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kleinbl00  ·  91 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: December 27, 2023  ·  

Garbage disposal went out a few weeks back. Just started leakin'. It's okay, it's a Sears; my father-in-law put it in back in like 2004 which I recognize is exactly the sort of thing old people say.

The total time to diagnose, research, purchase, remove and replace the garbage disposal was approximately 2 1/2 hours spread across two days. That included a run to Home Depot to get an assortment of plumbing to replace the father-in-law's "rocket garbage out the other sink" drain geometry.

This made me realize that the machine, from an "effort and cognition" standpoint, has been the equivalent of two, two and a half "garbage disposals" a day, six to seven days a week, for two years.

My cousin and his friends are having a boy weekend, a "for those who tried to rock" adventure at an AirBNB to recapture the mood of trying to be rawk stars back when they were in their teens and early 20s. They're all extremely excited about it even though it's weeks away. I declined my invite because frankly, I was nowhere near them as a teenager (and when they were teenagers I was... seven) but pointed out to my cousin that they clearly need to do this more often; with "deaths from despair" leading all other causes for white dudes over 50, simply bringing guitars, poker chips and tequila to a beach cabin twice a year could extend their lives an easy 20 years. My cousin agreed (several of them clearly neeed this) and pointed out I should come next time as dorking around with a bunch of aging butt-rockers might just clear up my musical constipation.

I said that every ten-fifteen years I'm apparently required to do something stupid and laborious that shuts everything else down. In high school it was a 4x4 Triumph TR-7 with a Chevy 400. In my 30s it was a birth center. In my 40s it's apparently a $150k CNC machine. Besides which...

I had the world's cheapest Atmos studio. I've been limping along on these ancient Tascam surround controllers, one of which I've owned since it was new in 2003. They were born at the height of the capacitor plague, and yes I've recapped all three of them multiple times. I taught myself surface-mount soldering just so I could rebuild the analog section of one. And about five months ago a yahoo in a stolen car drove through the substation that shares a yard with the police department. I heard the bang from here, a quarter mile away. Power flickered in a crazy way, then went out, and despite having four separate UPS in this house, it took out a 40TB server and two surround controllers. The server? Came back once it was allowed to express its outrage. But the controllers started dying in ways I've never seen, that the Internet has never catalogued, that cannot be solved without replacing and reprogramming ePROMs and ICs that have not been available since Obama was president.

Said-same cousin pointed out that Washington's current laws make it so that I will have to pay capital gains on the amount of crypto I'll need to sell in order to expand the birth center. The thought process went like this:

- For that amount of money I could move to another state for a few months while I pull the money.

- But it's going directly to schools.

- Which absolutely need it, this is why your kid is a private school brat.

- Besides which, the only people who would be sympathetic to your plight are the sort of people you hate.

- You aren't even vaguely poor anymore. Why do you feel so poor.

- Because you haven't spent any gains on anything since before COVID.

So I sold some crypto and bought myself a $5000 audio interface. B-stock, of course; I'm not a monster. It showed up yesterday. I put Kai through the monitors one last time and tore it all out.

I dunno. It should feel like a victory. So far it feels like a defeat. I've spent two years trying to find a cheaper solution. I failed. This will solve my problems perfectly - I goddamn saved myself some time by subconsciously buying the wrong bits of eBay which will serendipitously allow me to remove an entire digital-analog conversion chain consisting if eight cables and three powered devices - and yet, my inability to figure out some clever way to solve the problem is absolutely galling. Never mind the fact that this is such corner-case weirdness that the cheapest solution is to use actual movie theater parts - since they aren't made anymore, and since my chosen gadget interfaces at a systems level with the rest of my gadgets, it would be stupid to, you know, not do what every other Atmos studio does. Not that there's a lot of those.

I think there's a fundamental alienation that takes place when your problems are so far removed from the normal experience of everyday life that they take paragraphs to describe. It's probably why, despite being wildly successful by any metric whatsoever, things are a constant goddamn struggle.

LOOK AT THIS LITTLE FUCKER

Goddamn R2 unit right there. It's 650-odd parts in SolidWorks. I did not design about 150 of them. I had to model them in Solidworks, though, and they all need to line up in three dimensions. 650 parts, no tolerance stacking errors. It all fucking bolts together.

I used to get sick at the end of every season. It's my body responding to stress, basically, by collapsing once I'm over the hump. I haven't had a season since 2019 but I've made a speedrun from stomach flu to thanksgiving to my kid's birthday to COVID to Christmas. My wife has caught none of it. I said something like "I'm embarrassed for my genes" and she said "that's not your genes, that's your ACE score" and she's probably right. That, and those 650-odd parts are... kind of it. There are a few bits and bobs that need to be modified or tweaked, and a couple minor components that need to be created and tested but fundamentally, the next part is "wire it, plumb it and program it."

Two garbage disposals a day for two years. No excuse me, nearly three. Fucker showed up April 2021. While it was crossing the ocean, the Ever Given was clogging the Suez.

kleinbl00  ·  160 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: October 18, 2023

I think there's a bigger issue at play.

Rid makes an insightful point that I've mentioned many times before: free societies pay a heavy penalty when their governments lie because adherence to the government is based on trust. Autocracies pay no penalties when their governments lie because adherence to the government is based on fear. As a result, any conflict between an authoritarian society and a free society will involve the authoritarian society spreading as many lies as they can - if your opponent relies on integrity to rule, damage their integrity. They have no counter.

Any thoughtful wonk tasked with coming up with a "public square" social media platform for a free society would make it a utility, monitored by public health and safety officials, with surveillance and enforcement that matched that society's civil standards. Remove the phrase "free society" and you have VK and WeChat to a T. On the other hand, the principle task of social media platforms within Western, capitalist nations is "engagement" ie outrage in order to drive advertising dollars. As a result, the madder it makes people the richer the founders become.

This, of course, creates a feedback loop: if you want clout on social media, you make people mad. If you want to get rich with social media, you maximize anger. Before too long your metaphorical corner coffee shop has become Thunderdome. I remember when the Internet was a lovely place to meet interesting people; my web designer (22) holds as her mantra "never become a main character on the Internet." The overlap is complete: social media becomes a mechanism whereby Enrique Tarrio and "Donbass Devushka" are your advertising dollars. Then you add in the right-wing takeover of Facebook, Musk's Thiel-led takeover of Twitter and the psyop known as Tiktok and it becomes pretty clear that the current utility of social media is for totalitarian societies to stir shit up in free ones.

And I think people are fucking sick of fighting.

We've slowly learned that social media is where you go to get mad. I think we can unlearn that? But I think it's gonna be even slower. I've taken to telling people that Russia must fall in order to keep Donald Trump off of fucking Facebook and I mean it. Until social media can be turned into a utility good for something other than chaos agency, it's fucking done. We've turned it from a place people go to talk to a place people go to laugh and point. Conversations have been replaced by clout-chasing. Moderation is utterly lacking - I posted an interview with a formerly-Russian band to my I-fucking-hate-having-it page for the show and the result has been daily battles with Russian trolls trying to take my page down. Any actual engagement? Naah. An opinion is an excuse to get kicked in the nuts. So the people with opinions are the ones who want nothing more than to encourage nut-kicking.

kleinbl00  ·  170 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: October 7, 2023

You know what show I love that I shouldn't? The Crown. Know why? It's really a lengthy investigation into the collapse of the British Empire as told through powerless bystanders, like Star Wars and the droids, Hidden Fortress and the peasants, or Last King of Scotland and James McEvoy's imaginary doctor. Granted, "Elizabeth Regina" is one of the more powerful of the powerless narrators but aside from Maggie probably-not-actually asking the Queen to dissolve parliament so she could stay in power, it's pretty much about crusty old people sucking while their empire fucking collapses around their ears. I fucking love it.

Fifteen years of avid history consumption has left me with a refined and educated taste when it comes to the collapse of the British Empire and while there are plenty of flashpoints to talk about, from my armchair I'm going to call out Amritsar. This is at the absolute tippy-tippy top of "the sun never sets on the" British Empire, when they were the undisputed heavyweight champions of the world, kings of all they surveyed, "My intention was to inflict a lesson that would have an impact throughout all India."

It's all downhill from there. Lend/lease begging, having to spy on the Roosevelts, rationing for 15 years, Suez, British Leyland, the Falklands... collapse takes a while. Britain has been a vassal state of the US since losing Iran but they still thought they were a power twelve years after that. Shit, they still thought they were a power after the Nazis fucking leveled London.

I think the GOP imploded July 21, 2016. I think that their failure to nominate anyone other than the guy none of them wanted was the Republican Amritsar. It was their foot soldiers doing what they'd been trained to do, been brought up to do, been bred to do, not what they'd been asked to do and now? We wait for the degenerates to fucking die.

The fact that Josh Hawley and Tommy Tuberville continue to be Josh Hawley and Tommy Tuberville, despite the substantial detriment suffered by the GOP because of it, tells me that none of this shit is going to be over quickly. There will be a Falkland Islands conflict. There will be some form of Operation Black Buck.

everything I ever needed to know I learned from James Bond

kleinbl00  ·  200 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Summer Check In.

