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President Biden’s lawyers found a few classified documents last November in an office he used after he was Vice President, and he immediately informed the Archives and other authorities. Then they started searching in earnest, and found more in a box in his garage and an adjoining room, mixed with private documents.
        The “liberal” media found out about it this month and went absolutely insane, screaming “Where’s the transparency you promised us?”
        Joe Biden’s job isn’t to inform the American people of his every little fuckup, that’s the media’s job itself. He could have done what Trump would have done and shredded the documents, and nobody would have been the wiser. But being an honest man, unlike his predecessor, he went about it by the book. He didn’t hide anything.
        Someone should inform those who are charged with informing us that a window is still transparent even when nobody is looking at it.
        What the “liberal” media won’t tell you is that “liberal media” is a lie in America, told by America’s people’s true enemies, its ultra-rich, like the Sacklers, Waltons, and Kochs. The media are owned by selfish, greedy billionaires who don’t even pretend to care if you live or die. Black lives matter? To them, only rich lives matter, and no poor life, White, Black, or Asian, matters.
        There are two media, the entertainment media and the news media. The greedy, selfish, amoral 1% own almost all of both types of media, and have been trying for the last half century to combine the two; witness the network morning news shows leading off about a football game when there were dozens killed in an airplane crash and dozens more in Ukraine were murdered by the terrorist state Russia’s president with a huge missile.
        To the amoral, soulless 1% who own the networks, the football game is more important than people’s lives. After all, they own football teams, they need the media a lot more than a murderous foreign terrorist who, by the way, controls atom bombs. But tell the news of the game first, despite the fact that anybody who gave a damn already watched the game! After all, it’s the rich people who own that game, they don’t give a damn about democracy, and in fact are jealous of Russia’s authoritarian government and its easy loot for their evil oligarch class.
        The entertainment media have been liberal for decades; bread and circuses don’t matter to the owners, although entertainment media started becoming more “conservative” (meaning authoritarian) with Dirty Harry. It’s their wealth. But all of the network news shows are conservative, with some, like Fox and Sinclair, going all the way to the Fascist right.
        Their wholly owned media will say “I don’t want to hear about class warfare” while waging it against Americans. If the media were liberal, let alone transparent, they would inform you young ignorant fools that in 1965 when I was thirteen the federal minimum wage was a living wage, and America had no working poor. They wouldn’t hide the fact that when my dad was eight in 1940, the lowest taxable income rate was four times the median income. These are all facts that you can easily look up.
        There are still a few liberal newspapers; the Illinois Times is pretty liberal. Mother Jones is as liberal as Fox is conservative. But liberal papers are few and far between, and there are no liberal TV news outlets.
        Thanks to the media, the meaning of a lot of words has become rather fuzzy. To a working class conservative, he wants to conserve social norms, like marriage and heterosexuality. That’s nothing at all like a rich conservative, who may be Jeffery Epstein or some other child molester. All they want to conserve is what is theirs: their wealth, power, and privilege. Liberals didn’t kill Aunt Jeremiah, the rich conservatives who own the food company who owned her did. It’s not about Uncle Ben, it’s about the Benjamins.
        It seems to me that the only people who aren’t being transparent are the media itself. But don’t expect them to be transparent about the fact that they are owned by rich conservatives who were born rich and want to continue becoming richer and richer until everything collapses like it did in 1929. There are no patriotic billionaires and never have been.

This is intended for a far more general audience, but I thought I'd see what you folks thought about it before I loose it on normal people.

