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I'm announcing the end and results of my experiment that's been running for 6 years. The nature of the experiment was to evaluate the objectiveness of the SN community by picking a username such as this one I decided on and then just being constructive and seeing how the karma winds up. When I first started it was a very very very difficult battle to get beyond my username in discussions and I had to work at least 10 times as hard as normal to not be discounted immediately as a troll. But I stuck it through and over a long enough time and with enough work I established myself and the karma went from miserably poor to nearly perfect.

Why wasn't it absolutely perfect? That was mostly my fault. I engaged in trolling very occasionally and such trolling activity was correctly labeled as such. That wasn't a part of the experiment that was just me making bad decisions. The troll votes were fair and I should not have done that no mater how satisfying it was because I was frustrated. That's why we have moderation I think.

And so time went on and 939 comments did happen and we get to today. I don't like what I see going on around here. Despite my username I don't particularly enjoy fighting with people nor do I want to see ugly things. Fighting and ugly is occurring a lot lately and as best I can tell it went from a background level of crap to a prominent feature of daily life at SN around the 2016 elections. The deep division that is building in the United States became well represented here and its been low grade conflict ever since. What a waste of time and energy.

This particular comment in the last couple days really resonated with me a lot:

The reason I'm telling you this is that it feels like this site is becoming more Reddit-like by the day. I don't mean that in terms of ideology, but in terms of inauthenticity. Instead of people making genuine statements openly engaging with one another, there's an ever larger number of inauthentic comments such as yours which I assume you thought would be clever, but which came off with all the authenticity of a [modern] Hollywood script. This leads to a system where there's an immense amount of noise, yet ultimately next to no genuine communication. It also trends towards echo chambers because how does your comment contribute to a discussion or, perhaps convince me that my views are somehow flawed? It doesn't. It's just the sort of comment that gets upvoted by those that ideologically agree and ignored by those that ideologically disagree. Except for the occasionally weirdo determined to actually *talk* to people they disagree with, such as myself.

There are 2 important points in here: not engaging in constructive discourse and inauthentic people. That comment was next to some of mine in a thread but the note about ineffective discourse rang so heavily I owned up to non-constructive behavior I had just engaged in out of frustration. Though in that instance what I did wrong was attributing motive into another person which is the exact behavior from others that has got me so frustrated. I'm starting to devolve and I'm going to put a stop to that.

The second more important topic I think is the ones about in-authenticity. I don't know how a segment of the population has decided with such conviction that they know when another person is being authentic or not. The problem here is that one person says another is being in-authentic and then of course the only response is to assert authenticity. There is no mechanism to prove it one way or another. Except for the case of when someone tells you how authentic you are. I've been called in-authentic so many times now that it's quite clear to me: you bozos have no idea what you are talking about with me. Since I can easily prove you are wrong in those assertions it's an easy logical conclusion to form that you don't get this stuff right. And you don't care. You've constructed a system where innocence is impossible. You suck.

I really do have a friend that is an ex East German and is still a communist and I've talked to him about the conflict going on here. He quite clearly told me that no one from the left (his version of left where our democrats are quite right wing) would come to this place except to fight. I didn't even think about something like that but what's going on around here sure looks like it. As stated before: I'm not interested in fighting.

Back to the experiment: in the last year or two my username is being used as evidence against me again in addition to the calls of in-authenticity. It's fascinating to see that happen and who the demographic is: almost always AC and I think always from the left. This is telling me that objectivity is being lost around here because the ACs used to be much better behaved and I'm not interested in going through an enormous amount of effort again to continue to run this experiment. I'm cutting my losses, keeping my karma, saying that it lasted 6 years and Trump broke everyone so bad it disrupted the delicate state I had to make for this experiment.

Was that ever a good idea? I dunno, it was an idea. What would make it a bad idea is if my username is causing undue heat and noise and I think it is anymore.