I highlighted what I highlighted because it brought me joy. I miss you. Honestly, earnestly and without irony. And I highlighted it because it was the first thing you've written in a very long time that had some hope and optimism to it.

For... 30 years now I have taken on the wayward children of the Internet, via PM and email, to be a Magic Mirror of advice. It took me roughly 25 years to figure out that I do it because I've never been able to tell the kid inside "it all turned out okay." I got to where I am through no guidance but my own. That's not how I'd have chosen to do it. Looking back from my unashamedly, unabashedly accomplished place in the clouds I can see how much more easily and painlessly I could have gotten through a lot of stuff if there had been someone there simply to bounce ideas off of.

Likewise, I look at you and I see a path less traveled. The anger that I'm choosing to let go of. The hopelessness I fight not to embrace. The fundamental, despairing rage. The health problems that are mine, only ten years down the road and an order of magnitude worse. There are many lives I haven't lived and yours is most definitely one of them - I was inches away from joining you on the cannery fleet, for example.

That's the sort of stuff that the internet ultimately fails at. Intense, heartfelt, non-negative emotion. That is why everyone is leaving - if we were in a room together you could watch my face, hear my voice and recognize gladness for what it is. Instead you're upbraiding me for not hating Boise enough nearly two years ago.

If the end result of all my communication with you is "the first real good belly laugh you've had in years" I am glad of that, too. It seems like you haven't been given much and if that's what you'll take from me, have it with my blessing. But please listen when I say this: my whole point, since you decided to nope out entirely, was "it's not so bad here." And I say that because thee and me looked out over the horizon, looked inward to ourselves, and made fundamentally different decisions. You chose to go, I chose to stay.

You've fought earnestly and valiantly against your environment and have triumphed. Again, this brings me unironic joy. I've fought earnestly and valiantly against my environment and have triumphed. This does not bring me joy because, as you said, tech-bro class-traitor Hollywood-boot-licker yadda yadda yadda. Rest assured nothing you can say is a tenth as colorful or relentless as my internal monologue. Yet here we sit, separated by months and thousands of miles, having a dialog.

That cabin up in the mountains a million miles from anywhere, just you and your telescope? That was the first dream I allowed myself to have. There was no part of me that wanted city streets and a knowledge of Windsor knots. That's back when 7 stoplights was too cosmopolitan by half; I grew up in a town that was 70% Mormon, with a Mormon police chief who issued a fatwah against my entire family when I was barely old enough to read because my mom was friends with "the gays." That guy? Yeah he managed to kill four of his own officers in four years in "training accidents"when I was in high school. Huh - a cop has been following me and my friends everywhere we go for five hours - must be a Saturday. One stepbrother is enough; I'd have two except the SLC police department ruled that the other one had committed suicide with a hunting rifle from across the room. The Mormon hate? I haz it. And yet steve is a hell of a nice guy and I'm supremely glad to know him. Nicest guy at my school was a Mormon, actually - probably why he died of a brain tumor at 35. Yeah, Unibomber shack with a 20" reflector and tens of thousands of dollars of SBIG was the goddamn dream. But then I met a girl who wanted to help women become mothers and then we did the math and it only pays for itself in a metropolitan area and then you make lemonade. You'll excuse me if I offer you a glass from time to time.

"Class traitor" is an interesting epithet. It was coined by the NKVD to enforce the Soviet system of state-sanctioned hierarchy and has been applied vociferously and eagerly to any foreign social strife ever since. I don't care which sociologist you care to cite, they all agree that social mobility is the cornerstone of democracy. They differ on how much the wealthy should be penalized for their mistakes and how much support the poor should be given in their advances but the only people firmly in the 'know your place' camp are the totalitarians. If you look at it, I'm the one who comes from a long line of slave-owners. My great-uncle was the chief of surgery at Montefiore, not yours. If I get my daughter into Harvard it will not be a WASP milestone but a continuation; yeah yeah foodstamps yeah yeah RIT dye but also Swarthmore and Cornell. The Soviets would welcome me back to the nomenklatura with open arms; I've learned the error of my ways and now know that the proletariat has nothing to share with the guiding lights of the Party. You? You're a peasant who refuses to work. Do you not understand your place in the system, comrade?

But we both know that's bullshit. You've finally achieved some happiness and that makes me glad. I haven't. I likely never will. The rich will never trust me because I am obviously up-jumped white trash; the poor will never trust me because I am obviously a "class traitor." So let me share what I do have:

Every person has something that costs too much. They have some item that for them, is a splurge. The economists (European economists; these are dangerous ideas in this here American Republic) even have metrics: we all own something that costs roughly 50 percent more than the thing we should have bought, and that thing is our anchor.

"I'm not truly poor, I have nice kicks." "I'm not lower-middle-class, I have a Coach wallet." "I'm upper-middle-class, I drive a BMW." "I'm wealthy, I wear a Rolex." This is why the Republicans hammer on this stuff - their job is much easier if people lack the mental fluidity to imagine other possibilities. "This is why we can't have nice things" - Feudalism as meme, right there. The poor aren't truly poor if they have flat screen TVs and air conditioning, I saw it on Tucker Carlson. What made you upper-class in '80s Moscow? A washing machine.

So making nice things that the people with student loan payments and a 10-year-old car who struggle with their childcare expenses can afford? Yer goddamn right. That's me being a class traitor. Kinda like the duel I'm having with the city council right now - their new building code was crafted so vociferously to ban "methadone clinics" that they ended up banning "clinics." Me? I a third of my patients are Medicaid. I can absolutely make money off poor people by providing them healthcare. It's my flavor of capitalism - lemonade flavor.

__________________________

I highlighted what I highlighted because I have nothing to add to your monolog. I have nothing to argue with. You could write that last sentence on your tombstone and it'd be a happy ending. We've been trading notes for ten years or more now and I didn't think you'd make it this far. Neither did you. Your day-to-day is very different from mine and no lie - I'm envious. A big part of me would be very happy dealing with your bullshit, rather than mine. But lemme share a story:

I used to do airport noise mitigation. 'round here that meant coming into your apartment, setting up microphones, and sitting there in the silence until I'd counted a requisite number of planes. So there I am, sitting in someone eles's space, and that space is extremely airport-adjacent.

There were nice apartments - lemons from lemonade. There were ghastly apartments - one dude just had pee pads scattered all over the floor and had clearly let his dog go wherever for weeks to make the space "welcoming" for us (never mind that he volunteered). One really stuck with me though. Living room was empty except for a big screen TV, a barcalounger, a horse trough full of canned chili and a horse trough full of empty chili cans. Oh, and a TV tray with a fork on it. And I could hear the siren song of its simplicity. Still can.

I think every dude struggles not to "feed that wolf." I think it takes a lot more fortitude to turn your back on the world and dare nature not to kill you. I think it is an inspiring act of courage to refuse your lot and survive, to make a better life out of nothing, to ultimately reject that thing that gets most of us out of bed in the morning and to do it in a way that isn't two troughs of chili and a flat screen.

So you'll forgive me if I occasionally put on your shoes and second-guess your choices. Would I be as full of outrage, as condemning of everyone I meet, as seethingly spiteful of earnest, heartfelt congratulations?

I fight it every moment, mutherfucker.

So from one cranky old man to another, I'm glad you got a belly laugh. You need more of them. And I'm glad I still get under your skin. It means you're still listening. And I'm glad you're not dead.

Keep it up.

kleinbl00  ·  217 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: These moments totally happened at the GOP primary debate

Jason Gilbert pointed out that the principle reason to watch the debates was schadenfreude and my wife agreed. It was pretty terrible.

Now I want to say this in a tone of voice thenewgreen can hear: Ramaswamy is a soulless huckster opportunist who is utterly devoid of principle, ethics or empathy. He is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with the tech industry, everything that is wrong with hustle culture, and everything that is wrong with venture capital, everything that is wrong with entrepreneurship and everything that is wrong with mutherfucking LinkedIn. Donald Trump is a low-achieving silver-spoon racist blowhard who has farted his way to every successful position he has ever held but Ramaswamy? That specious little dipshit took one look at the past seven years and went "hey I could do that" and DID.

He is a LOATHSOME human being who deliberately aped demagoguery and dysfunction because he wants nothing more than to be on the Republican ticket as VP. He is Stephen Miller if Stephen Miller were doing it for clout. He is opportunism personified, an actuarial table in slacks, the negative space left in a human husk once all morality or guidance have been blasted away by pure, naked greed.

He's a shoo-in for Trump's VP because he went "hey racists, here's some racism." "Hey bigots, here's some bigotry." "What's that? You want some wonkish made up bullshit numbers to feel better about the prejudices you know you shouldn't have? Here's something straight from my ass, you're welcome!" "The Base" knows that Trump shoots from the hip; because their accelerationist nephew liked this guy's made-up bullshit policy about something he knows fuckall about, they now think Trump's got a "policy guy" to come up with numbers to own the libs.

Vivek Ramaswamy is walking leprosy because he fucking knows better and he doesn't fucking care.

