a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
keifermiller's comments
activity:
user-inactivated  ·  1969 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Democracy Participation Th{ubski}read

New voting machines: the same as the old voting machines.

Paper ballots rule.

user-inactivated  ·  2006 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Haiku is still not quite dead

    I don't think a desktop OS without graphics hardware vendor support is ever going to find its niche now

The groundwork is kinda there. Haiku's strategy for troublesome drivers has been to lift them from FreeBSD. IDK if it works at the moment, since last I checked FreeBSD 11 doesn't support my cheapo integrated AMD chip.

My worry is more the resource dump that is modern web browsers.

    Thanks to the generous support of donors, Haiku, Inc. was able to employ a developer to work full-time on enhancing WebKit port and areas of the system relevant to it (which turned out to be nearly everything) for over a year.

That year was 2014.

user-inactivated  ·  2121 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Capitalism Has Failed, and TIDAL is Proof, and Oh Also About Our Imminent Doom

By something else, I didn't mean Communism. I meant "it depends".

Mostly I responded because "What is the alternative?" implies to me a choice between Capitalism and Whatever Else. That would require more control over the situation than we actually have. At some point, Capitalism will stop being a viable process, be it for ecological reasons, cultural change, financial crisis, whatever.

I'm not saying that we don't have agency, just that choosing Capitalism from now until forever isn't really within our practical sphere of choice. If no other set of relations is viable, human history will get really bleak really fast.

user-inactivated  ·  2121 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Capitalism Has Failed, and TIDAL is Proof, and Oh Also About Our Imminent Doom

something else

What that something else looks like depends on the conditions that turn the page on what we've got now. The traditional wager was that worker unrest would be the main driving force, and it's a short hop from there to assuming that "The Alternative" is big 'c' Communism.

If it is ecological collapse that does it, though, well that society is gonna look different from one where the tipping point was revolt due to mass unemployment.

user-inactivated  ·  2199 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: March 21, 2018

I've started playing LISA. Really digging it so far; it is even more surreal for me as Olathe is a stone's throw away from here. Very undertale and/or earthbound feeling. I also gave Forza 7 a shot, and hated it.

Speaking of things that are a stone's throw away, turns out that the library from our defunct anarchist infoshop survives. Gonna go check it out while I'm on vacation in two weeks' time. Hopefully the weather will be nice out, didn't really go out much over the winter compared to the past. Got sick after my first freezing bike ride, and just said fuck it. I used to not give a shit about the cold, since the trailers at work were freezing anyways. But they fixed the heaters, set them to "inferno", and left them on well into the 60's.

In light of warm weather happening earlier and earlier every year, we've got a buncha tomato and thyme sprouts going. Kale is doing well in the planters, and there is a packet of borage seeds sitting on the counter that need to get going. Picked 'em up from the public library (along with the tomato and thyme seeds). Apparently bees like borage? Never really seen it before.

user-inactivated  ·  2203 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Stormy Daniels is crushing President Trump at his own game

Heartland checking in.

The most vocal Trump supporter I know is a flat earther who has a woodie for Pence and doesn't think that Catholicism is a part of Christianity. Also mesas are the remains of giant trees, evolution isn't real, dinosaurs never existed, but the giant trees put out more oxygen and that's why dinosaurs were so big. It's science baby.

The second most vocal is very adamant that capitalism hasn't failed as it's never been properly implemented and that we just need more moral capitalists. Also Trump understands what he as a religious underemployed white man wants.

The rest are clutching at their guns and/or threw themselves on the sword to avoid voting for Hillary and/or are blatantly racist.

None of them care about this. This wouldn't be an issue if They hadn't taken God out of school.

user-inactivated  ·  2213 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: March 7, 2018

This month we're trying to stay under $50/week for groceries. One week down, so far so good. It's gotten me back into baking again, so that's nice.

...

The downstairs neighbor lady has been trying to kill the decorative grass planted in front of the building. She says she hates that it grows faster than the lawn, and the seeds have spread all over "her yard".

I've started guerilla fertilizing.

---

Transitioning to windows has been weird. Relearning how to do basic tasks on the CLI sucks.

user-inactivated  ·  2227 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: February 21, 2018

We had an ice storm yesterday, and I realized that I do, in fact, have smooth rods. They're just tied up in my acrylic framed printer.