And that's my recap of the experiment. I'll also be retiring this username and in the future I'll post AC. Lastly I'm going to wonder off and go die from coronavirus to the absolute joy of the rabid ACs. Come here rabid ACs let me give you a hug before I leave. *cough*

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Follow up: It looks like I made a lot of fans. Some of my fans have started asking if I plan on restarting my career after retirement. I do not. I've already hung the jersey on the wall and I've got my certificate of effort and my certificate of participation. I am quite satisfied with the 6 year long run I had here.

Be assured that any form of $adjective Troll or Knowledge $adjective are tribute bands. They are not authorized licensees of Knowledge Brand Trolling nor are they officially recognized by Knowledge Troll Enterprises, Knowledge Troll Partners, nor Partner Troll Enterprises, or Enterprising Trolling Partners.

Washington state public health press release. Linked to specific time because of shit audio that explodes in volume. No useful information is lost. Be warned: it will explode again once because they appear to be incompetent at audio.

Choice quotes:

Don't panic

You can have symptoms of only mild flu or only mild cold and still have Corona virus

There may be people around us that don't even know they have it

If you live in Washington state maybe you should put this on a loop just in case: SPIRIT IN THE SKY- NORMAN GREENBAUM (EVOL WALKS COVER)

Shit just got serious. Discuss!

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Edit 1: Fix link to specific time in video by moving forward a few seconds to get past audio explosion

Edit 2: Editors made me make a real story instead of a journal entry that I submitted as story so removed the note about this being a dupe. You bastards!

There was some really great discussion about Coronavirus and Politics and with that discussion fresh on my mind while watching ABC and CNN cover Coronavirus and watching a Youtube recommendation I'd had a very clear example of the absolute fucked up priorities the media has when reporting Coronavirus. For the sake of our species I hope it is well understood that politics needs to take a step out of the way and we need to focus on real problems and real solutions.

I am consistently seeing media reports about the piss poor job that Trump is doing especially in the past day when it looks like a total shit show. We can pick one example: faulting Trump for the face mask shortages. I watched a news segment where they explained that Amazon is out of face masks then went to explain how this is Trump's fault. Many experts in a panel all explaining how awful Trump is and how he is going to fuck this response up and we are all going to suffer for it and we just need masks and it's his fault.

I won't even say they are wrong - I don't see a point in arguing with such a topic in any way regardless of how much fault I think Trump holds for the face mask shortage or not. What the media is not saying is that a cloth face mask like the stereotypical one you see everyone wearing in China will not prevent you from getting infected in any way. The mask is used to prevent an infected person from infecting more people by catching the sputum that is expelled when coughing or sneezing and is infectious. If you cough or sneeze there's a 20 foot sphere of danger that lingers for 10s of minutes. The mask will not save you from it but it can save you from causing it.

Another thing the media is not saying is that you can make your own mask! The cloth mask is not magical. It is just cloth. It doesn't have chemicals in it. It wasn't blessed by a shaman. It's just a piece of cloth with a mechanism to hold it in place. Do you have an old shirt and scissors? Then you have a mask! But telling people that a mask won't save their ass and showing them how they can make their own mask in 5 minutes doesn't make Trump look bad enough and doesn't cause enough panic to get the ratings. We are being sold out and fucked by them.

Has mainstream media done anything constructive to help people? I haven't seen it but if you have examples I'd appreciate hearing them. I think this is rather disgusting myself. What would I like to see instead? Let's talk about what mom would do.... which was produced by an Anarchist, the supposed agents of pure chaos, and is calm and rational and more helpful than the clowns at CNN.

This was originally submitted as a story but I screwed up the submission so I expect it to be rejected. On further thought I'll start here and promote if this bears fruit.

This was the most sickening moment of your presidency, Mr Trump – stop your dangerous racist rhetoric now, before it’s too late

Looks like we hit the limit for Piers Morgan and that limit seems to be when a pile of people chant "SEND HER BACK" at a rally and the crowd and president together demonstrate solidarity by putting fists up in the air. I can't really add anything more to this: the activity is dangerous and this is disgusting. You can't just kick people out of this country no mater how much you don't like them.