    “I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers. Maybe the answer is zero. It probably is zero for all I know, right? I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero,” Ramaswamy said. “But if we’re doing a comprehensive assessment of what happened on 9/11, we have a 9/11 Commission, absolutely that should be an answer the public knows the answer to.”

Hear it in Trump's voice. Give it Trump's cadence. This loathsome little turd has a BA from Harvard and a JD from Yale and he's fuckin' whatabouting the Twin Fucking Towers. Why? To get those sweet, sweet QAnon votes.

Kill it with fire.

Slowly.

kleinbl00  ·  218 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Prigozhin reportedly killed in plane crash

So without hyperbole or excess speculation:

1) Thomas Rid (of Active Measures fame) observed in a now-deleted tweet that the Texiera leaks demonstrated a "breathtakingly granular insight" into Russian troop movements as well as command-and-control.

2) Lukashenko brokered a peace deal between Prigozhin and Putin that was every bit as altruistic and guileless as everything Lukashenko has ever done.

3) The US Embassy has been shouting "Errbody out of the pool" since August 18.

So odds are good we knew this was coming, odds are good we estimated that a Russia with Prigozhin in its side is more tactically useful to us than a Russia without a Prigozhin in its side, but odds are equally good that we estimated doing anything about it other than shouting "BY THE WAY WE THINK BELARUS IS ABOUT TO GET REALLY FUCKING DICEY" would be tipping our hand.

I reckon Prigozhin was summoned to Russia for some fuckin' ruse or other, Lukashenko guaranteed his safety and Prigozhin got whacked. Benefits Putin personally, benefits Lukashenko politically, but militarily is equivalent to murdering Erik Prince in 2004.

When you strike at a king, you must kill him.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

I think the question of whether Prigozhin was cagey or lucky has been answered. The question of what the endgame looks like has not.

The swamps between Belarus and Ukraine are probably going to freeze in a few months. The question will be whether Russia/Belarus launches a counteroffensive once the ground is hard.

kleinbl00  ·  218 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: US Colleges and Universities Are Becoming Giant Exploitation Machines

This is grievously wrong. Like, "tides push the moon around" wrong. And it's not hard to be right - There's plenty for Jacobin to be mad about when it comes to colleges and universities (Land Grant Universities exist to colonize hostile native land and give incentive for settlers to occupy the West, for example). And in being as wrong as it is, it paints up some really weird targets ("Part of what the debt is doing is serving a disciplinary function") and misses the big, obvious problem, namely capitalism.

There's no secret here. There's no weird Reagan-fed conspiracy. There are fundamental, congressional and capitalist causes for the current state of education.

- 1976: Congress prohibits discharge of student loan debt in bankruptcy, ensuring that any debt incurred by going to college will be paid off short of "undue hardship" (which has gotten increasingly hard to establish) or death.

- 1983: US News & World Report introduce the college rankings, which make no allowances whatsoever for value or outcomes. Three generations of college students grow up under a metric that literally argues that money is no object.

- 1987: Alan Greenspan becomes chairman of the Federal Reserve, introducing nineteen years of easy money policy. Loans become preposterously cheap and a massive wave of campus building ensues. NOTE THAT THIS DOES NOT INVOLVE ACQUISITION: Universities, across the board, decreases their land from the 1860s to the modern era as a way to subsidize tuition. There is not a university out there, other than Stanford, that isn't a bizarre swiss-cheesed matrix of shot-full-of-holes plots.

- 1992: Congress introduces the FAFSA, streamlining and broadening the available debt to students. It becomes much easier to get into debt and just as impossible to get out of it.

- 1993 Congress introduces the Federal Direct Student Loan Program, allowing direct loans from the government to students. These loans are guaranteed (the government will get its money) AND they can be sent to collections upon default (students can be made to pay twice).

I attended college in two decades across 30 years. The whole idea of college as "exploitive" is true within the realm of diploma mills but across public and traditional universities and colleges it has a lot more to do with the fact that "college" has been marketed like summer camp since Animal House came out. I mean look - I filled out the first FAFSA. I went "wow, I don't like these rates" but I also got to go "and also I don't need them." As a white male I was able to pay for college with credit cards and inheritance mostly and then retest and get a frickin' stipend so I totally lucked out.

But not entirely: only 40% of public university students pay full price. The real money-maker for colleges and universities is foreign students, who always pay full price. Hey what's been going on with them:

_______________________

That article uses the phrase "Fordist" four times. I had to look it up. It appears as if Jacobin Magazine is bent out of shape about education for the proletariat which is a little weird for a bunch of socialists. But then, picking on the lazy river is a decidedly 2004 take. Trust me, I was there, designing colleges with lazy rivers.

And again, this data is out there and available. Jeff Selingo has made like three books out of it. There's no shortage of grad students writing angry academic screeds about the evils of academia. It's been frickin' 10 years since NY Law prevailed against its students.

    What changes is, first, who the institution is understood to serve. In other countries, institutions are thought of as having this mandate to serve local students, to serve students who are seeking different kinds of education.

And in the US, competitive institutions have to sing for their supper. Selingo actually suggested examining the endowment of any university you were thinking of attending because the health of their investment portfolio determines how many students have to pay their way and how hard that university has to hustle for tuition (the investor's benchmark is Yale, which grew from $1.3b to $42b under 20 years of David Swenson - 54% of Yale students receive need-based grants). They are as huge and expensive as they are because they remain the premier institutions worldwide; an American degree may be no better than an Estonian one but it commands vastly more cache and prestige for those international families that are primarily concerned with being impressive. But again, this is a weird take for a Swarthmore grad. My mother's a Swarthmore grad, I dated a Swarthmore grad - it's for people who want to pay as if they were at Harvard but face a job market as if they went to the Art Institute.

The big news with US Colleges and Universities is they're eating shit. GenZ has taken an appraisal of the value proposition and noped out. Friend's daughter just got into a highly competitive program - they get 200 applicants and have room for 15 students. It's at a community college, they graduate dental assistants, and your $20k of education gets you a starting salary of around $85k a year. Meanwhile the midwifery program just lost 1 of 8 graduates (at $60k a year) because that student decided she'd never make her money back. She ain't wrong. I think it's 50/50 they teach out that program next year.

The difficulty colleges and universities face is that they've had 40 years under the same model as medicine - money is no object, anything to save a life. But for the past ten, the medicine has been ineffective so students are skipping their insulin. It's going to collapse. It's overdue. But none of it is malevolence, just end-stage capitalism.

kleinbl00  ·  252 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Everything I, an Italian, thought I knew about Italian food is wrong

cracks knuckles

pours more coffee

Would you like to see my "traditional" St. Patrick's Day feast? Here it is. Fuck yeah, "corned beef" and cotija. with fuckin' mayonnaise. 'cuz look: the irish didn't eat cow. Cow was too expensive. You ate cow when the cow was dead, and you invited over everyone you knew because holy shit look at all this cow. Then the potato famine happened and almost everyone you knew was dead or moved and here you are, hated and spit on and despised for trying to earn a dollar but oh my fucking god, the Jews... have cow. And they have cow cheaply. And they have preserved cow, fat stacks of it just sitting there, bounteous quantities of cow, so when you're done sleeping ten to a room and actually have a key to a door you can lock you're goddamn right you're going to have a feast. You're going to celebrate having made it, having crossed an ocean without losing your identity, you're going to rally all the things you remember as good from the old country in the new country, and you're going to improvise with whatever is available, and you are sure as shit going to boil a fucking pastrami and call it tradition.

The prevarication around tiramisu is fucking hilarious. The edit war is truly something else (" tiramisu --> tiramisù= please respect the original italian spelling= WHEN IT IS ONE WORD, IT WANTS AN ACCENT ON THE FINAL U; not so when it is written as 2 separate words. Otherwise, it is CULTURAL APPROPRIATION & TAMPERING WITH our Italian culture. Just as if you started spelling Pizza with just one "z", or spaghetti with just one "t" and omitting the "h".). But go back to the beginning and it was some Australian explaining dessert.

I got into a fight with an Olive Garden back in like 1995 about Tiramisu. I asked one of the servers what kind of cheese went into Tiramisu. They told me there was no cheese in tiramisu. I asked the manager. He assured me that they didn't make tiramisu with cheese. I assured him that they defrosted tiramisu with cheese so we could both be right and he got real mad. So I spent some time on the fledgling internet looking up Tiramisu and it was acknowledged back then that it came out of the NY restaurant scene of the '80s which makes perfect sense. Imagine Trump saying it. "Tiramisu." You'll never hear it any other way.

Now? "it is CULTURAL APPROPRIATION & TAMPERING WITH our Italian culture." Look. "Italian" was "Tuscan" until 1861, much like "Italy" was "Hapsburg Empire." Contrary to tradition, the only European countries older than the United States are like Spain and England. All the rest of it was various shifting empires and fiefdoms. But fuck, man, America sits on the ashes of genocide. Italians have lived in Italy for hundreds if not thousands of years, they just weren't Italian. Errbody who lived around here 200 years ago? Yeah man we erased the shit out of their culture.

So I'm going to pretend my culture has always been here, except when it wasn't here, then it was somewhere older, therefore wherever they came from has a longer tradition. And I'm going to use that tradition to tell you why I have the right to do whatever the fuck I wanna do because I always have, and "always" is whatever the fuck I say it is.