I actually have a fair amount of them, so I was able to work off of this design:

And thus, the product of yesterday:

Currently, it seems to have a build area of ~180x180mm, which is horribly offset (the orange square). The constraint is that moving the smooth rails outwards causes the pulleys for the drive line to collide with the frame. Fixing that is easy, but fixing it in a way that doesn't add a huge amount of volume (and print time) to the corner pieces is still elusive for me.

I'm discovering I kinda like doing CAD stuff so long as I'm using OpenSCAD. FreeCAD is easy to use, but I never learned to use it in a way that didn't screw you over if you needed to go back and change something you did at the beginning.

user-inactivated  ·  2303 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: December 6, 2017

- The dumpster fire burns bright, nationally and at work.

- I'm recovering from losing my voice.

- 3D printer is on hold until shipping madness settles down.

user-inactivated  ·  2317 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What are you playing?

Sgeorge and I have played minecraft games where I host on my linux box and she played on her windows 'puter. It's a tradition when work gets snowed out.

user-inactivated  ·  2344 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: October 25, 2017

work

Vacation starts today! Hell. Yes.

My full time supervisor tried to dick me out of the first two days, but I'm better at office politics than he is.

union stuff

Time to vote for the local leadership. It's disheartening because my current local leadership supports Hoffa, but they're also pretty competent. And because they support Hoffa, we've got an outsized representation. Multiple people on national negotiating committees for the upcoming UPS contract. On the other hand, that doesn't mean shit if they aren't willing to push the envelope...

3d printer

I've learned enough of FreeCAD to know that I don't like it. Had to reinstall my system because the linux distro I was using didn't have an operational OpenSCAD package. Greetings from Ubuntu 17.10! I now have OpenSCAD, and can get back to tweaking the Mini Kossel parts to accept v-slot.

concert

I'll have seen Gogol Bordello by this time next week. 1,700 people venue. Very excited.

user-inactivated  ·  2354 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What are you scared of?

Electricity.

Me? Replace a wall plug?

Fuck no.

Edit: Also Pressure Vessels. Even the lowly Moka Pot.

user-inactivated  ·  2360 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: October 11, 2017

I think I'm falling down the 3d printer rabbit hole. Right now I'm sorting through various reprap plans trying to figure out which one is the one.

Right now, 'tis this one.

Qualifications for being the one: cheap enough, and well documented enough.

EDIT

This one is also in the running. Delta printers are soo much more scifi to me, though.

user-inactivated  ·  2387 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: September 13, 2017

CHICKEN

Tyson wants to come to town. I suspect they will get to, but it won't be a fun affair.

APPARTMENT

The unit next to us finally rented. It has been empty the entire 9 months we have lived here. The new tenants are... frigid. Say "hi", and they just keep lookin' forward and walk past. Meh.

That said, we've been here 9 months, and we don't have any red flags about continuing to live here. This is unprecedented. The goal is to stay here a few years until we have a down payment together.

BREAKFAST

I'm eating a large bowl of refried beans and meatless taco meat.

user-inactivated  ·  2412 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How do you guys organize the files on your computer? What are your personal rules for your digital life?

:\

I rely on search tools and bookmarking systems. Grep and Projectile. A few library based applications like Steam, Darktable, and Calibre to organize for me. The rest is a pile.

I've got a remote backup and local rolling filesystem snapshots and they're all basically your 0cleanup folder. My home folder is a sea of jpegs that I exported from raw files but couldn't be bothered to put into a subfolder.

plz, send help.

user-inactivated  ·  2425 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: An Exchange on Finland Station

    Here's why I hate modern socialists: They can't have a discussion that doesn't hinge on (A) nomenclature (B) history (C) semantics so you end up having a historic discussion of the nomenclature of semantics or a semantic discussion of the nomenclature of history or a nomenclatural discussion of the history of semantics and somehow, because the entire body politic of American socialists is so far up their own ass they can no longer see daylight, any discussion as to why a person who isn't already a resident of Eugene, Oregon with a masters in revolutionary politics in mid-century Spain should give the first fuck about any of it is assumed as solved by inspection and it's NOT.

You should absolutely not checkout the r/socialism subreddit.

    can't look up from their fucking kombucha

Hey now, don't drag kombucha through the mud. That shit tastes good. If you can get over the smell of feet...

... there is a simile here. I feel it.