It is insufficient that Trump would say he did not like the crowd's actions. He needs to follow up with explaining that you don't just kick people out of America and I haven't seen him do that yet. The cost of not doing that is allowing a mob rule to form and that is the dangerous part.

Vile.

Repellent.

Shameful.

Shocking.

Disturbing.

Those were my first thoughts as I watched the crowd at President Trump’s rally in North Carolina last night frenziedly chanting ‘SEND HER BACK! SEND HER BACK!’ about Muslim US congresswoman Ilhan Omar – as their President stood proudly making no attempt to stop them.

Please discuss.

I've just gained interest in the Antifa/Proud Boys/Patrior Prayer situation in Portland, Oregon and the violence that is going along with it. In my opinion the violence is abhorrent regardless of which side is engaging in it and both sides basically suck. Portland is now the front line in a culture war with 3 components: politics, religion and human rights. Oh boy!

The mayor has ordered the police to stand down so when the last 1/2 to 3/4 of a riot broke out the cops stood by the side and watched. Poeple were beat up and injured one of them fairly severely and required emergency medical care. An ambulance was dispatched to the scene but would not get in the middle of the mob. The police would not escort them to the casuality and a guy with a brain hemorage induced after being struck in the head had to walk himself while dizzy to the paramedics.

It's not a secret that the Portland Antifa wing is violent. Not all of them are violent in fact the violence is likely to be only on the part of a few individuals inside the Portland Antifa wing. But there is definitely violence. There are even open threats of harm from Portland Antifa to people opposed to them.

Given that the violence is not a secret I was really surprised to hear that the Democratic Socialists of America joined Antifa for the last protest that devolved to a riot. There is a multiyear history of violence with the group they joined and there are very recent examples of violence as well.

I've started to wonder at what point protesting turns into a violent socialist uprising. Things will slowly transform from one to another so no clear line is going to exist. But we've now got people who call themselves socialists teaming up with a well known violent group.

Thoughts?

Do you often think to yourself boy this Internet deal is some cool shit but it just goes too fast? Do you long for the better days when you could watch a page incrementally render while the frame contents download and you could watch a gif load line by line while the modem beeped and buzzed and hissed and lights were blinking? What if you could have all of that and on top of a layer 2 that is half duplex and has collisions like an ethernet hub but not everyone in the broadcast domain can even hear each other? If you add in ping times that never take less than 3 seconds and you've got one of my favorite new hobbies: amateur packet radio and AMPRNet or Network 44/8. Read on to learn about a chunk of the Internet where operating at all is a serious challenge and TLS/SSL is illegal to use.

Here's some ping results. After you stop laughing and resist the urge to call tech support to tell them to fix their broken stuff then ponder that the results are this good only after quite a bit of work and these results demonstrate nearly ideal link quality:

$ amprping -c 10 somecall.ampr.org
PING somecall.ampr.org (44.0.0.0) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from somecall.ampr.org (44.0.0.0): icmp_seq=1 ttl=28 time=2431 ms
64 bytes from somecall.ampr.org (44.0.0.0): icmp_seq=2 ttl=28 time=3709 ms
64 bytes from somecall.ampr.org (44.0.0.0): icmp_seq=3 ttl=28 time=4261 ms
64 bytes from somecall.ampr.org (44.0.0.0): icmp_seq=4 ttl=28 time=5956 ms
64 bytes from somecall.ampr.org (44.0.0.0): icmp_seq=5 ttl=28 time=3840 ms
64 bytes from somecall.ampr.org (44.0.0.0): icmp_seq=6 ttl=28 time=3844 ms
64 bytes from somecall.ampr.org (44.0.0.0): icmp_seq=7 ttl=28 time=4771 ms
64 bytes from somecall.ampr.org (44.0.0.0): icmp_seq=8 ttl=28 time=4431 ms
64 bytes from somecall.ampr.org (44.0.0.0): icmp_seq=9 ttl=28 time=4475 ms
64 bytes from somecall.ampr.org (44.0.0.0): icmp_seq=10 ttl=28 time=4387 ms

