we knew from the 1918 pandemic.
On the bright side, covid cost Trump the election.
Biden won on the fact he wasn't Trump, end of story. Same as Trump had won because he wasn't Hillary Clinton.
Mozilla proves open source has a money problem.
After laying off 70 staff at the beginning of the year, Mozilla gave the remaining 700 Firefox developers the pink slip.
They have the "opportunity" to continue working for free for a foundation. You can be sure that the people running the foundation will get paid one way or another, just not the workers. That's how open source works now - foundations pay themselves to fundraise for the management paycheques, while in many cases doing not much else.
It's now become not just okay, but fashionable, to point out how they're leeches.
App stores generated over $100 Billion this year.
Spyware Android OS took in only 32% of that, leaving 68% to Apple.
Looks like the app stores have solved the funding model for many developers.
Amazon TV ads reveal most vendors are making less than someone working part time flipping burgers
Amazon is feeling the heat from its policies, so in Canada they're running ads saying that "over 30,000 Canadian businesses sell more than 1 billion a year on Amazon."
For most or them. It's shit. The rule of Pareto states the obvious - 80% of sales are made by 20% of vendors. That means 24,000 vendors are competing for the remaining $200 million in sales. That's a measly $8,333 in sales each.
If they're lucky they're making 20% margin (because people shopping on Amazon are VERY price conscious). So, $1,666 a year in gross profit before expenses. $32 a week.
Seriously? $32 a week profit? And they hold on in the irrational hope that they will somehow break out, despite more and more competition.
Personal silver lining:
Despite the pandemic, the hospital hasn't forgotten my eye surgeries. Though it looks like it's going to take a year or two. Because covid doesn't care.
More silver linings: I dodged covid.
I know two people who died from it, and they were the type you couldn't tell them what to do if their lives depended on it. One of them was hacking up her lungs while insisting that it wasn't covid because god protects believers. In a way I guess she was right - dead people can't catch covid again.
Rumours circulated I was dead.
Obviously someone confused me with the death of the covidiot across the street.
Went legally blind again.
A series of haemorrhages in my better eye left it far worse than my bad eye, which is between 20/300 and 20/400.
Not the first time, but it made things like stairs and streets risky. And walking the dogs at night very much limited.
Bad time for a hernia
In October I got another hernia, and it got to the point that, between it and my diminished sight,I stopped volunteering at the food bank in the middle of December, as we were prepping for Christmas baskets. The busiest time of the year and I'm a no-show. Sucks to be me. But my dogs really liked all the time together uninterrupted.
Best time to get a hernia
Somebody brought covid in after I stopped volunteering, and people are isolating. Never thought I'd find a silver lining to a hernia. But one of my friends got infected, and it's the last thing she needs to deal with. Absolutely the wrong time. Because covid doesn't care.
Should I stay or should I go - Balance of risks.
I was already thinking of quitting in the new year before covid got in, because risk increases with time, and it was inevitable that the odds would catch up.
At the same time it's guaranteed we'll lose volunteers over this, so I'll go back for a while. But I have doubts over long-term viability - if we start bringing more high risk people to help out who were SUPPOSED to be blocked, there's no way.
Obviously if it can't be operated safely it has to close.
Where are the old coders?
I can't wait to come out of retirement once my eyes are fixed. I want to finish the personal project I started as my eyesight faded, plus I have two other projects I want to tackle.
So where are the old coders? Why aren't we hearing more from them?
Are they burnt out? Got dementia? The thrill is gone? No more creativity?
The personal computer industry was started by people working in garages and basements and kitchen tables creating new and innovative hardware and software. No managers. No agile development. No foundations leeching off them. But there were profits, and these both enabled and drove developers to continue creating.
Retired coders don't have to worry about getting fired - thanks to retirement pensions. Same with no need for venture capital. "
There's also a natural competitive advantage - the old coders built the existing shit, know what's crappy, and can do it better from scratch the second time around without interference from management.
Build what you want, the way you imagined it.
So why isn't it happening? After all, life expectancy for those who don't get covid is 90, and when a 65-year old reaches 90, its likely to be 97. So more than 3 decades to give a big "Fuck You" to the current way of doing things.
