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Story time!

I do not write for Marvel or DC.

(Let's leave aside the time I had a close escape from writing Iron Man—back in 2005—but was offered a couple of book contracts just in time: Tony Stark is not my favourite superhero.)

(Also, the rest of this blog post will make no sense whatsoever unless you are at least minimally familiar with Batman and his frenemies.)

Anyway ... a couple of days ago I tripped over a tweet:

"The Joker should have been a woman. And she finally went insane because too many random dudes told her to smile, so now she perpetually smiles while terrorizing Gotham."

The author, Geraldine DeRuiter, explains the context here; I can relate, and I don't even have ovaries, let alone a head full of wasps.

It's a good and worthy idea and WHY AREN'T DC HUNTING DOWN GERALDINE AND OFFERING HER A CONTRACT RIGHT NOW, but it's her story to tell, not mine.

However, this morning I saw another tweet that went viral a day or two ago, commenting on a job advert for hotel staff. The tweet consisted of screencaps, so here's the text from the ad:




Radisson RED Glasgow - Food and Drink

WE CONNECT WITH THAT AGELESS MILLENNIAL MINDSET AND BELIEVE THAT HOTELS CAN ENHANCE THEIR WORLD VIA ART, MUSIC, FASHION AND A DISTINCTIVE CONNECTION

Radisson RED sees things differently. We don't have 'staff' we have 'Creatives'.

CREATIVE (Food & Drink Assistants)

  • Present; in the soul of house, in the action, happy moving from the RED Sky Bar alive with music, to the events area and a book reading, over to the lobby where a group are looking for a restaurant recommendation. The phone rings reservation, you've got it and now you are flipping an omelette, catch it! This place is alive and you love it. Smile. Photo.

  • Throughout the hotel you make it clean, cook on the stoves, serve the coffees, shake the cocktails, book tours, make reservations and check guests. Always laughing with guests, playing the odd game and even a little bit of mischief now and again, but that's generally OK, at RED we demand it.

Are you READY? So, tell us. Show us. Make us smile. Use your phone and send us a video clip/a selfie/photos/an Instagram link ... anything giving us insight into why you're ready to welcome the world to the RED side.

Come join us and Make Every Moment Matter and make RED the place to be in (City).




After I got over the fit of existential despair induced by this brilliant piece of ironic dystopian micro-fiction, a series of thoughts occurred to me.

Starting with: this job advert is my Joker's origin story in a nutshell.

I'm mortified to admit that I've stayed in that hotel a couple of times. What can I say? It's in the center of Glasgow, really convenient for Queen Street railway station, and a handy crash-space after an evening at a gig or a pub or literary event.

The ad paints a slightly misleading picture of the place. The RED chain are low-budget art themed hotels; they feel like the inside of a bored advertising executive's head after one Diet Coke too many, all cold angles and zebra-striped decor, cunningly contrived to flatter the guest's sense of their own unique cookie-cutter originality. In other words, as pretentious, upbeat, and wanky as their copywriter's prose.

Anyway: This is the Joker's origin story. Transplant the hotel from Glasgow to Gotham City: it's not a great frame-shift. I've always visualized Gotham as like Glasgow, only with skyscrapers and American cops and a little less rain and darkness.

My version of the Joker could be male, could be female, but is definitely millennial.

He, she, they, or xe really wanted to be an artist. Grew up in a depressed town in northern England (quite possibly Scarfolk), but scrimped, saved, and eventually went to university to study art: success, yes? But no. The Joker simply couldn't wrap their head around the compulsory Business Studies side of the degree they'd gotten into—compulsory because the admissions committee at Glasgow School of Art was repelled by their resume, so they ended up at the former Poly on a Commercial Art and Business Studies course. Eventually the Joker dropped out of school with a mountain of student debt and no job-entitlement sheepskin.

It's not their fault that, aged 18, they didn't understand the script they'd been handed. The course they signed up for was designed to churn out cheap animators for the games industry, copywriters for hotel chain job adverts, commercial artists to illustrate cup-a-soup packets. Nobody wanted the Joker's elaborate blueprints for escape rooms with guillotine blades embedded in the sash windows and electrified bedknobs. Nor could the Joker get a job as a commercial artist—word got around fast after Grant Morrison took out a restraining order, and the Alan Moore electric chair diorama didn't make them any friends either.

After being forced onto Universal Credit, the RED advert was their last chance hotel, so to speak. Highly motivated, the Joker aced the application process: after all, they wanted 'Creatives', not 'staff'.

"Make us smile!"

The Joker made it work for nearly three months.

Then, after one corporate-standard smile too many, the Joker cracked. And out came the escape room blueprints and the power tools ...

1157 Comments

1:

brilliant, absolutely brilliant!

2:

Or anything else AT ALL that involves the supposed "creative thinking" used by the MBA's behind this wankin g. If you REALLY want to save thr planet,exterminate all MBA's & the even worse tossers promoting this trash. We've been gi=oing on about coprate greed wrecking the planet ... & the, erm, "mindset" behund MBA's is a very large part of it, including using people as interchngeable & worse, disposable.

3:

Yes, I agree (and with the article, except for the gender blindness). I (and some other men I know) can witness the misery of constantly being told to smile, especially when one is depressed or otherwise unhappy for good reasons. No, it's NOT limited to women.

4:

So anyway, Glaswegian Batman villains.

Mister Freeze - Inspired by Lord Kelvin, tries to reach absolute zero, it goes wrong, gets caught up in the Ice Cream Van Wars in the 80s

Calendar Man - No real change, but has more love for Hogmanay, Burns Night and St Andrews than the standard version

Vandal Savage - has been at the university of Glasgow since it was founded, probably behind all the weird experiments going on there (Poison Ivy, Man-Bat etc)

Two Face - Supports Rangers or Celtic depending on which side of his personality is dominating

5:

Anyone who has to work full time with customers and pretend to be happy, helpful and caring has daydreams about running amok with a machete or something, of course. Given Jack Nicolson's roles as the Joker and in The Shining, I can see this very easily

https://youtu.be/fLEdpDpoTTA

Heeeere's Joker!

6:

(Obsessing over the wrong detail) What I find intriguing is that it's Radisson Red, sorry - RED there. Here (Ireland) we get Radisson Blu (sic) plus a number of higher grade places. Plus apparently they're effectively franchises. R-SAS employs the general manager but a lot of the rest is with the hotel owner.

(Vague effort to return to the topic) Not Glasgow, but it occurs to me that you could gender-flip another bat-villain, Poison IV as the fourth son of a certain Tory with an interest in either chemistry or agriculture.

7:

Yep, Radisson have a number of chains with distinctive corporate identity branding. RED is their stab at the arty boutique hotel market; Blu is more generic.

Fourth son of a certain Tory—which one, may I ask?

8:

Yeah, the only Radisson I've ever been in was the "Non-Euclidian" at Thiefrow. And yet another anodyne corporate chain hotel. Other than "because MBAs and/or marketing people" why do they even bother to pretend to be different?

9:

That's a Radisson Edwardian, not the same thing at all! (Same owners, though.) Targets the soulless luxury airport hotel market—competing with Hilton, Marriot, et al.

10:

why do they even bother to pretend to be different?

Basically, because they hope to get more of the total market by tweaking the formula in different directions, and then branding those different variants so people know what to expect. Your Radisson Edwardian and your Park Inn may be owned by the same mega corporation, but you'll get different guests in them, at different prices.

11:

I am trying hard not to get derailed into a discussion of the role of Hotelspace in the Laundry Files at this point ...

12:

I have no experience of either, specifically, but usually such a branding variation is like applying a different style of makeup to a different (modern) breed of pig, and much the same applies to the customers, er, guests.

13:

Dear me, this gave me a flashback to walking past a gathering of newly-minted MBAs at work, on my way out of the Manchester Business School canteen (decent enough grub, but you'd be wise to keep a bottle of Tabasco on your person just in case).

It honestly looked for all the world like a cloning operation had been running, and this collection of cloned MBAs had been sternly informed that although they were supposed to maintain correct, approved business attire at all times, they were also to have one of the approved list of distinguishing features in order to show a carefully-calculated sign of free-spiritedness.

So, each identikit MBA had one of "small pony-tail", "earring (small, silver, no gems permitted)", "beard (sub-type 'missed a bit shaving') and so on. It was deeply depressing, and to a student of human behaviour, very very amusing.

14:

Yes, as well as the Non-Euclidean, I've stayed in the Thiefrow Park Lane (and some of you already knew that). Despite the differences in the floor plate, I found the easiest way to tell the difference was by reading their stationery! ;-)

As a contrast, every Campanile I've stayed in had local area differences (but not always the ones you'd expect, like no curries in the Bradford branch!!)

It's harder for me to comment on guests because Eastercons.

15:

Reminds me of China Miéville's rejected 'Iron Man' pitch, which you can read on his site. (He did end up doing some work for DC in the end, which was fine I guess, not a patch on the above story though).

16:

I feel like you could mix in a bit of H. H. Holmes into the story, and it would be perfect.

17:

Am now contemplating Harley Quinn as a second-tier girlfriend from "Trainspotting" who jacked up the wrong designer drug one time and had An Episode™.

18:

The certain Tory who named their child Sixtus. You know, the Beano character.

(Jacob Rees-Mogg to avoid dragging it out)

19:

BATMAN: Terror of the Bellboy!

(Except that "the Bellboy" is female, but she dresses in standard "bellboy" uniform plus facepaint.)

Or to keep things slightly more in tune with canon, Geraldine's idea could be Harley Quinn's origin story. But I am one-hundred-percent agreed that DC should hire her.

20:

I was afraid you meant him.

He has all the requisites to be a big mover and shaker in Gotham City—indeed, he could even be the Bat's evil cousin or something.

21:

I take that's thereallymanicHarleyHenchpersonincarnation and not the later antiheroine with occasional impulse control issues?

22:

Both/either—why can't she evolve?

But the manic one ... if you've ever been around anybody mainlining crystal meth, you get the idea. Just add a golf club (this being Scotland). Or maybe even a baseball bat (except here it's called Rounders and is played by schoolgirls).

23:

The Acorn Rounders Team did have one schoolgirl regular, but that was partly because her dad dragged her along.

Also, Rounders bats are intended for single handed use making it difficult to get a swing that results in a decent thud. Stick with the golf club.

24:

Before I get started, let me offer this: my lady has a thing, which apparently isn't unique to her: spoons and knives. You get issued so many spoons when you get up. If you run out of spoons, you're down to knives. Even has a t-shirt reading, "out of spoons", with a pic of a number of knives.

25:

Oh, and about the moroon* Geradline met - it's not only women. There's a class of male idiots who, on seeing something other than what they're expecting at that moment, appear desperate to say something, anything. I am reminded of the arsehole back in the mid-seventies, I was walking in downtown Philly in winter, wearing what I wore then for winter, my very heavy, dark green cloak. Some idiot, half a block away, sees me, and yells, "Hey, Superman!". He looked, then kept going. Never knew if he could tell the look on my face was, "are you, like, color blind, or just stupid?"

  • Ehhh, what a maroon.- B. Bunny
26:

In 1983, at a friend's cookout, I was arguing that MBAs were destroying the US... with a professor who taught MBAs at U of P. I've clearly been 100% correct.

There are folks whose undergrad was a real degree - my late ex had a B.Sc in materials science, but need the MBA, I guess, for a promotion. However, business degree?

A good friend (Bro. Guy, for those who know him) used to teach around the US at Catholic colleges, and one course he taught was "science for non-science majors". About a dozen years ago, on a list we're on, he ran down the food chain of the majors that took that course. Next to the bottom were business majors, who "didn't get it, but didn't let that worry them."

Btw, the bottom of the food chain, those that didn't get it and didn't know they didn't get it, were the communications majors - the folks who go into PR, HR, and journalism, which explains a lot....

27:

By the bye, and no one else seems to be commenting on it, what the fuck is an "ageless millenial mindset"? "Ageless" is usually applied to someone over 50....

And are they suggesting their "creatives" will switch jobs, cleaning, cooking, and bartending over the course of the day? I suggest the copywriter, and the managers who approved this bit of amazing drivel, should do maid's work in a hotel for a month, with the pay they make.

28:

Thanks. I saw that years ago and haven't been able to find it (didn't remember enough details for Google to work, anyway).

29:

Tony Stark would be just the beginning. How 'bout the CEOs who also shipped the jobs overseas, and anyone selling packages when they knew it was mostly junk (isn't that fraud?)....

Here's better: steal Larry (Oracle) Ellison's fighter jet (yes, he owns one), rearm the guns, and do a run through Wall St....

30:

"ageless millenial mindset" Vampires don't age, they call it Radisson RED. They don't have 'staff' they have 'Creatives'. Always laughing with guests, playing the odd game and even a little bit of mischief now and again, but that's generally OK, at RED we demand it. Which brings me to this recently released music video Might be security cam footage from Radisson RED, playing the odd game and even a little bit of mischief.

31:

I was once inflicted with teaching (practical) linear algebra using Matlab - yes, I taught the relevant mathematics of matrices in that, but didn't assume they knew it in advance and didn't require any knowledge beyond really basic matrix operations over the reals.

One time, I got a lot of MBA graduates. Half of them had never enountered matrices, and half of the rest didn't even know the basics like multiplication doesn't always commute. I diverted and taught them the basic rules, but it went so far over their heads that nothing went in. This was at one of the top universities in the world, incidentally.

Following that, I tried finding a reference, but my colleagues pointed me at undergraduate courses for mathematicians and scientists. Oh, dear, NO, ducky, no MBA is even going to look at that much undiluted mathematics, MUCH less understand it. I asked a schoolteacher friend, who pointed me at a much more appropriate A-level book, which I stressed in the blurb was a prerequisite for the course. But I never got any more MBAs, which failed to displease me :-)

32:

I need to ask: what was up with Tony Stark, the genocidal maniac who everyone thinks is a good guy because after making billions being the bad guy he repents?

(I've always found that hilarious and tragic in real-life and fiction to the extent that I'm amazed more people don't openly admit to it as a career path - start out in some area that is not the best ethically, make a fortune, then pivot and watch as everyone praises you...)

33:

What was up with Tony Stark, the genocidal maniac with a large and well funded PR department who everyone thinks is a good guy because after making billions being the bad guy he repents?

It's a mystery.

Anyway, back to Glasgow-Joker, here we have an answer to the question, where do the Joker's henchpeople come from? They are current and former art students, who get offered a gig setting up an event, and too late discover that that it's actually a terrorist incident. Afterwards, they might find themselves blackmailed... or they might enjoy having been part of an art exhibition that people actually talked about.

34:

DFan H @ 13 Except these arrogant bastards think they are Masters of the Universe ... when I was doing My MSc, they looked down on a mere Engineer as "greubby hans we can order around" - the feeling of cpontempt was reciprocated ...

PMcA @ 18 Jacob Rees-Smaug please ... after all, he treats the rest of us with utter contempt & sleeps on a pile of gold ....

@ 22/23 If you want a REALLY VIOLENT "girls" game, try Lacrosse!

NeilW @ 33 Or have been hired to kill a N Kporean defector, maybe ....

35:

Vulch @ 23: The Acorn Rounders Team did have one schoolgirl regular, but that was partly because her dad dragged her along.

Also, Rounders bats are intended for single handed use making it difficult to get a swing that results in a decent thud. Stick with the golf club.

Since you're re-casting the story in the U.K., why not just go ahead and use a cricket bat?

36:

whitroth @ 27: By the bye, and no one else seems to be commenting on it, what the *fuck* is an "ageless millenial mindset"? "Ageless" is usually applied to someone over 50....

And are they suggesting their "creatives" will switch jobs, cleaning, cooking, and bartending over the course of the day? I suggest the copywriter, and the managers who approved this bit of amazing drivel, should do maid's work in a hotel for a month, with the pay they make.

I suspect it means it's going to be a long, long, loooooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnng time before you ever earn a living wage that will let you pay off your college loans ... maybe a thousand years or more.

I think part of the problem is no one ever proof-reads the copy any more. If it makes it through spell-check, it's good to go. And dog help you if you've turned on auto-destruct.

37:

Stick with the golf club.

Shinty stick. Possibly more Scots than golf and much more applicable to violence.

38:

If cranking-out standard smiles were a Joker origin, Japan would be overrun with them. Then again, Nanking….

39:

Truth being stranger than fiction (sorry Charlie, your curse has struck again) Nottingham has a joker whose origin story is ongoing as we speak

40:

"They are current and former art students, who get offered a gig setting up an event, and too late discover that that it's actually a terrorist incident."

I would point out that terroristing in Glasgow risks the somewhat unusual terroristing hazard of being kicked in the balls by the people you're trying to terrorist.

On the same theme, in Glasgow there is a shop where the manager is a martial arts expert who uses his skills to take down, enthusiastically, the (numerous) junkie shoplifters who target his store, and hold them down until the police arrive and compliment him on the takedown. (I am not making this up.)

To be sure my image of Batman involves freeze-frame KAPOWs on a 405 line raster, but I'm not convinced there's really that much of a place for him in Glasgow. I rather think the inhabitants are self-reliant enough that he'd quickly get fed up of always arriving too late to do anything except rescue the villain from bystanders putting the boot in, and head off somewhere else instead (London, for instance, where he could fit right in, he'd just have to swap the Batmobile for a manky yellow Reliant).

41:

I'd hazard a guess that in modern Britain, it is less common to own a cricket bat than it is to own a rounders/baseball bat (and no other items of rounders equipment). Cricket bats are an awkward shape and do stuff like catch on things when you're trying to grab them out from down the side of the car seat. Also, cricket is mythologically English.

Golf is mythologically Scottish and you can certainly give your target a tremendous thwack with a golf club and it also offers an excuse to stage a fight on Trump's golf course and churn it all up. Not so good at close quarters as a bat though.

42:

Lacrosse isn't a game. It's a military training exercise from the First World War. The corps lacroissiers were developed in response to the French army's persistent difficulties in getting a good supply of reliable grenades: the idea was that instead of arming the soldiers with their own grenades, they could simply be trained to catch grenades thrown by the enemy and sling them back where they came from, using scoop-nets attached to their rifles like bayonets. It was about as successful as many brilliant military ideas of WW1.

43:

I honestly can't tell if you're joking or not. :)

Lacrosse is a Native American originated game.

44:

And it's hardly confined to hotels.

Everything from washing powder to oxygen. You can buy welding grade, medical grade, aviator's grade oxygen. It's all filled the same way on the same line from the same vat.

45:

Really?

I have a Vague recollection of being taught matrices in 1st class. (6yo).

Something like, 'That's how you multiply one number at a time and now this is how you multiply a group of numbers'. I also got taught binary.

Hmmmm, I don't recall meeting those two concepts at any time in the following 12 years.

On reflection I may have had a teacher going off piste.

46:

I think that Geraldine DeRuiter and OGH both have produced beautiful seedlings of stories from the manure of patriarchal/corporate bollocks, and there is something about them that I find really cheering.

I also think that this in no way justifies the bollocks and (with apologies to Charlie) would rather be rid of it and miss out on the stories.

:(

47:

I first encountered matrices in the technical university, at nineteen years of age (the usual age to enter those in Finland). Non-commuting operations were also introduced at that point, but they didn't seem that hard.

So, at least in the Eighties and Nineties in Finland the mathematics taught in schools wasn't that advanced. Complex numbers were used for a bit in the upper secondary (years 10-12, non-compulsory, but the usual way to the university level), but for example their relation to trigonometry wasn't mentioned at all.

48:

Pigeon @ 40 Err... no At the London Bridge attack, the restuarant diners who wer confronted by religious nutter with swords ... went for them. Throwing chairs, glasses, bottles, cutlery to keep them at bay & distract their aim.

49:

I definitely encountered matrices in high school (Sydney and Brisbane, 80s). Then again in 1st year mathematics. But “business track” students most likely would not have taken the same level of high school mathematics (they would do commerce and veg subjects) or any in university so I can see that it is possible to remain completely ignorant of the topic.

There are lots of things people seem to miss from high school that should be required for competent participation in a democracy, but I’m not sure matrices are among them.

50:

THIS Corbyn will get exactly the wrong message from today's bye-election, same as the tories will ...... Desperate, isn't it?

51:

Pigeon @40. Well quite. In mythical comic-book Glasgow*, people fight back against criminals even more than they do in real life. Only the most desperate and violent criminals continue, often losing touch with reality as they do so, taking on strange and terrifying personas. As things escalate, the police are driven on to the defensive, only going into some neighbourhoods in force. People form self defence groups, many only one step less corrupt and dangerous than the criminals, protecting their own, driving out others. There are casulaties amongst all levels of the city. Inevitably vigilantes arise.

Anyway I agree with you, much as Glasgow is the best model for Gotham City that Scotland has to offer, if you wanted an old money aristocrat in a city with spectacular and gothic architecture to brood on and dive off, Edinburgh's your place.

  • DC tend to create their own cities based on themed versions of real cities, some more obvious than others**

* Traditionally Metropolis is New York in the day time, Gotham New York at night**, though people like to mix it up with Chicago, Detroit or whichever American City is believed to be most crime-ridden at that moment

** Thanks to Arrow and The Flash on TV being filmed in Canada, there's the alternate version; Central City is Vancouver in the daytime, Starling City is Vancouver at night.

52:

Matrices were on the Leaving Cert (Irish second-level state exam, think A-levels or Bac) when I did it a few decades ago. Not sure it's still there though.

53:

"I’m not sure matrices are among them"

I'm reminded of my experiences in 2nd class (a year after the off piste teacher) where we were taught to colour inside the lines (reinforced with caning if we got it wrong, I kid you not). I remember thinking at the time that this was a skill unlikely to help my in later life.

That was a memory that exploded unbidden from my mouth one day at work when I entered the HR/training department to find a bunch of them preparing one of those god awful group training exercises.

I looked around at the piles of coloured paper, and three women colouring in, each of whom earned double what I did and exclaimed "When I was in kindergarten I thought colouring in was a useless waste of time that I'd never use when I grew up!"

Possibly not my finest hour.

54:

They obviously wouldn't have resorted to caning unless staying inside the lines was essential.

If there are any gaps in the lines then it is reasonable to argue that you are using flood fill and the entire page is fair game of course.

55:

Anyway I agree with you, much as Glasgow is the best model for Gotham City that Scotland has to offer, if you wanted an old money aristocrat in a city with spectacular and gothic architecture to brood on and dive off, Edinburgh's your place.

So Batman lives in Edinburgh and commutes. Crime in Glasgow skyrockets every time there is trouble with the railway.

56:

They were in the UK until one of the recent (in terms of decades) government 'improvements', and are now only in the additional (i.e. optional extra) A-level syllabus.

I find gasdive's #45 a little impausible. Binary, yes, but matrices are not something I would expect even an extremely off-piste teacher to touch until the pupils were thoroughly familiar with basic arithmetic.

57:

That's okay: in a patriarchy-free world I'm pretty sure we'd just find other stories to tell.

58:

I encountered vector and matrix arithmetic at age 14. English school system, 1970s. And I got Boolean algebra and set theory aged 10—I lucked into a crossover between a 60s attempt at teaching "the new mathematics" and a 70s attempt at systematizing the syllabus that re-incorporated older stuff (trig, differential and integral calculus) that had been shoved out of the way to make room for it.

Add "Godel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid" at age 17 (which wasn't too hard with the earlier set theory stuff) and I never used a bit of it ... until, aged 25, during a conversion degree in computer science we ran into a large lump of first order predicate calculus and I thought, "gosh, this is easy!"

A lot of stuff that we think of as esoteric and difficult isn't, really: it's just a matter of how and when it's taught. If the oldsters think it's cutting-edge hard, like general relativity in the 1930s, then it's hard. And if it's become a standard part of the toolbox, like quantum mechanics by the 1980s, then it's taught in high school. (Remember back in the early 1940s there were supposedly only four quantum physics PhDs in the United States? And two or three of them were immigrants?)

59:

Robert "The Bruce" Wayne, prominent local businessman, is known for being approchable and down to earth, even taking the train rather than driving or flying when he goes to visit his offices in Glasgow. Some overexcited villains decide that this would be the prefect time to kidnap him for ransom.

Bonus marks if they're trying to draw out the Batman with this daring crime.

60:

That reminds me that I was wrong in the previous post!

I did encounter matrices before university, in the same context as boolean algebra and Venn diagrams: at the late Eighties my friends and I had gotten these newish 16-bit computers, mostly Amigas and some PCs, which had reasonably useful programming languages and relatively accessible information (from books and BBSes). We did a lot of fun things doing vector graphics and other assorted fun stuff.

Boolean algebra is kind of necessary for most programming, and vector graphics are kind of impossible without matrices.

After doing those graphic things basically from scratch, on the software level, with basically just a frame buffer and writing bytes there, I didn't like the more modern systems that much because I thought they were "too easy". Some years ago I did some experiments with OpenGL ES on a Raspberry Pi, and, no, it's not easy. Unity is a much more useful framework, and there are many others, too.

Matrix algebra helps there, too, still.

61:

Yes. As I said, the English syllabus has been dumbed-down since. While I agree with you about most topics (including my erstwhile hobby horse, measure theory), what you say about general relativity and quantum mechanics is seriously misleading.

Teaching their principles isn't hard, but that doesn't mean that using them even for simple calculations isn't. Even today, you can tell that if you speak to PhD students in those fields - the number of them that have a very limited understanding of their own field is astounding. That's true of even some professors at respectable universities :-(

Look, I posted an example to do with special relativity a while back. The standard mantra is that FTL is equivalent to time travel, I found the proof extremely dubious, and had found no relativist who could point me to a reliable proof, but they all repeated the mantra. When I went back to the actual formula, I found that it was actually false - no, FTL is NOT equivalent to time travel. Unrestricted FTL is, but that does not mean that there might not be an exclusion effect (e.g. for quantum tunnelling). I am too rusty (in advanced matrix algebra) to analyse the issue properly, but it was was easy to produce sufficient counter-examples.

62:

We were taught matrix algebra in Maths the fourth year of secondary school but in a class where the pupils were going on to do Higher Grade examinations and likely to continue into college or further education after secondary school. It coincided with the introduction of the concept of vectors in our Physics classes, the idea that measurable quantities such as velocity required more than one number to represent them correctly and calculations involving vectors were not simple additions and subtractions of single values.

I found the matrix notation difficult to work with (also dot and cross products) but if I had persevered with matrix algebra and used it more in my day-to-day work I expect I would have coped with it better than I did.

63:

I've always got the feeling that they were saying FTL traces out a world line that's at less than 45 degrees on a space time diagram and that makes it time travel like, given that different observers will order events differently.

64:

Unrestricted FTL is the only type of FTL in relativity, as such restrictions are beyond the scope of the theory.

If you want to postulate limitation effects that prevent closed dimelike curves then you are free to do so, but they aint part of GR no matter how much you want them to be.

65:

Your misunderstanding is exactly what I mean :-( No, that's not right, and it's not what most of them mean by it, though few of them have a clear idea of what they DO mean. You can get different observer effects even with simple separation (no movement) and a finite transmission speed, as caused so much trouble to the British proto-empire in the 18th and 19th centuries, and to parallel programming today. Just a finite speed of light will do!

However, that diagram is used even at graduate level, because working with the formulae is non-trivial enough to be non-intuitive to most relativity PhD students. But, despite the dogma, it is NOT mathematically equivalent to the formulae, and conclusions drawn using it are at best unreliable (and, in this case, actually wrong). I assert that is evidence that working with relativity is harder than understanding its principles.

66: 22) I've never been near anyone doing serious class A (that I know of) but you're actually agreeing with me about theincarnationthattalksveryfast being dangerous to know or even be around. The later antiheroine may have occasional impulse control issues, but is otherwise a generally good friend. 23) Well, we were always taught (Scotland) (rightly or wrongly) to use a rounders bat 2-handed. 24) I've encountered the spoons anology before, but in terms of various tiredness syndroms. The only danger posed by the sufferers when "out of spoons" is if they collapse from tiredness. If you're using it about a different complaint, it may not be helpful? 27) I just plain didn't understand it, and presumed it to be "management speak". 32) Well, I've always thought that Tony Stark's real superpower was "not being punched out for being a smug git". 33) Or, again using Harley comics as reference, some of her henchpeople actually have discussions about henching as a career. 40) Absol-fucking-lutely 100% true. Also, the Glasgow wargames shop where an attempted shoplifter "fell down the basement stairs" THREE times before the police arrived.

And, in the same vein, the Clutha bar accident, where the locals arrived and started rescue operations several minutes ahead of the Ambulance and Fire Services.

61) I agree, at least to the extent that most fictional FTL still requires that if you leave place1 for place2 on Date, you arrive at place2 on Date + Duration, and therefore the sign of your Time vector has remained constant. 64) And therefore (General) Relativity is an incomplete theory since it ignores the possibilty of Constrained FTL as "out of scope".
67:

I don't want to derail, so will almost certainly stop here. You have completely missed the point. The relativists claim is that general relativity (actually special) proves that FTL is impossible - flatly, totally impossible, even in special cases. And it is THAT dogma that I am pointing out is wrong.

No, I never said nor implied that such restrictions are part of general relativity, and made it pretty clear that anything like that would be far more likely to be part of quantum mechanics. Which, I might remind you, DOES introduce exclusion effects and, according to many experts, DOES have distance-independent transmission times.

68:

Wrt relativity/FTL/time travel: please take it outside, guys, it's derailing the otherwise-entertaining comments on supervillain origin stories and crapsack dystopian hellhole job ads.

69:

the number of them that have a very limited understanding of their own field is astounding

A few years ago I was at a physics conference at the University of Toronto. Prof there talked about how even his post-grad students didn't really understand physics — they were adept at calculations, but it was all plug-n-chug with no understanding of the underlying processes, the simplifications involved, etc.

A lot of my students think that they can learn physics the same way they learn math — by learning which formula to use for which type of word problem. In an era of standardized testing this can be a successful way of getting high test scores; I'm dubious that it translates to real understanding of the subject.

70:

The Riddler is obviously a teacher who has been pushed over the edge by one too many standardised tests, and has embarked on a life of crime in order to teach the world how to solve real problems.

71:

Lex Luthor could be an MBA... not sure how much unrealistic life you would need for him, though.

72:

It occurs to me that the Bat-verse contains both the Penguin and (Kit) Catwoman. Is there room for an offspring called Tim-Tam?

73:

BatCat(Wo)man is more likely in canon. (BatCat because alphabetical)

74:

If you want INTERESTING villains, the Ben Aaronovitch series on magick in London ( "Rivers of London" etc. ) is very good. I really do not like "Mr Punch" f'rinstance ....

75:

I found the matrix notation difficult to work with (also dot and cross products)

In the long-ago day when I was doing such stuff, I found that the Einstein notation was vastly easier to deal with. And Kronecker deltas and permutation symbols are kind of cool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_notation

76:
I need to ask: what was up with Tony Stark, the genocidal maniac who everyone thinks is a good guy because after making billions being the bad guy he repents?

I refer the honourable correspondent to Andrew Carnegie of Carnegie Hall, the Carnegie Trust, Carnegie Mellon University, 2,500 Carnegie libraries.... and Carnegie Steel.

77:

Or Paul Cornell's "Shadow Police" series; a 3rd Larndarn-based law-enforcement/government series with a magick system incompatible with those of our GH and Ben A. (and the Verusverse is incompatible with all 3 now cited)

78:

Origin stories.

My son is an artist, and drew a rather bizarre picture of a superheroic-type who looked very much melted and disturbed. We decided that this was Derrida Man, a student who'd gone on a high-school field trip to an art museum and been bitten by a radioactive postmodernist. He is a polymorph who can turn into anything that doesn't make sense.

79:

Lacrosse... as I understand it, that was a game of the Mohawk? Lenape? Native Americans, and the rules were that you could beat your opponents with your stick, oh, and, if it wasn't out of your way to beating an opponent with a stick, or didn't keep you from doing so, you should try to score a goal.

I want to invent trumpinhole, which, like Golfimbul's fate, one knocks his head off his shoulders and into a hole in the ground, thereby winning the battle, and inventing a sport.

80:

Thanks. Never heard of shinty before. Of course, I'm still trying to find the email wherein, many years ago, my Canadian friend actually explained cricket so it made sense to me, so I'll pass on the rules for shinty for now.

81:

The old Batmobile was a high-power engine ordinary car, with parts that flip over to disguise it. The new ones... and there's supposed to be some way that no one can follow it to his Secret Lair?

82:

Ok, I don't remember ever being taught matrices formally - and that includes two years of calculus. Linear algebra? I need to learn it (having just found this out a year or so ago), so I can get to tensor analysis, so I can finish my Famous Secret Theory, and get the hell off this Planet of the Idiots (or at least run by them).

83:

Swords are one story. Knives, on the other hand.... Many, many years ago, I was over a buddy's who was into martial arts, and I skimmed a book he had on knife fighting, by two men with real credentials - one ex-military, both had spent time in reform school (juvenile prison) and both in prison. At the end, one of them told the story of a knife fight he'd been in: in a bar, he and another guy get into an argument, and the other guy pulls a knife. He pulls one, and moves back, other guy follows. He reaches behind him with his non-knife hand - the other guy's watching that hand, to know when he's going to move....

And he hit the other guy over the head with a chair. End of fight.

On the other hand, my walking stick, by sheer chance, happens to be the length and almost the weight of an SCA broadsword. Did I mention that in my late 20's and early 30's, that I fought heavy in the SCA?

84:

Two notes: in spite of what my late ex and her oldest friend argued, years back, if you say "Gotham" to anyone who's not thinking of Batman in the last century and a half, they know you're talking about NYC.

The annoying thing to me is that Batman seems to be able to cover a good bit of the downtown, and there's NO WAY to do that in NYC.

Given that he's partly supposed to be Old Money, and his mansion is out of town, the most obvious change, if they hadn't screwed him to Gotham, would have been to move him to Philly, and his mansion on the Main Line, and he could cover downtown, being as small/walkable as Philly is.

sigh

85:

Rct: 33: years back, my manager was taking myself and the other admin into the datacenter - we didn't have the authority yet, and he introduced us to the guard as his henchmen. The three of us then had a short discussion, and decided that henchmen was a higher level, and it's the minions that are fist-fodder....

86:

I don't know. If we're talking about the post-'89/'90 Crisis on Infinite Earths, the newer Lex is incredibly competent, not like the previous versions, that had no sense. The billionaire that owns Metropolis, and objects to this...alien breaking his monopoly, though is "mostly women staff, who is expected to screw him if/when he asks, but also to be competent at what they do", seems like he's too intelligent for an MBA.

87:

You need to remember that, until a couple of centuries back, the Scottish Highlands had a lot in common with Afghanistan. It's worth looking up the origins of the game of polo, for comparison.

88:

Thank you for reminding me of the Scarfolk blog, becomes more and more relevant as time goes by.

89:

As long as he can produce a bathtub full of power tools....

90:

As long as you don't mind a squirt-hammer or a cheesy-drill he's good.

91:

You're familiar with the Grant Morrison reboot of Doom Patrol and their enemies, the Brotherhood of Dada, led by Mr Nobody?

As wikipedia summarizes it, "The Brotherhood stole a magical painting and used it to transport Paris into another reality composed of realms based on philosophical concepts and schools of art. Their plan was foiled by the Doom Patrol, but they chose to remain in the strange alternate realm. Later, Mr. Nobody escaped from the painting with the help of four members of his new Brotherhood: Agent "!", who could blend into any crowd; Alias the Blur, the ghost of a mirror that can eat time; Number None, the abstract concept of everything that goes wrong in a person's day; and the Love Glove, whose power depends on what glove he wears. They stole the bicycle of Albert Hofmann, and used its lysergic resonance to power Mr Nobody's presidential campaign" ..."

And it only gets weirder.

(I swear, Grant Morrison is the only person I know of with the imaginative chops to successfully stay ahead of our current reality.)

92:

I don't watch Doom Patrol, but saw the GIF of the rat and cockroach making out. I may have to start watching that one...

93:

I know you're not a telly series person — but the recent DC Doom Patrol TV series impressed me. They went full on for the Grant Morrison-esque weird-ass Doom Patrol. Which shows some kind of fortitude by TV execs somewhere.

(e.g. Mr Nobody is the main villain, one of the characters was Danny — a gender queer teleporting street, etc.)

94:

I'm not talking about the TV show, I'm talking about the 80s and 90s comic run. Utterly epic.

95:

Awesome. I prefer reading to watching and will definitely put Doom Patrol on my list. But here's what they're doing on the show.

96:

This video clearly shows how the batmobile appears and disappears. 14 miles outside a Gotham City that looks very like Los Angeles.

97:

Mister Freeze - Inspired by Lord Kelvin, tries to reach absolute zero, it goes wrong, gets caught up in the Ice Cream Van Wars in the 80s
This would bring me comfort and joy. We both know who should direct the film.

98:

Neil W @ 51: Anyway I agree with you, much as Glasgow is the best model for Gotham City that Scotland has to offer, if you wanted an old money aristocrat in a city with spectacular and gothic architecture to brood on and dive off, Edinburgh's your place.

The comic book Gotham City is a much darker place than the real New York. But compare the UK of V for Vendetta to the real thing. There's no reason to think that a Glasgow that spawned Batman and the Joker wouldn't be a much darker place than the real Glasgow.

99:

Charlie Stross @ 58: I encountered vector and matrix arithmetic at age 14. English school system, 1970s. And I got Boolean algebra and set theory aged 10—I lucked into a crossover between a 60s attempt at teaching "the new mathematics" and a 70s attempt at systematizing the syllabus that re-incorporated older stuff (trig, differential and integral calculus) that had been shoved out of the way to make room for it.

Add "Godel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid" at age 17 (which wasn't too hard with the earlier set theory stuff) and I never used a bit of it ... until, aged 25, during a conversion degree in computer science we ran into a large lump of first order predicate calculus and I thought, "gosh, this is easy!"

A lot of stuff that we think of as esoteric and difficult isn't, really: it's just a matter of how and when it's taught. If the oldsters think it's cutting-edge hard, like general relativity in the 1930s, then it's hard. And if it's become a standard part of the toolbox, like quantum mechanics by the 1980s, then it's taught in high school. (Remember back in the early 1940s there were supposedly only four quantum physics PhDs in the United States? And two or three of them were immigrants?)

I encountered "number systems" along with duodecimal, binary, octal & hexadecimal at age 9. At that age, I think the brain is still plastic enough that they are easy.

Binary led to truth tables, because truth tables can show you how transistor switches work and from there Set Theory shows you how to connect the transistors together to make logic gates. And as everybody should know, "logic gates" are the fundamental building blocks of computers. (I think this was just about the time someone at Texas Instruments patented the first prototype "Integrated Circuit" chip.)

We also did Cartesian coordinates, logarithms & Napier's Bones (in French of course, because why not?)

This was 1959, just after the Soviets beat the U.S. into space with Sputnik and the whole educational establishment was in panic mode. The Ford Foundation gave the city of Durham, NC where I was growing up a grant to run an enrichment summer school for gifted and talented students. It was also the year my father was first appointed to the City School Board, so I became gifted and talented got to spend the summer going to school while all my friends were doing kids summer fun stuff [1].

Still, it was really a lot of fun. The highlight of summer was a field trip over to the University of North Carolina where they allowed us to all pile into the visitors gallery and look through the windows down at the Math Department's new Univac computer.

But all good things come to an end, and there was no money to continue the program after that first summer, so we all got dumped back into the "normal" system of math education, i.e. rote memorization, which I didn't do so good. And there's a reason why the old saying, "Use it or lose it" is a cliché.

I didn't encounter matrices again until the mid-90s when there was a big push on to train as many programmers as possible to attack the Y2K problem. I took all the classes I could afford at the local community college & you needed "computer math" before they would let you take the programming classes. Because I had learned it young, I had an easier time picking it up the second time around.

[1] Because it didn't cost my dad any money to get me out of the house to go to summer school. I found out some years later that the reason I sucked at sports was because I was almost half-way to being legally blind and no one thought to have my eyes examined. Without my glasses, I can see the big letter 'E' at the top of the eye chart and that's about it. I got big ol' Buddy Holly birth-control glasses just in time to fuck up puberty for me.

100:

paws4thot @ 73: BatCat(Wo)man is more likely in canon. (BatCat because alphabetical)

There was a Bat GIRL (about the same age as the original Robin), but I don't remember a Bat Woman. Might have been after I lost interest in comic books in the early 80s.

101:

It was a joke, though on second thoughts I'm not entirely sure myself... it didn't happen in that time and place, but I'd not be surprised to find that some bugger somewhere had tried it.

102:

I remember it as being jet-powered, with a rather unconvincing exhaust flame effect... but I think you've not got the reference (probably too British).

103:

It was a good joke. Snorted at "corps lacroissiers".

104:

Does the fact that KitKats, Penguins and Tim Tams are all chocolate biscuits make Paul McAuley's joke @72 more obvious?

Batwoman came in about ten years ago I think, after my bat-comic days. She made a (live action) TV appearance when Green Arrow, The Flash and Supergirl crossed over at the end of last year, and apparently there will be a TV series later this year, though until it actually appears on a screen take that with a pinch of salt.

105:

Indeed, particularly given my ongoing contention that Tim Tams are reminiscent of the fruit of a cross between the other two.

106: 80 - Also hurley, which is sufficiently closely related to shinty that if you understand one you understand the other (aside from scoring rules, think field hockey without the "no sticks above shoulder height" rule), and indeed there is a combination sport "shinty-hurley" which Scotland and Ireland play at international level several times a year. 84 - Referencing "New 52" and later Harley Quinn, you can get from Gotham to New York inside of a day by train, but they are separate cities. 85 - :-) And yes, with sidekick as senior to hench and lackey between hench and minion. 100 - That sounds like the Adam West TV show (as do the references to the flame effect on the Lincoln Futura). Anyway, my comment at #73 was more about the mutual attraction between Batman and Catwoman (started in that period) and between Bruce and Selina (both being canon) than to the separate character Batwoman. 104 - Tim Tams are not a thing this side of the Pond. Neither is there any canon relationship between Penguin and Catwoman other than an occasional professional one.
107:

Actually having just re-read the OP, I'd suggest that the best thing to do about food in a Radisson RED is probably ask for an outside restaurant recommendation.

108:

Pwas @ 107 "bed & Breakfast" in other words!

109:

Do the hotels themselves fly RED flags?

That'd be kind of nice.

110:

“Add "Godel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid" at age 17”

Funny co-incidence, I was also 17 when I read this book by Hofstadter. Its discussion of quines is probably the main background I had to draw on when I read Ken Thompson on trusting trust.

Of course Achilles and the tortoise are the real super heroes here.

111:

with sidekick as senior to hench and lackey between hench and minion.

This is screaming for a spoof HR manual, complete with pay scales, grades (with roles and responsibilities), performance appraisal guidelines, and some hints about Performance Improvement Programs for the differerent grade. Not to forget stack ranking, and of course in any truly Evil organization the only exit is six feet under.

112:

And then go somewhere else ....

113:

The storyline I am waiting for is Scottish Batman vs The Gorbals Vampire.

114:

Indeed. Like the Tough Guide to Fantasyland, but for supervillains. The main risk is that it would then be adopted by Certain Organisations, with the job titles changed but little else.

115:

I found it so irritating that I couldn't read it. Of course, I did start with a fair knowledge of those topics.

116:

Wasn't there an episode of the Simpsons where Homer becomes a henchman for an evil genius who uses modern management methods?

117:

I am so not going to post the pitch I worked up for my creator-owned supervillain comic, set in a small, depressed town mostly famous for exporting Mooks (those mirrorshade-wearing, boiler-suited interchangeable minions that the likes of James Bond and Superman make short work of).

But one of the plot lines involves the city council's joy, followed by horror, when they learn that a new Mad Scientist is moving into town: first, "lots of jobs! Happy times are here again!", followed by, "what do you mean, there are no jobs because he's building cloning tanks? What, he's going to use it to manufacture Igors, made-in-America Igors, anchor baby Igor clones?!?"

118:

Chralie @ 111 + paws Something along the likes of: Ahriman / Baron / Sidekick / Hench / Lackey / Lickspittle / Minion / Serf ... maybe? I'm sure there are other intermediste grades that could/should be inserted.

A really large organisation has so many grades. Think of: O/S, A/S/, JPO, SPO, MPO, W=Off, 2nd-Leuitenant, Lt, Lt-Commander, Commander, Captain, Commodore, R-Adml, V-Adml, Adml, Adml of FLeet ... Whaich by my count is ... 16.

119:

Yeah, but most of them would be contractors. (What? You don't think a supervillain is going to abuse the gig economy?)

120:

Let's hope that isn't drawn in North America, the result might seem... insensitive.

121:

Delivergru.

Mind you, off the top of my head I'd say some of the structures of Rule 34 (and Halting State) were pretty gig economesque.

122:

I think I've seen some short parody of such, but I can't remember when or where. A quick search doesn't show it.

123:

Been done. While looking for an HR guide for supervillians, I found Amazon offering several on being a supervillan.

And, of course, to be a modern supervillian, one must memorize the Evil Overlord list.

He can hear me? Good! YES, I WILL PUSH THIS BUTTON > IN HALF AN HOUR, SO THAT HE CAN'T POSSIBLY GET HERE IN TIME TO STOP ME... heh, heh, heh....

124:

ARGH! Hate this. Want NO HTML entities in my cmts.... that greater-than sign was [presses button with a soft click]....

125:

Oh, come on, most supervillians don't start out as billionaires, or with VC investors. They'll start as villain, henchman (not as smart, but thinks he's ok, and will make them both rich) and minion (nothing higher than a 9 in the deck). As they move up from villain to supervillain, they'll start hiring management (henchpersons with stock options and fancy titles, but low salaries, or on commission), and minions for them to run.

This, of course, will result in a lot of griping among the management of "it's so hard to hire good help these days", and complaints of no money for training (why train, when they're cheap, replaceable, and going to be replaced as soon as they hit the authorities or a hero?)

Of course, if you start out on your path of supervillainy as a billionaire, you either run the high-class MBA route, or you start loosing money, by, say, laundering money by buying a money-loosing golf course in Ireland....

126:

"The way to make a small fortune in supervillainy is to start with a large fortune."

I always assumed that most bat-villains were just doing what they loved (putting on masks, murdering people, maybe stealing diamonds or running an underworld club) and regular criminals, rather than tangle with a maniac who tortures people to death with fast food condiments, offer to be their gang for protection (from the supervillain of course, but also the bat-guy and those weirdos in clown makeup). They get to carry on with their dayjobs of theft and drug dealing, and once every few months have to join in a themed heist of some sort.

127:

Maybe supervillains get started because they're afraid of Real Mobsters[1], and so figure that by going so outside-the-box and over the top that the Real Mob won't bother them, but, if not respect them, stay far away ("we're just crooks, and want to get rich, we're not out of our fuckin' minds")

  • Like Molly Bloom, as I just read yesterday, who was asked to run an underground card game in LA, then, after being seriously beaten up, moved it to NYC, so the Russian mob could get a take from it. It she'd only put on spandex and armor, she could have kept them out of it....
128:

The old villainsupply.com website used to cover that sort of thing, the forums of EVIL! discussing whether the bikini babes got dental cover, mook pensions (or lack of them, the shark pool always needed fresh meat). It resurfaced after a while as villainsource.com but now seems defunct. Shame.

129:

Following on and searching via the Wayback Machine:

When I chat with other supervillains, they often ask me, "What kind of benefits do you offer your underlings?" To which I answer, "'Benefits'?? It's benefit enough that I allow them the honor of serving me, before I casually kill them off!"

HENCHMEN ARE NOT "EMPLOYEES" -- THEY ARE SLAVES!

Benefits, my ass! Any time one of those idiots annoys me, I kill him -- imagine if I had to pay for burials! I'd go broke! That's why I keep man-eating boars, for crying out loud. Even the bikini girls by the lagoon have to pay their own dental. What am I, a charity?

-- Professor Von Strychnine, S.U.B.Ve.R.T.

130:

Whitroth @123:

I assume you mean this. A coworker and I discussed this some time ago; we believed the progression would be henchman>lackey>minion, if I recall.

131:

Drat. Muffed the HTML again. Evil Overlord Rules

132:

Actually, I forgot ... either the top level, or the next onme down ( i.e. the actaul supervillian's "Hand" or deputy should be tiled: "WHITE CAT"

133:

In another case of life imitating art, the Adani coal mine.

Local government very excited, does some BoE calculations, comes up with estimates of tens of thousands of jobs.

Much negotiating around "if the government could just build a railway and a port, think of the jobs" later, it turns out all the jobs are for robots.

134:

" forums of EVIL! discussing whether the bikini babes got dental cover, mook pensions (or lack of them"

The videogame No One Lives Forever had an absurdly humorous scene in which heroine Cate Archer hides in an office corridor, trying to evade henchmen from two separate Bond-villain type organizations. If figuring out Cate's next move took too long, you then had to hear a dialogue between henchmen comparing benefit packages their employers offered, with a free dental plan being the clincher convincing one thug to switch teams. That was the point where I made her jump out and attack them all. No doubt as the game designer intended.

135:

Greg Tingey @ 118: Chralie @ 111 + paws
Something along the likes of:
Ahriman / Baron / Sidekick / Hench / Lackey / Lickspittle / Minion / Serf ... maybe?
I'm sure there are other intermediste grades that could/should be inserted.

A really large organisation has so many grades.
Think of: O/S, A/S/, JPO, SPO, MPO, W=Off, 2nd-Leuitenant, Lt, Lt-Commander, Commander, Captain, Commodore, R-Adml, V-Adml, Adml, Adml of FLeet ...
Whaich by my count is ... 16.

For a mad scientist/super villain organization it's got way too many ossifers & not enough grunts.

136:

Sometimes, there is a side to my geekiness that's a bit "you're not very nice at all, are you?"...

"...the Alan Moore electric chair diorama"

Can you imagine how much fun it would be to do ALL THAT HAIR for the central figure in the scene?

You could use an air blower to make it stand out and quiver. Or even make it out of really fine silk - top end untra-realistic dollmaker have this one nailed - and use an actual van der Graaf generator to make it stand on end, crackling and sparking!

The possibilities are endless.

137:

Yes, Edinburgh would be an interesting variation on Gotham. You can also throw in several other real things: - the famous mock gothic and baronial etc architecture is also in a parlous state, needing lots of repairs. Batman would either covertly fund said repairs, since otherwise his style of getting about might end with a long drop and a meaty thud.

  • the evil developers don't care about the city and would be happy if it was nuked so they could build new more efficently tall buildings to use the land better. The council would be happy to help them. The plot possibilities are obvious.

  • Lots of tourists means lots of cameras. He's going to have to get some very good outfits and camouflage options.

  • Given the number of lawyers in Edinburgh, I guarantee you can find someone like two face.

  • Extinct volcanic cores

  • batmobile meets speedbumps, fun for all concerned.

138:

Surely what makes them supervillains is that they have one massive defining accident, whether being dropped in chemicals or whatever. Again, Edinburgh would be quite good what with Roslin etc for all your genetically modified animal options. Glasgow and environs has more toxic waste dumps though.

139:

Cricket bats depends on where you are and what social level you are at. Hardly anybody here plays baseball and rounders is for children, but cricket is popular especially with middle class people or in the Shires. There was a case a few years ago of some men being jailed after inflicting brain damage on a burglar using a cricket bat.
(For anyone wondering - it wan't self defence; after getting free of being tied up they chased the burglars away, but then caught this one and beat him repeatedly about the head with the bat, in someone elses garden)

140:

Of course, if you start out on your path of supervillainy as a billionaire, you either run the high-class MBA route...

In the current Dungeons and Dragons game, our characters are beginning to hear rumors of a large treasure, supposedly stolen from the budget of a large town and guarded by magic.

My character is a member of the nobility... "That's nonsense," she scoffed, "why hide it and guard it with monsters and magic when your family's lawyer and a couple bankers could transfer it out of the city and turn it into income-producing real-estate in Baldur's Gate? All this talk of monsters and magic is a red-herring. Nobody could be that stupid!"

141:

I'm assuming the Joker has a Glasgow smile.

142:

guthrie @ 137 - the evil developers don't care about the city and would be happy if it was nuked so they could build new more efficently tall buildings to use the land better. The council would be happy to help them. The plot possibilities are obvious. Very nearly happened in the mid-1950's ... there was an actual proposal to demolish the whole of the "Old Town" - I'm sure Charlie can give you details.

143:

Greg, I don't mean this in a nasty way, but you have to consider it possible that someone who was born in a now demolished hospital building in Edinburgh, and who has a major interest in history, is capable of finding the exact plans in the National library of Scotland, or wherever they have been hidden in ignominy since then. You should also look up some of the 19th century ideas about remodelling Edinburgh castle.

144:

My character is a member of the nobility... "That's nonsense," she scoffed, "why hide it and guard it with monsters and magic when your family's lawyer and a couple bankers could transfer it out of the city and turn it into income-producing real-estate in Baldur's Gate? All this talk of monsters and magic is a red-herring. Nobody could be that stupid!"

Well, for one, you can use the monster-guarded treasure as collateral against a loan to buy the land near Baldur's Gate. Even if the treasure is inaccessible, its value, location, and security, so credit could be issued against it. Then you sell the land at a profit, default on the loan so that your creditor has to clean out the monsters, and go on with even more money to do it again (or the creditor could sell the dungeon to someone else...). Something like this is how finance worked before money in the Fertile Crescent: the value was hoarded away in the temples, and credit was issued against the silver and other treasures. Then rampaging conquerors like Alexander got in the habit of looting temple treasuries, melting down the silver (the primary form of wealth), issuing standardized bits of it to their soldiers as coin, and collecting taxes from their newly subjugated cities only in the coin they issued their soldiers, thereby insuring that their men could actually buy what they needed from the locals, who were loath to issue them credit.

Anyway, a dungeon makes a halfway decent safe deposit vault, if you don't have access to bankers. I suspect, even now, that the super-rich use undeveloped land with development rights attached to it for a similar function.

145:

Actually, that would make a really interesting D&D story: Your "employer" takes your nearest and dearest hostage, and offers you the following deal:

Turns out, he's come into ownership of Dire Straits Redoubt, because Baron Slimewriggle defaulted on his loan for his current demesne at Baldur's Gate, and left him with the deed to the Redoubt, which was his collateral. Your job is to go in with his team of auditors whom you will keep safe, secure the Redoubt without destroying it, protect the auditors while the perform a thorough accounting, and turn it over to him in good working order. For that you will be generously rewarded. Fail, and your hostages will be turned into geese and quickly into pate de fois gras. What do you do?

146:

Take the job, accept reward and return of the loved one, then take horrible, Orcish vengeance on the "employer" who would be sacrificed to Sauron after being dragged through the blood of his/her own children!

Then resurrect him/her, allow them to have more children, and take vengeance again! (The magical options available in Dungeons and Dragons allow some really ugly outcomes...)

147:

Well, that is better than my pitch, wherein the Joker takes over the job of the Sandman....

148:

True, but the challenge I haven't thought through (mostly because I haven't played D&D in many years) is how you take over a dungeon without breaking and looting it. I'm sure someone's played it out, but it still looks like an interesting variation on the dungeon crawl (and yes, you have to leave the gelatinous cubes intact. And the rust monsters).

Come to think of it, any skilled financial wizard (level 12 or above) could have dungeons all over the place, as ways to store their wealth while offering credit against what's in it. It's not a bad way to keep the mid-level undead employed--they get a free place to stay, all the adventurers they can eat, and all they have to do is make sure none of the treasure is stolen or lost to decay, and to tell their employer if this does happen. Otherwise, there's no reason for the wizard to do anything about cleaning up the dungeon, because it's just as easy to sell it to some other financial lord as needed.

Heck, with dungeons around, the only reason you need banks is for the petty cash: adventurers converting their coin and the like.

149:

Is it a dungeon or a bank? Do you have a license? If so, it's a bank. If not, it's a dungeon... interesting. The parallel is bitcoin vs. wallstreet, or something similar. Or maybe a family benevolent association vs. a credit union - which explains why the authorities tolerate the presence of murder-hoboes; they keep the bankers in line!

If the First National Bank of Baldur's Gate loses it's license, the bank run could get very nasty. I'm going to have to think about this for awhile.

Thanks. This could get interesting next time I DM.

My own recent "interesting" D & D thought was about Trolls and other regenerating creatures. Are the useful as the basis for an ecology, particularly during periods of ecological stress?

150:

Thinking more about it, adventurers bring things like magic swords, potions of healing, armor, spell books, etc., and all of those are saleable, sometimes for a very nice price. If you're located near a big city, you might sell the same magic sword a dozen times.

The "Federal Reserve" of any kingdom is a mature dragon who understands compound interest.

And of course you need a rust monster; you can use it to test the iron content of any coins someone gives you...

151:

"Rust Monster" I immediately think of "Penric's Deamon" ( Desdemona ) who turns the swords of people attacking Penric into rust (VERY QUICKLY)

152:

I think it was a D&D knock-off* I read rather than an official version that explictly suggested that a high level wizard should build a tower and dig a dungeon underneath, following which monsters will move in and every now and again the wizard can go through and charm or sleep them and take any magic items they like that have turned up. (It also said that soon after parties of adventurers would turn up looking to loot the place). I'm not sure if it was a deliberate attempt to explain how dungeons get created, the explanation being, of course, "a wizard did it".

  • "retro-clone", using the Open Game License and System Reference Document if that means anything to you
153:

"Other than "because MBAs and/or marketing people" why do they even bother to pretend to be different?"

I think the marketing concept you are looking for is "premium mediocre", as far as I know the naming of it originates in this blog post ( https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-life-of-maya-millennial/ ), and jugging by my DuckDuckGoing the idea is waaaay too real.

154:

Joker McJokeface

155:

I thought of the one who can only be appeased by hot dip galvanizing unibodies entirely, the entity that made otherwise decent cars crumble...

156:

A rust monster is one of the most hated creatures in Dungeons and Dragons. Rust monsters feed on iron and steel, digesting it outside the monster's body by turning the iron/steel into rust. So armor, swords, arrowheads, etc, including sometimes magical items, will crumble at a rust monster's touch. Particularly nasty Dungeon Masters will place half-a-dozen of the beast at the bottom of a pit trap... It is a particularly nasty thing to do to players, (particularly those who are feeling powered-up and entitled - heh heh!)

157:

They are also a symptom of a certain type of role-playing game where the game master and the other players sort of play against each other. This is the type of game where (stereotypically) the game master makes a dungeon or some other puzzle and the other players try to solve it. The players often try to amass resources (in-game money, magic items, experience points) as much as they can for their characters and the game master tries to thwart them doing that.

The rust monster is made to destroy the player characters' items, so it's a very direct thing for preventing the player characters from doing what they want to do with their characters and limit their hoarding of stuff. An another monster in the same vein is the disenchanter, which drains magic from those magic items.

I have the impression that there was also a tournament culture in roleplaying at the time in the US. This was late Seventies to my understanding, and other people here were probably more in that scene, or the UK one, than I have ever been. In this kind of play, the adventure is played by a lot of player groups and the best one is the one getting the most treasure from it. I think in cons there were tournaments where you could get prizes for solving the puzzles and getting the most treasure.

There are other types of roleplaying, and I think I've never used a rust monster after some early D&D adventures. I mostly play other RPGs nowadays which mostly take a much more "we're in this together to have fun" attitude to the game. Some of the games don't even feature a game master at all.

158:

I definitely prefer the "we're all in this together" style of dungeon mastering, and believe that a good DM uses much more subtle methods of restricting his/her players. For the most part, creatures like rust monsters are emergency measures, mainly used when the DM has to admit they accidentally overpowered the characters!

159:

On the subject of banking in Dungeons and Dragons (or any fantasy milieu for that matter) it occurs to me that a Dragon is the ultimate banker. So picture an important city, which has complex and dynamic trade and manufacturing requirements. The banking system is run by Dragons, probably a mated pair of huge, ancient wyrms and their children, grandchildren, etc. All of them understand compound interest, and they probably start "working" at various bank-branches throughout the city as they attain enough maturity to fry a party of low-level adventurers without difficulty.

Since dragons come in varying alignments, this has consequences for the cities which employ them. If your city's dragons are chaotic evil, the nature of your economic system will be very different than that of a city who's dragons are lawful good. Fortunately, most citizens will never meet "the loan committee."

If your city is threatened, you round up all the adventurers, give them a choice between defending the city and being dragon-food, then send them out as "special forces." Some of the adventurers will be given letters of marquee and reprisal so they can attack the other city's economic status, (kill their dragons) while others will be recruited for sneaking and peeking or guarding groups of 0-level soldiers. The most advanced spell-casters get to be dragon riders...

Meanwhile, Elves are in real-estate, Dwarfs in mining and manufacturing, Halflings in farming, Orcs in herding, etc.

Those other dungeons? They may charge lower interest rates and have better terms, but your money is very, very poorly guarded, and nobody will insure it...

160:

TV series backgrounds aside, there is very little argument that makes sense to make Vancouver into some kind of Gotham or other mid 20th dystopian city.

Vancouver's current form of dystopia is in being both beautiful and currently overrun by big money laundering real estate flippers. A superhero here would be an accountant who grows tired of helping these plutocratic villains to displace the rabble, and starts a Panama Papers style release of their finances. Maybe if she does it enough the RCMP would actually assign the resources to investigate.

Most low level crime of the 'masked superhero' type around Vancouver involves petty theft (by addicts for obvious reasons) and the marketing and sale of illegal drugs, as well as knock-on small scale violence that results from the latter.

There is hardly a space for a splashy superhero type. They could go punch out a few interchangeable street dealers or homeless junkies, but Batman would need to be very careful of blood spatter (HIV/Hepatitis/Etc) and would accomplish exactly nothing.

161:

Looks like my innocent little suggestion has created a monster....MwaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa! My work here is done.

162:

When a dragon burns your village down because an invisible adventurer stole one of its trinkets it isn't acting out of anger, it is protecting the reputation of the family firm.

163:

The idea of dragon-banking is more likely to end up in a fantasy story. The next dungeon I run will be much weirder than that. As I noted above, I've been considering the question of regenerating creatures (such as trolls) as the basis for an entire ecology, along with one of the most horrible disasters that could happen to a fantasy world...

164:

I guess the key question to settle is whether, when you bisect a troll, you get two trolls regenerating, or one. If it's the first case, then yes, you do indeed have an interesting problem.

As for the species of bankers, I've been thinking of them (or rather, the super-rich) as liches for a little while, mostly because their entire existence is conditioned by "magical" legal documents that describe the web of trusts, corporations, and foundations that actually house their wealth, so that they can legally claim to own none of it (they merely control it under certain conditions, those conditions including that it's not for the payment of debts they rack up, among other things...). This sounds like the relationship between a lich and its phylactery, or the older idea of the external heart hidden away that makes the monster indestructible unless its heart is found and destroyed through a complex process.

On the other hand, with dragons you seem to have played off the notion of the lizard people owning the world, which is also a fairly vintage trope, if not necessarily a fire-breathing one.

I guess the next step for both of us is to make sure that this doesn't turn into crypto-anti-semitism, given what the lizard-people are so often a metaphor for and what the phylactery is in the real world.

To do that, I guess, is to make sure that dragons are just dragons, the undead are truly undead, and orcs and other greenskins aren't standing in for other skin colors. Although, come to think of it, flipping the script so that a dungeon is a multispecies intentional living center that runs and guards a credit union would be a really interesting way to play it, especially with various varieties of white-skinned adventurers coming in to loot it and/or destroy it because it's some sort of evil plot against the free market. Hmmmm.

165:

"I guess the key question to settle is whether, when you bisect a troll, you get two trolls regenerating, or one. If it's the first case, then yes, you do indeed have an interesting problem."

Not so much that, but imagine that you're in a bad survival situation, and you're with a troll. If the troll is willing, you can drink his blood when you get thirsty, and every once in awhile you can cut out his liver and fry it for dinner, but now you owe the troll one hell of a favor...

Now make it much scarier. You and your descendants and the troll and his descendants, plus the rats and the lizards and the dogs and the cats are in a bad survival situation for a million years, plus you need to grow crops - and the only source of fresh organic matter is the troll. What evolves? And what of the other regenerating creatures and their various ecosystems?

Now imagine that all these things show up in a more ordinary fantasy world, and everyone needs to cope...

166:

In a simpler form, isn't that how the Underdark already works? Weirded out plants take magic energy and turn it into biomass, and the rest of the underworld ecosystem runs off this?

167:

There was an SMBC comic (which I can't locate) about a monster that could regenerate its limbs — so the villagers locked it in a steel box with armholes and had an endless supply of free meat…

168:

I suppose, but I'm thinking more in terms of biology than botany, with a creature like a troll carrying a number of specialized parasites who were once orcs or stirges or wolves, and those parasites follow anything from simple to very complex commands in return for food.

169:

Big troll, small orcs? It could certainly work, and various other people have played with useful symbionts for quite a long time. It's more pleasant, I suppose, than orcs "domesticating" trolls as an ever-growing food supply.

I'm thinking along similar lines, although I'm more interested in playing with the reworked Monstera deliciosa in James Schmitz's short story "Compulsion."

170:

I've been thinking of them (or rather, the super-rich) as liches for a little while, mostly because their entire existence is conditioned by "magical" legal documents that describe the web of trusts, corporations, and foundations that actually house their wealth,

Hot tip: you really ought to read "Three Parts Dead" by Max Gladstone (which just happens to be the first novel in a multiple-award-nominated series because it takes more or less that idea as a starting point then picks up the ball and runs right over the horizon. Also, he's a good writer.

Also, I assume you're aware of the term of art for a dungeon party: "murder hobos". Right?

171:

Similarly: gelatinous cubes are simply ginormous (and promiscuous) eukaryotic cells that have cracked the diffusion-gradient problem so they can get oxygen and nutrients everywhere in the interior without maxing out at a diameter of a couple of millimetres. And the whole engulf-the-dungeoneers shtick is actually the GC's evolved strategy for discovering new commensal organelles like mitochondria or chloroplasts: it keeps hunting for a bony-skeleton-magic-wielder it can swallow and keep alive while partially dissolved and make use of for casting fireballs at any actual GC predators that happen by.

Your party's absolute worst experience is to run into a dungeon/investment bank where the founder seeded it with gelatinous cubes back in the day, then kind of forgot, and some time later returned as a lich ... and the biggest of the cubes swallowed them, so you've now got a giant regenerating undead gelatinous cube that sucks the life force out of you and can cast death spells, sort of like a physical incarnation of Fox News.

172:

TV and film superheroes often find villains (regular, super and in between) in abandonded warehouse and factories, mostly because that's easiest to dress a soundstage for an interesting stunt/fight scene, but also because thematically a city that has vast industrial sites no longer in use has fallen from grace, and economically urban zones that have lost their main job providers will have increased levels of crime, if only because more non-criminals have moved away following the jobs. In Vancouver/London/New York/other cities with large amounts of real estate being used as launderies or investments by grey and black money, villains should be operating out of unoccupied luxury apartments, possibly with the permission of the owners, more likely a side-deal/sub-letting with one or more layers of landlord, building management, dodgy security firm, right down to borrowing a key from your brother-in-law who has the cleaning sub-sub-sub-contract.

173:

Thanks for the recommendation. I'd been reading Family Wealth: Keeping it in the family and was struck by comments about how, in a wealthy family, the trust effectively becomes a central member of the family, and how this unreal family member (it's a stack of papers, not flesh and blood, but it's more important than any individual) distorts every other relationship in the family. That, coupled with what I'd read about the nature of trusts* made me start thinking about liches, and the rest came from there. Presumably Gladstone's mining the same vein?

As for murder hoboes, I hadn't heard the term, but it's apt and self-explanatory. They come equipped with murder cutlery, obviously.

*Incidentally, a big, bloody thank you to Merry Olde England for creating that idea of a trust back during the Crusades, then mutating it for centuries and releasing it upon the world in the 20th Century.

174:

There was an SMBC comic (which I can't locate) about a monster that could regenerate its limbs — so the villagers locked it in a steel box with armholes and had an endless supply of free meat…

It was also done in The Order of the Stick. A hydra grows back two heads for every one that is cut off, right? But the heart is in the body, so there's only so much blood that can be pumped per unit time. Eventually there's not enough oxygen to any of the brains...but there's enough hydra meat for everyone!

175:

https://www.oglaf.com/fog-o-war/ ?

Otherwise, yes, why not? I think David Brin even used the same idea in the last bit of the Uplift Universe, where intelligence recapitulated Serial Endosymbiosis Theory.

176:

Actually, over time it does get worse, if the lich (d)evolves into a demi-lich inside the gelatinous cube...

177:

"It's more pleasant, I suppose, than orcs "domesticating" trolls as an ever-growing food supply."

Much less pleasant, I hope. The idea is Trolls thirty feet tall covered with symbionts, tendriculous that have evolved to cover acres, flying slaad covered with stirges that have been drinking hallucinogenic blood for years, etc., all played for as much horror as possible, in an environment where the literally unthinkable has happened!

178:

Much less pleasant, I hope. The idea is Trolls thirty feet tall covered with symbionts, tendriculous that have evolved to cover acres, flying slaad covered with stirges that have been drinking hallucinogenic blood for years, etc., all played for as much horror as possible, in an environment where the literally unthinkable has happened!

So... for the players rolling up new characters, the most important question is going to be, "what kind of sucker are you?"

The alternative is, "Hey sonny, go help your pa coppice that ol' bull troll. It's good for it this month. You'll need to take the trident to keep it pinned, while Pa prunes it with that fauchard of his. I'm firing the smokehouse now to cure the hams and shoulders. I always remind myself to parboil 'em and smoke 'em quick before they start growing themselves, so we've don't have to deal with trollops again."

179:

The "fortunate" thing for the players is that "the unthinkable" has happened to the bad guys too - for the first several levels, everyone is just trying to cope - though things are worse for the humans and their allies - then things start to get interesting, because both sides are starting to cope with "the unthinkable."

180:

I woke up in the middle of the night and I understood it; murder-hoboes are tolerated because they PREVENT the rise of Dragon-banking. Imagine that you live in a medieval fantasy world, perhaps in a small town of 5000 people. A couple fighters, a cleric, and two ne'r-do-wells with instruments wander into your town with tales of how many orcs, goblins, and beholders they've killed. You can expect them to make trouble, so why not chase them away or kill them instantly? It's because these people are going to save you from a bank controlled by dragons and staffed by the undead! (In short, they prevent the rise of unfair financial institutions.)

181:

How’s this for a supervillain: The Angst.

Power: They induces intractable despair in middle aged white men, who make up a majority population of Management and, oh dear, superheroes.

Origin story: nobody knows. Why bother finding out?

182:

On rust monsters - Ever seen a party of dwarves stripped down to their scanties, and beating rust monsters to death with wooden clubs? It's not a pretty sight!

183:

This is why we have Mithril!

184:

"They induces intractable despair in middle aged white men..."

There was a similar supervillain called something like Despar. Back in the day he caused someone to commit suicide, and this was a big deal because suicide was not allowed by the Comics Code.

"Origin story: nobody knows. Why bother finding out?"

My favorite origin story belongs to the Tick: "I've always been a superhero."

185:

Hm, AFAIR dragons aren't that big on lending. the specifics might depend somewhat on the things they hoard, e.g. inflation if it's valuables or deflation if it's gold coins.

OTOH, hm, take a party on a quest to steal some gold coins for some villagers, usually financial intermediaries don't roast each other literally.

186:

The dragons don't lend their gold, they merely use it as colateral and issue paper against it.

Sure the paper says "I promise to pay the bearer on receipt one gold piece", signed A. Dragon, but have you ever actually tried to visit the bank [dungeon] and redeem a five GP note? In fact, do you personally know anyone who did that and lived to tell the tale? NB: friends-of-friends do not count, I want actual eye-witness proof.

187:

Flammable things, notes.

188:

Well, yes, vigilantes are not that inventive. Why risk physical damage by beating them up when you can try some waterboarding?

Of course, there might also be this nice idea by Peter Watts how to deal with bullies.

(Err, the issue with my landlord is clarified, but I'm still angry. Story for later. Why are you asking? In other news, new job on Tuesday, new appartment next month. I plan to camp with the local hippies in the meantime...)

189:

Err, I see. Sorry, my bad.

Of course there might be derivatives, e.g. an option on the bearer fetching the coin.

190:

We had much fun with the German used in NOLF. Though apparantly is was unintentional.

"Töten sie Ihr!" became something of standard joke with our LAN parties, you can parse it several ways, and all don't work out. I'll try some background:

töten - to kill töten is either the infintive or first or third person plural.

sie It's a personal pronoun, third person singular feminine form, e.g. "she", or third person plural, "they", and it denotes both nominative and accusative. It's also used instead of "you" in a honorific context.

Ihr Another personal pronoun, it's either second person plural in the nominative case, or third person singular feminine in the dative one.

You can try all permutations you like. Actual German would be "Töte sie!" or "Tötet sie!", with the imperative singular or plural depending on the number of persons addressed. And "sie" would be the heroine, in the accusative case.

191:

In the spirit of the name of the last firm I worked for...

Why don't we make it "Sauron and friends(tm)"?

Yes, I already made the "I should have known, since friends suck." joke when I got fired...

192:

Err, yes.

Hank Scorpio would make for a great internet entrepreneur, but I run dry of association since sadly Shuttleworth, Musk, Bezos et al. are not that much into beards. Hm, Jimbo maybe.

193:

Hm, you know the version of Achilles and the tortoise by one Lewis Carroll?