Italy is currently embracing Fascism Mk. II so no wonder they've decided pizza was invented by the pope. Back in the '80s? You made fun of your friends for thinking they'd get pizza in Italy because everybody knew it was mongrel American food. "Traditional" italian food was anything you've never fucking eaten before and then you promptly pointed out that "Italian food" is wholly reliant on the introduction of noodles by Marco Polo and the introduction of tomatoes by Christopher Columbus. Everything was new back then and progress was the watchword. Now? Now everything is old which is why you don't get the rights to control your womb; historically speaking, your womb has always been controlled read your fucking bible.

Whenever you don't like something, reach for an old book, thump on it and say "the book doesn't like it either." Some dipshit will go "ackkkkshully" because he's read the book but you can paint him up as an intellectual egghead look where they got us fuckin' Adam and Steve do you believe that shit.

And all this

Is an elaborate exposition

On the simple fact that if you're selfish

"The past" is whatever made you happy as a child

and

"the future" is whatever other people are doing that makes you mad.

Traditions have always been and shall always be the method by which old people enforce their cultural mores on young people. That's all they fucking are. That's all they'll ever fucking be. America's framing of its own history is whatever the 'boomers think: WWII is ancient history because it was before they were born. The '50s were a time of innocence because they were too young to understand McCarthy. The '60s were a time of idealism because they were teenagers impressing each other in the back seats of their ramblers by talking about Che Guevara. The '70s were a time of disillusionment because they had to get jobs. The '80s were a time of wild economic success because they voted themselves massive tax breaks. And fuckin' hell they ate tiramisu (say it with me with your tiny hands) at that restaurant on the upper east side so of course tiramisu has existed since god was a kid.

please respect the original italian spelling=

to b_b's point, In God We Trust and Under God were the Knights of Columbus virtue signaling that they weren't godless Communists just because they were Catholic. The whole of the 20th century culture was given over to performative "we're not communist" virtue signaling and we will live with it until the last fucking boomer dies.

This is why I'm an enthusiastic member of the "maskless COVID and opiates" party.

kleinbl00  ·  288 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: June 14, 2023

Say hello to my little friend.

And I do mean little; d is 6mm, D is 19mm, b is 10mm. And at his list price, he is worth two thirds his weight in gold.

And I need three of them.

here's the thing

You don't often see "axial angular contact ball bearings." They have exactly one application: ball screws. The purpose of a ball screw is precise transformation from rotational motion to linear motion. they come in several grades and mine are confirmed to be "there are none more precise" grade through empirical measurement. If you want to go more precise you have to go hydrostatic and my Kern comes from a time before Kern went "we have to go hydrostatic."

The purpose of "axial angular contact ball bearings" is to eliminate all backlash. You've got a bearing race on one side, you've got a bearing race on the other side, and by precisely squooshing them together you make sure that the bearing itself never moves while you're moving other stuff. Within normie machine design your normie angular contact ball bearings end up about tight enough because everything else is about tight enough and you get your tenth of a thou or half a thou or thou or ten thou or are-you-fucking-kidding-me twenty thou without resorting to eldritch magic.

The theoretical repeatability on my machine is a quarter of a micron. I will never hit it? Fuck, I have no way to measure it! But I have to try.

I watched a guy "set up" his CNC machine. He's got stepper motors. He has 400 pulses per unit, which is an important number to know, because it tells you how many signals the controller sends the motor to move by any given amount. His 'unit' was millimeters, so is mine. So his machine has 400 increments between 0 mm and 1mm, or every pulse of his controller potentially moves his ball carrier two and a half microns. My machine has 37 million increments on the X, 74 million on the Y and 84 million on the Z. This is mostly useful for things like active noise cancellation, backlash compensation and other DSP-driven accommodations of the limitations of physics. After all, a coronavirus is about a tenth of a micron. The glass scales capable of measuring to a tenth of a micron will tell you that you need climate stability on the order of a tenth of a degree per meter of length if you wish to maintain accuracy. So - the difference between "part made in the morning" and "part made in the afternoon" can be a micron even if everything is mathematically perfect.

There is exactly one legitimate manufacturer of six by nineteen by ten axial angular contact ball bearings. I'm going to guess they manufacture them at the behest of exactly one ball screw manufacturer. And if you need, them, you bloody well need them. I say "legitimate" because I have sourced Chinese counterfeits for a tenth the price. I will not be purchasing them.

Where things get exceptionally stupid is where you start digging into bearing pre-load. See, my little friend wants exactly one newton-meter of preload in order to suck up the backlash. He'll take 1100lb of axial load, which is good because the Z axis has a constant force of 50 lbs against it - this is probably why I need bearings, because the brigand I purchased this machine from did not understand "axial angular contact ball bearing" and redesigned the machine to BYPASS THEM. As a consequence, one of them is annihilated. The other two might not be? But considering the violence they've experienced (going from 8:1 reduction of a 25W motor to direct screw drive by 750W) I'd be a fool to leave them alone.

So okay. How do you put zero point seven foot pounds of preload on a nut? I mean, your typical lockwasher will do more than that. Your typical Nylock will come off with zero point seven foot pounds of preload. We're talking a truly minuscule amount of torque; I have a torque wrench that will measure all the way down to half a newton-meter in hundredth of a newton meter increments because of course I do, I have an Italian hyperbike. But it won't alarm until 1.5 newton-meters. Even at my most ridiculous I'm in the margins.

Fortunately, the bearing is German. There are procedures.

that little guy? My little friend's little friend? Has precisely machined little sawtooth combs inside that are pushed against by precisely machined little set screws. You torque your nut down, and then you affix it with a 2mm allen wrench via axial force. They're pretty dear, too. List is like a hundred bux. And again, I need three.

Did I say things had gotten "exceptionally" stupid? Well they're about to get thunderously stupid. See, d is six, D is sixteen, h is 8. This guy is teeny, tiny too. And yet, you'll note it is not "nut shaped." It is, in fact, a "DIN1810" nut, subject to ISO 2892.2. Should you need to buy one of these, you buy a "KM wrench" where KMxx is like a dress size. KM wrenches range from a KM72, whose outside diameter is an eye-popping 460mm in diameter, all the way down to a KM00, a minuscule 18mm in diameter.

Do you see the problem?

INA didn't. I called them. When I asked what wrench, exactly, they wanted me to turn a 16mm KM nut with, considering the KM spec only goes down to 18mm, they said they'd have to get back to me on that. I suspect there's some AMS socket no one has ever heard of. I did ask if anyone ever bought these magical little friends and they assured me there was an inventory of 126 of them within the continental US so they keep stock for a reason.

I did reassure the engineer on the phone that at the prices I'd been seeing I was unlikely to purchase said wrench (I mistakenly looked up a "KM16" for a 16mm wrench before I figured out the dress-size thing; they're $800). I was far more likely to fish around in my toolbox for an errant abandoned 16mm socket wrench and maul it with a mosquito grinder. But I wanted to know if such a thing existed. My quest was in vein. My cousin, meanwhile, volunteered to maim the socket because the idea of a rednecked harbor freight socket to tighten a $100 nut one newton-meter on a $650 bearing appealed to his sense of the absurd.

At which point I realized that with a given force of one newton-meter I could 3d print something out of ABS that would be ten times as strong as I need. At which point my cousin pointed out I could glob silly putty on the thing, stick a torque wrench in it, hit the whole mess with freeze spray and rest assured that the force had been fully transmitted.

I've accomplished other shit? The auxiliary spindle works? Everything powers up? I haven't started programming it and I'm still missing bits but we're making progress?

And a big part of that progress is truly wrapping my head around buying two thousand dollars worth of bearings and nuts that I can tuck in my cheek.

kleinbl00  ·  302 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: May 31, 2023

Now a networked device

I fucking wept when I showed that off to my wife.

My thinking was the spindles would be a simple wiring matter. Nah. a dozen dual-layer terminal strips and four fucking switches.

Mulling over buying a sound company.

kleinbl00  ·  308 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace

I have been on the ragged edge of doing a dual review: Bill Browder's Red Notice and Adam Curtis' Traumazone. The former is an investment banker's discovery of ethics as he transitions from corporate raider to political dissident; the latter is a skilled but heavy-handed documentarian's near-total removal of his influence over a subject told almost entirely through carefully selected BBC News B-roll of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Browder, notably, doesn't ever figure out that creating a kleptocratic paradise in the ashes of the world's largest state economy might end badly until he finds himself detained by the FSB... and doesn't really seem interested in doing anything about it until his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky is tortured to death. Curtis, on the other hand, rubs your fucking nose in the fact that we spent 10 years whistling past the graveyard, pretending that every warning sign we saw was a blazing red flag prophesying the return of the Tsars.