        Unless you’re a mathematician or a computer programmer, the chances are that you’ve never heard the term “number system” before. It simply never comes up in the normal bits of life.
        When I was born, only mathematicians knew about number systems, and they were the only ones who could program a computer. Then, despite everyone saying it couldn’t be done, Grace Hopper invented high level programming; computer languages like Assembly, FORTRAN, and COBOL. No longer did you have to be a mathematician to program computers. Her accomplishments should be taught in primary school!
        Normally, we think of a number system as simply counting. There’s no system, you start with one, and if you’re recording your counts, when you reach nine, the next number is ten, a one and a zero. But that is a number system. It’s base ten, or “decimal”. It’s base ten because it’s based on ten digits, zero through nine.
        But that’s not how counting has always worked. Have you ever wondered why clocks go from one to twelve and there are twenty four hours in a day? It’s because at some time in the past, they had a base 12 or 13 number system (the zero is a relatively modern concept), perhaps why 13 is now considered unlucky. 12+1=“Time’s up.”
        The very first number system wasn’t written down, because nobody had yet invented writing, but was very obviously base six; zero, which was meaningless then, through five. The digits were the fingers on their hands, the very first calculating devices. One finger on one hand was equal to five on the other hand. “One sheep,” one finger, “two sheep,” two fingers... “five sheep,” open hand. “Six sheep,” one finger on the other hand, first hand closed. You could say a closed fist is zero. “fifteen sheep,” three fingers on one hand and two on the other. Easy to keep track of how many sheep you’ve counted, as long as you don’t have to pick anything up or scratch your ass.
        This base six number system became Roman numerals, with IV meaning “one fewer than all fingers” and V signifying an outstretched hand. As their society became more complex, so their method of writing down numbers became more complicated.
        The decimal system was invented between the first century and the fourth by the Hindus, and the Arabians learned it from them in the ninth century. We use the Arabian marks for the numbers, as does almost everyone else these days, with variations.
        After fingers, the first computer was a pile of rocks, and nobody knows when the first pile of rocks was used as a primitive abacus. The rocks later advanced to become beads on the abacus. The math could be done in any number system with an abacus as long as you have enough beads on a string to cover all the digits in your number system, or a pile of rocks.
        A modern digital Turing computer uses the binary number system, with two digits: zero and one, on or off. Five in binary is 101, and yes, you can count on your fingers in binary. The prehistoric base six lets you count higher on your fingers than base ten, which ends at ten, and binary lets you count even higher on your fingers. Yes, in school you can cheat in math class by using your fingers as abacuses if they won’t let you use a calculator.
        You can do things in binary math you simply can’t do in decimal, like ANDing or ORing. The Who most likely didn’t know, when they sang “Bargain”, that the lyrics “one and one ain’t two, one and one is one” that they were talking not about romantic love, but boolean algebra. In it, 101 (binary five) AND 011 (binary three) are 001; or:

        101
AND 011
        ----
        001

        That’s 5 (101 binary) AND 3 (011 binary) equals 1. So if someone says “five and three is one,” they’re correct. With an AND, both numbers must be one for that digit to be one. An OR is the opposite; the answer is one if either is one. 5 OR 3 = 7.
        That’s really handy in programming. Not so much in day to day life.
        The prehistoric base six number system became base 12, an easy conversion from base six, for timekeeping. Because, of course, there are twelve full moons in a year (thirteen in a year unlucky enough to have a blue moon).
        Programmers also use octal, or base eight, and hexadecimal, or base sixteen, because they are the easiest number systems to convert to binary.
        A digital computer is basically a complex abacus with one bead each on thousands or trillions of strings. Some people say a big enough computer could become sentient. I’m still asking, how many beads do I need to add to my abacus before it becomes self-aware?