    And sweet jesus fucking christ if they'd try speaking in the language of the people who need socialism, in terms of what those people would get out of socialism, they might not be hated and mocked by mutherfuckers like me.

If they manage to Capitalize (heh) on this moment, and keep any of the people who have started to align with them, it'll be because of this: those new people are coopting the movement.

Sunkara's print journal saw subscriptions level off in 2016. You'd have assumed it would have grown during the Bernie movement. He certainly did.

But the DSA has grown from 8,000 to 25,000 dues payers since the start of the year. Not a staggering amount, I know. And of a lot of them probably did it as a reaction to Trump. Foul weather supporters, if you will. But here's the thing: those new people? The ones who out number the old guard? Surprise, surprise: they just voted in new leadership.

Looking at my twitter feed (the vote literally happened this morning), it looks like the Praxis (I know, the name isn't helping) and Momentum slates won. Which is good, as they're a big part of why I was willing to join DSA last month.

Praxis focused on community organizing.

The opening line to their preamble was relevant to your semantics/nomenclature/history comment:

    The Left’s lack of impact is not a messaging problem; it’s a substantive one.

The core nugget of their platform:

    Our National Training Strategy is an attempt to un-pack the ‘secret sauce’ of a wide array of organizing skills and tactics so members develop the skills to pursue their own politics. Poor and working people — particularly people of color — are often treated as external objects of organizing. People all around us are carrying the burden of struggle each day because they must in order to survive. No one is simply waiting for us to reveal the truth of socialism.

Emphasis theirs.

Meanwhile, Momentum proposed focusing on HOLY FUCKING SHIT. Working examples of American socialism:

    A national campaign for Medicare For All is at the heart of this project.

Their labor strategy is similarly build-on-what-we-actually-have:

    What is the role of a socialist organization in the labor movement today? We argue that the current situation leaves us with one choice: the adoption of a rank-and-file strategy.

    ...

    Our view is that this program should focus on three main strategic “industries”: education, health care, and logistics/distribution. These fields are critical nodes in today’s economy; offer opportunities to both rebuild existing unions and organize the unorganized; and give rank-and-file socialist organizers the chance to build power while living a decent life.

Which has merit to my eyes, although they are colored by Teamster United lenses. The only reason TU didn't take control of the Teamsters last year is that they didn't contest Canada at all. They limited their slate to the US. And they won the US. So that gives me hope.

Minneapolis just got a $15 minimum wage. Kansas City is voting on the same this Tuesday. So that gives me hope.

I just found out that I now have two DSA organizations within 40 minutes of where I sit. A viable candidate for city council is meeting with one of them later this month. To reiterate: I live in fucking Kansas. Sure, the Berkeley of Kansas. But still: Kansas. So that gives me hope.

This is shit that gives me hope: the new kids seem to be grabbing the wheel and looking around, not down.

Maybe there's not a lot of 'em. But I know there's not a lot of people voting for city council.

edited to add links

user-inactivated  ·  2430 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: I found this Cicada emerging from his shell yesterday.

    More often than not, the only sign you'll ever come across that they're there, besides their sound, is the little husks they leave behind.

It was really neat to watch it emerging from the husk.

The dog, though, has gotten quite good at spotting the little guys. Apparently they are delicious.

user-inactivated  ·  2450 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: July 12, 2017

My basic falafel is:

1lb chickpeas (dry/pre-soaking)

1 onion

2-3 jalapenos

1 standard issue grocery store bunch of cilantro

a small pile of ground coriander

a variable amount of garlic

salt

flour if needed

I have some Sumac that I put into our hummus, and I keep meaning to try it in the falafel but I forget. TBH, we make it so infrequently I haven't felt much of a need to change it up.

We do have a big ass jar of turmeric...

    To the point where I've almost bought a deep fryer just to make them better/faster.

DON'T TEMPT ME!

I dare not take it. Not even to keep it safe.

Understand. I would use this fryer from a desire to do good... But over me, it would wield a power too great and terrible to imagine.

Oreos. I would fry a shitload of oreos.

user-inactivated  ·  2452 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why government agencies should move from DC to the Midwest

    The United States and as agriculture has become streamlined and industrialized, people have been leaving for urban areas for a number of reasons

We're pumping nitrates into the ground at an amazing rate. I got signs warning me not to eat the catch from the local river.

    A large percentage of them are in The Great Plains.