Possible reasons? Well, for many people at 40, they're past their peak in terms of coding. They've either gone on to management or changed fields. Does anyone believe an RMS or ESR has any gas left in the tank when they passed their peak in the 90s?
Maybe they just don't have a creative urge any more and can't be arsed to do much more than piddling around.
Maybe they can't make the switch to yet another platform ("what, again?"). It can be discouraging.
But it's not like retirees want to just sit around and rust. Look at who's volunteering. Plenty of retirees.
So are they just intimidated, afraid they'll come up short? Come on people, if someone had offered such a deal to you when you were 30 years younger - guaranteed pay, work on whatever you want, partner with whoever you want, and keep any profits, wouldn't you have jumped on it?
Twenty: The final AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGHHHH
It’s that time of year again. The time of year when everyone and their dog waxes nostalgic about all the shit nobody cares about from the year past, and stupidly predicts the next year in the grim knowledge that when the next New Year comes along, nobody will remember that the dumbass predicted a bunch of foolish shit that turned out to be complete and utter balderdash.
Except this year. NOBODY expects the Spanish In... Oh, wait, that was a century ago. Time flies when you're having fun... but if you're having fun, why would you want to time flies?
A deadly, redundantly named worldwide pandemic has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans alone, not to mention the rest of the world, but we're the worst thanks to our cluelessly incompetent leadership. Rather than the Spanish Influenza from a century ago, Covid-19 is far deadlier.
And that ain't all! Murder hornets, record storms and flooding, record setting fires out west, the world's economies collapsing, massive protests against police officers murdering Black people, a defeated American president determined to hold on to power... 2020: Written by Stephen King, directed by Quentin Tarantino, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson.
With all of the bars closed for months, I got a lot of writing done.
I might as well go ahead and do it anyway. Just like I did last year (yes, a lot of this was pasted from last year’s final chapter).
Some of these links go to /. (these would be old stuff), S/N, mcgrewbooks.com, or mcgrew.info. As usual, first: the yearly index:
Journals:
Articles:
Driving the Snakes from Ireland
An open letter to my congressman
20 Downsides Of Electric Vehicles: Debunked
The Allegations against Joe Biden
No, We’re Not All In This Together
The Dumbest Word This Century (so far)
Reviews
Science Fiction
Song
I’m Dreaming of a Green Christmas
I’m Dreaming of a Wet Christmas
Last years’ stupid predictions (and more):
I predicted that I wouldn’t have a book ready in 2020. I got it right! This year I'm predicting that I will release a book, maybe two.
The monster will be banished on January 20. The plague will take a while longer.
I’ll also hang on to most of last year’s predictions, and add one or two new ones;
Someone will die. Maybe you, maybe me. Not necessarily anybody I know... we can only hope. Unfortunately I hit the nail on the head last year; I lost my mother in October, and a few friends left the earth without a rocket as well.
SETI will find no sign of intelligent life. Not even on Earth.
The Pirate Party won’t make inroads in the US. I hope I’m wrong about that one.
US politicians will continue to be wholly owned by the corporations.
I’ll still be a nerd.
Technophobic fashionista jocks will troll slashdot (but not S/N). I have no idea if that one or the following held up, anybody been there lately?
Microsoft will continue sucking.
The pandemic will continue plagueing us.
Happy New Year! Ready for another trip around the sun?
Nothing for Soylentils: On Nihilism
Nothing for Soylentils: On Nihilism
Recent journal talk has brought things on SN to a head. It is time we had a talk about absolutes again, about truth, and justice, and beauty, all the big things. Mostly it is khallow, again, but fustakrakchich as well, that have been spouting some pretty, philosophically, fascist stuff. Perhaps it is time we had "the talk". The talk about Nothing.
