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And then they complain about democracy

What a bunch of whiners!

But to tell the truth, I think the story is bullshit. Somebody in trying move in with something much worse, but to make the sale, people have to be convinced that what they have is no good.

Democracy has but one flaw, the voters. Until that is acknowledged, well, don't expect much progress on the matter.

Edit:

On a related note: Why do "liberals" cling to "The true, grim, face of the Democratic establishment."? I mean, there's Podesta, still got a job. Maybe because they're not liberals, but merely democrats? And why would anyone vote for that when they have republicans? SNAFU!

If you do, you may find this interesting.

Russian intelligence sources have claimed that Michael D’Andrea, head of CIA operations in Iran and who orchestrated the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, was killed in a US spy plane downed yesterday in Ghazni, Afghanistan.

Is it true? Who knows?

Don't leave anything important behind for the enemy to pick up

Don't know if anybody really cares, but our little adventure over there is costing us 250 million dollars a day.

So, I'm setting up a RockPro64 to takeover email and apache duties for an aging server in the basement and in the process, I managed to do something incredibly stupid. So, I have the base OS installed and updated and I was setting up my ZFS partitions before installing and setting up services for the server. The plan was to make ZFS datasets on a mirror of SSD disks for /home /var and /etc. I first made the /home dataset, temporarily mounted it on /mnt, rsync'ed the data from /home to /mnt. Then I sudo rm -rf /home/*, unmounted /mnt, and remounted the zpool/home dataset on the /home directory. Everything looked good, so I added that change to the fstab and rebooted. System came up with the zfs dataset mounted on the /home directory. Perfect!

Next, it was time to do the zpool/var dataset. So I mount zpool/var to /mnt and cd into /etc, rsync it all over, unmount the zfs dataset and finally sudo rm -rf *. Next mount the partition...Ah crap, I copied the /etc data on the zpool/var dataset. No big deal, I'll mount the zpool/etc dataset to /etc and copy the data over--this should be no problem. So I attempt to remount the zpool/var dataset to get the /etc data, sudo mount -t zfs zpool/var /mnt.

sudo: you do not exist in the passwd database

Ah crap. I think I'm in trouble. Let me try root and fix all of this, su -.

su: user root does not exist

As you can figure, I'm pretty much screwed and am no longer able to do anything to recover this over ssh. I hope tonight when I get home I can pull the emcc module off of the board and one of the zfs drives, plug them both into the laptop and fix this. I'll probably mount both and rsync the /etc data back to the emmc device. Sure, I can likely reinstall at this point and start over, but I'd rather not have to if I can just pull the files from device and put them on the other.

If anybody thinks they have a way to fix this over the current SSH session, I'm up for suggestions. I'm pretty sure this ssh session is the last time a user can log into the system until /etc is restored.

If I learned anything from this, it is if the command has the potential to hose user logins, do it as root and never with sudo.

**EDIT**

The system is back up. I pulled the emmc module and one of the SSDs from the zpool and mounted them both on my laptop. A quick rsync moved the /etc data from the zfs dataset back to the original /etc directory. All in all, this was good because it gave me a sanity check. Who puts /etc on a separate partition? How do you then read fstab if it is on a different partition than root without doing funny initramfs monkey business? So, if I really want to keep my etc config files backed-up, I either need to cron a rsync job or figure out how I'm booting a SBC with the root on ZFS. I think I could keep /boot on the emmc and move the rootfs to ZFS. I once saw a guide for installing EFI and grub on the emmc and installing Gentoo on a SSD. I could probably do something similar, but I'd have to figure how to do it with the Debian/Devuan tools as I have very little time to keep what will be a hobby/production server up-to-date.

from the inconvenient-truth dept.

[An earlier version has been in editorial limbo.]

Glacier National Park is replacing signs that predicted its glaciers would be gone by 2020

The signs at Glacier National Park warning that its signature glaciers would be gone by 2020 are being changed.