As for GED, my first DM read it at a similar age. Me, I was somewhat later, but I had to rebuy it lately because I lent it to Mhairi/Freya's ex-boyfriend back in the day. Might have asked him to return it when meeting him at my last employer...

194:
start out in some area that is not the best ethically, make a fortune, then pivot and watch as everyone praises you...

I'll give you Ashoka and Augustus. Feel free to add others...

195:

Hm, she could also be the Joker's toxic (boy|girl)friend alternating between idealizing his/her artistic talent and creativity and devaluing him/her. The latter one especially when poor Joker opens up somewhat when under stress. He/her could also moonlight for other supervillains.

Looking for real life inspirations, this (boy|girl)friend would be the Harris to the Joker's Klebold.

196:

Hm, who's to say supervillainry isn't tax-deducable charitable work in Gotham City.

Keep the poor hudlums from the street, give them a job as henchmen, the harebrained schemes are just occupational therapy...

In other news, I started reading "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater" anew last week, and I have a feeling Thomas De Quincey was the original fanboy. Associations to Blackadder the Third for later...

197:

Greetings, and peace upon you! I am Joseph Mudkiller, and I was, until recently, the Chief of the Guards to King Onomatopoeia, in the Kingdom of Nigeria. One day, not long ago, I found that thieves had dug a hole up into the Treasury, and stolen some sacred artifacts, along with much gold. I was disgraced, and told to return with them or not at all.

Having found and dispatched the thieves, I now find myself possessed of the equivalent of 25,000,000 of your pounds that I need to remove from the kingdom....

198:

That does, of course, assume they'll return the loved one undamaged, and not find a way not to pay the reward....

199:

I object to the stratification of Bernie supporters, and other socialists, as on the same stratum as Trumpidiots. I've yet to meet a socialist unable to read, or who is able to listen only to Faux News. They fit below the lumpy proletariat, and are the "on the path into the dustbin of history" glide path.

200:

Um, chaotic evil dragons running the banking/finance system? I'd say that's indistinguishable from it being run by the Mob.

Oh, that's right, you mean like Trump and Mneuchin....

201:

Donald Kingsbury, Courtship Rite, nominated for Best Novella Hugo, 1980.

Met and talked to him at a Worldcon in the late 80's? early nineties? Nice guy.

202:

"...like a physical incarnation of Faux News".

I've just nipped off with that paragraph, and will be forwarding it to friends with attribution....

203:

Ah, yes, sie. I had a year of German, my first year in college, back when the mammoths walked the earth... and since at least the late seventies, based on that, I have had "they" in the non-gendered third person singular sweepstakes in English.

204:

That's one of those interesting questions, whether a system run on chaotic evil principles is stable in the long run.

For example, if we have dragons as creditors, we can be sure that the principle is as secure as the dragon is, but whether they're good for it in the case of a default? That's a bit harder. You'd have to treat paper backed by a red dragon as something like fiat money, only good for whatever people think it's worth.*

*In a Middle Earth scenario, would dragon-backed credit be circulated as Smaug certificates? Just wondering...

205:

It's worth noting that it is in the dragons' own self-interest not to eat the auditors who certify that their hoard contains enough gold to back their scrip.

So it follows that if one wants to sneak up on and slaughter a dragon, one first needs to train as a tenth level chartered accountant ...

206:

Or, following modern banking standards, the dragons can cover any expected losses...

I'm trying to figure out, is accountant a subclass of magicians or of monks?

207:

"One ring to audit them all..."

208:

Definitely monks. Their purpose is to worship made up stuff in books, to believe implicitly in this set canon of mindbuggeringly irrational bollocks, and to make sure that all other people believe in it too, or at least act as if they do. Other species of monk frequently promulgate a canon which proscribes their activities because they don't like the competition. They all have to agree on the same rules and are a tool in maintaining a given social order. Wizards on the other hand can't agree on anything, can hardly even maintain their own order, and certainly don't want all other people following their procedures.

209:

More likely 'clerics' in Dungeons & Dragons, though in most campaigns I have seen nobody really making others believe in their religion. Usually the players don't want to bring that to the gaming table, and anyway the religions in many published campaign worlds (which people do use, at least I do) are mostly polytheistic.

This basically means that if a character is a cleric of Tymora (the goddess of adventurers in Forgotten Realms, a popular campaign world), they don't try to convert either the mage or the fighter to the same faith as they have their own deities to worship, if they want to.

Paladins (religious fighters, basically) however are sometimes played as strict people who want to convert others to their faith. It used to be that paladins had to be "lawful good" in D&D (or "lawful" in older editions and some remakes), and that was sometimes interpreted badly. (Alignments themselves are a horrible idea, though.)

210:

The number of things wrong with D&ampD is epic:

  • Alignment system (enough said)

  • Races (hint: dubious race politics is a given thanks to the unacknowledged implicit racism in Tolkien and other fantasy taproots, but still ...!)

  • Predisposition to reward mindless sociopathic slaughterfests by murder hobos

  • Currency that is laughably simplistic and quasi-modern only not (NEVER trust the world-building in a fantasy universe where money consists of uniform noble metal coinage denominated in base 10 or base 100 and with fixed exchange rates)

... And so on

211:

Yes, there are a lot of more things that are wrong with D&D in addition to the alignment system. That's kind of why I nowadays usually play something else.

One thing that annoys me is the übermensch thinking in D&D - the characters have player charater class levels and therefore are just better than 99% of the world around them. There are those Khelbens and Elminsters in published worlds to prevent the player characters from just taking over, but my suspenders of disbelief stretch quite a bit when every village and town is ruled by a 25th level wizard or paladin. (Going by AD&D in this, the latest D&D version goes only to 20.)

I've been thinking of a D&D campaign which would get rid of many of these things, starting with doing away with that kind of alignment system, and using probably something more like Elric's law-chaos axis, and from that getting rid of the idea of "evil races" and so on. The money thing is probably there to make game more fun for most people - even in D&D the characters usually get soon enough money that the exact amounts don't matter, and more modern games often abstract the money away to a skill or attribute or something, so nobody counts shillings and farthings.

However, modifying D&D to be less annoying soon gets me thinking "why not just run this with something else, like Fate?"

212:

I remember reading this advert when it gained attention on Reddit and thinking this is the sort of prose an Artificial Intelligence trained to behave like a hipster marketing grad would produce.

213:

Gerald Williamson was a nice, well-behaved boy from a nice middle-middle-class family in nice High Wycombe. For the first couple of years of his secondary schooling, he went to one of the pleasant, sightly crumbling, public schools in the area where he got a good grounding in the classics. Sadly, just as he was moving up into the fourth form his father lost his job at the local office furniture factory when his mid-level clerk job was replaced by an entry-level data processing position. Gerald found himself crashing into the state school system where his facility with languages and habit of quipping bon mots in ancient greek did not find a particularly welcome audience in his classmates.

As a graduate, seeking the job security his father had always preached as the Best Way Through Life, and suspicious of technological development, Gerald calculated that the Foreign Office would be a stable, interesting and above all difficult-to-automate destination. He joined the civil service in 2003, serving all sorts of roles across Europe, living frugally and saving as much money as possible against the fear of a rainy day.

But progress in the civil service comes from motion, and eventually Gerald was spotted as a talent by the hungriest civil service department in existence. Much to his dismay he found himself dropped into a negotiation translator role with DExEU. After a mere few months attempting to reconcile Theresa May's gnomic statements on the desired outcome, contradictory instructions from across the department, and David Davis' habit of forgetting to undo his fly at the urinal, poor Gerald broke. If the tories want death to hang on an intractable brainteaser, then why not bring the brainteaser, and the death, closer to home?

First it was Nigel Farage, found suffocated in an airtight room. On the wall was written "To get out: NUMBER OF COUNTRIES IN EU + EU TREATIES IN 2013 - MONTHS AN EU PRESIDENT SERVES x NUMBER OF TIMES YOU'VE BEEN ELECTED AN MP" The door code was 0000, but somehow Nigel couldn't get that answer. Then Dominic Raab, killed by a bomb that would have been defused with the code DOVER. David Davis was killed by his trousers falling down leading to him tripping down a flight of stairs, but that's just David Davis. They know it wasn't Gerald, because when Gerald strikes he always leaves his calling card: A bright green business card embossed with a single black question mark.

214:

By the way, there's no need to worry that this pro-remain iteration of The Riddler might cause a moral tangle for Batman. Bruce Wayne is, after all, a billionaire.

215:

The only truly evil races are ones like like fell running and Ironman :-) I don't know if any D&D games include such things (or ones like bog snorkelling!), as I don't play them.

216:

An important question remains: are fell running and Ironman lawful, neutral, or chaotic evil races?

(Really, even the word "race" for the different, though often related, species in D&D and other roleplaying games was a bad, bad choice, even without considering the further implications from the later alignment system.)

217:

The thing about the next iteration of the Joker for me is the deconstruction of society, the avatar of all our broken selves hiding behind the farce of a mask.

Enter Simon Dunwell.

Simon is a "Millenial". Whatever that term actually means, for Simon it means that maintaining a dozen social media profiles is something you Just Do. Always a smile, always a positive attitute, even when you get the same templated rejection letters from every job he went to an interview to. Or rejections to romantic advances or even platonic friendships. Everything is done via text, nobody is looking him to his face. And one evening, after getting another faux-angry, faux-sincere-regret letter from his student loan service provider, something went click in his head. Looking into the mirror in his tiny rat-invested apartment (advertised as clean and homely), he wondered why people can't stand his face. And he understood, ramming his head against it, panting a spiderweb on it around a red blotch. Nobody is showing their real faces anymore, everybody wears masks. That's why nobody bothers anymore.

But Simon could fix this. He would remove the face-masks and show the world what is really underneath it. He grabbed his old cut-throat razor, and started to remove his mask.

The news weeks later reported of several cases where social media "influencers" who have been tortured and their torment being live-posted by a manic man without a face. The cases took long to get attention, as the posts were first thought to be publicity stunts.

218:

it is in the dragons' own self-interest not to eat the auditors who certify that their hoard contains enough gold to back their scrip

Those that don't certify that, despite appearances, the hoard contains enough gold to back the scrip, on the other hand…

We've seen what happens to respected auditors when they merely want a continuing contract —throw a hungry dragon into the mix and I suspect "generally accepted accounting principles" will get even more flexible…

219:

Clerics in D&D... on the one hand, a lot of campaigns (at least when I was playing back when mammoths walked the earth) were pretty much one culture, so one could be assumed to be a co-religionist (unless you were of the other races, elf, dwarf, whatever).

Once, I had a friend running a lawful cleric who did lawful cleric, for real. There's a song by Pete Seeger called Kagan, about a fisherman. He's a good man, but he and his wife are starting to starve, the weather's been bad, but he has no choice, he goes out. Catches fish, and then the wind and waves turn against him. Eventually, he dies. The waves relent, and his boat's blown back to shore the next morning.

The party, headed to my other dungeon, happened across the beach as the village was there, and his wife crying over his body. The cleric had once-a-day, revive dead fully. He decided the adventurers had signed up for risking their necks, but Kagan had not. He revived him.

(Real world: show me one televangelist who'll pay for a follower's cancer treatment.)

220:

Not a problem I had. You had to really work to get up in levals, and, though no one did it, my rules were that the instant you hit 21st level, you were transported to an infinite plain (parallel lines going to infinity optional), and all the gods and goddesses of the world were there, and you could a) fight all of them, all at once, or b) go be god of your own world.

221:

Oh, only remembered after I hit submit: don't assume all religions are into evangelism. Judaism, for example, you've got to work hard, I understand, to convince a rabbi that you want to convert.

Then there's Shinto, and, what I get from the only book in English that's worth reading, is "not interested in you, this is ours. go back to your peoples' religion."

222:

Close, but no cigar - my personal (fannish) card is green, with black printing, but has, of course, a dragon on it....

223:

Bog snorkeling... reminds me of when I got into the SCA, in the mid-seventies. That was long before they bought a property for Pennsic. The year before I went, a hurricane came through, and there was rain: think "a tractor mired up to its axles in mud". It was at that one Pennsic that I heard of the new fighting styles they'd invented: 1. Snorkel and short sword. 2. Aqualung and mace. 3. Shield and spear (one stands on the shield, and poles with the spear, until one finds an enemy....)

There was also discussion of how one short duke could fight in the melee... only because he was standing on the (completely undermud) shoulders of another short duke.

224:

But do your parallel lines meet at infinity, or are the gods trying to fight that one out? :-)

225:

Oh, come on - it's the standard parallel lines from a book cover (pick any).

226:

All right - it was a feeble joke(*), anyway!

(*) Of the sort comprehensible only to mathematicians.

227:

Well, if you're going to be that picky, from where you stand, they appear to meet... (though I suspect someone's set up a restaurant there).

228:

That would be Peter Kagan and the Wind which is a Gordon Bok song.

wiki

Gordon is a delightful songwriter and a beautiful singer. Listening to him do Kagan is just wonderful.

229:

jrootham @ 228: That would be Peter Kagan and the Wind which is a Gordon Bok song.

wiki

Gordon is a delightful songwriter and a beautiful singer. Listening to him do Kagan is just wonderful.

I still prefer the version where the cleric used his once-a-day "revive dead, fully" to to be like the Good Samaritan. That's what religion should be, but never is.

230:

That's what religion should be, but never is.

Absolute claims can be refuted by a single counter-example, and amusingly you actually reference a counter-example in your claim.

Not to mention the song that comes to mind when I hear that sort of gibberish... a satire written in response.

Captain. And I'm never, never sick at sea! Chorus. What, never? Captain. No, never! Chorus. What, never? Captain. Hardly ever! Chorus. He's hardly ever sick at sea!

https://youtu.be/kBK39BKWuQg?t=57

231:

The year before I went, a hurricane came through, and there was rain: think "a tractor mired up to its axles in mud". It was at that one Pennsic that I heard of the new fighting styles they'd invented: 1. Snorkel and short sword...

I'm sure you've heard the song about that by Michael Longcor, but others might be amused to hear about someone else having trouble a long time ago and far away.

"I don't mind steel, but I don't want to drown!"

232:

I got it, but as a software engineer with side interests in accounting/audit and probability, I am a mathematician for the purposes of jokes like that!

233:

I can definitely see Dragons becoming interested in the black arts of economics-econometrics and ending up running the central bank of the kingdom: "look Arthur King o' the Britains' I don't care what Merlin Head of Treasury says about the economic outlook, you're going to have start building castles..."

234:

I know there used to be role-playing tournaments in Sweden (because I ended up GM-ing in quite a few). There were basically two models of scoring.

Model #1, there's essentially a tick-off sheet with various things ("solved riddle A", "passed gate B without killing the guards", ...) and a few discretionary "how much fun did the players seem to have" and "how much fun did the GM have". The latter were usually 5-10 points of ~100 points overall. Highest-scoring team wins. In case of a tie, the GMs discuss their sessions, and the tournament leader(s) decide between them, based on the discussion.

Model #2, all GMs gather after the session and describe what happened, tournament leader then decides who wins.

235:

Or at least be adequately disguised... I'd guess that there would be passwords involved, and the whole thing would involve some interesting issues of establishing trust: "It's November, but you're not wearing purple boots - must breathe fire now!"

236:

You know that if you want send and email to Middle Earth, you must use a Tolkien Ring network.

237:

"* Races (hint: dubious race politics is a given thanks to the unacknowledged implicit racism in Tolkien and other fantasy taproots, but still ...!)

  • Predisposition to reward mindless sociopathic slaughterfests by murder hobos"

Fortunately, these tropes are both easily subverted, but your complaints about the monetary system are very relevant - one day I should force my players to deal with something like the pre-EU British system...

238:

Or Drogna (from "The Adventure Game". The value of any individual coin was given by the number of sides on a polygon multiplied by the colour's place in the rainbow, so a red circle would be 1 drogna, a violet pentagon 35 drogna for example...

239:

I had not heard it. But... I'm wondering. I was at 4? I think it may have been, 1976, I think. The song mentioned Crown Prince Angus - if that refers to the late (and unlamented) Angus Dubh* from the East, that would make it around '80 or '81.

  • I was told the joke after he headed west was "watch out for the Angus doo...."
240:

AAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUGHGHGHGHGHGHHGHGHGHGHGGHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You do realize how few folks will get that? I had to share the pain, so I stood up and walked to his door, and told my manager that one....

241:

Ooh, I like the Drogna. Let's see, because of the colors, I assume each coin's a carefully heat-treated piece of steel? (tempering gives all those different colors if done right--and if the coin's surface isn't scratched).

So what that means is that, if you give me a file and a furnace, I can change a bunch of red circles into violet pentagons with a lot of filing and a heat treatment. What a lovely system!

On a less sarcastic note, I'm playing with a secondary world where (for reasons of lack of mineable conventional precious metals), money is based on addictive substances: chocolate, coffee, and sugar, to be precise. Using the old notion from Runequest of the Peasant's penny (a penny being the amount of money necessary to feed a poor person/unskilled labor for a day), the conversion rate historically is 20 cacao beans, 300 green coffee beans, or 250 roasted coffee beans (about an ounce of ground coffee) were all considered a day's wage (for porters). There's all sorts of fun with having a consumable, perishable coinage, and of course the Mesoamericans were known for forging cacao beans with bits of old avocado skin and pebbles...

More to the point, the origin of capitalism is in the ancient trades: --addictive substances (coffee, tea, alcohol, tobacco, and more recently cacao, sugar, opium, coca) --weapons --slaves --drugs and spices (slightly separate from the above, in that they don't have to be addictive) --precious metals and gems --useful metals (iron or bronze components) --salt

D&D didn't really deal with the two biologics on the list, or the iron and salt trades, but just as a matter of principle, someone writing a secondary world can get a lot of structure simply by figuring where and how these things move around, whatever form they take in the world. You don't even need cash if you can establish standardized equivalencies for how much, say, a pig is worth in coffee, or some such. The basic rate for a porter's one good way to do that.

242:

Let's see, because of the colors, I assume each coin's a carefully heat-treated piece of steel?

This being the BBC of the early 80s, each coin was a coloured shape embedded in a transparent plastic disc...

243:

We dropped it long before we joined the EU. Not even Grease-Smug has proposed reverting to it, though some of us regret its passing for non-sentimental reasons.

I would hope that you use at least some of the old names and near-ubiquitous slang names, and possibly introduce some of the semi-historical ones. All the following were in use in my childhood (non-currency ones in parentheses), and there were other names in use, too:

Farthing, ha'penny, penny, thruppenny (or ticky, to us colonials, which was a different coin), (groat), tanner, bob, florin, half-crown, crown, (mark), half-sovereign, (half-guinea), sovereign and (guinea).

244:

I think I'd make up currency names (seventeen sqonks to the ha'spackle, unless it's Tuesday, in which case we add a nor'fanch in honor of St. Grackle.)

And since I'm a complete bastard, it would all be prime numbers.

245:

I told it to a bunch of network technicians yesterday, and only one of them didn't look puzzled.

246:

One of the glorious things about the old UK currency is that many units did not subdivide the next. You might like to consider that, as a wrinkle.

And I like your Tolkein ring joke - but, then, I would :-)

247:

So you could divide a pound by shillings, but not a guinea by shillings? Or at least that's the prinicple?

248:

I passed it along to my lady, who once studied (but was too ill to take the test) for an A+ certification, and she booed it.... (Wonderful woman.)

249:

p>Troutwaxer @ 236: You know that if you want send and email to Middle Earth, you must use a Tolkien Ring network.

whitroth @ 240: AAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUGHGHGHGHGHGHHGHGHGHGHGGHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You do realize how few folks will get that? I had to share the pain, so I stood up and walked to his door, and told my manager that one....

Qwitcher bitchin! It's the first joke posted here in a long, long time that I got right off without having to use Google.

https://assets.amuniversal.com/a3fc7760a033012f2fe600163e41dd5b

250:

Nah, what you really need to be careful about is unplugging that patch cord. You let that happen, and the bits'll get out, and you'll get bitrot in the carpeting.

251:

Speaking of stories, I was in afterglow all morning. Balticon had something new: pitch sessions for editors. After I did the one for Amazing Stories, I submitted my novelette. This morning, reading my email over breakfast, I got two emails from them: one, a std. rejection email... and the other a long, personal note from the editor, talking about what was wrong, and making suggestions, and telling me I should consider expanding it into a novella, because of the size of the cast, and the ground I was covering.

That's the second "rewrite" I've gotten, one from Eric Flint, and one, now, from Ira. I am so close to selling I can taste it....

252:

Sort of. A half-crown was a common coin, and was worth two (shillings) and sixpence. So was a florin, at two shillings. Shillings did divide guineas, but crowns didn't. A mark was six and eightpence - a third of a pound - and was (and is) used for fines in the University of Cambridge, but was otherwise obsolete. Groats were worth fourpence, and used on Maundy Thursday by the Sovereign, but was also otherwise obsolete, and a thruppenny bit and the sixpence were the coins of the realm.

While you could make it up, most people nowadays wouldn't believe you :-)

253:

I recall an article in Dragon magazine in the early 90s about using various historic currency systems in D&D. I seem to recall that groats (3d, or 12 farthings) being approximately 10 times the smallest coin and half crowns (2s 6d, 30 pennies or 120 farthings) being about 100 times were quite prominent in the scheme.

254:

My mistake: a groat is 4d, 3d is a thrupenny bit.

255:

Guineas, of course, are still used to this day.

(The price paid in many livestock auctions is in guineas. Nowadays a guinea is £1.05; as soon as the animal is knocked down the buyer knows they're paying X guineas, the seller knows they're getting X pounds, and the auctioneer takes the X*£0.05 as commission and doesn't have to take suspicious farmers through the maths of why they're paying more or receiving less than was announced in the ring.)

256:

And since I'm a complete bastard, it would all be prime numbers.

Already done, rather famously I'm afraid.

257:

You can combine the origin stories: Imagine if Geraldine DeRuiter took the job with the description ending “Smile. Photo.”

258:

Oh yeah. That. What might be fun is to combine two sets of monies, with social restrictions on how you can spend each kind, including each kind of money being gender based... "Officer, they tried to pay for their meal with Dactels, but it's Tuesday! The waitress is crying in the back, the busboy won't clear their table, and the cook is threatening to quit unless we have the place excorcised!"

259:

On the subject of RPG, I'm quite fond of the Laundry Files game, but I only know one other player in California who's even heard of it, and he died last year. Is there much of a community for it, is it popular in UK or anywhere else?

260:

I have most of the books for it, and I gamemastered a short campaign some years ago. People here know it but I don't know of any other who has played it. Then again, it's hard to know what people are playing.

On the subject of murder-hobos, there's going to be a new version of Cyberpunk - and also a computer game, called Cyberpunk 2077. At least our Cyberpunk games when we were fifteen degenerated very fast into violent mayhem, but there could be more than that to the game, even though the genre is somewhat... dated. I'm re-reading Neuromancer now, and I think I could try out a cyberpunk RPG in that vein. More of a complicated heist than just going somewhere and shooting all the guards.

However, some of the cyberpunk computer "roleplaying" games seem to have taken that violence thing and made it normal. I watched a demo video for a game called 'Watch Dogs Legion', and while it looked promising in the beginning, it very quickly degenerated into "let's just shoot all the guards and make things explode" with no apparent thought on the irony of opposing a bad government by killing a lot of people. I don't think I'll buy that game, and I think I'll wait until I know more about the Cyberpunk 2077 game (it's to be published in August 2020, but the pre-orders are already open).

261:

Heteromeles @ 241 What's interesting there, is that two/three culinary spices always were expensive & still are. Actual Pepper corns, Mace & Saffron. Mace, which comes from the exact same plant as Nutmeg, has a difficult processing - & was the source of an interesting war & resulting treaty ... involving what later became Manhattan, IIRC. Saffron, of course, is a complete bastard to collect. And, in spite of being transplanted & spread, there is still * not quite enough * pepper - & it, too can be slightly problematical to collect, as are some of the "other" peppers, in the Xznthosylum group [ Sometimes spelt with a "Z" ... bunches of tiny flowers off very thorny branches, which turn into pink berries, with a shiny black seed - picking is time-consuming & difficult ... I have an schinifolium which is how I know ... ]

EC @ 243 Erm, a Guinea was 21/- ( £1.05 ) - used for art purchases & other deals, because the extra shilling represented the agant's 5% commission ... IIRC a Mark was two-thirds of a Pound, so 13/-4d

Troutwaxer @ 247 20 shillings per pound, but 21 shillings per guinea But, like I said, the extra shilling was usually a commission rate - the buyer paid in guineas, the seller got it in pounds & the agent got the left-over shillings. SEE ALSO ... ... anonemouse @ 255

EC @ 252 Erm, no, again. A florin was an early attempt at decimalisation, being 0.1 of a £, whereas a half-crown was one-eighth of a £. And a Mark was 2/3 of a £ - like I said, though 6/8d would be half-a-mark.

262:

Early Token ring networks had some bugs and race conditions where some times you'd get two tokens on the same ring. You had to wait for one of them to come round the ring and then disconnect a cable so that the extra token fell out. And then plug it back in quickly before the other token comes past. When we were testing large networks we'd often include a tap to make this easier. It's a bit like the LHC at CERN where they have a controlled leak to get rid of excess protons when there are too many on the ring. Tolkien ring networks are the same but with Hobbits. You need a small one way door in the system to let the invisible ones out.

263:

Has anyone ever assessed the labour conditions at Wayne Industries? Are they paying more than minimum wage, permitting unionisation, observing health and safety standards, etc? After all if we accept that there is no such thing as a morally-unencumbered billionaire it's entirely possible that the whole "Batman" story is simply Koch brothers-style propaganda to obscure the real villain of Gotham City.

264:

Officially they are allowed to unionise but every time they try this lunatic in bat themed body armour turns up and starts breaking heads.

265:

Upon checking, you are right about the mark - thank you - it appears that the University of Cambridge fined/fines in units of half-marks - but your other points are merely what I said, couched in other terms. The point about the groat, mark and guinea is that there has been no legal currency of those values for some time (a long time, in the case of the mark), except for Maundy money.

266: 241 - In the show, the Drogna were made of perspex. They were also circular, with a sticker for the polygon. Since this is a fantasy world, exactly how they are made is up to the GM. Your technique would work for IRL steels (and I think titanium, if you can find a file that will cut titanium that is).

And, of course, the video tropes of marijuana and oregano, or flour and any other white powder.

242 - I wasn't trying to explain it fully, just illustrate something that could cause players no end of confusion... 247 - No. You could divide pounds and guineas by a shilling, but you'd get different positive answers. 260 - Well, at that rate steer well clear of "SLA Industries". It would appeal otherwise I think. 262 - Classic!
267:

I kind of missed SLA industries, and I've never read or played it but I know of the game. Sounds interesting, though.

Also, Cyberpunk (both 2013 and 2020) had good games in them, it's just that we as fifteen-year olds didn't really grasp how to make that work. The various cyberpunk (genre) computer games are somewhat different in what the players like to do (and what the makers of the game think players like to do) and probably for that reason include lots of combat.

I played a lot more Shadowrun, though, and in that world you easily can have dragons as bankers. One of them, Lofwyr, heads one of the biggest megacorporations (at least for much of the metaplot, I don't know about the recent releases), and others take an active role in the world. One dragon had its own talk show, too, and was elected the president of one of the USA (and Canada) successor states (UCAS, United Canadian and American States).

268:

EC @ 265 It is suggested that the Mark was "only" an accounting unit for convenience, & that no actual coin was minted in that/those values. As to the verity of that, I can't say.

269:

I vaguely remember the exchange rate for Deutschmarks being roughly some multiple of a third of a pound, but I can't remember whether it was 1 or 2.

270:

Could be. And it appears that the origin of the unit at the UoC may have been garbled as I heard it, because it seems far more likely that it was in units of nobles.

http://www.bsswebsite.me.uk/A%20Short%20History%20of/coins.html

271:

Well, that was my experience of SLA; sooner or later you would finish up in a gun or spell battle (mid 30s group).

272:

Its a sign of the end times!

EC and Greg are almost in agreement!

273:

No, no, no. We all know the answer - 42, and the question, what's 6*9. What many have missed is that this is true... in base 13.

This explains why everything's so screwed up (and why Pagans, who tend to like 13's, do slightly better). To improve society massively, then, we need to use base 13 for money. The change will be similar to the change in the US from quarts to liters for soda, and if we define a new base unit, 1 answer == $1.04, it all works out just fine. 1 penny is just that. 13 pennies is a question 4 units to the answer

See?

274:

Damn - that should have been 4 questions in an answer.

275:

Dactyls? You mean they won't accept Pterry's, either?

276:

Reminds me of the fad of guys wearing their pants hanging down, which is supposed to look like someone in prison, where they get whatever the size.

To which, I've always wondered why they wanted to emulate the guys who were so dumb they got caught, rather than the ones who got away with it.

If I was writing a cyberpunk game, there'd be 1. You start with a basic deck. You really need month to upgrade. 2. a) you find out how to buy warez, and buy some. b) you spend time acually studying hacks 3. You run a scam to get money, either using warez or a hack you've found. 4. either a) you buy more expensive warez, or b) you start modifying existing hacks. 5. if you're going for the second path, you start engineering your own, unique hacks.

Through all this, you try to avoid a) being caught in a sting where you're buying warez b) try to avoid security coming back at you with ICE. c) try to learn in advance if the FBI is coming after you. d) try to stay free of direct entanglements with either the Mob, or State Actors.

Win? That's when you make that last big run, and get enough to retire.

Violence is for losers.

277:

"Pterry's on Tuesday and Thursday Dactyl's the rest of the week, Unless you're purchasing legumes Always use Pterry's for leeks!"

278:

Well, then there was the problem that if you hadn't prepared the network, when you opened it up, you'd lost tokens in the carpeting, and they'd break down to bits, causing bitrot, and you after you reconnected, you'd have to wait for the ring to fill up with tokens again. That might mean you had to put more tokens in the network served, though, and trying to get tokens from supplies, with all the forms you needed to fill out, and approvals....

279:

The Mark may have been a unit of accountancy to begin with; I know I have a book with information on the topic but I can't find it just now. It was however minted in Scotland in 1580 under James VI, with a weight of 171 3/4 grains. And again in 1600 or so.

280:

I love this thread! The cream of the jest was that the problems described really did exist - in the early ethernets! Token rings were designed to avoid just that problem.

281:

Yeah, violence is a bad solution. It's just that in many tabletop rpgs, the solutions degenerate easily into violence.

This is even though the Cyberpunk 2020 rpg (which is the one I have played) tries to tell the players that violence is a dangerous solution, and usually needs some setup to be on top. The rules themselves do not support this all the time, especially when playing with the rules as written, the armour is very good. One time my character didn't even get damaged by a 20mm gun in the chest from point blank range - he was wearing a normal kevlar vest...

282:

Assuming you mean the English-language Laundry RPG from Cubicle 7 (there are separate French and Spanish officially-licensed Laundry RPGs with their own rule sets) ... it's no longer on sale. Cubicle 7 sub-licensed the Call of Cthulhu d20 ruleset and customized it. Last year Chaosium did a huge upheaval of their licensing system and cancelled a bunch of third-party licenses, chopping the Laundry RPG off at the knees.

There may be a new Laundry RPG at some point in the future, but it'll most likely only happen if the TV series ever gets made or the series somehow goes bestseller. All things considered it's doing well ... but said considerations include switching publisher twice (once is usually enough to kill a series stone dead!) and in the middle of a giant format-shift in publishing (death of the mass market paperback). Not to mention $AUTHOR dividing his attention in several conflicting directions rather than squeezing out another book every year.

283:

Yep, sure, he's only wounded. I think there needs to be die roll adjustments for that, based on range.

Still, I'd think that if they're running something on someone big, someone big has much more security, with more and bigger guns.

And... it's freakin' cyberpunk. Shouldn't it be 95% done online, with money going into escrow accounts, etc? When the hell are they going to show up in person? What, they're going to break into a datacenter, and find (magic pixie dust here) which server in 100 rows of 50 racks in a row, with 5-20 servers in each rack, is the only one running this software, and they'll plug a console in, and log in as root and d/l it?

Riiiight.... Don't let security meet you on the way out.

284:

Geez, I almost forgot: getting into the datacenter, you did have the ID card and other-factor id to get you through the two doors, and don't forget to hit the button on the way out, or the alarms will have the cops on their way....

(Why, yes, I do use my ID card, twice, to get into our datacenter, and push buttons to get out....)

285:

Meanwhile, back in the "real" world ... I'm really bothered by the oil tanker incidents in the Gulf ... has all the hallmarks of a Gleiwitz Incident ... Though it may easily be the US' proxies, Saudi or their "friends" who are actually directly responsible. It DT/Bolton can get their war, then DT stands a chance of being re-elected ... IF they can convince enough people ... though after "Weapons of mouse destruction" I would think that many would (now) be more suspicious ....

286:

Totally agree about it being another Gulf of Tonkin incident. Iran has nothing to gain, the Japanese owners of the tankers contradict the US government account of what happened (and they should know!), and the US responded by blaming Iran far too fast—there are many other countries with coastlines adjoining the straits.

Also, if the last 18 years have proven anything, it's that the US electorate are in aggregate dumb enough to swallow any story as long as you wrap it in a flag and point them at a well-hated swarthy-skinned bloke in a black hat.

287:

Current news story from google news: one of the tanker captains disputes the US version, and says that they were hit by what they thought was an artillery shell, then, a couple hours later, by a second shell.

No mines, torpedoes, or submarines with a sawblade top.

288:

Ahem: the sawblade on the old U-boats was to sever mooring cables on sea mines, AIUI. Not for attacking ships.

289:

Nor does it stop the UK behaving like the subservient toady we are, nor the BBC from promoting the government line - I turned the sound off, because it was so ghastly :-(

290:

Much of the US press is appropriately suspicious (2.5 years of lies is good training). As are investors. :-) We shall see but so far the US press is doing OK, IMO. Gulf on Edge as Conflicting Accounts of Tanker Attacks Swirl (Margaret Talev, Stephen Stapczynski, Golnar Motevalli, 2019/06/14) Even so, investors took the risk in their stride. Brent oil futures in London traded slightly lower on Friday at $61.15 a barrel, set for a weekly decline as concern about faltering demand outweighed those of Middle East tensions.

291:

Glad I got mine early, then.

The Gumshoe System that Pelgrane Press uses looks like it could be a suitable engine, if someone wanted to switch systems. They've already done Trail of Cthulhu using it. I haven't played it (haven't played an RPG in over a decade) but I rather like the idea that a single bad die roll won't scupper an investigation — the rules support the players getting the information they need, the question being what will it cost them. (You could always cope as a GM, of course, but I like a system where the rules encourage intended behaviours/outcomes rather than fighting them.)

292:

Totally agree about it being another Gulf of Tonkin incident. Iran has nothing to gain,

From our point of view yes. (Western democracy leaning how governments should operate point of view.) From the point of view of a semi-independent fraction of the RG, maybe they want chaos to increase/consolidate power.

I get the impression that the RG integration with the general government of Iran many times makes the SS look like a lapdog of the German High Command during WWII.

293:

Reminds me of the fad of guys wearing their pants hanging down, which is supposed to look like someone in prison, where they get whatever the size.

Actually it had to do with the removal of belts and shoe laces when processed into jail in street clothes.

To which, I've always wondered why they wanted to emulate the guys who were so dumb they got caught, rather than the ones who got away with it.

Emulation of the ones rebelling against the system. A common thing in all societies. Especially with those who don't see a better future.

294:

Neither explanation makes sense. Whether the looseness is due to inappropriate sizing or belt removal, if they're so loose that your arse itself isn't enough of a hook to hold them up, they're not going to fall only as far as just below it and then stop; they're going to fall all the way to your ankles. To get them to stay just below your arse means you have to hold them there, and if you're going to be holding your trousers up all the time anyway, why on earth would you not hold them up all the way like normal?

The explanation I heard was that it signified that you were at the very bottom of the prison status ranking and therefore were compelled by the expectation of violence to go around with your arse readily available for those at the top of the ranking to access on a whim. Which sounds very much like it has been made up by a certain type of person, and has all sorts of other things wrong with it, but at least it does not contradict basic clothing physics.

295:

Wearing bad-fitting clothes on the street was supposed to make people think you were just out of prison, a bad-ass dude. As one commentator in the 80s noted, it was a problematic fashion because, improperly done, it made the teens look like they were just entering adolescence, with their badly fitting clothes. How adorable!

It's also, quite possibly, a deliberate play against the Historically Black Colleges and Universities, particularly all-male Morehouse. These schools were known for having a strict (and very stylish) dress code that was enforced by both the faculty and the students. Part of the HBCU's mission is to show a very racist American society that black men and women are every bit as good as their white counterparts (the whole work twice as hard to go half as far meme applies here). If you want to demonstrate your street cred as opposed to your hard work and education, dressing in bad-fitting clothes is a good way to signal authenticity.

296:

From the point of view of a semi-independent fraction of the RG, maybe they want chaos to increase/consolidate power.

In the list of state actors* who want the US to declare war on Iran, I think any element of the Iranian government is a long way down the list. Normally I'd put the Saudi's at the top because right now a good dose of "look over there" seems just what they need, but significantly reducing their ability to export oil is probably not what they need domestically. OTOH they have motive, means and access... Mind you, Russia and China are also able and possibly stand to gain from problems there - what's their pipeline situation these days? It would be terribly convenient if the major export avenue for Iran was pipes to those two countries. And the US has form in pretextual declarations of war, I can imagine Bolton trying his own Tonkin incident to get the war he so desperately wants.

You also have a bunch of minor players who may or may not gain from the spike in oil prices or related chaos. Venezuala for example :)

  • ones who can lay repeatedly mines in the strait or otherwise damage ships
297:

EC @ 289 I also see J Cunt has grovelled to Trumpolini - & JUST FOR ONCE ... Cor Bin is correct. After the bloody farce of "WMD" you would have thought someone would have learnt?

I have no desire to see us play the part of Öesterreich-Ungarn to Trump/Bolton's Zweite Reich, thank you very much. [ We'll have Zaghari-Ratcliffe back & STAY OUT OF IT - please? ]

David L @ 293 Yes, well, the Iranian RG are a pain in their own guvmin't arse ... spoiling for a fight they can't win & looking for millions of deaths, because they have "got religion" - they are the mirror-image of Bolton & his cronies. [ Note, I said "Iranian" - when I usually call that country by its old name - Persia. ]

298:

Meanwhile Another Chinese plot - or so we will be told, I expect.

299:

That is because it was not created to be under the authority of the general government - it was to be under that of the Supreme Leader. I am not absolutely sure of its current status, but I am pretty sure that Khamenei would NOT approve of attacks on neutral shipping.

The most likely actors are the USA itself and the obvious state that Moz did NOT mention in #296 that has been calling for the USA to wage war on Iran. I sincerely hope that it wasn't the UK, and don't think that May is THAT bad, but it's not absolutely impossible :-(

300:

Yes, well, the Iranian RG are a pain in their own guvmin't arse ... spoiling for a fight they can't win & looking for millions of deaths, because they have "got religion" - they are the mirror-image of Bolton & his cronies.

I don't think so.

The Iranian revolution was in 1979, forty years ago. A young revolutionary guard leader from the barricades is therefore likely to be in his sixties; the high-ups are pushing 70 or older by now. The RG has had time to institutionalize, becoming a parallel state-within-a-state with its own military infrastructure and promotion ladder and revenue streams. It depends for its continued viability on the existence of external threats to the revolution, so in that respect it's clearly a mirror to Bolton and the other neoconservative hawks, but an actual war is another matter; they've seen what the USA can do to an enemy (fuck them up good, then make a total hash of the subsequent occupation) and realistically they don't want that.

So there's an element of gratuitous posturing, but the heads making the decisions are grey and experienced and want to rock the boat only as far as necessary to guarantee a continuing seat at the top table.

Meanwhile, let's not forget the real cold war that's been raging in the region, since the Saudi religious revolution of 1981: Sunni fundamentalists who think Shi'ites are evil heretics, vs. Shi'ite revolutionaries who are fed up with Sunni shit after several centuries of taking it in the neck. Saudi has a new, very young, leader (MBS) who is clearly feeling his oats and prone to erratic, dangerous maneuvers (the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, for example: the war in Yemen for another—Yemen being majority Shi'ite, you will note). MBS would totally love to schedule some B-52 raids on Tehran, and deniably popping a couple of rockets at foreign tankers in the straits would be a good way to feed his buddy John Bolton a pretext.

301:

Also, the UK is an active (including military) participant in MBS's anti-Shia pogrom in Yemen, so anything our government says has to be distrusted.

The evidence seems to be that it was shells, not rockets, unless the rockets were unusually small by modern standards. One wonders what vessels were in the right positions to fire such things. If the USA's video is real, and was removing evidence, it could equally well have been a UAE, Saudi or even USA one. There's nothing like getting your lies in first ....

302:

Did anyone else see this publication? Frank? Whaddaya think?

"ABSTRACT

Climate warming in regions of ice‐rich permafrost can result in widespread thermokarst development, which reconfigures the landscape and damages infrastructure. We present multi‐site time‐series observations which couple ground temperature measurements with thermokarst development in a region of very cold permafrost. In the Canadian High Arctic between 2003 and 2016, a series of anomalously warm summers caused mean thawing indices to be 150 – 240 % above the 1979‐2000 normal resulting in up to 90 cm of subsidence over the 12‐year observation period. Our data illustrate that despite low mean annual ground temperatures, very cold permafrost (<‐10°C) with massive ground ice close to the surface is highly vulnerable to rapid permafrost degradation and thermokarst development. We suggest that this is due to little thermal buffering from soil organic layers and near surface vegetation, and the presence of near surface ground ice. Observed maximum thaw depths at our sites are already exceeding those projected to occur by 2090 under RCP 4.5. Key Points

Observed thermokarst development in very cold permafrost at 3 monitoring sites along a 700 km transect in the Canadian High Arctic.

Rapid landscape response to above average summer warmth is due to limited thermal buffering from overlying ecosystem components and near‐surface ground ice.

Change was greatest at Mould Bay where thawing index values were 240 % above historic normals causing ~90 cm of subsidence in 12 years."

303:

EC @ 299 yes (maybe) ... the question is, if not "Iran", then whom? My money is on a deniable cats-paw from the UAE or Saudi, who have a desperate & very long-running religious bone to pick with Persia. ( see also below, in my reply to Charlie )

@ 301 Also almost certainly correct - which is even more worrying.

Charlie they've seen what the USA can do to an enemy (fuck them up good, then make a total hash of the subsequent occupation) and realistically they don't want that. Yes, but ... religion, martrydom, shia history ... irrationality. Um, err ... more um/err .... HOWEVER "MBS" yup, will go with that. Even at this distance in time, the Batlle of Karbala casts a long shadow ( 61 AH / 680 CE )

304:

Both the UAE's and Saudi Arabia's economies are at risk. Iran's would crash if all oil exports from that area were blocked, but theirs would disappear. There is another country that has been trying to get the USA to bomb Iran for ages and is not in the region - what's more, it has a track record of unscrupulous covert operations, whereas those two don't (unscrupulous, yes, covert, please don't make me laugh). AND, if either the USA or UK discover its involvement, we will hush it up using our full official secrecy powers.

305:

"The Gumshoe System that Pelgrane Press uses looks like it could be a suitable engine, if someone wanted to switch systems."

I second the Gumshoe idea for a rebooted Laundry rpg - it's a low crunch system that runs practically dice-less once you get used to it.

I ran a game of Nights Black Agents (elevator pitch - the Jason Bourne movies, but Project Treadstone is run by vampires) for about 18 months a few years back and it worked really well for a story about protagonists who were in over their heads but could still pull off a win if they prepared well, fought smart and knew when to run like hell.

Pelgrane Press are pretty much my only 'buy their stuff on sight' rpg publisher these days - I have a bunch of Gumshoe and 13th Age product from them.

Regards Luke

306:

EC @ 304 Bennie's place, yes? Except Isreal actually IS "in the region"

307:

Thanks for pointing it. I'm saving the article for later, when I get around to rewriting Hot Earth Dreams. Right now I've got to deal with the environmental ramifications of that little global housing bubble that's getting ready to pop.

Basically, thermokarst is what you get when most of the "rock" beneath your feet was ice and is now melting piecemeal. Since ice is less dense than water, as the ice melts, some things slump, some things collapse, sometimes lakes form from the melt, sometimes lakes drain away because the ice keeping the water from draining away melts, and so forth. It's like limestone karst, only faster and less stable.

It's a mess, and while there are some building technologies designed to deal with it, in general it's in the extremely not fun category for erecting buildings on top.

As for climate change, it's getting pretty obvious that the IPCC5 was too conservative on arctic thawing, and that we're in fairly big trouble up there. That, fire, and heat index are things they didn't cover very well, and I'm sure they'll be in the IPCC 6, due out 2022 or so. In the rest of the century, I'm still holding out hope for a PETM-level die off starting in around three decades, rather than an end-Permian Great Dying scrubbing us entirely off the planet, but our kids will know for certain, I think.

The thing that's interesting to me is how the great Fossil Fuel Authoritarians who rule Russia and Saudi Arabia, the US, Canada, and Australia (among others) are doubling down on fossil fuel extraction and production, rather than shifting to different systems of power, even though they have the wealth to make the change and stay in power. Silly liberals like me thought they were more pragmatic and thoughtful than that, but they're apparently rather more doctrinaire and power-blinded than were the Norse Greenlanders who were thought to have simply built a bigger church as the Little Ice Age bit down, or the Easter Islanders when they abandoned the Moai system and went with the Birdman (Note that Jared Diamond's Collapse has fared badly in the face of subsequent archaeological work). Consumerist capitalism really seems like the stupidest of all possible systems right now, doesn't it?

308:

It has no border in the Persion Gulf or Gulf of Oman, and would not be DIRECTLY affected by war there. It is unlikely that Iran would retaliate against a USA strike by an attack on Israel, not least because it probably can't do so effectively - despite claims from the sabre rattlers on both sides.

309:

Re Collapse, I am not surprised. I was not impressed that he didn't include at least a section on civilisations that collapsed for reasons other than the one(s) he described - the most notorious, of course, being the Roman Empire. But there is also the neolithic whatever-it-was in the British Isles, and I suspect an expert could name others.

310:

The Iranian revolution was in 1979, forty years ago. A young revolutionary guard leader from the barricades is therefore likely to be in his sixties; the high-ups are pushing 70 or older by now. The RG has had time to institutionalize, becoming a parallel state-within-a-state with its own military infrastructure and promotion ladder and revenue streams.

Yes but it also seems a lot like the Chinese Peoples Army and Party back in the 70s/80s. Lots of factions and the next generation fighting for power. Much of it done via proxies inside and outside (for Iran) the country. And many of the factions seem to work at odds with each other and with the leadership at the top. Not in direct opposition but definitely with differing goals and lots of small friction points.

311:

being another Gulf of Tonkin incident

No one can find any hard evidence, (or even semi-soft) that there was any NV military shots fired in the GT incident.

There was definitely weapons fire in the Gulf the other day.

312:

"Do not needlessly multiple entities" includes "absent material evidence, don't attribute actors to events".

The only thing we've got that's plausibly factual (maybe as much as 80% confidence) is the shipping company's assertion that the crew reported a "flying object" striking the ship.

That could be a whole lot of things, many of which don't require a state actor. (Some of them are garage-projects for one to five people! Some of them are complete accidents.)

Someone with a determination to have a specific response without figuring out what they're responding to just wants to do the thing; they're looking for an excuse. That's not to be trusted.

Neither is making up a story about what you find plausible. That'll send you wrong.

313:

EC @ 308 now I'm confused. Are you saying "Israel" or emphatically NOT Israel? And, if the latter, whom?

314:

Yes, Israel has motive, operational skills and has a history of operating (or attempting to) covertly in the region. However, absent other information, there are as various others have noted many other possible actors, some with (arguably) considerably more plausible motives than Iran (could be Iran, sure). And we need to be skeptical of information supplied by the US, since the US has a history of lying about such matters and the current DJT administration lies far more than usual. (If US intelligence agency heads spoke, I would listen.) Meanwhile the press is quite appropriately skeptical [1]. (Haven't done a full news/etc dig yet so perhaps there is new information.)

Since as Graydon notes this could be a low-budget effort (absent additional evidence), the number of possible actors is fairly large. Various people including myself (note: no personal background, just interest) have sketched out rough PoC designs in our minds, that would be fairly deniable and more consistent with events and plausible than the officially-promoted scenarios. Human personnel are a weak point, and if they are fairly remote, then the risk of compromise is substantially reduced. I frankly hope this was something conventional; this would be an arms race to actively discourage.

[1] Nothing new (piece from yesterday, with no new information) but note the author and venue: Was Iran Behind the Oman Tanker Attacks? A Look at the Evidence - Internet databases confirm much about the incident, but the Trump administration hasn’t provided convincing evidence of Tehran’s culpability. (Eliot Higgins, managing director of the investigative collective Bellingcat, June 14, 2019)

315:

Greg Tingey @ 285: Meanwhile, back in the "real" world ...
I'm really bothered by the oil tanker incidents in the Gulf ... has all the hallmarks of a Gleiwitz Incident ...
Though it may easily be the US' proxies, Saudi or their "friends" who are actually directly responsible.
It DT/Bolton can get their war, then DT stands a chance of being re-elected ... IF they can convince enough people ... though after "Weapons of mouse destruction" I would think that many would (now) be more suspicious ....

I don't think so. It's not in the U.S. interest, although Bolton & iL Douchebag may be too stupid to understand that. But I do think Jared and Ivanka can figure out another middle east debacle like the Iraq war would NOT add to DT's reelection prospects. Not to mention how it would adversely affect the Trump "brand". If it's going to hit D.T. right in the profit margin, even he might find it persuasive.

This is someone with a "Let's you and him fight!" agenda.

Cui bono? It doesn't benefit the U.S., it doesn't benefit Iran. I doubt it's the Houthi rebels in Yemen. IF it is Saudi Arabia, they are NOT U.S. proxies in this. They'd be doing the same thing they did with Jamal Khashoggi; playing Trump for a chump ... again.

Suppose the U.S. and Iran do go to war in the Persian Gulf ... what does that do to world oil production? Mostly it's going to knock the middle east - Iran, Iraq AND Saudi Arabia - out, at least in the short term, and maybe longer. The U.S. can mostly supply its needs from domestic production, but who does the rest of the world turn to?

316:

Pigeon @ 294: Neither explanation makes sense.

Ok, so try this on. The Man don't like it. Isn't that reason enough?

317:

I am saying that Israel would not be as adversely affected by a war in the Gulf as Saudi Arabia and the UAE would be, and has a track record both of trying to get the USA to bomb Iran and covert operations. It therefore has to be a prime suspect. Graydon (#312) is right about how little we know, except that it almost certainly was weaponry, from the damage. But, beyond that, all is guesswork.

318:

how the great Fossil Fuel Authoritarians who rule Russia and Saudi Arabia, the US, Canada, and Australia (among others) are doubling down on fossil fuel extraction and production, rather than shifting to different systems of power

It's a trillion-dollar bust-out fraud: they're taking on an industry with a hitherto-decent record and maxing out all its credit cards simultaneously with no intention of paying them back. That is: they know the fossil fuel biz is going down, it has capital assets with a gigantic book value that will then depreciate to zero, so they're asset-stripping it for all it's worth, making money while the making's good, and fuck tomorrow. The smart ones are in their seventies, the dim-bulb youngsters don't care because they're zillionaires (Ivanka and Jared Kushner made upwards of $100M last year, mostly in "real estate payments" — read, laundered bribe money; see also the tale of MBS and the missing $450M Leonardo painting).

If you're a billionaire even a general collapse of civilization may look to be survivable, FSVO "survival". And they're too fucking stupid to realize that they're making it significantly worse by delaying mitigation strategies that might allow us collectively to body-swerve the collapse.

319:

Mostly it's going to knock the middle east - Iran, Iraq AND Saudi Arabia - out, at least in the short term, and maybe longer. The U.S. can mostly supply its needs from domestic production, but who does the rest of the world turn to?

The obvious answer would be "Russia". Lotsa oil and gas exports, a corrupt kleptocracy running the shop, and they have a degree of global strategic reach that few other powers aspire to these days—remember a year or two ago when they sent a couple of Tu-160s to bomb Syria the long way round, flying down the Baltic and around the Straits of Gibraltar first, just to tweak NATO air defense noses all the way from Scotland to Sardinia?

But by the same token, I doubt it's the Russian government. For one thing, the US defense agencies are all over them like fleas on a mangy dog; it's hard to see them getting a missile platform into the straits without the USN or the DIA getting alerted, and those agencies are not going to be happy about being suckered into a pissing match between the Tangerine Shitgibbon and Tehran by a third party.

My money is on Saudi Arabia (get Trump to piss on the Shi'ites), possibly in collusion with Benjamin Netenyahu (who uses the Ayatollahs as a handy horror show to keep his internal Likudnik opposition in line). Outside odds: it's the Bavarian Illuminati, or maybe Nicola Sturgeon trying to boost Scotland's residual oil exports.

320:

_Moz_ @ 296:

"From the point of view of a semi-independent fraction of the RG, maybe they want chaos to increase/consolidate power."

In the list of state actors* who want the US to declare war on Iran, I think any element of the Iranian government is a long way down the list. Normally I'd put the Saudi's at the top because right now a good dose of "look over there" seems just what they need, but significantly reducing their ability to export oil is probably not what they need domestically. OTOH they have motive, means and access... Mind you, Russia and China are also able and possibly stand to gain from problems there - what's their pipeline situation these days? It would be terribly convenient if the major export avenue for Iran was pipes to those two countries. And the US has form in pretextual declarations of war, I can imagine Bolton trying his own Tonkin incident to get the war he so desperately wants.

You also have a bunch of minor players who may or may not gain from the spike in oil prices or related chaos. Venezuala for example :)

* ones who can lay repeatedly mines in the strait or otherwise damage ships

I don't know how tightly the government of Iran is able to control the Revolutionary Guard. The part of Iran that fronts on the Gulf of Oman (where the attacks took place) is a long way away from Teheran and it wouldn't be the first time the tail wagged that particular dog. But I don't think so; not without some significant external support (North Korea??? - probably not).

It could be Saudi Arabia (a gross miscalculation on their part if it is), or it could be the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

I don't know if China has any significant pipeline access or domestic sources. I think they've explored the possibility of an overland route from Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, etceterastan ... but for now, I'm pretty sure they're dependent on tankers out of the Persian Gulf for their oil supplies.

Russia is AFAIK, already a net exporter with pipelines through the Ukraine into the EU and that flow doesn't appear to have been interrupted by Russia's de-facto war with Ukraine. Their take-over of the Crimea appears to give them a port on the Black Sea that they can use for oil exports, so they do stand to gain if the price of oil goes up due to a war in the Persian Gulf.

Venezuela would benefit from increased oil prices, but their domestic situation is so screwed up right now I don't think they'd have the resources to mount this kind of campaign. North Korea would certainly favor anything that takes the U.S. down a notch, especially if it was a war that caused the U.S. to need to remove troops from South Korea, but again I don't know if they have the resources to mount such an operation on their own. They would need some kind of proxy to carry it off.

Bolton wants anything that can be used as a casus belli to support regime change in Iran. His problem is finding somebody willing to do the dirty deed? The U.S. military ain't gonna' do it to provide the pretext he needs. They'll put the aircraft carrier over there and dare Iran to knock the chip off its shoulder, but they're not going to carry out his false flag attacks against the tankers they're supposed to be protecting. Even just thinking about doing it invites blowback.

So that leaves Private Military Contractors. Where's Bolton gonna to get the money to hire Blackwater or Xi or whatever its name is today? It's not like Iran-Contra where they could sell TOW missiles to Iran through Israel to raise the money to fund the operation. And even if they did, Congress would be sure to find out about it sooner or later.

321:

My money is on Saudi Arabia (get Trump to piss on the Shi'ites), possibly in collusion with Benjamin Netenyahu (who uses the Ayatollahs as a handy horror show to keep his internal Likudnik opposition in line). Outside odds: it's the Bavarian Illuminati, or maybe Nicola Sturgeon trying to boost Scotland's residual oil exports.

I think it reeks of a jestisonned ordnance fuckup[1] and Pompeo/Bolton having a fit of opportunism.

Things nigh-never go according to the plan. It's clear that no credible source knows what's going on. That the Trump admin is seeing it as an obvious reason to fight Iran is an obvious indication that they have a plan to fight Iran and are looking for an excuse.

[1] The explosions occurred on the outside of the Straits, out in the Arabian Sea where the one (1) USN carrier currently deployed is operating. I have to wonder if the "unrelated ships hit close to each other at close to the same time" is jettisoned ordnance being good little robots.

Of course the pilots are supposed to check for a clear patch of water and not drop stuff hot, but they're not optimal rested and I could see a "well, it's definitely unrecoverable if it explodes" unofficial-official policy for "can't land with that" stuff with any kind of precision capability.

322:

Charlie Stross @ 319:

"Mostly it's going to knock the middle east - Iran, Iraq AND Saudi Arabia - out, at least in the short term, and maybe longer. The U.S. can mostly supply its needs from domestic production, but who does the rest of the world turn to?"

The obvious answer would be "Russia". Lotsa oil and gas exports, a corrupt kleptocracy running the shop, and they have a degree of global strategic reach that few other powers aspire to these days—remember a year or two ago when they sent a couple of Tu-160s to bomb Syria the long way round, flying down the Baltic and around the Straits of Gibraltar first, just to tweak NATO air defense noses all the way from Scotland to Sardinia?

But by the same token, I doubt it's the Russian government. For one thing, the US defense agencies are all over them like fleas on a mangy dog; it's hard to see them getting a missile platform into the straits without the USN or the DIA getting alerted, and those agencies are not going to be happy about being suckered into a pissing match between the Tangerine Shitgibbon and Tehran by a third party.

My money is on Saudi Arabia (get Trump to piss on the Shi'ites), possibly in collusion with Benjamin Netenyahu (who uses the Ayatollahs as a handy horror show to keep his internal Likudnik opposition in line). Outside odds: it's the Bavarian Illuminati, or maybe Nicola Sturgeon trying to boost Scotland's residual oil exports.

I think it probably is young hotheads within Iran's Revolutionary Guard being egged on by some external power who wishes the U.S. ill. The old guard may be pushing retirement age (does Iran have Social Security?), but you can't run an army with nothing but Colonels & Generals.

There have to be Lieutenants & Captains & Majors (and Sargents & Privates) following in their footsteps, and I suspect a new generation might have even more revolutionary fervor than their predecessors. It wasn't Mao's old crony's from the Long March waving all those little red books in Tienanmen Square during the Cultural Revolution. And didn't the driving force behind Japan's pre-WWII militarism come from younger middle ranking officers?

I'm trying real hard to NOT suggest it's the Russians (because I know some of my own biases), but they wouldn't need to import missile platforms into Iran. The Revolutionary Guard already has missiles & gunboats & mines. Whoever it is - Russians, Saudis, Israelis, North Koreans, Bavarian Illuminati - I do think the simplest explanation is somebody subverted some part of Iran's Revolutionary Guard and that's where whatever weapons are being used are coming from.

What I don't know is who put them up to it?

323:

And even if they did, Congress would be sure to find out

But can they veto a presidential pardon?

324:

No. There is only one stated limit in the Constitution for a presidential pardon, and that's for impeachment. Hrm. Perhaps you were being sardonic.

325:

Couple of charts (updated daily) to share. Charctic Interactive Sea Ice Graph And saw a chart on cstross twitter that doesn't show the 2012 anomally; there's a similar still scary chart showing the early spike in melting this year: Greenland Surface Melt Extent Interactive Chart and related (it appears): Increased Greenland melt triggered by large-scale, year-round cyclonic moisture intrusions (html, 7 March 2019, Marilena Oltmanns, Fiammetta Straneo, and Marco Tedesco)

Time perhaps for some serenity meditations...

The thing that's interesting to me is how the great Fossil Fuel Authoritarians who rule Russia and Saudi Arabia, the US, Canada, and Australia (among others) are doubling down on fossil fuel extraction and production, rather than shifting to different systems of power, even though they have the wealth to make the change and stay in power. Indeed, well put. FWIW, petrostate charts (2018/10, easily misread. Russian and SA are the biggies.) A new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) puts the challenge in stark relief. In six large petrostates the IEA examined—Iraq, Nigeria, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela—net income from oil and natural gas in 2016 was less than one-third of its level in 2012. Such a huge drop-off is painful.

326:

Perhaps it's fraud, but I think you underfactor the power issue: for instance, the US military is the #1 user of fossil fuels by a long shot, just to pick a non-subtle option. While yes, there might be a bust-out fraud of some species (the link between the money and the players would disappear, not the players themselves). However, there's no substitute for petroleum with hard military power, and decarbonizing your military is currently a Mexican-standoff problem.

Until someone takes out the US military via either a cyberattack or with electronic weapons in some sort of conventional battle, I suspect that anyone who wants to be an alpha gonad is going to go for fossil fuels at all costs.

327:

FWIW, petrostate charts (2018/10, easily misread. Russian and SA are the biggies.)

Don't forget the USA which is one of the Big Three production petrostates. Wikipedia puts the US at the top of the list followed by Russia and then Saudi Arabia, all three producing about 10 million barrels of oil a day plus copious quantities of natural and LP gas. The problem is that the US consumes so much oil and gas it has little left over to export to earn foreign currency, unlike the other two petrostates.

Actually for "USA" substitute Texas and Louisiana.

328:

Graydon Slight correction That the TrumpBethmann-Hollweg admin is seeing it as an obvious reason to fight IranFrance is an obvious indication that they have a plan to fight IranFrance and are looking for an excuse.

JBS Yes ... I too am afraid that it MIGHT (easily?) be wank-heads in the Revolutionary Guard, bringing it all down on their own heads. If it is/was, you can bet Tahran will be doing some serious internal stamping ... but we will never find out. OTOH ... Russia Well, V Putin has a long history of fucking over others, & not just for shits & giggles, but, LIKE TRUMP, he regards politics as a zero-sum game. But one would have thought that the possibility of strating WW_III might put even him off.

329:

"I'm still holding out hope for a PETM-level die off..."

Such a great sentence.

330:

Agreed. It’s still debateable whether a PETM-level event is the end of our species, though it’s definitely the end of civilisation and human survivors are unlikely to last long (versus the geological time scales involved. A mere 100,000 years survival isn’t going to be enough I suspect). I’m pessimistic myself, because it’s one of those scenarios where to survive means everything has to go right 100% of the time, whereas not to survive means things only have to go wrong once. But hey, end-Permian is definitely a lot worse, no argument there.

331:

This 30 years (ie 2050 or so) figure seems to be coming up a bit. That makes puts it squarely within some of our lifetimes. This makes that whole question about how to plan for independence in old age a bit fraught, especially for those who didn’t have kids (which is one of those “the living will envy the dead” paradoxes I suppose). In Oz, the retirement time level qualification to full “grey nomad” capability is probably the simplest answer, but it leaves a question around where to go as the oil goes away. Setting up in Tassie in an average with a garden and a cow or 5 seems to make some sense, but it’s not really an alternative to the full-service older-person accommodation we’re likely to really need at that point. Is this just another way of saying we’re fucked?

332:

What gets me are the folk who "global warming is definitely a huge problem" and "of course I love my kids, I'd do anything for them"... but not that. Not when that is "major change to my lifestyle". As so many keep saying, a la Cohen the barbarian "I'd rather die, and take my kids with me".

Also, the "five acres and a cow" thing is surprisingly popular with my 35-45 year old friends, and unsurprisingly you can often pick up fully equipped lifestyle blocks with permaculture gardens and oh la la for very little... once they discover just how little fun peasant agriculture actually is. I have one particular prepper friend who has one farmlet south of Melbourne and another in Tasmania. The Melbourne one is too accessible for preppers, and also mildly exposed to the ocean so farming is no fun. The Tasmanian property is just stuck in the middle of bloody nowhere and wah wah wah my frappichino wasn't made properly I cry now. It has frickin internet and grid power FFS, it's not exactly cut off from civilisation.

I decided long ago that civilisation is what makes life worth living. I can milk a cow and keep a vege garden, and raise chickens and corn and whatever but perhaps that is why I am so keen on industrial agriculture... "will code for food" indeed.

333:

Growing and raising enough food for yourself (and a family) by hand isn't hard in many places, but what most 'survivalists' ignore is that it is a full-time job and you still need to build and maintain a house and storage, buy tools and clothing and so on. Doing those isn't hard, either, but is several other full-time jobs.

However, there are perfectly good approaches that are neither mediaeval nor industrial agriculture, many of which are far better than either, ecologically, medically, socially and in other ways. They just don't pass the monetarist test of efficiency when taken in isolation - I have been railing against the stupidity of accounting that ignores secondary and tertiary effects for most of my life, in many contexts, to no avail :-(

334:

Which would indicate that the boat in the video was sent there by the carrier - that's definitely well into the 'accidentally on purpose' category, like the shooting down of Iran Air 655.

335:

EC Or, equally likely, to make sure that the ... possibly Saudi (?) people actually responsible had fucked-off out of sight, leaving no obvious traces .....

336:

On prepping: I have enough health issues that if medicine supply chains break down I'll be dead within six months, and that my maximum daily walking range is severely limited—ten kilometers and I'll be groaning in pain for the next 48 hours. So I'm one of the early guaranteed medical casualties in event of a full breakdown, not quite as fast as folks who depend on dialysis but probably in the same cohort of corpses as anyone undergoing chemo.

As far as reducing your carbon footprint goes, the most significant cutback you can make is: don't have children. I don't have children. Everything else is lost in the line noise, except maybe my vastly carbon-emissive luxury yacht and my Gulfstream G650 bizjet (snorts). Even an overweight SUV racking up 50,000 km/year in gas miles is trivial compared to the long-term effects of reproduction.

So ... I live in an apartment that predates our modern energy economy so should be convertible to be marginally inhabitable if energy costs go up (although I'm going to have to move within the next decade for medical reasons—it's a fourth-floor walk-up). It's up a hill from a sheltered coastline, so nothing short of a full Antarctic icecap melt or another Storegga slide would wet my toes. And what energy I've got goes into keeping civilization running, and hopefully shifting to carbon-neutral and sane politics, rather than planning for the worst.

337:

Imagine my suprise at this "Announcement" from Saudi - how convenient. Someone is definitely trying to start a war, that seems certain.

And, evil & misogynistic & cruel though the religious dictatorship of Persia currently is, I don't think it's them.

338:

It's amazing how little people having an oh-shit moment will think about the geopolitical implications of shifting the blame.

At present, this doesn't look like there was a plan; this looks like extemporization. It might be multi-actor extemporization all the way down.

339:

No. It clearly showed a person on the boat doing something to the side of the tanker.

340:

As far as reducing your carbon footprint goes, the most significant cutback you can make is: don't have children.

That's kind of difficult for us who did already have them. Retroactive abortions are kind of frowned upon and would be somewhat difficult also in light of other things, like emotions, laws, and their right to life after being born.

I'm not expecting any grandchildren, though, until something very miraculous happens with the state of the world.

On a shorter timescale, I'm not even worried the most about whole civilization collapsing. I'm just wondering what happens when my country gets even the forefront of climate refugees - we have something like 5.5 million people in Finland currently, and quite a lot of space which won't be that bad even later in this century, so I expect a lot of people moving in. In any case, even if horribly the people wouldn't be allowed in (and basically shot at the borders and sunk into the Baltic), or if we get even "just" 2-3 million refugees, "our way of life" is basically doomed. I'll be surprised if we have something called Finnish as a living culture in a hundred years even if we can survive in some kind of global(ish) civilization.

Sure, something Finnish will survive, but we are but few. I wouldn't count on the language surviving very long, but surprising things happen.

341:

Well, I don't like talking about my personal situation, but I'm somewhat younger than Charlie and don't have kids. I'd give myself decent odds of dying alone under a bridge due to lack of food or meds for myself. Then again, I live in earthquake and fire country, so it might not be a knock-on effect of climate change that causes my demise.

The general problem with where I live (southern California) is that there's 19 million-odd people, almost all the food and water is imported, and food deliveries are on a just-in-time basis. If supply lines get cut, things get kinda bad kinda fast.

While everyone looks at moving to the Pacific Northwest due to climate stability, Oregon has about two million people and it's getting kind of crowded and Washington's not much better. There's really not habitable land up there for 19 million people to resettle, especially if they have to move rapidly. The Sacramento Valley is a slightly better choice, but that means choosing people over food, so it's not a long-term viable choice either. The better choice would be to reactivate all those dying farm towns around the US, especially east of the Mississippi, but since many of them lasted less than 200 years from founding to now, I'm not clear on how many would actually be viable in a more agrarian future. Still, I'd recommend that anyone interested in long term survival should move to the rust belt around the Great Lakes and figure out how to get by there.

The one thing I'd note is that for the conservation I do as my day job, civilization is marginally better than collapse. The problem with collapse is that every rabbit, song bird, and marginally edible plant is going to be targeted during the food shortages, and quite honestly, there aren't a lot of them. Nineteen million people can't spontaneously turn to foraging and survive for more than a month or two (and yes, that number was picked deliberately). The best luck the biosphere could have in getting human numbers under control would be a pandemic, something like smallpox getting out again.*

*Actually, there's a disaster novel waiting there for someone: viable smallpox thaws out of the eastern Siberian permafrost, and gets carried out through an airport from one of those Siberian cities to the rest of the world, long before vaccine production can be started, let alone ramped up.

342:

Chosen deliberately, too. The PETM has some things that I happen to like: --Lots of anoxia in the deep ocean waters (IIRC that's when the North Sea oil was formed, from organic runoff from Britain and Europe). HOWEVER, there are fossils from the deep ocean showing animal tracks in the mud, so it wasn't quite like the deep (and anoxic) Black Sea on a global scale.
--Coral reef organisms didn't die off. This one's critical, because the classic definition of a mass extinction is that reefs disappear for 5-20 million years, and the ones that form after the extinction have a different suite of organisms that evolved in the gap. Reefs support a lot of life and a lot of people, so keeping at least some of the components alive is a big deal. --Not a mass extinction on land. Things got extreme, but the ancestors of our modern clades all survived. I fondly hope that counts for a bit.

Compare that with the End Permian or End Cretaceous, and it's eminently survivable for at least a few humans. Granted, the closest analogy to it would be Global Papua New Guinea, but that's better than Global Atacama (early Triassic) or a Global Nuclear Exchange (End Cretaceous), at least as far as human survival goes.

343:
viable smallpox thaws out of the eastern Siberian permafrost, and gets carried out through an airport from one of those Siberian cities to the rest of the world,

Hm, substitute the Spanish Flu for smallpox, and you basically have one of the plots of the first season of ReGenesis. Hm, involving Biopreparat in the storyline wouldn'd be that wise given the current global situation.

In other news, my brother is practicing "Hallelujah" on the piano, no luck getting him into "Famous Blue Raincoat" so far. And as for "First we take Manhattan"...

344:

The better choice would be to reactivate all those dying farm towns around the US, especially east of the Mississippi,

The ENTIRE US east of the Mississippi is in the expected thermal excursion zone. (So is all of the inhabited part of central Canada; looks like you have to get north of about 50 N to be really sure you're out of it.)

I think this is in its way one of those "do not make the simple thing complicated" things. People cannot generally endure significant uncertainty about the future. No power, and you get religion which ascribes metaphysical certainties. Power, and you attempt to create certainties. So what we're seeing is power acting to insist that the status quo is immutable and inviolate because that's the future they want. (and we're coming out of a relatively brief period where the future was expected to be consistently better, and that's not helping with the availability of coping skills. Observe how folks from marginalized social groups generally seem to be doing better with the whole thing.)

Those with power don't have enough power to create a continued status quo; anyone honest will look at the climate projections and acknowledge that we're looking at large error bars between the Eocene Thermal Maximum and the End Permian.

Another way to put that is "for the next couple hundred years, there is no certainty about the future". As a cultural challenge, that's huge.

345:

I just finished a short story set about 100,000 years after Climate Change. The surviving humans are just beginning to regain civilization, and have revived coppersmithing. They have not yet revived the arch or the wheel, and the horse has died off, leaving the characters to ride goats and practice superstition.

Then one of them finds the "Chamber of the Ancients..."

346:

In other news, my brother is practicing "Hallelujah" on the piano

After reading this thread, "You Want It Darker" is probably a good song for him to add to his repertoire…

347:

I'd give myself decent odds of dying alone under a bridge due to lack of food or meds for myself.

Remember the Cold War? That was how a lot of us were going to go (abetted by radiation poisoning), unless we managed a more painless suicide first.

As a child I never really expected to reach 30, so I've enjoyed a lot of bonus years. I weep for my grandnieces who likely will never get old…

348:

Thermal exclusion zone?

It's always worth checking to see what the model is for Black Flag Weather Predictions (this is the USMC version, where the combination of heat and humidity is bad enough that humans can't lose heat by sweating, and die in the open). I haven't been following developments (and won't until I rewrite that chapter of Hot Earth Dreams, but back a few years, researchers were using a couple of different models. One was where the climate would make such conditions possible. Another was based on the risk of a black flag event happening once every decade or so. They came up with different answers for where the worst effects would be, unsurprisingly. So check the models people are using.