I think we made the same mistake we made with China: give every advantage of a free market to a market that isn't free and the cagiest and most sophisticated in the ecosystem will make out like bandits while the hoi polloi develops extremely-well-justified hatred for your entire way of life. Browder's book illustrates the Upton Sinclair maxim “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" while Curtis points out just how complicit the rest of the world was in creating the modern failed state of Russia.

kleinbl00  ·  308 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace

Sachs' principle concern is nuclear war and always has been. I wrote him a couple letters arguing with him when he was just a chin-stroking intellectual with a monthly column in Scientific American - at one point even excoriating him for a convenient but wrong interpretation of the Cuban Missile Crisis (which I happen to think was an American blunder in which the world was saved by the Americans backing down) where I was taking the side of the USSR. I think if you start from the viewpoint "Vladimir Putin will end the world on a whim" you end up a lot more sympathetic to Sachs' arguments.

I, on the other hand, doubt Russia has any nukes. They haven't tested anything since 1990 and their arsenal is maintained by the same conscript core that maintains their tires. yeah, they could probably light up their arsenal and get 20-30% non-duds but it took them the better part of 36 hours to be ready to go back when they knew what they were doing. That, combined with an insight into Russian command & control described by Thomas Rid as "exquisite" in reference to the Discord Leaks, lead me to believe that the American optimization on the Ukraine War is "keep them covered and watch them die."

Charitably - I suspect some of the fellow travelers would take an abrupt right turn if they weren't concerned with armageddon. If he were more worried about Ukrainian lives than his own we'd probably agree more.

Geography, Business decisions, social choices and the general development of the United States over the past 100 years have created an environment in which the utility of the automobile is fundamentally unmatched. Banning cars would destroy American society. As it is, access to and control of cars is limited: first you need to buy one. Then it needs to pass a safety inspection. Then you need to license it. Then you need to insure it. Then you, as an operator, need to pass multiple tests in order to operate it. There is an entire subclass of the criminal code (moving violations) that govern the operation of automobiles.

The first car I bought at seventeen cost me $350. It was $200/mo to insure it because I was young. As rudimentary as my driver's ed course was, I still had to attend it. I still had to be supervised. I still had to be tested. By way of comparison, at 18 and one month I drove my car (50 miles round trip) to a trailer park and paid $59 for a Chinese assault rifle. I paid another $39 for 1400 rounds of armor-piercing ammo. I asked the "dealer" if any of this would be reported and he said "I write down your name, put it in a safe and ceremonially burn everything after two years." He never so much as asked to see my license.

I grew up with steering columns that impaled you like a bug in the event of a collision. Lap belts were introduced 8 years before I was born. I remember when three-wheelers were banned. I remember when seat belts became mandatory in my state. I remember the addition of third brake lights. I remember the addition of airbags. I remember the addition of side airbags. I remember the mandating of crumple zones. I remember why Americans hate Ralph Nader:

I'm not quite sure what your point is? But there is absolutely no fucking parallel between automobiles and guns. There never has been, there never will be. Guns have been at about the same level of use safety since the advent of the cartridge. Their misuse safety, on the other hand, has plummeted for purely cultural reasons. The use safety of automobiles, on the other hand, has risen admirably, even if you account for the prevalence of cell phones and distracted driving.

I have also never seen scared racists line up to buy fucking cars.

kleinbl00  ·  323 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: May 10, 2023

wow.

That was extraordinarily frank of HR. "We don't see this situation getting any better? And it's unlikely this organization will ever truly utilize your talents again." By way of comparison the last jobbyjob I had hired a consultant to follow me around for a week to figure out how to do my job cheaper. When they couldn't, they just decided to see what broke by firing me. It cost them $23m.

I don't want to be a downer on this but if this person is telling you "things aren't likely to get better" they are probably planning their own exit, and their replacement will likely be utterly without loyalty. They'll look at what you cost, they'll look at what they need, and they'll recognize they can get a gold star for the quarter by remaindering your ass. So definitely figure things out, definitely give it the time it deserves, but also keep in the back of your mind the reality that your situation is not as stable as it appears.

kleinbl00  ·  323 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: May 10, 2023

It was really vital because the radio station took me from "I'm going to give you $5k a year in sponsorships" to "I'm gonna sell my DDJ400 and never speak your fucking names again" in the space of four hours on Friday.

I wrote a long "what the fuck" email to someone I trust on Monday, got a "fuck off and die then" response and yesterday, called and had two half-hour conversations around "you can't make someone not suck by telling them they suck". Ultimately I must work at the pace of those people bent and broken enough to occupy the center of the Venn diagram of "government employees" "teachers" and "broadcasters." It is a witches' brew of Pareto-Principle underachievement and lethargy and holy fuck it bugs.

But all that had been resolved to "we don't hate you we hate everybody" and "when you tell me three times I'm holding you up I will possibly think about not doing that at some point in the future" to the point where I was actually enjoying being a radio DJ again.

Seeing fuckin' 2300 rivetheads together in a room was sumpin' else.

kleinbl00  ·  325 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: In which NYT reputation rehabs Elizabeth Holmes

I'm a book, two documentaries and a miniseries into Theranos and the clear answer is:

- things were so compartmentalized that no one ever had a clear picture

- anyone who might have a clear picture was fired

- they ran the place like a police state

- fraternization outside staged company events was heartily discouraged

- you took your money and you shut the fuck up

- their NDAs were toothy AF and they were extremely litigious

It was a real Sand Hill Pyongyang kinda place. The Dropout is, if anything, too kind.

kleinbl00  ·  337 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: April 26, 2023

Tell me more about this "far left side of the spectrum." What's on it?

- legalizing weed?

- reproductive rights?

- gun control?

- Student loan forgiveness?

- Medicare for all?

- Climate action?

- transgender rights?

- critical race theory?

There's exactly one issue there that isn't 60% or more favored by the entire mutherfucking country. That one issue? definitely favored by those it affects (people with student loans) who are (a) young (b) democratic. Your whole "extreme leftys" viewpoint could be rewritten as "anyone under 30" who, due to Biden's "extreme left" agenda, actually turned out and voted.

I hate to break this to you but abortion is legal in fight-the-real-enemy Ireland while here in the land of the free, home of the brave, the Republicans are going after no-fault divorce so I'm going to have to ask you to give me that Overton Window back, you've yanked it clear over to "whatever the Republicans do is conservative" rather than "conservative means 'let's not change things'".

"Executive orders" is pure whataboutism and you're better than that. You know it. One party is firmly at "we'll crash the economy to prevent veterans from getting healthcare" while the other is at "let's roll back the AUMF" except no movement on that, we're too busy playing brinksmanship over Judy Blume books. The Judicial is busy going "I am the law", The Legislative is busy going "no money for woke Marines" and the Executive just announced re-election and you're at "the real problem these days, lemme tell ya, executive orders, maaaaan" like you live in some other country or something.

You're gonna vote. You're not gonna vote Trump. And I get that this is all displeasingly lolbrooks academic to you but some of us are already underground railroading misoprostil so get your cranking out of your system and rejoin the human race. You wanna bitch about executive orders? Work towards functional legislative and judicial branches.

kleinbl00  ·  374 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Colorado River Is Running Dry, but Nobody Wants to Talk About the Mud

Marc Reisner pointed out in 1986 that the most prominent archeological evidence of Americans on this continent is silted-out dams. His forward for the book posits an alien race far in the future that will deduce we were waterfall worshipers, considering how many we will have created.

    In 1963, humans stopped time, when the brand new Glen Canyon Dam on the Utah-Arizona border cut off the reddish sediment that naturally eroded the Grand Canyon. Today the river runs vodka clear from the base of the dam.

The destruction of the Glen Canyon Dam is the main through-line of Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang. One of the characters, "Seldom Seen" Smith, is a bigamous jack mormon whose family farm was condemned and inundated at the dam's creation. Abbey was inspired to write Monkey Wrench Gang by a mysterious crime wave around Albuquerque NM in the '60s, when billboards along I-25 and I-40 spontaneously combusted, forcing the outdoor advertising companies to resort to steel construction. He hypothesized Doc Sarvis and Bonnie Abzug without knowing how close he was with Bonnie, anyway... in real life, the lady burning down billboards on the outskirts of town was my mother.

    Each day on average for the past 60 years, the equivalent of 61 supersize Mississippi River barge-loads of sand and mud have been deposited there. The total accumulation would bury the length of Manhattan to a depth of 126 feet — close to the height of a 12-story building.

Reisner points out that the Army Corps of Engineers has long recognized that the life span of any given dam is 50-80 years, depending on weather conditions... but because of the bureaucratic framework of the ACE, "50-80 years" counts as "eternal" for bookkeeping purposes.

    The bureau recently issued ideas to create new outlets for lake water at lower elevations in the dam so it can keep producing power and delivering water to users in the Southwest, Mexico and California. But there’s only one modification that would actually solve the sediment problem: boring two tunnels at the base of the dam, one at grade level with the riverbed. That would kill the reservoir but allow sediment to pass downstream. The bureau said this option had been discussed, but “not further considered.”

It is always discussed whenever a dam silts up, and is promptly rejected because any tunnel you dig will also silt up. The only way to fix a silted dam is to drain it, dismantle it, dig it out and rebuild it. This never happens because it's far more expensive than just abandoning the dam and building another one somewhere else. The trail of dead left by the Army Corps of Engineers is where most of the dam removal projects find fertile ground: it's a rare working dam that is removed, while silted over nightmares can generally be pulled out with nothing more than a fuckton of privately-sourced money.