The signs in the Montana park were added more than a decade ago to reflect climate change forecasts at the time by the US Geological Survey, park spokeswoman Gina Kurzmen told CNN.
[...]
But the glacier warning isn't being removed entirely, she told CNN. Instead, the new signs will say: "When they will completely disappear depends on how and when we act. One thing is consistent: the glaciers in the park are shrinking.

Old sign

New sign

According to famous philosopher of science Karl Popper, scientific theories require predictions that risk being wrong. This was one such prediction. Another prediction about Mt. Kilimanajaro that did not fare well reads:

if current climatological conditions persist, the remaining ice fields are likely to disappear between 2015 and 2020

What concrete and risky predictions of climate science came true? It's clear that climate modelers can generate wrong predictions that people can see with their own eyes in real life, but can they also generate correct ones?

PS: I'm not asking for every prediction to hit the mark, but 0-for-2 is bad. And don't pretend that points lining up on a graph is in the same category. Accepting the conclusions of consensus climate scientists who judge each other's work (i.e. grade each other's homework) requires trust. For many people (including me), that trust was never established.

PPS: Someone wrote that "there is literally zero proof that could possibly" change my mind about global warming, and therefore I'm in "denial". But I asked the above questions because I am interested in evidence, not because I don't care.

Or is it just notes between debtors and creditors?

I only ask because of all this bullshit I always hear about the deficit/national debt which are used to justify austerity and the coming cuts to existing earned benefits.

We could pay off the principal, and tell then banks to fuck off on the interest. Or just tell them to fuck off completely and zero the books ourselves. The government has that power. And then we can make labor the global currency instead of the petro-dollar, since the dollars aren't worth shit without the ass wipers to serve their master. I know I'm being all nationalistic and shit, but I thought it was kinda cool when the world thought American labor was the best labor, and they all sang Elvis tunes, worth every penny. But now, it's just the dollars. Even your ISIS guys have to be paid in dollars, or they jump over to work for Al Qaeda. Either way, there's lots of dollars in that business.

Who wants to convince me that putting some random homeless people in the white house and congress would be any worse than what we are doing to ourselves right now?

you

tell

me

Funny argument about it... between... who else? [um, I can't verify the veracity of that link, I may have been fished in again, for now I'll run with it]

Aren't I a stinker?

CES 2020: Analogix Announces ANX2187 TCON With Gamut Rotation

We haven’t talked about Analogix in a few years, and we certainly haven’t talked about TCON announcements much at all. At CES 2020 Analogix announced the new ANX2187 TCON chip with little fanfare, but it could drastically change the way PC displays are manufactured and how end products end up in terms of their colour accuracy.

Analogix has been a leader in delivering TCON solutions to the PC and laptop market for many years, and the market has been relatively speaking quite boring when it comes to new developments. Analogix wants to modernise the display panel experience for monitors and laptops with the introduction of the new ANX2186 which promises to bring 3D Colour Gamut rotation to the PC market.

Display makers usually have a quite hard time in terms of producing accurate display panels using the “traditional” manufacturing methods. In the old way of doing things, a panel’s colour accuracy is largely dependent upon its manufacturing and if it comes out matching the target specifications, with it being very hard for display vendors to individually adjust the display controller firmware on each panel in order to achieve better calibrations and accuracy.

The ANX2186 is a TCON that features gamut manipulation in the optical domain – in essence it’s a calibration engine that sits at the TCON level between the display input and the DDIC and is able to transparently manipulate the gamut in its 3D space. This technology isn’t inherently new, one area it’s been present for years has been in the mobile space (Samsung’s mDNIe was first as far as I know) as well as in TVs by various TV SoC vendors.

What this allows is for calibration and manipulation of the colours fully independent of the DDIC firmware of a display panel. Display manufacturers can now very quickly with help of automatic tooling calibrate each individual panel in a product line, write the compensation/calibration factors as ROM data to the TCON, and not have to worry about fiddling with the much more complex firmware data on the side of the DDIC.