--- somecall.ampr.org ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 26848ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 2431.017/4210.951/5956.851/848.803 ms, pipe 3, ipg/ewma 2983.116/3823.098 ms
$

Why is it so slow? At 1200 baud with 1 bit per symbol that is only ~150 bytes/sec max theoretical throughput. Then add in the delay between when the packet makes it to the modem and the modem tells the radio to transmit. On the receiving side that radio also needs a bit of time for the squelch to open up and audio to flow into their modem. The collision control logic includes a random delay with a slot time of 100ms. Repeat this whole process again while I get the ping response and my observed throughput under very good conditions is about 80 to 100 bytes/sec when talking to a peer and about 30 bytes/sec when using a single other node as a router. That's one hop. Getting this thing to do something useful is an exercise in patience that's for sure.

Here's a quick pile of buzzwords and concepts for the networking nerds. I hope you find this interesting and maybe get a good laugh.

• Ham radio operators by RFC have the netblock 44.0.0.0/8 reserved for our use. The intended purpose is to research and experiment with IP on the air. Considering the Internet ran out of IPv4 space years ago, this reservation is generally lightly used, and the fact that it's worth a small fortune when carved up on the open market, I'm really surprised Network 44 exists at all anymore.
• The physical layer is narrow band FM with AFSK modulation and available bandwidth around 4kHz.
• The data layer is called AX.25 and it is in the RFCs. It's basically an extension of X.25 (ethernet) specification with hardware addresses derived from the station's call sign, a connected and reliable messaging mode built in, and source routing too! All at L2!
• Not everyone in the broadcast domain can even hear each other and it may not be reciprocal because of conditions or even just station transmitter power. It is very easy for one station to send an ARP request and blow up the packets of another station it can't even hear.
• By law there is no privacy on ham radio at all. This means no encryption. While not strictly true it does mean in practice so far that there is practically no security at all. Implementing security is an exercise in using null ciphers and relying only on message signatures. Right now people use no passwords, pass trivial passwords over the air in plain text, or use MD5 hashing for authentication. So basically no security at all.
• TCP/IP on packet radio is not very common. Most people wonder why. It is easy to tell when using it: it's a nightmare level of a challenge to make work well. But it has been a very fun challenge.

So far we've done experiments with FTP, HTTP, IRC, SMTP, NNTP, POP3. Roughly for interactive use this system can only be described as extremely painful. For bulk tasks such as transferring email as long as the messages are small it isn't so bad because you can just walk away.

I'm looking forward to playing with this more. 1200 baud operation is just the easiest: there is also 9600 baud operation. As well the modern version of this is hacking WiFi routers to form mesh networks so ham radio and IP can mix together with a network that moves data at hundreds of kilobits to several megabits per second.

I hope you found this interesting! 73

I thought shit was crazy before but right now I'm wondering on what planet in what universe in whose reality I wound up in where the concept of giving everyone a right to housing and a right to financial security even when they are unwilling to work is something that can be achieved. It was amusing when I first heard of the announcements for the Green New Deal and I laughed but perhaps I should have been crying.

The problem is that people are discussing this. I'm seeing comments like "what's the problem?" and "this is just a good set of a basic ideas." What? What's the problem? The desire to make change does not mean that what ever idea you come up with is something that should be done - that's the problem.

Please explain to me how this can work at all. This bill proposes a hypothesis: we can wind up in a better place if all people can not be refused housing in any way or financial compensation even when they outright refuse to contribute in any way financially. Go ahead and provide evidence that demonstrates this is true. I would settle for evidence that this is financially viable in any way at all.

The bill proposes the hypothesis - it is not up to other people to have to initially falsify it. Where is the information that backs this hypothesis?

I do not understand how this concept can survive critical thought. Prove me wrong. Some ideas: in the end we save money because the unaccounted costs of supporting those people anyway is severe. Or perhaps we can just shift budget from somewhere else. How much budget?