Donald Trump had an excellent catchphrase: Make America Great Again. Too bad he had no intention of doing so. The motto was as empty as coal is black. His entire administration was one of enriching himself and his friends; witness the 2017 tax cut that slashed his taxes but did nothing to yours. He was about White supremacy and hatred of foreigners. He was the world’s greatest fraudster, greater than Ponzi or Maddoff (both of whom went to prison; Trump is still free).
        But what makes it such a great slogan is that it’s exactly what America needs. Not trickle down tax cuts that never trickle down, because wealth flows upwards, but restoring America’s greatness to the fifties and sixties.
        Back then, we were number one in everything. Europe, Asia, and a big chunk of Africa had been destroyed in the war while we came out relatively unscathed. We had the best infrastructure except the German Autobahn, which President Eisenhower set out to remedy with the Interstate Highway System, and the Russian space technology, which Eisenhower tackled by starting NASA.
        There was poverty, but far less than today. There was no such thing as the “working poor,” in 1965 the federal minimum wage was $1.50 and a McDonald’s hamburger was 15¢. Now that same sandwich is $2.49. To match 1965’s greatness, we need to raise the minimum wage to $24.90. And to keep the rich from continuing to steal our labor, tie the minimum wage to inflation like Social Security is; the rich benefit from inflation. Where do you think billionaires came from? None existed when America was great.
        The rich, who own the media, stole America’s greatness and sold it to foreigners. Its media claim that raising the minimum wage raises inflation, when no minimum wage increase in history has ever led to prices rising; you can look the data up, they’re all on the internet.
        The rich have another evil tool to use against America (meaning the 95% of Americans who aren’t filthy rich legal thieves), racism. Our only dark spot in those great times was Apartheid, that we called “Jim Crow Segregation”. It, and the continued racism of today are Elon’s and Donald’s and Jeff’s and the Sacklers’ and the Waltons’ way of keeping us at each others’ throats so we won’t notice who’s really holding us down.
        How about tax greatness? Before World War Two, only the rich paid federal income tax; in 1940 the lowest taxable income was over four times the median income. In 1955 the top tax rate was 95%, why aren’t Musk and Bezos paying that? Instead, they pay no tax at all! Yet, nobody is willing to change it.
        Perhaps that’s because we have ceased to be a truly democratic nation and have become a plutocracy, where the campaign contributions determine who wins an election. The Republicans worked to overthrow Roe for half a century, where is the party that will work to overturn Citizens United? A name, by the way, that was as much a lie as “right to work” laws, which gave no one any rights, except giving the rich the right to destroy labor unions.
        How about health care? We used to have the best health care in the world, but since the rich, who are so averse to the taxes that pay for civilization, haven’t allowed America to have universal payer like the rest of the industrialized world, we have dropped from the best to among the worst. There are third world nations that get better health care than us!
        Make America great again? Don’t be foolish enough to ask a billionaire to do it, because they have no clue what it’s like to be a real American, one who actually needs to work.

You think people in China eat dogs? This dog thinks otherwise:

Dawang bossing the town, collecting fees
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1weiRzSDBQ

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.
        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:

Random Scribblings

the Paxil Diaries

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

2021

Articles:

The Bicycle
 

No, We're Not Entering a Recession!
 

Free Books!
 

A little advice for a Terrorist War Criminal
 

1984 China
 

The Robots
 

Changes
 

Marijuana Myths
 

A Gift from God?
 

The Man With No Belly Button
 

Only Yesterday (The Invisible Hyphen)
 

Useful dead tech part three
 

Weird TV
 

The Brits have it wrong
 

Review:

The 1619 project
 

Song

A.G.E
 

Waking Up Is Hard to Do
 

Fixin' to Die Rag (Russian Version)
 

Last years’ stupid predictions (and more):

        I completed my seventh decade of life, turning 70 last April.
        I pedicted that I would have another volume of Random Scribblings, because all it lacked was a table of contents and cover art. I still haven't made the art; when I go to Track Shack on 3rd and Laurel, there are never any trains until I leave. Oh, the HTML for that book is less than half done.
        I did get Only Yesterday done, but I didn't write that, although it was as much work.
        But I’ll also hang on to most of last year’s predictions.
        But here's a new one: I predict that there will thankfully be no elections in 2023, at least here.
        Someone will die. Maybe you, maybe me. Not necessarily anybody I know... we can only hope.
        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?