TCON = timing controller.

Goldman Sachs has admitted that they will begin considering the gender of the board members of other companies before deciding to do business with them and providing IPO services.

So starting on July 1st in the US and Europe, we’re not going to take a company public unless there’s at least one diverse board candidate with a focus on women.

Goldman Sachs influence may be traced to a large amount of gender discrimination. Pressure placed on other companies might be responsible for a wide range of gender based discrimination, which merits investigation.

It's unclear if what Goldman Sachs is doing is illegal gender discrimination. Some might be able to argue that selectively doing business with companies based on gender of their members amounts to prohibited gender discrimination. However, in some cases, the law only prohibits gender discrimination within a company, not regarding dealings with other companies, a loophole which should probably be fixed.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-24/goldman-rule-adds-to-death-knell-of-the-all-white-male-board

The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei recently moved from Berlin, Germany to Cambridge, England

He has much to say about his home of four years:

Germany is intolerant, bigoted and authoritarian, he says.

About his 10-year old son Lao:

“I don’t want him to live in harsh conditions. I don’t think Germany provides a good environment for foreigners.” He mentions that Lao was recently threatened by a shop owner there.

On rudeness and xenophobia:

They would say in Germany you have to speak German. They have been very rude in daily situations. They deeply don’t like foreigners.

On authoritarianism:

Germany is a very precise society. Its people love the comfort of being oppressed. In China, too, you see that. Once you’re used to it, it can be very enjoyable. And you can see the efficiency, the show, the sense of their power being extended through the connected-mind condition.” You mean there is no room for individuality? “Yes. They have a different kind of suit: it doesn’t look like what they wore in the 1930s, but it still has the same kind of function. They identify with the cult of that authoritarian mindset.
[...]
Fascism is to think one ideology is higher than others and to try to purify that ideology by dismissing other types of thinking. That’s Nazism. And that Nazism perfectly exists in German daily life today.

Clinton says 'nobody likes' Sanders and won't commit to backing him if he's the Democratic nominee

Hillary Clinton blasts Sen. Bernie Sanders in a new documentary, saying "nobody likes him" and declining in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter to say whether she would endorse and campaign for him if he's the Democratic 2020 nominee.

"He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done," Clinton says in the film, according to The Hollywood Reporter. "He was a career politician. It's all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it."

[...] In the THR interview, Clinton also pointedly questions the "culture" around Sanders' campaign, from "his leadership team" to "his online Bernie Bros."

"It's not only him, it's the culture around him. It's his leadership team. It's his prominent supporters. It's his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women," Clinton said, before suggesting that Sanders himself was complicit in promoting those voices.

#ILikeBernie Trends After Hillary Clinton Says 'Nobody Likes' Bernie Sanders

Despite Clinton's criticism, Sanders is a clear front-runner for the Democratic nomination, with the latest data from Morning Consult showing that he has the highest favorability of all candidates in the primary race. Sanders is viewed positively by 76 percent of voters, while former Vice President Joe Biden is viewed favorably by 71 percent. Senator Elizabeth Warren comes in third at 65 percent.

Meanwhile, only 17 percent of respondents said they had an unfavorable opinion of Sanders, while 22 percent had an unfavorable view of Biden. Warren was viewed unfavorably by 18 percent.

Hillary Clinton Defends Harvey Weinstein Association: 'How Could We Have Known?'

Hillary Clinton has defended her years-long association with disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein, saying it was "something that everybody thought made sense."

Weinstein has long been a major donor and fundraiser for the Democratic Party and reportedly brought in over $1.4 million to Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.

Clinton has since disavowed Weinstein, saying she was "shocked and appalled" following the publication of numerous claims of sexual assault and harassment against him in 2017 that led to his fall and the rise of the #MeToo movement.

It could be a moot point. FiveThirtyEight forecasts a 45% chance for Biden to win the nomination, and just 18% for Sanders.