What makes philosophy itself so confusing, and so reviled by the, um, less intellectually curious, is that it deals with foundations. And it deals with foundations by questioning them. For the edices that stand upon these foundations, this is tantamount to sabotage, and indeed it is. Perhaps everything we know is wrong? Maybe Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" or the Wachoski (former) Brothers Matrix, are true representations of our "reality", and we are actually living in a dream world. Of course, the real question, is what happens when we wake up from that world of appearences? Is there a world of reality, like Plato's True Sun, waiting to blind us with the blazing truth of reality? Or, is it possible that behind the world of appearence, there is nothing, or worse a crappy hovercraft with the same old slop everyday that is supposed to taste like Tasty Wheat? And more bad Matrix movies? *shudder*
We are here right now to understand the relation between the two paths. Not so much as the red pill vs. the blue pill, but the red pill versus no pill. It is one thing to reveal that experienced reality is not really all that real, we all know that to a certain extent, but we expect the shimmering water of a mirage to become a solid roadway by the time we get to it. It is another to find onself hurtling through empty space, when the pavement ends. But either of these is an exercise in sublation. We take what we see, and we subsume it under a larger understanding, erasing its significance as mere phenomena. And this sublation may be the real point, regardless of what we use to do it.
Now the point came up in a journal by acid andy, purportedly attempting to get away from politics. He cited a very common worldview, what is some times called "Realism" or in political science, Realpolitik, the idea that everyone is selfishly motivated:
"We want Tribe X to get more money, power and/or freedom, at the expense of Tribe Y."
[cite] I pointed out that this is a common presumption by certain political views. And of course, there was a response.
Here is khallow's scathing obvious rebuttal, such as it is:
"We want Tribe X to get more money, power and/or freedom, at the expense of Tribe Y."
This, in a nutshell, is the Libertarian/Republican/Fascist view of human nature.
Or in other words, your view. Ideological nihilism only says something about you.
Followed by my response:
Oh, noes! I have "touched" khallow! You are so deep into the nihilism you cannot see outside it?
Nihilism trouble appeared in a comment by by fustakrakich (#1080231):
Why do you hate nihilism?
To which I replied,
Nothing there to hate! Why do you think there is? Are you empty inside, Fusta?
And thus it begins.
So our question is, what is "nihilism", and why does aristarchus hate it so? What provoked all this talking about nothing was my original comment on acid andy's "Tribe X" comment.
This, in a nutshell, is the Libertarian/Republican/Fascist view of human nature. Was just reading an interesting review of the alt-right fascination with the fascism inherent in Dune, over a the The L. A. Review of Books [lareviewofbooks.org], how the inferior races are incapable of delayed gratification, and so we need aryan heroes to rule over the rest of us.
As you can see, the nihilism originates with khallow, which is strangely appropriate. And he is not wrong. Nihilism, as a philosophical position, has a long and varied history, but is often connected to eras of dissolution and disillusionment. Thus the Dune reference: the failing Empire calls forth a super-hero? But this is predicated on a recognition that the values of the past are corrupt, decadent, and in a word, not real. And this is the real kicker: if those values were not real, then no values can be real, and the only thing that matters is power. Relativism is the first step, fascism is the end result. But the use of state power to enforce values that the enforcers themselves admit are unreal never ends well. But this leads us to the connection between "standing up for values" and nihilism.
Nihilism, as most sources will tell you, is from Latin "nihil", or "nothing". English has the word "nil" remaining, as well as the related name of everyone's favorite dev/null. So Nihilism is the view that Nothing is, or to put it more correctly, "there is nothing". (Either of these, as existential claims, are problematic, as you can see.) Often this "nothing" is divided up into different types, political nihilism, moral nihilism, epistemological nihilism, and so forth, but really what it all comes down to is the idea that there is nothing. This may seem strange to many, but, if you seriously consider reality, it is vastly over-rated. I mean, what evidence do we even have that reality exists, outside of our own experience? It is a live possibility that everything we think we know and experience is wrong. And the real question is, how do we prove it is not. I like the call the the "possibility that we are Massively mistaken" hypothesis. And it scares the crap out of some people.