Forty years ago last summer I learned how to program computers. I was thirty then, and bought a cheap computer, a TS-1000. It was monochrome, text only with a dozen blocks that do very primitive graphics, 1 mHz clock speed, with 2 kilobytes of memory. A very small, primitive computer.
        I bought it because I hated my job pumping gas at Disney World, despite its numerous perks, and had read that a teenager had become a millionaire writing computer programs. A teenager? I could do that! Hell, I was hacking electronics as a teenager, making a guitar fuzzbox, like was sold for $300 in music stores, out of a broken $10 transistor radio!
        The computer came with a tutorial on how to program it in Sinclair BASIC. It took a few weeks of spare time to learn well enough that I could write an analog clock display, albeit not a very accurate clock, and simple 2-D video games, building up in complexity.
        The most ambitious game I wrote at that time was a two player battle tanks game, similar to what Windows would have decades later. The only trouble was, the slow clock speed of the machine, with the added overhead of its BASIC interpreter made it unplayably slow.
        So I learned Z-80 assembly, re-wrote it based on the BASIC version I had written; BASIC is incredibly similar to assembly, and I had to assemble it by hand because that computer had no assembler I knew of. Then I had to add timing loops to slow it down.
        A couple of years later, I discovered that the teenager was Bill Gates, his parents were rich lawyers who worked for IBM, and he became a millionaire making an operating system he had bought to work on an IBM-PC, then licensed that OS to IBM. And I bought another computer with my meager Disney wages, a Radio Shack TRS-80 MC-10. This was color, but text-only as well.
        I bought its repair manual because I’ve always wanted to know as much as I could about stuff I owned, and discovered that although it was text-only, its video chip was capable of graphics. It was fun finding its address and what value to POKE there to make it do things; trial and error, short routines, etc. I had hacked its hardware with software.
        I wrote a graphics program for it called HRG, bought a classified ad in Byte Magazine, and sold enough copies for $20 each to pay for the ad, but not for the blank cassettes or postage.
        Learning was always easy as a young man, as long as I worked my ass off on it.
        But half a decade later during a bad recession I got a job with the state of Illinois on the basis of my knowing about computers; they were still new in offices, and most people had never seen one. Of course, the state had mainframes for decades, but “microcomputers” were still new.
        I started out entering data, and wound up writing the databases in dBase, later taking a college course in NOMAD. I still have the textbook in my basement, I think. The two languages are similar enough that I suspect that dBase was originally written as NOMAD on a PC.
        Four decades after haunting the library and devouring dozens of books learning assembly, and almost a decade after retiring, I find the books I’ve written are listed on Goodreads and sign up for an author account.
        It requires RSS for a linked blog. I’ve never used RSS on either end, and as of when I created the Goodreads account yesterday knew nothing of it whatever, except that a thing called “RSS” existed. I searched for information all afternoon yesterday and wound up where I should have started, W3C Schools.
        I’m seventy now, but I’ll bet I have that RSS feed up and running faster than I had that machine code tanks program running when I was young!
        Update: Two hours. Who says you can’t teach am old dog new tricks? Of course, XML ain’t hand assembled machine code...

It's been over two years, but I can now run xeyes on my Slackware64 15.0 desktop again.

The bug was not in Slackware, nor was it in the nouveau graphics driver, but in nVidia's proprietary driver. I was tempted to submit a bug report to nVidia, but a couple of days ago I checked whether they'd released a new driver, and I installed NVIDIA GLX Module 525.60.11 (the previous one was 515.something) and lo and behold xeyes runs!

With previous versions it was crashing the X server almost instantly.

I've been running xeyes since about 1995 on Slackware (I used OLVWM in those days in glorious 256 colours). It's so cool having curved windows. The way things are going, I figured that the young whipper-snappers might forget about these things and the day would come when they wouldn't run any more.

It seems these days are not here yet.

The time has come when I need to bite the bullet and learn how to do some web development. It's really not my cup of tea. However, I have an idea for an application that needs to have a GUI in a web browser.