    Mr. DeHoff noted that the Bureau of Reclamation regularly monitored sediment in the early years of the reservoir. But it stopped in the wet years of the 1980s, saying it would take 7 centuries for Lake Powell to fill with soil.

Ahhh yes, the '80s.

A controversy erupted after a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in September 1983, when Watt mocked affirmative action with his description of a department coal leasing panel: "I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent."

    Mr. DeHoff of the Returning Rapids Project thinks the nutrient-rich sediment should be allowed to pass through a decommissioned Glen Canyon Dam, on to Lake Mead, where it could be shipped to farmers in places like California’s Imperial Valley.

Unfortunately the nutrients are soluble. The sediment is not. Silt is mostly sand, which is why the mud is so treacherous. Constant underwater flows generally separate the constituent mud into gravel, sand, decomposing organic matter and chemical compounds. The organic matter and compounds make it to the ocean, that's what makes deltas so lovely. Gravel generally gets left in the slow spots. Sand? Sand builds up in cataracts. A dam is a man-made cataract.

    Jack Schmidt, director of the Center for Colorado River Studies at Utah State University, warns this is impossible, given the volume of mud. His solution? Move the sediment further downriver. That will be very expensive — in the tens of billions of dollars. Moving sediment through the dams involves dredging or piping sand and mud long distances. And the dam itself would have to be redesigned to allow silt to pass through it.

This design does not exist, has never existed and will never exist. It is possible to design a catchment basin to minimize the silt accumulated but you can no more make a dam that won't silt than you can make a filter that won't clog.

    For now, the Bureau of Reclamation isn’t commenting on draining Lake Powell.

Do you want to be the guy who says "we expect you to be the Salton Sea pretty soon?"

    It does have the expertise to decommission Glen Canyon Dam today, and begin studying how to move sediment downriver through the dams. It will take years to implement any plan.

Churchill figured out how to decommission dams with a quickness.

    Lake Powell, I believe, is the one that should be drained. And then Glen Canyon should be declared a national park. It was the most beautiful stretch of the Colorado River, and if we allow nature to do its work, the entire canyon would return to what it looked like in Eliot Porter’s book.

Ultimately? We probably shouldn't have so many people inhabiting the Great American Desert.

WSJ has been trying to fetch the word "Richcession" into existence for a few months now. Broader point is that the bad economics of this particular moment are tilted much more towards the 1%, rather than the 99%.

Know the last time the word "anti-trust" was used in a state of the union speech? 2023. Know the time before that? 1979. If I were a democratic strategist, and I were looking to not give the former Tea Party any fuckin' leverage in this moment, I would let the banks eat shit. Each and every one of them. I would throw them into receivership, I would pay out my FDIC deposits on that tiny splinter faction of America that has less than two hundred and fucking fifty thousand dollars in their checking account and I would dare the Republicans to defend Chinese venture capital at the expense of medicaid and student loans.

There aren't any laws being broken here, just bad decisions. Capitalism is the freedom to make bad decisions. Schumpeter called it "creative destruction" and it's the same thing that let Uber briefly out-price taxis, that let AirBnB briefly out-price hotels.

You only have to look back fifteen years to see what happens when you don't make banks face consequences. You lose Congress and you sow dragon's teeth. Since a thunderous amount of bailout money went to people who didn't need it, who put it in banks that didn't need it, who shored it up with assets that they knew would suck, this is just financial Ouruboros.

let the bodies hit the floor

kleinbl00  ·  387 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Cult of the January 6 Martyrs

I wonder how much the judgment would matter to Comcast/Charter/Etc's carry packages. Fox is a net loss from an advertising standpoint; at this point if Comcast were to decide you need to opt in to buy Fox News they'd be dead in six months.

There will come a time when the country has decided Fox is too toxic to be subsidized and when that happens it will vanish with a quickness. Really, the only thing that gives them an edge over NewsMax or NRATV is legacy.

kleinbl00  ·  388 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Soviet Venus Images

“I witnessed how disappointed the scientists were when they did not find life on Venus. Two of them even said that their lives had been in vain as it was only this dream that had brought them into science in the first place... By the way, one of them later became a clergyman,” space journalist Vladimir Gubarev recalled in his book.

The American scientific community was baffled by the Soviet attention to Venus. One of the pet theories at Los Alamos National Labs was that the Soviets were conducting atmospheric nuclear tests on the far side where Americans couldn't analyze them, which does a lot more to illustrate Cold War paranoia than anything else.

kleinbl00  ·  399 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Stephen Wolfram: What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?

Stephen Wolfram is really great to hear from on this discussion because he's been tricking computers into doing useful things for 40 years while this entire enterprise is tricking computers into doing impressive things.

I did a pre-engineering curriculum that used Mathematica and Matlab. I transferred to an engineering curriculum that used Excel. I had about two months worth of "I have made a terrible mistake" followed by "this is a clown show" followed by "well fuck it's mostly just picking parts out of McMaster-Carr anyway" but I died a little inside.

Nobody I went to school with had the first clue how to work Matlab. They'd never heard of Mathematica. But oh shit - give 'em something tricky and they'd show you how to use Solver! Brute force that fucker, go get some coffee and use the sum of your college experience to that point to determine whether or not the answer was bullshit.

Most of them couldn't tell.

You can't type gibberish into Wolfram Alpha. You will ask it a properly formatted question or it will give you a bad answer. It'll give you plenty of tips as to how to ask good questions, and they really want to convert you to the Church of Getting It? But they won't hold your hand.

Microsoft, Google and OpenAI won't even show you the context.

kleinbl00  ·  401 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Case for Hanging Out

    Sheila excels at hanging out, and that’s not purely a matter of extroversion—it’s not only about the accident of personality. Despite the drinks we’d consumed, it’s not about the lowering of inhibitions either. She works at it—she puts effort into this seemingly effortless phenomenon. Sheila and Dave have constructed a schedule, a way of viewing the world, and even a home that’s conducive to hanging out, because to be a person who cares about hanging out means building a life that nurtures this passion. It means making space in your day to day for hanging out, sometimes at the expense of productivity.

A formative book in my life:

This is not a book about making movies, or writing movies, or selling movies. This is a book about turning yourself into a mercenary starfucker, a how-to manual for self-SammyGlickification. It includes endearing strategies such as:

- never drink tap water

- always hang up first

- if someone else is on their cell phone at the table, you damn well better also be on your cell phone

- have a favorite table at a favorite restaurant and always tip well so that you will always be seated there

- Spend whatever rent you would have for somewhere nice on a car that looks impressive

- never show anyone where you live

The fundamental argument is that nobody in LA can actually afford a life, therefore you must do what is necessary to portray yourself as someone who looks like they can afford a life. This was 23 years ago, mind you.

I rejected this advice wholesale. First apartment I had in LA had room for people to sit. It was a shithole in North Hollywood. The ones I let my wife live in, though, were great for entertaining. The ability to have people over counts for a lot and we did it all the time.

But everyone has roommates now. And nobody has any space. And houses are out of reach. And all our friends are online. So any actual in-person gathering has become a ritualized, formalized affair in neutral territory.

let's go older

    RELIGION. Religious affiliation is by far the most common associational membership among Americans. Indeed, by many measures America continues to be (even more than in Tocqueville's time) an astonishingly "churched" society. Yet religious sentiment in America seems to be becoming somewhat less tied to institutions and more self-defined. The 1960s witnessed a significant drop in weekly churchgoing--from roughly 48 percent in the late 1950s to roughly 41 percent in the early 1970s. Since then, it has stagnated or (according to some surveys) declined still further.

    UNION MEMBERSHIP. For many years, labor unions provided one of the most common organizational affiliations among American workers. Yet union membership has been falling for nearly four decades, with the steepest decline occurring between 1975 and 1985. By now, virtually all of the explosive growth in union membership that was associated with the New Deal has been erased.

    PTAs. The parent-teacher association (PTA) has been an especially important form of civic engagement in twentieth-century America because parental involvement in the educational process represents a particularly productive form of social capital. It is, therefore, dismaying to discover that participation in parent-teacher associations has dropped drastically over the last generation, from more than 12 million in 1964 to barely 5 million in 1982 before recovering to approximately 7 million now.

    VOLUNTEERING. Next, we turn to evidence on membership in (and volunteering for) civic and fraternal organizations. These data show some striking patterns. First, membership in traditional women's groups has declined more or less steadily since the 1960s. For example, membership in the national Federation of Women's Clubs is down by more than half (59 percent) since 1964, while membership in the League of Women Voters (LWV) is off 42 percent since 1969. Similar reductions are apparent in the numbers of volunteers for mainline civic organizations, such as the Boy Scouts (off by 26 percent since 1970) and the Red Cross (off by 61 percent since 1970). At all educational (and hence social) levels of American society, and counting all sorts of group memberships, the average number of associational memberships has fallen by about a fourth over the last quarter century.