So, maybe there is nothing. It is possible. The real question, however, is why would anyone ever maintain that? What is to be gained by "nothing"? As they say, "Nothing ventured, nothing gained!". As a negative, one purpose of nihilism is to counter something-ism. "Something-ism" is what the Hellenistic Greek Pyrhonnists referred to as "Dogmatism". "Dogma" derives from "doxa", or opinon, but the Latin word "doceō", to teach, gives the meaning of dogma in English: a teaching. The Stoics were of the opinion that reality is real, and that the proper discipline could lead to actual knowledge of reality. If you are going to teach (being a "doctor") you had better have something to teach, even if you have to make it up! It was the claim to access to the ultimate reality, to the objective truth, that riled up the Skeptics, and caused them to come up with a counter-program.
So what do you do with someone that is convinced they have a handle on the truth? Well, you have to disabuse them of that notion. The Skeptics did this by developing argument forms, called "Tropes", that were aimed at countering Stoic claims to knowledge. Their point was not to prove the Stoic claims false, but to show that a counter-position was equally plausible, leading to a draw, an ἐποχή ("epoche"), a suspension of belief, or a recision of a the truth claim. But this brings us to the crux.
"Realists", used loosely as a term of deparagement for those who think there is an objective, extra-experiential reality, are bothered as much by sceptics as they are by nihilists. In the inaugural episode of Neil de Grasse-Tyson's resurrected "Cosmos" series, he goes right to the issue. Copernicus basically discorvered that the Ptolemaic model of the universe was clunky, and that a Heliocentric model was much easier mathematically. To which I said, "duh!!" I do that a lot. But it was not until Italians read Copernicus's book that trouble began. And, the trouble ended up not being so astronomical in origin, as philosophical. Giordano Bruno read not only Copernicus, but also Lucretius, a text that was on the Index Librorum Prohibitoum, De rerum natura, or "The Nature of Things. Now Lucretius work was neither sceptic nor Stoic, it was instead, materialistic. The Greek atomist school is pre-Socratic, and as Lucretius lays out, denies the divine, the supernatural, the post-biotic existence of persons. So here is our first irony: The church sought to ban the consideration that physical reality might be all there is.
Now we are at the heart of the matter, so to speak. Scepticism opened up a range of doubt, materialism went whole hog with a non-metaphysical theory, but that is not the point. The point is, nihilism. Materialism has many advantages, in terms of scientific exploration, and technological development, but it promotes, or even asserts, a partial nihilism. What exists, exists, but it has no reason to, existence is meaningless. Now, scepticism is not so sure about this, being, after all, skeptical. Religion, then, is opposed to both the admission of doubt, and the assertion of a reality that doubts those things that religion claims to know. In other words, the Church was afraid of the possibility of nihilism.
The skeptics, after all, are not so worried about nihilism. You tell me that the chair I am about to sit down on is only a figment of my mind, that perception is no indication of reality. As a sceptic, I say, maybe, maybe no, the only important thing is that when I sit, I sit. But the nihilist says, but how do you know the chair exists outside of your perception of the chair? We could be in a Matrix-like virtual construct! And the sceptic says, "Yeah, maybe, so what? As long as I can sit down." It is, however, much worse for the realist. They say, "But, you are sitting on a chair! How is that possible, unless there is an objectively existing chair that existed underneath your preception of the chair, and in fact both the cause of your perception, and your not falling on your arse?" To which the sceptic responds, "Maybe, maybe not." See? This is the problem. Do not try to sit on the chair, because obviously that is impossible. Instead, try to realize the truth, there is no chair.
Ok, who is more the moron, the "realist" or the nihilist? On the one hand, both of them claim knowledge of ultimate reality in a way that is demonstrably impossible for humans. On the other, the claim that something exists is something more a positive claim that saying that nothing exists. At least with "nothing" you are either totally wrong, or totally right, right? So the Realists, like the Stoic Dogmatists, are the ones with more exposure. And this is where I suggest that they are actually the greater Nihilists? This will take a moment to explain.