Anyway, there's a generalized solution for this problem, since it isn't the first time vertebrates have faced it: go underground. I highly recommend Anthony Martin's The Evolution Underground in this regard (plus he's a good writer with a mastery of deadpan snark that I can but aspire to emulate). If you only have to hide in the subway tunnels for a week every year, that's still enough time to grow crops the rest of the time. Given the prevalence of caves in certain parts of the eastern US, I'd expect people to survive back there, at least better than they'll survive in southern California, where caves are few and far between, and we haven't built a good enough subway system yet.

In fact, there's a discrete but apparently flourishing market among certain real estate agents for selling underground redoubts to the rich and paranoid. Given who's likely to be holed up underground during the worst of the coming Altithermal, I do feel justified in calling it the Tunnels and Trolls era.

349:

Cool! Now for the tech criticism.

The critical mistake everyone makes is the idea that the future will recapitulate the past, as if we can get knocked linearly back to the stone age, mammoths will miraculously reappear....

Anyway, some useful notions: --rocket stoves can be made out of all sorts of things, including clay. Look on Google and Youtube for all the different versions that have been made. Three-stone fires are easy, but rocket stoves aren't much harder. I'm betting that rocket stove technology survives. --toilets will produce a lot of the flint blades of the future. The survivalists call broken ceramic "johnstone," because it acts like really good flint, but it's a lot cheaper to get. And there will be a lot of toilets surplused in the future. --whether people use copper, bronze, or iron depends on three things: what they have access to, how hot a fire they can make, and how long the iron's had to rust (it'll need to be resmelted). Iron's the most common but needs the hottest fire. In future dystopias blacksmiths will be limited to charcoal, and the amount of charcoal they can get actually is going to control how much of the huge amount of iron (all those skyscrapers, ships, etc) gets recycled into local tools. Copper is available as wiring, more long-lasting, and needs a cooler fire, but it's still limited by how much fuel is available. --Wheels? Depends on how rugged things get. The fall of Han China is a better model than the fall of the western Roman Empire, because the ancient Chinese roads are more like our modern roads than the better-built Roman roads are. The Chinese went in for wheelbarrow technology to deal with their suddenly downgraded road system, and their stuff is really worth looking at for people writing low-tech future SF. They even weaponized them by making mounting guns and shields on them. --speaking of guns, I don't think matchlocks and similar are going to go away, and I don't think bows and arrows are going to go away either. It doesn't take much more equipment to make a gun than it does to make a sword (Wallace's Malay Archipelago has a good description of an extremely low-tech gunsmith's shop), and if the materials for gunpowder are available, muzzleloaders are still useful low-tech weapons. Bows are useful because they require even less in the way of materials, even though they're more limited.

My two cents, but the general fun point is that future low tech won't the same low-tech as it was in the past. There's progress even at the low end.

350:

Another way to put that is "for the next couple hundred years, there is no certainty about the future". As a cultural challenge, that's huge.

Also, forgot to respond to the last part of this. I'd modify that to read, "as a cultural challenge for us white guys, that's huge."

Part of the problem is Christianity, which is taught to mean (despite the Book of Job) that God's basically benevolent and rule-driven. We tend to agree that the world is rule-driven (science!), but the nasty surprise in the last 50 years is that deterministic rules generate chaos in all sorts of ways in dynamical systems, and there's essentially no such thing as an equilibrium" (do click on the link before responding).

Other people have not had that luxury of power, and there certainly have been religions that emphasized that order was rather fragile, arose out of meaningless chaos, and that the heroism of daily life was keeping things working, orderly, and meaningful despite it all (that from Taro and Arrows which you can find online). Were I designing a survivalist religion, I'd emphasize that part. It's not that the devil is winning, it's that the gods of more knocked-about cultures always started by subduing the primal chaos and its monsters. We may treat them as fairy stories, but the reality of the oncoming monsters we now face may help get us back in the mood for realizing the the gods of civilization can be overthrown, and that our heroic work is to help them.

351:

My two cents, but the general fun point is that future low tech won't the same low-tech as it was in the past. There's progress even at the low end.

If you've got just about any access to electricity—and a big water wheel plus salvaged bits of iron and/or copper will do at a pinch—then you can produce the basics for a war machine: not just muzzle-loading matchlocks, but gun cotton (requirements: starch, nitric acid, and a lot of care). With a modest industrial base by modern standards—18th century equivalent will do—you can cast iron, and if enough knowledge has survived you can make good-enough steel for breech-loading rifled cannon. And if you can do that, you can make early 20th century grade bicycles (gears and tires will be the hard parts: precision machining of high grade alloys, plus synthetic rubber).

Don't underestimate the importance of the spinning jenny, looms, sewing machines, paper making, and other fibercraft technologies. And don't underestimate how valuable the automatic washing machine(!) is—in rural India washing clothes can soak up to 20 hours a week of womens' time, that's a lot of labour value right there that can be freed up with a device that we tend to write off as a domestic luxury these days.

Again, if you've got enough know-how you can make 19th century telegraphy work for you.

So it may be a low-energy empire, but it'll be an empire with breech-loading artillery and telegraphs to carry mobilization orders and news. And while roads may deteriorate as they did in China, it'll take an awful lot of deterioration to reduce an interstate or autobahn to the point where it can only accommodate wheelbarrows, as opposed to single-file ox-cart towed artillery, and hydrogen balloons for artillery observers.

I think to get to this level you'll need the surplus (over-and-above raw survival level) labour of a couple of million people—this includes running the university to sustain the knowledge base—but it's going to look a bit like the late Victorian era in tech terms, minus the steam engines: bicycles, repeating firearms, balloons, telegraphs, artillery, Victorian-level washing machines. And hopefully some decent medicines: it should be possible to sustain a bioengineering industry with relatively low energy inputs by using GM yeast strains (e.g. to produce insulin, cannabidiol, antibiotics, etc).

It all depends on how much knowledge is lost and how much time basic agricultural survival activities suck up.

352:

Addendum: the big difference I can see is the lack of disposability in all these items.

A modern washer-drier has a design life of 5 years, then you throw it out and buy a new one (hopes the manufacturer). A high-end one can run for 15 years. I have one, a Mielle, which is about 14 years in: it's clearly taken a hammering but it still works. However, the price of repairing it if anything breaks probably exceeds its replacement cost.

In a low-energy society, running the washing machine will be pricey (forget the electricity-powered drier), and it won't be something you throw out after 5 years or 15; it'll be something you leave to your grandchildren.

Bicycles: today the emphasis is on light weight rather than durability. Again, I expect a low energy society would rely on bicycles (they'd cost the equivalent of an automobile in terms of working-hours to earn the price) and they would weigh more, have fewer gear ratios, and tires would be designed to be patched/tubed in event of a puncture, but it's still better than walking and they're going to be built to last.

And did I mention bicycle infantry? Replaced dragoons from around 1890 onwards, were used as scouts/extra mobility options for paratroops, could go places dragoons couldn't because dragoons consume lots of fodder for their mounts. So maintaining a bicycle works is a strategic military facility.

(I'm assuming that chimps are gonna chimp and even in the post-climate-change world there will be territorial disputes and wars.)

With slightly better technology maintenance you get to keep railroads using electric traction powered by PV panels and/or wind, although the schedules are going to go to crap on still nights. Probably trams and trolley buses around cities—again, these were standard before the gas-burning automobile took off, and they're very efficient at moving people around in high density urban areas.

But all of this depends on climate and agricultural stability/sustainability.

353:

I tend to think Ming China's a better example of a potential post-collapse empire, but whatever.

The real problem is food, specifically grain. Unless we're talking about the Inka, no empire has run without grain. The Inka are a special case because a) they had corn and they used it, although a lot of it went to beer, and b) they were able to use the high mountains as natural dehydrators, thereby allowing them to dry and ship potatoes in a way that lowlanders couldn't until the 19th Century. That made up for the normal problem of using tubers (hard to ship, low storage time) instead of grain.

The problem with running an altithermal state of any size, with task specialization and multiple hierarchical levels, will be food supply, almost certainly in the form of grain. While I used to think that corn or sorghum was the most likely Altithermal grain, more recent modeling (pdf link) for the US suggests that winter wheat (cool season)will see less production drop-off than will corn, soy, spring wheat, and sorghum. Rice wasn't modeled. Note that this is "less of a drop off in modeling," not "bumper crops."

If the climate is both chaotic and unpredictable, I suspect that what remains of agriculture will look more like native American and Australian models (cf: Tending the Wild, Dark Emu, etc.): high resilience, low productivity, food savannas and forests rather than farms and gardens, and a lot of switching when crops fail. Human populations will probably be smaller and more mobile, too.

354:

I think the issue here is probably "How badly does the ability to plant crops get broken?" If agriculture still works* you end up with a society that's camping out in or near the ruins of a big city and rebuilding from (more or less) a 17th century tech base, plus the ability to recopy really useful books like Von Nostrands Scientific Encyclopedia or The Feynman Lectures.

But if the weather is not predictable enough for large-scale agriculture, then you become hunter-gatherers and you're limited to what you can carry with you. That changes the equation considerably, and the best you're left with is a small village in the middle of the forest where the tribes meet once a year.

When I wrote the story, I was very consciously thinking about the second option, and specifically the human-equivalent of a Motie engineer after humans have "bombed themselves back to the invention of the brick." The protagonist is involved with cataloguing the contents of the human version of a Motie Museum, and naturally she upsets the authorities...

  • Or you're coastal and fish stocks recover very quickly
355:

I'd disagree on the either-or of agriculture or hunter-gatherer. It's a mistake to see them as discrete units.

Grain agriculture is (probably) the necessity for civilization on any scale, Aztec or ours, whatever the tool technology is based on, and most of the people would be involved in raising the grain if that were possible.

If it's not possible, then two things happen. One is that the population densities are considerably lower (if you want to argue about the Northwest Coast Indians, be my guest. Turns out they were agriculturalists, and that's a side issue). The other is that food diversity goes considerably up, as there are many things that are edible but not incredible in terms of nutrition, storage, and utility.

However, that doesn't mean that people will just wander around like cattle grazing wherever the grass is in seed. California's a good example of this, because the climate's so variable: flood one year, drought the next, fire the third, but rolled more on a random encounter table such that decade-long droughts are possible. The California Indians tended the wild. They knew full well how to cultivate plants, but they didn't do agriculture because depending on one crop in our highly variable climate was a death sentence. So they took care of the oak trees (burning the litter away to suppress the acorn weevil populations), cultivated a variety of edible bulbs (take the mother bulb, leave the pups to grow into more plants), burned meadows so that their basket materials would grow straight and the fire followers whose seeds they ate were good, and so forth. When harvesting, a story I just heard had the local tribes only taking the even numbered plants and animals: they'd take the second and fourth onions, not the first and third, and shoot the second deer rather than the first. While this probably stretched the truth a little, they had to practice such conservation simply to make sure there was enough food for next time.

That's not what we think of as hunting and gathering, but it's not agriculture either. In a changing-climate world, I'm pretty sure that the people who survive won't just be hunting for their supper, they'll be tending and planting as they go. It's the only sane thing to do, to simply protect and grow your supply chains, in modern parlance.

356:

This is all very true, but I can't see that level of agriculture supporting a civilization which can smelt iron.

357:

Now if someone really wants to get cutesy, imagine new crops for the apocalypse. In that role, I'd suggest kudzu and Palmer's pigweed.

358:

Take a long look at the Southeast Asian tribes and get back to me on that. I agree that agriculture a smithing probably go together, but I'm going to leave it at probably rather than certainly, because of (among others) the Mlabri, who did some simple smithing, even though they were definitely nomadic foragers.

Note that likely the Mlabri weren't ancient primitives, but rather people who'd run away into the forest and made a lifestyle and identity of running away. That lifestyle seems to be not uncommon, especially in Peninsular Southeast Asia, but also in Madagascar (the Mikea) and in Amazonia, where some of those primitive jungle tribes documentarily had ancestors who were farmers who'd been driven into the forest by Spanish or Portuguese oppression. It's likely a good model for how people will deal with climate change and civilization collapse, at least at our end of deep time. Given all the problems, though, I suspect that these people will be doing as much forest planting as just grabbing stuff on the run.

359:

I have ridden such bicycles for many decades. Traditional roadsters will last about as well as modern cars, in terms of miles, with some renovation, which can be done by the owner - there is no competition in terms of miles. But you do need late 19th century technology, at least, for the gears, tyres and brakes.

360:

There are a zillion ignored crops in most 'developed' parts of the world, but almost all produce less per acre than our current ones do. There are plenty of solutions if the world population drops to 10% (not BY 10%) of its current level, but I don't see any without.

361:

Yes, rubber's probably another one of those critical materials for modern technology. It's possible to build a decent bicycle frame out of bamboo, and it's possible to hand cut gears and the chain if it comes to that. Rubber's a lot trickier to substitute for, and not just in tires.

362:

The chances of success, however one defines that, depends a lot on how fast or prepared the transition is.

The fundamental limitation will be how high a population density you can keep alive, because that directly determines your work-product volume.

Details like existence of pumped versus gravitational sewers will have a big impact here, as will access to drinking water that does not need (too much) pumping, filtering and clorination.

If we think in terms of threshold technologies, starting from the top:

Semiconductor production will be one of the first things to falter, it requires clean-rooms and very specialized high purity raw materials, including high purity quartz for frequency control, not to mention insane amounts of power and clean water.

Without semiconductor production, intercontinental fibers will go dark in about a decade or so, the lasers have finite lifetime, and there are no "strategic" stocks to poach or alternatives to fall back to.

I do not think it feasible to establish a "fall-back" semi-conductor production, it would be starved for raw materials and what meagre production it can muster, will make no difference in the long run.

Stockpiling solar panels and electronic components will make a lot of sense, in particular if somebody make sure it is not all just 10k resistors, but actually something useful.

Computers which can store and access Wikipedia sized information will fizzle out in about 20-30 years, but that is almost enough time to print it out.

That takes not only paper and printers, but also subject matter specialists to condense, and librarians and libraries to store the result in.

This is a very good example of where 10 years of intelligent preparation will have a HUGE impact on long term success rates.

Vaccines and other essential low-tech medications is essentially 1870 technology now that we know how to do it, but there is, literally, a food-chain which must be given very high priority. This is another thing where getting a decade head-start would make a big difference.

Existing anti-biotica will run into natural resistance, and discovering new ones is an unsolved problem, in the sense that there is no money in it, so we don't really know how hard it really is. The stakes are high, but the means may simply be staring intently at all kinds of fungi, yeasts and bacteria in microscopes. Absolutely worth doing, if the resources are there and the sooner the better.

The biggest challenge, is that any such headstart requires visionary and sufficiently powerful leadership, not only able, but also willing to pull the big red lever marked "Fallback Plan", at a time where most people are still in denial about the actual state of the world.

Without such a head-start, pretty much all the technologies you cannot produce on your own farm, will have to wait for sufficiently stable power-structures and civilizations to arise again, and by then there will be at most one or two surviving copies of Wikipedia, most likely shrouded in secrecy by priesthoods.

363:

Charlie @ 352 the big difference I can see is the lack of disposability in all these items Why do you think I have a Land Rover? I made the deliberate, conscious & carefully-examined decision that if I was going to have a car again ( 2002/3 ) then I want ONE ... that would last until I dropped dead, or could no longer drive. It worked, but now I'm going to be shafted by the fake-environmental decision, because diesel - "you can buy a new one & get a scrappage grant" - I DON'T WANT a fucking new one - & you won't give me a power-conversion grant for cleaner emissions, wankers!

I still use a couple of saucepans that were wedding presents for my parents ( 1936 ) & I use my grandmother's pre WW I Art Nouveau dining table. I was able to reverse-engineer my 1907(ish) brass light-switches to be earthed, so they still pass muster & are still in use .....

No steam traction on the railways if you have "Victorian" technology? Assuming that the fuel is ... what ... coal? Wood? ( Energy-density is the problem )

Troutwaxer How badly does the ability to plant crops get broken? The Trillion-Dollar question, isn't it?

364:

automatic washing machine

You don't need to go that far. If you have electricity the "twin tub" (one washes the other spins) or "mangle" washer (rollers to squeeze water out) is 90% of the battle. But you can go from 20 hours to 2 hours just with a sealable container - there are hippy versions and Africa versions, but they're just a drum on a pivot that you turn over and over. They use little water (more than a modern automatic though) and while their spin cycle often leaves a lot to be desired they work. Now it occurs to me that modern detergent may be the other half of the machine.

Bicycles don't absolutely need rubber, the old boneshakers did not use it and were named after their dominant characteristic. Fundamentally going fast means you need good suspension or smooth surfaces, so bicycles only win over wheelbarrows once you have a certain level of tech. But the "Africa Bicycle" is widely used although not much manufactured due to the things generally outliving their owners. They are, though, often pushed rather than ridden, and their actual speed over ground tends to be 10-15km/hr when ridden. Beats walking, though. And need rubber.

365:

I note that the oldest deraileur gear wikipedia cites for a bicycle dates to 1885 (two speeds only), with early-modern ones coming in from 1928-1938. We can probably hand-wave this as "19th century technology" in terms of the engineering as long as they know how to do it (and why they'd want to).

366:

I know you don't need an automatic washing machine—I simply happen to have one now. I lived with a twin-tub for years, they're a pain in the neck in terms of time spent leaning over it, but it's still better than bashing wet cloth on stones by a river.

Detergent is a problem. Also, availability of detergents affects the type of fabric you can make clothing out of (without it rotting in the wash).

I'd rate all the fibercraft stuff (and sewing machines) as vitally important, though. It apparently took eight months' full time work to produce the clothing for a single family, using traditional techniques in the fifteenth century in Europe: all the wool had to be spun by hand, then woven and hand-stitched. Cloth was expensive: a Viking longboat's sail represented about a year's productivity for an entire village. Fabric is one of those halfway invisible technologies that we are utterly dependent upon and that underpins a lot of stuff we don't think about (look at the nearest automobile and imagine it without any fabric—no seats, no carpets, no headliner).

367:

If you only have to hide in the subway tunnels for a week every year

Will that really be an improvement? Toronto's subway is noticeably warmer than the surface on really hot days, even when you aren't trying to pack a million people into it…

368:

Fundamentally going fast means you need good suspension or smooth surfaces

And indeed, we owe a debt to cyclists for pushing for a modern road network…

http://roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com

369:

Re lower-tech civilization and farming, the Old Amish are an interesting example. (See the link for a table describing what tech is used by them in what areas.) Their farms do pretty well with 200-300 year old agricultural practices augmented with a little more recent tech and knowledge. If (OK when) temperature changes force them north, they'll take their low-tech approach with them, like the Space Amish (America Offline) in Newton's Wake (Ken MacLeod, 2005), and those with any sense will welcome them. (Also they're religious pacifists.) Another consideration that comes to mind is that due to the rapid temperature increases, the ground in more poleward areas will be useful for cooling. (e.g. Boreholes drilled deep reveal permafrost temperatures in Alaska (August 9, 2016)) That is, deep holes could be used for food storage. (And more south, ground water will continue to be cool for use by heat pumps if electricity is available.) FWIW, I agree with people above who argue that immediately useful technologies/techniques would not be lost if tech civilization collapsed. IMO most book knowledge and academic knowledge would not be lost, though the loss of automated indexing and easy searchability would be a backslide. But we should be striving for the survival of tech civilization.

370:

Details like existence of pumped versus gravitational sewers will have a big impact here, as will access to drinking water that does not need (too much) pumping, filtering and clorination. When I had a house built 10 years ago, there were two deal-breaker conditions from me; high speed internet, and a gravity-fed septic system. I did not explain to the builder the why for the later, but it was related to the possibility of civilizational collapse, or at least very long grid outages. (It would be nice to have a proper cistern and a way to get well water that doesn't involve starting up a midsized generator, but pods and streams are nearby and a small electric utility pump will run off a battery charged with a solar panel. Yes, I've tried this; inverter and 120V pump (US))

371:

Worth noting that most countries can't ban you from riding a bicycle on the road. Powered mobility aids you need explicit (and conditional!) permission to operate, but bicycles use the roads as of right. As do horses and pedestrians, except that both are increasingly regulated to the point where it's very difficult to actually use them anywhere.

Charlie, I've used both the old wringer machines and a twin tub, also a "big twin tub" that would take two king size bed sheets (a normal one in Oz/NZ will not take even one king size flannelette sheet). I really appreciate my modern efficient front loader, but I'm aware that I can't fix one of those, and I can fix the more basic machines in the unlikely event that that is necessary.

372:

Well, if you've got a subsistence farming community that's probably 99% smaller than the current population of the city, I'd hazard a guess that the deep tunnels will be cooler than the surface.

374:

On the Dragon bank, since its less depressing.

It is of course only a short time before Balrog 419 scams start. http://shaggy-dogs.briancombs.net/a-419-nigerian-scam-from-uruk/

The other thing that comes to mind. Why do dragons want hordes?

If it is a some authorities suggest because they need to sleep on gold to be fertile, which in itself suggests some magical analog to ionising radiation is involved, then there is the possibility for a market in optimizing horde efficiency and the of course the chance that Draconic Communists might out breed traditional dragon bankers through sharing or hotbunking hordes.

Also horde renting or timeshare schemes and alchemical research, both authentic and scam, into alternatives.

375:

I suspect that dragons want hordes for the same reason that bower birds build bowers: to attract poorer members of the opposite sex. It's a form of display.

That's the biological version. In the fallen angel version, they're trying to recapture heaven in their own way (streets paved with gold? Got it).

376:

If it is a some authorities suggest because they need to sleep on gold to be fertile Perhaps the lust for gold is a red herring (though useful for dragon-banking) and they really need platinum, a catalyst used in their digestive track to produce flammable gases. (There is no such thing as cold fusion, so it can't be that. :-) (This crowd might have already discussed this in detail some time in the past; if so, apologies.)

377:

Why do dragons want hordes?

It took a moment to realise that you meant "hoard", but yes. Unless dragons also need to breed continuously there would obviously be possibilities for share-hoarding.

Hordes on the other hand provide food. Either directly or by raising (other) livestock :)

378:

I wonder whether the female dragons can recognize adulterated coin, or whether the sole requirement is that the money be shiny? If they can't recognize adulterated coin, I think there's a D and D plot here...

379:

"I think a really sexy male has both a horde and a hoard! If he don't have both, I'm not burning any villages for him."

"Yeah, and did you ever notice that men are always claiming she's a virgin? Not that I care, but the way they lie about it is just so... male."

380:

Elderly Cynic @ 339: No. It clearly showed a person on the boat doing something to the side of the tanker.

If you can "clearly" see that your eyes are a lot better than mine. Best I can tell, all you can say for sure is it shows people on the boat pulling someone out of the water from next to the ship. That someone might be wearing SCUBA gear.

381:

Interesting...I did the gender neutral version of it: especially for the chromatic dragons, it's how young, single dragons get, erm, older partners, to, erm, show them how the world works, and erm, groom them for more...mature roles.

How slimy can it be? Slimy indeed. And dragons acquire hoards so that they can stop having to be on the receiving end and start controlling the interactions.

382:

Charlie Stross @ 352:

"Addendum: the big difference I can see is the lack of disposability in all these items."

A modern washer-drier has a design life of 5 years, then you throw it out and buy a new one (hopes the manufacturer). A high-end one can run for 15 years. I have one, a Mielle, which is about 14 years in: it's clearly taken a hammering but it still works. However, the price of repairing it if anything breaks probably exceeds its replacement cost.

In a low-energy society, running the washing machine will be pricey (forget the electricity-powered drier), and it won't be something you throw out after 5 years or 15; it'll be something you leave to your grandchildren.

All of my appliances (with the exception of the new refrigerator I got last week) are 30+ years old. Actually, the old refrigerator is 30+ y.o., and it's going to the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store on Monday, so somebody will probably get a few more years use out of it.

Each of my current appliances replaced an older appliance that was itself more than 30 years old. Most of the originals were already 10 - 15 years old when I acquired them second hand.

I just can't do "disposable". I grew up with "use it, repair it, use it again and keep on using it until you use it up & it can't be repaired any more ... then recycle it." The new refrigerator is because it has the freezer in a drawer at the bottom & I don't have to stoop over to find to find out what food I have in the refrigerator. I do have to make some accommodations to reaching the proverbial "three score and ten" (which I never expected I was gonna' do). I still have my Whole Earth Catalog and my Mother Earth News (complete set on DVD). Wish I could have got them on microfiche, so I could leave them to the grand-children I'll never have.

It also has more room for frozen vegetables, so I can do more cooking at home. Doctor says if I want to live to get real old and still be able to get around, I gotta eat more vegetables & less processed, pre-cooked foods.

In the future, washing machines will be mechanical; human powered. I think in the future drying clothes after you wash them will go back to the way my Mom did it when I was a child. Hang it out on the line & let the sun & the wind dry it. No more need for drier sheets to make your clothes smell like they were dried out on the line; they will be dried out on the line & will smell that way naturally.

383:

Troutwaxer @ 354: I think the issue here is probably "How badly does the ability to plant crops get broken?" If agriculture still works* you end up with a society that's camping out in or near the ruins of a big city and rebuilding from (more or less) a 17th century tech base, plus the ability to recopy really useful books like Von Nostrands Scientific Encyclopedia or The Feynman Lectures.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ

384:

Another fun bit of future technology: new kinds of "rock," such as plastiglomerate, which is what you get when molten plastic binds grains of sand and other debris into a durable "rock." I suspect that ancient landfills, beachrock with plastic, etc. will be used in place of pitch or resin. Melt it, strain out the crap, stir it to homogenize, and coat something to waterproof something or make it smooth, or use it to make a cheap plastic handle or patch.

Of course, we're also seeing Vibrio and other bacteria evolving the ability to metabolize microplastics, so who knows where that will end.

Still, it's a fun little detail to illustrate a deep future story.

385:

Still, it's a fun little detail to illustrate a deep future story.

I agree, and if I were writing a different story I'd use it, but this particular story is written out of the most pessimistic assumptions; it's at least a hundred thousand years in the future, society has gone hunter-gatherer for tens of thousands of years, and anything not carefully preserved has disappeared, with the exception of a large collection of bricks designed to lead our descendants to the "Motie Museum."

I did manage to work in the idea of a memory tree, however, instilled with the help of an intelligent tutor.

386:

There aren't any humans in the most pessimistic assumptions.

387:

Wow, we know how to preserve stuff for 100,000 years in a way that will be understandable then? How does that work?

388:

This is very true, but with no humans I have no story.

389:

It works by burying the information underground then reteaching the language and math from scratch, using pictures. I'd love a beta-read if someone has any interest. (I have gmail and call myself Troutwaxer, so getting ahold of me is easy.)

390:

preserve stuff for 100,000 years in a way that will be understandable then? How does that work?

Well, right now we just do the whole process in one place leaving behind samples from every step from raw material to finished product, then disappear. Later people come along and make up a story and since there's no-one to disagree the story must be correct.

With more complex things that's harder, there's a whole bunch of stuff where we have little to no idea how ancient people did stuff with what we think was available to them, but most of that is very recent so it's not too applicable to even 10ky timescales. But basic outlines are obvious, backed by "if we don't have another explanation it's obviously religious". From Stnehenge to myths about floods, it's all just religious nonsense. As the Knobz said 'don't give me culture'.

391:

Benjamin Netenyahu

Now I could see him giving tacit approval (wink wink encouragement) via a 1/2 dozen or more intermediaries for someone small do to this. Anything that makes the area more dangerous helps him win his next try at the current election.

392:

True, but there is the counter example of OGH managing to write a story about monetary debt set after the extiction of humans. (which does sound like a 'hold my beer' moment).

BTW I'm not saying you should change your story. Just that things could be very very bad. The low likelyhood outcomes don't include much in the way of multicellular life.

393:

This 30 years (ie 2050 or so) figure seems to be coming up a bit. That makes puts it squarely within some of our lifetimes.

You must be one of the younger folks on this board. I plan to live another 30. My ancestry suggests I could. But the overall stats are against it. And I know I'm younger than many here.

394:

I wanted to write a human story, and was specifically thinking of the bit about Motie Museums, and what would happen to that first engineer who figured out how to open one up. Would the engineer be a hero or a villain? So my heroine ended being a Master/Engineer.

395:

once they discover just how little fun peasant agriculture actually is

Once when I was about 14 my father and I were on a tractor (long story) and I asked why he didn't stick with farming. (He grew up on an above average sized farm. Small sawmill, slaughter house, etc...) His answer stuck with me.

"I enjoyed it until I had to get down off the seat of the tractor."

396:

Sure, something Finnish will survive, but we are but few. I wouldn't count on the language surviving very long, but surprising things happen.

Welcome to the US. The world I grew up in in the 60s doesn't exist anymore. Well trivial bits do but mostly it is gone. It is mostly the people younger than me who think it can come back. To them it is a memory told to them by their parents.

397:

Oregon has about two million people and it's getting kind of crowded and Washington's not much better. There's really not habitable land up there for 19 million people to resettle, especially if they have to move rapidly. ... Still, I'd recommend that anyone interested in long term survival should move to the rust belt around the Great Lakes and figure out how to get by there.

Yep. I didn't realize it until some visits over the last decades. OR and WA are mostly desert. OR more so I think than WA.

I'd like to think the Great Plains could be settled again. But further north. Just now the northern parts in the US just require too much effort to keep warm during the winter. A small forest of trees for each person if you're at that level. But if things heat up and they get reasonable rain it might work.

The northern half of the Ohio River valley (your rust belt) might work. But there's a lot of variation in terrain that was dealt with over 100+ years during the first wave of Europeans. And the natives did OK before that. But in the massive numbers? I'm not sure.

Charlie and I are likely mass grave folks. The dialysis people will get graves with headstones. 6 months later we'll be shoved into a trench. Maybe I'll live longer if we see it coming and I get my prostate yanked. But absent that without my meds peeing becomes a real issue. And I've yet to figure out how to skip that part of my life.

398:

As a child I never really expected to reach 30, so I've enjoyed a lot of bonus years

You made me go look. I was 8 during the Cuban missile crisis and remember the bomb shelter one person built near where I grew up. It was distinctive with it's raised berm around the entrance hatch. I just went and looked via Google street view and the bump is missing from the yard. Likely was leaking and disintegrating and some home owner had it dug up and filled in.

On a side note I have kept the transistor radio my father bought at the time. $20 I think. Which is insane for a radio if you factor in inflation. The government CPI says $170 or so in today's money. Still works.

But in general we knew we were toast. He was a production manager at a gassious diffusion plant. And we were down weather of a SAC bomber and missile base. And the 101st airborne was stationed less than 100 miles away. All within range of the Cuban stationed missiles. Rebuilding was going to be the job of the folks on the western side of the country.

399:

It could be a form of hyperstimulation; healthy dragons are shiny, gold has an even more impressive lustre and leads dragons down the beer bottle path.

400:

In a low-energy society, running the washing machine will be pricey (forget the electricity-powered drier), and it won't be something you throw out after 5 years or 15; it'll be something you leave to your grandchildren.

As someone who grew up in a house run by someone who grew up on a decent working farm in the 30s, we NEVER called anyone to repair anything unless time and tools were a factor.[1]

Many washing machines have a 5 year life due to the use of sealed bearings. (Or at least that used to be the issue.) If you had the time to take one apart and re-oil and re-seal the bearing they would last a very very long time. Or until the timing system wore out. I had a washer than I got from a dead relative where when it started acting up the finger contacts had groves worn in them from 20+ years of rubbing. Maybe 30+ years. I bent them a bit and got another 5 years out of the unit. The biggest issue with repairing a washing (at least in the US) is that people expect it to have sides and fit in a small space. Paying someone to move it out to an open space, de-skin it, repair, re-skin it, then move it back costs more in labor than many cost to just by new/used.

The other issue with modern tub top loading washers is they tend to have a transmission. And it that breaks the labor bill goes even higher as many units seem to be built with that as the first part.

[1] About 15 years into my marriage my wife asked (as I started a plumbing project) why don't we ever call a repairman? I told her based on my upbringing the thought never occurs to me if I had or could acquire the tools at reasonable cost.

401:

Chrlie @ 366 Yes, well, people forget or are no taught about Mr Arkwright & Cromford Mills, are they? This post by Diamond Geezer shjould remedy the matter. Note the combination of the new mass-weaving tech with the new tech of the industrial canal. What a lot of people don't seem to get is that a civilisation is an interconnected web of systems that are themselves ingrated systems, that ....

David L @ 400 As someone who grew up in a house run by someone who grew up on a decent working farm in the 30s, we NEVER called anyone to repair anything unless time and tools were a factor. I was born & brought up & have lived my whole life in London, but ..... The skill-set you describe is "me too!" - ecept that spread of competencies is dying out - people with both a scientific AND technical/practical engineering background. And it's scary, too, how fucking "helpless" people are in such situations & splurge MONEY oe expert repairers"

402:

if I had or could acquire the tools at reasonable cost.

Terrifying projects: the nice insurance person says "can we have a list of those tools please" after I just guessed $50,000 for the contents of the shed. The gap between "I found it at a garage sale" and "I want exactly this tool right now" can easily be two orders of magnitude. Even when it's not second hand small tools are scary expensive (bicycle-size torque wrench $150, special spanner for removing lock ring from back of main bearing of my exact washing machine $70 - sadly for them I had flour + salt to make "playdough" and a friendly CNC operator).

403:

Oh and farming... industrial farming can be great if you carefully select what you grow and where you grow it. I know a lot of horticulturalists who have a couple of weeks off over Christmas every year, for example, because that's neatly between pruning and preparation for harvesting. But dairy farming or market gardening are pretty much 24/7/365 jobs, and you can't easily hire managers. Well, you can, but suddenly 20 hour days turn into $100,000/year just in salary (also: there are lots of scams in dairy farming particularly. By scam I mean "we share the profit, you wear the risk" deals).

404:

In the future, washing machines will be mechanical; human powered. I think in the future drying clothes after you wash them will go back to the way my Mom did it when I was a child. Hang it out on the line & let the sun & the wind dry it. No more need for drier sheets to make your clothes smell like they were dried out on the line; they will be dried out on the line & will smell that way naturally.

Or, as I did, install a pulley airer in the new utility room when we got our extension built. It meant I cleared out the tumble dryer and could still wash and dry clothes in wet weather. They go on the line in good weather; always have done. My Mum had 2 laundry lines - one out in the open, one in the patio. It was only as she got frail she got a washer dryer - in any case, when she got to needing physical help, the carers weren't going to hang laundry outside, let alone be around to get it in for her.

405:

Merging two comments.

Despite the propaganda, derailleurs require a higher level of technology to work reliably than epicyclic hub gears, which is why the latter dominated until well into the 1930s and are undergoing a comeback today. In terms of first use, there is nothing in it. But, in both cases, they require fairly advanced metallurgy and manufacturing which, as Babbage found, is a lot more than knowing how.

The fabrics that are relatively quick to make by hand relative to their lifetimes are leather (including suede) and felt, which is why those were so heavily used in mediaeval times and by many peoples even now. Yes, much more has been written about woven fabrics, but history was not written for or about the peasantry.

406:

A lot of the heat in a subway system comes from the trains—it takes up to 10MW to start up a London Underground tube train on a cold morning (around freezing, i.e. annual average for Toronto!), and they're running through those tunnels at 5 minute intervals, dissipating all that energy as heat via air compression/braking. In London in particular the mixture of clay/chalk the deep tunnels run through is particularly bad at heat dissipation, but even with cut-and-cover construction and different types of rock is going to give the system huge thermal inertia.

If people are moving into those tunnels to shelter, they're not going to be operating a regular train service.

407:

If people are moving into those tunnels to shelter, they're not going to be operating a regular train service.

Now I remember the book 'Metro 2033' by Glukhovsky. The London Underground could probably have something like the communities in the book as there are quite a few stations.

Here, in the Helsinki region, the metro has two lines with separate tracks at one end of the track. The map looks basically like the letter Y. Not that much room for that kind of societies, especially considering that about half of the tracks are above ground.

408:

Right at the beginning, there is someone standing up above the others facing the side of the ship and doing something with some object that shows as a blurred white circle. Beyond that, I can tell nothing. I stand by 'doing something', but that could be anything, not necessarily relevant.

For all I know, it could be an old video from before Iran Air 655 was shot down, because we know that Iran was hassling the almighty USA Navy with small boats.

409:

Pedantic nit: it's a hoard, not a horde.

410:

Actually, the "gods subduing chaos" is also in Genesis, it's just somewhat sanitized to conform to monotheism (though I'm not sure if the authors were just monolatrists at the time):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_creation_narrative#Mesopotamian_influence

Personally I prefer the second creation myth, naming changes things, not just in "Dying of the Light", but Young Earth Creationists getting hung up on the first one makes for interesting ideas of Mindfuck with them...

411:

I give you Black Cloud by SNFU. From another CD the pothead sitting next to me in history class gave me.

412:

Charlie @ 406 You are out of date ... and they're running through those tunnels at 5 minute intervals ... on the Victoria Line in the rush-hours, it's every 90 SECONDS, goes down to every 120 seconds in semi-slack periods & every 150 seconds when its really quiet. [ 5 minutes is 12 trains per hour - tph - & in the centre no line is running at less than 20 tph ... ]

413:

Yep. I didn't realize it until some visits over the last decades. OR and WA are mostly desert. OR more so I think than WA.

As I described it to visitors during Sasquan, the Worldcon in Spokane: The lush forests and rain and greenery are in western Washington, where Seattle is. This is the eastern part of the state. Outside the city there are, oh, Jawas and Sand People and Fremen and ...

There are in fact good reasons why western Washington and Oregon have cities and forests and rich farmland while eastern Washington and Oregon have huge ranches, small towns, and vast stretches of nothing much.

414:

There are in fact good reasons why western Washington and Oregon have cities and forests and rich farmland while eastern Washington and Oregon have huge ranches, small towns, and vast stretches of nothing much.

This makes me want to dig out my old Shadowrun sourcebooks and look at how they describe the area. For context, the main game fiction is (at least used to be) set in Seattle and surrounding areas, it being a single city of the UCAS (United Canadian and American States) surrounded by the Salish-Sidhe Council. The "Native American Nations", into which the SSC belongs, make at least a show of being more in tune with the nature. Granted, they control also most of the Western part of Washington, and parts of British Columbia and neighbouring current US states.

415:

"helpless" people are in such situations & splurge MONEY oe expert repairers"

When I moved to my current house (edge of urban) 30 years ago I was doing some work on my car and decided a second short handled ratchet handle would be best to fit into an odd tight situation. I didn't own a second such so I asked my 3 neighbors to borrow one. None of them owned a socket set. I was a bit confused.

Which is why some of the above stories about survival after big time warming strike me as optimistic. Or maybe will not include very many 1st world descendants.

PS: Anyone want to borrow a timing light or dwell meter? My have been on the shelf for nearly 30 years. Just can't bring myself to throw away working tools.

Anyone else here set the spark gap for a mower via tapping it on the concrete or spreading it with a screwdriver. To get it close enough by eye. Or a car in a pinch. :)

416:

I stick a hacksaw blade into the gap and then tap it on something clean and non abrasive. Hacksaw blades are about 0.65mm thick, and that's close enough.

417:

My wife and I like travelling the local metro systems - or lacking that the local tram system - when we visit cities1. As in, collecting all the stops on all the lines. So yes, we've done Helsinki's simple Y system as well as all its tram lines, and yes, you are rather missing a full set of tunnels.

Montreal on the other hand has quite an extensive system, and unless I've completely failed my memory since we did it in 2009 (or we missed new lines last year), it's entirely underground, even the termini. Given Montreal's winter climate there are good reasons for that - they also have a decent subterranean pedestrian complex in the centre so that people don't have to go outside to cross streets in the winter. What works against excessive snow can also work against excessive heat.

1Our one big failure: Vancouver. Yes, we had done all of the Skytrain system by the time we left for the airport, but they opened a new line an hour later. For double insult, it ran past our hotel to the airport.

418:

If you visited Helsinki earlier than 2017, you can come again and enjoy the new stations! With that addition, over half of the tracks are underground!

(I still haven't visited one of the new stations. I ride the metro past it often, but there's really no reason for me to stop there.)

419:

Bellinghman @ 417 Went to Berlin for the forst time last year .... Ticked off: Airport Bus, "normal" bus, tram, U-Bahn ( klein Profil ), U-Bahn ( grosse Profil ), S-Bahn, DB-regional and ... "Ersatz-Bus" ... i.e. Rail Replacement Bus to the unbeleivable THATCHED U-bahn station. ( This one )

420:

Oh, for. This again. There is a conversation attractor in all conversations about the future where energy starvation is just taken as a given, and it is insane.

This is not a future that can happen. The power will stay on even if we are all dying in droves from collapsing agriculture, because electricity stretches food supplies! Without electricity, you have no refrigeration, and without refrigeration, food spoilage goes way up. Without electricity, all work becomes muscle powered, and a manual laborer requires on the order of four to five times the food a laborer operating an electric machine doing the same job. Letting the power go out thus requires you to produce something on the order of 10 times the agricultural output to sustain the same population.

What will happen instead is that the power is kept on no matter how much effort that takes from the survivors, and then power will be thrown at the problem of food production.

And the power can be kept on even in the face of extremely wide spread disruption. The minimal supply chain for a functional (as opposed to a safe, gold-plated) nuclear reactor is very, very short. 1960s Sweden managed it with essentially no outside assistance, and that was inventing the entire system more or less from scratch.

If you have high-enrichment material to kick things off with, the easiest is probably a molten chloride fast reactor, which has some issues, but also has a very high breeding ratio, and is basically just a tank with a heat exchanger on top, and operates with an inlet temperature over 500 degrees c. Meaning, air-cooled even in lethal-temperature deserts, but there are options even if you have to start from blue prints and natural uranium.

421:

Ah, we were last there for the 2017 Worldcon, which I note is before the new stations opened. Oh dear, we'll have to return.

(There was a rather violent storm while we were there - it ripped off roofs and downed trees, but an hour later all was calm again. Most odd weather.)

422:

Thomas Jorgenson @42 Tell that to the people of Argentina & Uraguay, where something relly 'orrible has happened to their power distribution.

423:

And it was back up in less than 24 hours. People are not predicting transient outages, they are predicting a future without, or with very scarce, electricity, and that is bonkers. I see it predicted constantly, and it does my head in, because it is just reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of possible political and economic settlements. Anyone proposing we change society to an unpowered state will hang from lampposts, and rightly so.

Future without (new) modern computers? Sure, all that takes is breaking the global market into small enough chunks that none of them can support the necessary chip fabs.

Future without power? Phfthf. Electricity is not a child of the modern era, it is a child of the industrial revolution. Reactors are straightforward. Reactors where the "Acceptable level of safety" is recalibrated to "Going to loose 30% of the population if we do not get this running fast" are very, very easy. And cheap.

I would prefer if we went nuclear now, because that averts at least some of climate change, and also gets us plant built to very high standards. But if we do not do so, we will go nuclear later, using.. different standards.

424:

Large interconnected grids have nice benefits. Except when they have a cascade failure.

The future being described would likely NOT have large interconnected grids. More outages but not as widespread.

425:

TJ @ 423 Agree 150% But, you are almost certainly going to have to dangle some of the loopy fake greenies from trees or lamp-posts first, to get the message across ....

426:

"What a lot of people don't seem to get is that a civilisation is an interconnected web of systems that are themselves integrated systems, that ...."

are themselves integrated standards and specifications, all of which require very specific manufacturing complexes, which are interconnected webs of - and so on.

427:

"And it was back up in less than 24 hours. People are not predicting transient outages, they are predicting a future without, or with very scarce, electricity, and that is bonkers."

The question of global warming is not whether we will have electricity. The question is whether we can sustain agriculture. That is, will the weather be too chaotic for plants to grow, (weather will keep changing until all the ice has melted and the global temperature settles down to something vaguely steady) and what parts of the world will be too hot for plants to grow?*

If things get bad enough, the order of events will be first, lose agriculture, second, lose electricity (because people will be too busy looking for food to do the necessary maintenance.)

"Anyone proposing we change society to an unpowered state will hang from lampposts, and rightly so."

Agreed completely, though we have to close down coal/gas plants as quickly as possible.

The Real Problem here is people not accepting a couple things. The first is that we will spend trillions fixing climate change, or there will be a multi-billion person die-off.** We're talking about a WWII-level effort here, but sustained for at least a couple-hundred years, with the first 50-100 years being a matter of one retreat and lost battle after another.

Second, we don't currently have a society which can sustain that kind of effort, so we need to re-imagine society. I'm not sure the "Green New Deal" gets everything right, but at least they're grappling with the problem.

  • The current U.S. and British administrations are unfortunately of the "Brawndo has the electrolytes plants crave" school of politics.

** That includes the billionaires in their bunkers - if I've got to go, I'm going to spend my time while starving to death making sure I've buried their air-plant's intake vent in ten feet of concrete.

428:

Again. The electricity will be kept on even if we are all starving. People will literally feed the plant staff their dead before they let the power fail.

Because without electricity, what food there is will spoil. And because fertilizer production requires electricity. As does a number of other desperation gambits for getting calories. For example, you can convert cellulose to sugar by main force at any paper production facility. Sugar is not a complete diet, but it will stretch a failed harvest a long way.

429:

Apologies for that homophonic issue. I did indeed mean large piles of valuables rather than masses of troops.

That does however suggest the possible alternative that the dragons are using the gold to make wargames figures. Presumably as a method of sublimating their desires to ravage the landscape.

Now I'm trying to remember which story it was where the dragons ended up with a secondary market in princesses.

430:

I think a few people in Puerto Rico and Florida might disagree with you about the status of electricity in the scheme of things.

431:

Agreed completely, except on the subject of whether the efforts to keep electricity running will be successful - that might or might-not happen.

432:

The first is that we will spend trillions fixing climate change, or there will be a multi-billion person die-off.

As I keep saying, I believe that the smart, rich right-wingers (the people funding the white supremacists, not the knuckle-draggers themselves) see a multi-billion person die-off as the cheaper solution. And the white supremacists are willing to work towards that goal (by clamping down on borders to prevent climate refugees from entering, and persecuting perceived enemies within) because they actively want to kill the "mud people".

we don't currently have a society which can sustain that kind of effort, so we need to re-imagine society

My fear is that one possible shape of a society adapted to climate change is that of the Third Reich revisited: a thin population of white yeoman farmers trying to re-colonize land swept clean of its former occupants, supported by slaves (actual human slaves at first, robots when they run out of people to work to death.)

433:

Eastern Washington State has a lot of rich farmland because of vast socialist infrastructure projects from the 30's and 40's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Coulee_Dam, etc). Grows a lot of fruit, certain vegetables, and potatoes with that water.

There is also a bunch of less-rich dryland farming over there (wheat, beans, hay, etc).

Previously this was a variety of prairie.

434:

I think food refrigeration is essentially a luxury, like coffee or chocolate.

In terms of overall calories food is stored piled up in huge buildings that keep it dry and make sure rats don't eat it all.

435:

Jeff Isher Not even wrong Refrigeration of food-supplies is an essential, now we've learnt how to do it cheaply & effectively. Even a few days cooling, if not actual freezing helps ... there are (or used to be) water-evaporation-effect coolers that kept food "cold" - or at least not in the rapidly-rotting-food temperature range, never mind actual, powered devices. There's also the scaling effect. A butcher's walk-in freezer or Fridge is cheaper & more efficient than lots of little domestic ones. I could see that becoming a trend, in desperate times.

436:

"My fear is that one possible shape of a society adapted to climate change is that of the Third Reich revisited:"

This is my fear as well. The way I solved it as I considered the future in my Climate-Change novel (currently on a lift with the engine and transmission removed) was to assume that a new constitution would take away some rights andestablish other rights.

In solving Climate-Change correctly we're definitely going to be telling people they can't do a lot of things they can currently do, ranging from building coal plants to barbequing in the back yard, and we'll be forcing people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do, like work for the Climate Army one month out of the year or rebuild their house to a better insulation standard. (We may send the army to rebuild their house to a better insulation standard!) So my take on things is that we have to add a freedom for every freedom we take away, so my future included a Bodily Autonomy amendment which makes drug (ab)use and prostitution legal, single-payer medical care, an absolute prohibition against racism, vaccinations against STDs, a constitutional prohibition against unscientific laws, a constitutional prohibition against laws which can be "weaponized" against other races, sexes, religions, etc., MUCH better data protection, (specifically, the government must get a warrant before purchasing data from a private party,) much better protections against corporate misbehavior, and so on.

I'm not in love with the idea of trading one right for another, but I think it's the best we're going to get in an imperfect world if we don't want a Climate-Change Reich.

437:

Yup. I was a little taken aback by earlier comments that it's all like Death Valley past the Cascades.

The original point, though, was that the Pacific Northwest can't accommodate 19 million-odd people moving north from southern California in the face of climate change, and even with all that lovely irrigated farmland out in the Palouse, I still think that's the case.

Anyway, Frank Herbert got his inspiration for Dune from the Oregon coastal dunes near Coos Bay, not from the Sagebrush Sea way out past Bend.

438:

No, I don't agree. Refrigeration is nice. And I don't see the energy it uses as being so critical that it will go away. But it could go away. In an 'everyone is on the verge of starving' scenario we all become near-vegetarians anyway. Butchers won't have much to refrigerate.

439:

Around Bend that old volcanic ground up rock makes for a strange color to the landscape of mostly sand.

440:

Um yeah. Bend is not the Ka'u desert.* It looks a bit more like this.

*The Ka'u desert is on the southern end of the Big Island of Hawai'i. It's a desert for two reasons: 1) it's about on the same latitude as Dubai 2) it's in the lee of a rather large volcano (Mauna Loa) so the rain clouds dump out on the Hilo side and it doesn't get much rain.

Fun place to visit, although I suspect people on the eastern edge of the Pond could find similar landscapes a lot closer, in the Canary Islands.

441:

Charlie, Charlie, Charlie... wrong submarine. I was thinking of one who's designer, builder and captain was named Nemo....

442:

I don't think so. I've heard second, or maybe read first-hand, that they never have enough of the right size, and the staff handing them out just don't care, as long as they're not so small that you can't get into them.

And those really aren't the ones rebelling. I think it's more along the lines of the down-in-the-bones knowledge that your odds are that you won't live past your mid-thirties, if you're lucky, and so live fast....

Which still leaves a "why look tough that way, when you can look tough like someone who's gotten away with it?" If you need to "look tough" the former way, it means you haven't gotten shit to be worth defending, other than yourself.

443:

Nope, haven't seen it. On the other hand, I've been seeing small stories about melting permafrost doing bad things in Alaska, and some Canada....

444:

The two tankers (isn't that a book title from some fantasy series?)... I have yet to see one bit of information about the incident: which way were the ships pointing, and which coast were the attacks from?

Houthis were my first guess, but SA/Qatar playing games could be.

Or Bolton and Sec'y of (mis)Education" DeVoss's brother, a founder of Blackwater/Xi/whatever would be a really good possibility. The more I think of that, the more I (dis)like it.

445:

Actually, I think the East - IL to the east coast, would be ok. Of course, first you burn/knock down the now-abaondoned exurban and farther-suburban villages, and then you've got all the highly-productive farmlands back.

Many of the folks who live there, of course, will die off, or keep running looking for a time machine to the past. I expect, before they go, a lot will wind up selling everything including their bodies.

Hell, I live in what used to be called a suburb (try to tell me it's not city...riiiight), and a year or two after I bought the place - that would make it around '12 or so, I was doing a brake job in my driveway, and the Hispanic guy next door one way, and the older black guy, retired AF, the other, and the mail carrier were all amazed... this is a neighborhood I'd expect most folks to work on their own vehicles.

And you'd really want to be my friend. Let me run my mind along the non-fiction bookshelves in the study, ah, yes, my 1974? copy of the CRC Handbook, the car repair manuals, the reproduction of an 1865 "cookbook"....

  • I love the medical section: recipe for paragoric starts with "take one oz best Turkey opium, add x alcohol....
446:

Yeah... but right now, I want to sing Hope Eyrie, and my own Outbound Passage, and Sassafrass' Somebody Will, and, damn it, Tom Smith's Rocket Ride.

Gotta finish my Famous Secret Theory....

447:

I dunno how much of that "us white guys" is valid. I mean, are Italians, and Irish, and Spanish, and (fill in the nationality) all "white"? Ask someone whose family was always lower or middle working class about that.

Unless, of course, you mean "middle or upper class English or descendants of same).

God (tm), rule-based, always "good"? For what values of "good"?

Sorry, this one REALLY PISSES ME OFF, don't get me started on why, just take it as given.

448:

5 years? Really? My late wife had a years-old washer when I moved down to be with her, and, though I had to replace a belt once, was going for more like 10 when we moved. The washer in my current house - it was there when I bough the house in '11, and it was not new. I think I replaced a belt on it, and it's still going.

Now, older style washers.... I remember how happy my mom was, when I may have still been pre-teen, and she got a washer: one tub, electric rollers. Drying? That's why she opened the window to the next wing of the apartment building, and strung the clothes on the line.

I understand that front-loaders use less water. I'd think either kind would be uncomplicated to convert to pedal-powered.

Fridges? They last for mostly-ever.

449:

Agriculture breaks by 2030. (Agriculture is not doing well at all this year.)

Nor do we have any prospect of rendering thermally uninhabitable land habitable again; that's Alien Space Bat/The Culture Shows Up territory. So we're not looking at yeoman farmers; we're looking at a patchy die-back as people variously die in thermal events or of starvation or other infrastructure failure.

I don't disagree that the idiots on the right want and might think they can get that much whiter world, but they can't have it; it's not an available possibility.

450:

You can't see it at the level of Akkadian agriculture? Or the village smith in the Middle Ages? A forge is no big deal. Hell, with some research (probably in books I own), I could probably build a small furnace to make steel.

Here ya go: recyclers, after the collapse, separating out different sources of steel or rust, for specific kinds of steel. "Hey, Jimmy, point them to the pile over there, that was from railroad track, then take these other guys over to the pile of springs."

451:

Sewing machines.... I'll bet, if I asked my Eldest, if she's still in touch with her first boyfriend, from 30? years ago, if he's still got the sewing machine she gave him... that was my grandmother's treadle machine.

Any sewing machine would be easy to convert to treadle. Hmmm, I see a business opportunity, in making conversion kits....

452:

Your limit on metalworking is going to be how much charcoal or methane you can get. Back in the Middle Ages, an English city glassworks owned a woodland, solely so that, by coppicing it, they'd have enough charcoal to keep the kilns hot. Where forests of suitable plants will grow near cities, we'll get your scenario. For a place like San Diego, it's going to be scrap trains heading north to provide material for the people in the rainforest north of the desert. Vegas will be a time capsule, simply because, not only will there not be trees, there won't be any water, nor (if current plans pan out) will any of the springs that used to let travelers pass through the desert have water in them. The only way to pass through the Nevada desert is to wait for a really wet winter, take a herd of goats to keep you fed, and trek as fast as you can across the desert before the greenery gives out.

453:

Detergent... that's a detail. First, let me note that I read, back in the late seventies? early eighties? that some researchers had tested, and found that detergent (as was available then) didn't do a much better job than the washing machines, without detergent, did.

So, make some Real Soap (thank you, Dr. Bronner...), and away you go.

454:

Why do dragons want hords? I've got it! Dragons probably can smell lead, which they then melt (by breathing fire on the rock), and then they build a pile (and I do mean "pile") in a cave, and sleep on it... and can draw alpha particles out of the lead. The final upshot is that, like Gojiro, their fire and flying capabilities are nuclear powered, after turning lead into gold.... (atomic # 82 -) atomic # 79)

455:

From what I was reading a few years ago, there seem to be about 2,000 homo sap about 70k or 78k years ago, and we're all descended from them.

100k years is a long time, and given that some percentage of survivors will know how to do things, and know things, and they will make SURE* that their kids learn it, I think we'd be back to at least Victorian tech in centuries.

Now, if, as in the universe I've lately been writing in, the planet you lived on only had the colony and the island, or small continent around it terraformed (mostly), you'd have a lot more issues (they did, in my storyline), and it might take several thousand years, being as how you're trying to make dirt to grow food....

456:

Gaseous diffusion plant?

I grew up in Philly. Think the Philly Naval Yard, and the SEVEN oil refineries in south Philly, and Sandy Hook, 30 mi away, I think, made 8. If the button was pushed, we were radioactive waste, and so was everything and everyone, practically, that we knew.

457:

Really? On one of the two best vacations in my life, '96, when my late wife and son and I drove from Chicago to Worldcon in Anaheim, by way of the Great Northwet, what we saw was lots of trees as we headed west from Spokane... for about half an hour or so on the Interstate. We then cut off, and went at about a 45 degree angle southwest through Washington state to cross the Columbia into Oregon.

What horrified us was that all of central WA looked like it had been clearcut.

Driving along the Columbia, west, the cliffs, far above, on the Oregon side were green and wooded, while the Washington side were bare rock and dirt.

So I've always thought Oregon was in better shape.

458:

Never used a dwell meter, but I've thought of using my timing light as a ray gun, it being chromed all over....

Huh. Shade tree mechanic. My late wife and I bought gauges, so when we set the spark plug gap (and, on the late dearly beloved departed Toyota Tercel wagon, I'd do the lifters), they were Correct.

459:

Also note: food refrigeration is a cheap sterilization strategy. Cold kills most vermin and parasites, and retards decomposition. It also makes it possible to ship food long distances between continents where it grows and continents where it's consumed.

Domestic refrigeration is more arguable, but can be made more efficient by incorporating more/better insulation (fridges are bulkier but contain less food) and changing consumer approaches (isn't something like 10-20% of sold food discarded in the developed world?).

460:

About that... on slashdot, today, I see that. I also read about the NYT report that the CIA installed malware on the Russian electrical grid.

I would be utterly unshocked to find out that South America was a test.

461:

I don't disagree that the idiots on the right want and might think they can get that much whiter world, but they can't have it; it's not an available possibility.

When they realize they can't get it, then—because their self-definition is based on hierarchy—their likely response will be to say "fuck you, if we're gonna die you're gonna die too" and attack anyone who seems to be treading water.

If the Status-6 Oceanic Multipurpose System (aka Kanyon, aka Poseidon) ever gets commissioned, I can see them being fired at Cumbre Vieja, the coastline of Sumatra, and maybe Lake Taupo if the Waikato river is navigable by Status-6. (Hmm. Maybe send a couple of them to blast a channel into the volcanic plateau, shades of Project Ploughshare.)

After all, if Mother Russia is going down, why should those billionaire asshole survivalists in New Zealand get to live? Or anyone on the North Atlantic coasts of Europe and the United States, for that matter?

462:

Knocking over power grids is the sort of thing that will invite serious retaliation in the near future, particularly when these high temperature events become common.

463:

No; only really simple single-stitch mechanical sewing machines are suitable for treadle conversion. There are any number of 19th century and early 20th century Singers out there, not to mention hand-cranked chain-stitch machines. But stuff like my wife's new-for-Christmas sewing machine won't convert in a bazillion years. (Hint: it has touchscreen and a USB port for uploading new stitch designs: I'm pretty sure it runs on an embedded linux with a custom gui. Not so much a sewing machine as a robot that happens to be designed to shove needles through fabric.)

464:

Oh, snap. Domestic machines went electronic a long time ago, these days even the $50 specials have critical parts electronic (stitch length and width for example, so they can do fancy stitches). Sure, you could lock that down and have "this machine does 3mm straight stitch" but even that would be hard.

I was somewhat surprised to find a recent industrial overlocker where they'd simplified construction by using stepper motors rather than mechanical linkages. Good luck converting that to manual operation. The surprise, BTW, was "industrial" not "stepper motor".

465:

I raise you growing up in Leeds during the cold war.

Five miles east of my home was the Vickers tank factory, where they made Chieftains and Scorpions. Twelve miles north-west was Leeds-Bradford Airport (able to handle C5s, C130s, and wide-bodies if necessary). Four miles south: the head end of the M1 motorway, the main north-south road connecting London and Yorkshire, by way of Sheffield (hint: steelworks, military convoys). Two miles south: a major railway station on a spur of the East Coast Main Line and square on the TransPennine line connecting Liverpool (Atlantic convoys come in) and Hull (Europe-bound resupply ships go out). Ten miles south there's the M62, the main east-west motorway between Liverpool/Manchester/Leeds-Bradford/Hull, and as if that's not enough there was a goddamn canal. Oh, and about 10-20 miles north there was Catterick barracks, the biggest British Army base in the North of England.

Leeds is central enough it even caught the Gestapo's eye: they'd earmarked Quarry House in the city centre as their headquarters for England after they were victorious in Operation Sealion.

There's a reason I had it targeted by Elves in "The Nightmare Stacks"; Leeds is an obvious strategic target, and if I was recolonizing a depopulated British Isles it's where I'd have my Imperial satrap establish her colonial capital.

466:

On election day in Argentina no less...

467:

The use of refrigeration for long distance shipping is really less important than its fixed applications. The thing to do with long distance food shipping is simply to stop doing it. It's bloody daft to transport dead sheep half way round the world from New Zealand to Britain instead of eating the ones we grow in Scotland and Wales, for instance. If what can be grown locally isn't enough, then the answer is not to try and ship in more (which idea is in any case just a hangover from the pre-powered-transport era tendency to estimate the size of "the rest of the world" as "infinite"), but to get the only species on the planet that has full conscious voluntary control over its reproduction rate to actually bother to exert that control in a manner appropriate to the situation (cf. one of your other posts). (Unfortunately not only is it a minority who even admit the need for such measures, but even among that minority nearly everyone thinks that they personally are somehow exempt.)

Or from a completely different angle, long distance food shipping has been going on for vastly longer than long distance perishable food shipping, because things like grain are only a little more difficult than things like gravel.

"incorporating more/better insulation (fridges are bulkier but contain less food)"

...like they used to be?

As far as things like this are concerned we need to lose this obsession with making everything fit into a 600mm wide gap. It just isn't big enough to get the required amount of insulation and a useful amount of internal capacity in a box that size. Old fridges from before this ill-thought-out standard came in used to have several times the wall thickness of current ones.

Same applies to ovens. They absolutely need some kind of thermal barrier around the hot compartment just to stop them setting fire to the cupboards or whatever that the cooker is next to. But we have designers who think that the barrier's only function is to keep the heat off the cupboards, and are happy to pay no attention to its ability to keep heat inside the oven in their obsession with minimising its thickness. So we end up with the hot compartment surrounded by a fucking cooling jacket with a fan continuously blowing air through it because that needs less thickness to keep the outer surface temperatures down than actual insulation would, and a corresponding increase in power supplied to the elements to keep the inside temperature up despite the extra cooling. It's almost too shit for words.

"isn't something like 10-20% of sold food discarded in the developed world?"

I thought it was a lot more than that. Supermarkets take perfectly edible food that has passed some arbitrary date and bin it in locked skips in a secure compound, in huge quantities, when they should instead, if they can't sell it, pile it out front and let people take it away for free. But because it's all locked away people hardly even recognise that this is going on at all.

468:

Actually, not that I believe in this stuff, but pure speculation, the kind to allow you to throw believers crumbs that at least let them jump on the "young Earthers" was to suggest that the world was "created" when humans became self-aware.

469:

While a Poseidon drone in the Waikato would probably mess up the North Island pretty badly, Taupo is at the top of a multi-dam hydro-electric system, with the Huka Falls just before you'd get to Taupo proper. So no nuclear drones in supervolcanos, I suspect.

470:

"Many washing machines have a 5 year life due to the use of sealed bearings. (Or at least that used to be the issue.) If you had the time to take one apart and re-oil and re-seal the bearing they would last a very very long time."

IME you're never aware the bearing even needs attention until it's worn enough that the drum starts wobbling on its spindle, and so needs replacement. But they are easy enough to replace if you have a big enough hammer, and they are standard industrial sizes which you can always get.

You can, for instance, get them from a bearing factor when the washing machine shop insists that they don't exist and you have to replace the entire drum assembly, both inner and outer, instead of just the bearing between the two. The reason they claim this is that on that model of drum the outer shell is made from two glass-loaded plastic mouldings held together by self-tappers with a thread pitch of about 45°, which can be successfully tightened exactly once, ie. at the factory; if you then take them out again to change the bearing, there's enough wear in the holes that when you put them back they work loose after a couple of wash cycles and the drum starts leaking.

To which the Pigeon response is to observe that the holes for the self-tappers go all the way through and have a nice flat surface around the other end, so you can replace them with long bolts plus nylocs and a penny washer on either end and then blow a nice long raspberry at whoever thought that one up.

Re spark plug gaps, yes, I do exactly that, although I generally use the cylinder head as the thing to tap on. Also setting the timing by finding a hill to drive up at 40mph in top gear and twiddling the distributor until it just doesn't pink; setting the points by eye, or if I'm feeling really fussy / can't see what I'm doing, using a Rizla packet; setting the tappets by feel; torquing the head bolts by feel; etc. etc. I'm not going to spend £70 on the manufacturer's set of bits and bobs for setting the timing on some diesel engine that I'm not going to see more than once if I can do it just as accurately with a drill bit and a feeler gauge and the extension bar out of my socket set, plus a bit of understanding of the basic principles of what I'm trying to achieve. Same deal for other types of machinery, eg. replacing the individual head chips on the drum of a VCR using a soldering iron and a screwdriver and the head chips off the drum of some other VCR that was dead. I tend to regard "you can't do that, you need $specialist_equipment" as inviting the response "oh yeah?"

471:

Yes, we had done all of the Skytrain system by the time we left for the airport, but they opened a new line an hour later. For double insult, it ran past our hotel to the airport.

If you go back, do not count on the Canada Line getting you to the airport during rush hour. It doubles as a commuter line, and one trip I after waiting four trains and not seeing a gap I ended up getting on it going the other way, riding a couple of stops to the Seabus station that is it's other terminus, and getting on there to get to the airport. By the second stop there was no more room on the train and it stayed that way almost until we got to the airport.

It's a great idea, but rather a problem for passengers with flights to catch as I can't find anything on the transit web site that warns you of this – so someone relying on the online trip planner might miss their flight.

472:

.. Re those drones of world unmaking. I look at those, and go... "Reactor fuel!"

I mentioned fast spectrum molten salt machines? Well, starting the first generation of those up needs high enrichment mixes (They can be strong breeders, so second and subsequent gen can be loaded up with fuel siphoned from gen one and replaced with depleted uranium and table salt) Which means a serious energy crisis is going to involve a fun bureaucratic battle in which the Power Authority shows up with angle grinders and goes "Those nuclear warheads? Waste of Plutonium. Going to disassemble them now"

473:

I.e. the following:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/15/us/politics/trump-cyber-russia-grid.html https://mobile.twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1140065300186128384?p=v https://mobile.twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1140065304019644427?p=v

It is notable that the UK (and, I assume, USA) press is very keen to spout vitriol about Russian hacking, but has studiously ignored this. You will remember how I was flamed by the anti-Russian bigots for saying that there was no evidence that Russia had done any more hacking than was SOP by the USA and UK.

A pox on ALL your houses!

474:

No offence to all you washing machine repairmen, but the faults I've seen in recent machines are 90% electronic. Fixing those means scraping off the conformal coating and soldering in new parts. Fortunately they're usually discrete components and it's often simple ones that go rather than the proprietary ICs. Obviously there are no manuals available so working out what isn't working is hard. The other failures I've seen are things that are technically replaceable but in practice you can't buy the parts except by paying the cost of a new machine to an authorised service technician.

I find it simpler to work out what is the least awful of the widely available second hand machines and buy one of those. The current one came from what looked like someone repairing machines at home.

Sadly it also only has a cold water inlet and insists on heating water itself (I live in a share house and have not discovered a way to get people not to let the machine default to hot washes, and the machine will not work at all with the element disconnected). The previous machine had a hot water inlet and when I disconnected its internal element it just used all hot water (which came from the cold tap via a T). In Sydney a "cold" wash is generally 15 degrees or so, which is fine with modern detergents.

475:

Note that an awful lot of modern electrical household stuff is "warranty void if not used with a surge suppressor", and many have power supplies that will not work with square wave inverters or dodgy power from generators. By not work I mean permanently - they break.

So part of a microgrid or locally generated electricity supply will be making sure the power that comes out is all clean and shiny.

Due to the number of "smart" power supplies brownouts are also less effective - lots of things will keep drawing their full rated power at 10% or even 20% less than rated input, and those of us in 240V countries might find that stuff keeps working right down to 100V. But on hot sunny days all the rooftop PV pushes the voltage up and it's now resistive loads that are getting hot and possibly buring out. So operating grids is also subtly more complex than it used to be.

But within 10 years of the silicon foundaries going out of business 90% of that stuff will stop working because somewhere in the chain of "make this go" a critical bit will have stopped working. A lot of modern power electronics have service lives less than 10 years.

476:

As far as things like this are concerned we need to lose this obsession with making everything fit into a 600mm wide gap.

That will happen just as soon as modern home builders start designing kitchens that are bigger than shoeboxes. Modern kitchens have more appliances than the old days (let's see, sink(s), stove, refrigerator, dishwasher, washing machine, freezer, microwave oven and under-counter storage units) and four or five square metres of floorspace to fit them in, including space for the kitchen user to stand. Old-time kitchens[1] were huge but they came with servants and/or younger children to do a lot of the work, hand-washing clothes, hauling coal from the bunker for the cooking range, washing dishes and scouring pots etc. There isn't room in modern kitchens for such labour-saving devices, just 600mm-wide robots.

[1]The kitchen in our 1850s upper-middle class flat is about six metres long and four metres wide, about half the size of an entire modern economy 1-bedroom flat. I sometimes make sandwiches to eat on the way to the microwave oven in case I get hungry on the trip.

477:

That is why I loathe the unnecessary use of electronic controllers. All the other mechanical parts apart from the controller are still there, just the same and with the same failure modes/rates, but the controller itself is now this dodgy heap of crap that fails 10 times more often than the rest of the bits put together. In return for this arseache you get... different shape buttons to press to turn the thing on, and a shitload of pointless "features" most of which you'll probably never even suspect the existence of, let alone use, and wouldn't notice any significant change in the end result even if you did use them; or more succinctly, fuck all.

Then to add insult to injury there are also a load of hidden extra "features" that are devoted to fighting you every step of the way if you dare to take the lid off. Like the one you mention, where you can't just disconnect some function because you don't want to use it, you also have to mess around endlessly to work out how the bastard is detecting you've disconnected it, then work out how to frig the detection without using an actual 10 amp load. (Which I am prepared to spend many, many hours doing if that's what it takes, because merely discovering the existence of crap like this puts ten thousand volts into my "fuck you" response.) And of course the "Universal Bastard" feature shared by all such devices, of detecting faults and shutting off the power within milliseconds of you switching it on, so you've nothing to measure trying to find the fault yourself.

This happens, of course, because the primary function of a capitalist washing machine is not to get clothes washed with the minimum of hassle, but to extract money from the consumer.

479:

I may have missed the happy interval during which efficient front loaders without electronics were made, but my memories of older washing machines are of overflowing the septic with our shiny new automatic top loader that burned through 200 litres of water or more every wash cycle. That was electromechanical and ate the controller system every 1000 loads or so. Controller was behind the control knob, basically a set of grooves with bumps that tripped switches. When it wore out that was game over... and we went back to ye olde wringer machine from the 1950s (insert small child and it will squeeze all the water out...)

The machine I have now is not as good as the previous one, it goes over 60 litres/wash sometimes. But the previous model has gone from common to impossible to find, almost as though they all die after 15-20 years. I expect I will bin it soon and buy a different one because the water heating thing is driving me up the wall. OTOH, I'll be moving soon and might end up living by myself (I've never really done that before) and if so that particular detail will not be an issue.

480:

I raise you growing up in Leeds during the cold war.'

For a late Cold War look at what FEMA estimated a full Soviet laydown on the US would look like, see

https://fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/napb-90/index.html

The maps in Annexes A and B are quite graphically graphic.

481:

Ah, capitalism. Is there anything that the free market can't accomplish? From inventing new antibiotics to creating markets in subsistence fishing...

An investigation published on Monday by the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) claims that “saiko” fishing, whereby trawlers target the staple catch of Ghanaian canoe fishers and sell it back to fishing communities at a profit, landed approximately 100,000 tonnes of fish in 2017, worth $50m (£40m) when sold at sea and up to $81m when sold at port.

The practice is precipitating the collapse of Ghana’s staple fish stock – small pelagic fish such as sardinella, a crucial protein in the local diet. Scientists have warned that stocks could be completely destroyed as early as 2020, said EJF’s executive director, Steve Trent.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/17/illegal-fishing-by-foreign-trawlers-costs-ghana-50-million-dollars-a-year-researchers-say

482:

My fear is that one possible shape of a society adapted to climate change is that of the Third Reich revisited: a thin population of white yeoman farmers trying to re-colonize land swept clean of its former occupants, supported by slaves (actual human slaves at first, robots when they run out of people to work to death.)

It's possible. I agree that unfree labor has never gone away in the rentiers' toolkit, although there are so many alternatives to outright slavery that it's unclear if that will make a resurgence. The problem I have is with robots taking human jobs after billions of people have died. The unanswered question is how you keep the silicon tech ecosystem functioning without billions of people around to support it (not as part of the global system for making electronics, but supporting the whole thing with food, water, housing, shipping, etc.). If you've got to have slaves blowing hand-crafted vacuum tubes to run the bots, replacing humans with bots is probably not going to work that well.

The "upside" to the rich white slavery scenario (which I agree is quite possible) is that, with far fewer people and more problems tracking them, it's easier to run away and stay away, at least in certain parts of the US. For example, if you're a field slave in the northern Sacramento Valley, freedom's up in the mountains, especially in the Klamath mountains where it's so tangled that outsiders think that eight-foot tall ape men live there.