    The most whimsical yet discomfiting bit of evidence of social disengagement in contemporary America that I have discovered is this: more Americans are bowling today than ever before, but bowling in organized leagues has plummeted in the last decade or so. Between 1980 and 1993, the total number of bowlers in America increased by 10 percent, while league bowling decreased by 40 percent. (Lest this be thought a wholly trivial example, I should note that nearly 80 million Americans went bowling at least once during 1993,nearly a third more than voted in the 1994 congressional elections.)

    The rise of solo bowling threatens the livelihood of bowling-lane proprietors because those who bowl as members of leagues consume three times as much beer and pizza as solo bowlers, and the money in bowling is in the beer and pizza, not the balls and shoes. The broader social significance, however, lies in the social interaction and even the occasionally civic conversations over beer and pizza that solo bowlers forgo.

(the book was originally a very short article)

Articles like these bring me a melancholy joy because on the one hand, yeah, hang out more. On the other hand, they make you feel guilty for not just hanging out more without acknowledging that "hanging out" is economically and logistically untenable and has become more so with every passing year.

    I can’t be the only one for whom memories of ages 16 to, say, 25 consist mostly of sitting around bedrooms, crappy dorm rooms, and crappier apartments, doing nothing much at all.

The bedroom is now shared with Nana, the crappy dorm room is part of a $20k/yr experience and the apartment is $1800/mo.

Link related

kleinbl00  ·  404 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A post for chat gpt  ·  

(rolls eyes)

(sighs)

(pours cup of coffee)

So look. Once upon a time, American conservatives believed in welfare. Conservatives believed that if you wanted to see what capitalism could do, your best move was to unchain your captains of industry from the social morass. It's not that conservatives liked poor people, it's that they figured the whole point of government was to get the waste people out of the way of the ubermensch. That all changed with William F. Buckley and The National Review, and it all changed with Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged.

Buckley was the son of an oil magnate who did well in the Mexican coup of 1914. Rand was the daughter of a pharmacist in St. Petersberg who did poorly in the October Revolution. Buckley was of the opinion that the rich owed poor people in general nothing, and poor brown people less than nothing. Rand was of the opinion that poor people will come with guns and take away everything so get yours and defend it with your life.

But you can't say that without circumlocuting around it so they invented a whole new language for "fuck poor people." They smothered it in intellectualism, terminology, metaphor. What, according to Rand's biographers, is Objectivism? "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute". Buckley, for his part, burst onto the scene by claiming that Yale was full of godless communists who refused to let good Christians practice their god-given selfishness.

Sometimes they let the mask slip. Rand called John F. Kennedy a fascist for coming up with the Peace Corps. During the '80s, the most outwardly flagrant decade of "objectivism" or "compassionate conservatism" or whatever, Ivan Boesky said "Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.”

The thing is? It's nothing but intellectualized selfishness. It is the core principle that you are the center of the universe, you should own it, and you should expect everyone else to do the same. Rand called it "the Virtue of Selfishness" and "objectivists" spent the next sixty years arguing about whether she really meant "selfishness" because it's really hard to see "selfishness" (or "greed" for that matter) as anything but a pejorative. Rand didn't give a fuck, she was on the losing side of The Terrors.

Objectivism is this thing teenagers fuck around with because teenagers are isolated, pampered and circumscribed by more rules than adults. In general, objectivism goes by the wayside as soon as your place in society becomes rewarding but some people get stuck.

If the only place you have friends is online discussion forums, you are more likely to get stuck.

Yudikowsky is younger than I am. He caught that tail end when things were switching from UseNet to MySpace. Usenet had no formatting and the only thing you could distinguish yourself with was your ability to argue; MySpace had pictures so it was all over as far as nerd culture was concerned. IN MY OPINION this drove the can't-get-laid types deeper underground where the only place they could find any friends was among themselves. And, since "themselves" were generally over-clever, socially-awkward people who didn't get invited to parties, I-Me-Mine became the obvious guide star. You can't talk about Reagan, though, that's what your parents are doing. And you can reference Rand but you're doing something new and exciting. And nobody will listen to you but your online friends so you basically go Philosophical Incel.

Incels can't get laid not because they suck at life but because there's something wrong with women. Objectivists can't get ahead not because they lack the empathy that most people use to form bonds but because society is broken. And, much like Incels sprayed all over society with GamerGate and Elliott Roger and Enrique Tarrio and all that bullshit, the Objectivists gave us LessWrong and SlateStarCodex and Nick Land and latter-day accelerationism and this whole constellation of entitled white bullshit. If you want to see what that looks like among the dipshits who aren't posturing intellectuals, this is the book. If you want to see what it looks like among the dipshits who are?

Look. The protective coloration used these days is "effective altruism.". Here's how that works:

    Effective altruism emphasizes impartiality and the global equal consideration of interests when choosing beneficiaries. This has broad applications to the prioritization of scientific projects, entrepreneurial ventures, and policy initiatives estimated to save the most lives or reduce the most suffering.

Sounds great, right? It's altruism, but it's effective, because you're being impartial! You're saving the most lives! You're reducing the most suffering! And you're doing it this way because you know better!

The definition of "effective" and "altruism" is just as tortured as "selfishness" was under the Objectivists. Hitler was an "effective" "altruist" because humanity would benefit from a world without Jews, since Jews were inferior. The living standards in the United States and Australia are substantially better now than they were when the place was full of aboriginals, and so much more population is supported - objectively speaking, genocide is good! Can't say that out loud, though. Far better to spreadsheet that shit so you can talk about which genocides you can slow down with the least amount of intervention.

Here's the problem. They all want to be Hugo Drax. That's the whole schtick. Elon Musk moving to Mars. Peter Thiel on his tropical island. They know better than you - they are "less wrong" - and obviously only the most credible rubes believe in a second coming while true geniuses know that it's the AI we have to worry about.

And I wouldn't give a shit? Here's the punchline about Roko's Basilisk.

...see, that's Harlan Ellison's most famous story. "Roko" was fucking trolling. "There's nothing to attract a troll quite like a posturing pseudointellectual who thinks he knows better than everyone else," he said, tongue-in-cheek. But you either learn from that?

Or you give Sam Bankman Fried billions of dollars.

    For as much good as I see in that movement, it’s also become apparent that it is deeply immature and myopic, in a way that enabled Bankman-Fried and Ellison, and that it desperately needs to grow up. That means emulating the kinds of practices that more mature philanthropic institutions and movements have used for centuries, and becoming much more risk-averse. EA needs much stronger guardrails to prevent another figure like Bankman-Fried from emerging — and to prevent its tenets from becoming little more than justifications for malfeasance.

Fundamentally? It is now, has always been and shall always be "It's okay that I'm a selfish fuck because I'm smarter than you." In any reasonable society that gets you pilloried. In shareholder capitalism that gets you a board seat.

And that's why it will never be okay.

There's a few things going on here:

1) History has never not been controversial... except for that glorious shining 40 years between Watergate and 9-11 in which white people managed to convince other white people that racism had been solved. Even in the middle of that we had A People's History of the United States and Lies my Teacher Told me. During that period the party line on Reconstruction was "things were complicated but it all worked out fine, just fine" (it did not work out fine and "genocide is something Europeans used to do."

2) History has always been utilized to justify current politics. Edward Said's whole point was that Europeans only study other cultures to justify their sense of superiority and only apply the frames of other cultures for their "otherness." Wallerstein noted that in studying sociology or anthropology, the only cultures studied are "nulls" where the object under scrutiny is so primitive and disconnected from other cultures as to disregard all influence other than that of the researchers. First Gibbon then Toynbee then the Durants created a narrative that goes "Minoa, Greece, Rome, darkness, Enlightenment, culture" without noting that "Rome" decamped to Byzantium after Constantine, without noting that everything we know about the Romans and Greeks we know because the Arabs and Persians skipped that whole "darkness" bit and without noting that Sumeria predated Minoa by an easy thousand years. That's an uninterrupted stream of perspective from Gibbon's first publication in 1776 to the Durants' last in 1975.

3) Collegiate expenses suffered a historic expansion from 1992-2008 due to aggressive financialization and a glut of degree seekers from 2008 due to soft jobs conditions. They started experiencing historic contractions in 2017 when Trump came to office and forced out or discouraged foreign participation, the only demographic that pays full price in the US.

Worthy of note - Zinn taught poly sci, not history. Loewen taught high school. From a position of pedigree, Bill O'Reilly has more business writing history (BA, Marist University) than Shelby Foote (dropout, UNC Chapel Hill) Nikole Hannah-Jones has no credentials in history, but then, the most important historical document of the past few years was in the paper, not academia. WEB DuBois had more historical cred than the rest of these people combined and he, too, had to write in the paper, not academia because, frankly, his writings didn't support the predominant narrative.

Gibbon wrote about a Rome that was a thousand years dead and yet, over the past two hundred years, plenty of new perspectives have been shed. Paul Kriwaczek has shed new light on the Babylonians despite the fact that they've been gone for two thousand years. I think it's a decidedly "associate professor" take to presume that just because there are fewer tenure track history professorships available there will be less history studied. I think it's more accurate to say that there will be a less homogeneous narrative which, in my opinion, is a very good thing indeed.

kleinbl00  ·  458 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: IT DIDN'T HAPPEN HERE  ·  

Whelp, I think Consequence 1 is that the State Department and CIA will never let Russia be a world power again. The fact that the neocons allowed Russia to regain enough power to place a useful idiot in the oval office will forever inoculate the Gray Men from allowing politicians to set policy. The CIA gets their teddy bear back - "destruction of the Former Soviet Union" has been on their wishlist since they checked off "Destruction of the Soviet Union". I don't know that they'll succeed but between the Magnitsky Act, the Bucket'O'Sanctions and the half-tithe we're spending to decimate the Russian military five times over, I know it's rough for Russia.