The ones that survive are the ones they plowed the interstate through. Everything else is dead.

My grandparents lived on my grandma's family land out near Bouge. I like the people out there, but they won't be coming back. Just like the rail lines.

    see some kind of weird outlier

Oasis among the thistles.

Some of 'em even have art scenes.

user-inactivated  ·  2452 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: We’re losing a whole generation of young men to video games

    This comment section is like some kind of Marxist gamer form of redpillism. ...if you aren't willing to try and hold up your own part (having a job and not being a useless sponge) no good will ever come to you.

"Every child knows a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish."

--- Marx in a letter to Louis Kugelmann.

user-inactivated  ·  2465 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: June 28, 2017

My new campaign at work is an unfortunate one, because it involves filling out grievance forms instead of being sassy.

The sassy route is less official, but has the distinct advantage of not having to write through three fucking layers of transfer paper.

- Union Copy

- Company Copy

- Steward Copy

- Member Copy

Full on, regular weight too. None of that easy to use thin shit.

My hand hurts.

____

My ISP got gobbled up into a larger affair. This is the first day of service under the care of the new regime.

Not a graceful start so far. I'd happily pay a premium for municipal run bandwidth toobs.

This is the second attempt to post this. Shoddy service consumed the first one in a conflagration of doing the bare minimum somewhere in Mn.

Oh, FUCK. They're 49% owned by Comcast.

EDIT: I'd say were are zeroing in on service up-time. Oscillating around it, if you will.

user-inactivated  ·  2482 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 1st Weekly Bakers' Thread

I'll hopefully have some photos later today. Reinstalling my computer as I managed to generally bork things up.

How do y'all handle your final rises? I do it on a towel and then transfer to a baking sheet, but I didn't flour my towel well enough yesterday... mussed up my loaf when I had to resort to peeling it off. :(

EDIT

Final Rise

Crap

30 Minutes Later

The Other Side

Crumb

user-inactivated  ·  2489 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pesky whippersnappers are now destroying Applebees, apparently.

And if you fuck up and let them go bad in the pantry, you can cut them into chunks and plant 'em to make more fucking potatoes.

Fuck diamonds. Potatoes should be the universal symbol of enduring love.

user-inactivated  ·  2490 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Homelessness up 26% in LA YoY, 10% in Seattle , *61%* among LA youth  ·  

    needed

inevitable

What does UBI boil down to? It's a prop to keep capitalism from running off the rails once society no longer carries the structures that made it a stable social arrangement.

But it needs to do more than that to work in the long haul.

It needs to support the current economic system and it needs to suppress the reorganization of society around whatever new social structures emerge. Because those laborers are indeed human beings. If they're freed up, they're going to go into society and create new complexity.

And that newness is going to give rise to something else.

user-inactivated  ·  2498 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What are your weekend plans?

I'm planning on spendin' the weekend taking in the annual Busker Festival.

It's also my sister's birthday, and (handily enough) she also wants to check it out. Which is kinda surprising, because she's always rolled her eyes at it in years past.

user-inactivated  ·  2513 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: May 10, 2017

FERMENTATION

I've got some jalapenos lactose-fermenting on the counter. Two days in, no verdict yet on if they'll turn into pickles or not yet. Never done this before. They're bubbling, though.

edit: tasted one. slightly sour. starting to smell 'right'.

I think my sourdough starter has picked up some of the yeasts from my wife's homebrew. It smells startlingly like ale and apples.

GARDEN

The kale, are sad. The beets are stunted. The Turnips? Doing dandy. And the potatoes are thriving.

THOUGHTS

I'm finding the Stoic's conception of the divine pretty interesting. I don't believe it, but it is my first experience reading about a religion and feeling sorta wistful.

user-inactivated  ·  2528 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: April 26, 2017

Books

Having a hard time getting back into War and Peace. Haven't gotten reinvested in the lives of characters, which is a problem since that's the crux of the book.

Instead I've started into Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. I tried reading it ages ago, but couldn't get into it. This (Penguin Classics) translation is much better.

Bread

So. If I process in 2oz increments our miniblender can turn wheat berries into a rough approximation of flour. I did a 24 hour fridge ferment at 100% hydration (8oz 'flour', 8oz water, 0.15oz yeast, 0.15oz salt) and hot damn if I didn't get a loaf. Not a lofty loaf, to be sure, but still: a loaf. Not bad since I decided to try using soft wheat berries, which have less gluten than hard.