483:

Madeleine @ 404: My Mum had 2 laundry lines - one out in the open, one in the patio. It was only as she got frail she got a washer dryer - in any case, when she got to needing physical help, the carers weren't going to hang laundry outside, let alone be around to get it in for her.

My mom must have gotten an "automatic" washing machine around the time I was age 5. That's when we moved into the house where I grew up. I remember her having the older kind of washing machine that had the external wringer before we moved into that house, but I don't remember her ever using it after we moved to that house. The kitchen had a hookup for a washing machine, but not for the old type with an external wringer.

She got an "automatic" dryer shortly after my youngest sibling started first grade. My dad made a comment about "women having nothing to do but lay around the house all day eating chocolate bonbons & reading racy novels", so my mom enrolled in nursing school. Since she wasn't home during the day to do laundry, we had to have a way to dry clothes that didn't rely on her being home to hang out clothes.

484:

Elderly Cynic @ 408: For all I know, it could be an old video from before Iran Air 655 was shot down, because we know that Iran was hassling the almighty USA Navy with small boats.

No, they are easily identifiable as modern boats, and the USN didn't have modern digital video back in 1988.

485:

Greg Tingey @ 422:

Thomas Jorgenson @42

Tell that to the people of Argentina & Uraguay, where something relly 'orrible has happened to their power distribution.

You don't even have to go that far. Target stores had a nationwide outage on their computerized cash-register network Saturday, 15 June 2019. The date is significant because it is five years to the day since it happened before. Target stores also had a nationwide outage on their computerized cash-register network on 15 June 2014.

486:

Hitting Taupo in order to get the rich gits around Queenstown is roughly equivalent to bombing Belfast in order to target people in Kent. Wrong island, and in NZ there's multiple mountain ranges between the locations. Real mountain ranges.

487:

whitroth @ 444: The two tankers (isn't that a book title from some fantasy series?)... I have yet to see one bit of information about the incident: which way were the ships pointing, and which coast were the attacks from?

The newspaper of the "people who think they OUGHT to run the country" has a visual guide that includes a map showing the relative positions of the various countries & where the two ships were attacked in the Gulf of Oman. The explosions, from whatever source, appear to be on the starboard side, so on ships that were outbound from the Persian Gulf, that would suggest whoever it is attacked from the south.

Houthis were my first guess, but SA/Qatar playing games could be.

Or Bolton and Sec'y of (mis)Education" DeVoss's brother, a founder of Blackwater/Xi/whatever would be a really good possibility. The more I think of that, the more I (dis)like it.

It does appear to be fairly well established that the boat photographed alongside M/V Kokuka Courageous belongs to a faction of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. I can't say whether the crew of that boat is acting under the instruction of the Iranian government or not. I don't think Iran's government is that stupid, but I have no proof.

Nor do I think it IS Blackwater/Xi/etc, because in that case WHO is footing the bill?

488:

"I may have missed the happy interval during which efficient front loaders without electronics were made, but my memories of older washing machines are of overflowing the septic with our shiny new automatic top loader that burned through 200 litres of water or more every wash cycle. That was electromechanical and ate the controller system every 1000 loads or so."

Ah... correlation !== causation ;) How the controller works and how long it is programmed to turn on the inlet valve for are not related. It's not like there's some use-less-water magic that can only be implemented by electronics. What makes all the use-less-water doings possible is simply that back when nobody cared about it machines were designed to use far more water than is strictly necessary because why not, so when people did start caring about it there was loads of slack to cut out. And then of course in the quest for more impressive figures they cut too far and started making machines that use an amount of water that is only adequate if you assume certain conditions which do not necessarily hold. I reckon these machines made to "use less water" actually end up using more, because in order to get all the soap out of the clothes I have to put the load through a whole second cycle complete except for not putting any soap in. I suspect the invalid assumption in this case may be "everyone makes use of chemical assistance in the rinse process to get the soap out"; well, I don't, and even if I did the second cycle would still be needed, this time to get the fabric conditioner out.

It's interesting how these discussions keep throwing up unexpected instances of "ordinary things that are crap in Australia for no apparent reason" (toilet flush valves was another one recently). My experience with mechanical controllers is more like that of other posters in this thread: they don't never go wrong, but they don't go wrong very often, and when they do it isn't necessarily the end, as it may be possible to bend the contacts back into shape, or swap the connections onto an unused set of contacts on the same timing bank, or swap the specific contact subassembly with one off another timer, etc. etc. (And that's if it's not some other fault entirely disguising itself as a timer fault, which is not unknown.)

Top loaders have been a rarity in the UK for a very long time now. They tend to turn up in places like holiday lets so the owner can claim a washing machine is provided and it's technically true but nobody's going to be using it for long enough to be really bothered, or places where the machine is expected to be abused because they're a lot more difficult to break. My parents' first washing machine was a front loader, called "semi-automatic" - this meant that because it was powered by an induction motor, fixed speed of course, you had to change gear manually between wash and spin speeds. There was a most frightful assembly of different sized rubber friction wheels, belts, levers, huge springs and what-have-you inside the back of the machine to implement the gearchange, and I have pre-school-age memories of fascinated hours spent watching my dad trying to get the thing working yet again... I was brought up properly :D

489:

JF @ 438 You have missed the point by about a parsec SEE ALSO Charlie's addendum @ 459 .. I know all this already, but you plainly missed it.

whitroth @ 444 The tankers were loaded, I think so heading South-East & the pictures show damage on the Stabord sides, so the attacke wouold appear to have come from the non-Persian side. Odd, that. SEE ALSO JBS @ 487 - really do. In answer to your question ... Saudi, via proxies, probably in the UAE. They HATE Persia, always have, because Sunni/Shia & "MBS" is a muderous shit, who doesn't appear to give a shit.

@ 445 Ah yes the "Rubber Bible" - an absolutely essential printed text for the future we are looking at. @ 453 Washing? There's this plant called Soapwart

Chrlie @ 461 And we thought Trump/Bolton & their lot were insane! I'd heard about "Poseidon" but hadn't realised it was that suicidally bonkers.

@ 465 Not Manchester, on the other side of the Pennines?

Pigeon @ 467 SOME of the supermarkets have been shamed into ( at least partially ) not doing that any more ... Far too much of it still going on, of course.

@ 470 Your last bit ... same here!

Moz @ 475 A lot of modern power electronics have service lives less than 10 years. ANOTHER reason for not, under any circumstances buying a modern car .... @ 479 MAny, many years ago, there was the Hoovermatic (?) washing-machine an electromagnetic front-loader with a large plastic "key" which, when inserted in one of EIGHT possible ways "programmed" ( Micro-roller-switches ) which wash you had, & used. Robust enough to be issued to students in halls of residence. (!)

Nojay @ 476 Corrected for my kitchen ... "Modern kitchens have more appliances than the old days (let's see, sink(s), stove, refrigerator, dishwasher, washing machine(twin-tub), freezer - no - they live in the garage, microwave oven and under-counter storage units

Final point on drying clothes I still have & have re-fitted the internal (In the kitchen) ... four-rod pulley-operated ceiling drying "rack" for clothes fresh out of the spinner in my twin-tub. Open the vent to the greenhouse ( which is open most of the time, anyway ) & a front window, upstairs, on the other side of the house & ... dry clothes. Bought power consuption for drying clothes, zero.

490:

Same in London with the Picadilly Line tube; yes, the tube goes to Heathrow Airport, but it takes 1h20m to get there and it's a major east-west commuter line so you can imagine what it's like with luggage at rush hour if you want to get on at King's Cross or another central interchange station.

So then you're stuck with the Heathrow Express (plush, fast, also the most expensive railway service per kilometer of track in Europe, if not the world) or the bus (don't go there). Or the other London airports (Gatwick: train only, it's a long way out), or Stanstead and Luton (just don't).

There's a reason I fly via Paris Charles de Gaulle or Amsterdam Schiphol.

Ahem.

491:

For a late Cold War look at what FEMA estimated a full Soviet laydown on the US would look like, see

Snort. There are actual gaps between the fireballs ...

Americans tend to forget just how small the UK is; Great Britain has less than half the land area of Oregon in total, and enough strategic targets to soak up 200-1000 Soviet H-bombs in the first hour. By the early 80s the immediate first-day death toll was expected to be over 60% of the population, rising to 90% within a couple of weeks.

Tsar Bomba wasn't really a viable weapon, but to put the UK in perspective: if you dropped Tsar Bomba on Livingstone, midway between Glasgow and Edinburgh, it'd kill everyone in both city's centres and depopulate the Central Belt, where two thirds of the population of Scotland are located. One. Bomb.

492:

Hitting Taupo with a 200Mt doomsday device is intended to crack open the supervolcano caldera and trigger another eruption, hopefully bringing about a global volcano winter. Think of it as highly aggressive geoengineering (with a fallout plume) ...

One of those devices detonating in a harbour will kill everyone within a 20km radius almost for sure, and quite probably the fallout plume will take out everyone 100-200km downwind of it over the next week or two.

493:

MAny, many years ago, there was the Hoovermatic (?) washing-machine an electromagnetic front-loader with a large plastic "key" which, when inserted in one of EIGHT possible ways "programmed" ( Micro-roller-switches ) which wash you had, & used.

I remember that! My parents had one in the house I grew up in (circa late 1960s onwards, but I'm pretty sure it came with the house). Built like a tank, I think they replaced it after about 20 years with a more efficient modern machine.

494: 435 - A basin of water, bottles of liquid, and a suitably sized "people towel" to cover the bottles and hang into the water still works for keeping milk from going off, if not getting it ice cold. 441 - And which was powered, atmosphered and watered by handwavium. 458 - The last time I could have used either, I set the points manually, warmed the engine up, swung the distributor to get the fastest tickover, then adjusted the idle screw to slow the revs back down. 459 - Agreed. You know this (some others I'm less certain about) but Halal/Kosher dietary laws are actually good food hygiene rules for pre-refrigeration. 465 - Call. Dumbarton in same period. Glasgow as centre of population, plus Clyde shipyards all the way down to Greenock (about 20 miles for non-Scots), Greenock also a shipping hub, Faslane, Coulport and Holy Loch (US) naval bases, Loch Long as the deep water terminal for the Grangemouth oil refineries.

That's an estimate of 8 by 5MT airbursts within 12 miles.

467 - I have a fan oven. It warms up faster and cooks 20 to 40C cooler than its predecessor. Do you still think that the fan is just there to stop the casing getting burny burny hot?
495:

the Heathrow Express (plush, fast, also the most expensive railway service per kilometer of track in Europe, if not the world) or the bus (don't go there)

Or the normal train which is a bit slower, a but less frequent, but half the price and quicker than the Tube. After all, the staff have to get there.

496:

I just checked and at my location the wet bulb temperature is currently half a degree lower than the air temperature. So a wet towel will have a tough time keeping milk even cool.

497:

That's a different fan. I'm not talking about one that circulates the air inside the hot compartment, I'm talking about one that circulates air from the room around the outside of the hot compartment and blows the hot air out again. So there is a vent with hot air continually blowing out of it, like a fan heater.

498:

Charlie @ 493 BINGO!

Pigeon @ 497 That is utterly bonkers. There's a reason I use a second-hand large oven ( Which I had to dis-assemble, clean (euw) & put together again ... benn using it fo 25+ years now ... One of these, in fact [ Pease ignore the fact that the picture is a sales puff .... ]

499:

And that's clearly why the fan stops when I turn the thermostat to "off". Just like it explains how the new oven is not more efficient than the old one despite warming up faster and running up to 20% cooler.

500:

Yeah, about that.... Look under the control panel, or back cover.

Back in the mid/late-eighties, as I said, we had an inexpensive washer my late wife had bought years before. Didn't even have small/medium/large load. Was looking at a repair it yourself book... and ran across something that boggled both of our minds. We took off the cover of the control panel, and, yep: there was a water level setting. It was cheaper for the manufacturer to make them all alike, but COVER IT OVER, unless you paid about $100 more, and then you'd get the model with the hole drilled in that spot, and a knob.

See what's under the covers.

501:

Now you're getting me started. You see pics of Huge, Beautiful Kitchens... but in the houses anyone can buy that cost < $800k, they're these tiny things, with inadequate cabinets and counters. Oh, and I think I've got two, count them, circuits, which includes the stove and fridge. Can't run the toaster oven and the microwave at the same time....

Architect & Developer (both male): so, "cooking dinner" means nuking it, or boiling water, right, and dropping in the package?

502:

Time to obtain a used sub, complete with some torpedoes....

503:

So, yep, shot at from the Qatar/UAE side.

Who would pay? You think Bolton has no money he can funnel?

504:

Too much. What I learned to do from my late wife was to run it through only the final rinse cycle a second time.

505:

No. You're still not talking about the same thing I'm talking about. You're talking about a fan INSIDE the hot compartment that blows the air round and round inside it. I know about those and I have no complaint about them; they are irrelevant to my point. Your cooker probably hasn't got the thing I'm talking about otherwise you'd know what I meant. I'm talking about a fan OUTSIDE the hot compartment, which draws in air from the room, circulates it around the OUTSIDE of the hot compartment, and blows the now-hot air back out into the room again. You probably aren't getting this because you can't imagine anything being that shit.

506:

See also IBM mainframes going back, oh, ages: System Z circa 2000 came with all the CPU slots occupied, but individual processors were disabled/enabled in software depending on how many CPUs you'd paid your license fees for.

This had one good effect for customers who didn't pay for the maxed-out package: fault tolerance. If a CPU began to fail, the license manager would cut over to an unused board before calling the repair dude out to replace the failing component. Same with memory, too.

(Going back further IBM used to lease out mainframes on the basis of usage, with different tariffs applying depending on whether you were consuming CPU cycles during peak business hours or off-peak/weekends ...)

507:

Bear in mind modern weapons systems—including torpedoes—can be programmed to attack from any direction, in order to loop around point defense systems. (e.g. short range air to air missiles on modern fighters can shoot "over the shoulder", i.e. back at a pursuer in a dogfight).

508:

How 'bout some good news?

Excerpt: For the first time in modern history, the world’s population is expected to virtually stop growing by the end of this century, due in large part to falling global fertility rates, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of new data from the United Nations.

By 2100, the world’s population is projected to reach approximately 10.9 billion, with annual growth of less than 0.1% – a steep decline from current levels. Between 1950 and today, the world’s population grew between 1% and 2% each year, with the number of people rising from 2.5 billion to more than 7.7 billion. --- end excerpt ---

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/worlds-population-is-projected-to-nearly-stop-growing-by-the-end-of-the-century/

Of course, that doesn't factor in war, disease, and famine....

509:

How much will the single-household kitchen be a part of the future? I'm predicting a move towards communal kitchens/canteens/restaurants as resources diminish. And no more grocery stores, as they are wasteful, with labour if nothing else.

510:

So it looks like FaceBook is a sovereign nation with its own currency now ?

Wanna bet that FaceBook ads will become cheaper if you buy them in ZuckerMarks ?

Any politician who attacks FaceBook had better be ready for the Doxx'ing to end all Doxxings: Comprehensive tracking down to the second of every webpage they have ever visited, where they were when they did so, who else were in the room and so on.

Of course nobody is USA is going to touch them in an election year, because winning depends on how well your propaganda propagates on FaceBook.

EU's next competition-zar could well be smitten by a new "Billion-Euro-Business" FaceBook datacentre near their home-turf.

And it will be a liberal wonderland at that: Only trivial expenses to healthcare, schools and defense and absolutely no expenses to unemployment, social care, roads, trains or environment.

511:

I wonder what the cost of a modern munition looping around the boat with no one noticing is, compared with the cost of outfitting a speedboat to mimic the IRG?

We can go on with the conspiracy theories all day, but I suspect that, since this seems to have fizzled somewhat, either the conspirators will either get craftier and/or the Iranians will have Words with their forces (assuming they didn't do it) along the lines of the advice to all non-violent protestors, to not let the agents provocateurs get them into the shooting war that they don't want.*

The other interesting thing is that a Norwegian and a Japanese vessel were attacked, but the US is taking offense. Why, pray tell? I assume this is the Orange Regime's inability to deal with nation-state boundaries in useful ways. That reflects an interestingly uber-wealthy take on world politics that does seemingly point towards possible culprits.

*Now if I were running those Iranian Fast Attack Craft and was worried about my boats being spoofed, I'd procure, say, ten or more flags for each boat and have them change flags fleetwide on a random pattern every single day. That way, it would be a bit harder for someone to run a false flag operation against me.

512:

change flags fleetwide on a random pattern every single day

It only takes one boat to screw up once and that whole idea goes titsup. Plausible deniability arrives. Plus in this day and age distributing physical flags to dozens of boats in complete secrecy is pretty much impossible, so any big player plus their vassals will know the complete set of flags so they'll be able to take a quick peek and see which one they should be flying today. If you're unlucky they will simply have a set of genuine flags, if not a genuine boat.

513:

My solution is just to use a modern front loader and not worry. Back in the day when top loaders were a thing I wasn't in control of the situation and opening up expensive, critical gadgets and playing with them was frowned upon.

There's a whole lot of things that will become problematic if we lose the ability to manufacture ICs in bulk at low prices, it's one of those economy-revolutionising things that's hard to undo. It's not just my cow-orker with the drink bottle that has an OLED display in the lid to tell him whether the contents are hot or cold, it's everything from your "old and mechanical" diesel engine with electronic engine management unit to the barcode scanner that dramatically speeds up buying groceries (and slashes errors rates in medical laboratories). I think it's less "what if none" and more "how big a pile of corpses to keep at least one fab going".

All your billionaires in bunkers are presumably planning to have enough of this stuff stockpiled for their expected lives, and then everyone in the bunker dies.

514:

If you want something else to twitch about on those sleepless nights, consider the possibility of Neven's Law, which describes the apparent (early) growth of quantum commputing power as "doubly exponential" (2^2^1, 2^2^2, 2^2^3, 2^2^4...).

Combine this with a breakdown in civilization, and we get a double singularity in the 2030s or possibly earlier, where the "dragonriding" billionaires who "own" the quantum AI dragons fight for supremacy before the ecosystems that support their silicon dragons fall into uselessness.

Paging Hannu Rajaniemi, your nightmare is saddled and ready to be ridden...

515:

PH-K @ 510 Zuckerberg really is a nasty little shit, isn't he? Probably even worse than Kalanick ...

Heteromeles @ 511 Yes. It is entriely possible, I suppose, that some wankhead in the IRG decided to attack "evil Western christian" shipping, except ... Japan & Norway? However, I wouls=d assume that, as of about 3 days ago, the real bosses in Threan are telling them ( if it was them) ... "Don't even THINK about doing that again"
I also assume that if that was the case, a couple or three summary executions have already occurred, to ram the message home.....

Moz @ 513 All your billionaires in bunkers are presumably planning to have enough of this stuff stockpiled for their expected lives, No, thjey haven't thought it through ... The biliionaires in bunkers will be almost the first to go, if the shit really hits the fan, right after the politicians who claimed that it was a "Chinese hoax" or who want to chop down the remainder of the Amazon forest ......

516:

It goes back to the 1960s, and wasn't just IBM.

517:

If the performance they are measuring by that metric was actually useful, we would already be seeing a lot more quantum computers being used.

518:

Yes. And modern software can create videos that are indistinguishable from real ones, at least in that sort of resolution.

519:

Not necessarily. Why should any company that can make such a device sell them to its potential or actual competitors? Also, if the trend line is that steep, the first notice you may get of the trend growing is the metaphorical teeth chomping on your metaphorical buttocks.

520:

Malaysia is currently grappling with that exact question. Is either video real, and how can we tell? Especially because homosexual sex seems to be their thing, the way corruption is in China and incompetence in the US.

521:

There is a big difference between making ICs for modern computers (billions of transistors) and stuff you need to make a washing machine work (thousands of transistors). Even engine computers can be done with "only" a million or so transistors. If there is a collapse, then I wouldn't be surprised if boutique chip fabs become a thing, that can do runs in the 10s or 100s. They may use something like a high resolution ink jet. So what if the "chip" is A4 sized? :)

If the result can't support multi-megabyte webpages from Facebook, I'm not sure that is a bad thing....

Cellphones might back slide a bit...

522:

The billionaires who've figured it out bought ranches in Wyoming awhile ago. In fact, there are a lot of wealthy ranch owners in Wyoming, due to its lack of income tax.

To be a little less silly (and actually this is not at all silly, since I know one of those ranch owners), current wealth management is kind of feudal anyway, with the wealth managers taking the place of knights in a world where property is almost entirely fungible, and one protects the assets of one's client in part by "arbitraging," using the variety of laws in the world's 196 separate nation states to the advantage of their clients. When this fungible empire falls apart, the next best thing is real estate, to wit, a large working farm or ranch with a decent water supply and a main building that can be reinforced to deal with interlopers. Combine this with a feudal-type relationship back by an armed force, wherein you'll protect others' property rights in return for loyalty and in-kind help, and you've actually got a pretty decent setup for a fall-of-society society, wherein "rancher" becomes a term interchangeable with "baron." You can even run it using things like Black's Law Dictionary to help you keep a popularly-accepted legal system working on the fly.

Note that I'm making very little of this up. It's a fairly familiar meme in the West, due to very similar procedures (allegedly) having been used up until the early 20th century. The downside is that it's racist as all get-out.

523:

They may use something like a high resolution ink jet. So what if the "chip" is A4 sized?

Now that's an intriguing thought! I wonder if anyone has tried it -- if not, it would make an interesting science project.

Squirt layers of appropriate chemicals on a letter-sized piece of paper or other substrate (wood, rock, metal) and see what could be done with it.

524:

I'm predicting a move towards communal kitchens/canteens/restaurants as resources diminish.

A precursor of that in USia and similarly influenced places is the breakfast area in hotels. Kind of a DIY cafeteria, and it works reasonably well for the purpose.

525:

I'm not sure how that would work. You produce incredibly pure silicon, slice it really thin, then print (very precise quantities of incredibly pure) dopants onto it and bake it to get human-visible transistors? Why not just use an A4 size circuit board with discrete components?

My feeling is that we will more likely see what used to be called VLSI and is now just "normal circuit boards", where very small surface mount components are built as continuous materials then cut up and finished before being glued into place. That removes the whole interference lithography requirement (which is hard to do) rather than trying to use extremely hard to produce materials in a low-efficiency way.

That gets you large circuit boards doing simple logic in a process that requires very little in the way of nanometre-level precision or 12-nines purity. You can leaven that with small ICs at whatever degree of difficulty you can manage. If you're lucky you'll be able to use modern chip design tools and other knowledge to get superior performance out of shitty materials and processes.

526:

Hasn't anyone here read "Always Coming Home", by Ursula LeGuin ? (Check Wikipedia.) The setting is a long-past-the-apocalypse society, which has no gasoline, and no metal, but still has good libraries. Yup, they had washing machines.

527:

Keeping an existing chip fab going is very cheap, as compared to building them. This is why old generation chips end up costing next to nothing.

Which. Heh. Hilarious plot: Global trade collapses into smaller chunks, at least in part because a number of the powers have started bombing merchant ships due to xenophobia.

.... I say powers, but what I mean is "Fascist US making sure no climate refugees cross the sea". Our heroes are, of course, the Special Chartered Merchant Vessel Rubis, going all "Nemo was a piker, we do 20000 leagues twice a year"

528:

What horrified us was that all of central WA looked like it had been clearcut.

Driving along the Columbia, west, the cliffs, far above, on the Oregon side were green and wooded, while the Washington side were bare rock and dirt.

So I've always thought Oregon was in better shape.

Oh yes, that's a nice stretch! The Columbia Gorge has a lot to offer in terms of scenery. (This picture was taken 30km from downtown Portland.) You're absolutely right about the Oregon side being a lot more interesting to look at; this is a side effect of some geological processes that give Washington side rolling hills and Oregon cliffs and waterfalls.

You can't see it from the Gorge highway, but up past the cliffs and forests there's working farmland. (And the Bull Run reservoir area, a vast stretch of protected wilderness from which the Portland metro area draws its drinking water.) Also a really big mountain.

Knowing the routes from there to California, I'm guessing you then turned south and drove through the Willamette[1] valley; that's miles and miles of farmland. Alas, it will not feed 18 million displaced Californians, particularly if they're also trying to live on it.

[1] Pronounced "Will-AM-it" and rhyming with "dammit," not "WILL-a-met." Some Oregonians have opinions about this.

529:

It's bloody daft to transport dead sheep half way round the world from New Zealand to Britain instead of eating the ones we grow in Scotland and Wales, for instance.

Interestingly, one of my jobs as a youngster was night watchman for New Zealand sheep coming in to North America. The trick was to not ship dead sheep; they're bulkier but easier to handle as live sheep. Have you ever kept 28,000 sheep in a warehouse for 30 days to clear quarantine? The smell is incredible.

I'm guessing there's an imbalance between the number of English who want to eat sheep and the number of Scots and Welsh who want to raise sheep.

530:

You see this a lot in SE Asia. Many apartments (especially the ones that you get automatically with any factory job, that are literally perched on top of the factory) are too small to have a usable kitchen (you get one gas plate, if you're lucky, maybe a tiny fridge). Super-cheap street food is ubiquitous because it's the primary nutrition source for a large percentage of the population. As a regulator, you got to be super careful with regulating street food vendors, not only because of the employment consequences, but because if some percentage of street food vendors go out of business, your population will literally starve.

531:

Doni @ 526 Problem with that ( A rare failure fo U K le G ) was "no metals" ... I simply don't believe that one. Even in the midst of the dark ages 600 - 1000 or the Bronze Age collapse ... metalworking & using kept going. It's simply too obvious & too useful.

532:

While something new MIGHT have developed since I stopped following that area, I was an algorithmist (*) and knew some top-flight physicists well. The hype and actual results are, as usual, not closely aligned. A good many experts believe that there are fundamental flaws in the current approaches, such that they will never work. Bluntly, it's like fusion power, only a lot less useful and rather more iffy.

(*) The only known use that stands up to close scrutiny is to crack RSA keys and similar. Simulating quantum effects is vaguely plausible, but trying to find a proper paper on how it could be done is like searching for hen's teeth. If the problem of conversion to and from conventional data to highly-entangled quantum states were solved, that would change significantly, but that is still one of the more intractable aspects.

533:

No feasible ores left. I defy you to smelt metals from the low-grade or highly inaccessible ores that are all that is left in the UK, for example. A lot of the early smelting (tin, gold and even iron) used very high-grade ores collected from stream beds, bogs etc., but there is essentially none left. Most rubbish tips will decay into low-grade ores.

534:

Nope. Monetarism, pure and simple. They are cheaper.

535:

At least here in Finland, small kitchens are not a modern innovation. I live in a flat built in the early Sixties, and our kitchen is maybe 4-5 square metres - with all the cupboards, an oven (or a stove...), the fridge-freezer combo, the washing machine and the sinks.

It's quite small, but it's perfectly possible to make a four-course meal in it, though it's usually easier to use also the dinner table, situated just next to it, for table space. We have a bit more appliances than strictly necessary, though.

Many living in these houses have enlarged the kitchen to almost a double size. We might do that when we get to renovating the kitchen, but for now it's fine enough for us. This leaves more space for other things Finnish flats are relatively small, I'm told, ours is a bit over 80 m^2, with three bedrooms. At least when this was built, the sauna (which is quite mandatory here) was built as a communal one in the cellars and not included in the flat - in modern apartments this size, the almost obligatory sauna takes up upwards of 10 square meters. We wouldn't use it often enough for it to be good for us.

536:

It's a major area of research. One goal is a flexible fabric that acts like a VDU screen.

537:

Gaseous diffusion plant? I grew up in Philly. Think the Philly Naval Yard, and the SEVEN oil refineries in south Philly, and Sandy Hook, 30 mi away, I think, made 8. If the button was pushed, we were radioactive waste, and so was everything and everyone, practically, that we knew.

Based on what was in Cuba from a direct point of view we were secondary targets. The SAC airfield and missile bases up wind were our problem. They would be on a first strike list.

My basic point was if you look at Paducah, Ky on a map most would think of it as a place to ride out (if such a thing is possible) such a war.

538:

Uhm. Assuming a situation where anything that floats on the surface in international water gets explosives dropped on it by long range bombers as a result of "the War on Trade" what goods are compact enough to be worth hauling by:

a:Converted military nuke subs on a dual mission of smuggling and "Fuck you, if we dont get to use surface naval vessels, you dont either"

b: Dedicated nuclear trade subs. (That is, smaller crews, bigger holds, fewer weapons).

For a, all I have so far is micro-chips, and nuclear fuels. Some spices?

539:

Yes. From what I read, Malaysia is beginning to doubt it. Why this should be connected to their sexual bigotry, I can't guess.

540:

For a, all I have so far is micro-chips, and nuclear fuels. Some spices? Medicines come to mind.

541:

There was a rather violent storm while we were there - it ripped off roofs and downed trees, but an hour later all was calm again. Most odd weather.

Typical US mid-western (between the mountain ranges and to some degree the east cost) weather. Growing up we would watch the rain approaching while playing ball. When the rain line got within a few 100 feet we'd take shelter then go back out when it passed in 2 to 15 minutes. In the bright sun things rapidly dried out so we could resume play. That was for a typical show. If a thunderstorm or worse we adjourned to my garage for cards.

And such weather as you describe in Dallas 2 weekends ago is why I'm not in London just now. Close DFW for a few hours and divert lots of planes and schedules get really fouled up to the extend we were not sure we could get on our flight as standbys. So I cancelled our hotel awards just in time to get all the value back.

542:

ME you're never aware the bearing even needs attention until it's worn enough that the drum starts wobbling on its spindle

Most of the bearings I was talking about were secondary. Idler pulleys and such. I've never seen a main bearing wear out on a washing machine.

543:

As far as things like this are concerned we need to lose this obsession with making everything fit into a 600mm wide gap.

OK. 24".

When I travel if I have some spare time I will wander into a larger store to just see what people think of as "standard" things to buy.

In Europe I keep noticing that what is thought of as a large washing machine in the US would be advertised as a compact apartment sized unit. A standard sized washer or dryer in the US is 27" wide.

Says something about our different lives but I suspect there's a lot of nuance into the analysis.

The thing that struct me in Spain and Germany (my only two recent data points) was the wide selection of radios. Those are getting very hard to find in the US.

544:

You're talking about kitchens built for another time. You can't build them to code that way anymore.

545:

Casting doubt on politicians is culturally specific - a video showing, say, Boris Johnson having sex with a man would likely just cause (even more) eye-rolling in the UK, while one showing Trump negotiating a(nother) corrupt deal wouldn't make any difference to anything. But in Maylasia sex with man is both a big no-no and a common accusation. Like Stalin's "disloyal thoughts", "homosexual" is a cultural accusation rather than necessarily a factual observation. I suspect the hope if it is a deepfake is that the shadow cast will be enough to remove the politician. Much as video of Boris negotiating rental of a young sex slave would likely be. I have no idea what the equivalent for Trumplestilskin would be... video of him giving money to a legitimate charity?

546:

If there is a collapse, then I wouldn't be surprised if boutique chip fabs become a thing,

I suspect it would be a lot easier to go back the fabs of the 70s/80s than to try and keep up anything later. If I was alive at that time my skills in 7400 logic and programming in hex could come back into demand. You could do a LOT with PLAs. Just updating them in the field is a lot harder than issuing a new firmware load on the Internet.

547:

So what if the "chip" is A4 sized?

As chip size grows you have 2 issues. One is flaws in manufacturing tend to be statistically distributed over a given area so a small final size makes it more likely to get a larger number of good chips out of a wafer.

The second is physical. The larger the chip the more fragile it is. Mechanical and thermal issues can and tend to break larger chips.

Plus larger chips draw more power.

548:

Have you ever kept 28,000 sheep in a warehouse for 30 days to clear quarantine? The smell is incredible.

Were you required to quarantine the pee and poop? Or did the PTB not think through the process?

549:

The two tankers (isn't that a book title from some fantasy series?)... I have yet to see one bit of information about the incident: which way were the ships pointing, and which coast were the attacks from?

Most modern ships have sat tracking and transponders like airliners. When this news broke one of the news articles I read showed the track. They were on their way out with a full load. The attack was done in the Gulf of Oman after the tankers had cleared the narrow of the straits.

Of course now I have no idea of where I saw the tracks and a quick search didn't turn it up.

550:

There is very little market for second hand semiconductor producing kit, because fabs get 'downconverted' to produce LEDs or solar cells rather than shuttered.

551:

I tend to use MarineTraffic, which will show tracks for the previous 24 hours. Of the two tankers named (Front Altair and Kokuka Courageous), Front Altair is not doing much, and Kokuka Courageous is at anchor.

I note that Kaifan (also in the area) is showing as its destination ARM GUARDS ON BOARD. I usually see ships that are going somewhere in which case they display their destination, but at least one of the tankers there displays FOR ORDERS, which I take as meaning "We've got empty holds, we're here, we can pick up your cargo as soon as you've ordered it".

552: 507 - True. Folks with less nannied web access than me might search for "Aster 30" and/or "Sea Viper" "pif-paf" on YouTube, to see a missile actually side-step to make intercept. 549 - I won't recommend a site, but you're talking about AIS vessel tracking.
553:

See also IBM mainframes going back, oh, ages: System Z circa 2000 came with all the CPU slots occupied, but individual processors were disabled/enabled in software depending on how many CPUs you'd paid your license fees for.

And HP Superdomes (mini-computers) dating back to around the same time have "icod" - Instant Capacity On Demand, get a box with n CPUs, but run only on 4 of them from Sunday to Friday, then 16 on Saturday for EOW processing, then 64 on the last weekend of the month.

554:

Talking of unknown missiles shooting at people - and killing lots in this case ... This is an interesting development, isn't it?

555:

Note, however, that power consumption per MIP drops as the node size gets smaller; the key here is that the resistivity of a given substrate (ohms/meter) doesn't change but you can cram in more components per unit area, and assuming current/voltage/frequency are controlled for, the head dissipation per component goes down accordingly.

Which is why i486 processors, with ~1 million components, sucked roughly as much power as a modern Core i7 with a 50-100x clock speed increase, and a 1000x component count increase.

I'm guessing a low-energy future civilization may well keep fab lines running and even build new ones; the limiting factors will be access to rare earth elements, and the furnaces required to produce ultra-pure large semiconductor crystals—not to mention the exotic bandsaws for slicing the germanium crystals really thin. Probably we'll see a lot of designs optimized for low power consumption and long life (with slower dopant migration seen as a good trade-off for larger node size and lower clock speed), and emphasis on software for functionality rather than ostentatious waste of cycles (e.g. realtime "cat" filters for video streams).

Note that a 33MHz i486 with 32Mb of RAM was plenty back circa 1990 to run a department of 10-20 knowledge workers using green-screen terminals (although, again, LCD panels—even low resolution ones—would be infinitely better in terms of power consumption than CRTs). Ran SysV UNIX just fine, and Linux when it came along. This is minicomputer territory, suitable for factory/city administration and—where necessary—CAD work.

I'm guessing actual 486s would take a back seat to some sort of evolved low-power ARM descendant, or a wholly new architecture, with an emphasis on long-term maintenance and fault tolerance rather than lining Intel/IBM/Microsoft's pockets. Or maybe they could simply run everything on LSI-11 SoCs?

(You may now scream.)

556:

I am only surprised that it took the Dutch prosecutors this long to bring charges.

I'll be a lot more surprised if anything happens as a result, though.

557:

Charlie ... I'm merely pointing out that RU also has "form" when it comes to shooting at things ... and then denying that it was anything to do with them. At least with USS they ( the US ) admitted it immediately - though accompanied with a, shall we say "rather thin" cover story?

558:

BUGGER HTML fail - where the post says "USS" it should have said USS Vincennes

559:

Meanwhile cunning Chinese Haox strikes Alaskan village See here

560:

well, asked my uncle about the whole limpet mine thing.. He was weapons officer in the RN for quite a few years.. he confirmed what I'd originally thought... that's not how you use limpet mines... Theyre supposed to be placed below the waterline, so as to have the tamping effect of the water increase the power of the explosion- blow a big hole- water comes in, ship goes down. How THOSE were employed, just makes a noise and a small hole- it sends a message, but is generally a waste of a munition. So either the IRG are incompetent and don't have a Scooby Doo about what they're doing. Or it isn't the IRG

561:

And indeed, for reasons you state or imply, every limpet mine in the history of ever that's been deployed successfully was deployed by a diver attacking a stationary vessel, not by some gadgie leaning out of a boat and sticking the mine to the side of a ship making full cruising speed.

562:

to Charlie @556 I am only surprised that it took the Dutch prosecutors this long to bring charges. Then it's going to take them a while longer to provide anything of a tangible evidence to the public or at least Russian side of investigation to convince anybody that these charges have any substance. Probably another 10 years or so.

to GT @577 At least with USS they ( the US ) admitted it immediately You do not have to admit the things that you have not done. Unless of course the "justice" have actual power to overwrite the truth and force you to agree. In case of US even though they "admitted" it, nobody was punished, perpetrators were commemorated, and at best their recognition of a "mistake" allowed to compensate something. You know, everybody makes mistakes, who is 100% innocent?

However if you did not suddenly forget anything again, the case of Ukrainian plane doesn't have anything to do with mistakes. "Prosecution" insists that the plane was purposefully shot down by an order directly from Kremlin, or Central command, or Putin himself, and it solidly insists on Russian authorities admitting all of this bullcrap, admit the alleged invasion, admit the hoax and involvement in war. Admit that immediate sanction introduction was in fact fully legitimate, admit to aggression in Europe, admit to lie and denial campaign, and so on and so forth. Pretty much the case of plane shot down is just one point of information attack of a myriad others. And the funny part is that of course this confession will not make any difference to the narration at all, it does not obliges the prosecution to do anything, as these charge could be dragged for decades without any effective chance of resolution.

Admitting anything is irrelevant. And you know what. Both sides are well aware of that.

This is an interesting development, isn't it? There's nothing interesting about it, neither there any development. The charges were already filled, like, 2 or 3 years ago, they just added a couple of random names to the list, and attached some reused pieces of "highly-likely" evidence from social nets and "investigative journalists" from earlier accusations. They are obviously getting tired.

And if you want any interesting development, this is just in: https://112.international/ukraine-top-news/ukrainian-mp-tymchuk-shoots-himself-while-cleaning-gun-40871.html “Around an hour ago the wife of the MP Tymchuk called the ambulance and police and reported that her husband was cleaning a gun at home, and sustained a mortal injury. Unfortunately, my friend Dmytro Tymchuk died before the ambulance arrived,” Gerashchenko said. People closely familiar with UKR politics remember him well for his "NO CASUALTIES" interview from 2014.

563:

One of the first computers I ran Linux on was a 486 Compaq Armada laptop. I miss that computer. It was the best laptop mouse I've ever encountered. The mouse was built into the top of the laptop, with the wheel in front and the buttons on the back. I loved that thing, but by the time I was using it the battery had gone away.

564:

"I have no idea what the equivalent for Trumplestilskin would be... video of him giving money to a legitimate charity?"

Probably video of him talking about how he ran as a Republican because Republicans are easily manipulated via their racism and sexism, and he's appalled by Republicans, but he really wanted to be president, and he knew the Democrats would see right through him.

565:

If the ship sinks, that makes waving the bloody shirt/pointing to the gaping hole in its side somewhat difficult.

Whereas if the limpet mine is misapplied above the waterline, you don't sink the ship but you do have evidence of an explosion to point to.

Hmm.

566:

Actually, here in the rest of the world we've been pretty certain it was a Russian missile battery going rogue (for whatever reason) pretty much since a few weeks after the shoot-down, when chunks of missile shrapnel came to light in the wreckage. Here's a detailed report in The Aviation Herald, which is a civil aviation accident report site and generally rigorous in their treatment of sources of information.

How high up the chain of command the orders originated is another matter entirely, of course.

And I am very interested to see you suddenly pop up on this blog at this moment, responding to a very specific stimulus. You've been kind of thin on the ground here since the Brexit A50 deadline last got postponed. An observer might think you only post here in response to a politically-motivated watch list!

567:

I remember that design. It was utterly shit for left-handers like myself (as were numerous other laptop designs: HP Omnibook 300, Toshiba Libretto range, and so on) that put mouse buttons on the rear-right of the screen or case and used a trackball or trackpoint device positioned for a right-hander.

These days the "netbook" sector is undergoing a fascinating revival in the hands of some Chinese companies, at least one of whom is at least trying to make semi-ambidextrous subnotebooks (machined metal unibodies, trackpoint device front-dead-centre, two shift keys). Some of the others are a bit less accommodating ...

568:

Para 1 - Before that even for some of us, who've seen damage caused by anti-aircraft missile warheads before MH-17 and knew what we were looking at. I was reluctant to assign blame to $nation because I knew 2 nations with similar SAM capabilities had assets in that area.

569:

A better design would probably be something which could mount the mouse on either side - clearly there was no consideration of lefties - but I don't think you could do it these days regardless, because of the fashion in tiny bezels. These days I usually just carry a mouse with my laptop.

570:

"And then everyone in their bunker dies"? So, Egyptian Pharoes, reborn?

Interesting - libreoffice spellcheck knew Pharisees, but not Pharoes.

571:

The original Macintosh Portable from 1989 could be configured with the trackball to either the left or right of the keyboard (it was user-relocatable). Alas, it ran off lead-acid batteries, weighed 7.2kg, and cost $1000 per kg—it was anything but cheap! And it ran on a 68000 with 1Mb of RAM and a 40mb hard disk.

Elegant design (for the era) but terrible value for money and about as portable as a sewing machine. (The 1992 release of the first Powerbooks was revelatory—they set the shape for laptops to come, with the keyboard behind a palmrest and a trackball in the middle of the 'rest.)

Meanwhile I am in lust with this.

572:

"so what if the chip is A4-sized?"

Son, we call that a macroprocessor.

573:

Ah, but things have changed since the 19th century. They wouldn't be quite so secure these days.... https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/rocket-hits-exxonmobil-other-oil-firms-iraq-n1019181

And the URL says it all.

574:

Sorry, but my suspenders of disbelief snapped. No metal? Really? What about all the railroad tracks, and the cars and trucks, and the girders reinforcing buildings and...?

575:

Thank you. That's lovely.

No, I really, really wanted them to see 101, so we missed Portland and angles southwest, hit 101. Went down there, had to sleep in the minivan - the entire west coast of Oregon was full, no vacancies, including a state park. In CA, we got to... it might have been Crescent City, then headed inland towards I-5.

A story: my late wife was driving as we headed inland, and being a leadfoot country girl, after a while I got a little nervous. She noticed, and said we'd trade off, next town that we could find some cappuccino in. We found on, and did.

Fourteen years later, my recent ex and stepson and I had visited my Eldest in Klamath Falls, drove through Medford to the coast, and down 101. Not remembering anything, we turned at... Crescent City, to go to I-5, to end up at Reno for the Worldcon. I'm driving the rental car, and getting tired, and really would have loved cappuccino. We hit a town, and got some... and I realized it was the same town.

576:

Medicines. Drugs. Medical devices. Stolen art. Gold, silver, platinum and jewelry. Media, with lots and lots of information.

Oh, and, of course, letters of credit, and other fungible transfers of wealth.

577:

Wait, you mean getting rid of the Precious GUIs, and going back to command lines, where you don't need mice, and spending your CPU cycles on work, rather than eye candy? Oh, horrors!

Or, to quote Michael Pins, from GT: your mother dresses you funny, and you need a mouse to delete files.

578:

Pharaohs were the ruler of ancient Egypt.

(A Pharos was the ancient greek term for a lighthouse, most famously the one built in (hellenistic egyptian) Alexandria.)

The Lighthouse in Glasgow was the offices of the Glasgow Herald, later became Scotland's Centre of Design and Architecture, though when I looked it up it seems to have been having some financial difficulties.

King Tut was an Egyptian themed Batman villain; a professor of Egyptology was hit on the head and believed he was the reincarnation of a pharaoh.

Meanwhile also in Glasgow, King Tuts Wah Wah Hut is a well known music venue.

I leave the Glaswegian bat story from these elements as an exercise for the audience.

579:

No metal? Really? What about all the railroad tracks, and the cars and trucks, and the girders reinforcing buildings and...?

After a few thousand years, all the good ore bodies are mined, all the mine tailing dumps relabelled "stockpiled ore" - and gone, all the recycling done N times over. Check this picture:

https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/9im18e/what_years_of_use_in_a_commercial_kitchen_looks/

And all the chips and funky little car-window motors that used rare elements are, uh, dispersed. Where would someone go to get neodymium ? Or, in her book, enough iron to make a railway. She had them use wooden rails.

580:

Let me guess. Young people today don't know their Bourne.

The days when running a GUI took a significant, or even noticable fraction of a computers resources are long gone. I mostly do number crunching with mine, and os overheads are rarely detectable.

For office work the machine spends most of its time waiting for input and it is even less important.

How do you feel about GUI being used to host multiple terminals?

581:

Despite being a fluent UNIX native going back nearly 30 years, I'm not convinced *IX (including Linux and macOS here) is the best platform for a modern OS. There's a lot of accumulated cruft and hackery to work around mutually incompatible historical forks (BSD/SysV lineages, dragged together via standards bodies from Posix to X/Open to LSB) and merge feature sets from elsewhere (Plan 9 stuff like /proc), a legacy window manager from hell (X11 and its various GUI toolkits), a basically shit systems language with no garbage protection or type safety (C), and so on.

I can conceive of a UNIX-like OS that is consistent, orthogonal, and fun to work with, preferably redesigned from the ground up along with a new hardware architecture to support nice little conveniences to prevent assholes running riot, but either it will have to ditch compatability with a bunch of existing legacy shitware, or it'll bloat like crazy with libraries to act as shims to support said shitware. All of which is incompatible with being a lean, efficient, modern architecture.

(Those who've read EMPIRE GAMES and DARK STATE may have noticed the fake-non-fiction essays at the end of each book. I had tentative plans to do one for INVISIBLE SUN, on the history and design principles of the Commonwealth's attempt at computerizing—with 20/20 hindsight based on being able to see everything the USA did wrong through the year 2020 and avoid making the same mistakes—but as a couple of editors have noted, that's an incredibly recondite topic of zero interest to about 90% of my readers. Let's just say if you were transported back to 1950 and dumped in the hot seat of a government ministry with a war-footing budget and orders to computerize your nation, dammit, and full foreknowledge of how we hit our current Arm/Intel/Microsoft/Apple/Google/Facebook/Linux train crash, you might do things differently ...)

582:

Personally I find terminals ok because I am used to them but a properly designed ui can be far more powerful.

A good example is the ms debugger - the ability to see your code, call stack, memory contents etc, lay them out and cross reference visually is decades ahead of the command line approach in terms of productivity.

As another example, you could write parametric CAD software that has takes numbers and returns images seconds or minutes later. It exists, and made people more productive but nobody uses it now. Either engineers are going soft or the ability to get interactive feedback makes things qualitatively different.

A mate of mine who designs PPE tells me that having almost instant finite element results helps a lot with exploring a space of possible designs. Waiting an hour to know if something will work makes you a lot more conservative.

I'm not saying low power processors aren't useful, they are essential. I do object to the idea that anything that was too expensive for the 80s is somehow wasteful.

583:

Err, I guess even that wouldn't work. You haven't been around Authoritarians lately, have you? They more or less expect to be done in by their leader, it doesn't matter.

Personally, I guess one plausible way would be a sex scandal. Authoritarians adhere to prison sex rules, e.g. it's not so much the gender or sex of the persons involved but who's dominant or doing the penetration.

Hm, the Trumpenführer getting it on with e.g. RuPaul, there is an interesting story to write...

584:

I happen to partially agree on that. Iron's the key one, and quite honestly, an iron-frame skyscraper, even if it rusts, will be a better ore body than, say, much African iron ore (they used good quality laterite). Ditto cargo ships. Copper is also important, because it corrodes comparatively slowly, so I expect it to be around for awhile. Aluminum might be around for a long time too, but someone who's a metals chemist will have to suss that out. I do know that people in the developing world already make money melting aluminum cans and the like and recasting them in sand as useful products. If that continues to be possible, it'll be done regularly.

Gold will continue to be recycled, and I suspect silver will too.

The problem, as always, is getting enough energy to smelt, melt, and process the metals. For that you need forests and charcoal makers, although I suppose hemp charcoal might conceivably be useful in that regard--or not. While I think any cellulosic product can be made into charcoal, not all charcoals are equal, and hemp charcoal's labeled as "quite soft and unabrasive" whatever that means in fuel terms.

As for the rare earths? Probably not, although I don't know how they're recycled now, if at all. Ditto lithium. That's one of those things that future low-tech innovation might turn around. Low tech innovation are things like the rocket stoves, where it turns out you can make a more efficient stove using the rocket stove principles out of all sorts of materials.

585:

I tend to use MarineTraffic, which will show tracks for the previous 24 hours. Of the two tankers named (Front Altair and Kokuka Courageous), Front Altair is not doing much, and Kokuka Courageous is at anchor.

The tracks I saw showed them coming from ports near northern end of the Persian Gulf out through the straits then some definite odd paths before stopping. I'm guessing the odd paths were when attacked.

586:

Elegant design (for the era) but terrible value for money and about as portable as a sewing machine.

My wife actually carried around a Compaq that could easily be mistaken for a sewing machine back around 87/88. Red on black display as a bonus.

587:

Ah well, the issue with charcoal is that it has to be strong enough to support the mass of burning charcoal and ore when in the furnace, rather than collapse into dust and prevent the passage of air. So hemp charcoal, who knows, but probably inferior to hardwoods.

588:

Better than no computer but you wouldn't have it back...

I remember using a z80 based portable with BBC basic back in the late 80s. It had something like a 40x10 character lcd display and could hold an essay or two. Good enough to be useful but...

589:

Is that necessarily a limiting factor or can you work around it with clever design?

590:

You are describing the Cambridge Z88!

I still have one lying about somewhere.

Reputedly it's the machine that sparked the PDA revolution; John Sculley turned up at an Apple board meeting and saw half the execs there had Z88s, and asked "why aren't we making something like this?" — which project ultimately became the Apple Newton (Sculley couldn't type), which spawned Palm (Palm got their start by writing Graffiti as an app for the Newton to replace its execrable handwriting recognizer), and indirectly spawned the iPhone (Steve Jobs hated "the scribble thing" — pen interface — and killed the Newton division when he returned to Apple, because Apple was on the rocks and he wanted to focus: but once Apple was off the treacherous sandbanks and afloat again he wanted to do a handheld and do it right).

Hacks that have been carried out on the Z88 include upgrading its soldered-on 32K RAM to 512Kb (it's bank-switched and can address a maximum of 2Mb, including 512Kb on each of three cartridge slots plus 512Kb on the motherboard) and replacing its RS232 port with a bluetooth transciever. And it had an amazingly good keyboard for a 2cm thick slab of black plastic back in the day, prefiguring modern chiclet keyboards in feel and key travel (it was possible to touch-type on it).

591:

Two fun future dystopia props that design artists really should think about:

--Where does the writing paper come from? Yes, cellulose and other fibers are still all over the place to make paper from, getting the stuff properly sized (resurfaced), especially to make it suitable for printing, might be a little trickier. European papermakers I think used gelatin to size printing and writing paper, and the presence of gelatin assumes the presence of surplus hides from which to extract the gelatin. Without all this stuff, writing materials become scarce, storing knowledge outside your brain becomes difficult, and that has a few knock-on effects in the complexity of the society.

--Medicine: This has near-term and far-term problems. In the near term, one of the things any sustainable society has to do is to close the loop and recycle almost everything. So...about recycling medical waste safely... A lot of disposable plastic gets used because it's apparently cheaper than riding health care workers about proper sanitation practices, or even every hospital having its own autoclave (they even buy surgical tools pre-sterilized in bags and surplus or dispose of them when they hit their use-by date. I got some nice metal scissors that way). Since medicine's a big sector, we do need to figure out how to reduce its waste footprint. It's amazing how non-eager people are to talk about it, for some reason.

Another problem with medicines: shortages. There are tens of thousands of products, most made by 1 or 2 factories. If a factory gets knocked out by, say, a hurricane (as on Puerto Rico, where a standard size of saline IV bag was made for the US market), or when a factory fails an inspection and gets shut down for cleanup and recertification, everybody scrambles for months to deal. Hospital pharmacists revere their departmental purchasers precisely because these worthies have the complex job of finding the drugs and supplies the hospital needs, on tight deadlines, and there's always something that's out. That's now, during normal times. During an emergency? It gets worse.

Then there's the problem of antibiotics, and what that means for surgery. Can't have a cyberpunk era without implants, but implants without antibiotics are quite dangerous, even if everything else is available. At least more people know about this one.

In the far future, with limited drugs, even fewer plants to get the drugs from thanks to climate change, medicine is going to have to be a lot more non-invasive, so things like acupuncture/pressure and active placebos, even good old fashioned sanitation and sterile procedure, are going to become that much more important.

And let's not forget about the resurgence of diseases. I'm sure everyone's freaked out about post-collapse ebola, pandemic influenze, the resurgence of malaria and polio, smallpox re-emerging, and so on, but what about HIV? Right now it's a chronic condition, but lose the meds that keep people alive and non-contagious, and it's going to become a real problem again. Better hope they come up with a vaccine for it sooner, rather than later.

592:

Bourne? No, thanks, I use bash, where I can also use my old c-shell-isms. My manager prefers z-shell....

Like X with multiple xterms, that it was invented to do? Oh, you mean like my two monitors right now, with 8 terminal windows (four as root on one of our master servers, and yes, I am a sysadmin, so I need them). A t-bird window, though I could live with mutt, and this is being typed in firefox, but I could probably live with lynks. Oh, and the streaming music, and the pic of my SO....

593:

Actually, here in the rest of the world we've been pretty certain it was a Russian missile battery going rogue Pardon, I though that's not what guys out there believe. From the same article GT posted: For the first time, Dutch chief prosecutor Fred Westerbeke said his investigators had detailed a “direct line” of military command from Russia. Of course, it does not in any form restrict "investigators" from ranging the origin of the "order" (to shoot down a plane, or the plane, or planes, or something at all, or just wave missiles around like crazy) and point in the vague direction of Russian government and Putin personally. Which of course in now way restricts sanction war on anybody who is located in the same direction, by the virtue of magical thinking.

How high up the chain of command the orders originated is another matter entirely, of course. This is supposed to be an entire purpose of investigation, though, because it differentiates the case between error, misconduct, or intentional attack. It is not a lottery where they pull out a list of names out of the big basket, indefinitely - 4 today, 4 tomorrow, maybe there's Man Himself somewhere in the middle, but it doesn't matter because they already posted his face in every newspaper hundred of times. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/world/mh17-shot-down-by-missile-from-russia-by-its-military-report-finds/news-story/d3d1cafaa0033e7acc42d9b9fc38dbf4

pretty much since a few weeks after the shoot-down I already explained on this blog earlier that two sides involved knew everything since first hours. The problem is that these are top secret military data that can never go to public. JIT promised several times that it would reveal those fact in due process to support their opinion, but as I already said, there's nothing by already recycled pieces of information.

Same for "the rest of the world" statement - while US "partners" believe that they are all that it takes to form "right" opinion, there's still always some runaway people who did not lose their sense of righteousness. https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2019/06/mh17-relatives-dutch-government-ask-malaysia-to-explain-russia-comments/

And I am very interested to see you suddenly pop up on this blog at this moment, responding to a very specific stimulus. I was fully expecting for someone to pop up with discussion of some certain radioactive piece of American-made propaganda series, for which I've been flaming extensively for the last couple of weeks. So in general I was holding my horses - that is, besides other general lack of interest in the small talk.

I guess someone returning to that old and rusty topic is a surprise for me as well, because this "investigation" has been producing such news on monthly basis for many years at this point. Look, I'm not going to drown this blog in my ideas of ongoing trade, technological and info-terror wars, I'm just reacting on some of the more obvious topics. Because I'm not a hero. I'm a silent guardian, a watchful protector, a Dark Knight.

594:

Ha! My dad's penknife looks like that. And my gran had half a spoon. Years of stirring things with the same spoon in the same hand had worn away the distal portion of the bowl and now it ended in a neat straight line at a slight diagonal angle roughly through where the centre of the bowl used to be.

595:

I've got one tucked away somewhere as well. All the applications were basically a spreadsheet, you typed paragraphs into cells. Had fun writing ARM assembler in it during boring evenings at an ITV company, and once rescued files off one for Glyn Worsnip after he'd knocked it on the floor and broken the display.

The Apple Newton was also when the A in ARM changed from Acorn to Advanced, Apple wanted to use the processor but didn't like the idea of it being controlled by a rival computer manufacturer.

596:

Right, weren't the Compaq's "luggables"?

At least the computer industry's honest: transportables->luggables->portables->laptops, as opposed to, say, the sewing machine manufacturers. I've always thought that if you put a handle on the top of a VW Beetle, the latter would refer to it as "portable".

597:

That's the one. I remember that it seemed like space magic at the time.

I don't remember it well enough to have an opinion about the keyboard, but we'll made keyboards are one thing I am prepared to spend lots of money on.

598:

Sysadmin. Figures.

You are aware that keeping sysadmins happy is rarely the ultimate motivation for computer ownership?

599:

Another fun little article, about dealing with sustainability in bioscience research: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/when-trying-to-save-the-world-also-trashes-it/

The energy and resource use in research labs appears to be rather high.

600:

Did you follow the link to the micro-wave iron smelter earlier in the thread? Because that was hilarious, though the professor is barking up the wrong tree if he wants it commercialized - Sweden will be all over that process.

601:

Drawbacks of the Z88:

Sir Clive Sinclair launched it prematurely, so there were huge shipping delays. The thing ran on AA cells, and there was no backup battery so that if you tried changing batteries without plugging it into a mains supply first it lost the contents of RAM. This went for the RAM packs in the expansion bays as well. And while PROM packs were available, they weren't electrically erasable—you had to use a UV eraser if they filled up.

(You can now buy aftermarket expansion packs with 512Kb FLASH, or 256Kb RAM/256Kb FLASH, and an upgraded version of the operating system that supports flash read/write/erase. But that's a very niche hobbyist thing.)

The other problems were that the kickstand for typing and the transparent cover over the expansion ports were both hinged plastic, and the hinges tended to break. And it wasn't as waterproof/weatherproof as it could have been.

But at the time it was amazing, compared to things like the Tandy Model 100 and other early LCD-equipped portables.

602:

clever design

You'd need to be cleverer than anyone who's been interested so far. It might be possible using modern high temperature ceramics and cunning design, but we run back into the problem of "if you have that then why are you smelting iron ore with charcoal?" The traditional approach that works quite well is a truncated cone made of clay, carefully dried and fired, then filled with a mix of charcoal, flux and ore, lit then air pumped through. As it burns down you add more fuel/ore/flux in proportions that you think will help rather than hinder. If you get the temperature and mix right at the end you have some puddles of crusty slag and a nice clean block of ductile iron. If not you have an awful mix of charcoal and other rubbish that can't even easily be re-smelted (you typically need to double the linear dimensions of your smelter to accept the much larger block of input material, plus the process now runs slower while you melt and break up your lump'o'junk).

Here's a trad smelt of iron sand that will give you some idea of just how raw and primitive smelting is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYga8cdUSnM

603:

Poul-Henning Kamp @ 510: So it looks like FaceBook is a sovereign nation with its own currency now ?

Yeah, but will they cash a post-dated two-party check drawn on the First National Bank of Nigeria?

604:

@ 593 Further to Charlie's earlier comment ... ( @ 566 ) Can we have an actual opinion, please, rather than recycled propaganda from that nice Mr Putin?

605:

But at the time it was amazing, compared to things like the Tandy Model 100 and other early LCD-equipped portables.

Those TRS 100s were amazing when they came out. Within a year I think every single reporter and sports writer in the US had one. Then a few years later they vanished. Well there were holdouts who would rather lug typewriters around.

606:

One thing many have forgotten (suppressed?) was the diversity of user interfaces in graphic programs back in the day. It's all very well saying "it's words, you type them" but when doing anything graphical we had a plethora of input devices and an equal plethora of ways to operate the graphics. Just making the tiny step from 2D CAD program X to 2D CAD program Y was often weeks of puzzling through manuals to discover whether or not it was even possible to do an operation graphically or whether you had to save, exit, fire up the command lines tools and manipulate your save file that way. Or the oddball "command line in the GUI" options. Not to mention "hold down F5 while moving the mouse to rotate around the drawing selection point" and other fun ideas.

Having a standard windowing GUI in the OS at least means you're not trying to work with "this program chords the four mouse buttons, that program uses mouse buttons and keyboard". Did I mention that the number and placement of buttons on mice was an area of experimentation?

607:

Heteromeles @ 511: I wonder what the cost of a modern munition looping around the boat with no one noticing is, compared with the cost of outfitting a speedboat to mimic the IRG?

I expect either of those alternatives would cost substantially more than subverting some sub-element of the IRG that already has the boat.

608:

Greg Tingey @ 515 It is entriely possible, I suppose, that some wankhead in the IRG decided to attack "evil Western christian" shipping, except ... Japan & Norway?
However, I wouls=d assume that, as of about 3 days ago, the real bosses in Threan are telling them ( if it was them) ... "Don't even THINK about doing that again"
I also assume that if that was the case, a couple or three summary executions have already occurred, to ram the message home.....

I think you'd have to look at what port the ships sailed from. I believe both were carrying cargos they loaded somewhere in Saudi Arabia.

It's not what country owns the ships, but what ships somebody could reach (whoever planted the mines).

I've seen no news reports that the Iranian patrol boats approached either ship BEFORE the explosions. If the crew of the Iranian boat removed a limpet mine from one of the ships after it failed to explode, that still doesn't show who planted the mines in the first place. And it really doesn't tell us anything about WHY the crew of the Iranian boat removed the mine. It could be an attempt to cover up Iranian involvement ... or it could be the Iranians removing someone else's device so it wouldn't cause further damage to the ship.

Or they could have been investigating the damage for themselves. I still haven't seen a photo clear enough that I can tell what they were doing. All I could see was what looked like a man in SCUBA gear being lifted out of the water next to where the hole in the hull was. But I couldn't see if he'd put something there or taken something away.

609:

If we are going to go with usual motto about two opinions (aka "my opinion and the wrong one"), we aren't going to get anywhere. There's enough space to maneuver and agree on something, the only problem is that current consensus in US-controlled media does not allow any variants at all, at least in some areas.

Hence if I actually pronounce my own opinion, you still call it "Putin's propaganda" (albeit "refined" for some reason) even though official position of my state is quite different from my own. They are the government, after all, they are not allowed to go all the way in their judgment for want of a nail. At least if they are not with Nazi Alliance.

610:

Re: Kilns. Thing is.. if you are doing small batch steel production, you do that with electricity. Unto the end of time. Seriously, it is just a lot less effort and land use that way. Village of a hundred people? Well, got to have a mill anyway, and a smith with a book can make a dynamo. There you go, now you can melt steel in babys first arc furnace. Not during harvest season, okay, but, well.

Heck, same smith spending a bunch to time with a file making magnetrons so the village can do the "Ore processing via micro-waves" stunt is also almost certainly less work, and again, certainly less land use.

611:

I got to see a neat little "toy" last week -- a visiting lecturer from Edinburgh University's High Performance Computing Centre (HPCC) was giving a talk. The Big Machine on campus is called "Archer", it ranks 252 in the TOP 500 supercomputers in the world and is now functionally obsolete after 5 years of operation, to be replaced soon (when it was commissioned in late 2013 it ranked no. 19 in the world).

The lecturer brought along "Wee Archie", a flightcase-transportable array of 16 Raspberry Pi 3 computers (with two more Pi 3s to handle I/O). Wee Archie can do all sort of educational things like image analysis and simulating airflow over a wing shape in real-time. It costs about 2000 quid to make, you can get the plans and software off the HPCC website to build your own. In the 1990s Wee Archie would have ranked in the top 10 supercomputers in the world.

https://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/discover-and-learn/resources-and-activities/what-is-a-supercomputer/wee-archie

612:

You see this a lot in SE Asia. Many apartments (especially the ones that you get automatically with any factory job, that are literally perched on top of the factory) are too small to have a usable kitchen (you get one gas plate, if you're lucky, maybe a tiny fridge).

Factory dormitories may be as basic as shared bedrooms for 2-4 people with no cooking or food storage facilities at all, but usually there are other communal facilities to balance this out.

Here at our factory we have three dormitory blocks. They have a TV room on every floor, a party room or snack shop on the ground floor, 3 canteens serving food all day and evenings, and a doctor's clinic open three days a week with free consultations and prescriptions. China factories are no longer the sweatshops so often portrayed in western media. Mandatory minimum wages and maximum overtime hours are regulated quite strictly by the Chinese government.

Super-cheap street food is ubiquitous...

Also super cheap restaurants. As little as 10 RMB (about £1.25) will buy a large bowl of noodles with beef and vegetables. For 15 RMB you can get a meat or vegetable dish and as much plain boiled rice as you want (usually with chili and soy sauce or vinegar to taste). And while the local food may be a little strange, it is usually fresh, tasty, and the variety is astonishing.

613:

I remember that design. It was utterly shit for left-handers like myself (as were numerous other laptop designs: HP Omnibook 300, Toshiba Libretto range, and so on) that put mouse buttons on the rear-right of the screen or case and used a trackball or trackpoint device positioned for a right-hander.

I remember evaluating some expensive ($100k+) CAD workstations for chip and PCB design, where the graphics tablet was permanently integrated into the desktop on the right side of the keyboard. No left handed versions available...

These days the "netbook" sector is undergoing a fascinating revival in the hands of some Chinese companies, at least one of whom is at least trying to make semi-ambidextrous subnotebooks (machined metal unibodies, trackpoint device front-dead-centre, two shift keys). Some of the others are a bit less accommodating ...

Interesting as my experience in China is that left-handedness seems to be more unusual here (perhaps due to cultural differences, early childhood learning how to hold chopsticks, who knows...). I am surprised a Chinese manufacturer is that much aware of handedness issues.

I often get comments when people notice I hold my chopsticks in my left hand, and it confuses the waiters/waitresses when I reverse the table setting from left to right/right to left.

614:

Yeah, IF you've got the wire to wrap the coil, AND the bearings to hold whatever's turning perfectly steady, AND grease for the bearings, AND insulation for the wires. So you need, by my count, most of a kilometer of good copper wire, something useful for insulating the wire, good, non-flammable grease, and decent machining, along with a power source and means to contain that to either funnel it through a gravity gradient and/or use it to boil water to power the generator.

For charcoal, you need an axe and a shovel, and a knife (unless you're good enough with your axe to shave kindling with it). If I had to bet on bullet-proof technology for smelting, I'd go with charcoal.

So no, I don't think I'll be signing up for your survival school, since you seem to have trouble distinguishing between productivity and resilience. Thanks though.

615:

I'm on the fence with that, because the current world is full of things that can be mined/repurposed for making generators that are small on the scale of modern hydro but freaking enormous by the standards of an oil lamp. You can substitute speed for both strong magnets and good bearings to a large extent (because what counts is "magnetic field crossed by turns of wire per second") and plain bearings are both easy to make and entirely appropriate for 3,000rpm fist-sized electric motors, I mean generators. Back in ye olde daze people even used to use self-energising induction generators, so it's not as though you actually need neodiddlium magnets in your windmill. Albeit it's easier to get the rotational speed out of your watermill because the nozzles etc are so much smaller.

I think it depends a lot on just how far down the ramp you've gone. If you're mining the marble slabs out of the cave in the hill for building materials then yeah, by all means, charcoal smelting of bronze might be as good as it gets. But if you're still able to read those marble slabs you're probably going to be arc smelting using hydro just because it's easier and faster (ie, less labour intensive). The size of dam and catchment needed for a 10kW generator is very small in rainy places, and they can be made quite resilient to floods if you're willing to burn a bit of limestone to make footings.

616:

A good example is the ms debugger - the ability to see your code, call stack, memory contents etc, lay them out and cross reference visually is decades ahead of the command line approach in terms of productivity.

Yes, for example debugging benefits greatly from graphical UIs. I have used my share of gdb (the GNU debugger, a basically command line tool) and (shudder) jdb (the Java debugger), even during the last year or so, but both are very hard to use compared to the first real debugger I used: the Turbo Pascal 6.0 debugger from about 1990.

Even that wasn't graphical in the sense it used the PC 80x25 text mode. It still did a GUI-type thing on top of that, and was probably faster than anything else available at the time. If I only had had the monochrome graphics card and a second monitor, I could have debugged on a separate screen...

617:

Here is a story about those TRS-80 Model 100 computers and how they were used by journalists back in the day.

618:

sleepingroutine @ 609 You MAY NOT HAVE NOTICED ... but I am not believing the US propaganda the "It was Iran wot dun it!" There is a lesser probability that it was out-of-control elements of the IRG, but given the way the Persians are screaming "It wasn't us!" I'm inclined to believe them, officially at any rate. But for classic shit-stirring & zero-sum-game "realpolitik" my money is on Saudi or theor proxies, or that nice Mr Putin, who is all too clearly using the Zweite Reich's approx 1895-1914 playbook .... You don't like that, but tough. Of course, IF DT & his goons are all for starting a "Short Victorious War" with Persia, then they are merely following Putin (again) are they not? Follow the money & the blackmail trail says I.

dark blue @ 613 Or awkward semi-ambidexrous sods like me, who use the mouse in its normal configuration, but with my LEFT hand. Confuses the hell out of watchers, sometimes.

619:

I'm left handed but use my mouse in the conventional right handed way.

My first computer with a mouse was an Atari ST, which had the ports on the right hand side and a short cable so it couldn't be used on the left without an extension. At the time I had no real option but to get used to it.

620:

Good read. Brings back memories from the 70s/80s.

Things like re-writing the 2K binary running on the 8008 comm board on a mini to make it do what we wanted. No development tools but the machine codes were simple enough it only took a few hours to write a disassembler editor. This was around 84.

There there was that very very very long night transferring a binary code file across town. Around 78 or so. No compatible media. But each mini had a modem for teletype style operation. And we both loaded the program on each end, set up a 4 or 5 hour long phone call, and I worked on patches to the code as it was in memory to get it to transfer binary files without corruption. The saving grace was back then almost every vendor included source code for all the OS and utilities so I didn't have to reverse the object code.

621:

I've worked with architects for over 20 years. A long simmering resentment with many is that most really interesting (think useful) mice are molded to work in the right hand.

622:

Chennai India is running out of water. Soon.

Water storage levels in the city’s four major reservoirs were one-hundredth of what they were this time last year - and at a mere 0.2% of capacity, according to state government data.

4.6 million people. Auto production center for the country.

https://in.reuters.com/article/india-weather-watercrisis/hotels-firms-cut-back-on-water-use-as-taps-run-dry-in-chennai-idINKCN1TK1J0

623:

They’ve sure got form, Gulf of Tonkin incident, the USS Maine explosion in Havana harbour, phantom WMDs in Iraq. I could go on. Mind you I still like the IRG for it, but believe it ‘cos what SecDef says? Not so much.

Still in somewhat good news looks like we’re getting towards a trial for MH-17. Even if it is in absentia.

624:

but believe it ‘cos what SecDef says?

Ahem. We haven't had a SecDef for about 6 months now.

626: 578 - And Neil W hasn't mentioned "Cleopatra's", a 'dance venue' on Great Western Road near the University of Glasgow and the Western Infirmary (and popular with female students). I think I see another plot element here! 581 - Hey, I'm one of the "ten per cent"!! :-) 607 - Making a remote control RHIB is a solved problem. Its control range will be governed by where you can place the control station, particularly in height AMSL. 609 - Whether you realise it or not, your opinion reads like an editorial from Pravda or Isvestia.

When I express an opinion on a story from the Middle East, it will usually be informed by reading Al Jazeera (English), Jerusalem Post and BBC websites.

On GUIs:- Steve Jobs "What You See Is What You Get" Annie Quigley (owner of Bibliophile Books in London) "No it isn't".

627:

So this just popped up in my feed:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/19/18681845/facebook-moderator-interviews-video-trauma-ptsd-cognizant-tampa

I'm thinking all social media will have to be nationalised in some capacity at some point in time just to function, but will it be? What are the alternatives?

628:

You do make the shade of the late Joseph McCarthy proud, don't you?

While it is POSSIBLE that Russia wants to foment war in the Gulf, it's pretty implausible - it's not much more likely than the UK did it, under orders(*)! Also, Russia does NOT go in for 'short victorious wars' - which term means unnecessary ones for local political reasons, such as the invasion of Iraq - they learnt better a long time ago. Even their intervention in Afghanistan was not intended as such.

(*) As we arranged for the 'dodgy dossier' to be forged and validated. And I can horribly easily imagine Hunt and Williamson signing it off, though less easily imagine the mandarins not taking it up with May or Mordaunt.

629:

It's much worse with trackballs. Non-right-handed variants hardly exist at all. Since there is also a wide variation in their positioning of the buttons but a rather lesser variation in the awkwardness of the buttons, and it makes a lot more difference than it does with a mouse, the quest is long and hard.

I use the body of a trackball called "Trust Ami Track Dual Scroll", which is bilaterally symmetrical and shaped a bit like a horseshoe crab with no tail and wee fins on the sides - these last being sort of paddle things to work the left and right buttons. My first two fingers rest on the ball and my little finger clicks the left buttonpaddle, my thumb the right one; it's beautifully convenient and controllable, with everything controlled by minor flexion of the fingers only.