I think it will take several electoral cycles for Teh Crazeh to burn itself out in the Republican Party, but burn itself out it will. People forget: the number one requirement for Republicans has been LOYALTY since Newt Gingrich and we've seen the logical outcome of that. The era of Mitch McConnell is over; Democrats gained more seats than gerrymandering could protect, and Biden has nominated more judges than Trump as anyone with any character basically went "four more years" during the Trump Era. You can see this playing out in the Boebert Vs. Green debacle as the former nearly lost to a progressive Democrat while the latter handily beat her centrist challenger - Boebert now has to worry about actual voters while Green has to worry about even crazier morons to her right primarying her.

I think the cost of opportunism has been demonstrated for all far and wide. You can be Jason Miller? But all that's left for you is stand-ups on a hated network for old people whose only advertiser is a coke-addled pillow salesman. When all the world is leaning into ESG and everyone around you had a choice between ethics or opportunism, your scarlet letter is never going away. You know how Snowden shocked the world with all his revelations about the NSA? Ten years previously all that shit was called Total Information Awareness. Know what drove TIA underground? The whole country going "oh fuck not John Poindexter again." And that was effectively before social media, an era before teenaged citizen journalists could supercut your transgressions while bored. You can no more get history off the internet than you can get piss out of a swimming pool, and the whole of the Trump Posse Baby Ruthed the fuck out of that watering hole.

I think Jared Kushner is now Our Man in Riyadh. I think MBS went "I am the despot now" and the CIA went "fine, we see how well flattery works, we've got our own Donald Trump now." People forget - Donald Trump went "Jared is going to fix the Middle East" and by damn if Jared Kushner didn't somehow normalize relations to the point where you can fly direct from Riyadh to Tel Aviv now. Do I think Jared Kushner had anything to do with this? No I do not. The man's COVID solution was Facebook. But I think MBS doesn't give a shit about Palestine and the CIA went "we'll fund that emotion" and here we are. Will he still turn up drowned off the Canary Islands like Robert Maxwell? I sincerely hope so. But not while he's still a useful idiot. At its most cynical level, the murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi sent a message to the CIA as to how MBS intended to run the country, and from a CIA standpoint, it wasn't particularly expensive or damaging - compare and contrast with Iran.

As far as consequences for Donald Trump? Whelp, he's likely got federal charges lined up against him, his extremely shady taxes are public, and at least two states are lined up for criminal and civil charges related to a smorgasbord of shady shit. And there is no disinfectant like sunlight.

I think he's got five, six years of ignominy left. I don't know if he'll ever serve time. I know we'll be talking about it until he fucking dies, which is extremely tedious, but objectively speaking, the man is a historical figure. He matters more than George Wallace, Herbert Hoover or Richard Nixon. He's up there with John Wilkes Booth as far as I'm concerned.

We have been worried about a man like Donald Trump since before he was born. It has always been up to question what would happen if a legitimate challenge to democracy were to arise - how fragile is the republic, really?

I believe we have our answer.

One thing about our Mennonite form of government: it doesn't move quickly. There are many faster, more agile implementations of democracy in the world and while they're clearly better at coming up with things like universal healthcare, they also give you things like Brexit and Hugo Chavez.

Which is not to say it won't happen again. But a whole lot of Donald Trump's maneuverability was due to the element of surprise. You can attack Pearl Harbor twice but it won't do nearly as much. History doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme? And Donald Trump was what happens when George Wallace or Huey Long don't get shot, frankly. I don't know what that means for the future? But I know it'll be generations before anyone allows another Donald Trump to happen.

kleinbl00  ·  463 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: December 21, 2022  ·  

I'm sure there are people who can make open relationships work. I'll just say that in the 30 years I have been peripheral to the polyamorous community I have never once met one. More than that, nobody griefs quite like polys. Every anecdote I have about a bad breakup - every single one, except with the guy who is a diagnosed sociopath - involves a joint decision to fuck other people. The bitterest humans I know are the ones who tried to make open relationships work.

Quoth lil:

    If monogamy is not based on the desire and joy in being together, then it’s control.

"Monogamy" can be substituted out of that sentence with no difficulty whatsoever. Polyamory, chess, bass fishing.

"I want to explore my sexuality" is a very, VERY different statement than "I want to explore my sexuality with you." Recognize that she is saying "I am offering you no commitments" and that is literally all she is saying. Recognize that she is laying the groundwork for "I owe you fuckall behaviorally speaking" and gird your loins for it. You will suck at this. I say this because I know you.

Your best move is to say "come find me when you've figured it out, because you matter to me more than I matter to you right now and I'm not going to put up with that."

Li'l story. I've known my wife since 1994. She literally gave me my dorm key. And within a week she was dating this other guy. Dated him for five years. Married him. Stayed married to him for two years. Then got sick of his shit and kicked him out. He was literally the only person she ever dated.

And we started dating, and she said a few things about having never really dated, and wanting to maybe figure out what that looked like, and I was kinda cool with it, and she had a party with a group of friends, one of whom, like me, wanted to date her earlier but couldn't, and I thought "I owe her this" and then I immediately thought "no, no I don't" and came right back to the house having left and kicked his ass out.

We'd been "dating" for two weeks at the time. That was more than twenty years ago.

A serial monogamist who was married for six years doesn't need to figure out her shit at your expense. You can be cool with it? But you won't be happy about it. And she won't respect you.

CANCEL AWAY FUCKERS

kleinbl00  ·  480 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: I feel like we need to talk about AI language models

You know what's a very useful tool for a very small group of people? 3d printers. I own two. Right now one of them is spooling out a cryptex for my daughter's birthday. The other one hasn't been used in a while because it's primarily useful for turning digital designs into wax for casting in metal. The cheez whiz guy was mostly bought for fixturing but as soon as I had it I discovered that I could make entire cable runs and solenoid fixtures and sensor adaptors and stuff with it? Boy howdy I now have opinions about filament. The goop guy was bought entirely for casting. That's not how most people use them, though. Cheez whiz printers are mostly used for making tacky crap your wife could buy off of Amazon for half the price. Goop printers are mostly used for making orcs with tits to use in your Warhammer campaign. I can't think of any of my friends, colleagues or associates to whom I would say "buy a 3d printer."

how much did you need a natural language processor anyway?

I've been researching bringing an AI onto our website. We need it for scheduling. There's this whole iterative goal-seeking mess whereby the clinician has X subset of appointments available and the patient has Y subset of availability for appointments. Finding the X-Y Venn diagram sweet spot is an iterative process whereby our receptionists play Battleship over the phone. AI sits there and does the mindless job of matching schedules, thereby freeing up my receptionists for problems that actually require intelligence.

Do I want AI to do all our scheduling? Hell nah, not even if it could. I want it to do the tedious goal-seeking BS.

I saw a thing on Twitter a couple-three days ago where a programmer wrote a piece of gmail middleware for a developmentally-disabled friend with a landscaping business. The friend types some halting language in response to an email, that email passes through GPT-3, the client sees formal, gramatically-correct business language. The guy with the disability has no problems mowing lawns and pruning trees but his written language skills have been an impediment. Likewise, if English is not your first language and you need to do a lot of conversing, models such as this go a long way towards leveling the playing field.

Look at it this way: this technology allows you to create a context-sensitive instruction manual. "I have six screws left and the door is wonky what do I do." It allows you to half-ass recipes: "I have eggs, milk and flour and want pancakes, what else do I need and in what proportions." It allows you to freeball your layover: "I have eight hours at Logan International what do most people do for fun on a Tuesday in Boston." Will it do any of this stuff perfectly? Hell nah. Will it do it better than asking random strangers? Probably not. But it will do it better than not asking at all and with a barrier to entry this low, that's not nuthin'.

    imagine a social media that's 80% propaganda bots powered by AI language models?

I doubt we need to imagine it. It's coming. Thing of it is, though, this isn't an AI problem it's a social media problem. All social media networks aren't profitable enough to pay for moderation, and the only remuneration available is through extremely low-value advertising. As such, social media reflects the incentives.

"Perfect Nazi garbage for everyone" changes the incentives, principally by diluting the value of the network and suppressing the value of advertising. If these models end up choking the arteries of Facebook and Twitter like a platter of bacon cheeseburgers I will dance a goddamn jig.

The content on social media from people you don't know is already valueless. It's already generic garbage. It's already useless. If it can be deprecated to the point where there's no reason to show it to others? We all win.

kleinbl00  ·  484 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: November 30, 2022

Then come up with an additional color for the hubwheel so we can tell the difference between comment and PM replies, please.

kleinbl00  ·  491 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: October 23, 2022

October huh