Realists claim that some reality exists. They claim this "reality" has certain characteristics. And from these characteristics, they derive policy. Not all that different than the program of the Stoics. But, at a certain level, these claims are groundless, based on pure supposition. Take for example, our beloved khallow. He knows that the world works on greed and accumulation of wealth. Ergo, redistribution or social justice programs are doomed to fail. Of course, true by definition, an example of petitio principii, but the point is, by being so locked up in unestablished assumptions about reality, this is tantamount to a nihilism. If my ontological presuppostions are accepted, my policy prevails. If not then some other set of equally ungrounded presuppostions will prevail, and then they will be right, because they have won. Yes, culture wars. Not a matter of who is right, but only of who wins. And that, of course, is nihilism pure an simple. If your presuppostions are losing, you burn it all down, since that is all there is.
So, I call upon my fellow soylentils, ponder the nature of reality, and the utility of denying the existence of anything at all, and the perfidy of claiming to know what reality really is. In Greek we call this "ὕβρις", overweening pride, and we follow it with the observation that, Whom the Gods would destroy, they first drive MAGA"
More original source, and links!
Fusta gets accused of nihilistic centrism! Oh, the huge Manatees! https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=40886&page=1&cid=1082923#commentwrap
Nihilism, by Nolen Gertz in Aeon, 27 February 2020.
Race Consciousness: Fascism and Frank Herbert’s “Dune”, By Jordan S. Carroll
And, Breaking!! New Resource: Three Therapies for the Affective Nihilist: Talking to Kaitlyn Creasy, By Andy Fitch at the LA Review of Books, 12/26/2020, if anyone needs more Nietzsche.
Jupiter-Saturn Conjunction Observation
I have a telescope and I haven't used it for years due to lack of space. It's been neatly away in its box. I thought I would get it out for looking at this Jupiter-Saturn conjunction.
On Sunday I decided to get the telescope built and do a test run. I was trying to cook a roast chicken dinner and put up the telescope at the same time. By the time I got it outside, the planets were getting very low on the horizon but after a few minutes I managed to get Jupiter and Saturn just as they went behind a tree, so I had to look at them in between the branches.
The next day it rained all day and the sky was completely overcast so I missed the real event.
We may actually get a third political party
Rumor on the street (I know, I know, slowpoke.jpg meme goes here) is that a bunch of Trump's drooling zombie supporters are planning on starting the "Patriot Party" because the GOP isn't, surprisingly, 100% all-in on utterly subverting the Constitution and going full-on banana republic juuuuust yet. Shocking, given their past behavior, but apparently some of them are just bright enough to realize that societal collapse is bad for their stock portfolios?
We've always heard that forming a third party in the US is de facto impossible given how our system so strongly encourages the two-party system due to its first past the post and winner-take-all voting allocation. Thing is, this Trump plague that's convinced a good 70 million Americans (aaaaaaaaaaaagh!) that up is down, north is south, and Trump is qualified or even sane, might just give this enough of a push to make it happen. It's not so much grassroots as it is a kudzu infestation, the "meme that ate the South" if you will, but it may actually happen.
And anyone who's interested in joining the civilized world should be all over this.
Now you're probably reading that last line and going "hold on a minute, what? Hazuki is about as fond of Trump as a marathon runner is of ingrown toenails." Very true, very true. But with enough of these hyper-partisan nuts, these baby fascists, these fanatical, lunatic cultists, *this could split the previously rock-solid GOP base right down the middle.* And what that means is, *neither* of these two factions will be able to win elections, meaning we may actually get the 50-100 years necessary to clean up the mess the GOP has inflicted on us from Nixon to Trump.
See, the GOP is very much a party of the lowest common denominator. They have a kind of unity the Democrats don't because, to put it bluntly, their base is fucking dumb and easily-manipulable. Liberals tend to be harder to corral because the entire point is to question authority and look for better solutions to existing problems, whereas the conservative mindset by definition follows the path of least resistance and least change. So the unity on the GOP side is no surprise, but it also comes with a built-in self-destruct switch: there is no negotiating with a fanatic, so when inevitably the base fractures, it breaks into *two* fanatical frothing mobs, which will then proceed to tear one another to bloody shreds.
I am all for it. Nothing, *nothing,* could be more poetic than the very pathologies the GOP has inflicted on the nation and the world coming back to destroy them from the inside, in as painful and humiliating and bloody a manner as possible. Hope they call ahead and rent a big convention center in Hell so they can save on expenses!