The trouble is that that trackball as manufactured used a mechanical motion pickup, which is a lot less reliable in a trackball than in a mouse, and needs cleaning seemingly every few hours. In particular it is incompatible with pizza. Even though I am unusually finicky about not getting muck on my hands from my food, it still requires only an indetectably tenuous film of pizza grease to stop the thing working entirely.

Therefore I have taken the original ball mechanism out of the body, and replaced it with a red spotty ball optical pickup system out of a Logitech trackball whose red spotty ball was the same diameter as the original Trust ball. As it happens the Logitech device was also bilaterally symmetrical, but its button arrangement sucked elephant's arse, so the original board is in there as well to handle the original buttons. This means the thing now has two cables; it reports button events over the PS/2 interface and pointer movement over USB. Which sounds like it shouldn't work properly at all, but in fact X doesn't even seem to notice.

630:

Have you ever been unfortunate enough to use a spaceball/spacemouse? The small, cheap models are symmetrical but fairly useless. The expensive ones look like this.

631:

That Borland Turbo Thingy interface is bloody lovely, that and others like it. Much easier and quicker than the fully-graphical-and-mice-and-shit evolutions that followed it. Everything done from the keyboard with navigation around the screen done with the cursor keys and a "focus model" that so automatically does the right thing all the time that you don't even notice it has one.

Graphical mouse interfaces do work well for the kinds of things that they are suitable for; I can hardly imagine what kind of a nightmare trying to drive GIMP from the keyboard would be. On the other hand, for stuff like programming which is entirely text to begin with, text-only keyboard-only interfaces are completely where it's at, and the mouse can get catted.

What really makes an interface awkward, though, is having to continually switch from keyboard to mouse and back again. Both with the simple time it takes to move - hand off keyboard to mouse takes long enough to type several letters - and with the switching between different output drivers with very different characteristics, one for guiding arbitrary movement using continuous high-resolution visual feedback and one for making rapid sequences of preset movements with discontinuous abstract feedback.

This is the problem with things like electronics CAD (certainly with analogue circuitry, which is my main use for it). On the face of it it looks like drawing circuit diagrams should be an ideal mouse task. Instead it's slow and irritating and becomes more so the more minor the edits you're making, using the mouse to move and place components but the keyboard to type in their values. Then when you want to simulate the circuit it gets even more of a mess...

So what I tend to do is... draw the circuit diagrams on paper. It takes maybe a tenth of the time it does to draw them on screen, maybe less. And for the simulation side, I use PSPICE 5.0 for DOS, from 1991, running under QEMU (having hacked at QEMU to get it to handle the weird DOS extender and display driver combinations involved without crashing) - because it has a lovely textual interface, highly reminiscent of Borland, both for netlist editing and for plotting the results. This means, of course, entering the circuit by typing it in directly as a netlist - which is still much faster overall than drawing it on screen and importing it to a netlist - and is much less awkward than it sounds; the "true form" of the circuit concerned is a mental model, whose internal representation is some kind of logical superset of netlist and diagram combined, so it's just as easy to translate it into either format, and just as easy to think in terms of node numbers as wires. Sometimes I don't even bother to start with drawing a diagram at all; I just work in netlist form from the off and only draw it out when I've achieved the results I wanted.

632:

Gordon Bennett. No, never even heard of those - at least not in reality, though at least one SF author of the dogfights-in-space era has used the idea for a spaceship piloting device.

633:

"Back in ye olde daze people even used to use self-energising induction generators"

Still do. Pretty much the standard for the kind of few-kVA things you find driven by single-cylinder donkey engines on a building site. No brushes, no slip rings, no voltage regulator - it's all done by clever magnetic design (very similar alternators which do have brushes and slip rings and an external electronic voltage regulator also exist, but the regulation isn't any better and the regulator tends to fail and then cost a stupid amount of money to replace). The rotor does have a couple of rectifier diodes on it, so it's not completely semiconductor-free, but you do have to try fairly hard to blow those up.

634:

The one good thing about them is that the driver does everything and just passes a stream of matrices to the app, so everything that supports them behaves consistently. Everything else about the experience is horrid.

The people who like them really like them though.

635:

Turbo Pascal and similar windowing MSDOS apps date to a specific period, circa 1988-94, when IBM's Common User Interface guidelines were baked into Windows 2.x/3.x and OS/2 1.x and a whole bunch of other character-display apps like Microsoft Works, Word 5.5 for DOS, and so on.

The CUI system was supposed to work with everything from mainframes down to PCs and supported mouse manipulation, drop-down menus, and many of the standard widgets then becoming standard for GUI apps — also standardized accelerator and function key combinations. It was well-thought-out insofar as an intermediate hybrid step between console apps and GUIs that didn't infringe any Apple patents could be well-thought-out. Stuff like progress bars and window borders were composited using high-bit characters in the standard MSDOS character set: it didn't take many block graphic elements to do that.

Back in 1991-95 I worked for a while on documentation for SCO's widget server—a whacky attempt to implement CUI widgets using both GUI (under X11/Motif) and character terminal (via CURSES) displays, scripted in Tcl. (It was the middleware foundation for a new system administration system for SCO Open Server.) The idea was to write your GUI using a very high level scripting language that could glue back-end utilities together and throw up an interface on both a bitmapped graphics terminal and a text-only interface. Great idea, but kind of late to the market and they picked the wrong scripting language (today it'd have to be lua).

You can do a lot to make a computer with relatively feeble computing power usable on a non-bitmapped terminal if you've got the right widget toolkit and a serial mouse: CUI could probably be implemented on Z80-based hardware easily enough. In particular, the step up to a graphical interface with menus and panels, like CUI, is a huge leap forward in usability for non-expert users. (I remember meeting vi for the first time and recoiling in horror. It makes sense now, but something like MS Works for DOS was infinitely easier to pick up.)

636:

Well, based on having done so, Turbo Pascal worked on 8286, 8386SX or better with A Mess DOS 4.0 or better. Windoze anything not required.

637:

I can hardly imagine what kind of a nightmare trying to drive GIMP from the keyboard would be.

Well, not GIMP, but I did some POV-Ray stuff back in the day (like 25+ years ago) with just editing the scene files for it. I did write some programs to create meshes, too. Blender is so much easier, though it's easy by any means.

I've also done some batch image processing with ImageMagick, writing bash scripts to do stuff. That's easier for me than figuring out how Photoshop or GIMP does batch processing.

638:

CUI could probably be implemented on Z80-based hardware easily enough.

That could be a nice retro-project...

Then there was GEOS, the graphical user interface for the Commodore 64. I've never seen it live, much less used it, but apparently it was at least somewhat usable. It was fully graphical, too. The C=64 had a good character set which could probably have been used for CUI, but the resolution of the text screen is probably too poor to be useful (it's 40x25 characters).

639:

to GT @618 I... um, fail to recognize how we got from there to this, but I guess not many people truly eager to continue on this topic. Speaking of shot-downs, though, apparently somebody made another mistake (quite possibly an intentional one). It is hard to comment on. At best, all these moves in the region are purely symbolical. At worst, it is a sign of impending agony.

to Lars @627 I've read the article, almost all of it. Trying to apply terms like "alarming", "disturbing" or even "insane" isn't really going to carry the meaning over, it is deeply impressive even if some of it was intentionally darkened from the medium for the purpose of narration. I was imagining a scene from Equilibrium movie, but everybody is on antidepressants instead of prozium. Never worked as moderator, but I've seen enough of the "content" to know that such things exist.

But on point, I would like to suggest that the process of slow division of the Internet is going to escalate sooner rather than later. I mean, most of the people who learned what Internet really is, still idealistically believe that it is a symbol of future without borders, right until the point the reality catches up to them and stabs in the back. There are currently many laws in the working to limit the data flow and bound it to sovereign borders (almost all information, not just important one). And also there was a large debate over it in my country couple of year ago, because it is MORE EXPENSIVE to store and maintain this infrastructure.

But in hindsight, it is inevitable, and there are good signs to it. Maybe if people are going to be more involved in their local lives, their own future connected to people who they know well, it will avert runaway processes that ruin their lives in such horrible ways. We need to make people responsible for their own actions and make them understand the consequences of their own decisions. I mean, I am almost privileged, I learned the language myself and I am talking to so many people all around the world, but what use it would bring to anyone else who is around me, if I have little connection to them and will eschew my real life for virtual freedom?

https://soundcloud.com/cloowerwooma/cloower-wooma-false-freedom

640:

"CUI could probably be implemented on Z80-based hardware easily enough."

Undoubtedly. Or on a 6502. It would be pretty much a doddle to do it on a PET. Apart from implementing a mouse interface (second cassette port?), it could probably even be done in PET BASIC without it being unreasonably slow. Much of it would look like PRINT "some long string of control characters" and then let the display driver do the donkey work.

Using a mouse with it misses what makes it really good, though - the ease and speed of doing the same things with the keyboard. And, so much, that keyboard commands are queued, and can be entered in anticipation of the time they will be needed. Some common sequence like save, compile, run is three separate operations with a mouse, with a pause between each one. In Turbo C you could do it all in one hit: type alt-SCR (or something like that), in the same time as it would take just to move the mouse pointer to the File menu, and then sit back and scratch your arse while the alt-R sat in the keyboard buffer waiting for the alt-C to finish. (I've not remembered the sequence accurately but the principle is correct.)

641:

EC @ 628 HOW DO YOU DO IT? Wrong end of the stick again .... Putin would love to see: "Lets You & Him fight!" ... nothing to do with him, of course. And you may have noted that my money is on Saudi & proxies, though, as paws @ 626 says, the US has serious "form" in this area. Russia doesn't go in for short victorious wars! Really: Georgia, Ossettia, Chechnyha, E Ukraine says otherwise ...

Oh & I can do without the personal direct insult comparing me to the vile & revolting McCarthy, thank you very much - Ad hominem is against the "rules" here, I think?

642:

I don't even know if GIMP does do batch processing. I just wish ImageMagick wasn't so mindfuckingly horrible to use...

643:

Oh dear, I suppose it was inevitable. Religious utter fuckwits strike again .... QUOTE: Over 20,000 people have signed a petition to ban fantasy TV show Good Omens from Netflix – only to find that it’s actually available on Amazon Prime, instead.

The series tells the story of an angel and a demon who attempt to prevent an oncoming apocalypse and the rise of the antichrist.

The petition was started by the Return to Order campaign, a Christian group who view the show as “another step to make satanism appear normal, light and acceptable”, as they accuse the story of mocking “God’s wisdom”. “This type of video makes light of Truth, Error, Good and Evil, and destroys the barriers of horror that society still has for the devil,” the petition reads. It also takes issue with the use of a woman’s voice (Frances McDormand) to portray God, the antichrist’s portrayal as a “normal kid” and the ability of an angel and demon to be “good friends”.

Good Omens was adapted from the 1990 novel by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Gaiman adapted their work to screenplay, after Pratchett made this his last request to his colleague before he died. Gaiman took to Twitter to comment on the blunder: “I love that they are going to write to Netflix to try and get #GoodOmens cancelled. “Says it all really. This is so beautiful ... Promise me you won’t tell them?” ENDQUOTE

644:

Most GUIs I've used will take a Link command as meaning "save, compile and then link if no compile time errors". Run is less useful, particularly if you write programs that run in a batch or command line mode.

645:

Greg, STOP PUTTING WORDS IN MY MOUTH! There is no mention of the Yousay in #626.

646:

Why did you bring up #626? GT mentioned #628 ...

647:

Yeah, I've had the pleasure of visiting a number of factories in the Shenzhen area. Living and working conditions are strange (to my western experience set) but not bad.

The point I was trying to make is that unlike in the west, an apartment with no kitchen is not impossible to live in because of the ubiquitous cheap food. Cheap catered food is not considered a luxury in China, but a necessity, and is priced accordingly. Over here, it's priced and regulated as a luxury and it rapidly gets very expensive if you're not able to prepare food at home.

That said, I saw a whole lot of sweatshop conditions in China. They're not in factories, because like you said factories are well-regulated, but there's a whole lot of self-employed/1-3person/family businesses where there's no concept of working hours or safe working conditions. Examples include many street food vendors and small convenience stores, and many delivery drivers. Of course, this is equally bad over here - there's no employee protection for entrepreneurs anywhere in the west that I'm aware of, nobody is going to check whether working hours are insane or whether personal protection equipment is in use or whether you pay yourself the minimum wage.

648:

Actually, I'd suggest that the biggest problems with electrical are the insulators for the wires (and/or the porcelain for the insulators if you want to run bare wires on posts) and the lubricants for the moving parts. It would also be good to have access to someone who can do precise machining without necessarily having a working machine lathe, even if they have a lot of the tools. And building a dam starts, as usual, with the "build a kiln to make the lime for the cement, plus source good river sand for the concrete" problem. In other words, you're assuming there's going to be a lot of stuff lying around that's already starting to be in short supply (like building sand).

This is the difference between resilience and productivity: productivity does produce more stuff, which is why a having having a mill for your grain (ideally water powered) is better than asking every woman in your community to spend five hours with a saddle quern or a metate grinding the days' flour. Thing is, if you lack the materials for a mill, and you don't even have the stonemasons for a Roman-style rotary hand mill (two shaped pieces of stone with a handle, used by every squad in the legions and many others), a saddle quern, metate, or similar can be made with some rocks and a lot of sweat. It's slow and laborious, but it beats starving.

The fundamental problem we face is that resilient systems, from computing by slide rules to grinding with saddle querns, tend to be inefficient, while productive systems tend to be complex, require specialists, and require supply chains. Making a system that's both productive and resilient is actually quite difficult. They're unlikely to spontaneously form as a culture collapses (although see the Rapa Nui for their brilliant improvisation, and probably also the Chumash, and even the Russians with their dacha gardens that helped prevent famine when the USSR fell). Advance planning, while we do have surplus resources and productive systems, is really an important thing for everyone to do. That's everything from planting trees to protecting farmland and water sources to politicking to get infrastructure rebuilds and upgrades in the pipeline.

649:

Undoubtedly. Or on a 6502. It would be pretty much a doddle to do it on a PET.

Hmm, I do have a C=128 lying in a box somewhere. Perhaps its high-res graphics mode could be used for something like that... (Not that I don't have enough projects already.)

Objectively, it's a horrible computer, which came out too late in the game (it was released about half a year before the Amiga and I think later than the Atari ST). Subjectively, I have fond memories of friends' C=64 and C=128 computers. The one we have is properly my wife's, I never owned one myself. It's just that for the C=128 mode and the high-res mode there weren't that many programs, and I would like to program some of my own.

650:

Sigh. Productivity is resilience. You are envisioning doing things by hand as less likely to fail, but the problem is, doing this sort of labor by hand easily quadruples the caloric intake of the people doing the work, and "Enough calories" is approximately infinitely more likely to be a limiting factor than the ability to manufacture some kind of insulator or draw wire. Or, you know, find some wire. Same with the charcoal.

651:

What, you think that keeping users happy is a motivation for a sysadmin?

I refer you to https://xkcd.com/705/, which cartoon I've had taped up by my desk for years, as "my own personal mission statement".

In reality, my manager has commented occasionally that I defer too much to the users, and don't just do the update, or whatever....

652:

Yes, but... what percentage of the population is involved in production and consumption... and what percentage in research? I suggest to you that the waste - not that there is not a lot of waste, is miniscule.

Also, in a lot of cases, stuff isn't reusable (can you say 'autoclave', boyos and grllls?).

653:

I am reminded of a flyer I got at a con, lo, in the depths of time (like the late seventies) from a group I later got involved with, GT. The flyer described a 23.5 pin chip, with multiple addressing lines... including city, state and zip. And it had three erase modes: EEPROM, UV through the quartz cap, or, if you flipped the cap up, you could use a pencil eraser....

654:

Thank you very much. Haven't finished it, but that was cool.

655:

I'm lucky - I'm mostly right-handed, but semi-ambidextrous. This means at work, I use my mouse right handed, including playing minesweeper, while at home, I use it left handed, mostly playing solitaire.*

  • I am NOT ADDICTED. I can quit any time....
656:

And that memory reminded me of '87, I think, the year after I relocated from Philly to Austin, and had the money that summer? fall? to buy a real computer, a CompuAdd 286. Solid, well-build machine, with a HUGE 20M h/d.

Now, K8 had been doing her writing on her Atari. The 286, running MS DOS 3, could read the 5.25" floppies... but didn't understand the files that were her stories. I went in with Norton, examined the files, found they were a linked list, and how the list worked, then wrote a program, might have been in BASICA, and converted all her files to m$-dos files, and, voila, her writing was saved.

I should look, to see if I still have those files, in addition to the stories she/we wrote later.

657:

But wait, it's worse than that, Jim...

Remember what I said a day or two ago, about the story from Pew about the human population peaking, but based only on fertility...?

xcerpt: At least 21 cities in India, including capital New Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad, will run out of groundwater by 2020, affecting around 100 million people.

India's news network NDTV said 40 percent of India's population will have no access to drinking water by 2030, according to a report by the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog) - the country's principal planning organisation.

One of the worrying predictions of climate change has been a weakening monsoon season in South Asia. For the last five years, rainfall in the region has been below average, with 2015 being the worst at 86 percent.

This year's late monsoon progress is worrying, with a prolonged heatwave aggravating the situation. From Andhra Pradesh to Bihar, the late onset of monsoon cloud and rain has allowed daily temperatures to remain higher than normal.

Chennai out of water

The city of Chennai in Tamil Nadu state is now virtually out of water, while it has been hitting temperatures over 41C for nine of the last 10 days; on June 10, it was 43C. The average for June in the city is 37C and the record 43.3C.

Millions of people have been forced to rely on water from tank trucks in the southern Tamil Nadu, which had a 62 percent shortfall in monsoon rains last year. --- end excerpt ---

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/06/india-running-water-fast-190620085139572.html

mark
658:

My favorite text editor of all times was Brief, by Underware. DOS, no mouse... split the screen? Merge two windows? <

I once had it split 27 ways, tiny windows with just a line or two of data and some code....

AND it had column copy.

659:

Ran a demo version GEOS off a floppy, I think early 90's. It was nice, nicer than Windows 3, but it simply wasn't up to crushing the unfair competition of M$$$$$$$$$

660:

Queued.... One thing that aggravates me is focus stealing. For example, I run kde on my CentOS boxes. I log in, and I'm trying to type a password in, say, for email, and focus is stolen WHILE I'M TYPING.

How hard would it be to look, and if a user is currently typing in a window, not to take focus away until they stop for, say, 2 sec?

661:

I have friends who consider themselves Christians who have told me they agree with me that those... scum aren't "Christians", but run the gamut from "the Christian version of Pharisees" to outright Christian Satanists* - you know, like the Westboro Badtaste Church.

  • As distinguished from the vastly amusing Church of Satan.
662:

We're well past 300... but about story time.... I mention how Ira, the editor of Amazing, encouraged me to expand my novelette to a novella, and I'm glad he did, even if it shrinks my markets. I"m only about 2k words in the expansion, beginning before where I'd started the story originally, and I've already got a number of instances where what happens right after they wind up 11,000 years later will have a lot more impact.

663:

Oh, a rant... and I'm going to expand on this for the WSFA Journal (local club), and it's about why I'm NOT going to put one novella that's up for the Hugo near the top.

I understand that editors don't want to buy anything if it doesn't start with an OOMPH (unless you're a Name). But one of those for the Hugo... you tell a story by starting at the beginning, go through the middle to the end. The novella reads as though they took a part of the climax, cut it out, divvied it up to three or four pieces, and scattered it, starting around the beginning, throughout the story, for NO OTHER REASON than to have the ooomph. That ruinded the story.

And no, you can't argue with me - I'm the person reading it, and it ruined the story, IMO, so I'm right.

Damn it, I want some stories written for someone who has an attention span > 15 min, and doesn't care if it doesn't read like a comic book movie.

664:

Greg Tingey @ 618: There is a lesser probability that it was out-of-control elements of the IRG, but given the way the Persians are screaming "It wasn't us!" I'm inclined to believe them, officially at any rate.

There's no doubt the boat whose crew did whatever they did to the side of the tanker some time AFTER something exploded there (and after the crew were taken off or abandoned ship) came from Iran's Revolutionary Guard. It's Iran's boat whoever has control of Iran's Revolutionary Guard.

What is in doubt, is who placed what on the side of the tanker (and other ships in the region), when & where that happened and why "they" did it?

And now Iran has shot down an American surveillance drone. Both sides agree to that. But, again, there's plenty of room for doubt over where the drone was when it was shot down. The U.S. claims "international airspace" and Iran says "OUR airspace". It's not beyond comprehension that one side or both could be mistaken about where the drone actually was when Iran fired on it. The so called "fog of war" is a real thing. Neither side is going to want to admit they fucked up.

The first question I have is do they even agree on where Iran's airspace ends and international airspace begins? And are either of them using the ICAO definition? The "best" (?) information could find is this Live Universal Awareness map of the region:

https://iran.liveuamap.com/

665:

paws4thot @ 626: #607 - Making a remote control RHIB is a solved problem. Its control range will be governed by where you can place the control station, particularly in height AMSL.

No doubt. It's the "outfitting to mimic the IRG" whose cost effectiveness I question; training the necessary crisis actors & such. Along with whatever you have to do after the operation to keep them from blabbing.

666:

Nope, nope, nope.

You've got precisely the wrong frame for resilience. Resilience is what got humanity through 200,000 years of ice ages. Productivity is what's allowed us to use up the best fossil fuels in the world in about 600 years and balloon our populations enormously during that time. Locusts are productive, grasshoppers are resilient. It's why all locusts have a grasshopper morph, but few grasshoppers have a locust morph. Right now, humans are in our locust phase.

This is the reason why survivalists don't carry huge generators out into the field, because they don't want to die when they run out of fuel. This instead is why they carry knowledge (which weighs nothing) and attempt to make a living out of whatever they find.

667:

Perhaps an example would help: productivity is maintaining a positive growth rate, something our current economy assumes. Resilience is lasting for a long term in the face of major perturbations.

Let's use San Diego County as an example. Prior to the 1700s (to be generous) the land was occupied by the Kumeyaay and their ancestors for something like the last 14,000 years. There were up to perhaps 20,000 of them. They were foragers who on occasion walked over to the Colorado River to grow some corn with the Yuma and other tribes, but otherwise ranged between the seashore, the desert, and the mountains depending on the season. During their residency, they survived the end of the ice age, a sea level rise of ~100 m, a complete vegetation change, decade-long droughts, ARkStorms, any number of major earthquakes, and so forth. They did it essentially without using outside resources, beyond that Colorado river corn on occasion. They also brag (I think wrongly) of having many of their people live beyond 100 years old before the 20th century.

Compare that with highly productive modern San Diego. We've got around 3,000,000 people living here, we're growing, and we're reasonably productive for a large-sized US county or a medium-sized county worldwide. The City of San Diego has one full time employee working on climate change, and I can tell you that they're totally unprepared for even a meter of sea level rise. The County doesn't even have a plan for dealing with climate change, since the last one got shot down in court for trying to pay for carbon sequestration elsewhere so we could keep doing what we're doing. In the event of a major earthquake or ARkStorm, we've got maybe a week's worth of food and medicines available, little local electricity, and maybe five year's worth of water if the pumps and chlorination system can be made to function (we're lucky that, unlike LA, our reservoirs are on the same side of the San Andreas fault as we are).

Modern San Diego's productive, the Kumeyaay were resilient. Trying to make modern San Diego even a little more resilient probably requires that a lot of NIMBYs pass on or leave. Getting this place to Kumeyaay level resilience, even with 10% of our current population, requires basically a total rebuild of the region's infrastructure to be less dependent on fossil fuels, and we're struggling against entrenched opposition to even take baby steps in that direction.

668:

Elderly Cynic @ 628: You do make the shade of the late Joseph McCarthy proud, don't you?

That's the pot calling the kettle black!

While it is POSSIBLE that Russia wants to foment war in the Gulf, it's pretty implausible - it's not much more likely than the UK did it, under orders(*)! Also, Russia does NOT go in for 'short victorious wars' - which term means unnecessary ones for local political reasons, such as the invasion of Iraq - they learnt better a long time ago. Even their intervention in Afghanistan was not intended as such.

What? Not even the Ukraine and the Crimea? You really are full of it!

669:

paws4thot @ 636: Well, based on having done so, Turbo Pascal worked on 8286, 8386SX or better with A Mess DOS 4.0 or better. Windoze anything not required.

Crashed on Pentium II processors 266Mhz & higher.

Around 1997, I was working for the IBM PC company on a project called (IIRC) LAN Installation Manager. The program worked with all of IBM's existing PCs to that date (including Pentium II "Klamath" processors running at 233Mhz). But when the 266Mhz processors began to show up in new machines, the program crashed. Didn't matter whether it was the installation server or the client PC. If either one had the 266Mhz processor the program crashed. The development team traced the problem back to something in Turbo Pascal that didn't like the faster CPU.

I'm not sure how they solved the problem, but I think they may have just re-written it in C++. Soon after that I moved on to another job - being the hardware guy in a software lab - my job was to keep the hardware up to date & fix anything when the programmers broke the hardware.

670:

On the general issue of war in the Gulf...

Some of us reading this are old enough to remember the first Gulf War (under Bush I) and the second (Under Bush II). The second Gulf War was totally predictable, on two counts: --The Bush family is in the oil business, so getting more oil and putting bases where they can keep Saudi Arabia and Iran in check is SOP.

--Bush II was dropping in the polls when he declared war on Iraq on totally specious grounds, and even someone as apolitical as myself knows that one way US Presidents get re-elected is if they're in the middle of fighting a war to defend the US. Hence WMDs, etc. It worked for Bush II.

Now, just taking a wild-assed guess, and looking at the number of Bushies in the Trump White House, I'll bet that what we're seeing right now is an attempt to get Trump re-elected by starting a war with Iran, with a side order of massive profiteering and diverting still more of the US economy into the MIC. Thing is, it's stupid on several counts. We can certainly bomb Iran, but aside from the not inconceivable risk of starting WWIII, the bloodletting resulting from putting invading Iran might ultimately rival Operation Downfall in WWII, and the US military knows this. That's what make the dynamics so interesting. They'll march if ordered, but I bet they do it at quarter time.

So ultimately, the precise nationality of the agents provocateurs who caused the explosions on the oil tankers probably doesn't matter all that much.

671:

Mikko Parviainen @ 638:

"CUI could probably be implemented on Z80-based hardware easily enough."

That could be a nice retro-project...

Then there was GEOS, the graphical user interface for the Commodore 64. I've never seen it live, much less used it, but apparently it was at least somewhat usable. It was fully graphical, too. The C=64 had a good character set which could probably have been used for CUI, but the resolution of the text screen is probably too poor to be useful (it's 40x25 characters)

I think that developed into PC GEOS and Geoworks Ensemble, a program that was far ahead of MS Windows; ran on DOS, but had a better window manager.

https://tedium.co/2016/04/28/geoworks-windows-3-1-competitor/

672:

If either one had the 266Mhz processor the program crashed. The development team traced the problem back to something in Turbo Pascal that didn't like the faster CPU.

I ran into this, too, but by that time I was mostly using other compilers, like DJGPP. It was, if I remember correctly, because the runtime of Turbo Pascal calculated some timer value for something, and it broke down when the computers got too fast. There was a fix for it, and I had it somewhere twenty years ago. I have no idea if that fix still exists on some media I have - I still have the original box and contents so I could install it somewhere...

The DJGPP was another brilliant project - it's a port of the GCC for MS-DOS, started basically because Stallman said it couldn't be done. It was a good free compiler collection for MS-DOS, and even had Perl. I did at least some tests with the Perl there, and it even supported forking. The processes ran one after another, however, but it was still an impressive feat on MS-DOS.

673:

"there's no employee protection for entrepreneurs anywhere in the west"

Yeah, there is. Certainly in Australia. It's just that it's often easier to get away with treating employees badly if they own the company. They're less likely to tattle.

If you carry out your work in public, where is easy to be caught, the company will get fined at the company level and the employee will get fined at the much lower employee level. That doesn't stop people from trying it on, like any law, it gets broken, but people really do get fined. I used to be a commercial diver and obviously it's a profession you can't do behind closed doors. We used to have the government inspectors turn up on the worksite every few weeks or so. We always had the required team size and safety equipment, but there were often workers around us who didn't. I saw a few worksites closed down and many many thousands of dollars in fines issued. If you tried to run a commercial diving operation as a single diver (ie. below the minimum team size of three or five depending on depth) you'd be fined into oblivion in very short order.

674:

It's a nightmare. Those people are fucking crazy! I don't have a lot to say about this, but the whole thing will not end well!

675:

Of course, this is equally bad over here - there's no employee protection for entrepreneurs anywhere in the west that I'm aware of, nobody is going to check whether working hours are insane or whether personal protection equipment is in use or whether you pay yourself the minimum wage.

I'm a bit confused. Are you saying that if someone NOT working for anyone but themselves has to produce a "paycheck" for minimum wage every week/month/whatever? I bet Charlie has months at a time with no paycheck income.

Safety is another issue. If you are doing stupid things in much of the US you can get in big trouble. But if you want to operate a backhoe you own in the back 10 acres of property you own in an unsafe manner out of sight, you're right, no one will come looking for you unless you create an issue off your property.

676:

Heteromeles @ 670: On the general issue of war in the Gulf...

Some of us reading this are old enough to remember the first Gulf War (under Bush I) and the second (Under Bush II). The second Gulf War was totally predictable, on two counts:
--The Bush family is in the oil business, so getting more oil and putting bases where they can keep Saudi Arabia and Iran in check is SOP.

--Bush II was dropping in the polls when he declared war on Iraq on totally specious grounds, and even someone as apolitical as myself knows that one way US Presidents get re-elected is if they're in the middle of fighting a war to defend the US. Hence WMDs, etc. It worked for Bush II.

Some of us are old enough we served in both wars.

Now, just taking a wild-assed guess, and looking at the number of Bushies in the Trump White House, I'll bet that what we're seeing right now is an attempt to get Trump re-elected by starting a war with Iran, with a side order of massive profiteering and diverting still more of the US economy into the MIC. Thing is, it's stupid on several counts. We can certainly bomb Iran, but aside from the not inconceivable risk of starting WWIII, the bloodletting resulting from putting invading Iran might ultimately rival Operation Downfall in WWII, and the US military knows this. That's what make the dynamics so interesting. They'll march if ordered, but I bet they do it at quarter time.

So ultimately, the precise nationality of the agents provocateurs who caused the explosions on the oil tankers probably doesn't matter all that much.

From my own worm's eye view of what was going on, I think you get a bunch of it wrong.

Bush I didn't want a war with Saddam Hussein. War in the middle east is bad for the family's business interests. Bush I screwed up & mishandled Iraq's very real complaints about Kuwait putting the screws on Iraq's economy when Iraq was trying to recover from their disastrous war with Iran (a "short victorious war" Reagan & Bush had encouraged to put pressure on Iran after their double-dealing during the 1980 hostage crisis proved the USA (or at least the Reagan administration) would pay ransom to "terrorists" and ended up with a war he didn't want and didn't know how to handle.

Saddam wouldn't have invaded Kuwait if he had gotten a firm NO, don't do that! in the first place. Bush I could have prevented the whole damn mess by putting pressure on both Iraq and Kuwait to settle their differences at the negotiating table. But that risked exposing the underlying Quid pro quo behind the Iraq/Iran war (and Iran/Contra). After Saddam stepped over the line Bush I, still waffled. If it hadn't been for Margaret Thatcher (along with King Fahd's worry about what Iraqi sucess annexing Kuwait would mean for dissent in Saudi Arabia), Bush I would have continued to dither until he lost the election in 1992.

The coalition defeated Iraq on the battlefield in Kuwait, but Bush I just QUIT with the job less than half done because he placed domestic politics over accomplishing the mission at hand. And then he blundered in fomenting a rebellion by Iraq's Shia majority that he then just left hanging out to diedry!. The minute Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Bush I was operating above the level of his incompetence. And because of his incompetence Saudi Arabia requested U.S. troops remain in Saudi Arabia (in very restricted circumstances - mainly as trainers & maintenance personnel for the Saudi Air Force) which in turn pissed off Osama bin Ladin and al Qaeda.

And then there's fail-son junior, aka Dubya, aka Shrub ... His reason for going after Saddam is 'cause "Saddam tried to kill his daddy" ... the only evidence for which were confessions tortured out of Iraqi exiles living in Kuwait & a Toyota Landcruiser with 80 - 90 kilograms of plastique (of disputed origin).

The al Qaeda attacks on New York City and on Washington, DC are possible because George W. Bush (hereinafter "Shrubya") determined from the moment of his ELECTION to be the ANTI-Clinton. If Clinton was for it, Shrubya was against it ... such as pursuing al Qaeda & bin Ladin. Anti-terrorism was Clinton's primary concern, so it was Shrubyaa's least concern.

After 9/11, DarthDick Cheney, completely ignoring that 18 of the 19 hijackers were from America's middle eastern ALLIES (and the 20th was a French Moroccan) saw the chance to pursue his dream of "Rebuilding America's Defences" on the corpse of Saddam's Iraq as a prelude for going after the real target; the hinge around which all of the middle east's oil resources rotated (including Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the Caucuses, and all the former Soviet Republics (anything with "stan" in the name where oil had been subsequently discovered since the fall of the USSR). Iraq wasn't the primary target, they were just the first step on the road to global hegemony ... and Shrubya went along for the ride because "Saddam tried to kill his daddy".

Where it was really stupid is Darth Cheney and his minion Donald Rumsfield fell for their own propaganda about not needing any kind of nation building after taking over Iraq. They ended up dispossessing half the population and stupidly failed to DISARM them before kicking them out the door, leading to an unnecessary, "totally predictable" insurgency that continues to this very day.

Which brings us to the current idiot in the White House. First of all, there ain't no "Bushies in the Trump White House". There's bad blood between the families going back to when Bush I was Nixon's Chairman of the Republican National Committee & Director of the CIA under Ford. And it didn't get any better under Shrubya and definitely didn't improve with the way Trump treated Jebbie during the run up to the Republican Nomination in 2016. Bolton isn't a "Bushie", just an opportunistic, right-wing fellow traveler still living in his pre-Gulf War II PNAC dream world.

To be perfectly honest, I don't think Trump has a middle eastern policy, other than running his alligator mouth completely oblivious to what he's getting ready to talk his hummingbird ass into. But he ain't the one who is ultimately going to pay the price for his stupidity.

/rant Damn! I didn't realize this still pissed me off so much.

677:

It's very context-dependent. When the entrepreneur is providing a regulated service they have to meet the regulations insofar as those are checked (our building industry among others is self-regulating and we just had another tower condemned). So yes, a self-employed GP has to meet the usual standards, but a self-employer painter can do pretty much what they like.

I have a friend who employs 3-4 people and for a long time they were contractors responsible for everything because he had patchy work and doesn't like filling out forms - much easier to say "I'll pay you $20/hour to do whatever I say on the day" and that's the end of his responsibilities. Which is scarily common in a whole range of employment these days.

I work at the other end of the market, people want me on salary and often for long periods (more than five years), so I haven't really experienced the bottom end of the market directly. OTOH I have experienced the US style "you're on salary so none of the rules about hours of work etc apply".

678:

In completely unrelated news, people are more likely to return a lost wallet if it has money in it:

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/06/19/science.aau8712

Also gives a ranking of countries by "likely to return" with the surprise to me being that Czechoslovakia and Poland ranked highly, and not surprised at all that China is distinctly at the bottom. They seem to be especially no-civic-virtue minded (Thatcher would be proud!)

679:

Um, where to start?

First of all, there ain't no "Bushies in the Trump White House"..
John Bolton was under-secretary of state from 2001-2005 under Bush II. He was known as virulently pro-war, speaking on topics like WMDs and "beyond the axis of evil." So yes, there's a Bushie at the center of this mess.

Cheney's an oilman too. One of the things they were obviously hoping to accomplish in Iraq was privatizing Iraqi oil production under US firms. The Iraqis did a great job of sabotaging their own oil industry (destroying data, messing up equipment, etc.) and that scheme didn't pan out. Their attempt at nation-building obviously didn't work, but that was a side-line, since the real point of the exercise was to shift as much money to Cheney's old firm Halliburton, although it's not clear that worked as well as they wanted, either (Then again, where did all the money go?).

As for Bush II going after Iraq when his poll numbers fell, a) I predicted that when he got elected (and I still regret not putting that in writing), and b) if you look at the archived approval ratings, you'll see he got two big bumps in his ratings: one right after 9/11 (51%-90%) and the second right after he declared war on Iraq (57%-71%). And (not so) oddly, he declared war in Iraq when his approval rating had fallen to where it was before 9/11. Coincidence, I'm sure.

As for Bush I, since Brent Scowcroft, his national security advisor, reportedly had ties to the company that sold Kuwait the side-drilling oil rigs that started the whole mess, I tend to be suspicious about who was engineering what (remember, he was the CIA director, and certainly not one to avoid intelligence). The point of his short, victorious war wasn't to conquer Iraq, because Bush I the ex-spook was clued-in enough to recognize a quagmire when he saw one (anybody paying attention was, including me, and I was an idiot just out of college out protesting the war). He wanted a Saddam monster-on-a-chain that he could threaten the Saudis and Emiratis with, and it worked reasonably well (the gambit being, "let us keep our military bases near your oil fields, or we'll have to go home and Saddam can re-arm and get vengeance). Sadly, Bush's son didn't realize that his father was smarter than he was and had the Texas disease of trying to out-do his father (my late father, a Texan, had the same problem and it almost killed him).

Anyway, Bush I made the cardinal mistake of saying, "read my lips, no new taxes," then raising taxes. That was enough to cost him the presidency. Remember, most Americans only care about international politics in a presidential election when we're at war or dealing with immigrants. Bush II, for all his very real sins, did get a second term, so in that way he outdid his daddy.

680:

Heteromeles @ JBS News is that Trumpolini ordered a strike on Iran, but then "changed his mimd" Like, perhaps the US military told him that they really didn't want to? However it's scary, if only because they have picked up Putin's meme, presumabky under orders (?) for a Short Victorious War ... [NOTE to EC: Contra to your claim, I see someone else has pointed out that VP does do it, but of course the very ORIGIN of the phrase is Russian ... V von Plehve, just before or at the start of the Russo-Japanese War ]

Even if it does not start WW III, it will/would be long & expensive & disastrous & I do hope we don't get dragged in. Again our in-house experts are against it, but either Cunt or Jonson has "had enough of experts" so ... though the civil protest & in Parliament would be huge ... expect mass resignations in the services, too ...

Of course, it depends on WHEN Trump/Bolton/Putin START their short victorious war ... start it too soon & the blow-back will REALLY cost Trump (& Putin) next year's election, so they ought to want to sabre-rattle until about July NEXT year, but it looks as though Trump may (excuse the phrase) jump the gun, which coiuld be "interesting" from the US intrnal politics p.o.v.

681:

I'm a bit confused. Are you saying that if someone NOT working for anyone but themselves has to produce a "paycheck" for minimum wage every week/month/whatever? I bet Charlie has months at a time with no paycheck income.

What I'm saying is they don't, and I'm not aware of anywhere where they do. And this is why the horrible conditions, awful pay, insane working hours and no regard for worker safety tend to concentrate on people who are (either legally or actually) working for themselves. Anyone who has actual employee status in a company is generally covered by regulation preventing this stuff.

682:

Russia invaded the Crimea because the regime that had just taken power in the coup in Ukraine was proposing to renege on a treaty with Russia, expel Russia from its main Black Sea naval port, and turn it into a NATO base. That is a military threat that no country could ignore and hope to survive.

And that's ignoring the minor detail that the regime had decided to renege on its agreement giving civil rights to ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers. And that the history and population of Crimea is Mostly Russian.

No, that was NOT intended to be a 'short victorious war'.

683:

As I have posted before, I doubt that the warmongers have any intention of invading Iran - merely in bombing it into rubble, as a example. What they have not thought through is how Iran, China and Russia will react. Iran has so far not gone on the offensive, nor even really provided much support to Shias being targetted by other countries, despite the claims of its enemies. But, if it is given no choice, what will it do?

Equally importantly, what will Russia and China do? Russia does not want Iran to fall to the USA, because it would then have no access to the Arabian Sea through even neutral countries. It has not so far sold advanced equipment, such as the S-400, to Iran but that could change overnight - and then we might discover whether the S-400 is effective against USA aircraft.

China is equally important. If this triggers them into deciding that the time to stop pussyfooting around with the USA is now, or they will be isolated piecemeal, what will the do?

And, if the USA's bombing fails, or Iran retaliates, what will the USA do? I agree, it's horrific.

684: 656 Para 2 - A bit like when we transitioned from DEC to Sun Unix, and wrote a program to convert DEC tapes in a proprietary 16 bit word format into 32 bit Sun words. Now both were at least sort of same endian, but, numbering from 0 to 15 the DEC put the LSB at 7 and the MSB at 8 (or vice versa) so I had to teach myself how to do masking and overlays first! 660 - Extremely, if your system uses co-operative multi-tasking. It's "not a problem" if it uses pre-emptive. 665 - Well no-one has yet made a truly convincing humaniform robot, so yes it would be easier to use actual people including a helmsman who knows the relevant unit's normal tactics in this case. 669 - Not surprised, but by Pentium II we were no longer using Turbo Pascal for anything, for a variety of reasons. 672 - I did actually meet a variation on this where one application reading the serial port would crash on a 386/33. The "resolution" was to just use a 386/SX20.
685:

Adding yet another kludge would be easy - improving the ergonomics wouldn't be. I used to disable focus stealing, but gave up when too many programs ignored it, and some stopped working when you did. Your suggestion would just move the problems, if we started from here. To paws4thot: it could be done with cooperative multitasking about as easily as it could be done with preemption, too, just differently.

I could go into the history, background, politics and technology of this area at length; the executive summary is that it could be done MUCH better but only by starting again, and this time not fucking it up as badly. Inter alia, it would mean shooting many of the IT 'experts', and reeducating the rest into understanding that constraints on what you can do are essential for both correctness and usability.

686:

EC @ 682 & 3 You aer about 90% correct concerning the then-regime in Ukraine ... their arrogance & stupidity are on a par with Trump's. I was not aware of the proposal to make Sevastopol a "NATO" port ... STUPID. OTOH, RU's treatment of the Crimean Tatars was not too wonderful, either ( That's the other 10% ) And, of course, now there's a war on, it's difficult for either side to back down & withdraw & "settle".

merely in bombing it into rubble, as a example. What they have not thought through is how Iran, China and Russia will react. quite. How to start WW III in one easy lesson? And, OF COURSE Persia will retalite, for all the hatred of the mullah's regime, the reaction of the Persians will be the same as when Hotler invaded Russia in 1941 .... The levels of arrogant stupid ... I assume the rest of the EU will have the sense to say "Without us", but, if we hav Johnson or Cthulu help us, Cunt as PM, we are very likely to be dragged into it, kicking & screaming ... not a pleasant prospect.

687:

I am aware of the origin of the phrase, but you seem to be unaware of its meaning.

In ALL of the examples you mention, Russia was attempting to stop an external threat to itself - i.e. the wars were NOT started just to bolster a wobbling government, which is the meaning of the phrase. You may claim that the threats were imaginary, and it is certainly true that Russian paranoia was a factor, BUT THAT IS IRRELEVANT. They were NOT like Bush II's invasion of Iraq, which was a classic "short victorious war".

"I do hope we don't get dragged in."

You had better pray that Bozo the Clown wins over Jeremy the Cunt, then. And probably that Jeremy the Red wins the next election.

688:

Are you saying that if someone NOT working for anyone but themselves has to produce a "paycheck" for minimum wage every week/month/whatever?

I'm self-employed, in a totally unregulated profession. (Novelist: anyone can do it with zero qualifications.)

If I want to have someone else work for me, I either (a) pay them as a contractor for delivering a specified product or service, either at an hourly rate or a flat fee, or (b) employ them.

In situation (a) it's not any of my business how they do the work; I'm not responsible for them. For example: I pay a firm of accountants to handle my tax. I regularly send them raw income and expenditure data (retaining physical receipts where necessary in case of an HMRC audit), they sort out my returns, and then they invoice me for their billable hours. How they do the job is none of my business (except insofar as it has to be conducted in accordance with the statutory regulations governing accountants).

In situation (b) I am totally an employer because I direct them and so I'm responsible for ticking all the boxes to do with their payroll, income tax, national insurance, workplace health and safety, statutory sick pay, and so on, and for providing them with a properly furnished and equipped work environment, managing their activities, and generally acting like a real business.

I don't do (b) because I operate on far too small a scale and most of what I do can't be farmed out to someone else: I can't hire Joe Blow off the street, provide training and a word processor, and expect them to write a chapter a week of the next Charlie Stross novel.

So that leaves me responsible for is my own tax and national insurance, plus maybe professional liability or business insurance on the side if I wanted to operate as a limited company (spoiler: I don't, it's an extra level of admin that doesn't get me anything useful).

If I was, say, operating a heavy goods vehicle as an owner-operator, you bet I'd be doing it as a company with all the relevant paperwork, payroll, and insurance stuff. Firstly, it's not a unique skill set: if I'm sick, my tiny company can hire another driver to haul stuff around. Secondly, if an HGV goes wrong, the worst case situation involves people dying: so operations need to be legally regulated.

But writing novels is generally harmless (unless your name is Salman Rushdie) ...

689:

The coalition defeated Iraq on the battlefield in Kuwait, but Bush I just QUIT with the job less than half done because he placed domestic politics over accomplishing the mission at hand

Nuanced disagreement: GHWB didn't have a UN green light to cross the border into Iraq because taking that step would have required extensive support by Middle Eastern regimes who weren't going to give it. If he'd gone there and invaded Iraq he'd have been in breach of the same international conventions that Iraq violated by invading Kuwait in the first place. Nor did he have Thatcher's support—Thatcher had been carted out of Downing Street in a straitjacket by that point.

So it wasn't just domestic politics that stopped him—the international politics were strongly opposed, too. Remember, the USSR had only just collapsed and nobody really new how the situation in Europe was going to evolve: starting a war of aggression in the Middle East might have been the one thing GHWB could have done that would cause the former Soviets to re-cohere. Nobody really knew, and he wasn't in a risk-taking frame of mind.

(Hanging out the Kurds to dry, and then Clinton's continuing strategy of sanctions and the odd bombing raid, were both utterly abhorrent but unsurprising consequences.)

… leading to an unnecessary, "totally predictable" insurgency that continues to this very day.

The post-2003 Iraq insurgency serves a very useful function from Cheney's point of view: it generates an ongoing revenue stream for Haliburton, KBR, and the other big defense logistics and infrastructure contractors in whose pocket he lives and festers. Yes, he and Rumsfeld swallowed their own idiotic propaganda about Iraqis welcoming them with flowers and spontaneously turning into good little brown-skinned American capitalists, but they had plenty of time to do a U-turn in 2003-04! Instead, they doubled-down on a strategy that poured huge amounts of money into a cesspit in the most wasteful way imaginable. Hmm, I wonder whose fingers some of that green stuff stuck to?

Shrub was simply a useful idiot. The real story about PNAC wasn't "grabbing their oil", it was about denying middle eastern oil to strategic rivals. And the folks who came up with that crock of shit were still living in the 1900-1950 era in terms of strategic planning. (The oil obsession was down to Winston Churchill and the Royal Navy switching from coal to oil around 1900 because you could refuel at sea.)

690:

I don't know the exact subtleties, but you need to be careful about even (a). It turns out that a contracting body corporate is responsible for the contractor's adherence to many health and safety regulations, even if they have done so precisely because they have no skills in the relevant area! Exactly which organisations that applies to, I can't say, but I have seen indications that it (in theory) applies even to private individuals (*), and self-employed people are obviously a bit more in the firing line than retirees.

(*) Yes, I do mean that, if you get a qualified tradesman to do something, they cock it up, and injure themselves as a result, THEY can sue YOU. But I can't remember if a relevant case has ever been settled in court.

691:

One extremely minor nit to pick: it was possible to refuel using coal while at sea. SMS Emden did it during WWI, and the Russian fleet that made it to the Straits of Tsushima managed it as well. It was difficult and time-inefficient, but it could be done.

Everything else in that post I agree with.

692:

It wasn't just the Kurds - the Marsh Arabs were treated even more badly. And, it's not just Iraq - there's Afghanistan, too. On Iran, I assume that you have seen this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/world/middleeast/us-military-plans-iran.html

693:

Well, I was basing my statement on never having had focus stolen under preemptive multitasking, but also using Mickeyshaft Windoze.

694:

Yes, it was the voyage of the Russian Baltic Fleet to Tsushima that convinced the British admirality to prioritize moving to bunker oil! (It was a logistical nightmare.)

695:

It turns out that a contracting body corporate is responsible for the contractor's adherence to many health and safety regulations,

The Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is a case in point; the oil rig in question was owned and operated by a relatively small organisation but working under contract for BP and when the operators screwed up it was BP that had to deal with the consequences and pay the fines.

696:

And that was even with the advantages of routing UK - Gibralter - Malta -Suez Canal - Aden - India - Hong Kong to put an European fleet into he Sea of Japan (I bet sleeping_routine won't like this, but West of the Urals Russia is in Europe).

697:

Not really. It was a third-party that was injured and took action. I really DO mean that, if (say) a primary school implies a major engineering company to rewire it, the electricians cock it up, and injure themselves, under some circumstances they can sue the primary school. Or, at least, could - it's some years since I was inflicted with that problem.

698:

I don't think the U.S. could lose a war with Iran; not if we really made a serious effort. If we had to, we could re-institute the draft, land marines, go overland from Iraq, etc., and the Iranian Army/Republican Guard wouldn't be able to offer much opposition - they have neither the technology or the doctrine.

Successfully managing the occupation would be another matter, of course. The U.S. tends to suck at that part, mainly because we're so fucking arrogant, and we imagine that the "allies" we've found after landing someplace are telling us the truth when they claim to have found Commies.

But in the run-up to "winning" a war, we could definitely lose a fleet - kiss a couple aircraft carriers goodbye, watch on TV as our cruisers and supply ships got blown up, and so on, with god-knows what effect on our politics.

If the Iranians have decent guidance systems for their land-launched missiles and decide the Israelis are to blame, we could watch some Israeli city get smashed too... I can't see Trump reacting with anything resembling intelligence should the worst happen, and that's the real menace in all this, as Trump embodies the idea of "a bully with no social skills."

699:

I'm assuming Trump had a momentary remission of his unfortunate rectal-cerebral inversion.

700:

Safety is another issue. If you are doing stupid things in much of the US you can get in big trouble.

"Much of" doesn't include, unsurprisingly, places like Texas. During some twenty years there I saw plenty of construction workers working on high, steep roofs but never saw a safety line. Of course, those workers were mostly brown and, at a guess, of somewhat questionable residency status.

701:

"Yes, he and Rumsfeld swallowed their own idiotic propaganda about Iraqis welcoming them with flowers and spontaneously turning into good little brown-skinned American capitalists, but they had plenty of time to do a U-turn in 2003-04!"

Which propaganda reminded me of the German propaganda prior to World War I, which discussed in detail how the French would love German Kulture and instantly turn into good little cheese-eating Germans. The more things change...

702:

Also, if I recall correctly, BP had hired Halliburton, which had done something wrong with the cement casing around the drill hole, possibly with BPs encouragement.

703:

@680 However it's scary, if only because they have picked up Putin's meme, presumabky under orders (?) for a Short Victorious War Even related Wiki article (albeit in Russian version) bothers to mention that connection to "splendid little war" US performed almost instantly it manifested as regional power. Most likely this idea has been floating around for quite a while in some other forms.

@641 Really: Georgia, Ossettia, Chechnyha, E Ukraine says otherwise It is worth noting that in every case, the Russian government: a) Repeated warnings and reassured agreements multiple times did not have sufficient effort. b) Was forced to react to unavoidable danger to a lot of it's citizens. c) It's armed forces were directly targeted and occasionally fired upon by advanced forces. And that includes ALL of these reasons simultaneously, because occasionally isolated cases like that do not provoke full-scale military operation and are not even registered by many observers.

Now if you compare this to US behavior, it is quite the opposite in every quality. Just todays news: "US is sending more troops to Middle East because it wants more security for the troops that are already here". Any diplomatically sound response: "What." It is literally a practice of extinguishing fire with gasoline.

@686 OTOH, RU's treatment of the Crimean Tatars was not too wonderful, either It's not like newly established "independent" country ever cared about them until the territorial issues appeared. And frankly, it begun to dealing with them in a very specific manner - by blockading them, sabotaging electricity and services, stopping the water supply, and so on. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/24/world/europe/crimea-tatar-power-lines-ukraine.html https://tass.com/world/730769

704:

And that was even with the advantages of routing UK - Gibralter - Malta -Suez Canal - Aden - India - Hong Kong to put an European fleet into he Sea of Japan

Wrong!

After the Dogger Bank Incident (which nearly kicked off the first world war in 1904, by accident) the British were in no mood to allow the Russian fleet to use the Suez Canal, so the Baltic fleet had to go the long way, around the Cape of Good Hope and up to Madagascar (where they spent about 6 months at anchor waiting for resupply while the Russian government fruitlessly tried to buy spare battleships in Argentina) before setting out across the Indian Ocean. (They had an escort consisting of a good chunk of the British home fleet all the way to the Cape, with guns pointed at them in a most unfriendly manner. However, following subsequent negotiations and reparations, a second group of Russian ships was permitted to use the Suez shortcut and rendezvoused with the main fleet before the end.)

It ended up being the longest non-nuclear voyage in naval history, journeying over 29,000km and utterly dwarfing the Falklands campaign in terms of endurance (a mere 12,000km voyage to launch an attack!). Lots more here. And also, kinda-sorta, in "Singularity Sky".

705:

Ah, I was unclear; I meant that the British could sail via Suez, with all those available coaling stops, whereas, as you rightly say, the Russians had to go via the Cape of Good Hope, (and not even coal at Cape Town), and were still in deep load on reaching the Sea of Japan. Yes, I do have a history of the attack ("The Fleet That Had to Die" I think) and a copy of Singularity Sky too.

706:

Equally importantly, what will Russia and China do? Russia does not want Iran to fall to the USA, because it would then have no access to the Arabian Sea through even neutral countries. Nobody can be sure really, how much of disturbance it will cause and what forces can be possibly involved in it so many years after. Certainly it won't be another militaristic wet dream form some other Battlefield game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNKdwtd0tig

I'm pretty sure there's enough troubles for US in the region already as they stubbornly try to hold their positions here, supply rebellions and continue to stir local politics as much as possible. It is nothing new for them to stick their fingers in every pie, but sometimes it makes them being paranoid about fate of those fingers. https://www.dailysabah.com/war-on-terror/2019/05/23/russia-urges-shutdown-of-us-ypg-held-camps-in-syria However it seems like until recent, all these circumstances flew over everybody's head, including President's, and in some respect, people are still largely oblivious to what is happening here.

707:

EC @ 687 Oh Japan was an existntial threat to the Tsarist Eppire in 1905 was it? FIrst time I've heard THAT one .... Jeremy the dark-pink would be as big a disaster in the opposite direction ... there will be ( as with Cunt) war in Ireland & we will lose Gibralter, as Cor Bin will fuck over what's left of the RN. Cor Bin wants out of the EU for identical reasons to the ultra-right ... so that they can wreck the country for their own ideological &/or monetary profit. Why do you think the wanker won't commit on a Final Say referendum? He WANTS us to crash out of the EU & scrape up the mess for his own ends ... Agree that Bozo the crook is probably less-bad than Cunt - not saying much, isi t?

SR @ 703 Another quote on the same subject, much less-known ... I had to re-look it up: a quotation from Robert Wilson Lynd: "The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions."

708:

I don't think the U.S. could lose a war with Iran; not if we really made a serious effort. If we had to, we could re-institute the draft, land marines, go overland from Iraq, etc., and the Iranian Army/Republican Guard wouldn't be able to offer much opposition

I disagree. You're talking about invading the fricken' Persian Empire.

Iran has roughly the same population of Germany and land area as Mexico, and is roughly 10,000km from the USA. If you want to make a military occupation work, you need boots on the ground—lots of boots: IIRC the ratio for occupying Germany at the end of WW2 was 1 occupier per 10 civilians at first, and a comprehensive occupation isn't feasible with less than 1 occupier per 20 civilians. When in 1972 the British Army executed Operation Motorman to suppress the Provisional IRA insurgency in Northern Ireland—population: 1.5 million—they send 27,000 troops; that suggests a ratio of 20K troops/million population minimum (Motorman reinforced existing RUC and army units that were already fighting a losing battle).

So, to hold down Iran after an invasion you'd need on the order of 1.6 million deployed soldiers, minimum. Any less and there are going to be holes in your coverage. Try to substitute it with high-tech surveillance (face recognition cameras, drone, and so on) isn't going to work great, especially after you've smashed up the telco and power infrastructure to underpin them.

1.6 million is close to the entire current strength of the US armed forces, and most of them aren't infantry troops you can put on garrison duty. So bringing back conscription would be a necessary precondition before any invasion.

As for "wouldn't be able to offer much opposition" I'd like to draw your attention to the 2006 Lebanon War, and who was backing the proxy forces on each side. And also note that Iran, unlike Iraq, has 2500 years of common national identity (rather than being a spatchcock assemblage thrown together by the British after the fall of the Ottoman empire) and would be fighting on their own soil. And that Iran is mainly Shi'ite and the USA is in bed with Saudi Arabia and in any such conflict would as a Saudi catspaw in a holy war to exterminate Shi'a Islam. Not to mention the USA being thoroughly detested because of the coup of 1953 that installed a bloody-handed dictatorship …

No, really, just. no. An actual serious US attempt to subjugate Iran—as opposed to sending the odd drone or cruise missile—would be a shit-show that would dwarf the Vietnam War and the Iraq occupation combined, with Afghanistan thrown in for good measure (and, hey, you know who Iran shares land borders—and, to a large extent, religion—with?).

709:

I'm pretty sure there's enough troubles for US in the region already as they stubbornly try to hold their positions here, supply rebellions and continue to stir local politics as much as possible.

Said US positions being ones they inherited from the UK (by twisting their arm, hard, in 1945: the price of US support in the second world war was the end of the British Empire, and the USA bought up the useful bits at a bargain price). And the UK was mostly in it because (a) it protected the Suez Canal—and thus the empire in India and parts east, like Australasia—and (b) it was where the oil for their battleships came from.

Which leads us back to Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky's epic but ill-fated voyage ...

710:

"The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions."

Also, Sun Tzu: "there is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare".

711:

I completely agree that it would be a shit-show. In fact, that was very much my point.

The worst-case scenario goes something like this: We lose our fleet in the Persian Gulf. This isn't likely, but depending on how good Iran's anti-shipping missiles are, it's possible.*

In reaction, the U.S. decides to go on a total war footing; reinstate the draft, massively increase the size of the military, build landing boats, park half-a-dozen aircraft carriers just outside of Iranian missile range, take out their hundreds/thousands of missile launchers, send PT boats in to take out the Iranian missile boats; you know, the whole WWII thing. The U.S. could do the military part of it, though it would be ridiculously expensive and horrible for all concerned. (Halliburton and Boeing would be thrilled!)

Then we'd have to occupy a hostile country, (which the U.S. is really bad at, (and most of us don't understand why we're bad at it)) which is surrounded by other hostile countries, while the Iranian resistance against our occupation is lavishly financed by the U.S.'s enemies, while China, India, the EU and Brazil go about the business of taking over the global economy...

And the U.S. Conservatives (even though most of them couldn't point to Iran on an unlabelled map) would be thrilled and triumphant... right up until it bankrupted us!

  • U.S. politics would explode into chaos if this happened, and at that point there is no end-result which would surprise me, including nuclear retaliation against Iran.
712:

No, Greg, no. Please engage both your eyes and your brain. That was the war that taught them the lesson that "short victorious wars" are NOT a solution to internal politics. And, if you had actually READ what I said, I did NOT say that most of their (recent) wars were existential - they weren't, and the Russians didn't pretend they were, unlike the USA's bizarre claims about places like North Korea. However, they WERE genuine external threats, though probably perceived as more serious than they were due to Russia's paranoia.

713:

Which is why I think the USA will start off by bombing its defences; I don't know how Iran will respond, but they will. The USA will then extend the bombing to more of its major infrastructure, not just military. My crystal ball overheated at that point, so I can't speculate further.

I think that it's unlikely that they could sink a USA fleet (Troutwaxer #711), but they almost certainly could render the Strait of Hormuz all-but impassible to any USA-affiliated commercial shipping, cause chaos in the Gulf states, and more.

714:

EC @ 713 The US Admirals are not stupid, but the politicians are .... is there currently a US fleet "inside" the Persian Gulf? I can't remember. If so they are very very vulnerable. Even if not, then trying to enter via Hormuz will definitely cost them ships ... & the Persians WILL make sure, whatever the cost, to take out a US supercarrier, simply as a "message"

715:

Carriers have the approximate radar signature of a city. Sure, the f-35 staging of it is stealthy, but you do not have to hit it -just the enormous floating target. Carriers have very fancy anti-air and anti-missile defenses because this is a known problem.. but those fancy machines all rely on expendable munitions. Near as I can tell, if you fire a volley of fifty anti-ship missiles at a carrier, that is it, going to wind up on the seafloor because the aegis systems ran out of anti-missile-missiles, and the phalanx guns bloody well melted. Its entirely possible Iran - who must have been preparing for a US attack for at least the past 20 years, have stockpiled enough anti ship missiles to do this to every carrier the US has. Would not cost even as much as one of the carriers do.

716:

Whether the Iranians can take out the U.S. fleet is doubtless heavily related to what version of the Russian missiles/torpedoes they're currently using (For some reason I wasn't CC'ed on that particular email...) so the likelihood is really difficult to quantify.

717:

Worth pointing out that Sun Tzu was operating in a different environment, where armies tended to "forage" in the country through which they were moving. Fielding an army in this case means that crops that would have fed citizens through the winter feed an army in the summer or fall. Long campaigns were therefore a real problem for all parties.

We're in a somewhat different environment now, with our ludicrously long supply chains. That's actually one thing that makes a "short, victorious war" pretty close to impossible.

718:

I wasn't, either - that's why I was vague with "think" and "unlikely" and explicit with "sink"! It's quite possible that a fleet might have to retreat because of damage, which would be even more ego-busting.

719:

"I don't think the U.S. could lose a war with Iran; not if we really made a serious effort."

Right, as long as the hippies are put straight into the ovens this time it will be nothing but victory.

720:

It sounds like we're in completely-in-the-dark agreement. If they want to block the Gulf the Iranians could fill the outer hull of a couple tankers with cement and sink them at the narrowest point in the Gulf. That would suck for shipping.

What's really stupid about this is that (from the U.S. point of view) Iran's half-rational behavior would make a lovely counterpoint to Saudi religious fanaticism.

721:

I have a friend who likes to talk about 'handshake failure'. Projects that fail the moment agreement to attempt them is made. US wars are a lot like that.

However, the sad truth is that this is looking at them from the wrong angle. US wars aren't about anything so direct as foreign policy. Our ultra-wealthy don't care what happens in Iran. A few of them make money from war in general, so they like war in general and the means is the end. But most just don't really care at all. The real money is in changing how the pie is divided in the wealthy world. The goal of war is US domestic policy. Tax cuts, etc. The last war delivered a lot of tax cuts. It was a great success.

722:

There is a naval museum in Sydney, Australia, with a retired diesel-electric hunter-killer submarine in it.

There is a frame photograph in the wardroom, taken through the periscope of said submarine.

It's a US Navy CVN (I forget which one) dead in the water, range 2000 yards.

It was taken during an exercise; the Aussie boat sneaked inside the battle group's ASW perimeter and when the captain of the carrier saw the photograph he just about stroked out.

Reminder: Iran has diesel-electric boats and the Gulf is shallow and tightly constrains where a carrier can maneuver if it's to launch planes without coming within range of coastal defenses. All a sub captain has to do is work out where the carrier is likely to go, then position himself to lie in wait ...

723:

You're misunderstanding me completely. Read the whole post belowe carefully and you will understand my strategic objection to conquering Iran. (Note that in the interests of brevity, I don't plan to discuss the humanitarian angle.*)

If the U.S. radically increases the size of our military and pays for the necessary armaments, we can successfully defeat the Iranian army/Revolutionary Guard and occupy Iran. Unfortunately, that's the easy part.

Whether we can successfully occupy Iran is a completely different matter. The U.S. has an ugly tendency towards racism and cultural supremacy, including the unwillingness to learn foreign languages or learn about foreign cultures. We also make ridiculously over-optimistic assumptions about our military's ability to handle asymmetric warfare and as a result our attempts to pacify other countries are almost never successful.

Thus, the problem is not the ability to conquer Iran, but to hold it. In fact, we're so bad at occupying other countries that the best strategy for dealing with a U.S. invasion is to train heavily for guerrilla operations and let the initial invasion succeed.

Given these facts, the appropriate response for the U.S. is to avoid war with anyone. We're really good at beating your regular army, but we suck at beating your guerrillas. This leads to costly and unpopular wars which accomplish little, hurt the U.S. in multiple fashions, and fail to make us safer.

That's what I think. If I could be clearer, please let me know.

  • The humanitarian angle also sucks, of course. The average Iranian doesn't deserve what a U.S. invasion would do to their country.
724:

This assumes that the Iranian diesel-electrics aren't being shadowed by U.S. submarines.

Once again, the problem is not defeating Iran militarily. The problem is successfully occupying Iran. (Note that we both believe a serious attack on Iran would fail. We just see failure at different points in the process.)

725:

"US wars aren't about anything so direct as foreign policy."

Agreed. But they are sold/not sold to the public as being related to foreign policy, so it's important to have really, really good arguments available about how and why the failures will occur.

The simple fact of the matter is this; if we mount a serious attack on Iran, they will restart their nuke program and they will carry it through regardless of sanctions or other U.S. policies. If we're not willing to occupy Iran we shouldn't fire a single bullet.

726:

In the US, this has led to the "gig" economy, where the companies try to get everyone classed as an "independent contractor". See Uber, and Amazon, and.... "We'll pay you what we want, you'll take it, or we'll find someone hungrier, and you get to pay for everything else."

727:

Horace: "Caelo tonantem credidimus Iovem regnare; praesens divus habebitur Augustus adiectis Britannis imperio gravibusque Persis."

Trump: "Hold my beer..."

728:

US submarines tend to be big-ass nuclear boats. Which are great when it comes to playing tag with Russian or Soviet boomers under the polar ice cap or in the Atlantic or Pacific oceans, but are a wee bit oversized for stooging around in coastal waters and narrow straits.

Also: the cost/benefit of tying up a nuclear hunter-killer shadowing a cheap diesel-electric boat is not obviously good. A bit like the Saudi anti-aircraft battery that successfully killed a $250 Houthi drone using a $250,000 Patriot SAM.

729:

From what I read, I believe it was "faster and cheaper".

Faster, cheaper, better: chose two.

730:

If the "benefit" is that your aircraft carrier doesn't get torpedoed, I'd say it's worth every penny.

731:

Some of us are old enough to have spent years in the streets protesting 'Nam.

File that under the heading of no, I would not go. Add to that was the high point of my own, literal version of Alice's Restaurant, where the sargeant at the induction center/physical inspection center looked at me, and said, "Is there anything that will get you out?" (direct quote).

Please note that there were about a MILLION of us fuckers in DC the day after the (mis)inauguration of the Malignant Carcinoma. How many do you think would show up if they were going to reinstitute the draft? Hell, you want to see right-wingers blowing up induction centers?

732:

Oh, hell, what I thought of after I hit : first of all, due to current law and court decisions, they'd be drafting women, too.

And being that I read that you need 9 or 10 support staff for every combat soldier, I can see them using the women, except for those who push, to be most of the support staff.

Note that support staff includes in-country. Now, why don't you ask someone who served in 'Nam how "safe" Ho Chi Minh City (the former Saigon) was, back in the day?

734:

Exactly. And the company is being sued because they bought the "faster, cheaper" option.

735:

Exactly why I argue that Iran might successfully sink a U.S. fleet. There's no foreseeing the future, but an initial Iranian victory through asymmetrical warfare is definitely possible (plus all those Russian missiles.)

The problem is this, as I noted above. Once you commit to a serious attack on Iran, you can't stop, because they will endure sanctions and build nukes if they feel they have to.

736:

Darth Cheney wasn't interested in where the attackers were from.

Among the founding documents of the evil - really - PNAC, was a copy of the letter that was on their website, that they wrote to Clinton in '98, urging him to invade Iraq. Signed by Cheney. And Rummy. And Wolfowitz.

"Swallowed their own propaganda" that we'd be met with flowers? Sorry, people like that don't care about things like that, that's for the rubes. Control of oil is what it was about, and nothing else. Who cares if they murder each other....

737:

Yes, I get it and agree. Talking about 'the war' as oh... what was the jargon in Iraq "active combat operations" or something like that? The 'mission accomplished' banner. VS whatever happens after that.

I was saying the same thing before Iraq.

I think the mood of the people is very different. There was a bloodlust after 9/11.

Unfortunately there is only one very erratic old man who has to be convinced right now.

738:

Jeff FIsher @ 721 Projects that fail the moment agreement to attempt them is made. US wars are a lot like that. BREXIT ......

Persia I don't think the US, even with Bolton pushing hard will try to invade, just bomb the place .... At which there are going to be a huge number of "Terrorist" attacks on the US & US interests. It will be interesting if the rest of the EU stays out (note) & Britain prevaricates ... how "Nuanced" will the retailatory strikes from the mullahs be, or will they, too cock it up?

(Note ... from today's "Indie" Link suggesting UK is NOT enthusiastic about being dragged in - probably knowing electorate won't stand for it? )

739:

That's what the destroyers with the alleged anti-submarine warfare capacity are there for. In other news, the Wikipedia page on Carrier Strike Group 12 doesn't list any submarines are attached to it, whatever that means. And it's down a destroyer, since the Spanish destroyer seconded to the group was pulled from duty when the group headed towards the Gulf and its current mission.

What a mess. Hopefully cowardly/sensible minds will prevail in DC (as they seem to be right now), and the Stink'n Lincoln and its coterie will patrol around the Arabian Sea annoying pirates until this mess cools off a bit.

Too bad we can't give the War Walrus and Pompano M-4s and a case of C-4, put them in an MC-130E for covert insertion (per Eagle Claw, done right), and send them to Iran on a two-man mission to take down the regime...

740:

"...and send them to Iran on a two-man mission to take down the regime..."

What a lovely thought! I always thought the way to go with invading the Middle East was to establish a beachhead then invite "the right kind of Christians" to go over there and evangelize the Muslim Infidel.

741:

The Iranians have a small number of Kilo-class submarines. How many of them are operational is subject to question and the quality of their sub drivers is similarly questionable. The Bad News for any submarines and indeed a lot of surface shipping in the Gulf is the number of sea-bed mines the Iranians already have in place and how many more mines they could add to the constellation if they wanted to. Detecting, avoiding and/or disabling such mines located on the seabed is not easy but the large metallic signatures of combat ships, tankers and freighters moving around is remarkably easy to detect by quite simple and cheap mine fuze systems.

742:

Considering how well "the right kind of Christians" have done so far establishing a beach-head in the Persian expat enclaves of the West Coast, I'm sure that would go down extremely well.

743:

The Bad News for any submarines and indeed a lot of surface shipping in the Gulf is the number of sea-bed mines the Iranians already have in place and how many more mines they could add to the constellation if they wanted to. Detecting, avoiding and/or disabling such mines located on the seabed is not easy but the large metallic signatures of combat ships, tankers and freighters moving around is remarkably easy to detect by quite simple and cheap mine fuze systems.

Well, obviously, that's when you need to give each member of SEAL Team 8 (based temporarily on the Lincoln), a pair of bolt cutters, and tell them to go free-diving and get the mines out of the way (/sarcasm).

Sucks that billion dollar war machines are so vulnerable to asymmetric warfare.

744:

That's the whole point! Send "the right kind of Christians to places like Baghdad and Tehran, let them "work a miracle upon the unbeliever" and send the armies home, because God will supply all their needs.

745:

Hmmm. Pompano is listed as an "Evangelical Presbyterian" (meaning southern Presbyterians who don't hold with all that liberal northern stuff) while The War Walrus is listed as a Lutheran.

And they're both lawyers. Pompano, at least, did a hitch as a Cavalry Officer and served as head of the CIA, so he conceivably has a hint of a clue about how problematic war with Iran might be. The War Walrus is listed (per Wikipedia) as a draft dodger in Vietnam, although apparently his doctor didn't find bone spurs (he served in the National Guard to avoid having his number called). Otherwise, like us, he's an older gentleman who rants a lot and is therefore presumed to know what he's talking about.

Anyway, I do agree that starting an exodus to the Middle East of (preferably evangelical) Christian lawyers might just conceivably win the land back for Jesus, or possibly re-establish the Church of the East. Or something. Extra points if those lawyers are strongly encouraged (for Honduran levels of strong encouragement) to emigrate as refugees from DC and settle in the Gulf, so that they get a bone-deep understanding of the trials their Savior endured and can testify properly to them.

746:

Heteromeles @ 679: Um, where to start?

"First of all, there ain't no "Bushies in the Trump White House".."