It made me realize I've never tasted fresh whole wheat flour before.

The next step is, I think, to try soaking the wheat before I blend it. It should result in more flavor (as the seed starts to wake up), and should make things easier on the blender as the bran softens.

World Building

I've officially given up on my playgroup ever getting back together in meatspace. If we do play, it'll have to be play by forum, as every day of the week sees someone working.

So, I'm taking some of the world building I had done for the microlite campaign I had started to run before things fell apart, and I'm taking the opportunity to rework it to (hopefully) be more hard/low fantasy. I want to keep the races close to what they were, but I'll probably toss out everything else. I'm kinda interested right now in recasting the world and magic system as pantheistic.

The plan is to release it as a CC0 setting on github.

user-inactivated  ·  2563 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: March 22, 2017

oooo. Preview says markdown headers work?

edit: interesting. only in the previews.

Gardening

====

The adventures continue!

Kale

----

We had a close call a few days ago, when the wee sprouts outpaced the watering regime, but every body is doing just fine. They just look like sprouts right now, roughly two inches high. Nothing to point to what the are except for maybe how deep a shade of green that they are. Almost tinges of blue.

Seeds

----

So apparently the library has annual gardening exhibit. Naturally we're gonna check that out. Apparently there are free seeds, but what I'm really hoping for is information on when to look for local planting dates.

We've also given up on finding onion seeds. I thought it would be fun to start 'em that way, but apparently the gardening industry has other ides. Starts it is. Locally started starts ideally. Starting a seed, letting it grow and increase in mass and volume by a factor of bazillion so you can pluck it out of the ground, box it, and then ship it across the country is fucking laughably wasteful. I've moved those boxs. Smell nice, but they are heavy, and large.

    Before we got off the phone, I asked Salatin if he could ship me one of his chickens and maybe a steak, too. He said that he couldn't do that. I figured he meant he wasn't set up for shipping, so offered him my FedEx account number.

    "No, I don't think you understand. I don't believe it's sustainable — or 'organic,' if you will — to FedEx meat all around the country. I'm sorry, but I can't do it."

The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

Weather

----

The guidance on when it is generally safe to plant would be useful, because Kansas is fucking weird weather wise. Over the weekend it we were hitting above 80F/26C, but I just woke up and it is 37/2C out right now.

## Community-supported agriculture?

Does that style of header work? Also, any Hubski peeps a member of a CSA? We are thinking about trying to work that into our budget. Might be doable, since the car got paid off with the tax return.

Camera and Shipping

====

Canon hasn't said what exactly happened to the camera when it and I had our brief romance with the asphalt, but they did charge us $200 and said "it'll be a week".

The interesting part of sending in the camera was, for me, the fact that I sent it via USPS instead of my own workplace. I dropped the camera off shortly before noon on Saturday. Paid like $15 for a flat rate shipping box and some packing materials. Got a tracking number which when we checked it in the parking lot at work on Monday before my shift started, told me that the package was out for delivery, over 1000 miles away.

Mental State

====

I've been pretty dour recently, so I'm making a better effort at watching my emotions and consciously noting when I feel that way.

I've also been putting a decent amount of energy into configuring a hakyll setup to put on my VPS, but I don't actually know what would go on it. Thinking generating content for a website -even if no-one reads it- feels oppressive. And slightly... shameful? Definitely a twinge of something like. And yet I felt fine barfing forth pubski comments.

The question I'm struggling with is this I think: what the fuck do I have to say that would stand up to living in its own repository?

Hakyll is fun to configure, though.

user-inactivated  ·  2695 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: DON'T PANIC

Bernie Sanders ran as a socialist, and netted over 12,000,000 votes, according to realclearpolitics. This number is skewed downwards somewhat by the fact that he did better in caucus states.

And according to the NYT page I had open in the background, around 120,000,000 voted in the general. Probably slightly more, because I just added the D and R votes together, but, still.

Is roughly 10% of the electorate socialist? I don't think so, because I know a fair amount of Sanders supporters who are not. I only know a couple who would identify as such.

I'm one of them.

This is the same reason I don't think that all Trump supporters are fascists. Because I know a fair amount of them. A lot of them are people I have respected for years.

Life is more complex than that.

user-inactivated  ·  2748 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The faces of Hubski. Been a while, let's see your mug!