AMD Ryzen Floating Point
Years ago I thought it would be fun to do some 3D graphics completely from scratch in C, using SDL for output. I wrote some code to do basic vector and matrix functions (single- and double-precision). I wrote functions to draw lines and so on, to project vertices from 3D to 2D, to scale them and to render them on the screen.
I got a 64-bit computer and it still worked.
A couple of years ago I bought an AMD Ryzen 7 2700U laptop which is running Slackware. I had all sorts of trouble with it, particularly with the integrated graphics which was causing it to hang.
I tried my old code on it, though, and was pleased to see it run. The second time I ran it, it didn't work. My code checks for pixels that are off screen and doesn't try to plot them, and outputs an error message to the console. I was getting thousands of them. So I figured that there was something wrong with the machine. Computers are supposed to be deterministic. You should get exactly the same results each time you run a program.
This summer I built a new PC with an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU and an nVidia GTX 1650 graphics card, running Slackware. Today I thought I'd try my old code. It ran perfectly first time. The second time, I got thousands of error messages about the pixels being out of range.
What's going on? What subtle bug has it revealed in my (very simple) code? On other machines it didn't have this problem.
Could it be that the ancient version of SDL that I'm using does something weird to the state of the hardware?
Update: Fixed it. It was an uninitialised local variable which just happened to be zero when it was supposed to some of the time.
I had a line of code at the end of the loop which updated the camera (view point) position so that I could have it "flying forward" each frame, but I had decided to stop the flying at one point many years ago. I forgot to assign (0,0,0) to the increment vector. Sometimes it was getting random garbage in it and when the vertices were getting translated, they were getting ludicrous values.
It wasn't my multi-threading (I commented that out).
It's funny how a change of CPU revealed that bug.
Do you see ads on youtube when using linux?
I have a Roku -- the ads on youtube are getting unbearable -- every 10 minutes or so two ads. On my android phone, the ads are insufferable as well. But when I watch youtube on my linux desktop, I never see any ads at all. Zero.
This has me thinking I want to buy a fanless mini-pc and use that with my TV instead of the Roku, at least for youtube. Before I do that though, I'd like to know if my experience is unique and whether others have noted the same phenomenon, i.e., no youtube ads with Linux.
Don't Read This Journal Entry
If you get the point of this journal it will only make you sad.
If you don't, then you're an empty shell of human.
Either way, it's not a good scene. So don't read this journal entry.
The 10 most important things I’ve learned about trust over my 100 years
By George P. Shultz
December 11, 2020George P. Shultz is a former U.S. secretary of labor, treasury and state, and was director of the Office of Management and Budget. He is a distinguished fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
Dec. 13 marks my turning 100 years young. I’ve learned much over that time, but looking back, I’m struck that there is one lesson I learned early and then relearned over and over: Trust is the coin of the realm. When trust was in the room, whatever room that was — the family room, the schoolroom, the locker room, the office room, the government room or the military room — good things happened. When trust was not in the room, good things did not happen. Everything else is details.
There are countless examples of how that lesson was brought home to me across the past century, but here are 10 of the most important.