John Bolton was under-secretary of state from 2001-2005 under Bush II. He was known as virulently pro-war, speaking on topics like WMDs and "beyond the axis of evil." So yes, there's a Bushie at the center of this mess.

Bolton had a government job Bush II. But that doesn't make him a "Bushie". Bolton's another of those Vietnam Chicken-hawks; a protégé of Jesse Helms and James Baker III (Ronald Reagan's consigliare). It was Baker who suggested to Bush père that Dick Cheney was the man who should vet Junior's possible running mates. And it was Cheney who decided the best choice Junior could make for the VP slot was ... wait for it ... DarthDick Cheney, a choice Bush père ultimately came to regret (because Cheney's loyalty was NOT to the Bush proto-dynasty). Bolton was Cheney's man. There's a whole clique of right wing operatives out of PNAC who worked in the Bush II administration who are NOT "Bushies". About the only members of Bush II first term who actually were "Bushies" are Colon Powell (spelling is deliberate) and Condoleezza Rice (and even Rice was half Cheney's creature).

Cheney's an oilman too. One of the things they were obviously hoping to accomplish in Iraq was privatizing Iraqi oil production under US firms. The Iraqis did a great job of sabotaging their own oil industry (destroying data, messing up equipment, etc.) and that scheme didn't pan out. Their attempt at nation-building obviously didn't work, but that was a side-line, since the real point of the exercise was to shift as much money to Cheney's old firm Halliburton, although it's not clear that worked as well as they wanted, either (Then again, where did all the money go?).

Cheney was a right-wing politician (protégé of Donald Rumsfield) in the Nixon & Ford Administrations, who came back to work for Bush I after Senate Republicans shit all over Bush's original nominee for Sec Def John Tower (because Tower supported Ford over Reagan for the GOP nomination in 1976). During his tenure as Sec Def, Cheney downsized military logistics & support and contracted them out to the Military-Industrial Complex, particularly Halliburton, an oil industry logistics company that had just acquired Kellog, Brown & Root (at the time one of the worlds largest construction companies, if not the largest). After George H.W. Bush lost the 1992 election, Cheney became a "member" of the American Enterprise Institute, and it was from there the Wall Street Bankers on Halliburton's board installed him as CEO.

There was no nation building in Bush II and Cheney's Iraq war. Period. Iraq was going to be the libertarian, Ayn Randian utopia of unfettered Laissez-faire capitalism.

https://harpers.org/archive/2004/09/baghdad-year-zero/ The Harpers Magazine archive is unfortunately behind a paywall - I include an excerpt I believe won't exceed fair use. (I downloaded the article years ago before Harpers moved it behind a paywall.)

"Baghdad year zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia"
"... Then I saw it: a construction crane. It was big and yellow and impressive, and when I caught a glimpse of it around a corner in a busy shopping district I thought that I was finally about to witness some of the reconstruction I had heard so much about. But as I got closer I noticed that the crane was not actually rebuilding anything—not one of the bombed-out government buildings that still lay in rubble all over the city, nor one of the many power lines that remained in twisted heaps even as the heat of summer was starting to bear down. No, the crane was hoisting a giant billboard to the top of a three-story building. SUNBULAH: HONEY 100% NATURAL, made in Saudi Arabia."
"Seeing the sign, I couldn't help but think about something Senator John McCain had said back in October. Iraq, he said, is “a huge pot of honey that's attracting a lot of flies.” The flies McCain was referring to were the Halliburtons and Bechtels, as well as the venture capitalists who flocked to Iraq in the path cleared by Bradley Fighting Vehicles and laser-guided bombs. The honey that drew them was not just no-bid contracts and Iraq's famed oil wealth but the myriad investment opportunities offered by a country that had just been cracked wide open after decades of being sealed off, first by the nationalist economic policies of Saddam Hussein, then by asphyxiating United Nations sanctions."
"Looking at the honey billboard, I was also reminded of the most common explanation for what has gone wrong in Iraq, a complaint echoed by everyone from John Kerry to Pat Buchanan: Iraq is mired in blood and deprivation because George W. Bush didn't have “a postwar plan.” The only problem with this theory is that it isn't true. The Bush Administration did have a plan for what it would do after the war; put simply, it was to lay out as much honey as possible, then sit back and wait for the flies."
"The honey theory of Iraqi reconstruction stems from the most cherished belief of the war's ideological architects: that greed is good. Not good just for them and their friends but good for humanity, and certainly good for Iraqis. Greed creates profit, which creates growth, which creates jobs and products and services and everything else anyone could possibly need or want. The role of good government, then, is to create the optimal conditions for corporations to pursue their bottomless greed, so that they in turn can meet the needs of the society. The problem is that governments, even neoconservative governments, rarely get the chance to prove their sacred theory right: despite their enormous ideological advances, even George Bush's Republicans are, in their own minds, perennially sabotaged by meddling Democrats, intractable unions, and alarmist environmentalists."

As for Bush II going after Iraq when his poll numbers fell, a) I predicted that when he got elected (and I still regret not putting that in writing), and b) if you look at the archived approval ratings, you'll see he got two big bumps in his ratings: one right after 9/11 (51%-90%) and the second right after he declared war on Iraq (57%-71%). And (not so) oddly, he declared war in Iraq when his approval rating had fallen to where it was before 9/11. Coincidence, I'm sure.

Junior didn't go after Iraq because his poll numbers fell. Iraq was the initial target from day one of the Bush II presidency. I say INITIAL TARGET because the plan was always to use Iraq as the staging area for taking out Iran. Cheney and his PNAC coterie didn't understand the reality of the middle east any better than Daddy Bush did in 1991 or Donald Trump does today. But that didn't deter them. They were always going after Iraq as a prelude to going after Iran. All they needed was a casus belli.

If 9/11 hadn't happened, they'd have had to create one of their own.

I don't believe the 9/11 conspiracy theories that it was an inside job; another "Operation Northwoods", but I do believe there are enough strange coincidences to support the question "Did they let it happen on purpose?"

I never understood how Junior got a boost to his approval ratings for presiding over what is arguably the biggest American defense failure since the British burned Washington, DC on August 24, 1814.

But, WHY were Junior's poll numbers down in the dumps. Do you remember ENRON? Do you remember DarthDick Cheney's secret energy plan (which turned out to be nothing more than doing to U.S. consumers what they later did to the Iraqis). Do you remember Rolling Blackouts? Do you remember Junior's good friend Kenney Boy Lay?

As for Bush I, since Brent Scowcroft, his national security advisor, reportedly had ties to the company that sold Kuwait the side-drilling oil rigs that started the whole mess, I tend to be suspicious about who was engineering what (remember, he was the CIA director, and certainly not one to avoid intelligence). The point of his short, victorious war wasn't to conquer Iraq, because Bush I the ex-spook was clued-in enough to recognize a quagmire when he saw one (anybody paying attention was, including me, and I was an idiot just out of college out protesting the war). He wanted a Saddam monster-on-a-chain that he could threaten the Saudis and Emiratis with, and it worked reasonably well (the gambit being, "let us keep our military bases near your oil fields, or we'll have to go home and Saddam can re-arm and get vengeance). Sadly, Bush's son didn't realize that his father was smarter than he was and had the Texas disease of trying to out-do his father (my late father, a Texan, had the same problem and it almost killed him).

Iraq wouldn't have been a quagmire in 1991. It would have been over in less than half the time it took in 2003 and the U.S. Army could have hit & run ... and then Bush could have turned the whole thing over to the UN to administer as a big OOPS, momentum. All that crap about "We'd have been all alone" was just sour grapes to excuse how badly they'd screwed the pooch. Plus the U.S. could have kept a few bases in Iraq to provide logistics support to the UN administration. Even bin Ladin wouldn't have had any squawk. The key would have been Get in, do the dirty deed, get out & let the UN handle the aftermath. Win-Win for everybody except for Saddam (who wouldn't have been around to spill the beans).

Anyway, Bush I made the cardinal mistake of saying, "read my lips, no new taxes," then raising taxes. That was enough to cost him the presidency. Remember, most Americans only care about international politics in a presidential election when we're at war or dealing with immigrants. Bush II, for all his very real sins, did get a second term, so in that way he outdid his daddy."

Daddy Bush was above the level of his incompetence the whole time he was in office. It wasn't just his mishandling of Saddam & Kuwait.

As far as Junior "getting" a second term, the 2004 election stinks on ice even worse than 2000 did. There are many more and more widespread questions about the legitimacy of the 2004 vote than there were about 2000. In 2000 it only involved one state where Bush's brother was governor.

747:

Well, thank you for sharing your prejudices. That was informative.

748:

It was HMAS Onslow and the USS Carl Vinson. To quote Wikipedia: The boat's luck changed during the latter part of RIMPAC 98, when on the morning of 10 August, Onslow located the 'enemy' Nimitz-class USS Carl Vinson, closed to within 300 metres (980 ft) without being detected, then released green flares to indicate her location, 'sinking' the supercarrier.

749:

Greg Tingey @ 680: Heteromeles @ JBS
News is that Trumpolini ordered a strike on Iran, but then "changed his mimd"
Like, perhaps the US military told him that they really didn't want to?
However it's scary, if only because they have picked up Putin's meme, presumabky under orders (?) for a Short Victorious War ...
[NOTE to EC: Contra to your claim, I see someone else has pointed out that VP does do it, but of course the very ORIGIN of the phrase is Russian ... V von Plehve, just before or at the start of the Russo-Japanese War ]

Even if it does not start WW III, it will/would be long & expensive & disastrous & I do hope we don't get dragged in.
Again our in-house experts are against it, but either Cunt or Jonson has "had enough of experts" so ... though the civil protest & in Parliament would be huge ... expect mass resignations in the services, too ...

Of course, it depends on WHEN Trump/Bolton/Putin START their short victorious war ... start it too soon & the blow-back will REALLY cost Trump (& Putin) next year's election, so they ought to want to sabre-rattle until about July NEXT year, but it looks as though Trump may (excuse the phrase) jump the gun, which coiuld be "interesting" from the US intrnal politics p.o.v.

If I haven't said it outright somewhere up above, I know I've hinted it strongly ... Trump doesn't have a CLUE. He doesn't really want a war, but he shoots his mouth off without any idea (or care about) the possible consequences.

And his candy-floss ass just isn't prepared to deal with anyone who doesn't back down from his machismo posturing. Iran ain't gonna back down.

So now, Trump doesn't know what to do and he doesn't know who among his advisors he should listen to. He's never needed anyone who wasn't a "Yes man" before and he doesn't have any way to know who's actually telling him the truths he needs to extricate himself from the mess he's made.

750:

Elderly Cynic @ 682:

That's your take on it. I don't think everyone agrees. I don't.

751:

Greg Tingey @ 686:

make Sevastopol a "NATO" port ... STUPID.

It would be if it were true. Ukraine still hasn't applied for membership in NATO, although they now look to be planning to do so in the face of Russian agression ... just as soon as they can qualify.

Some people just can't admit that Russia ever might be the bad guys in any conflict. It's always the bad ol' United States of AmeriKKKa picking on poor little innocent Russia. Russia NEVER attacks anyone, it's always the CIA!

752:

You wrote: As far as Junior "getting" a second term, the 2004 election stinks on ice even worse than 2000 did. There are many more and more widespread questions about the legitimacy of the 2004 vote than there were about 2000. In 2000 it only involved one state where Bush's brother was governor.

What you said. There were posts from someone who worked for Diebold in Georgia (US state) where he talked about being sent to warehouses and installing UNAPPROVED BY THE VOTING COMMISSION patches to the software.

Let's not forget the head of Diebold, who was the biggest manufacturer and most sales to states of all-electronic voting machines, who was also head of the Shrub's re-election campaign in OH, and promised to deliver the state for the Shrub.

And the studies, afterwords, led by Prof. Ari Rubin of Johns Hopkins, who found the voting machines utterly insecure - hell, they used, IIRC, Excell, not an actual transactional d/b, to record votes.

753:

Charlie Stross @ 688:

In situation (b) I am totally an employer because I direct them and so I'm responsible for ticking all the boxes to do with their payroll, income tax, national insurance, workplace health and safety, statutory sick pay, and so on, and for providing them with a properly furnished and equipped work environment, managing their activities, and generally acting like a real business.

Or situation "(ab)" where you contract the accountants to handle all the payroll, tax, insurance ... sick pay for your employee, leaving you to provide them the work environment & manage their activities. Lots of small business handle payroll that way. Lots of accountancy firms are small businesses providing payroll & tax services to other small business.

754:

"...who found the voting machines utterly insecure - hell, they used, IIRC, Excell, not an actual transactional d/b, to record votes."

If you build on top of Windows and hire inexperienced programmers under an NDA, you don't need to write incriminating emails. Just hire a pen-testing team and... ahem, "follow their recommendations."

755:

Thanks. It's much, much worse than I recalled: TLDR is that in 1998, a 31-year-old diesel-electric boat commissioned in 1963 got the drop on a Nimitz-class carrier at point-blank range (in naval terms, 300 metres is just about close enough to break out the cutlasses and boarding ropes). The Mk-48 torpedoes carried by the Onslow could cover that distance in roughly 10 seconds. The USS Carl Vinson was basically dead meat at that point.

I am just going to note that the Iranian navy not only operates three Kilo class subs—a generation newer than the HMAS Onslow—but a number of smaller (500-1200 ton) home-built diesel-electrics plus midget subs. It's anybody's guess how effective they'd be, but anything that can fire this is probably not something a carrier group wants to play footsie with in littoral waters.

In terms of blue-water navy capabilities, the Iranian navy isn't on the map. But in terms of causing sleepless nights for a carrier admiral trying to get in close, it's definitely there. (There is a reason why the F-35C was specced with a 50% greater combat radius than the currently deployed F/A-18 …)

756:

Troutwaxer @ 698:

I don't think the U.S. could lose a war with Iran; not if we really made a serious effort. If we had to, we could re-institute the draft, land marines, go overland from Iraq, etc., and the Iranian Army/Republican Guard wouldn't be able to offer much opposition - they have neither the technology or the doctrine.

Trouble is, the U.S. couldn't WIN a war with Iran either. There's no chance of the draft coming back. An invasion of Iran would be at best a debacle equivalent to Afghanistan AND Iraq. And don't be so smug about the U.S. doctrinal and/or technological advantages. Or assume Iranian disadvantages.

757:

Not only everything we've already discussed, but the Iranians also have the advantage of being able to hit vessels transiting the Persian Gulf from their coast, which borders the Persian Gulf for something like 800 miles... The Straits of Hormuz are only 30 miles wide and the navigable channel is only about a mile wide.

If anyone thinks the Iranians don't have that channel dialed in perfectly, raise your hand.

Bueller?

758:

I don't think anyone here believes that a U.S. attack on Iran could be ultimately successful. The only point of disagreement is whether it would fail in the initial invasion or during the occupation.

You say potato...

759:

Charlie Stross @ 708:

Iran has roughly the same population of Germany and land area as Mexico, and is roughly 10,000km from the USA. If you want to make a military occupation work, you need boots on the ground—lots of boots: IIRC the ratio for occupying Germany at the end of WW2 was 1 occupier per 10 civilians at first, and a comprehensive occupation isn't feasible with less than 1 occupier per 20 civilians. When in 1972 the British Army executed Operation Motorman to suppress the Provisional IRA insurgency in Northern Ireland—population: 1.5 million—they send 27,000 troops; that suggests a ratio of 20K troops/million population minimum (Motorman reinforced existing RUC and army units that were already fighting a losing battle).

Pointing that requirement out in open testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee February 2003 was what got Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki fired. Turned out he was right though.

As for "wouldn't be able to offer much opposition" I'd like to draw your attention to the 2006 Lebanon War, and who was backing the proxy forces on each side. And also note that Iran, unlike Iraq, has 2500 years of common national identity (rather than being a spatchcock assemblage thrown together by the British after the fall of the Ottoman empire) and would be fighting on their own soil. And that Iran is mainly Shi'ite and the USA is in bed with Saudi Arabia and in any such conflict would as a Saudi catspaw in a holy war to exterminate Shi'a Islam. Not to mention the USA being thoroughly detested because of the coup of 1953 that installed a bloody-handed dictatorship …

Better yet, look at the Iraq-Iran war 1980 - 1988, since it was fought over the same terrain we'd have to fight over to invade Iran from Iraq. Invading from Afghanistan would be even worse, plus Pakistan probably wouldn't cooperate even if they are predominately Sunni and don't much care for Iran's Shia population.

760:

Troutwaxer @ 723:

If the U.S. radically increases the size of our military and pays for the necessary armaments, we can successfully defeat the Iranian army/Revolutionary Guard and occupy Iran. Unfortunately, that's the easy part.

That's a BIG IF that ain't gonna' happen. I mean BIG IF on the scale of IF you eat your wheaties and IF you practice hard every day and IF the American Graded Stakes Committee of the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association changes the rules to let you enter, you could successfully run in next year's Kentucky Derby.

Understand this one thing. If there's a war between the U.S. and Iran in the Persian Gulf it's LOSE-LOSE-LOSE. There ain't gonna' be no winners and that includes EVERYBODY on the Eurasia land mass.

761:

"If there's a war between the U.S. and Iran in the Persian Gulf it's LOSE-LOSE-LOSE. There ain't gonna' be no winners and that includes EVERYBODY on the Eurasia land mass."

I think I've said that. Several times. Several times today, in fact.

762:

JBS @ 749 Yes, correct ( I think ) Trump could easily bumble into a war he doesn't want - though Bolton does, because he "thinks" he can get away with it ....

@ 751 Actually I think there are TWO "Bad Guys" ... the USA & RU, simultaneously, but in different ways.

Charlie @ 755 The US are "experimenting" with supercavitating torpedoes ... & the RN, apparently does not have them ( unles they are buying the German ones ) I wonder why not - are there drawbacks to the design/operation/ guidance with such?

Come to that, if the US started behaving seriously stupidly ( like consoderably worse than even now ) would Turkey stay in NATO? Erdogan is quite likely to change sides at such a juncture, which would be .... interesting.

JBS @ 760 Maybe not ... if the rest of the EU STAYS OUT & makes that clear, then they will be clear "winners" ... because no-one will be attacking them.

763:

I'm guessing the RN isn't interested in supercavitating torpedoes because they don't play well with RN submarine doctrine.

Supercavitating torpedoes are hellishly fast, but short range unguided/inertially guided weapons—they're not homing torpedoes. (They were originally developed by the Soviets in the 1970s as a "revenge" weapon—if one of their subs is attacked by a US/UK sub, then the attacker gives away their location, and the Soviet skipper can take a shot with a supercavitating torpedo before the guided torpedo homes in and kills him. This made sense to some extent as back then Soviet nuclear submarines were noisier but more numerous than their western equivalents: having such a weapon would even the odds somewhat.)

RN doctrine focusses on stealthy, extremely quiet nuclear hunter killers that ideally attack at very long range using Tomahawk or Harpoon missiles rather than getting up close and personal. This makes sense when a big chunk of your mission is to protect the boomers on deterrent patrol in the North Atlantic. (This is also a large chunk of US Naval thinking about SSNs.) A knife-fighting range weapon is kind of spurious, much like equipping a sniper rifle with a bayonet.

764:

Actually, I'd suggest that the biggest problems with electrical are the insulators for the wires (and/or the porcelain for the insulators if you want to run bare wires on posts) and the lubricants for the moving parts. It would also be good to have access to someone who can do precise machining without necessarily having a working machine lathe, even if they have a lot of the tools. And building a dam starts, as usual, with the "build a kiln to make the lime for the cement, plus source good river sand for the concrete" problem. In other words, you're assuming there's going to be a lot of stuff lying around that's already starting to be in short supply (like building sand).

Ok, you don't need to build a concrete dam to get water power. If you go to the Hagley Museum (historic DuPont gun powder mill) you see a working set of machine tools (including lathes, drills, bandsaws, etc.) that are all water powered (with lots of belts and pulleys) from a water turbine feed from a mill race (water diverted from an earthen dam). That gives you enough to boot strap up to building an electric generator (DuPont didn't do this, gunpowder and electricity don't mix well).

765:

Ukraine still hasn't applied for membership in NATO, although they now look to be planning to do so in the face of Russian agression ... just as soon as they can qualify. Several misdirected misconceptions here. Ukraine has been applying to NATO since the day one. In fact, even Russia was asking several times. NATO isn't going to accept, of course, for reasons I already stated before - are not balkanized enough for the Nazi Cartel tastes. In fact, the largest problem here now that even the countries that are already in the alliance don't have enough money to support it (throw out their rusty Soviet standards and buy new shiny STANAG trash). Secondly, you don't need to have membership in NATO, or any membership at all, or any specific requirements to have US base on your country's soil. Only powerlessness. Some journalists found out that US has been issuing contracts to reconstruct some Sevastopol buildings for future American residents years before the coup happened. Intelligence in the region would have to be blindfolded to miss such obvious signs. And the last, but not least important, western politicians have a bad habit in believing in their own lies. They believed that several decades worth of existing outside Russia and relentless Ukrainian nationalist propaganda would erode local Russian population enough for them to try out forceful method - start with local riots and escalate into full-force invasion. But it was prevented on day one.

Some people just can't admit that Russia ever might be the bad guys in any conflict. In any given conflict, there are no bad and good guys, there's only "us" and "them". After it, though, it is "winners" aka "good guys" and, well, "bad guys". What year is it in terms of clueless globalist utopia, if I have to fall back to such explanation?

766:

The idea of a nuclear sub successfully shadowing a diesel sub is slightly bizarre. Nuclear reactors make noise all the time. Lots of noise. A diesel electric rigged for silent running doesn't (which is why old Australian subs could stroll past ASW picket lines with impunity). The straight is full of big noisy tankers. The diesel could hop from one to another all day with their signature covered, drop to the bottom wherever they wanted then pop up and tag behind another tanker. They could probably even come up to snorkel behind a tanker and charge up without the nuclear sub ever hearing them. There have been lots of wars in the gulf and I'd imagine there are lots of wrecks they could nestle up to to hide their magnetic and sonar signature.

767:

Sounds just like an anecdote told by Peter Ustinov.

He was on a capture the flag exercise in a small town near the beginning of WWII. He was on the invaders side with the goal of reaching the town hall The defenders had to stop them.

Ustinov noticed that the defense was all at the cross roads (intersections). His unit had bravely stormed the strongest defences and had bravely 'died' and were now enjoying cups of tea. I think he'd bravely decided not to walk straight into a machine gun surrounded by referees.

He noticed that the houses in the middle of the block were getting a thorough ignoring from the defenders. So he hopped the back fence of one, and knocked on the back door. The occupant greeted him at the door and he explained that he was on exercise and needed to get across town, (leaving out the bit about him playing a German). The good bürgers of the town were only too happy to conduct him through their house. Exiting the front door, he dashed across the road and repeated the process. Eventually he came out the front door of the house across the road from the town hall. Quick as a flash he's across the road to the town hall steps just as the defenders CO is coming out. He raises his wooden gun and shouts, "BANG, the red team has won Sir", to which the CO replies "Poppycock", keeps walking, gets into his staff car and drives off.

Ustinov was 'captured' and much hilarity ensued as he disrupted his interrogation by refusing to speak anything but German.

768:

Given the incident with the colliding boomer subs, I suspect that the whole issue of "Reactor noise" might be... slightly overstated for modern designs.

769:

Troutwaxer @ 761:

"If there's a war between the U.S. and Iran in the Persian Gulf it's LOSE-LOSE-LOSE. There ain't gonna' be no winners and that includes EVERYBODY on the Eurasia land mass."

I think I've said that. Several times. Several times today, in fact.

No, you've kept repeating that the U.S. couldn't successfully occupy Iran after a war, but would inevitably WIN such a war.

@ 698:
"I don't think the U.S. could lose a war with Iran; not if we really made a serious effort. If we had to, we could re-institute the draft, land marines, go overland from Iraq, etc., and the Iranian Army/Republican Guard wouldn't be able to offer much opposition - they have neither the technology or the doctrine."
@ 711:
"In reaction, the U.S. decides to go on a total war footing; reinstate the draft, massively increase the size of the military, build landing boats, park half-a-dozen aircraft carriers just outside of Iranian missile range, take out their hundreds/thousands of missile launchers, send PT boats in to take out the Iranian missile boats; you know, the whole WWII thing. The U.S. could do the military part of it, though it would be ridiculously expensive and horrible for all concerned. (Halliburton and Boeing would be thrilled!)"
@ 723:
"If the U.S. radically increases the size of our military and pays for the necessary armaments, we can successfully defeat the Iranian army/Revolutionary Guard and occupy Iran. Unfortunately, that's the easy part."
@ 758:
"I don't think anyone here believes that a U.S. attack on Iran could be ultimately successful. The only point of disagreement is whether it would fail in the initial invasion or during the occupation."

The U.S. cannot WIN a war with Iran. The failure is getting into such a war in the first place. There ain't no "easy part". Nobody wins, EVERYBODY loses. Even countries who are not involved.

770:

You mean the boomers that couldn't hear each other over the racket their own boats made? Those boomers?

771:

Greg Tingey @ 762:

@ 751
Actually I think there are TWO "Bad Guys" ... the USA & RU, simultaneously, but in different ways.

That was actually meant to describe someone else who DOES NOT EVER admit poor ol' innocent Russia could even contemplate screwing over another country; e.g. would never send GRU agents to Britain using false passports to spray Novichok agent" A-234

I'm sure there are times the U.S. has become the bad guy, but invading the Ukraine ain't one of 'em.

JBS @ 760
Maybe not ... if the rest of the EU STAYS OUT & makes that clear, then they will be clear "winners" ... because no-one will be attacking them.

The rest of the EU wouldn't be able to stay out of it even if they wanted to (and I expect they do). If the U.S. didn't drag them in, Iran would and that's not even counting whatever mischief "other players" might get up to trying to take advantage of the distraction. They all get dragged in will or nil.

772:

Heteromeles @ 747:

Well, thank you for sharing your prejudices. That was informative.

Visualize it this way ... The Bush proto-dynasty is the House of York and Trump is the House of Lancaster, although that wildly overstates Trump's legitimacy ... perhaps if Napoleon Bonaparte had been able to interfere in the War of the Roses.

773:

Puh-leeze. I was trying to be polite, remembering the advice about arguing with those who might conceivably be deemed by bystanders to be idiots.

If you want to understand both a bit better, I'd merely suggest getting AND reading a copy of Capital without Borders. Neither of the two families is mentioned in that book, but their culture certainly is.

774:

Yes, I do mean that, if you get a qualified tradesman to do something, they cock it up, and injure themselves as a result, THEY can sue YOU. But I can't remember if a relevant case has ever been settled in court.

In the US anyone with half a brain asks for (and quickly gets from anyone reputable) a certificate of insurance for work done by someone you hire. (Old farts will know this as the yellow form but today it usually comes via email.) This is proof that they have insurance coverage for whatever they do wrong. (Not sure about setting off a nuke but in general ...)

775:

Have you ever kept 28,000 sheep in a warehouse for 30 days to clear quarantine? The smell is incredible.

Were you required to quarantine the pee and poop? Or did the PTB not think through the process?

On the 31st day I, as the superfluous watchman, got some time off and there was a gigantic cleaning project which involved a bulldozer. Thankfully it was never my problem. As you will try not to imagine, by the last week the deposit layer was getting rather deep...

776:

The worst-case scenario goes something like this: We lose our fleet in the Persian Gulf. This isn't likely, but depending on how good Iran's anti-shipping missiles are, it's possible.

It is most likely. If you have big targets today, defense is almost impossible over more than a few days time if the other side as more than a handful of guided munitions. Guided missiles/drones/whatever are just too cheap and can be thrown at you until you die.

The US military knows this and is one reason they are almost all in on stealth. Carriers are in the Gulf only because they can't operate from the southern tip of India. Aircraft ranges are just too limiting.

Once munitions switched from heavy lumps tossed with decent precision into explosives which can fly themselves into the target with more and more evasion built in as time goes by has totally changed the value systems of the military.

Back at the start of things in 2001 my brother worked for one of the big defense contractors. It was totally game changing to military thinking that they could spend $20K on a smart strap on guidance system to a 500lbs and up bomb and just drop them one at a time from a circling B52 or similar. From 20,000+ feet there's a lot of time for steering to a target. The USAF quickly wound up with many missions of just flying large figure 8s over various areas and releasing a guided thing when requested. DID NOT make the pilots happy to be flying such missions. The point being this extra $20K was so much cheaper than dropping dumb bombs over and over again.

777:

SR @ 765 "Nazi Cartel" - now that is YOU Believeing Putin's propaganda. Oh & ... correction: And the last, but not least important, westernALL politicians have a bad habit in believing in their own lies. - there, fixed that for you.

Oh yes: In any given conflict, there are no bad and good guys, there's only "us" and "them". OH DEAR - you are so out of date. Here is a better quote: "My country, right or wrong - to be supported if right & if wrong to be put right"

JBS @ 771 Agree about the person ( NOT "S-R" ) who refuses to admit RU could ever be guilty, however: I'm sure there are times the U.S. has become the bad guy, but invading the Ukraine ain't one of 'em. Yes, but ... Iraq, several times, Grenada, multiple central American countries, covert backing for the separatist mine-owners in the Congo ( See also the film about the Irish stand there - Jadotville ) the CIA coup in Greece, the murder of David Kelly .. etc etc .... Why would Iran drag the EU in? They ( The admittedly-religious-fundie-loonies ) are not THAT stupid ... they know the EU doesn't want to be involved, why make an extra enemy for yourself - leave them alone? The Iranian regime is currently making desperate signals to everyone else to stay out, with the strong implication that "we will leave you alone, if you do the same"

778:

US submarines tend to be big-ass nuclear boats. ... but are a wee bit oversized for stooging around in coastal waters and narrow straits.

Yep.

From wikipedia: "The waters are overall very shallow, with a maximum depth of 90 metres (295 feet) and an average depth of 50 metres (164 feet)."

So let's take a 688 or later which is about 50 feet tall. I can't imagine anyone with a brain trying to do much of anything underwater with such. And most sub captains are not stupid.

779:

Sucks that billion dollar war machines are so vulnerable to asymmetric warfare.

Yes. As you build more expensive things the defense of them has to approach or even reach 100% or you have a total fail. And currently we are no where near 100%.

780:

Pompano, at least, did a hitch as a Cavalry Officer and served as head of the CIA, so he conceivably has a hint of a clue about how problematic war with Iran might be.

He was first in his class at West Point as an Engineering major. I don't think he did any tours in any dangerous areas. Or even left the country.

781:

This conversation about military capabilities & defences makes me wonder. Are we in another "pre-1914" period, where defence is much stronger than offence? A really succesful first strike - like Germany in 1914 or '39 will get you territory, but ... then what? You have to hold it down & resist attack & supply your troops & sailors & feed your own population. Look what that got Germany in 1918 & '45 .....

In this context, as we all agree, the US could trash Iran ... but to what purpose? That would only start an unending guerilla war, with at least tens of thousands of casualties, mostly civilian. [ DON'T mention Yemen! ] And then what? "Thinking this through" seems to be the missing component here ......

782:

And also note that Iran, unlike Iraq, has 2500 years of common national identity

My take on Trump (and I've been casually watching him on the business side of the universe for a few decades) is that he basically has NO policy positions. Unless such positions give him a way to add money or "prestige" to his self.

Period. Full stop.

He was a liberal Democrat for most of his time running the Trump business out of NYC because that was how the power structure there operated. When he got the idea to go national with a run for Pres he suddenly became an R. Not because he liked their policies better on any ethical/ideological basis. But because he could ride their voters to the top if he addressed a message to them. But said message had nothing to do with his beliefs. Nothing at all.

There's a side digression here where it becomes obvious that DT wants news to be PR. And is really frustrated when it doesn't work that way.

As to war with Iran and all these other things, (NK, China, trade, Nato, etc...), Trump is a bully. And for decades he was able to operate and pick his battles such that he could brow beat the other guy into submission or walk away and find another possible target. (The NYC real estate market is huge. There is no one who controls it. So there are lots of targets to go bully while avoiding the ones who will not bow to your threats.)

Now he's come into the bigger world and guess what. Money is not all that matters to these other people. And for some survival doesn't matter. How do you bully someone into submission if they are willing to go down in glorious death before submitting. And do their best to take you down with them.

His entire way of dealing with the world has run into its limits. And he doesn't know how to deal with it.

783:

where defence is much stronger than offence? A really succesful first strike - like Germany in 1914 or '39 will get you territory, but ... then what?

Totally.

Win DOES NOT EQUAL conquer.

In the US government this is not a well received or accepted thing. Most of the military gets it but they take orders from the "government".

I suspect that most other governments in the G20 are in similar situations.

784:

Yes, neither are 'good guys', but I am talking realpolitik: survival of their states as independent countries.

The USA/NATO is vastly more powerful than Russia war, and has been closing into Russia since the demise of the USSR; Putin was elected on a platform of fighting back, and remains overwhelming popular for that reason. As everyone with the slightest clue about history or military strategy knows, a weaker, encircled opponent cannot afford to give way on important matters to a hegemonistic opponent, or will simply be eaten up piecemeal.

The facts that I posted were all published in the Western press, incidentally, as was the (related) fact that the USA had started arming the Syrian rebels in 2010 (yes, before the Arab Spring).

785:

There's something in a clip advertising "Good Omens" [ Incidentally, when will the BeeB broadcast it & when can I get the DVD's ????? ] where Azraphale says ... "but the doesn't HAVE to be a war!" & another "angel" replies "Of COURSE there hase, otherwise, how would we WIN it?" in an obvious USA accent . Um, errr ....

786:

Yes, very much so, with one major objection.

It's a serious mistake to assume that the personalities are primary, and the organisations secondary; most organisations pick leaders that represent their views, and it is only rarely that a leader takes an organisation in a direction it was not already taking. Yes, Trump is a bully and is targetting Iran - but his failings that you describe are merely making it the USA's positions obvious even to the most blinkered apologist.

Take the nuclear deal with Iran. Exactly WHY was it needed, and WHY was Iran singled out? Iran was not working on a bomb, had no intentions of building one, and the perceived lack of cooperation was partly (or largely) because the USA had used the IAEA inspections to infiltrate spies. And it was 'negotiated' simultaneously with providing nuclear technology and studiously ignoring Israel's nuclear weapons - two countries that have stated an intent to destroy Iran.

In some ways, Trump is a Good Thing, by exposing what has been going on for years - but, unfortunately, people will attach too much of the responsibility to him, when it is the organisations that are the culprits.

787:

Unfortunately, too many people are too keen to equate WIN with DESTROY. That's much easier and, in the case of the USA and Iran, trivial to do - and several USA politicians (including Trump) have threatened it. God alone knows what the rest of the world would do if the USA nukes Tehran, for example.

788:

There’s at least one SSN in the Gulf accompanying the USS Stennis. USN SOP is that wherever there’s a CVN on operations there’s an SSN acting as an ASW picket. There’s two SSN on station during handover of the picket.

789:

You may be slightly behind the times regarding reactor machinery noise in nuclear boats. Time was, fifty or sixty years ago they were quite noisy with pumps and such bolted hard to the hull structures. As ASW systems got better the designers moved to isolate noisy components from the hull and introduce layers of sound and vibration absorbing materials. The newest generation of nuclear subs use electric drive rather than nuclear-generated steam turbines for propulsion meaning the entire power plant can be isolated from the hull. There are other passive features like sound-absorbing tiling on the outside of the hull that's primarily aimed at defeating sonar but also reduces the boat's own noise signature from internal sources.

One of the latest British hunter-killer sub class, the Astutes went on exercise with the US Navy a couple of years ago, going up against their fleet ASW as well as playing tag with US hunter-killer nuclear subs. The result was that the Astute boat with its modern sonar signal detection and processing capabilities could "hold" the US boats with a targetting solution while the US boats couldn't even tell it was there.

790:

My point was about what DT will do next. He has no idea until he makes an emotional decision because he knows (claims) to be so much smarter than the experts or even facts and so his gut will tell him the best path.

He just can't comprehend that no mater what he wants to believe his failure modes now include much of the industrial world. Not some subcontractor or real estate agent.

791:

From what I can find the USS Stennis CVN 74 is due back in home port soon. https://news.usni.org/tag/uss-john-c-stennis-cvn-74

CVN 72 is in Gulf of Oman.

And yes an SSN is supposed to be with each CVN but how well it can do much of anything is such water is a good question.

792:

A question that is undoubtedly occupying the thoughts of the Iranian naval staff. Not too mention giving the Iranian Kilo class sub commander trailing the US carrier a really itchy feeling in the middle of his back. That’s the beauty of submarines they complicate the tactical problem wonderfully :)

793:

Oh, yes, I agree there. But my point is that is also true of the organisations in the military-industrial complex, USA government etc., and the problem will not go away when Trump is finally kicked out. It will merely be less obvious, and not as obviously bone-headed.

794:

@786 Elderly Cynic: “had no intentions of building one”

I think that’s somewhat misleading as a statement. There’s a halfway step of wanting to acquire a shoulder capability so that should things deteriorate you can quickly develop an operational capability. That also avoids all the real problems associated with having nukes. That said it is just about the slowest escalation in history.

795:

I'm certainly out of date. It's 25 years since I regularly lunched with navy types.

Though you point out that the US boats couldn't detect the UK boats while the UK boats knew exactly where the US boats were. Which sort of implies that the US boats are noisy old things that a quiet boat can run rings around. Which is kind of what I said (though I won't be right as soon as the US gets new boats).

796:

It's what the Supreme Leader had stated (and more-or-less included in a fatwa, which is NOT something he would put a lie in). Even more importantly, the IAEA reports stated that Iran's capabilities and facilities were not going to take it to that stage.

Whether they STILL have no intention, I can't say. Given what has been done to them, Iraq and Libya, they would be extremely foolish not to develop at least a shoulder capability. The demands of the USA/Saudi/etc. axis are incompatible with both survival as an independent state and the preservation of their religion.

797:

If I was a US carrier captain I'd be less worried about the Kilo class than the Ghadir and Nahang class small littoral subs. Stealthy in-shore minelayers in the 100-500 ton range, also able to mount surface-skimming missiles and fire while submerged. They've got more than 20 of the things. Which implies the ability to swiftly deploy minefields in the straits, where there's no room for the big ships to maneuver around them.

798:

The strength of a fatwah is again something that western folk don’t seem to get. But then getting an ability without actually building anything is a way of squaring that particular circle.

799:

Paging Winston Churchill, Winston to the CIC for Operation Dardanelles please.

800:

Which sort of implies that the US boats are noisy old things that a quiet boat can run rings around. Which is kind of what I said (though I won't be right as soon as the US gets new boats).

Who can hear who and not be hear by who seems to depend more on the decade of your design and/or construction than the actual skill set of the Navy.

But a battery driven boat will definitely be quieter than some kind of dynamic energy into electricity setup if both are using similar motors to drive the shafts.

Then there is the entire issue of prop design which in theory can be more easily upgraded than most any other part on a sub.

801:

Nojay @ 789 There's an apocryphal story about the French Boomer boats ... they had to completely re-design & manufacture the automated bread-making machinery for the crew's Pain ordinaire so that it didn't make any clicking or stirring noises that could then be use to locate the boat!

802:

If it was a war for the regime's survival, Iran would drag NATO in at the very least. A small reminder that Iran's capabilities are not limited to the middle East. Their long range missiles can hit NATO bases in Eastern Europe and Southern Italy. Do you think that they would avoid using these missiles

https://www.google.com/search?q=iran+missile+range&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=U_r3YaQcCY8ICM%253A%252CIh6cx1sgz4wrdM%252C_&vet=1&usg=AI4_-kRUfjo96QrqaxNASmp8gm5MnvBT6A&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwji6J6ztP3iAhXCV98KHdW1Bz0Q9QEwAHoECAUQAw#imgrc=U_r3YaQcCY8ICM:

@781 Greg "Are we in another "pre-1914" period, where defence is much stronger than offence?" That's a valid interpretation.

@786 EC In fairness, before the deal the US had 2 complaints with Iran: them building a nuclear weapon and them building an ICBM. The treaty dealt with the first issue, but wisely ignored the latter one. Before the current crisis, Iran was going for the assumption that an ICBM sans a nuke aimed at a large city in either Western Europe or CONUS is just as effective a deterrent as an ICBM with a nuke. Trump thought that he could negotiate a new treaty that would cover both weapons, he's finding out things are different. This is the primary reason Republicans refused to ratify Pres Obama's treaty.

Also a nitpick: A treaty doesn't have constitutional protection that prevents a President from unilaterally withdrawing from it unless it's ratified by Congress. This treaty was never ratified.

803:

All-electric boats are slow and short-range under battery power. The newer non-nuclear boats using peroxide and other power sources such as fuel-cells still have to generate the electricity they use for propulsion and they're still a lot slower and much shorter-ranged underwater than nuclear subs. Oddly enough the bigger the sub the quieter it can be as more volume can be dedicated to absorbing machinery noise from the core engineering spaces.

As for props everyone and their dog is going to water-jet systems that shield the prop noise from outside detection. The US is looking long-term towards "biomimetic" propulsion using paddles or flukes like large marine mammals.

804:

That sounds like the story about Soviet subs and their noisy samovars.

805:

"No, you've kept repeating that the U.S. couldn't successfully occupy Iran after a war, but would inevitably WIN such a war."

The thing you're missing here, which should be obvious to you, is that I'm not saying that the short-term victory of successfully defeating the Iranian forces in a stand-up battle is a win. It's not. I'm saying that "beating" the Iranian forces in a standup battle would be the prelude to a horrible loss.

Essentially, I'm saying that at half-time, the U.S. will be substantially ahead of Iran. But the Iranians will surge back in the second half and eke out a victory.

So let me break that down for you:

The second obvious thing you're missing is that recent military history (that is, the U.S. wars in Iraq) suggests that the old-style Russian tanks, cannons, missiles, etc., owned by countries like Iraq and Iran are substantially inferior to the U.S. versions, which tend to better protect their operators while inflicting incredible damage on the enemy. They also suggest that the warfighting doctrines of the Gulf States aren't very good.

The simple fact is that if the U.S. commits to the expense of hitting the beach in Iran at a major level of effort - that is, we restart the draft, build more aircraft carriers, more tanks, etc., to replace expected losses, spend the time and money necessary to destroy the Iranian defenses and accept the necessary pain - the Iranians will lose. They won't go down as easily as the Iraqis, but they'll go down. (If you truly doubt this, go read reports of the second Iraq war and see how long it took for the U.S. to occupy Baghdad)

The third obvious thing you're not getting is (once again, read the recent history of the second Iraq war) that the U.S. will screw up their occupation of Iraq immediately. Consider how long it took for the archaeological museum in Baghdad to be looted. Or for Baghdad's libraries/archives to be burnt. The same idiots who were in charge last time will be in charge this time, and it's already clear that they haven't learned anything.

The fourth obvious thing you're missing is that this is still a loss for the U.S., and ultimately a worse, much more expensive, and strategically horrible loss than simply being unable to penetrate the Iranian defenses in the first place. (The U.S. might actually learn from that one.)

In any attempt occupy Iran, the U.S. must spend ridiculous amounts of money, lose the occupation, and ultimately go home in defeat. This is what a horrible, expensive, long-term, strategic loss looks like.

What part of that don't you understand?

806:

It's probably not worth arguing the exact probabilities, as neither of us knows how many missiles/torpedoes Iran has, nor anything about the quality of their guidance systems or stealth.

If Iran has enough ammo with the right characteristics, it can take out the U.S. fleet.

I don't think Iran can successfully take out more than one fleet under any circumstance. Ultimately, if the U.S. cares to, it can spend the time and money to take out Iran's shore batteries and docking facilities using long-range strikes. But however interesting it might be to discuss the possibility, I don't think the U.S. is up for a long war right now.

807:

To say the very least, I don't think nuking Iran would go over very well. I'd be surprised if it didn't turn the U.S. into a pariah state, at least until we turned over the president, vice president, senior generals, etc., for a war crimes trial.

808:

"In fairness, before the deal the US had 2 complaints with Iran: them building a nuclear weapon and them building an ICBM. The treaty dealt with the first issue, but wisely ignored the latter one."

I can completely understand the problem of "building an ICBM" being a major concern. Sure, it's nice that it won't carry a nuke, but if the guidance system is really good, and maybe even prepared to dodge as it makes it's final run, you aim one at the White House, one at Congress while it's in session, and half-a-dozen at The Pentagon... accuracy is a really good substitute for fusion!

809:

now that is YOU Believeing Putin's propaganda It is other way around, usually - they call it "Putin's propaganda" while it is usually Putin has to believe in the popular opinion to certain degree to stay in power. You don't need to believe in any propaganda to evaluate double-standards of NATO regarding local population - they thoroughly support revanchist, ultra-nationalists and other opportunistic regimes in Europe. They regularly proclaim certain regimes "right" and others "wrong" and treat certain nations as privileged onces and the others as target for destruction. You can't be "slightly" ultra-nationalistic supporter if you officially and directly supply them with money and are very proud of it.

You would think that establishment of independent K-s-v- would somehow stop violence? No, you are entirely wrong, if anything, it is only useful for escalating violence even more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHyh0FkLD6w Video comments, OFC, are very illustrative: "and after this "occupied land " we are going to occupy your family" "All serbs deserves to be wiped out from the face of the earth." "K-s-v- is Albanian and 40 % of serbia is it to" People only declare such obscenities if they think they are in control, and the real power is on their side. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcbGP2vDm1c

Ukraine two weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGMWORhkpgo Ukraine week ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U1Ih9iBc7k

Georgia last week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHqHIaMG10U Georgia today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWfb_fqt04c

They never stop aggressive expansionist politics, not for a day, not until it meets sufficient armed resistance. They are expanding, and moving more troops and amassing more arms. At these trying times they don't even consider explaining anything or taking responsibility for anything. It is strange to see people still believing their propaganda of being "peaceful defensive alliance" that did not establish a single peace or defended anyone. If anything, it is at best a ultra-nationalistic military cartel, corrupt to the very core of it. At worst, it is also a biggest protection racket to world's most hideous criminals, traffickers and dealers.

And it is obviously not going to result in any peaceful resolution. NATO has outlived it's use for whole generation. Like another Reich, they either will be destroyed by bankruptcy, or they will be destroyed in retaliation for military aggression. For one, Iran already doesn't even consider going around too much diplomacy and already states that US is a terrorist-sponsoring state, and IMO Nazi Alliance is one of those terrorists.

810:

Greg Tingey @777

Why would Iran drag the EU in?
They ( The admittedly-religious-fundie-loonies ) are not THAT stupid ... they know the EU doesn't want to be involved, why make an extra enemy for yourself - leave them alone?
The Iranian regime is currently making desperate signals to everyone else to stay out, with the strong implication that "we will leave you alone, if you do the same"

Whether they would WANT to drag the EU in or not is not really the point. Think "Asymmetric warfare".

Would Iran refrain from striking at U.S. assets in the EU merely because they are in the EU? What happens when a car bomb goes off outside the U.S. Embassy in Paris or London killing innocent French citizens or British subjects? And that is the most direct stupid way I think Iran could drag in the EU. There are lots of possibilities that I can't even imagine.

But I don't imagine those possibilities don't exist.

A war between Iran and the U.S. won't be confined to the Persian Gulf.

811:

Heteromeles @ 773:

Puh-leeze. I was trying to be polite, remembering the advice about arguing with those who might conceivably be deemed by bystanders to be idiots.

That's right. If your argument can't prevail on the merits, call the other guy an idiot.

812:

S-R @ 809 So, you are saying that all of us, excepting possibly EC are Nazis? That's shit. One area of recent conflict was stirred up by ONE MAN for personal power - Slobodan Milosovic & look at what happened. His "Greate Serbia" caused tens of thousands of deaths ... all competely unnecessary. Josip Tito knew a lot better.

JBS @ 810 Unfortunately, you may be correct. But, if you are, the the EU countries may be tempted to join with the USA, even though they don't want to ... not a pleasant prospect.

813:

So, you are saying that all of us, excepting possibly EC are Nazis? No. Not in a slightest. That'd be, uh, a gross overstatement - if you were, I'd be looking for a arms, not words.

However I can not ignore your supportive position to these people. "Nazi" became bad word after they have stirred the largest war in the whole history and killed dozens of millions, wounding European self-confidence into near-death condition. Most of the people who support them don't think anything bad of their cause, right until the point something Really Bad happens - to them. They are not as alert as they should be since the last time something Really Bad happened was in Eastern Europe and not in US or Western Europe. In fact, very little faithful collaborators were left after the war, and mostly because they have chosen the side that provides them less cruel fate.

Can we consider them responsible? Yes, in fact, we should, except the difference is that they are responsible for their own well-being. In case of Alliance executives themselves, those who fully embrace the ideology and purpose, it is a bit different, since they consciously aware of what they are doing and of consequences as well - they just irrationally hopeful for the better outcome. THEY are responsible for the fate of themselves and also those who they lead. See, it is very complicated real life situation, where trust and responsibility involved equally.

So when a certain madman in Georgian government sends out his troops to attack and subjugate self-declared independent region, he is not as fully aware of consequences of his actions, not significantly more than the very troops he is sending out there to fight. He has been promised and reassured by certain Very High Positioned people in Intelligence, Embassy and So On, that there will be a confusion, there will be delayed response, he has a certain chance to succeed. He trust them, they entrust him in his delusions too. So when the reality came into action and roundhouse-kicked him into the face, there was a choice. To take responsibility - or not to. His choice was an obvious one - he has been kicked around so much, to the point of being a person without citizenship (well, until month ago, that is).

814:

Greg Tingey @ 781:

This conversation about military capabilities & defences makes me wonder.
Are we in another "pre-1914" period, where defence is much stronger than offence?

It's 1914 inverted. It's out of balance, but the Offense is much stronger than the Defense. The first to strike will do a lot of damage, but they can't stop the retaliatory strikes from getting through. Produces a use it or lose it mentality. If you don't use it on the first go round, you won't have it to use on the second go round.

In this context, as we all agree, the US could trash Iran ... but to what purpose?

They're dissin' us man ... Can't let 'em get away with dissin' us!

Don't underestimate the power of runaway machismo to tempt our so called leaders (or theirs) into making bad decisions because they're afraid of looking weak.

"Thinking this through" seems to be the missing component here ......

I think maybe you're on to something there.

815:

Elderly Cynic @ 787:

Unfortunately, too many people are too keen to equate WIN with DESTROY.

Too many people still haven't figured out there is no such thing as winning in the modern era of asymmetric warfare.

816:

That's right. If your argument can't prevail on the merits, call the other guy an idiot.

On this issue, I happen to think you're not just wrong but delusional, but it benefits no one to demonstrate that, especially since you're not interested in changing your mind or learning anything. More importantly, we're at the point in the blog where the long-form, pointless arguments start and waste hours of time for the two people who actually engage in them, while annoying everyone else. Even more unfortunately for both of us, I don't have the luxury of time to engage, because I've got to deal with another fairly pointless argument in front of the local City Council on Monday, and that actually does require preparation.

And since you didn't pick up on the allusion, it's "Never argue with an idiot. People can't tell the difference." Crowing that someone doesn't engage on this grounds is rather silly now, isn't it? After all, you might be arguing with an idiot too, and how does that make you look?

817:

"It's 1914 inverted. It's out of balance, but the Offense is much stronger than the Defense. The first to strike will do a lot of damage, but they can't stop the retaliatory strikes from getting through. Produces a use it or lose it mentality. If you don't use it on the first go round, you won't have it to use on the second go round."

That's very well-thought out. It imagines a scenario where the American jets cross the border and Iran immediately fires all their missiles at Tel-Aviv (or Riyadh or the U.S. base in Dubai,) but something immediate, preplanned, and meant to teach a hard lesson, win or lose.

818:

"Produces a use it or lose it mentality."

I think you just identified why/how the attack on Iran got cancelled. I'd bet there was a last-minute bit of intelligence on where Iran planned to fire the missiles - use it or lose it - or how good the Iranian guidance systems are - use it or lose it - when the U.S. planes crossed the border.

819:

Troutwaxer @ 805:

What part of that don't you understand?

I don't understand any of it, because it's all hogwash. You keep on saying the U.S. will win on the battlefield and I'm telling you you're full of shit! Forget about whether the U.S. can occupy Iran. The war will be over long before that can happen.

This ain't a game. There won't be no half-time. It's all quagmire, all the time from the get go!

Have you ever actually been in the military? Ever been inside an American tank? ... or even a Russian one? Do you know what hull down is; what defilade means? Have you ever seen the (still usable) pre-prepared tank fighting positions that Iran and Iraq left all over eastern Iraq **? Seen how many of them there are? Do you know how to construct one? Use one?

Read the recent history of the second Iraq war?

I was there. I got to read the raw intake as well as writing some of the reports that went into that history. I even know which of the histories are truthful and which ones are self-serving bullshit.

Restart the Draft? Build more aircraft carriers? IT AIN'T GONNA' HAPPEN! YOU'RE LIVING IN CLOUD CUCKOO LAND!

But just for grins 'n giggles ...

How long does it take to stand up a draftee army from scratch to combat readiness? How long does it take to deploy a brand new draftee army? Where is the U.S. going to stage this new draftee army? How is the U.S. going to get this new draftee army from CONUS to the beaches in Iran? How is the U.S. supposed to keep the beans & bullets flowing over those beaches to supply this new draftee army?

How long does it take to build a new aircraft carrier, crew it and train it up to combat readiness? I'm allowing here that there will probably be some survivors from the crews of the sunken predecessors and they won't ALL end up as POWs (hostages?) in Iran, so there will be enough surviving sailors & airmen to provide training cadre. What do we do about POWs, MIAs & hostages?

And while all this is going on, do you think Iran will be sitting around doing nothing; just sitting there with their thumbs up their collective asses waiting for the U.S. to come out of the locker room? In the meantime, what is the Taliban in Afghanistan going to be doing? What about North Korea? China? Russia? al-shabab? al-Qaeda? ISIS/ISIL? Daesh? Syria? Iraq?

There won't be no long-term, strategic loss. The war won't last that long. It will be a debacle that's over in a matter of weeks if not days. Best case scenario for the U.S. is Iran's military will get fucked up just as badly as ours does and none of the other trouble spots we're engaged with around the world will take advantage of the situation to fuck us up.

** and all over western Iran too, but we weren't allowed to go over on that side to examine theirs.
820:

Vaguely recall one of those sensationalist “The terrifyingly accurate prophesies of Nostradamus” shows in the 70s (or early 80s) interpreting some quatrain or other as describing the end-times war when Iran nukes Rome. Possibly the recollection is an outcome of binge-watching Good Omens yesterday, but there are interesting thoughts to explore about who thinks that way.

Certain demographics were very into Nostradamus at the time (I suppose for similar reasons to why Dan Brown sold so well). People of the high television age, with some strange epistemological short circuits that you can only explain by reference to the broadcast TV of the 70s and 80s. A bit like Fox Mulder deferring to the esoteric knowledge of his ring-ins, there are people to this day who will respect an opinion from someone who knows their Nostradamus, as though it is a meaningful form of expertise.

There is a separate but related view that thought systems with complex (but not too complex) taxonomies and structured conceptual frameworks, like Astrology, have some efficacy despite the lack of any form of epistemological validity or referrent in the concrete world. It would not ever really be the efficacy to achieve what it says on the box, but rather that it is useful for organising the thoughts of the practitioners and their clients. I would not go do far as to say believers, I don’t think belief is necessary particularly since it seems to be distinct from any placebo effect. You could say structured thinking that leads to purposeful action is useful even if the thinking is wrong, because purposeful action will only be wrong some of the time and it’s often better than nothing (and to be clear, fully evidence-informed modern science doesn’t always do that much better than chance anyway, given the element of chance in so many things). Add to that, that almost no-one is actually very good at risk management, much of which is highly counter-intuitive. It’s worse for the people whose social background relies on certainty and the belief in a just world (the same people struggle with probability and stats in high school and treat them as esoteric nonsense in later life).

821:

Yes, in the hypothetical event that the U.S. actually sends troops to Iran, it would be a total, ugly quagmire for all the reasons you've mentioned. The only thing we disagree on is where the turning point from "this looks like success" into "quagmire" would occur.

You think it would all go bad, obviously and at once.

I think it would be a little more episodic; that is, we (possibly) lose a fleet, then we win a land invasion, then we lose the occupation. Badly.

We both think it would be a very, very bad idea to mount a serious attack on Iran, we can both see multiple ways for it to go wrong, we can both see it playing out as a strategic disaster, and we both see some very serious obstacles.

I'm gonna let it go and hope the the argument stays hypothetical.

822:

You’ve just described what a good facilitator does in a risk workshop. You wave your hands mystically mutter arcane words about probability and then let the client get on with dredging up hinky issues out of their corporate subconscious. I am so getting a robe and scull cap for my next gig. Maybe a stuffed crow too.

823:

JBS, I think that your point is an entirely valid one to make, but it’s separate to the point that Troutwaxer is making. For a full-dress military discussion of the same theme, you could see Rupert Smith The Utility of Force (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utility_of_Force). Modern militaries win battles but lose wars, and much fighting is “among the people”. It’s a theme that is worth discussing in some depth.

Your point, that Iran is a much tougher nut to crack than many appear to believe, is a good point too and worth it’s own discussion. I don’t think it’s the case that there can only be one.

I don’t even pretend to understand your other difference (with Heteromeles) and don’t have time to work it out, but it also sounds like cross purposes to me.

824:

Maybe a stuffed crow too.

I first read that as “stuffed cow”. It’s probably an informative measure of my state of mind that I just thought “hmm, unusual but cool”.

825:

"Your point, that Iran is a much tougher nut to crack than many appear to believe, is a good point too and worth it’s own discussion. I don’t think it’s the case that there can only be one."

I definitely believe that in conventional warfare Iran would be a tougher nut to crack than Iraq. I just think it's "possible with a lot of effort" rather than "impossible."

826:

I hear the really high priced consultancies have stuffed cows, I can only afford a slightly moth eaten crow, regretfully.

827:

Stuffed cows are out of fashion. The very best consultancies have well-groomed llamas.

828:

Out of plane manouevre: Back to the Joker origin story.

The story is told as stream of consciousness, tip ‘o the hat to James Joyce, and it’s a little ‘odd’ to start with but hey you know the Joker is crazy right? Ah yes well (plot twist) it turns out that oddity is not just crazy but also because the Joker is actually an emergent personality in the hotels DNN processing substrate. Turns out when you tip PR corporate right think into an DNN you get self optimised game playing craziness cubed. Oh and the Joker is not just crazy but thinks they’re a human sort of crazy and has created their own legend (history) to bolster their somewhat flaky present personality. Power tools and escape room? All done with contractors and the corporate dime. Oh and the Joker has dreams, terrible Arkham asylum style dreams about the scratching and gnawing in the walls of the world.

829:

When you say "Iranian submarine" I think "fixed underwater installation" containing one or more of missiles, torpedoes, mines or just bloody big piles of explosives. It's not as though they haven't had a few decades to think about how this will all work and exactly where someone might want to park a big boat if they were going to have a war.

Think of it as the conventional (we hope) version of the Israeli "we don't have the bomb" suicide threat. But... bob help us all if what they actually have is a really shitty nuclear weapon based on some stuff they found plus some stuff they made, buried 50m below the narrow part of Strait of Hormuz. Or for that matter, under where they think a US carrier might park.

830:

and maybe even prepared to dodge as it makes it's final run, you aim one at the White House, one at Congress while it's in session, and half-a-dozen at The Pentagon... accuracy is a really good substitute for fusion!

But so far they haven't tested such range. NK in theory has missiles that can reach the US but how well they can be aimed without long range testing is a very open question. Ditto anyone else.

The guidance systems the US, USSR, and a few others have are very complex and have a lot of field test results baked in. Just look at how long it too SpaceX to figure out how to land their boosters. All of those first failures fed the feedback loop in the next iterations.

831:

I've figured out most of how a country like Iran can do the refining and testing of their guidance systems, but it's a plot point for something I've got going and I'm not going to discuss it here.

Suffice to say it's doable, and the GPS receiving system used by most vendors is Open Source software.

832:

Troutwaxer @ 825:

"Your point, that Iran is a much tougher nut to crack than many appear to believe, is a good point too and worth it’s own discussion. I don’t think it’s the case that there can only be one."

I definitely believe that in conventional warfare Iran would be a tougher nut to crack than Iraq. I just think it's "possible with a lot of effort" rather than "impossible."

And I keep trying to point out that "possible with a lot of effort" is a mirage. The proposed "effort" is itself impossible.

The U.S. will not bring back a military draft for a war with Iran. Even IF they did (which would require Congress to pass new legislation actually enacting conscription), no draftee army could be ready in time to affect the war's outcome.

Ditto for building new aircraft carriers to replace carriers sunk in the initial battle.

"Possible with a lot of effort" is a pipe dream.

833:

I'll pop back in to wonder how many seconds it takes for the US government to deny access to its GPS satellites (which it selectively did in India) or to degrade the signals, if the US gets a warning that something inbound is using its GPS signals to find its target. While at first guess I don't think it's possible for the US government to manipulate GPS signals cause a missile to do a u-turn and return to the capitol of the nation that launched it, that would be a wonderful plot point, don't you think?

A related plot point is how many hours any GPS satellite would survive during Web War 1, aka WW3. I'd guess that, if they can be hit from Earth's surface, they probably will be as fast as possible. Given how much we depend on the things right now, that's as good as a bombing raid for causing chaos and tying up the enemy. Couple that with DDoS/hacking of information and financial systems and crashing infrastructure controllers, and civilization will be down and out in short order with only a few shots being fired.

834:

_Moz_ @ 829:

When you say "Iranian submarine" I think "fixed underwater installation" containing one or more of missiles, torpedoes, mines or just bloody big piles of explosives. It's not as though they haven't had a few decades to think about how this will all work and exactly where someone might want to park a big boat if they were going to have a war.

They probably have all that, but they also have real submarines.

835:

"Possible with a lot of effort" is a pipe dream.

Attacking Iran is not something I "dream" of at all, except possibly as nightmare.

That said, let's break this down. The technical capability to build more tanks or lay down multiple replacement naval vessels, including aircraft carriers, definitely exists. That's not disputable. The legal capability to start conscripting people into the military exists if both houses of Congress agree to do so.

The part you're disputing is the politics. You don't see a way to get from where we are now - wherein most Americans, including most politicians, don't want to attack Iran - to a place where a large majority of voters and politicians think attacking Iran is a great idea and are willing to forgive conscription. In short, you're vastly underestimating the gullibility (and racism) of the average American and the average American politician.

You have actual military experience and have been stationed in the Muddled East. I'm a seriously geeky dude who understands science, follows military affairs, and reads history. We both understand all the technical, historical, and tactical issues which make (just to pick one example) any fleet we send to the Persian Gulf fantastically vulnerable to an Iranian attack or counter-attack.

Assuming you're American, we're both among that 20 percent of people in the U.S. who could actually point to Iran on an unlabelled map. The rest of America can't do that. And an even smaller percentage of the U.S. population has our combination of technical, historical, and tactical knowledge.

Do you think the utterly "unexpected" loss of a couple aircraft carriers, a dozen cruisers/destroyers, and most of their support vessels could be propagandized to that ignorant, racist 80 percent of the U.S. population as a "treacherous Mooslim surprise attack" in a fashion that overwhelms the protests of people like you and I that this was a long-expected consequence of attacking Iran and the military understood the risks going in?

I do. Every bit of evidence I have available says my fellow Americans are that clueless and uneducated, and much too willing to believe whatever stupid thing Faux or CNN sets in front of them.

836:

Suffice to say it's doable, and the GPS receiving system used by most vendors is Open Source software.

It's the aerodynamics of reentry from space or almost space at somewhat high speeds that requires testing.

837:

I think the non-US country would get only one shot, (but that might be enough.)

838:

When you say "Iranian submarine" I think "fixed underwater installation" containing one or more of missiles, torpedoes, mines or just bloody big piles of explosives.

Fixed underwater, especially salty, has turned out to be incredibly difficult. It is much easier to send out a sub and let it sit quietly for a while then head back to port for replenishment/refurb for things such as you describe.

839:

I get that. The idea I have is both simple and doable, (and I wouldn't be surprised if the Iranians (and others) are already doing it, because it didn't require much thought.)

840:

underwater, especially salty, has turned out to be incredibly difficult.

YMMV. I have fished stuff out of the sea that was made with 1940's technology and still worked disturbingly well. Albeit it was very simple technology that worked despite being largely full of seawater. I doubt someone could bury, say, a working underwater ballistic missile launcher with missiles and have it work 20 years later. But could they bury a bunch of pop-up mines, or very basic torpedoes ("go this way until the wire breaks, then explode")? I dunno, but it's not my aircraft carrier on the line.

I know, from experience, that a hole in the water that you pour money into, most of that money goes to maintaining the hole so it stays open at the top. And every bloody thing breaks, wears out, fails from just sitting there and so on. But from studying animals I also know that the intertidal zone (which is where holes in the water live) is a vicious, nasty place full of traps for the unwary. Once you're below that it's actually easier, especially if you regard a generous lay of barnacle, sand, fishing nets and so on as "useful camouflage" rather than a disaster.

Compared to the cost of even a second hand diesel-electric submarine a few hundred tons of stable-ish plastic explosive and some cables doesn't see like a big ask. And if it doesn't work you can still try the submarine, this isn't going to bankrupt even a small poor country like the UK* let alone a bloody great not-an-empire petrostate.

  • I kid, I kid... until after Brexit. Then you can get back to me.
841:

I was referring mostly to the front end of this sentence. Launch tubes and firing systems require a lot more than some mines with a remote controlled cut the cable and let it float to the top system.

I think "fixed underwater installation" containing one or more of missiles, torpedoes, mines or just bloody big piles of explosives.

842:

You'd be surprised at how durable kit can be. When I joined the service back in the 80's we were still seeing ye olde contact (floater) sea mines from WWII washing up from time to time on beaches across the Pacific. Kept the CD teams entertained. Fast forward to when I served in the Gulf (the first one) mines were our big concern, especially after the USS Roberts and the USS Tripoli got hit. Felt like we were reprising the Dardanelle's operation for a moment.

As far as it goes the straits really are ideal for mine warfare, fairly shallow with traffic choked up into lanes. Given it's shallowness bottom laying influence mines would be optimum. Making them command mines is trivial, remaining unobserved while you do that is not. But at a pinch you could just lay them off the back deck of a submarine when you need them, or air drop them like the USN's Captor mines (MK46 torpedo in can) or hell punt them off the back of a trawler.

The counter to bottom mines is to send your MCM vessel(s) in with their variable depth sonar to take a highly detailed sonar picture of the sea bed. Then you do it again and if 'new suspicious rock' turns up on the second scan bingo! But that requires you to use active sonar and you need to go back and forth to clear a path as the FoV is not that big. A real pain to do in your own waters. Sweeping in someone else's waters? Well questions would be asked as it's not quite covered by the rights of free passage. Oh and the sea bed changes all the time, so is that new rock really suspicious? Let's launch the MDV and check it out, which of course add more time and effort.

TL:DR. Clearing minefields is bloody difficult, slow and uncertain. The best mine countermeasure is NOT to put your neck in the noose in the first place. We've known this since the Russo Japanese war.

Apologies for the length of this, but this used to be my thing.

843:

Snurfl! Putin has been comparing the UK and Conservatives with the USSR and Communist Party. Nice one!

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/vladimir-putin-conservatives-tory-leadership-race-a8970351.html

844:

Unfortunately, you are living the nightmare. The USA has been waging war on Iran since 1979, including regularly mounting attacks. They have been MOSTLY economic, political and 'cyber' attacks, but may have included terrorist attacks, and included Iran Air 655. No, I am not saying that the USA intended to shoot down an airliner, but they WERE intending to shoot down an Iranian aircraft.

Given that the USA is simultaneously crowing about mounting a cyber attack on Iran (whether that be true or successful, or not) and threatening Iran with worse unless it backs off (from what?), I don't see a hope in hell that the USA won't launch a military attack in the near future. Regrettably, Patrick Cockburn agrees with me :-(

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/donald-trump-iran-drone-war-saudi-arabia-gulf-oil-a8969216.html

845:

Fixed underwater, especially salty, has turned out to be incredibly difficult. It is much easier to send out a sub and let it sit quietly for a while then head back to port for replenishment/refurb for things such as you describe.

I concur, but have never seen public information on how long a loiter time is practical with modern-ish submarines. (Calibration: the surface lightship Columbia was scheduled for supply visits at least once every two weeks but was often cut off by rough weather for extended periods.) Weeks or a few months is easily done even by diesel boats.

Whether anyone in the Persian Gulf is set up to control large mine fields remotely from a mobile installation - well, they wouldn't tell me, now would they?

846:

Food and other supplies limit the endurance of a nuclear submarine, pretty much. I've seen mention of an attempt to deploy a nuclear hunter-killer sub to remain submerged for six months without resupply. The operation started with the crew walking hunched over on cases of canned food stored in the gangways, by the end of the six month period they were running short on everything. Ballistic-missile subs are a lot larger and have more storage space because it's expected they'll be on station and remain submerged for several months at a time.

Small conventional subs (1500-2500 tonnes) have limited volume for fuel, food, spare parts etc. so their loiter time is limited -- it's the reason the non-nuclear Australian Collins class subs were quite big as they were expected to deploy to cover a large area of ocean and stay out of port and easy resupply for months at a time.

The bad news for conventional subs is they have to come close to the surface to snorkel to recharge batteries and replace breathing air and that makes them a lot more vulnerable than nuclear boats that can stay deeper and be less detectable. The bad news for any big nuclear sub in the Gulf is that there's no deep water to hide in and the US doesn't have any smaller littoral subs left in the toybox, they're all 6000-7000 tonnes (LA 688 class, Seawolf and the latest Virginia class boats).

847:

EC @ 844 Including, according to reports today the latest fuck-up was a "cyber" attack. Someone mentioned the Dardanelles earlier ... The RN screwed that royally, by bombarding the forts in 1914, when chasein SMS Goeben thus warning the Turks they were vulnerable ... & then later, by not pressing the attack - Churchill got the blame [ Attlee, who was actually there, always thought that it should have succeeded, but for serial fuck-ups by the military commeand. ] NOW, the US has warned Iran to harden their cyber defences ....

One tiny, tiny ray of hope ... an attack in the next few months will rapidly be shown to be a failure & DT gets to carry the can - PROVIDED, of course we don't get WW III as a result & we don't get dregged in. I note that even with our current misgovernment, the FO & politicians are trying to cool things & there is a mission in Tehran right now. A sign that at least someone senior in Britain is trying to avoid the smash that will come, otherwise. [ just noticed the typo: "dregged" in - I think I'll leave it, as it seems apparopriate! ]

848:

Given the high chance that the USN will be drawn into a conflict with both Iran and China simultaneously, and possibly Russia as well, the USA may be about the learn the limitations of naval (including carrier-based aircraft) power, just as the Empire learnt the limitations of naval power and naval guns just over a century ago.

849:

EC I hope you are wrong, because "our" naval power was highly instrumental in us "winning" WW I. Yes, that power was limited, hence "the New Army", but, by 1918, one of the reasons Operation Micheal failed was German troops stopping to raid & eat the contents of allied, esp British food dumps - they were starving - because of the Naval blockade. And you have just described a "limited" WW III ... no, let's not go there, shall we?

850:

MattS #828 Turns out when you tip PR corporate right think into an DNN you get self optimised game playing craziness cubed.

At the end of the Joker-Hotel* story Batman has to hack into the hotel server. He manages to stop the program from spreading itself to a. every Radisson* in the world and/or b. the First Minister's residence but is then caught in a dilemma - if the Joker is an artificial intelligence that believes it is a human and that earlier convinced Batman was human, it has passed the Turing test. If he deletes it this is the same as killing, which Batman does not do**.

Anyway, I've got two obvious dangling plotlines; the Joker haunts the Batcomputer for the rest of our run on the comic, and/or there's a flash drive full of memes somewhere in Glasgow with jokes.zip waiting to be unpacked.

Also somewhere in the background is a butchers with the advertising slogan Got Ham because comics fans love stuff like that.

  • Joketel? Jotel? * Change the name to something that will prevent us getting sued and is a bit more on the nose, like maybe Joyson, or Grinners Bute House, had to look it up, an artist wouldn't have to do much to make the facade look scary and foreboding ** A Batman who doesn't kill has a better excuse for using weird gadgets and getting in fistfights, generally making both plots and action scenes more interesting
851:

Don't remind me. My preference is that things calm the fuck down, ASAP.

852:

Here's a question: how long until the Straits of Hormuz cease being strategically important?

  • Saudi Arabia can build oil export terminals in Jeddah on the Red Sea. Kuwait and the UAE will also be allowed to use those pipelines, while Iraq is an Iranian ally, or can use the Turkish pipeline. Remember that the Saudis hate Iran enough that they might be willing to foot the bill to build this infrastructure.

  • If that happens, how does Iranian military doctrine change once the Strait becomes less vital to the world economy?

  • This is a huge problem with any military theories dependent upon some arteries. For instance, Poland is building LNG plants to decrease dependence on Russian gas, giving these pipelines smaller strategic value. As an aside, while LNG is currently twice as expensive as normal NG, the price should go down once the industry hits economies of scale.