Why is the War on Christmas such a big deal for people?

First of all: the War on Christmas does not exist. No one is declaring war on a holiday. Some people may not want to participate. Some people may not want to say Merry Christmas. Some people may hate Christmas with a passion and every Christian too. So what? This does not make a war.

Around these parts this was taken to the next level inside of a community I'm a member of. Right around the start of the holidays 2 people out of say 10 regulars and 30 non-regulars started an aggressive Merry Christmas campaign. Aggressive as in saying Merry Christmas to as many people as possible? No, this is a weaponized Merry Christmas.

"Merry Christmas and I hope that does not offend you and if it does too bad go somewhere else." Sigh. No one ever even mentioned any such thing at all. This just came out of the blue. The holidays really brings out the worst in some people I guess.

Around the same time true colors started to come out. These Christmas Warriors (not sure what else to call them) I suppose then became comfortable with each other and really let their opinions be known. You see, it's the Jews fault. They are terrible people - all of them. In fact they are a bunch of whiny cry babies that weren't even murdered that much in WWII really.

What is the end result? The community is vacant of all but 1 of these people now. And that person is constantly asking if anyone is around and wondering why the place has been vacant.

Thanks for driving everyone away - quite the Christmas present. It's obvious your heart is full of love and Christian ethics.

Recently I was talking with a non-technical person about the Internet, speed of light, and speed of communications. As a part of that discussion I got curious about the fraction of the speed of light that the Internet will move data around for me. I picked a few spots, sent a few pings, and did a bit of math.

Assuming a round trip time splits the duration evenly between send and receive latency my first measurements gave me approximately 1/5th the speed of light for a one way packet of right around 37,000 miles per second. Later on I repeated this experiment.

How does this work? Pick a geographic location some distance from you (I've done this with 150 miles and 1500 miles so far), pick an IP in that location then traceroute it to make sure the route isn't a mess, then ping it and note round trip time. Also estimate the rough distance to that location as the crow flies.

speed one way = 2 * miles / seconds - here are some values from where I sit:

RTT for ~150 miles: ~7ms = ~42,000 miles/sec
RTT for ~1500 miles: ~34ms = ~70,000 miles/sec

That puts the speed of a ping in a very respectable range of around 1/4 to 1/3rd the speed of light. G'damn that's pretty amazing.

I'm curious about the results from other people. Can anyone replicate?

I don't understand why nerds like Tesla Motors at all. For instance there is Rich Repairs often called the rogue Tesla mechanic because he dare attempt something like repair a Tesla vehicle when Tesla corporate doesn't want that to happen. Tesla will not supply him with parts, they will not support repaired vehicles and they won't even give them access to the supercharger network. If you dare do significant repair to a Tesla they will cut you off and leave you hanging with an expensive machine that is essentially no longer vendor supported. Rich likes Tesla but hates this behavior because it makes what he does extremely difficult.

They take this to the extreme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okLgtYgnd7A. In that video Rich covers an email he got from a Tesla owner that bought a damaged Tesla at an auction. The damage was to body panels only and is cosmetic so he replaced the panels and got a nice Tesla for a reasonable price. He then went in with full faith and totally committed to Tesla and sold his other vehicle.

He took the car to a Tesla center for some service and then they noticed that someone dared to attempt to repair one of their vehicles. They then as a total surprise blackballed him from Tesla in the middle of a road trip which means not only is his vehicle now no longer supported by the vendor he also lost all supercharger access. With out supercharger access it is extremely difficult to reasonably use the machine.

He had to ditch the car because he could no longer actually move around on his roadtrip usefully because of charge time. He flew back home after cancelling the trip and now has to find a way to recover his vehicle and after that he has to live with being blackballed from Tesla.

Now nerds - why do you possibly accept this behavior? Don't you not use Windows because of concerns about who actually owns and controls your computer? But it is ok that Tesla owns and controls your means of transportation and will fuck you with in a heart beat?

What gives?