There is nothing revolutionary about this. It's pretty simple. There will be some sort of database back end (I'll have to learn that too) and I will write some code to implement the business logic which will run on the server and speak to the database. It will speak to a web server on the other side and there will be a client which will exist in a web page for drawing the pictures, including the buttons and the text boxes to type things in.

The last time I went near any evil web stuff was over a decade ago. We were using Fitnesse to run a bunch of Ruby scripts on a server somewhere. I seem to remember there was a web server (written in Java) that came with it. I quite liked Ruby, but haven't touched it since.

Due to the fact that I am a bit lysdexic (I think) I find programming in dynamic languages very difficult. I also appreciate the extra layers of compile-time checks a compiler gives you. I realise this is not the way web development works, which is why I have avoided it. I prefer to write my code using TDD so I always write a failing unit test case before implementing code to make it pass, rinse and repeat.

So what I want is something simple and powerful to do the browser front end which runs in as many browsers as possible, and will not drive me mad or give me migraines when I'm trying to learn how to do it.

Suggestions please!

Ten Commandments to Conforming Citizen

1. Truth is disturbing. If you cannot handle the truth safely, replace it with gay ideology to remain safe.

2. Do not overthink, let others think for you. They can decide much better for you than you yourself ever could. Vote!

3. Reality is difficult and dangerous to live in. Enjoy proper living in virtual spaces instead. Socialize!

4. Be nice! Save the planet, stay at home, eat bugs, drink recycled. That's only natural.

5. Feeling is better than calculating. Computing or planning causes anxiety. Feel free, buy chems!

6. Evil fiat money is worthless, spend all your income surplus on good crypto. Low income? Borrow!

7. Live by example. Shine! Follow awesome celebrities.

8. Peace is treason! Enlist!

9. Belief is everything. Believe in everything you are told to believe in. Just believe us about that. Believe!

10. Possess nothing valuable and become happy. Imagine happiness and be happy, now! ^[1]

[1] We will be watching you being happy.

A couple of years back I wrote about career stuff where I was in a job that I was finding very frustrating, so I decided it was time to move on and that's what I did.

This was great for a number of reasons. It has let us relocate to Scotland and it has been a very valuable learning experience for me.

However, two years is quite a long time in a very intense business, mainly in a PHB role. The last 12 months have been particularly hectic. I've had very little time to myself (or to dedicate to my family) outside of work. I've worked some weekends (unpaid) as well as many evenings. There was some critical stuff that needed doing, and I got it done.

This hasn't been without some personal cost. In addition to not having much time for exercise (and therefore getting fatter and more unfit), the garden suffered, and so did my health. I've been on all sorts of extra pills, and I've been doing strange things in my sleep.

Never the less, I got a fairly substantial pay rise this year, above the rate of inflation, and I got sent abroad to work, including to rescue some very broken embedded C code.

I went from being PHB back to being a bit technical. I'm doing all kinds of stuff. Unfortunately some very good people left the company this year. It's a real struggle.

Being a PHB is a completely different world. It's amazing all the extra issues that people have that need to be dealt with. I've had to fight hard for extra pay rises for people who really deserved one but didn't get enough the first time round. I've needed to speak truth to power several times at board level. I'm not scared any more.

I think I need to move on again but there's a midlife crisis! I've always had an eye on the future and always been learning something new in my own time with a view to my next move. This last year in particular, I've been so busy, that hasn't been possible. So I kind of feel like a bit of an anachronism and I don't know what to do about it.

Once or twice I did spend some holidays and weekends hacking out the odd shell script to do something I'd done elsewhere years ago that was cool/fun/useful and I have written a few hundred lines of C, but nothing spectacular. I'm really struggling to focus my mind on such things. I'm maybe managing ten lines of C at a sitting. Evenings and weekends of writing code result in a week of migraines.

I have all sorts of half-finished and barely started projects that I need to work on, but my brain just won't do it. I need a break, but my brain won't switch off properly to have the required break.