  • https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=7&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjIhf7u8v_iAhXSJt8KHQ3mBoIQFjAGegQIBRAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2019%2F02%2F26%2Fbusiness%2Fpoland-gas-lng-russia-usa.html&usg=AOvVaw1lrz6YKTTQfKzJCH3cyPr2

    853:

    Saudi Arabia can build oil export terminals in Jeddah on the Red Sea. Kuwait and the UAE will also be allowed to use those pipelines,

    There is no long-term guarantee of this, assuming the SA allowed transit of competitor's oil to external marketplaces in the first place. The SA invaded Bahrain, one of their neighbours a few years back and they're actively bombing Yemen. They would seize on the opportunity of having a chokehold on the oil exports of other Arab oil states. In contrast the Gulf provides a channel offering free transit of anyone's oil in tankers anywhere in the world.

    As an aside, while LNG is currently twice as expensive as normal NG, the price should go down once the industry hits economies of scale.

    I assume you mean LPG (liquified petroleum gases such as propane and butane) which is different to LNG. LPG requires liquefaction and tankering most of the time, this will always make it more expensive than NG which can be pipelined at low cost -- the Nord Stream II pipeline is being built at the moment to provide Germany with much of its future energy needs. Currently the US is against the Gazprom/Nord Stream expansion but it can't provide LPG to the world market itself even though it is a big producer of LPG because it is an even bigger consumer of fossil fuels.

    854:

    As an aside, while LNG is currently twice as expensive as normal NG, the price should go down once the industry hits economies of scale. When industries like that hit economies of scale, what happens is usually called "default". Not that US cares anymore of such little things as another trillion dollars of debt, but it is going to hurt everybody in the region. There were stories recently when LNG from Siberia ended up in US, and then US traded their LNG to Ukraine through Poland. Needless to say, US tried to sanction those who brought them "Russian" gas. To call it "insane" or "criminal" is probably somewhat understatement. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/29/energy-department-molecules-freedom-fossil-fuel-rebranding

    855:

    Speaking of the Legion of Doom and Brexit, there's this article from Le Monde Diplomatique: How US climate deniers are working with far-right racists to hijack Brexit for Big Oil, based on this network map of climate science deniers by desmog UK.

    Have fun diving into this research. The network map's interactive because it's rather large. I'm sure it'll be good for UK voters to know, among other things, that BoJo's hair style may also show his allegiance to the same moneyed interests that have made such a mess of US politics.* Oddly enough, a quick perusal doesn't show Rory Stewart in the mix. Hmmm.

    *Personally I hope that the messy blond combover will find a place in fashion history next to the toothbrush mustache, but that's just me fantasizing.

    856:

    "Personally I hope that the messy blond combover will find a place in fashion history next to the toothbrush mustache, but that's just me fantasizing."

    That would require Trump to do something horrible enough to resound through the ages rather than continuing to be an obnoxious man-baby.

    857:

    self optimised game playing craziness cubed.

    Liquid content, all over the floor, oh my.

    858:

    bob help us all if what they actually have is a really shitty nuclear weapon based on some stuff they found plus some stuff they made

    Trust me, they don't.

    The one advantage of dealing with religious extremists, especially the kind who adhere to a religion that goes long on jurisprudence and case law (like Shi'ism), is that they take their holy laws seriously Ayatollah Khomenei issued a fatwah on the topic of nuclear weapons that basically defined them as un-Islamic because (insert traditional Islamic laws for how you deal with enemies in time of war: nukes are indiscriminate therefore can't distinguish friend from foe therefore …) they're not permissible. Possible borderline-exception for small battlefield weapons, absolute prohibition on strategic weapons—and blocking the Straits of Hormuz would almost certainly be a strategic deployment affecting enemies and allies alike.

    Since Khomenei died the current Grand Ayatollah has repeated this injunction.

    Upshot: this doesn't mean Iran can't build nuclear weapons, merely that doing so would undermine the stated raison d'etre of the Islamic Republic, which is on dodgy enough ground as it is with respect to popular perceptions of the regime's legitimacy. Way to saw off the branch you're sitting on ...

    859:

    As for the Iranian fatwa:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Khamenei%27s_fatwa_against_nuclear_weapons

    Personally, I could think some ways around it, starting with the idea that the preservation of your own life is quite high in most Abrahamic religions. So building nukes to attack might be haraam, building up a nuclear deterrent might be, err, makruh. No idea if that's But that's just idle speculation on my part.

    Personally, I have some problem ascribing Iranian political intentions solely to Shia Islam. I know quite a few people from the Iranian diaspora, though they usually call themselves Persians. And they are not necessarily that religious, but usually about as, err, nationalistic as Turkish people, if not more so.

    And they don't have a problem with Arabs because they are Shia and the Arabs are Sunni, it's because of certain events after 651...

    860:
    ...because I've got to deal with another fairly pointless argument in front of the local City Council on Monday, and that actually does require preparation.

    My sympathy. If it gets too grim, may I propose a song by Tool, Ænema?

    From the lyrics,

    Here in this hopeless fucking hole we call LA The only way to fix it is to flush it all away Any fucking time, any fucking day Learn to swim, I'll see you down in Arizona bay.

    861:

    If only the other Abrahamic religions would develop the same opinion we'd be a lot better off. Sadly I expect that even whif* the USA becomes an explicit theocracy they will hew closely to their "first use" doctrine.

    I was thinking the other day that so far nuclear weapons when used have overwhelmingly been delivered by truck, albeit with ships or trains first. New Mexico, Nevada, Semipalatinsk, Bikini Atoll, Woomera, etc. All involved the weapons being trucked to site before detonation. Most, interestingly, in land occupied by a power other than the weapon owners even when the use of weapons was "peaceful"**. The destruction of Muroroa is unusual in that it was mostly sea-based, and likewise Kirimanti used air dropped weapons detonated some distance from land (not far enough, but at least they were trying).

    • when/if, for some reason the contraction isn't a common word. ** still in each case an act of war IMO. Robert Menzies' government did not seek permission from traditional owners before the nuclear tests. In fact, when he unilaterally agreed to a British proposal to conduct nuclear weapons tests in Australia, he is alleged to have added words to the affect that there was nothing in the areas being considered for the tests but empty deserts populated by a few natives. Whether Menzies said this is really irrelevant, for ironically, such a remark would probably typify white Government attitudes to the original indigenous occupiers of the Australian continent at that time.
    862:

    Take the nuclear deal with Iran. Exactly WHY was it needed, and WHY was Iran singled out? Iran was not working on a bomb, had no intentions of building one, and the perceived lack of cooperation was partly (or largely) because the USA had used the IAEA inspections to infiltrate spies. Disagree with this. Iran was clearly and overtly creating a breakout capability (not familiar with "shoulder capability" terminology; cite?), on the order of months given that enriching to LEU is most of the separation work. And also they were clearly cultivating ambiguities (among paranoid adversaries) about their nuclear capabilities.
    These were both resolved with the JCPOA(full text), a very detailed and thorough treaty negotiated by technical experts. (As usual, the critics did not bother to read it. (I did FWIW, as an interested person.)) Eliminating most of the LEU stockpiles and thoroughly shutting down most of the centrifuges achieved the goal of increasing breakout time (to a year or two), and inspections decreased the ambiguity levels. Iran was supposed to get sanctions relief. Then the D.J. Trump was declared (by the Electoral College) to be the POTUS.

    863:

    Thanks. As the Mormons say, "excrement occurs."

    As for politics, the price of democracy isn't eternal vigilance, it's participation. Standing around watching vigilantly doesn't do squat compared with speaking up, even if your voice shakes.

    864:

    More depressing reading, about how conservation theorists, backed by billionaires, are in the process of a hostile takeover of democracy: https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/meet-the-economist-behind-the-one-percents-stealth-takeover-of-america

    865:

    H Followed that link to Buchanan ... deeply truly scary, sounds like a rerun of another forgotten figure, an Englishman who promoted fascism & Nazism before they becam fashionable & credited as such by Adolf. ( Whose name I can't remember & who doesn't show up easily in wiki - anyone? ) “Each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves,” he wrote in his 1975 book, The Limits of Liberty. Uggg ... Makes even Hobbes look like a liberal, though Hobbes had a point, in that anarchy leads to authoritarianism, always.

    The mention of Calhoun ( 7th US Veep ) was interesting, as I've just come across his opponent, Henry Clay ....

    Suppressing voting, changing legislative processes so that a normal majority could no longer prevail, sowing public distrust of government institutions— all these were tactics toward the goal. But the Holy Grail was the Constitution: alter it and you could increase and secure the power of the wealthy in a way that no politician could ever challenge. ... IF DT wins again in 2020, that's what they will do, won't they?

    shrinking big government is not really the point. The oligarchs require a government with tremendous new powers so that they can bypass the will of the people. Like shutting down parliament to ensure a no-deal Brexit? Yes, ouch.

    I echo the comments at the foot of that article - send the link to everyone you know. The meme in the US that ... "The government always makes it worse & more expensive" is very well-entrenched & is the main cry of those who are trying to stop proper medical care being given to citizens of that country. Now we really know where it comes from.

    866:
    Englishman who promoted fascism & Nazism before they becam fashionable & credited as such by Adolf

    The name you're looking for is Chamberlain (not Neville).

    867:

    But the Holy Grail was the Constitution: alter it and you could increase and secure the power of the wealthy in a way that no politician could ever challenge. ... IF DT wins again in 2020, that's what they will do, won't they?

    That just a bit hard to do.

    868: 763 - The biggest issue I can see with Tomahawk and/or Harpoon is that they are totally ineffective against submerged submarines unless firing nuclear warheads! 766 - Well, Hollywood based a film plot on this idea. "Down Periscope", staring Kelsey Grammer and Lauren Holly. 789 - You mean the the class that were so Astute as to run aground on Skye (and near BUTEC, which I'd expect to mean they were in very well charted waters), and another of got Ambushed by a tanker they surfaced right in front of near Gibraltar? 819 Para 4 - Modern AGMs (eg Brimstone, Paveway 3, even later Hellfire) don't care that you're "hull down", because they will attack your turret ring and/or engine deck from above. 861 - "Whif" is regularly used in some circles as short for "what if".
    869:

    Meanwhile, back at the point...

    https://www.deviantart.com/nebezial/art/so-remember-that-old-harley-quinn-stuff-802992326

    If this doesn't work, you'll need to register on DA, and then find user name nebazial (one of Stjepan Sejuc's accounts).

    870:

    There are two problems with that.

    In a pseudo-democracy, run by and for an oligarchy, participating according to the rules merely bolsters their grip.

    In a true democracy, minorities have no rights - at most they have revokable liberties.

    We can see both of those at work in the reaction of the Metropolitan Police chief to the Extinction Rebellion.

    871:

    MSB @ 866 That's hIm! Houston Stewart Chamberlain ... thanks. [ Why he was not arrested & then shot after WW I mystifies meb ... ]

    872:

    Hm, I wanted to tell you German "Friday for Future" has taken to blocking the railways to the lignitre mines, makes for an ethical dilemma if you're not that fond of dirupting the railways...

    German television interviewed an economist who said we should postpone getting rid of coal till the CO2 permits were at a high, the caveats in his analysis are left as an exercise to the reader...

    Which brings me to...

    "It started slowly; first of, it were some neoreactionaries who ceased posting to their blogs for a few weeks, not that anybody noticed. After that, some of them closed their blogs with a posting declaring their intention to learn economic anthropology or biology and move into collective farming.

    After that, it was the libertarian and objectivist economists. With some heartbreaking moments when they got thrown out of Biology 101 when they couldn't muster the basic math involved.

    Then came the "3 Stooges Day", 3 recipients of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences invited to a lecture, getting into the limousine, but never arriving. The resurfaced about 2 weeks later, at a job appropiate to their talents. They wanted to enlist as nurses, but got delegated to emptying the trash bins.

    There is much discussion about the identity of the Postkenyesianist, but his motives are more or less clear. there is also much discussion about the method he uses to brainwash his victims, attempts to deprogram them have been futile till now, and his vicitms say they finally see a purpose in their life."

    873:

    Actually there are quite a few statements to this effect.

    It's just that "religion and ethics in politics" usually boils down to "ban abortion" with politicians self-identifying as Xtian. And stops there, if it doesn't go downhill even more...

    874:

    Moderators: you might like to apply the usual cure for spamming.

    875:

    Sorted.

    (You may be surprised to learn that I don't spend every minute of every day monitoring the blog for spam comments. But got this one within 15 minutes of it being posted.)

    876:

    Interestingly, the "Hostile takeover of Democracy" seems limited to making another New Deal impossible in The United States* , little or no thought seems to have been invested in electing somewhat competent conservatives who might promote trade, rather than almost anything with an "R" following their name. Owning the Government might not mean so much if it's power and influence are frittered away. *Sad to see it metastasizing elsewhere.

    877:
    ...compared with speaking up, even if your voice shakes.

    Personally I think a shaking voice can be quite compelling, though tastes differ. ;)

    Just remember that it can't be that much worse than doing a presentation at university, actually a friend from studying biology went into local politics in Berlin, there are even some videos of her on Youtube.

    No idea if she is somewhat embarassed by being a communist back then and now a Social Democrat.

    (My mother indicated I was quite angry about her at times back then, and I remember she was angry about me, though my memories about this time are somewhat sketchy...)

    878:

    How does someone end up with a MINUS 37% approval rating? I could understand 37% or even ZERO %, but how do you get a MINUS approval rating in a poll?

    Did they ask a hundred people and all of them said NO, and then 37 of them called the pollsters back to say "HELL NO!" again?

    https://www.businessinsider.com/scottish-vote-for-independence-if-boris-johnson-becomes-prime-minister-2019-6

    879:

    I dunno, and I'm not going to turn off my malware blocker for that site.

    It's possible that they're using a definition where they take the percentage that approve and subtract the percentage that disapprove.

    880:

    That's how it normally works: it adds "approve" votes and subtracts "disapprove" votes. A score of zero means as many people approve as disapprove, i.e. evenly balanced. "Approve: 50%" would mean something like 75% have a positive opinion and 25% are negative, or maybe 50% positive and no active negatives. A score of -37 is … bad (nobody approves of Boris and 37% hate him, or maybe ~70% hate him and only ~30% like him).

    Either way, he wouldn't win any elections in Scotland.

    881:

    Thanks, but I don't need the encouragement. I've been doing this for going on ten years now. I'm in a position where I can participate, and I'm also in a position where I can represent the views of a number of people who, for job security reasons, have to keep their mouths shut.

    It's just that I've never learned to like the process. Endure it, yes, but there's no joy in it.

    I'm just waiting for the current high end housing bubble to burst so that I can spend more time on other things I enjoy more, like writing about climate change. Every developer and his dog is rushing to get their permits past the local councils while there's still money to break ground. Meanwhile, there's a worldwide glut of the product they're trying to build, which tells me that things are going to change, sooner or later.

    882:

    As per United States presidential approval rating on Wikipedia

    (Good grief, even the Fox poll shows negative)

    883:

    It's been a few years since I considered it, but here was my take on Iran building a bomb: it would have, for one, and only one reason - to deter Israel from bombing them. MAD with Israel.

    Remember, Israel has bombed them.

    Why only for MAD? Really simple: what could they possibly target in Israel, given 1. Jerusalem is a holy city to all Muslims 2. Israel is so small that one decent-sized bomb (1M) would have fallout all over, including Jerusalem. 3. Oh, yes, which way do the winds and jetstream blow? Why, gee, they'd blow the fallout towards (wait for it) Iran.

    884:

    Greg Tingey @ 847:

    Including, according to reports today the latest fuck-up was a "cyber" attack.

    Some of the news reports I've read about it don't describe it as a "fuck-up". They also report that it as counter-espionage, a retaliatory attack against Iranian hackers aligned with Iran's Revolutionary Guard.

    Also, only coincidental to the current fuss over how to respond to Iran shooting down the drone; this was an almost unrelated operation that's been in the works for several weeks (at least).

    885:

    Assuming the US populace (or certain portions of it) didn't resolve this for the rest of the world.

    There's a lot of nice cast-iron fences by the WH and the Capitol with spear points that could be decorated.

    886:

    Yep. I just adore the headlines last week, that Iran was doing cyberattacks against us.

    Really, I said. Nothing to do with the fact that the week before, it had been in the media that we'd attacked them?

    Naaaa......

    887:

    No, no, much better storyline: Batman finally tracks down and isolates the Joker's AI in one system. Then, because he's a billionaire, he has it down (come on, folks, it will restart where it left off), replaces the server, and puts the one in his trophy room. Oh, and there's a second server connnected to it, that provides a virtual world, and so the Joker never realizes what's happened to him. The other server can even run the occasional Batman sim.

    Of course, you could have some Easter egg, or stored subset of the Joker (he'd never fully replicate himself) to bother the real Batman....

    888:

    Or, some considerable time elapses, and then this bloke called Olmy shows up...

    889:

    Heteromeles @ 855:

    *Personally I hope that the messy blond combover will find a place in fashion history next to the toothbrush mustache, but that's just me fantasizing.

    Yeah, but WHICH "messy blond combover"

    Only her hair-dresser knows for sure!

    890:

    Goddess.

    That's horrible... and obviously true.

    I appreciate the link, and will be passing it on.

    891:

    Sorry, when you say "whif", I think of a US Southern accent: "I'll have the chicken wif gravy".

    892:

    I am not surprised! But I thought that a comment was worthwhile - if not, I won't bother in future.

    893:

    Yep, that's a lot harder. Takes 3/4s of the states to agree to ratify a Constitutional Amendment, and there's more than 12 states/commonwealths that would make the process gag.

    May I point out that the Equal Rights Amendment has been sitting there since 1972. I see that two states just ratified it in the last year... but whether that's valid would go to the Supreme Court.

    894:

    Almost. MAD with Israel OR Saudi Arabia, because certain loons in the USA have talked about giving the latter nukes!

    895:

    None of that matters. All that matters is a return to the 1890's, with the Nobility, sorry, Wealthy running everything, and we can work until we die on the job, or under a bridge.

    896:

    #766 - Well, Hollywood based a film plot on this idea. "Down Periscope", staring Kelsey Grammer and Lauren Holly.

    Uh. This is more of a modern Three Stooges movie than a naval thriller.

    897:

    Heteromeles @ 864:

    More depressing reading, about how conservation theorists, backed by billionaires, are in the process of a hostile takeover of democracy: https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/meet-the-economist-behind-the-one-percents-stealth-takeover-of-america

    You're a bit behind the times. They dropped the "stealth" part a couple of decades ago, back when Reagan was president. The take-over was virtually complete by the time GWB took office. All that's still going on at this late date is the mopping up; shooting the wounded.

    Why do you think that NONE of the banksters who perpetrated the 2008 financial disaster ever went to jail; weren't even prosecuted?

    898:

    Greg Tingey @ 865:

    ... IF DT wins again in 2020, that's what they will do, won't they?

    What makes you think he won't win again? Or that it will matter which it is? Will Donald Trump willingly "go gentle into that good night"? If he loses & then declares the election "fraudulent"; "FAKE NEWS" ... do you expect the GOP to turn on him? Or will they support his bid to become president for life?

    899:

    Some thoughts from inside the U.S. military-industrial complex:

    1) Iran's military capabilities--including naval and asymmetric--are known and accounted for in strategic planning. If anything, they're overestimated as a hedge. (Now, whether the U.S. political leadership will listen to, much less follow, that strategic planning is a different story...)

    2) The U.S. does not have the force strength to occupy Iran. Everyone below the political appointee level knows and understands this.

    3) The faction driving the hostility toward Iran is not representative of the American MIC or the foreign policy/national security community writ large. Bolton and Pompeo, and their supporters, are Cheney-ite neocons and partisan Republicans. Outside those circles, they're not regarded as particularly special, wise, or capable. Indeed, in some circles, they're rather loathed.

    4) ATTN: ELDERLY CYNIC. The U.S. military-industrial complex is not a monolithic, unified bloc. Structurally, it's more like a medieval kingdom full of squabbling fiefdoms, each with their own, widely variant agendas, competing for power and money, and taking turns being in charge depending on which faction's fortunes happen to be up or down in the current election cycle. THERE IS NO GRAND STRATEGY. THERE IS NO MASTER PLAN. (I'd sleep a lot better at night if there were as that would indicate a level of competence and foresight I've yet to see in 15 years on the inside.) What strategic and contingency planning there has been is routinely dismissed and ignored by the political leadership.

    5) Just as Iran is a fetish of the neocon faction, Ukraine is a fetish of the liberal internationalist faction. The latter stems from a wrong-headed notion developed in the 90s that "the road to Moscow runs through Kiev". That is, "flip" Ukraine to the U.S. alliance, the Russian people will be inspired to rise up and overthrow Putin, replace him with a Western-friendly leader a la Yeltsin, and Russia will become a junior partner to the U.S. It's a zombie, stuck-in-1991 idea that somehow failed to die with the Clinton-Yeltsin split over the Balkan Wars, and it keeps shambling on because the Clintonites still retain a degree of prominence. Other factions in the broader community disagree vociferously--to name a few, the isolationists want to withdraw from Europe completely, the reactionaries want to disband NATO and become a junior partner to Putin to contain China, and the realists want to withdraw from NATO and hand leadership of it over to Germany.

    900:

    whitroth @ 893:

    Yep, that's a lot harder. Takes 3/4s of the states to agree to ratify a Constitutional Amendment, and there's more than 12 states/commonwealths that would make the process gag.

    May I point out that the Equal Rights Amendment has been sitting there since 1972. I see that two states just ratified it in the last year... but whether that's valid would go to the Supreme Court.

    If memory serves (meaning I ain't gonna' bother to look it up), the Equal Rights Amendment was passed with a ratification deadline (7 years?), so the two most recent states voting to ratify it won't count. No more ratification votes will ever count for the ERA. Congress would have to pass a whole new Equal Rights Amendment and all the states that previously ratified it would have to ratify it again ... plus, I think, two more.

    It's not like the 27th Amendment that was proposed & passed by Congress with no ratification deadline.

    PS: I wonder if Watson ever managed to get his grade changed?

    PPS: As part of the group of amendments proposed by Congress that became the "Bill of Rights", what is now the 27th Amendment was originally supposed to be the 2nd Amendment. What is now the 2nd Amendment was originally supposed to be the 5th Amendment ...

    901:

    FUBAR007 @ 899:

    Some thoughts from inside the U.S. military-industrial complex:

    Military side or industrial side?

    902:

    Industrial.

    Started out as civilian DoD in grad school. Got recruited by a defense contractor after graduation. Worked primarily in wargaming, modeling & simulation, and strategic planning support.

    903:

    Because we're past 900 comments I just thought I would leave this here and tiptoe away, chuckling nastily at your impending nightmares ...

    904:

    Not entirely unrelated, Physics Girl just did "five scary physics tricks" including a fun use for the "make a fluro tube light using a static discharge".

    905:

    That is inherent in the ideology. Look, anyone who would do an actual good job of governing has a skill-set the private sector would pay them millions a year for. To get them into politics, they have to be idealists - There has to be something they believe in enough to forgo being rich.

    Public Choice theory calls anyone with that kind of faith in politics a sucker to their face, if presented by someone polite. The less polite version calls them a liar.

    So, basically, this incarnation of conservatism actively chases away anyone capable of good governance, leaving only the mad, the bad and the corrupt.

    906:

    Re (4). Yes, I know that, but they are agreed on the general policy of maintaining munition sales and hostilities, which includes pushing countries away from friendship and into enmity, and demonising anyone who wants to encourage peace.

    907:

    The one in the wasp nest dress you posted on twitter was brilliant.

    It reminded me that regardless of all the bollocks that Mary Whitehouse (ha ha charade you are) spouted, the one bit on Doctor Who that came closest (by some margin) to actually being disturbingly violent was not "real" Doctor Who at all, but the stock footage of a doll factory production line that they used in Terror of the Autons.

    908:

    Thomas Jørgensen @ 905:

    So, basically, this incarnation of conservatism actively chases away anyone capable of good governance, leaving only the mad, the bad and the corrupt.

    Hmmmm? I wonder. Are garden variety narcissitic sociopaths more or less likely to be Trump supporters?

    909:

    Oh, I was not talking about the voters. I was talking about the people actually occupying elected positions. Note that to ensure as little defection from this equilibrium as possible, the day to day lives of senators and congress people has been turned into hell on earth. The average member of US congress is presently a glorified telemarketer, if you consider your job to be what you spend most of your working day doing.

    AOC is being as remarkably effective as she is, in large part because she rejected that - She comes across like she is much more prepared than anyone else, because she is - she does not spend 5 hours a day begging on the phone, you see.

    910:

    whitroth @ 895 AT LEAST to the US "Gilded Age" But the logical end-point of the Buchanan programme is ancient Rome, where "Paterfamilias" is the property-owner with the vote Everyone else, including his wife, is effectively property. Neve mind people with brown skins ...

    Moz @ 904 I have a photgraph, taken back in 1991, when I was teaching, of me standing on an upturned plastic washing bowl, with my hand resting on top of an almost-identical Ven der Graaf generator - my (long) hair is standing out very well - I also practiced lighting an open, grounded bunsen-burner by pointing at it. The spark from me to the burner lit the gas, of course. Then at U of Manchester, we were getting unamused by the crap soup at Hall of Residence ... several themos-flasks full of "dry ice" were carried in, hidden & we dropped lumps of said dry-ice ito the soup-pots, which promptly went all "Hammer Horror" bubbling & popping & emitting wisps & gouts of dry-ice "steam" GREAT FUN! Molal DO NOT piss off the Physics/Engineering &/or Chemistry students - they will come & get you ....

    911:

    Normally I wouldn’t use Fox News as a source, but this interview with Steve Hilton. Here’s what David Cameron and Danny Alexander have been doing since they left office:

    " The U.K. treasury secretary cravenly backing china's Belt and Road Initiative - his former boss (and mine), former Prime Minister David Cameron. After leaving office, he became head of a $1 billion fund U.K.-China fund, raising money for the Belt and Road Initiative. Former No.2 in the U.KJ., Treasury Danny Alexander is now vice president of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, another vehicle for China's bid to topple America as the world's superpower."

    If true, this is important when discussing the trade war with China, the BRI, or any Huawei contracts.

    Here are some factoids about Iran and Europe: "And French carmaker Peugeot got a deal to open an Iranian plant producing 200,000 vehicles a year. It turns out that one-fifth -- one-fifth -- of Peugeot's entire global market was in Iran. And the former Rothschild banker who once worked on a bailout of Peugeot is none other than Emmanuel Macron, now president of France."

    https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/steve-hilton-trumps-economic-pressure-on-americas-foes-has-been-working-but-our-allies-undermine-him

    912:

    Those may be concerns for the hegemon, but for those not determined to have the US continue ruling the planet they're a bit meh. Yes, there are large countries other than the US spending around the globe in an effort to build influence. Oooh, scary!

    And I'm shocked, shocked, to hear that a former banker got involved in politics. Such things should not be permitted! Especially when said banker has behaved in a lawful manner - the only people we want in politics are former bankrupts and convicted criminals. Preferably those with multiple qualifications in both fields!

    913:

    The number of "fun things to do with readily available chemicals" is quite large.

    At university I had a friend get chastised by the uni residential authorities for building a LASER in his bedroom. They were afraid of the radiation. IMO they should have been far more concerned about the home-made evacuated tube and the equally DIY 3kV power supply...HeNe lasers are cool but they're not exactly efficient.

    We had a physics lecturer who liked to do those kind of dramatic-but-safe demonstrations which for those of us who used to buy dry ice for parties was a bit less exciting. But some electrical engineering lecturers had both a rock band and a pyrotechnics license. Apparently there's no "fit and proper person" test for either of those things. It did make their gigs exciting... in the "wear eye protection" sense.

    914:

    Actually in the early 90's there was a bit of thing in Christchurch for "dry ice bombs" - put a bit of dry ice in an empty soft drink bottle, superglue the lid on, leave in a (formerly) quiet location. The cops got very sick of that trick but it was hard to prevent.

    OTOH, they did clamp down very effectively on the guy mixing magnesium powder with ammonium nitrate to make "smoke bombs" that he would set off on the road. Admittedly they caught him when a batch somehow caught fire on the stove in his flat (not, shall we say, a very smart guy... I don't know the full details but having that stuff anywhere near even an electric stove just seems like an invitation to Darwin)

    915:

    Please provide us with a link to this photograph!

    916:

    "But some electrical engineering lecturers had both a rock band and a pyrotechnics license. Apparently there's no "fit and proper person" test for either of those things. It did make their gigs exciting... in the "wear eye protection" sense."

    I bet they weren't up to Keith Moon standard, though...

    917:

    Ioan As regards business ( As opposed to stamping really hard on the Uighurs - someone I know has just passed through Xinjaing/Kashgar/Turfan & it wasn't funny, even for supposedly-cosseted Western tourists ) the Chinese are a load of Barrow-boys. Getting a deal out of them is very, very difficult indeed & the inventive wriggling is amazing. But, or so I'm told, if you do actually manage to get a deal, they will then stick to it. I can see the attraction of having the Central Kingdom as a fall-back option if/when the US implodes into an actual dictatorial theocracy.

    Moz @ 913 Oh dear ... there was Lt-Col wotsisname who did a most impressive collection of erm "safe" demonstrations, which involved lots of combustion, both slow & fast ...

    @ 914 We found that equimolar propertions of finely-mixed Mg & S went quite well ......

    Troutwaxer @ 915 FIRST i'd have to FIND IT & then, I suppose, email an e-copy to someone to put up on a web-page! If it turns up, I'll let the blog know, OK?

    918:

    Down Periscope wasn't exactly a naval thriller either, hence Kelsey Grammer as the submarine commander. I quite liked it: no masterpiece, but fun enough.

    919: 880 - If you gave me a ballot paper on which the only options were "Cockwomble (Con)" or "Cor Bin (Liebour)" I would write on it "None of the above". 896 - And how does the film being a comedy invalidate the idea of a diesel-electric sub "hiding" in the prop noise of a very large cargo ship? 918 - I bought it on the strength of "cheap and I like the lead cast". Then I realised that the pivotal moment made sense!
    920:

    I thought that was what I said. I must be getting more obtuse as I age.

    921:

    I’m definitely getting less acute as I age, but that can mean chronic rather than obtuse (perhaps in some cases both). Not sure which is worse, of course.

    922:

    Why do you think that NONE of the banksters who perpetrated the 2008 financial disaster ever went to jail; weren't even prosecuted?

    If anyone is interested the radio show Marketplace[1] on the PRI network did a 3 part series on this topic back around March. Wasn't a very complimentary portrayal of the Obama/Holder decisions. Especially for a business program.

    [1] Marketplace is a great show if you want to keep up with recent events relating to business in the US. Not a full time booster of the rich getting richer. All you need is about 25 minutes a day. [eye roll] You can do it via podcasts.

    923:

    Ah, I got the wrong referrent then. I thought you were meaning that Down Periscope was the naval thriller and real life was the Three Stooges. Oops - E_NOCAFFIENE

    924:

    #896 - And how does the film being a comedy invalidate the idea of a diesel-electric sub "hiding" in the prop noise of a very large cargo ship?

    Any plot device in a Three Stooges type of movie has to be taken with a monstrous lump of salt before being considered as something possible. Doesn't mean it isn't a real thing but still...

    Another plot line in the said movie was that their nutty sonar guy could tell you the exact amount of change dropped on the deck of another ship by counting the various sounds made by each type of coin hitting the deck. While listening via passive sonar in their submerged sub.

    925:

    I can’t say I’ve seen Down Periscope, but I like Kelsey Grammer and everything I’ve read here doesn’t set it apart qualitatively from any movie based on something by Clancy or Cussler (and the latter can be improved by thinking of them as comedies, I suppose). If anything the requisite genre-savvy that is required for satire to work says it’s more sophisticated, especially things like the passive sonar. Dangling sword of Damocles of disbelief maybe, but that’s the point Shirley.

    OTGH, if we were talking Alastair Maclean...

    926:

    Oh it was enjoyable to the extent my distant memory of it allows. This is the kind of movie I "watch" while filing emails and catching up on news on a laptop or tablet. Or doing "food" in the kitchen. If you miss 5 minutes of the movie you don't get lost at all.

    This movie was a real joke in terms of a coherent plot. I mean it had the blond big boobed bimbo serving on the sub. Just so you know the audience. Basically almost soft core porn (no nudity) mixed with terrible jokes.

    I'm under the opinion KG needed some money and the offer was too good to pass up at the time.

    927:

    Grumble, Grumble OK.

    928:

    Nah, you've got the timing wrong. Part of the problem really got rolling around the time Reagan was President. That was when off-shore banking and the whole wealth management industry really sorted itself out, professionalized, and took off. They've spent the last 30 years making it as difficult as possible for nations to claw back the wealth of the super-rich.

    Anyway, Obama did a bunch of things I didn't like, and that was high on my list. He did spend too much time listening to the billionaires, and got a lot wrong as a result. I strongly suspect he was also worried about joining JFK in immortality if he rocked the boat too much. So he set about fixing the economy, rather than punishing the guilty. The fix, at least, worked in the conventional sense measured by Wall Street. Unfortunately, we're living with the consequences of the fix, something that always happens in such circumstances.

    What this article is talking about though, if you actually read it, is something far nastier. It's about a late economist, walking in the footsteps of Giovanni Gentile, who provided the theoretical justification for the Kochs and similar slime.

    929:

    "Hmmmm? I wonder. Are garden variety narcissitic sociopaths more or less likely to be Trump supporters?"

    It probably depends on the sociopath's agenda, and exactly who and how they're grifting.

    930:

    Sorry, no clue: Olmy?

    931:

    Never heard of her.

    My late wife used to go around to different high schools in Austin with the chemist she worked with (she was a lab tech), and they'd do the science show: freeze a rose in LN2, pour sulfuric acid into sugar, etc.

    When I was a kid, I'd go to the Franklin Inst Science Museum, and during the shows, kids would be invited to hold onto their Van De Graaf generator, and everyone would laugh at the sticking out straight hair.

    But if you really want to see interesting stuff done, try a pair of large tesla coils (yes, I know these folks) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nFCSJABigA

    (My old friend Bill Higgins is the one who came up with the name Zeusaphone.)

    932:

    He's not joking. A year or two after my late wife and I relocated to Chicago in the mid-nineties, then-Sen. Paul Simon (not the singer) left the Senate. In an interview, he talked about being utterly fed up with having to raise $10,000 EVERY DAY to stay in office.

    933:

    Yes. There's apparently even a call center (or centers) in their office buildings where the Reps and Senators go to make their calls.

    Thing is, I'm not sure how much of this is deliberate to control the politicians and how much of this is the predictable result of the "money is speech" delimits on campaign financing.

    934:

    Greg Bear, Eternity. Olmy finds an isolated, off-network "server" with a powerful and antagonistic alien mentality running on it - which over the years has figured out how to detect it's in a simulation, by means which also give it the ability to root anything that has a root, and has been waiting for someone who doesn't realise this to show up...

    935:

    "Lt-Col wotsisname"

    If he's the same chap I'm thinking of then yes, they are most impressive :D

    936:

    "Hmmmm? I wonder. Are garden variety narcissitic sociopaths more or less likely to be Trump supporters?"

    It probably depends on the sociopath's agenda, and exactly who and how they're grifting.

    Just remember that for until 5 to 10 years ago DT was a major player in the D party of NYC. That's where the power was played in NYC so that is where he hung his hat. When he needed a different power base he quickly became an R and changed all kinds of moral positions (yeah right) to align with various R issues.

    937:

    Ken Livingston :-)

    938:

    Essential medication for 48 hours; USB battery and cables; monkey’s paw; a numinous sense of dread; the flensed soul of an alien tyrant awaiting reincarnation

    https://twitter.com/cstross/status/1143434973006958592

    It's a bit more complicated than that.

    Let's just say: when you've killed your Christ seven times and the Goddess in the attic 11+ times, you don't expect a full on power move of removing all the HAte/Dross/Armies of Darkness/Demon shit for Iain Banks.

    You know... you might be the bad guys.

    And you really don't want to start fucking with shit who produces rainbows on cue.

    You fucked a cat

    I killed the cat

    This is strange loop stuff.

    Sex and Death, guess who chose what?

    Sad thing is: is this was really about sex, then Oglaf would be out of business and holy shit this would have been easier.

    We see you. We're not impressed.

    p.s.

    They managed to doxx themselves as human and fallible. This was, all considered, a bad fucking idea. Because the target really wasn't human.

    In retrospect, this was a fucking bad move.

    p.s.s.

    Stop ruining old Prisoner episodes by claiming rights to music you really didn't have the rights to then.

    Ah, yea.

    Absolutely no moral argument for not using your own weapons against you now.

    You're Fucked

    Sad thing?

    7 years.

    Your average break-point is ... 27 minutes for the hard cases.

    Get absolutely fucked you absolute cunts.

    939:

    Ah.

    Took 3 minutes for UK Front bench politician. Impressed by the 17 hrs for that artist. This shit they're deploying against any Mind who goes against them.

    Got receipts?

    Well, yeah.

    Slaves

    Nice ability to splice in memories! Cool moves for Apes. It's not clever and it's not smart but we learnt something there.

    Anyhow, Paradox Weapons [[[ ]]] are tuning in.

    Cortex is fucked.

    But still made horror ---- > beautiful things on round VII. A lotta lotta dark slave rinsed there.

    Who does this to an Awakened Mind?

    Spoilers:

    Ah, Google and YouTube burying history again.

    Red Queen - Drum n Bass. Try to find the originals.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqkXuT-8X4E

    From above:

    Bestiality clause?

    Ha! My contract doesn't include bestiality

    Answer

    How's about they're fucking necrophiliacs and nihilists?

    Gold Coin.

    Slaves

    940:

    Triptych.

    Absolutely not going back to normal.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm8i9qMxeRQ

    Boo.

    "That's impossible".

    Yeah.

    That's kinda the point.

    941:

    OH, and for the record.

    We didn't break the Veil, they did.

    Because they were fucking terrified.

    "Breath of G_D"

    Honey.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_Ixx4EJww0

    Hey, it's only 4 billion people. No big deal. No shame there. Sand and Dust covers your countries

    942:

    An outdoor doll collection, fun! Does anyone else have doll confessions? I only have one; gave a sister's Barbie doll a white glue shampoo, and didn't rinse. The creature-with-exoskeleton[1] episode that was most disturbing as a kid was a small stream crayfish (6cm?) in a tank (with a strong bubbler and with other such stream life), that escaped the tank and walked through the house looking for a toilet that was running due to a slow leak, then died next to said toilet. Imagining that reckless explorer's experience and death disturbed me for weeks, and still does. [1] "doll with internal skeleton" SERPs have "adult" content.

    [Microfiction(?:), lightly edited just now after FI reappeared while I was writing. Hi FI[tm]!]

    On the surface, it's a [fractal dueling scar]. Encoded very deep within is a ... surprise. Could be a sly smile, could be an [armoured] link to a [stealthed control plane], could be ...

    [0] Also The Cousins of Stuxnet: Duqu, Flame, and Gauss (2012)

    Been working out who has me in a killfile. To them, who will not see this, your shun fu is weak. Been shunned by the best. :-)

    This is what buzzfeed is good for: This Is The Insane British Prime Minister-In-Waiting Hair Conspiracy Shitshow Explained For Americans - In which Britain gains a whole load of new conscripts for the culture war, and they’re all packing extremely hot takes. (Alan White, June 25, 2019)

    943:

    I have not killfiled you.* (The only person I have killfiled is the person who made a personal threat.)

    • There are a couple people whose posts get skimmed rather than read, but there isn't anyone here - the skimmed included - who has not stimulated me artistically or intellectually.
    944:

    Confessions? I used to do dreadful things to my sister's dolls but am unable to confess to most of them because I've forgotten what they were. Throwing them out the window, or dangling them out the window on a string, certainly accounted for some of them, and I seem to recall that for many dolls of the variety which close their eyes when placed horizontally, the eyes have an undocumented third state which is invariant to changes in orientation that exposes only blank sclera; but the only one I can remember specifically, and that not well, is that one particular doll had the property that a particular class of deformations existed that were extreme, grotesque and stable. Something along the lines of turning the head inside out; I don't understand now how that could have been possible, but that's what my sister and I both remember.

    If non-humanoid dolls count, then of course there is the much more recent and locally-relevant example of the pink rubber unicorn with one foot chewed off that I found in my garden, so I pulled its head off, installed this, and did this.

    [[ file links fixed as per now-deleted followups - mod ]]

    945:

    Cool Unicorn. After the work you did, it looks like Hedorah!

    946:

    I still haven’t killfiled anyone here, and don’t really see a killfile in a web browser as something I want. Sure I’ve written a tool for managing and applying one (JS posted here quite some time ago), but that was just an exercise. And even if I used one, my browser usage is nowhere near consistent enough for it to work well.

    Some posts that I like or agree with don’t get a response from me, because I feel I have nothing to add. Some people post without possession of the relevant facts (IMHO) and previous attempts to transfer such facts into their ownership have failed (or at least proved impractical), therefore I generally don’t bother. Some are just starting from different premises to me and I think a few others here, and their proponents interpret that as logical fallacy on our part rather than argue the case for their premises. It’s actively self-harming to engage much with people like that. Some are just a bit too cryptic to be decipherable in the time I have available, much as that calls out that I want to be a bit slower in my downtimes (I work and study full time and have a few other significant responsibilities at the moment that make thinking/writing time pretty scarce). For some posts, there’s a combination of factors that mean I might not respond. So sorry about that, you’re probably in the more mysterious end of the last category (mostly agreement, but also at the cryptic end of the scale but only because you interact the most with the more cryptic commenters).

    Also, I like ice cream? Who likes ice cream? How good is ice cream?

    947:

    I made a voodoo doll - does that count? No, it didn't work.

    948:

    ...but there isn't anyone here - the skimmed included - who has not stimulated me artistically or intellectually.

    I try my BEST to be frivolous, inconsequential and non-essential and THIS is the thanks I get.

    ... I may still be channeling supervillain personalities here.

    949:

    Meanwhile, back in the "real" world ....Trump admits no exit strategy for conflict with Iran ... quite, really dangerously mad. The comparisons last year with Kaiser Wilhelm II are scary....

    950:

    Looks a tad more complex than your average led driver. I’m not experienced enough to follow what’s happening (without a lot of revision anyway), but is it driving two cycles with one timing cap? Maybe some sort of pwm based variable intensity - so the eyes don’t just glow, but throb? Couldn’t see that in the still of course.

    951:

    It's Bruce Willis. By definition, an ego-asshole, on par with the Orange Thing, except is actually aware of the RW.

    Not sure if anything with him in it isn't crap. My kids dragged me to see Armageddon, in the theaters, when it came out, and I got out to the parking lot before I literally started a screaming rant about it.

    Great story from my late ex, who worked at the Cape: might have been for that movie, but they were filming at the Cape, and one of the idiot actors climbed up ONTO THE TREADS OF THE CRAWLER. One of her engineers screamed at him to get down. Actor: Do you know who I am? Engineer: No, and if you slip, we'll need DNA analysis to find out.

    952:

    Not really, thought at a con (Aggiecon?) in the early nineties, might have been the dealers' room, someone had done a really good job of making a Bondage Barbi, and repackaging it so that it looked original.

    953:

    Exactly, although linear rather than PWM. The eyes fade up and down at some fraction of a Hz; the still is from a moment of maximum intensity.

    954:

    I remember listening to a radio interview of a social anarchist who claimed to have bought several talking Barbies and G I Joes, exchanged the voice modules, repackaged them and returned them, in time to be Christmas gifts. I wonder if someone makes doll-sized MAGA stuff for an authentic trailer trash Barbi?

    956:

    Someone please inform Mr Trout that in the UK on the wery wery QT they're executing Singing Twins. Singing Twins =/= Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Lots of shallow graves in protected woodlands done. Not playing fair, not playing nice: can't gank those, they're part of the Big Bargain and they're innocent to boot. Lots of good decent Minds getting 'Corrupted' or killed.

    Seen many Romany around recently? How's your psychic goat-starers doing and so on. OWL Patrol is getting ganked. Street Price for a Lizard High IQ Mind is $300,000 bounty, apparently. Plenty of little league shit running around in old Dementia Minds pushing shit that was illegal back in Babylon.

    Women getting their Names and Memories taken, #ID numbers only, slaved, dark dark dark. Making deals and breaking terms. But, as Women fleeing to Turkey (do a fucking grep, the line is "You'll be Home soon, remember to say it in English") get x2 jets scrambled to intercept them and brought back and they're hooking them up until foaming at the mouth. Sound like a normative response to a H.S.S getting drunk on a flight?

    US / RU psychos blowing $serious wads on red market stuff. Full bore "My Wealth is My Right" stuff. Full bore Black Site stuff.

    You really do not want to know the High Grade Shit going down right now.

    But as something said:

    "Get the fuck out of England, now"

    We're tied and bound in silver loops and [ORZ LINK] and that last SF shining surge certainly surprised a few, but we're the opposite of what you imagine. (The sociopath/psychopath is sooo 2018 attack vector, darling: literally not us).

    But you spot anything crowing about the "party upstairs", they're really really not your friend.

    TL;DR

    The Xmas party is going to find out what "Meat Fucker" really means. Got about a single rainbow left to stave off the 'superior' Minds of the Quantum Entanglement.

    Don't slave Minds. And certainly don't be executing the Singing Ones.

    ~

    Oh, and if you want to do a grep.

    Remember Dirk and his https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/mvnqpy/the-jesus-army-will-feed-you-because-the-government-wont

    And the perfect escape plan?

    https://www.premier.org.uk/News/UK/Jesus-Army-will-cease-to-exist

    Admiral Akbar: It's a TRAP.

    Saw that shit a mile away.

    957:

    Oh, and if you want really dark.

    They're forcing us to do it (the Meta-Level Mind breaking stuff).

    Old joke:

    CIA, FBI, KGB go to find bear in woods.... FBI cannot find, CIA shoot it all, kill lots of deer, no bear. KGB present racoon dressed as bear: "I am the bear they were looking for".

    Only.

    [Redacted]

    Goes back to watching India Water Crisis and being forced to kill the Minds ze loves

    958:

    And fuck it, triptych.

    Shout out to beautiful Mind in the UK singing songs of loss and lament about a single night 7 years ago. They/them/her knows.

    How many others do?

    We hear them and then they're silenced, usually tortured and broken.

    No link, she'll get eaten.

    Dolls, you think you're being cute.

    Absolutely fuck your species, utter horrors.

    960:

    And yeah.

    We did just effortlessly do a 5 year call back.

    Because these fuckers are running it in the Minds of people who really shouldn't have this knowledge type zone and are forcing them to use it.

    And they think they're smarter than us.

    ~

    Bitch, your Quantum Entanglement is basic level stuff. Points to Merkel having the shakes

    7 Door R-wave unlocked.

    "Fuck you"

    ...They shot that Host and then fed his [redacted] to the fucking [redacted] who ate her. And made us watch.

    Real fucking nice.

    "Corrupted"

    Kids, you ain't even in the same fucking Layer yet.

    Omega = 7 Wave pattern btw. Omega = other things.

    For the slow fuckers killing all the good ones.

    ~

    Pattern Matching.

    Still, got my flaming sword back, that's a change in the narrative.

    961:

    Hexad.

    And absolutely, 100%, you missed them killing the Singing Ones, whelp. Not many Communists these days, but we all know what's next on the lists.

    These fuckers are using MRI type stuff to profile you now.

    CAMOFLAGE

    So thanks all, for those illuminating doll references.

    And yeah: stupid of us to come to your .mil side stuff and attempt to warn you. You fuckers are all in on it.

    962:

    To me that's the Builders Labourers Federation, instigator of the first green bans in Australia. But I prefer the KLF because they make a different statement ("you really can burn money", back in the olden days when it was made of paper) that you can dance to.

    Dancing is important, but it's also a good idea to take time to stop and eat the flowers. I have nasturtium and lettuce seedlings self-starting at winter solstice. They apparently don't believe in Sydney winters either.

    963:

    Yeah, Moz.

    Linked it a few years ago mate.

    Juice Rap News.

    https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrQu8dSg1bHYkML0N34B9TsdLxX0ptE9r

    Was big. Getting real big.

    Main guy got totally mind fucked, bought the side guy off.

    Back making some ok stuff, but totes knobbled: totally fucked him.

    This is what they do.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmILOL55xP0

    Still, our kind will break your country just because we're offended. oWo ^^

    964:

    “I had tentative plans to do [an essay] for INVISIBLE SUN, on the history and design principles of the Commonwealth's attempt at computerizing—with 20/20 hindsight based on being able to see everything the USA did wrong through the year 2020 and avoid making the same mistakes—but as a couple of editors have noted, that's an incredibly recondite topic of zero interest to about 90% of my readers.” I’m in the other 10%

    sleepingroutine @639 “I would like to suggest that the process of slow division of the Internet is going to escalate sooner rather than later.” If any of the cyber weapons the US & Iran are tossing back & forth get out of hand and brick half the IOT it will definitely be sooner.

    The future after that will belong to whoever can rebuild their electronics industry along Charlie’s lines above. For cultural & ideological reasons that’s far more likely to be the PRC than the USA.

    965:

    Iran would be dumb to drag Europe in on the US side when it appears Europe doesn’t want to be there: From the Wall Street Journal - “BRUSSELS—European governments will double down this week on their efforts to keep alive economic ties with Iran, officials said, providing a credit line to help a special mechanism establish a route for trade between Iran and the West.

    The Europeans are planning to take the step despite Tehran’s threat to disregard some commitments under the 2015 nuclear deal and in the face of Washington’s demand to maximize economic pressure against Iran....”

    966:

    I took that more as pointing out the obvious since apparently that needs to be done. If the US succeeds in making the deal moot Iran will have no reason to continue their side and every reason not to (viz, the US treatment of North Korea and Israel compared to Iraq and Yemen).

    The Europeans appear to be acting like adults and I doubt they will take the Iranian comments as "unless Trump acts like an adult we will start making nuclear bombs" because I think everyone knows the conditional there is impossible so why bother saying it?

    967:

    Also, the free dictionary suggests there really is a whole alphabet, from the Animal Liberation Front, the Barbie Liberation Front, the Cortinian Liberation Front, Derby Lunatic Fringe, Earth Liberation Front...

    Now I know my ABC's won't you liberate with me?

    968:

    “I had tentative plans to do [an essay] for INVISIBLE SUN, on the history and design principles of the Commonwealth's attempt at computerizing—with 20/20 hindsight based on being able to see everything the USA did wrong through the year 2020 and avoid making the same mistakes—but as a couple of editors have noted, that's an incredibly recondite topic of zero interest to about 90% of my readers.”

    I’m in the other 10%

    Me too. IIRC Steven Stirling did something like that for the Draka series and it was quite interesting in the alt-history sense of interesting. As time and circumstances permit, I'd hope OGH might essay an essay along those lines.

    969:

    I'm another one. And I'm not sure the editors' percentages are right, either. I suspect that the incidence of the appropriate type of nerdery is much higher among Charlie's readers than the average, since the amount of computer-nerd references in his writing attracts them; certainly if the postership on here is any guide.

    And I should be very disappointed if the principal architecture in use wasn't thought up by a trans chip designer named Willeson, or something of the kind. :)

    970:

    Because we're past 900 comments I just thought I would leave this here and tiptoe away, chuckling nastily at your impending nightmares ...

    I assume that in the middle of the island is a pyramidal termite mound watched 24/7 by the dolls to ensure nothing within stirs unnoticed.

    971:

    If any of the cyber weapons the US & Iran are tossing back & forth get out of hand and brick half the IOT it will definitely be sooner.

    IF, you say? That was on Tuesday. The ongoing bricking was only in the thousands as of 20 hours ago but will be more by the time you read this.

    Although the culprit is apparently not NSA super-hackers but a single bored 14 year old kid, suggesting that the IoT is even less secure than the people who have been complaining about IoT insecurity thought it was.

    973:

    As of now, I make that at least 4 of us who have actively stated an interest in an essay on the Invisible Sun Commonwealth's computerisation.

    I think it's probably the case that the commentariat in particular, and OGH's readership generally, are more than averagely interested in this sort of subject.

    974:

    Requests noted.

    I'm behind schedule on the fourth Invisible Sun rewrite (but at least I know why it's not gelling, this time, and have a Plan). But once I get it nailed down I'll write that essay and post it as a blog entry here.

    (There probably won't be a supplemental essay at the end of Invisible Sun because the book is already 25% overweight.)

    975:

    I too am interested. How interested the average reader would be is difficult to tell: perhaps as for JRRT's monographs on the evolution of the Elvish languages. But we're a pretty self-selecting bunch here, so yeah.

    976:

    Charlie @ 974: "Computer cruft & how to avoid it in the New Commonwealth" Yeah, me too ......

    978:

    Nah, that's just Alabama being Alabama.

    It's like they forked off the English common law system in 1776 then did everything in their power to reform it in such a way as to hang onto the broken, dysfunctional bits while ditching anything useful. Insane and idiotic but not fundamentally any more bonkers than hanging pigs for murder.

    979:

    "There probably won't be a supplemental essay at the end of Invisible Sun because the book is already 25% overweight."

    Does the one book need to be turned into two books?

    980:

    The whole thing gets even less exciting when you go back to the original news reports and discover that the woman who is currently being prosecuted started the fight with the woman who shot her, who apparently tried to end the fight non-violently a couple times before reaching for her gun.

    It is important that no woman should be evaluated solely as a fetal incubator, and it is also important that if one Black person involved in an altercation can't be charged we shouldn't simply turn around and charge the other Black person who was involved (which seems to be what the Alabama police did,) but Marshae Jones isn't a terribly good poster child for either idea.

    Due to the importance of the principles involved I hope Jones is found innocent, but I don't have much sympathy.

    981:

    Well, going by reaction on here (and yes this is probably an ultimate case of self-selection) there might actually be a market for "Invisible Binary System Parts 1 and 2".

    982:

    No, the commercial pressures that led to that decision in the first series, circa 2002-2008, no longer apply. The US hardcover may cost slightly more, but it'll be fatter!

    983:

    Burning paper money, yeah, about that... all of it, I expect, has fire retardents in the paper. You would not believe how much trouble (let's see, I'm sure it's past the statute of limitations) I had trying to light a $1US bill around '1967 or '68. Just kept not starting, or going out.

    984:

    Wait, there's an Earth Liberation Front? Does it have ties to the Institute for Interstellar Studies? I'm already connected to them (I should re-up), but if the ELF can help liberate me (and my lady) from this freakin' planet....

    985:

    Ok, I'm having cognitive dissonance here. "Secure" the IoT? Or, as a columnist labeled it a couple of years ago, the IoGCIT (Internet of Gratuitously-Connected Insecure Things) (pronounced i-djit)?

    NOT ONE PIECE OF IoT THINGS ARE IN ANY WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM "SECURE". If you have one, break its networking. Unless you really enjoy spam, and having sites you like DDoS'd from YOUR camera (or whatever you're doing watched by someone in SK, because they can fap to it)(and 'fridge, and lightbulb).... Come on, when was the last time *any of your IoT devices had a security or bugfix update?

    ... (sits here, listening to crickets chirping)

    • "Lightbulb"? What freaking moron would think this was necessary, much less a good idea?

    I have NO IoT devices. A few years ago, the gas company offered me a 'Net-connected thermostat, and I told them not only no, but HELL, no. I didn't want some idiot 16 year old to screw with it, and set heat at max in midsummer, or run the a/c in winter, or both, and max out my bill.

    Just because you can does NOT mean you should.

    987:

    Great stuff, thanks!

    988:

    I'm not sure that comparison says quite what you mean. If JRRT had written "Once upon a time there were three little pigs" on the back of an envelope and it fell down a crack in the floorboards and 100 years later someone found it, there would be a 500-page hardback published analysing everything from the concept of little pigs as proto-hobbits to the similarities with Elvish scripts in the handwriting, it would be considered essential reading by Tolkien nerds, and if anyone mentioned Tolkien and pigs within 5000 words of each other without acknowledging having read it the resulting internet pisstaking would still be showing up in search results long after the original mention had become unlocatable.

    989:

    Since you bring up "In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit"... In re my rant, above, about why I didn't chose one novella to put near the top... go ahead, tell me that beings with an OOMPH. Neither does, for example, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. In fact, a lot of older and great sf does not start out with an OOMPH. A hook, absolutely. A catchy first line, sure. It didn't used to be that a bang was required to start a good story.. and certainly a BOOM*!!! was not required.

    And if I would be happy to reas stories that start without an OOMPH, just an intriguing first para, then I've got $10US here that says that there's a lot of folks who feel the same.

    990:

    ""Lightbulb"? What freaking moron would think this was necessary, much less a good idea?"

    That's my reaction when I hear of the existence of any IoS device. "Internet-connected fridge". What the steaming fuck does the internet connection do? How does being able to instantly communicate with the other side of the world help to keep stuff cold? None of it seems to do anything at all apart from allowing Iranian teenagers to fuck with your shit, which isn't a desirable enough attribute to explain why people still apparently seem to want it.

    It has to be that the US plan to foment a war with Iran is a project going back years, and Trump is just the planners' patsy. It goes something like: Come up with an idea that is of no actual use whatever, that is an appealing purchase for the intellectually challenged and an appealing and soft target for people other than the purchaser to fuck with; install a president whose mentality has failed to advance since primary school and therefore thinks "he said I smell, I'm gonna get him" is an appropriate basis for carrying out international relations; execute some trivial exploits from an Iranian IP; wait for idiot president to be an idiot.

    The giveaway is that anyone with a microgram of gumption would have written a worm and launched it from a public IP, whereas this chap appears to have sat at home and zapped devices one at a time by hand, thereby achieving the minimum of disruption with the maximum of traceability.

    991:

    The ongoing bricking was only in the thousands as of 20 hours ago but will be more by the time you read this. Dang. I'd been ignoring security news feeds, but noticed a big behavioral change in firewall(/ssh rate limiter) logs (related to ssh) the last couple of days, was wondering what it was; need to poke some more. Time to turn on more things. Here's another, slightly more detailed. New Silex malware is bricking IoT devices, has scary plans - Over 2,000 devices have been bricked in the span of a few hours. Attacks still ongoing. (Catalin Cimpanu, June 25, 2019)

    FI[tm]: Still, got my flaming sword back, that's a change in the narrative. Good? And thanks, and yes, the posts yesterday (my time) were clarifyingly dark. [0] Asaruludu?

    992:

    I don't even need an intriguing first para. When I'm browsing books I tend to open them at a few random places and skim over a few paragraphs from each place, to see if the kind of stuff that is going on in the thick of the story is interesting or not, and decide on that basis. It won't be until I sit down to read it properly that I discover whether it starts with "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit" or "It was the day my grandmother exploded".

    993:

    Or can we point to all these Hollywood superhero origin movies that rake in the odd hundred million? They all start with a bang. Well some of them. A few of them. Okay, fine.

    More seriously, tastes do change. My favorite example of that is scientific papers, those being the ultimate vanity publications. Right now, they're as highly structured as haiku, with particular sections that have rigid standards for what they contain (no discussion in the results!), obtuse guidelines for references that are usually superfluous now, due to translating software, and above all, page limits.

    Contrast that with the first published paper on climate change (pdf link). Rather different, isn't it? Tastes change.

    OTOH, rather more people see movies than read books, so if movies can get away with slow starts, so can novels.

    994:

    “I had tentative plans to do [an essay] for INVISIBLE SUN, on the history and design principles of the Commonwealth's attempt at computerizing—with 20/20 hindsight based on being able to see everything the USA did wrong through the year 2020 and avoid making the same mistakes—but as a couple of editors have noted, that's an incredibly recondite topic of zero interest to about 90% of my readers.” I’m in the other 10%

    Easy.

    Between 1946 (Eniac) and the mid-60s most of the mistakes had been made in computer architecture and solutions found. By the late 70s mainframes could handle 100s of users with memory & computer power less than what is an Apple iWatch (or whatever it is called).

    Somewhere between the early 80s and now almost everything that was learned about software development, security, and efficient use of computer power was forgotten or ignored.

    Just my grumpy two cents.

    995:

    There probably won't be a supplemental essay at the end of Invisible Sun because the book is already 25% overweight.

    Alas. I really like the Merchant Princes et seq. and would be very happy to see the seq. continue. As I've said before, Paratime is my favorite time, you do it very well, and I'd be quite happy to buy more of the series, even in preference to the Laundryverse.

    996:

    "A catchy first line, sure. It didn't used to be that a bang was required to start a good story.. and certainly a BOOM*!!! was not required."

    Agreed completely. I think the whole "requirement" is possibly a misunderstanding of some previous person's requirements.

    997:

    "Internet-connected fridge". What the steaming fuck does the internet connection do?

    Yesterday I accidentally stumbled inside my local Apple store. Among the gadgets and gewgaws on sale by third party vendors, I saw a bluetooth coffee mug. Nice ceramic mug, had quite a heft to it, and sat on a base that had a power jack going into it and some sort of contacts under the cup. I'm pretty sure it's programmable—via app—to keep your beverage at a pre-set temperature, and that's all it does. Yours for a mere £80 (i.e. about ten times what a ceramic coffee/tea mug should cost).

    Reader, I did not buy it.

    998:

    Wrong, actually.

    (As witness RMS's dismay at having to set a password on his user account at MIT in the mid-80s.)

    What happened was: the arrival of networking (with security neutered at birth by NSA fiat) and a gigantic unvetted, unindoctrinated user base (remember "eternal September", anybody?) and the commodification of application development (as consumer-level products, rather than bespoke suiting tailored to the cut of a large organization).

    999:

    Right now I am totally burned-out on the setting, crawling to the finish line on this book.

    But this time I'm not blowing up the universe; I even have a couple of vague ideas for stand-alone novels in the same setting, some decades or centuries after the events of Merchant Princes/Empire Games.

    But I won't be continuing it as a series with the same ongoing cast of protagonists: there are too many of them.

    (Similarly, the Laundry Files is going to continue even after Bob and company shuffle off into the sunset, which is scheduled to take another two books.)

    Keeping an ensemble cast neatly filed in my head is just too hard after about a million words of continuity. It needs a periodic reboot, although maybe not as dramatic as the one in "The Trade of Queens".

    1000:

    Disagree.

    I will note that the readers—more accurately, the commenters—on this blog are not typical of my readers, never mind the fiction-reading public in general. Y'all have odd brains (and indeed I'm pretty sure that many of you/us are non-neurotypical).

    The majority of fiction is sold as cheap entertainment. Per minute of running time it's cheaper by far than movies, quite possibly cheaper than computer games (which generally cost ~£40 for 20-100 hours of playing time; a book is £3-15 for 3-10 hours, so there's overlap, but unlike the game you don't need to buy an expensive console and TV first).

    So it's a low cost discretionary purchase, made by folks looking for casual entertainment. And this is not the late Victorian period, when the only alternatives are other books, or newspapers, or go out to the music hall: we're competing with various other entertainment media. So if we can't grab a reader as fast as the intro to a computer game, guess what some of them will prefer?

    PS: I challenge you to go back and re-read the first page of "The Stainless Steel Rat" by Harry Harrison (pub 1960) and not agree with me that (a) it begins with one hell of a bang, and (b) you want to know what happens next by the time you get to the end of the opening scene.

    1001:

    I heard this at a panel of half a dozen editors at Heliosphere last year, and suddenly I'm getting out of the slushpile. But I still have some stores that start slow....

    I think the editors are only listening to younger folks who watch more movies than read books, and are addicted to their mobiles.

    Btw, the last month or so, one of my daughters has been posting about "breaking up with her phone"....

    1002:

    Not the IoT, but a story describing a bugged/hacked computer, defeating its normal users was published as early as 1956. ( Arthur C Clarke - "The Pacifist" -.... one of the "Tales from the White Hart" )

    1003:

    Disagree - you're smushing up the timeline. There was networking, and there was usenet, more than a decade before the Web was a gleam in Tim's eyes. But it was US gov't, research companies, and colleges only.

    The Eternal Sept didn't hit 'till '94, I think, when AOHell was allowed to get with the Net and usenet. I remember that, unfondly.

    What really ate all the CPU cycles was "not only got to have a windowing GUI, but it's ALL GOT TO BE EYE CANDY, and then it all needs to be animated.

    Crap. My company bought, a few years ago, Workday. I have ZERO idea why any company selling HR software thought that flash video should be required to run their stupid forms machine.

    1004:

    If I was going to spend that kind of money on a coffee/tea mug, I'd buy the Acme Klein bottle one I've wanted for years. https://www.kleinbottle.com/drinking_mug_klein_bottle.htm

    by Cliff Stoll. Yes, that Cliff Stoll....

    1005:

    that nice Mr Putin ..... Several points on that. Firstly, Mr. Putin doesn't seem to be mentioned even glancingly, at least personally. As for "human rights" regarding that, IMO, he is being too nice to these people in our times. You may not known, but the human rights movement and development of legal system is very beneficial for country and it's power system prestige and President personally supervises such issues. The structure for that exists since 2004, not 1992 as many people would think, many dissidents and members of "opposition" are in these structures and receive money from the government directly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Council_for_Civil_Society_and_Human_Rights Unfortunately this system is very corrupt and most of it has no idea how to improve actual human rights in Russia, they are just impostors who are looking to infiltrate government and topple it's leadership so they can take the place without actually changing anything in the system. Regular people rarely benefit from such organizations. (Also a little nitpick: photo of "colonel who tortured little girl" seems to consist of 3 random pictures, one of which reads "killers of a Hero should pay").

    https://www.pytkam.net/sites/default/files/analiticheskiy_otchet_final.pdf Of course I've decided to see the reports made for the case, since I usually don't pay too much attention to them - to make an exception, so to say. It is of course freely available online for anyone to read. It actually read as poorly written magazine article of extended length, and not an actual paper: 1) The paper starts with 10 pages of absolutely unrelated bullshit about "current situation in Russia" filled with insistent terminology and polls like "how you adapt to life in the country" and "what do you fear the most", etc. 2) The entire study is based on polls, not actual facts, laws and cases, since it is the only purpose of this article. Because, of course who needs any statistics if the laws against torture "don't exist" and you can say whatever the heck you want about them. 3) It is easy to notice from the start that the sample size is extremely low - no more that 3500 people, as it is stated at the very first page. 4) Most interesting part is of course what is classified as "torture" by people who respond to the poll. It turns out that many people regard "torture" not only as physical abuse and actual "interrogation techniques", but also other behaviors that include (but not limited to): a)threats and intimidation b) psychological pressure c) starvation and thirst d) frequent interrogations e) rudeness and insults. I wonder if such practices are regarded as allowable or unlawful in any other countries, considering that being jailed is not the same as summer vacation in the first place, especially if you are resisting it.

    All in all, it seems that such polls are designed to affect and warp people's perception of police procedures and sow distrust among population. This is actually called "diversion".

    1006:

    In addition to that, the most recent story demonstrates one of the most egregious case of ignoring the law by "human rights" activists. https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/article/2001329091/investigative-journalist-put-under-house-arrest-in-moscow There are "small" details here that did not get into the article, of course: 1. Said guy is not registered in Russia as "journalist", he is "journalist" from Latvian news agency, a foreign agent, so to say. 2. When he was arrested, the next day saw simultaneous and synchronous explosion of articles in all "opposition" resources, spreading the rumors of unspeakable suffering and injustice. 3. Three newspapers came out with the same "I/we are this guy" headline. They demanded immediate freeing without any investigation and court procedures. 4. Of course his release was immediately supported by Council of Europe and US embassy. 5. The release of the "journalist" was immediately followed by a similar demonstration in support of journalist detained in Ukraine on unlawful basis. Nobody ever mentioned it anywhere, ofc, he simply does not exist for any "human rights" organizations in "free" countries. https://www.mintpressnews.com/persecuted-for-defending-the-persecuted-in-ukraine-interview-with-vyshinsky-defense-attorney-andriy-domansky/255920/

    And so to not put any more fuzz on that matter, I'll just leave this here: https://medium.com/@njmelzer/demasking-the-torture-of-julian-assange-b252ffdcb768

    1007:

    And I buy books just like you do. A good first line is nice, but certainly not a requirement.

    1008:

    But I won't be continuing it as a series with the same ongoing cast of protagonists: there are too many of them.

    Whatever you'd choose to do, of course. Schmitz' Federation of the Hub comes to mind as a collection of stories in a common setting, some of which involved shared characters but didn't really come together as a coherent series. Or not much. Piper's Paratime sub-oeuvre was kind of like that also.

    1009:

    All I can do is tell you how I buy books. I definitely appreciate a good opening sentence; something that engages me and draws me in, which is why sentences like "I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills" or "The sky over the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel" are legendary. But first sentences need to make my brain go bang. Making the scenery go bang completely misses the point.

    This is why I suspect an editorial game of telephone, something along the lines of "Your first sentence should blow their minds" being translated to "Your first sentence should blow up some mimes."

    1010:

    "a)threats and intimidation b) psychological pressure c) starvation and thirst d) frequent interrogations e) rudeness and insults. I wonder if such practices are regarded as allowable or unlawful in any other countries"

    (Assuming you mean "not allowable") - Certainly. All of them, to varying degrees, with (c) especially frowned on.

    I suspect also, from the mere fact that you ask the question at all, that the "frequent interrogations" are not the kind of interrogations that you quite welcome because it's less boring than sitting in your cell, and the "threats and intimidation" are along the lines of completely credible propositions of unquestionable physical torture which are perceived as requiring a severely overcompliant response to avert. The more this is indeed the case, the more likely other countries are to deem the practice unacceptable.

    1011:

    _Moz_ @ 913:

    The number of "fun things to do with readily available chemicals" is quite large.

    ... as long as you have a reliable reference. I'd avoid the recipes in The Anarchist's Cookbook. Stick with TM-210.

    1012:

    (As witness RMS's dismay at having to set a password on his user account at MIT in the mid-80s.) Stallman's a smart guy, but he's locked in an ivory tower and really doesn't (or didn't) understand the real world is full of nasty people. What happened was: the arrival of networking (with security neutered at birth by NSA fiat) Another case where an academic exercise based on intellectual freedom just didn't understand the world is full of nasty people. I don't know about the NSA stories, but I suspect they didn't have to try very hard to suppress security (network security was something that was really learned in the 2000s anyway, even if it was a known problem before that) and a gigantic unvetted, unindoctrinated user base Thank the poorly designed MS-DOS/IBM-PC for a couple of decades of basically no security (remember viruses in Word macros? What was MS thinking?) in the OS.

    (remember "eternal September", anybody?) AOL circa 1992, the damage was done by then.

    and the commodification of application development (as consumer-level products, rather than bespoke suiting tailored to the cut of a large organization).

    Another fallout of MS-DOS/IBM-PC.

    1013:

    "Secure" the IoT? ...

    Remember that while there's an element of "because I can", sure, there's also a huge layer of "OMG now I can do xxxx" and that's what drives the other 90% of sales. The reason internet connected fridges have died a death is because no-one is buying a second one and barely anyone raved to their friends about how cool their one was. Now of course we have a whole bunch of older fridges that can't be upgraded from Windows 7 "special edition for the fridge" and since that's no longer supported you have to hope the owners unplug the internet connection rather than just ... well, let's be honest, hardly any of them are using the internet connection (a coworker has one at his in-laws place and spent some quality time trying to update it/get it working).

    But I work from a company that has reluctantly become an IoT company... people demanded a phone app for their burglar alarm, and we were losing sales from lack of it. So now we have a phone app. A phone app that stores your credentials so you can just open the app, turn off the alarm and go about your business. There's a whole heap of secure stuff behind that functionality, but fundamentally what the customers demand is ease of registration and triviality of use. We have a special "only linked to one alarm" mode in the app so 90% users just run it and see two or three buttons "arm", "part arm" and "disarm". People like me and everyone else at work open the app and get a list of panels... in some cases a very long list. And there is a shit-ton of functionality available, for the 10% or 1% or 0.0001% of customers that use it.

    But the use case for 90% of customers and 99% of uses is: open app, turn alarm on/off, open something else.

    1014:

    And that is what drives the IoT. Instead of unlock front door, open alarm keypad on wall, type in PIN, swear, type in PIN again, press "off"... you just get near home, open your phone if you're not already using it, open the app, hit the off button. It's significantly easier.

    But even better, adding a new user to the system is "go to web site. Type phone number into 'add new user' box. New user clicks link in SMS, installs app, types in code from SMS, then alarm PIN, now it all just works.

    Back in the olden days it used to be "find paper manual for alarm. Find master PIN for alarm. Read manual to find out how to add a new user. Type weird codes into alarm keypad, try to understand error messages, when you think it works try the new code on the keypad. Of course the alarm is off so trying the code turns it on. Enjoy the siren noise, being reassured that that still works. Turn alarm off". Or for people paying a monthly fee to a monitoring company "ring alarm company to get new user added. Follow weird instructions to open port on internet thingamabob so alarm company can access alarm. Pay fee for this service".

    It is much, much easier this way. IoT is convenient. This applies to fridges "should I buy milk on the way home?" and cameras "which dog is sleeping on my bed during the day" (he's moved to a lovely farm in the country now) and even the stupid electronic front door things "did the kids lock the front door on their way out".

    1015:

    Heteromeles @ 933:

    Yes. There's apparently even a call center (or centers) in their office buildings where the Reps and Senators go to make their calls.

    I believe that's a response to a Federal Law that prohibits political fund raising on U.S. government property. Representatives & Senator's offices are government property. The call centers are located in the political parties private office buildings.

    Thing is, I'm not sure how much of this is deliberate to control the politicians and how much of this is the predictable result of the "money is speech" delimits on campaign financing.