1
I first saw the concept in action at home by observing how my parents treated one another and their friends and family. One hundred years later, I can still sense the steadfast love that my parents had for each other and for me, their only child. My mother made our home comfortable and welcoming; my father took me on jaunts out into the world, from his Wall Street office on Saturday mornings to a cross-country train trip when I was 8 years old. My early boyhood memories underlined the joy of family closeness and how it creates powerful bonds of trust.2
During World War II, I served in the Pacific theater in a Marine outfit that included a sergeant named Palat. I have forgotten his first name, but I have never forgotten the respect and admiration — the deep-seated trust — that he inspired. When Palat was killed in action, it brought home to me more than ever how pitiless war can be. Later in life, I thought about the loss of this trusted, beloved sergeant when I advised President Ronald Reagan about military action: Make sure it is just, I said — and equip the troops for victory.3
As a graduate student at MIT in the late 1940s, I worked with Joe Scanlon, a former research director for the United Steelworkers union. He would visit steel plants where costs were out of control and rearrange their practices, giving workers a voice in how their jobs were set up and, in many cases, a chance to receive a bonus based on increased productivity. This was later called the Scanlon Plan. I saw how Joe rebuilt bonds of trust between the workers and management that had been frayed or broken. Ultimately, both sides benefited, as did the country.4
In the 1960s, I was part of a committee studying changes in the meatpacking industry. Armour planned to open a plant in Worthington, Minn., an all-White small town. Black workers from a closed plant in Kansas City had seniority claims on the new jobs. In that era of great racial friction, trouble might have been expected. Yet the town’s civic leaders made it clear to us: Black families would be welcomed. Many of those families scouted Worthington and liked what they found. The visitors from Kansas City turned out to be tithers, so the churches in Worthington competed for them. Their faith led to trust. Trust was built — and quite a few families made the move.5
President Richard M. Nixon formed a Cabinet committee in 1970, when I was labor secretary, to address school segregation persisting, illegally, in seven Southern states. We formed biracial committees in each state to advise us. The discussions were civil, but there was little trust in the room. Then, by arrangement, Attorney General John Mitchell joined us. Mitchell was regarded by many White Southerners as “their” man. I asked him what he planned to do about the schools. Mitchell growled, “I am attorney general, and I will enforce the law.” Then he left. No nonsense. Opponents of school segregation could trust the administration.6
Trust was essential in every aspect of the desegregation effort. As we moved each of the seven states’ advisory committees to agreeing on how the schools would be desegregated, we usually waited until the matter was essentially settled before bringing in the president to add the final touch. But with the Louisiana group, not as much progress had been made as I had expected before Nixon’s scheduled noon arrival. I apologized to him and said, “This time, you’re going to have to finish the job yourself.” But it wasn’t a gamble. I knew the president and trusted that he would rise to the occasion — and he did.7
Often in my career, I saw that genuine empathy is essential in establishing solid, trusting relationships. In 1973, when I was treasury secretary, I attended a wreath-laying ceremony at a World War II memorial in Leningrad with the Soviet foreign trade minister, Nikolai Patolichev. As we walked, Patolichev, a tough old guy, described the staggering death toll in the Battle of Leningrad. Tears streamed down his face, and his interpreter was sobbing. When we were about to leave, I said to Patolichev, “I, too, fought in World War II and had friends killed beside me.” Looking out over the cemetery, I added, “After all, these were the soldiers who defeated Hitler.” Facing the cemetery, I raised my best Marine salute, and Patolichev thanked me for the show of respect. Later on, to my surprise, I found that I had earned the trust of Soviet leaders as a result of this visit.8
One day, as secretary of state in the Reagan administration, I brought a draft foreign policy speech to the Oval Office for Reagan to review. He read the speech and said, “That’s fine,” but then began marking it up. In the margin on one page, he wrote “story.” I asked what he meant. “That’s the most important point,” he said. Adding a relevant story will “engage your readers. That way, you’ll appeal not only to their minds but to their emotions.” Telling a story, he made me understand, helps make your case in a way that no abstraction can: A story builds an emotional bond, and emotional bonds build trust.9
Reagan brought his own ideas about trust to Cold War adversarial relations. He nurtured a trusting relationship with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, one that basically helped to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear weapons. Reagan’s famous formulation: Trust, but verify. The agreement was self-bolstering, because successful verification enhanced the sense of trust, and greater trust promoted verification.10
“In God we trust.” Yes, and when we are at our best, we also trust in each other. Trust is fundamental, reciprocal and, ideally, pervasive. If it is present, anything is possible. If it is absent, nothing is possible. The best leaders trust their followers with the truth, and you know what happens as a result? Their followers trust them back. With that bond, they can do big, hard things together, changing the world for the better.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/12/11/10-most-important-things-ive-learned-about-trust-over-my-100-years/
Void Ice Cream
DuckDuck sometimes surprises with its affinity to public authoritative sources, prioritizing well-established wikis of all kind.
Dusted off ice cream machine for upcoming good times. So I looked up some fine ice cream recipe.
https://gdmaze.fandom.com/wiki/Void_Ice_Cream
Well, I was not completely disappointed...