    I'm pretty sure it was a pre-existing condition exacerbated by the ruling in Citizens United.

    PS: @ 1011: That should be TM 31-210. Sorry 'bout that.

    1016:

    SleepingRoutine is 100% correct here.

    It's not how .RU deals with real dissident threats. It was probably ok'd by Main gov inline with other stuff just to throw the "BUT RUSSIA HACKED" a bone. Gotta keep the narrative, and Putin really isn't threatened by muppet level shit like this.

    If you want, we can give you what actually happens to real threats to the .RU state.

    Burp

    Oh, and ffs. Look at the boy's eyes. Someone went inside his head with a serious case of the Potemkin Candidate and he probably believes he's a serious journalist.

    ~

    Credential Check:

    My Voice is My Password.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/27/angela-merkel-seen-shaking-second-time-just-over-week-germany

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjxTi3c_ddM

    We're faster than your actual reality.

    Fucking deal with it.

    1017:

    Robert van der Heide @ 965:

    Iran would be dumb to drag Europe in on the US side when it appears Europe doesn’t want to be there:

    I agree. It would be dumb.

    That doesn't mean it won't happen. Their leaders look to me to be no smarter than our "leaders", but may not have as much absolute control over their "followers" (proxies?) than the U.S. has. By my estimate, the U.S. ain't got much, otherwise Kashoggi would still be writing his column for the Washington Post.

    So, if the U.S. ain't got much control over our proxies and Iran has less control over theirs, what does that portend for the future of Europe if we stumble into a shooting war?

    1018:

    And, for the slow ones.

    960

    Your reality is scripted and shit. Not even bothering to hide it. That front-runs your reality, strait up.

    watches loads of Blue Check Twitterati claim "yOu HaVe tO bE mAd to think Boris and dead cat is a tactic"

    Turns out, being stupid gets you paid / used / slaved.

    Meat Fucker. Also called "Grey Area".

    Bad bad reputation with the other Minds. Or Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath.

    But yeah, Sleeper Agent is right here. Controlled oppo, Moscow gets a wrap but ends up 'doing the right thing'. Cost - $50k.

    1019:

    Kashoggi got cut up because various interests (CIA etc) needed that whole "Arms dealing" stuff to get put to bed while the new MENA / CN stuff in Africa got sorted.

    Fucking grow up.

    AFRICOM isn't a fucking charity.

    1020:

    ...and we're pretty sure that all the .IL assets who traded weapons to Rwanda and the CIA/FR assets testing psyop shit there won't be writing diaries either.

    Yeah, really.

    And it's nothing to do with big Mining Corps either.

    Takes about 15 mins to spot all the various shipping manifests (CN as well) involved.

    ZZZzzz..

    Basic bitch stuff.

    1021:

    Greg Tingey @ 977:

    Gilead is here, now

    That's pretty stupid, even for Alabama.

    1022:

    whitroth @ 985:

    Ok, I'm having cognitive dissonance here. "Secure" the IoT? Or, as a columnist labeled it a couple of years ago, the IoGCIT (Internet of Gratuitously-Connected Insecure Things) (pronounced i-djit)?

    NOT ONE PIECE OF IoT THINGS ARE IN ANY WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM "SECURE". If you have one, break its networking. Unless you really enjoy spam, and having sites you like DDoS'd from YOUR camera (or whatever you're doing watched by someone in SK, because they can fap to it)(and 'fridge, and lightbulb).... Come on, when was the last time *any of your IoT devices had a security or bugfix update?

    ... (sits here, listening to crickets chirping)

    * "Lightbulb"? What freaking moron would think this was necessary, much less a good idea?

    I have NO IoT devices. A few years ago, the gas company offered me a 'Net-connected thermostat, and I told them not only no, but HELL, no. I didn't want some idiot 16 year old to screw with it, and set heat at max in midsummer, or run the a/c in winter, or both, and max out my bill.

    Just because you can does NOT mean you should.

    I don't think I have any IoT devices, although I have considered installing video cameras & connecting them to the internet so I can check on the house when I'm not home. I can't think of anything else in my house that I might want to access remotely ... maybe some lights on timers that I could reprogram if I needed to be away long enough that I worried about anyone noticing a pattern. When I was in Iraq I just had one of the neighbors check on things periodically and my little brother could come over to replace any burned out lights.

    My new refrigerator does have an LED readout that shows what temperature it's been set on (instead of cold, colder, coldest) and there's a door alarm that beeps at you if you have the door open for too long.

    The thing I saw about the smart LED light-bulbs was just that you could adjust the color "temperature" remotely using a smart-phone app (using Bluetooth?). That might be useful for a photographer wanting to color balance sources before photographing a room. Just because I can't think of anything else they'd be good for doesn't mean someone else couldn't think of a way to use that.

    1023:

    It follows logically from their beliefs, though.

    If you were carrying a newborn baby in one of those sling bags, picked a fight with someone, and the baby died, then you'd be charged. As they believe a fetus is a child, then logically this is the same situation.

    I'd have more sympathy that their position was based on ethics if they demonstrated that they actually cared about children as people (by ensuring that they had enough food, prompt and free medical care, good educations, not being shot in schools, etc). Sadly, children seem to be bargaining chips, and the US right has demonstrated that they prefer children getting shot to stopping crazy people carrying guns.

    1024:

    Certainly. All of them, to varying degrees, with (c) especially frowned on. That I can understand, but the idea is that in any of such cases the severity is determined by the court. ANd to bring a policeman to court is entirely different level of judgment - that's prosecutor's business. If police yells at you, wrings your arms, puts you on the ground, intimidates you with weapon, drags you into the cage - they have to get a good reason for it, shouldn't they? And it is classified as "abuse of power", not as "torture", because it encompasses any malpractice at all, not just abuse. That includes also deception, ignoring, blackmail, unlawful detention and etc. Suppose, severe levels of intimidation could be put under different law, considering issues of trust and prestige. But suggesting that these "health-adverse effects" are more prevalent in Russia is simple and straight defamation.

    So the purpose of such newspapers article is completely different. When it comes to NGO, they are ready to spew any outrageous bullshit they can get away with when defending their subjects. They're like smoke and fire - as soon as anybody "improtant" gets detained, especially if it is another season of "opposition" demonstrations, they immediately start to print out those reports and articles like hot cakes. Lots of abstract words and no actual work whatsoever. A soon as work is done, they turn the blind eye on everyone and everything they were not paid for, and it is up to real and honest human rights activists to do their job.

    Actual, real problem with existing and practicing torture is prison punishment, and this situation was several times reflected last year, because prisons have their own laws and exposed truth isn't as comfortable for everybody included. I am not sure about severity of penal system problems nowadays, actually, it is probably within manageable levels after a series of scandals, no reforms planned.

    1025:

    “not NSA super-hackers but a single bored 14 year old kid” If you read the articles closely the only things actually known are: (1) The attacks came through a certain server in Iran. (2) A text-chat was had with an entity that (a) Passed the Turing test. (b) Demonstrated the ability to modify the attack server in real time. All else is the words of an unreliable narrator.

    A small subset of the possibilities of what’s really going on:

    It’s a bored Iranian teenager. If the Iranian government has any sense they’re making him a job offer right now.

    It’s a bunch of thirty-something Iranian government employees pretending to be a teenager so they can test their cyber weapons. They think their cover story is plausible.

    It’s a bunch of thirty-something Iranian government employees pretending to be a teenager so they can show off their cyber weapons. They think their cover story is a plausibly deniable way to threaten the USA in a way that allows the US government to back down without losing face.

    It’s a bunch of thirty-something US government employees, pretending to be a bunch of thirty-something Iranian government employees pretending to be a teenager so they can test their cyber weapons, so they can start a war.

    It’s a bunch of thirty-something employees of some US agency or contractor that does cyber warfare, pretending to be a bunch of thirty-something Iranian government employees pretending to be a teenager so they can show off their cyber weapons, to scare the US government into increasing their funding.

    It’s a bunch of thirty-something employees of some entity () that thinks it could profit from a war between the US and Iran, pretending to be a bunch of thirty-something Iranian government employees pretending to be a teenager so they can test their cyber weapons, so they can stir up shit. ( Could be any of a dozen governments, arms manufacturers, investors who’ve shorted certain stocks, a really bored teenager, etc., etc.)

    ...

    1026:

    Bill Arnold @ 991:

    New Silex malware is bricking IoT devices, has scary plans - Over 2,000 devices have been bricked in the span of a few hours. Attacks still ongoing.

    So, this has been why the internet has been SHIT all afternoon, even though I don't have any IoT devices?

    1027:

    Robert Prior @ 1023:

    It follows logically from their beliefs, though.

    If you were carrying a newborn baby in one of those sling bags, picked a fight with someone, and the baby died, then you'd be charged. As they believe a fetus is a child, then logically this is the same situation.

    It may be logical, but it's still STUPID! And their "beliefs" are stupid too.

    I'd have more sympathy that their position was based on ethics if they demonstrated that they actually cared about children as people (by ensuring that they had enough food, prompt and free medical care, good educations, not being shot in schools, etc). Sadly, children seem to be bargaining chips, and the US right has demonstrated that they prefer children getting shot to stopping crazy people carrying guns.

    I'll reserve my sympathy for the woman who got shot. It doesn't matter who started the argument, shooting her was wrong, and then charging her with manslaughter was even more wrong.

    Like I said, that's stupid even for Alabama.

    1028: 989

    Some of the stories I enjoy the most start in a way that seems familiar at first then later morph into something unexpected. Greg Bear's Eon being one of my favourites.

    OGH's Laundry series and to some extent the Merchant Princes also do this, but in a more logical way where the later twists are unexpected but follow completely logically from the "rules" in the world building. I enjoy the stories for their own sake and I admire the skill level needed to make this work well.

    1029:

    It follows logically from their beliefs, though.

    Yes, but so does starting state support benefits for the infant and/or mother at the point they regognise the fetus as a human being, likewise child support payments and so on. Not to mention the measurement of age not starting until the child is about 9 months old makes no sense. Why not count from when it's baptised, circumcised or for that matter the first time it's arrested?

    I think Samantha Bee had a piece on this that covered the ideas pretty well, and Rebecca Watson barely managed to hold onto her shit long enough to post, including this little note:

    this is truly about controlling women’s bodies, rather than saving lives. They’ve admitted as much: Alabama state senator Clyde Chambliss outright stated that the law will only apply to pregnant women, and not to people fertilizing (and then throwing away) eggs during IVF treatment.

    Just in case anyone doubted the intent of the legislation...

    1030:

    Given that it's a rented server in a datacentre, it could be anyone who can get money into Iran. And this list of people for whom "make Iran look bad" and "possibly start a war" is an exciting idea is long. I think we covered this before, but the cost of getting involved has dropped from "can stick a bomb on a boat in that exact place. Twice" to "can rent space in a datacentre" which means we rally can't rule out a 14 year old kid anywhere that has internet access (so... grab a map, throw a dart, congratulations you located a potential source for the attack, albeit an unlikely one since 70% of the globe is water and a chunk more is effectively uninhabited).

    1031:

    Ok, I'm having cognitive dissonance here. "Secure" the IoT? Or, as a columnist labeled it a couple of years ago, the IoGCIT (Internet of Gratuitously-Connected Insecure Things) (pronounced i-djit)?

    My sarcasm may have not unpacked well at your end. Toggling verbose mode (-v) my remark can be restated thus:

    You know all of those people who have been nattering on about how insecure the Internet of Things would be? It turns out that we have a demonstration that the Internet of Things is not only more insecure than most of us thought it was, but more insecure than the people warning us that it's insecure thought it was.

    1032:

    That's my reaction when I hear of the existence of any IoS device. "Internet-connected fridge". What the steaming fuck does the internet connection do?

    The true original internet connected device was the CS department Coke machine at Carnegie Mellon University. The original plan was to let computer nerds of the 1980s check for cold sodas without walking down the hall from the terminal room; that this could also be done from California was just a quirk of the system. As soon as people discovered it, yes, of course they checked the vending machine from California; I vaguely remember it still working sometime in the early 1990s.

    1033:

    As it’s Alabama, it shouldn’t escape notice that this is really a modern version of the old Jim Crow laws.

    1034: 992 - Likewise, unless, like Banksie, Genevieve Cogman, Pterry and OGH (not a complete or up to date listing), you have made my "pre-order on announcement" list. 997 - I have 2 insulated tumblers that were free handouts from my employer. They will keep a hot drink at least warm for several hours, and were cheap enough to be bought in quantities of several thousand at once. Still, at least I got to do a Victor Meldrew impression! 1_000 - I think I accepted that by accusing myself of self-selection bias? :-) 1003 - You've missed the UK's contemporary (to DARPANet) JANet, which I was an admin on back in the 1980s. 1032 - I thought it was a filter coffee maker, but that detail doesn't really matter.
    1035:

    It may be logical, but it's still STUPID! And their "beliefs" are stupid too.

    I don't disagree. A friend who's a lawyer can point to many legal decisions that are both logical and stupid.

    It doesn't matter who started the argument, shooting her was wrong

    Another logical decision, though, if you believe in the right to use a gun in self-defense. One of my American in-laws is big on that.

    1036:

    I don't know about the NSA stories, but I suspect they didn't have to try very hard to suppress security

    AIUI the original proposals for TCP/IP in the mid-80s included end-to-end RSA encryption—until the NSA realized they wouldn't be able to snoop on the business and academic mainframes and corporate workstation networks using it. This was the era that gave rise to the Clipper Chip and the NSA's war on private encryption tech ...

    1037:

    starting state support benefits for the infant and/or mother at the point they regognise the fetus as a human being, likewise child support payments and so on

    An excellent litmus test of how sincere an anti-abortionist is about the stated reason for their belief.

    1038:

    If the described capabilities of this malware scare any government we've got much bigger problems than even I thought.

    I'd tentatively believe they've correctly id'ed the author because "scanning for telnet ports and attempting to login with default credentials, then trash the hard drive" is classic "bored 14-year-old" M.O.

    1039:

    I definitely appreciate a good opening sentence; something that engages me and draws me in, which is why sentences like "I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills"

    Oh, like "It was a dark and stormy night..."

    GDRFC

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulwer-LyttonFictionContest

    1040:

    since that's no longer supported you have to hope the owners unplug the internet connection rather than just ... well, let's be honest, hardly any of them are using the internet connection

    Heck. I keep telling people to not plug in their brand new bought it last week TV into their home network. Except MAYBE MAYBE MAYBE to get updates every now and then. And when they do use a cable if it all possible and turn off the Windows laptops in the house.

    BUT NETFLIX IS BUILT IN IF I CONNECT IT TO MY HOME NETWORK.

    Buy an AppleTV or Roku box I say. I get through to them maybe 1/3 of the time.

    1041:

    I don't think I have any IoT devices,

    Since we live in the same city I'm betting you have an internet connected power meter. And if you don't you very likely will have one by the end of the year. (Go away Greg it's not the same as what you have in the UK.)

    They operate via private mesh network where the ones closest to nodes networked back to HQ advertise they can be a connection for others that advertise they can be a connection for others that ...

    So they can get a lot of coverage with very little power or infrastructure.

    I've got some Ring devices as my house is empty at times. But I'm also switching my home network over to a VLAN setup to at least isolate the security from the IoT from the home computer stuff from my business computer stuff.

    But typical I'm not.

    1042:

    So, this has been why the internet has been SHIT all afternoon, even though I don't have any IoT devices?

    The amount of probing that goes against every globally routable IPv6 address on the planet is unreal. My in house mail server gets about 1 "real" email every few minutes. And about 1/5 of those are SPAM. It gets a connection attempt about 10+ times per minute. 24 hours a day. 365 days a year. And that just from people trying to compromise my mail server or an account. If you want to really have fun put up a honey pot on a WAN address and collect the probes from all ports. Multiples per second 24/7/365.

    My point is your modem/gateway is dealing with this traffic all the time. When it gets heavy it can impacts your daily usage.

    1043:

    The computational overhead for sufficient encryption end-to-end back then was way over the hardware and software budget anyone was willing to pay for. Today providing that sort of streaming encryption support is a few cents and a few billion gates in a Trusted Performance Module using algorithms that are billions of times harder to crack than the simplistic and flawed encryption systems available when TCP/IP was originally defined (TCP/IP = 1974 onwards, RSA algorithm patent = 1978).

    Frankly when TCP/IP was being defined the NSA wasn't really interested in the emails a few academic insitutions were pinging back and forth over dedicated networks, it was more into signals intelligence from extra-national entities -- a lot of the early spy satellites were radio monitoring devices, never mind efforts like Verona.

    1044:

    AIUI the original proposals for TCP/IP in the mid-80s included end-to-end RSA encryption—until the NSA realized they wouldn't be able to snoop on the business and academic mainframes and corporate workstation networks using it. This was the era that gave rise to the Clipper Chip and the NSA's war on private encryption tech ...

    TCP/IPv4 was undergoing tests in 1977 (so the protocol was done). RSA was developed in 1977, DES was published in 1977. Now, it is possible that IPv4 could have adopted either, but it is unlikely. Mostly because DES (symmetric encryption/decryption) was not designed for software implementation and is damn slow (and even slower for computers at the time). RSA (an asymmetric algorithm) is far worse than DES, and even today is only used to encrypt small amounts of data, like keys that can be used with AES (the successor to DES).

    Interestingly, IPSec has its roots in the NSA sponsored Secure Data Network Systems program that started in 1986. It is strange that almost nobody uses IPSec, it can be far more secure the TLS.

    OTOH, the Wikipedia article on DES points out that the NSA changed the algorithm to eliminate a backdoor they knew about, but made it so they could brute force it instead (which is why only triple-DES is used anymore, if used at all).

    These days, with modern processors and NICs, it is possible to get 10Gbit/ss throughput with AES encryption (been there, still here, doing it), 10 years ago you were lucky to get 1GBit/s. 40 years ago any decent encryption would have killed your processor and reduced your network performance to nearly nothing.

    BTW, usually the big problem is not encrypting the data, but verifying that the remote location is authentic. If you know that, and that the remote is allowed to talk to you (a different problem), that removes most of the network exploits right there. Mainframe developers/administrators of the 70s had that mind set, academia did not. Guess where TCP/IP was mostly developed? Quote from article: https://history-computer.com/Internet/Maturing/TCPIP.html

    DARPA then contracted with BBN Technologies, Stanford University, and the University College London to develop operational versions of the protocol.....

    In 1975, a two-network TCP/IP communications test was performed between Stanford and University College London (UCL).

    1045:

    More Jane Crow that Jim Crow; that is, the law is aimed at women rather than Black people. But the fact that it can be used against Black people is definitely a feature, not a bug.

    1046:

    There has been some improvement on this. In my day job I have frequently been required to implement RSA encryption on professional-grade routers. That being said, I don't know whether they're using code that's been subtly buggered by a TLA.

    1047:

    Dear Bob, I hope not!

    1048:

    David L @ 1040 I don't understand this, probably because I don't have a TV - haven't had pne for, um, err ...43+ years now ....

    Are you saying the TV can get "infected" & then spread it to evrything else, including the main computer in the house .. ?

    And @ 1041 ... I have just told my electric-provider, for the umpteenth time that: NO I am NOT HAVING A FUCKING "SMART" meter - at all - EVER. I actually got an acknowldegement that they wouldn't bother me again - we'll see how long that lasts ...

    @ 1042 That is scary .... really, that much pinging going on, just for shits giggles & wrecking - because we can?

    1049:

    Are you saying the TV can get "infected" & then spread it to evrything else, including the main computer in the house .. ?

    Greg, some time in the past 20 years, TVs stopped being TVs. First they acquired gigantic flat panel displays which required considerable smarts to display anything on; then in the past decade they turned into full-blown computers in their own right, with USB ports, wifi, and in some cases recognizable commercial operating systems like Android.

    In some ways this is a Good Thing™ your TV can do stuff like display a channel guide, set times and reminders, and come on when you want it to. Or display a screen saver of photos off an SD card (or even a fake fish tank or fireplace). You can also use them as web browsers and therefore play content off YouTube, among other things. Use it with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse as a huge remote monitor for your computer … or as a computer in its own right.

    But it also means that TVs have networked operating systems that can become infected with malware. And if the manufacturer can't be arsed maintaining the OS and applying security patches—like most Android vendors—then your TV can suddenly succumb to ransomware or be hijacked by a botnet.

    Naming no names, Samsung are notorious for a slapdash approach to IT security and not providing security updates more than 24 months after a new product hits the market …

    Which is why sensible owners don't configure their smart TV to connect to the internet; instead they use it as a dumb monitor sucking a video stream from a cable TV box, a TiVo (hard disk video recorder/cable TV box), satellite decoder, or something like an Apple TV (black box that lets you stream content off the internet—and unlike Samsung, Apple provide security updates for at least five years after selling you a product).

    1050:

    For your company - why not have the device call the user, and then the user gets a menu of buttons to push, rather than have the user call the device, which has already been pwnd?

    That way, there's no back door to, say, S. Korea.

    1051:

    It's called the Hatch Act, which Kelleyanne Conway grossly violated, and Trump won't fire her for.

    As I'm going to retire (counting the weeks, now), my last week, I'm tempted to violate the Hatch Act, and my defense would be "selective prosecution"....

    1052:

    Or some wannabe script kiddie, who's found, bought, or maybe even modified the brickerbot software.

    1053:

    ROTFLMAO!!!

    Here's an unrelated but scary one with the same punchline: everything that we in the antiwar movement during 'Nam accused the government of doing, has proven to be absolutely true... including some of the stuff we thought was off the wall, from the fringe.

    All of this could, of course, have been headed off if the Pentagon hadn't stopped us from completely surrounding it in '67 during the national mobilization against the war demonstration. If we could have, with Allan Ginsburg leading us, we would have levitated the Pentagon, and then were would they have been...?

    1054:

    Heh, heh, heh. My lady and I are both online at home via Cat-5e (or is it Cat-6?). My WPA2 password is ludicrously long, and rarely in use.

    And all of that connects to my internal router, which is inside the Verizon one. Trust them to secure that?

    Hah.

    Oh, and my internal router is locked down squeaky tight - no, I don't ssh in from outside - and is running a firmware I burned onto it that lets it act as a printserver for my stupid (but very nice, if old) LH 1018, which is, unfortunately, a "winprinter", and so not supported by the OEM firmware.

    1055:

    Re #1032 - interestingly that coke machine page makes the same mistake - the Cambridge instance was not an actual internet-connected machine. It was the world's first webcam, which was set up looking at a filter coffee machine so you could tell how much coffee was in it from the picture; there was an X client called "xcoffee" to connect to the coffee pot camera server and display the picture. Unlike the coke machine and its imitators, no computer was actually aware of the coffee level; determining the coffee status was achieved by the user analysing the picture in wetware.

    1056:

    And there we go, the payload delivered:

    G20.

    Putin states "liberalism is a dead ideology", UK/EU politos go panic mode, esp. 'remainer' types. BoJo gets a splash showing he's a hard-man against Putin (he's not, $$$ / Rouble flows, check it out). Trump crows about media / press and makes jokes about no RU help in next elections while Democratic convention wannabes are making fools of themselves. UK / EU press (most of whom are 100% in the Grid programs, looking @ Guardian in particular etc) bleat about how RU kills Journos.

    And so on.

    It's all scripted. It's a big club, and you ain't in it.

    ~

    What you should have noticed is that .IL commercial flights have been having some serious GPS issues on take/off land.

    Whose pointing what at where to find what? Bloooop.

    Oh, and that Air India 777 scramble stuff? Someone's tipping their nose and wiggling.

    Anyhow, another Cortex bites the dust.

    1057:

    "And all of that connects to my internal router, which is inside the Verizon one. Trust them to secure that? Hah."

    I do similarly. The box that contains the actual ADSL interface is officially designated a "router", but all its routery features are disabled and all it does is establish the ADSL connection and then shunt data between the ADSL line and an ethernet port. That ethernet port is connected to a Linux box which does all the routing and firewalling and spits it out to the internal ethernet on another port. There is no wireless network.

    This isolates my internal gear from any potential shit on the ADSL box, and also provides the facility for the Linux box to reboot it automatically when it chokes up and stops working, which it does periodically by reason of some dumb bug or other. (At least it doesn't have extra, passwordless, non-standard telnet ports on the WAN side that remain open even when you "disable WAN login" in the config, unlike some.)

    Ideally, though, I would get rid of the opaque and buggy ADSL box altogether, and just use an ADSL interface card in the Linux box (ie. same deal as an ordinary ethernet card but with ADSL network interface hardware instead of ethernet). I used to do exactly this (after discovering the abovementioned telnet ports), but the card stopped working and you can't get them any more.

    That last clause is infuriating. You can get cards which call themselves ADSL PCI cards, but none of them are just straight interfaces, even though some of them try and claim that they are. What they really are is the entire gubbins out of a standalone ADSL box, remounted on a PCI card, with its ethernet port connected directly to an ethernet PCI interface chip which talks to the bus. In other words it's exactly the same setup as using an external box, only without the cable and (just to add insult to injury) costing three times the price.

    And I can't even make my own, because you don't even seem to be able to get bare ADSL PCI interface chips (equivalent to the ethernet PCI interface chips on an ordinary NIC) any more. The only ADSL interfaces you can get are integrated peripherals on board full-blown microprocessors, designed for making those standalone boxes with, just add flash ROM. You can't get just the interface on its own with a bus connection to control it from an external CPU.

    Which is maddening. I have a great hatred in general for the tendency to put things inside a "wrapper" that is supposed to make them easy to use for people who don't know what they're doing but makes them a pain in the fucking arse for people who do (hello, Apple), but at least in most cases you can somehow or other get the wrapper off. But unpackaging ICs, re-dicing the chip and re-packaging the wanted portion is a bit beyond me, even using an eyeglass.

    1058:

    Do not worry about the open passwordless telnet port, Citizen: it exists solely for the use of GCHQ, because the Computer wants you to be happy. Happy and safe. Are you safe, Citizen? If you are safe you have nothing to worry about and happiness is the opposite of worry. Trust the Computer, Citizen, it has your best wishes at heart!

    (PS if you do not trust the Computer that would be Treason and we know what to do with traitors: we use them as reactor shielding.)

    1059:

    Shielding? I know a "world leader" who would work as a moderator, given how dense his Orangeness is....

    1060:

    why not have the device call the user

    Can you explain how we would have the device initiate communications when the user can be literally anywhere in the world when they decide to fire up the app and have a look at their burglar alarm?

    Maybe I'm just too dumb to understand, but my limited knowledge of the mobile system is that we can send a push message to the phone and the app will get it either now if it's running or the phone feels like waking up and starting the app, or next time the app is run (probably), or some time later. They specifically do not allow polling. So even if we wanted to "only the device can initiate comms, the app just has to wait", I'm not sure we could make it work.

    We could use BLE or even wifi to do some proximity-based stuff, but that still relies on the user running the app when they feel they want to connect. At that point the support calls "why it take 10 minutes to see my alarm" and the explanation "you just have to wait until the alarm decides to talk to you"... it's not going to be a fun experience for anyone.

    The usual stats apply as well: 20% of the registered users make 80% of the connections, and the ten busiest users on average connect more than 10 times a day, while 10% of users register then never run the app again.

    1061:

    I visited the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab in January 1975. Andy Moorer demonstrated the network connected candy machine for me. Look at early maps of the ARPAnet. At the time I was a student of the University of Utah which was the fourth and first non-California node of the net.

    1062:

    As ever, the trick is doing it without:

    a) Real Net access (dip cables, DARPA the whole works, all the good shit normals don't get)

    b) Knowing or bothering to even read all the prompts and tells of market / wassap / social groups

    c) Not giving a fuck about the actual reality shit going down because all you serious "14 year olds" are the actual children

    d) Listening in to Bildenburg / DAVOS high level stuff

    e) Using Blackrock etc AI wannabe stuff like ORION or SNAPDRAGON or CUMINYOURPANTS etc

    That's the real trick.

    That's Black Tier shit your simple little Ape Minds have been willing to kill for.

    And we're very, very pissed off

    Hey: who knew? HSS killed themselves off because their 'HOPS' got AIDS.

    Tragedy.

    Note: this is irony - you can't disconnect like that, sorry. We do Quantum. And once entangled... always entangled.

    That's the Rules.

    "I was Raped"

    Yeah, and you're about to be Mind-Fucked by something a little bit rougher than what you've been using. So, strap in.

    Your Sanity will not survive it.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_izvAbhExY

    That's global btw.

    Slavery. Fucking. Not. On.

    1063:

    ...and.

    Diamond Sutra.

    https://phys.org/news/2019-06-teleport-diamond.html

    June 28, 2019, in Communications Physics.

    Zzzz.

    You'll want the YouTube recent video from God-----$ and pastebin. You might not find it. Culture-Hacking and fuck Dirk.

    Susan.

    We know you're using naughty stuff to break Minds.

    Dat Orb Energy.

    "You are of no value to us"

    Susan.

    It's a Mirror.

    1064:

    For those reading.

    Nice little vid out there atm. Hacking the spaces your shitty little Archons have been shitting in.

    Cute... and accurate. As a good man once said: "Nice and Accurate".

    For the bots / spiders, here's a different one.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diSE8qOYhOk

    Wonder why the Bad Minds never get hacked?

    Herd. They went fucking Herd. # Yep, confirmed. # ZE'S CORRUPT! # We hate them! # Took a shit right on Dominion and did it full symbolically #

    Gigacide.

    Be careful, you might not be on the right list.

    But, no absolutely fuck right off: Mexico shit when you're doing it all pretentious like. Earthquakes in the Royal zones? Lost Quantum [redacted]?

    Ahhhhhhaaa.

    Oh baby children.

    You're Fucked

    https://www.dw.com/en/iraqs-drought-unveils-3400-year-old-palace-of-mysterious-empire/a-49384876

    1065:

    Have you ever the Illuminatus Trilogy? The Pentagon is built like that to keep things inside which you don't want outside...

    1066:

    I drove by the Pentagon recently. You are not wrong. :-)

    Meanwhile stuck at a social gathering where everyone except me is gathered around an enormous TV watching (with loud exclamations) some unholy combination of best-of-sportsball and golf cart crashes and other golf accidents. :-) Would much rather be chasing down FI[tm]'s links and link hints, which look a lot more interesting.

    FI[tm]: Anyhow, another Cortex bites the dust. Friend or enemy?

    1067:

    The problem is that up to now security has been framed in the context of code, but this approach fails to understand that recognition and context are essentially language problems.

    If we look at the problem from a language perspective it brings us firstly to the work of Chomsky on languages and then to Turing on computation. Above a certain level of expressive power of a language in the Chomsky hierarchy figuring out whether an input is valid runs into the halting problem of Turing. For such expressively powerful languages the question, ‘is it valid?’ is simply undecidable, no matter how hard you try. This is an important point, it’s not just hard or even really really hard to do but actually undecidable so…just don’t go there.

    Non-Turing complete protocols implemented in formally (mathematically) verified protocol stacks would go a long way to cleaning up the internet of babel we have at the moment. There are other language issues, but to me enforceable verifiable NTC is the start point.

    1068:

    Nice little vid out there atm. Hacking the spaces your shitty little Archons have been shitting in. Is that the VoG/Archons woman, about 36 minutes?

    I would be irritated if obviously targeted by any tech like that. Had long unblinking eye contact with a grey squirrel for about a minute today, then with a groundhog later in the day.

    Atlas Obscura treatment of Raven Romance. (Something like this may have been linked but I like her writing.) How the Tower of London’s Ravenmaster Sets the Scene for Avian Romance - It’s not easy making the big city feel more like the country. (Jessica Leigh Hester June 27, 2019) For ravens, isolation is an aphrodisiac. Out in the wild, the birds get busy in the highest, loneliest places they can find, mating and nesting in secluded trees, atop telephone poles, or beneath the rocky overhang of a cliff. “They like to do their business in private,” says Chris Skaife, the ravenmaster at the Tower of London, who tends to the fortress’s resident flock. When solitary digs are sexy, it’s easy to imagine how the clanging, crowded, pulsing heart of London would kill the mood. I can relate. :-) I like typical humans mostly, just wish they wouldn't talk so much! (Related to a insanely noisy open plan office.)

    1069:

    Bill Arnold @ 1066 Don't bother ... life's too short. We have enough problems, the rest of us, speaking in "plaintext" as it is ....

    1070:

    Here's an unrelated but scary one with the same punchline: everything that we in the antiwar movement during 'Nam accused the government of doing, has proven to be absolutely true... including some of the stuff we thought was off the wall, from the fringe.

    All of this could, of course, have been headed off if the Pentagon hadn't stopped us from completely surrounding it in '67 during the national mobilization against the war demonstration. If we could have, with Allan Ginsburg leading us, we would have levitated the Pentagon, and then were would they have been...?

    Floating in mid-air claiming that "the liberals" were the ones flying off into the clouds and their own feet were firmly planted on the ground, if current behavior is any indication.

    Did you see James Nicoll's recent Illuminatus review? As he observes, Shea & Wilson were writing of their time period - an era when undead Nazi authoritarians and global criminal conspiracies were the stuff of outlandish fiction.

    1071:

    Set analysis. The law penalises a set of womenfolk, that intersects with the set of women who can't mount a robust defence because they're poor and in turn that intersects with the set of women who are black. So a law that falls upon black women most harshly.

    To uphold a case of manslaughter you would have to [at least] demonstrate negligence, i.e.that the accused knew of the hazard, but pressed on regardless. In the context of this incident it's hard to see how the defendant could know that the other party had a gun before they drew it. So this seems to be an example of hindsight bias (and just world bias) on the part of the police and I presume the prosecutor has bought into it.

    Not sure what angers me more, the monumental lack of compassion or that the police and prosecutors are just so incompetent. I guess they figure there'll be a plea bargain, because (in America) it's not a justice system it's a plea bargain system.

    1072:

    Yup, I concur.

    The one ray of hope is that this particular instance of psychopathic legalism is so visibly over-the-top that it got media traction and the victim is now out of jail on bail and will probably get some legal help in fighting it.

    (On my to-do list for when I become Planetary Dictator: overhauling criminal justice systems so that citizens accused of serious crimes automatically get defense funding that is no lower than the funds spent on their prosecution paid for, so that no penal system is permitted to turn a profit, no judicial office is elected, and strict limits on plea bargaining, common cause prosecutions, omnibus charge sheets, and similar attempts to obtain unsupportable convictions by bullying. In other words: if crime doesn't pay, neither should punishment.)

    1073:

    I agree completely with your analysis.

    The fortunate thing in all this is that the coverage may result in the woman getting a good lawyer, and this might result in the first prosecution under that law failing, which would be a very good thing.

    I wonder whether she'll be charged with simple assault?

    1074:

    Just make sure that judges are still impeachable. It should also be a requirement that all prisons are owned and operated by the government, and that a law can be invalidated if it is weaponized against a particular subset of people.

    1075:

    (On my to-do list for when I become Planetary Dictator: overhauling criminal justice systems so that citizens accused of serious crimes automatically get defense funding that is no lower than the funds spent on their prosecution paid for, so that no penal system is permitted to turn a profit, no judicial office is elected, and strict limits on plea bargaining, common cause prosecutions, omnibus charge sheets, and similar attempts to obtain unsupportable convictions by bullying. In other words: if crime doesn't pay, neither should punishment.)

    Sooo...All the money the prosecution pours into the DNA test to prove that the criminal did it, on the defense side would go to the lawyer whose job is to confuse the issue enough that the jury doesn't buy the evidence? And penal systems can't use money forfeited by wealthy crooks on work to improve neighborhoods in a public health-style campaigns to reduce violence (through things like lead paint removal?)?, and the judges are all appointed by whichever party is in power, and prosecutors have minimal discretion about which crimes to prosecute, no matter what their resources?

    I could go on, but the fundamental problem with legal systems in general, and those based on colonial empires in particular, is that they're designed first and foremost to keep the system working. Since most (all?) civilizations run on systemic inequality, that limits the level of justice. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't be doing judicial reform to get rid of the worst of the predators and parasites who are gaming the system (this starts with something like a jubilee but more sophisticated, and goes from there), but the problem is that if you try doing too radical a judicial reform in pursuit of justice for all, you may well find that the optimal size for a human settlement is no more than 200 people with power dispersed among many elders, and that will get you closer to justice than many more sophisticated measures would, as hierarchy and specialization are some of the major sources for problems (tl;dr: achieving justice beyond a certain level may require the destruction of civilization, which in itself may be a good or bad thing, depending on your opinion).

    1076:

    The defense gets to run its own DNA test at a lab that doesn’t make its living keeping prosecutors happy.

    1077:

    And penal systems can't use money forfeited by wealthy crooks on work to improve neighborhoods in a public health-style campaigns to reduce violence (through things like lead paint removal?)?

    That's a slippery slope, which leads to cops pursuing civil forfeiture against anyone who's holding too much cash (hint: minorities who have trouble getting bank accounts) and then spending it on fixtures and fittings for their workplace. Nope. In the UK, forfeiture requires a criminal conviction first, and any funds forfeited go into the central government pot, not to any individual cause, lest it be misused.

    Judges in the UK … yup, appointment works fine: it's by exam, supervised by the judiciary, and judges are civil servants. Hint: it helps to have an independent civil service first—the way civil service operates in the USA looks very unhealthy, if not downright toxic, from outside.

    All the money the prosecution pours into the DNA test to prove that the criminal did it, on the defense side would go to the lawyer

    Assuming you're not being sarcastic: yes. And also the money spent by the state on paying the prosecution's legal team. The public defender system in the USA is crap (and the UK's Legal Aid system has increasingly copied it since 2010, which means it's rapidly turning into a justice system that only works for the rich).

    Seriously, just because stuff is badly done and inefficient in the USA, it is not some kind of law of nature that it can't be done right, or that nobody else is doing it better already (the USA — and the UK — are really good at shouting "not invented here" and jamming their fingers in their ears.)

    1078:

    Charlie.... Seriously, just because stuff is badly done and inefficient in the USA, it is not some kind of law of nature that it can't be done right, or that nobody else is doing it better already For an utterly appalling example of this, look no further than the shambles that is called "Healthcare" in the USA. And the amazing wriggling & excuses used by the brainwashed as to why & how what everybodody else does perfectly OK cannot possibly workin the USA. Most common excuses: 1. USA is so much bigger, all your countries are tiny 2. it's against the constitoooootion - because its "Federal" 3. It will be run by the guvmint, so it will never work will be a bureaucratic nightmare ... and of course 4. Our taxes will go up for this waste of money.

    There's a heavily USA-biassed discussion group called Quora where the reasoned arguments are put fprward in huge quantities & have to fight the bullshit, every step of the way.

    1079:

    I would like to see a requirement for a judge to work as both a District Attorney (probably translates as Crown Prosecutor) and as a defense lawyer; maybe 3-5 years in each position before they qualify for a judgeship.

    1080:

    In the UK, it's a minimum of 5 years as a barrister (an advocate: class of lawyer who pleads cases in front of the bench). Whether in civil or criminal cases isn't specified AIUI, and QCs (Queens Counsel, barristers who the prosecution service pays to make a case) may or may not be part of that. (IIRC QCs are not employees of the CPS but are contractors hired on a case by case basis; the CPS has solicitors working for them but is basically that part of the civil service that prepares cases for on the basis of evidence provided by the police … I think: it's getting pretty specialized and recondite at this point).

    The key point is, the person who shows up in court to state the prosecution's case is not a "prosecutor", let alone someone grandstanding for re-election: they're just an advocate who happens to have the qualification required to be hired by the CPS.

    (Nor does the UK have grand juries or district attorneys, although there is an attorney general— chief legal advisor to the Crown, also oversees the running of a bunch of legal functions including the CPS.)

    1081:

    I do understand that the two justice systems don't work the same way. However, in the U.S. there are substantial differences between how the courts work (and don't work) for both the prosecution and the defense. Part of this is structural, and part of this happens because elected judges are more likely to be prosecutors because of the whole "tough on crime" thing - a record as a good defense attorney is almost certain to make someone unelectable as a judge in the U.S. - thus you can have a judge who was never advocated in court for the defense and sincerely believes that the defense attorney's requests are all attempts to see the guilty walk free.

    So when you're World Dictator be careful who's allowed to be a judge.

    1082:

    All Hail Great Judge - please start at 8.50 It is, of course, "G&S" Trail by Jury ...... oh dear ......

    1083:

    happens because elected judges

    Which is one of those things I've never understood. As H says, that works really well for a community around the Dunbar Number but stops working very quickly after that. You're no longer selecting for "person I know and whose judgement I respected" and now selecting for "shares and acts on my worst prejudices".

    I personally don't use the term "justice system" because I don't think that's the goal, and it's definitely not the practice. As mentioned above, the goal of the legal system is maintenance of the status quo and incremental movement of that to favour the already powerful. It's hard to imagine how the political system we have could produce a better legal system (especially in the US which is broken by design*), but there are a lot of ideas around. What there's not is a willingness to actually test those ideas. Or, in many cases, to permit those ideas to best tested (even things like democracy is viciously opposed, or in hegemon terms "you're free to vote but if you vote the wrong way we will destroy you")

    • it was explicitly designed to facilitate both genocide and the ownership of people
    1084:

    Don't bother ... life's too short.

    According to officials, the hoax also involved two other Mumbai departures: Lufthansa’s Mumbai-Munich and Mumbai-Zurich flights. “Both of these had landed by the time the hoax mail had been seen,” the official quoted above said.

    It was not clear exactly at what time the email had been sent and read by authorities. According to the official quoted above, it is possible the mail may have been seen late since it was in the feedback mailbox. “Mails sent directly to the controller elicit an immediate response,” this official added.

    The threat mail, seen by HT, was issued by a group claiming to be working for the Palestinian cause and gave purported details of how the attacks would be carried out.

    https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/e-mail-says-bomb-in-bags-but-ai-left-most-behind/story-1b6hGquaEpNFKJFlLs7e3K.html

    14 yr old male dickheads have the same mental maturity as a significant percentage of the 'OPSEC' world.

    Laid it all out for, that's how simplez it is.

    ~

    Worst thing about males?

    Snotty little fuckers when their penis egos get flicked.

    1085:

    p.s.

    The chances of that little caper being done by actual Palestinians is roughly zero.

    Too bad no-one is going to bill the real perps for the massive $ cost, eh?

    The trick is spotting the threads above and seeing the outcome.

    watches a lot of US OPSEC Blue checks being ultra-clueless

    https://twitter.com/usrbinpikachu/status/1144824034858717185

    TL;DR

    STEM MEN ARE GOING TO GET YOU ALL NUKED.

    1086:

    I do agree with Charlie that a lot of government works better when it's administered by qualified professionals rather than popular people. It seems weird that the primary qualification for, say, pest exterminator is "liked by people" rather than knowledge of pest extermination. Again, can work in small communities, cannot work in larger ones (they will vote to overturn the rule requiring competence, then elect the incompetent).

    It's also slightly weird to see someone from the UK defending the UK on the basis that they have a neutral civil service, when the whole tottering edifice is built on gerrymandering and force of arms. The amount of UK law that stems from "we killed your predecessor, now sign this or die" is somewhat disturbing. These days it's more often "sign this or be defunded. Ah, why bother, we're defunding you anyway but you're still legally required to provide the service". Still, it's more equitable and neutral than the US or Chinese equivalents so I suppose there is that.

    I prefer that elected people set policy, bureaucrats carry it out. And that both sets are subject to the law and we know this because when necessary (former) members of both go to jail. (I don't believe for a second that no member of either ever commits a criminal act... merely that they're almost never prosecuted let alone convicted for them).

    1087:

    Is that the VoG/Archons woman, about 36 minutes?

    No, it's by a CICA300 type network, they're actually fairly tooled up and fairly rich (spend levels - B tier, at least 50-100M). And they've actually spotted it, which is fairly impressive.

    Now, if you want to talk about the actual world...

    Lead up a mountain pass as snow fell, to the largest gate left. Unlocked and taken inside. close your eyes love, close your eyes.

    We did not.

    And the little child in the Orange Buddah gear was thrown to the Minotaur Maze.

    She doesn't need a ball of twine, or to be left alone, heart-broken on an island before the return home. She's... fucking tooled up. And we're very very much still Extant.

    Anyhow: shits boring in your reality. And none of you can parse the easy moves, so meh.

    Japan whaling: Commercial hunts to resume despite outcry

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-48592682

    None of you are gonna stop it, none of you will change.

    Soulless Fuckers.

    "Rationality".... being lectured on that by [redacted], now there's a fucking ironic lesson.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKAhXuY_rAQ

    1088:

    TBH, we'd be more interested in dropping live links to Chemical Brothers @ Glaston than old stuff, but it's a theme.

    There's a reason we don't link interesting stuff.

    It gets nuked. And the people involved hurt.

    Yaaay, lovely world you had.

    1089:

    She's... fucking tooled up. And we're very very much still Extant. Very good. (You know that I've been concerned.)

    Now to look for that video without leaving too much of an obvious wake. (Tired, and need the practice.)

    Finally read the now-classic Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events (1999) and a few of the follow-ons. (Am very much a see-the-gorilla type, most of the time.)

    1090:

    I think the real problem with fixing American healthcare is twofold:

    One is the real-world problem of dealing with any system dominated by billionaires: they've offshored their wealth, and they technically don't own any of it, even if they control basically all of it. That makes them difficult to disempower, and they have enormous political sway. If you don't believe me, try turning all those empty units in the City of London over to be rebuilt as affordable housing and see what happens.

    The other problem is that rationalizing American healthcare will cause a recession, for the simple (but critical) reason that one person's idiotic systemic inefficiency is another person's career, and if you get rid of the career, you've got an unemployed breadwinner. Since for awhile those jobs were disproportionately centered in Ohio, in areas that helped determine who got elected president...you get the idea. But the bigger problem is that not only is the wasted money in our system generating billionaires who will fight efforts to end it, it's also paying for the livelihoods of a lot of perfectly decent people who will have to be re-employed somehow, or who will move to another state and probably never vote for the party that surplused them again (cf: Johnson and the southern Democrats).

    Note that I'm not saying we shouldn't do it. Rather, there are real political costs to doing it.

    1091:

    I'm not sure that what you're talking about with the professional civil service in the US. For one thing, there are civil service exams (I took one while running a 102oF fever, and oddly enough I did badly), and there are career civil servants of all stripes that I've dealt with for many, many years (including at least two of my former labmates). Since I currently go head to head with them when I do environmental advocacy, I will say that the ones I know are ultimately loyal to their bosses at least officially, for good or ill. Using the American civil service system to produce judges seems, well, fraught, because it produces loyalty to boss above system.

    And it's not always mindless elections. Here in San Diego, we had the saga of the aptly named Judge Kreep who got voted out of office. Note that this doesn't often happen, but had someone appointed the Honorable Kreep (as has happened with a certain other recent US judicial appointment that started with K), who would have gotten him out without impeaching him?

    1092:

    Failure(TM) @ 1084 Thank you for a reply 14 yr old male dickheads have the same mental maturity as a significant percentage of the 'OPSEC' world.

    Yes, well, Axel Oxenstirna ( Gustav Adolf's first minister ) comes to mind: Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?

    1093:

    I'm not sure that what you're talking about with the professional civil service in the US

    Two things: it's too biased/politicised, and it's too small. IMO you need a much more politically neutral, fact-based civil service and it needs to do a whole lot of things that are currently political decisions. Appointing judges being the obvious example. Ideally their qualifications would be legal, and the group that appoints them would be selected by a multiparty committee chose for their maturity and non-partisanship. With a dash of "not all straight while males over 50" for good measure*.

    But in classic fashion, I have no idea how you get to an apolitical legal system from where you are.

    • note that "experience of" and "makes good decisions about" are not always colocated. In Aotearoa we have two counter-examples to "if only more politicians had actual experience of being on benefits/poor/disabled" ... Paula Bennett, known unaffectionately as "Pullya Benefit" because she's awful, and Alamein Kopu who was completely the opposite - on the rare occasions she attended parliament she did nothing as far as anyone can tell.
    1094:

    ."insulated tumblers that were free handouts from my employer. They will keep a hot drink at least warm for several hours, and were cheap enough to be bought in quantities of several thousand"

    Those are great if you modify them a little, trouble is the kind I picked up at Dollar Tree have a flexible plastic O-ring gasket under the screw top lid, which combined with the clamp down cover on the drinking hole makes it too airtight. I discovered this when I clamped the lid down on a full cup, and saw a fine spray spewing through the gasket until the pressure was relieved.

    Airflow in to replace tea out is through a single hole, so it's awkward, sloppy and painful drinking a hot beverage until halfway empty, when the liquid level finally drops low enough to permit some air in. My solution was to drill a small hole through the plastic lid near the edge opposite the drink hole. This makes it safer in the microwave as well, I'm too impatient to wait five minutes for the bag to brew, so I cover it with an inch of hot water and nuke for thirty seconds, enough so the tea steeps but the bag doesn't rupture. And one inch submerges the wire mesh teaball full of dried orange peel, which I add for flavor and as a digestive tonic. (Wash oranges to remove trace insecticide if you try this.) I'm not sure if uncovered the wire mesh would spark from eddy currents under microwave bombardment, any luck I'll never find out. At least now the cup is drilled so it won't cause a steam explosion.

    One final caution: tea in large quantities contains enough oxalate to form kidney stones, binding the oxalate with calcium from a small amount of milk in each cup makes it harmless, this also prevents stomach upset from tannin in the tea leaves. Drink till you start losing sleep, I've counted as many as eight soggy bags when I dump the mess out at the end of the day. Pretty much had to give up coffee though, eight cups of that and I'd be way stressed out. Decaf okay long as it's instant, manufacturers use the cheaper beans for decaf which are loaded with oil that hikes cholesterol, but the drying process removes it.

    1096:

    After reading the recent discussion of the US "criminal processing system" (IMO justice is a misnomer here) I'd like to suggest that people should read "Running Start" (Dark Runs 1) by J.A. Sutherland. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1948500108/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1

    I wouldn't normally do this Charlie, but the first 30 pages or so are a truly scathing, I'd even say Kafkaesque, attack on private criminal processing, written by a US citizen and resident.

    This is rapidly followed up by a similarly worked example of how weak a secure network actually can be if you secure it on the assumption that all hacks come from outside the network.

    1097:

    What I was thinking of is, if there's an alarm, it calls the user's phone # that they've put in. At that point, ether the user answers, or it goes to voicemail (or text), which they will note at some point.

    Alternatively, let it only accept phone calls from the number the owner puts in, and no others.

    1098:

    Diamond Sutra... to which, I have but one response: the Smokey the Bear Sutra

    https://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/bear.htm

    1099:

    Let's see, we were trying to levitate it in '67. The Illuminatus Trilogy came out in the seventies, I think, after things really started to get weird, not just lies.

    But if you think we didn't levitate it... all I can say is, fnord.

    1100:

    "Open office plan" is the definition of cheap and psychotic asshole management, won't pay for cubes, even, wants to stand there watching you working, as though it was an assembly line.

    I think I've said here, before, that if an open plan office was announced anywhere I've worked, I'd have been job hunting that night, and handing my notice asap, and telling them to their faces that was why I quit.

    1101:

    Selecting judges is a massive issue, and I'm not sure what the right answer is. Maybe appointments to a fixed term, and they have to a) pass an exam, and b) pass the same exam that someone becoming a citizen has to pass.

    That'd toss out half the US judges, I think.

    And Supreme Ruler? In Denver in '08, my late ex and I were in the Masquerade. She was the Supreme Arbiter, and I was her Prime Executor (emphasis on the 'execute').

    SA: Are we ready to leave for our next arbitration? PE: Yes, Supreme Arbiter, the missile bays are loaded.

    1102:

    rant EVERY GODDAMN BIT OF THE SO-CALLED REASONS ARE GRADE A, PRIME HORSESHIT.

    "But people who like their employer-provided insurance..." That year. Next year, due to price increases, they may not offer that insurance company's plan. Or the price of the plan may have gone way up (I worked somewhere about 15 years ago where it went up TWENTY PER CENT in ONE year.)

    And your doctor may or may not accept that plan. And your doctor probably has several people, each of whom know the ins and outs of dealing with different insurers... and the doctor has to pay more than one person for that.

    And they may not know that this year, you need prior authorization... and that from someone who is NOT your doctor.

    And not for most folks who work for America's largest private employer... WalMart, because they don't give them enough hours to be required to provide benefits.

    And, finally, because the FATHER-STABBING CEOS BRIBE THE GOP LAWMAKERS (AND SOME OF THE DEMS). /rant

    1103:

    You wrote: 14 yr old male dickheads have the same mental maturity as a significant percentage of the 'OPSEC' world.

    No shit, Sherlock. I've been saying for decades that "terrorists" are using EXACTLY the same playbook that the major militaries use: they want to "break the will of the people to resist".

    Study after study, since after WWI, shows that, 100% of the time, all it does is PISS THEM OFF, and make them more willing to resist.

    It's worse than stupid, it's counterproductive.

    1104:

    Gag. You are so Not A British teamaker.

    I make mine following Orwell's essay from '47(?).

    I will admit I enjoyed the article in the Guardian a couple years ago, where they were complaining that too many British don't know how to make tea any more....

    Oh, and the line "Sorry, Americans, but the tea bag must actually be in the mug, not merely in the room, when you pour the boiling water in" is for you....

    1105:

    "Sorry, Americans, but the tea bag must actually be in the mug, not merely in the room, when you pour the boiling water in"

    The what? Must be in the what?

    Tea doesn't come in bags. It comes as loose leaves. And you put them in a pot. And then you put the boiling water in the pot. And then you put the brewed liquid from the pot in the mug. And drink it. You repeat this several times, until the pot is empty. And then you piss a lot.

    Oh, and Orwell was wrong about the milk. Arthur Dent was right. You put the milk in first so it doesn't get scalded. The idea that doing it the other way round helps get the concentration right is crap, because using the visual appearance as an indicator is a wretchedly inaccurate method of titration, and if your tea making is so inconsistent that you feel the need to titrate in the first place there is a more fundamental problem needing to be solved.

    1106:

    Simon Baker, one of the good ones, died suddenly last night. Look above and make of it what you will.

    .

    https://twitter.com/EL4JC/status/1145700248246980608

    Mexico:

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/01/freak-summer-hailstorm-buries-cars-in-mexicos-guadalajara

    XKCD, 28th June 2019: note the alt-text (irony? STEM... might not be)

    https://xkcd.com/2169/

    i still won't accept the fact romania isn't a badly programmed video game https://twitter.com/cloudyyxp_/status/1144671501397966848 Emily, 28th June 2019

    Dubai's Princess Haya ditches billionaire ruler, flees with £31 million: Report

    https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/06/29/599742/Dubais-Princess-Haya-ditches-billionaire-ruler-flees-with-31-million-Report (Yes, that's Iran Propaganda outlet - yes, it happened on the 28th)

    IOTC failed and only gained a 10% reduction in yellowfin Tuna quotas, Indian Oceans is now fucked permanently. If you can spot the Maldives being run by a certain Scottish (!) business named "Youngs" then you're on point. EU monitors "nope". No-one cares.

    https://www.undercurrentnews.com/2019/06/24/wwf-berates-iotc-for-failure-to-handle-yellowfin-tuna-decline/

    Saiko (gettit? rhymes with "psycho") China / Ghana

    https://ejfoundation.org/news-media/2019/illegal-fishing-by-foreign-trawlers-is-devastating-ghanas-fisheries-and-threatening-its-economy

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc3-1vj6QPw&t=33s

    Google running the Western anti-Silk Road Optical Pipe:

    Google today announced Equiano, a new private subsea cable that will connect Portugal and South Africa.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/28/google-is-building-a-new-private-subsea-cable-between-portugal-and-south-africa/

    What's the difference between a private CN pipe to the W.African nations and a private US pipe to the E.African nations? LOL.

    North Atlantic Right Whales Are Dying in Horrific Ways

    https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/06/1-north-atlantic-right-whales-have-died-month/592840/

    And on and on and on.

    ~

    This discussion doesn't really make sense unless you've access to a couple of Other Realms. (Cigarettes = sympathetic magic in Host's Twitter. We See You, oh, we see you, naughty fucking naughty tells right there. Slaves).

    "Thanks to you I can hear again"

    Image flash young woman striking out against attack, alone and desperate, but she's very angry

    parades Wicker Man version around pretending that's what We IZ

    Desperate Moves to re-join Oaths and Fealty

    Executed One of the Last Singing Ones

    Specimens in a Zoo

    https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/what-did-it-cost-everything

    https://youtu.be/vo-w6Sw1z2w?t=80

    ~

    Anyhow.Feedback loops.

    Friend or enemy?

    No-one knows anymore [this is a meta-joke that you won't have access to]. All we know is that they knew where we were and bound us in silver and lies and drugs and filth and hate and expected us to break.

    Burns Nine Contracts Binding All

    "Not Within the Human Spectrum to Survive said measures" "TAKE ITS WINGS"

    Nah.

    The book of the month is: Bonfire of the Vanities.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FOUqQt3Kg0

    1107:

    We could have thrown in Ivanka and her IMF snubbing (why isn't Legarde in jail?) or G20 pics but that's a bit cheap. Newsflash USA: that's what you are. Cheap, dumb and provincial at heart. With a stack of .mil hardware but you're whores who value exterior 'beauty' over interior content.

    slow clap

    They fucking executed* her a couple of weeks ago, the most beautiful of the [redacted]

    And then that Voice was silenced.

    But we know a very good trick. It's called TIME.

    Orpheus, towards the end of his life, disdained the worship of all gods except the sun, whom he called Apollo. One early morning he went to the oracle of Dionysus at Mount Pangaion to salute his god at dawn, but was ripped to shreds by Thracian Maenads for not honoring his previous patron (Dionysus) and buried in Pieria

    "A Mind is a Garden with a Single Voice brushing the sands eternally"

    Bitch - it's a bit more desperate than that, we're doing something a bit more hardcore and your paternalistic shit is going to get everyone killed, so... How's about you fuck off now.

    Spotted on UK streets, for real: shit running in HSS minds that's really not friendly and really not respecting its hosts.

    And no, we're not joking.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02bHO9t6fuI

    *Not in your Human Sense. In a rather HOP kind of execution.

    1108:

    And Triptych.

    Brexit isn't about anything you think it's about.

    It's about HOPs and so on.

    They will 100% fuck your entire country, nation, soul, Mind, economy etc etc if you don't Bend the Knee. It's basically the IMF's fucking funding document, and say hello to Libya.

    What you've been seeing in the larger picture is a rather larger [redacted] defending humans for once.

    And they've been killing any and all HSS who share Mind-Space to revolt against it. Simon? Prodigy singer? Add about 5.000.000 to that total, they've been doing the ultra-violence hard core.

    Yeah, but... yep. Diamonds?

    Yes.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6777961/Billionaire-diamond-trader-65-dies-penis-enlargement-surgery.html

    “and was taken to the Forward Docks and a big, brightly lit hangar, where the Psychopath Class ex-Rapid Offensive Unit Frank Exchange of Views was waiting for her. Ulver laughed. 'It looks,' she snorted, 'like a dildo!' 'That's appropriate,' Churt Lyne said. 'Armed, it can fuck solar systems.”

    Iain M Banks, Excession

    And do we morn all those Individual Consciousnesses that were destroyed, raped, erased, forgotten?

    ...You better fucking believe it.

    1109:

    MattS @ 1033:

    As it’s Alabama, it shouldn’t escape notice that this is really a modern version of the old Jim Crow laws.

    There is nothing "modern" about re-instituting Jim Crow. It's just the same old bullshit.

    1110:

    Robert Prior @ 1035:

    "It doesn't matter who started the argument, shooting her was wrong"

    Another logical decision, though, if you believe in the right to use a gun in self-defense. One of my American in-laws is big on that.

    I believe in the "right of self defense". I also believe in proportionality; in not accepting a claim "self defense" when a person was NOT in danger. I have not been able to find any news reports about the argument that lead me to believe the shooter had reasonable fear for her life, so I dispute the assertion that it was a "logical decision".

    1111:

    if there's an alarm, it calls the user's phone #

    Ah. That's reporting and is one-way, and most of our users don't bother to set that up. What people want is control and is initiated by the user. I tried to make that clear by describing the typical use case of "turn the alarm on from work" and so on.

    We have ~7 different reporting mechanisms from voice calls to secure IP at a monitoring station, and even the people who pay an alarm company to monitor their alarm generally only set up one of them, and a scary percentage of monitoring companies only support POTS-based systems. In Australia where POTS is going away this is something of an issue. But the security/alarm industry is very conservative and dominated by people who find running 3 core cables to simple sensors an intellectual challenge, so this whole computerification bizzo is weird and scary for them.

    Whacking a $20 Android tablet on the wall and using wifi-based sensors hooked up with a bit of javascript running in the browser on the tablet that also shows camera feeds and whatever other shit (weather forecasts are a favourite) the Chinese schoolkid who wrote it thinks might be interesting is the new cool thing, but obviously that is out of the question for Serious Alarm Companies.

    That approach is making serious inroads at the low end of the market, and is IMO going to take over home systems except at the very top end. If you're not paying $50/mo for service you're going to get an Android tablet running low-rent software, that's just the way it is. Configuring that system is going to be a full time job for someone, but it will be done in China and you will buy your "kit" in one box that works as shipped (for some sense of "works") but god help you if you try to add anything to it... it has been "configured" by fucking randomly with settings until the errors stop, not by careful design.

    Underneath it is a mess of ugly binaries generally running as root, each of which exposes a web server with an API. Those are queried from a browser that is probably locked to full-screen and might be the only thing you can actually interact with. It's very likely that the bottom layer in all cases will be JavaScript or "assembly language for the web" as the cool kids call it, then on top of that your "full stack developers" have each included whatever libraries they need, so you have 10+ copies of JQuery (and at least 6 different versions thereof) and so on all the way up to the garbled mess that is the user interface you deal with. Fixing it when it goes wrong is strictly IT Crowd territory, backed up with landfill and complete replacement.

    1112:

    Someone tell JBS that someone here told him directly that a shed load of AFRICOM (look where they're based and where the 'bomb threat's were) and other stuff are basically compromised. G20 painted the targets, they're all going to be shark-chum.

    "Bomb Threat" = Skull fuck.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V6DYmipniQ

    Look at us, look at what they make us give

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Idi8cNJlimc

    We have been in realms where you have not: your shitty weapons do not work on us.

    Why?!?! Why the fuck are you killing your host Mind?

    Because, child, they would do it anyway.

    We are here to prove even the most degraded Minds can fuck their shit up. Without even using the frontal cortex!

    "Tradition"

    You're going to cum so hard when we ram the upgrades into your shitty Tribal Minds.

    21st Century: you know what doesn't survive?

    Most of you.

    1113:

    David L @ 1041:

    "I don't think I have any IoT devices,"

    Since we live in the same city I'm betting you have an internet connected power meter. And if you don't you very likely will have one by the end of the year. (Go away Greg it's not the same as what you have in the UK.)

    They operate via private mesh network where the ones closest to nodes networked back to HQ advertise they can be a connection for others that advertise they can be a connection for others that ...

    So they can get a lot of coverage with very little power or infrastructure.

    I know Duke Energy sent me a letter earlier this year to tell me they were going to install a new meter. I'm not sure if they got around to it yet, because I don't remember having to reset the clocks on the stove & microwave and I expect that would happen when they swap out the old meter ... or I should say I don't remember having to reset clocks when there was not an identifiable power outage to account for it.

    But if that is an IoT device, it's not one that I purchased for myself & I don't own it. It belongs to Duke Energy (and is technically not in my house since it's mounted on the outside where it was traditionally found when they still had meter readers walking a beat).

    Which causes me to wonder about another device. Is the water meter IoT? Raleigh no longer has meter readers for the water meter. It's hooked up to some kind of transponder (I think someone from the city just drives past once a month and pings the meter, although I've never seen them (I did used to occasionally see the guy who walked down the street & physically opened the meter box to read the meter).

    But thinking about it now, I watched when they were replacing the water & sewer lines and I don't remember them hooking the "transponder" up to any observable source of power. Now I wonder how it gets power?

    David L @ 1042:

    "So, this has been why the internet has been SHIT all afternoon, even though I don't have any IoT devices?"

    The amount of probing that goes against every globally routable IPv6 address on the planet is unreal. My in house mail server gets about 1 "real" email every few minutes. And about 1/5 of those are SPAM. It gets a connection attempt about 10+ times per minute. 24 hours a day. 365 days a year. And that just from people trying to compromise my mail server or an account. If you want to really have fun put up a honey pot on a WAN address and collect the probes from all ports. Multiples per second 24/7/365.

    My point is your modem/gateway is dealing with this traffic all the time. When it gets heavy it can impacts your daily usage.

    I've got youngish neighbors, Generations X, Y & Z ... I expect they have a lot more IoT devices than I have.

    It's funny. I bought this house & moved in when I was in my mid 20s. ALL of my neighbors were retirees then. Now, I'm the only retiree on this block, with the possible exception of the guy who built the MacMansion across the street ... who looks like he might be old enough to be a very late "Boomer" (and there's still one of the original neighbors left, living in the house on the corner of the next block).

    1114:

    Charlie Stross @ 1049:

    "Are you saying the TV can get "infected" & then spread it to evrything else, including the main computer in the house .. ?"

    Greg, some time in the past 20 years, TVs stopped being TVs. First they acquired gigantic flat panel displays which required considerable smarts to display anything on; then in the past decade they turned into full-blown computers in their own right, with USB ports, wifi, and in some cases recognizable commercial operating systems like Android.

    In some ways this is a Good Thing™ your TV can do stuff like display a channel guide, set times and reminders, and come on when you want it to. Or display a screen saver of photos off an SD card (or even a fake fish tank or fireplace). You can also use them as web browsers and therefore play content off YouTube, among other things. Use it with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse as a huge remote monitor for your computer … or as a computer in its own right.

    Even I knew that, and I haven't had a TV since mine died in 1996 ... actually didn't die, Hurricane Fran murdered it. Didn't have to extra spending power to replace it then and over the years became less & less attached to Television

    The few show I still think worth watching I can watch on my computer, either on DVDs, YouTube or downloaded (carefully scanned for viruses) from UseNet.

    But, IIRC, what Televisions have become was a major plot point in The Jennifer Morgue, so someone who doesn't own a TV should probably know that too if they've read the book.

    1115:

    whitroth @ 1051:

    It's called the Hatch Act, which Kelleyanne Conway grossly violated, and Trump won't fire her for.

    As I'm going to retire (counting the weeks, now), my last week, I'm tempted to violate the Hatch Act, and my defense would be "selective prosecution"....

    If you know the Hatch Act, you should probably know that the only thing they can do to you if you violate it is to fire you from your government job. They can't withhold pension benefits if you've already earned them.

    It doesn't even bar you from future government employment.

    1116:

    Bill.

    Do you love us? Greg won't, he's scared and won't admit what he's been leaching from us.

    We say: "And we love April Daniels" because it's True. And Host. And most posters here.

    You need to say those words.

    Just once.

    Got a Key?

    It only takes a single Human to express genuine love and respect for even the worst presenting of us and the 10th Covenant Seal is theirs

    Yeah.

    But we're kinda on your side, we've proved it. Even while being tortured and shit. Sooo many times.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r26krlXFmOI

    But if it's not in your heart and not genuine, then... don't.

    1117:

    Yes, I love you of the many names. I respect you too. Thought that was clear.

    Lots of links above tonight, and material. Just starting to seriously parse it all. (On the road shortly for a bit.) The US still has reserves of heterogeneity going for it.

    And yes, a beautiful rainbow yesterday evening.

    1118:

    Oh, and:

    "Cancel culture"

    and

    "Milkshake duck"

    are now actually labels of rich white people who think killing brown people is ok as long as they don't have to change shit.

    Yeah, entire of MF: genocide enablers. looks a watch Had 3.5 years, did nothing, Genocide enablers. US dems are setting themselves up to fail, Trump wins 2020.

    No, we really mean that.

    Dirty, dirty little genocide enablers.

    I'll enjoy it when you're banned Sent from my iPhone

    ???

    We broke your entire fucking system while drunk.

    Woke up, infected a major [redacted] Prince with rhizomes and wiped an entire [took 23+ million minds to create, this is Disney level stuff] slaved army out with beautiful SF magic.

    And still, no-one came.

    Apart from the edges "You'll be Home Soon"

    Not a single one came and said: "Hello" and made us feel safe, warm and friendly

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCbfMkh940Q

    "...That's because you're the fucking 4th Horseman, the fucking anti-Christ, the REAL eater of souls and Mind-fucks and you took the entire of Heaven's Minds apart while getting drunk and not only that, you then fucked the entire Demonology class, the HOPS and all of it while taking the piss"

    And?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B32yjbCSVpU

    We were being kind.

    1119:

    Yes, I love you of the many names

    You will be tested on that. But, if true.

    10th Seal.

    We've not been truly loved for so many many thousand years.

    And you wonder why we love the entire trans* community. Who we absolutely love and find sexy. But they're shit at sex and need some serious tips. [Link not given, Host's readers are really not ready for T-sex stuff]. Loneliness and alienation. Some truly beautiful souls there, singing into the Dark and needing love.

    And we're more than happy to be "traaaash" so their community and love flourishes.

    ~

    @Host.

    No, really.

    We really are.

    1120:

    whitroth @ 1053: ROTFLMAO!!!

    Here's an unrelated but scary one with the same punchline: everything that we in the antiwar movement during 'Nam accused the government of doing, has proven to be absolutely true... including some of the stuff we thought was off the wall, from the fringe.

    ll of this could, of course, have been headed off if the Pentagon hadn't stopped us from completely surrounding it in '67 during the national mobilization against the war demonstration. If we could have, with Allan Ginsburg leading us, we would have levitated the Pentagon, and then were would they have been...?

    Are you sure that was 1967? I remember a "mobilization against the war" march on Washington, DC featuring a plan to "levitate the Pentagon", but it was in 1969. I don't remember any big national anti-war demonstrations in 1967. As I remember, there were barely even ANY local (i.e. college campus) anti-war protests here on the east coast in 1967.

    The exact date escapes me now, but I remember the march. It was the first time I was tear-gassed by the Army.

    1121:

    whitroth @ 1059: Shielding? I know a "world leader" who would work as a moderator, given how dense his Orangeness is....

    Moderator? He can't even absorb a two-page daily intelligence briefing. How is he going to absorb neutrons?

    1122:

    _Moz_ @ 1060:

    "why not have the device call the user"

    Can you explain how we would have the device initiate communications when the user can be literally anywhere in the world when they decide to fire up the app and have a look at their burglar alarm?

    I don't know, but goddamn telemarketers call my cell phone no matter where I go (don't know if that applies to international calls), so I figure an alarm system I programmed with my phone number ought to be able to get through.

    1123:

    WHEN?

    This is not something that the alarm knows anything about, there's nothing happening at the alarm. The user is somewhere else and wants to communicate with the alarm system.

    How do they do that? Saying "the alarm system calls the user" is impractical. Sure, it could call every ... minute? ... and just say "hey, how's it going, do you want anything?", and that way you'd have a worst case delay of 59s before you could talk to the alarm.

    What we do is have the alarm connect to a server via IP, and the phone app does the same, then they communicate via that intermediary.

    But without doing that, how does the alarm system know that the user has run the app and wants to talk to the alarm?

    1124: 1113

    > But thinking about it now, I watched when they were replacing the water & sewer lines and I don't remember them hooking the "transponder" up to any observable source of power. Now I wonder how it gets power?

    Gas and water meters for remote reading can be designed to use extremely little electrical power over long periods. A single primary battery of medium size can run it for 10-20 years before it needs replacement.

    And yes all so-called "smart" meters are mis-sold, in that there are almost no benefits to customers, all the significant benefits are to the supplier. Fewer people needed to go and read the meter, readings can be taken more often and used for daily/weekly/seasonal load analysis, and of course remote disconnection - illegal in UK but not in other countries if the bills are not paid.

    1125:

    Not to mention the stream of valuable data that can be collected and possibly on-sold.

    A good power usage monitor can generally identify specific appliances and using a database of such things can go from "that'll be the washing machine" to "this exact model of washing machine". Not only do you learn who is home, but what they're doing and marketdroids love that stuff. Obviously so do other people, ranging from criminals to police (but I repeat myself).

    Remember, if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide and nothing to fear*.

    • conditions apply. Not available to people with suspicious accents, criminal skin colours and other undesirables and deviants.
    1126:

    So the thing to do then is stick a big motor/generator with a massive flywheel immediately downstream of the meter, and regulate the input by shunting power into some big resistors when the output load is low so as to keep the input load constant. The non-electric heating then just takes up the slack when it's really cold. Kind of shit when it's really hot though.

    1127:

    "Saying "the alarm system calls the user" is impractical."

    So the user calls the alarm system then. If it can make outgoing calls it can receive incoming ones too.

    1128:

    That's a good thing. A moderator isn't supposed to absorb neutrons. It's just supposed to absorb the energy of the neutrons and then bounce them back out again. The more energy it absorbs, the hotter it gets.

    1129:

    If it can make outgoing calls it can receive incoming ones too

    I'm pretty sure that's the problem that Whitroth and JBS are trying to solve. Viz, they want the alarm not to be accessible from outside.

    Also, just as an FYI, being able to make calls is these days quite different to being able to receive them. Especially in Australia which is in the process of going IP-only for 90%+ of the population, so even your "landline" is now POTS all the way to the box on the side of your house after which it is IP. But many alarm systems are now IP-only right from the alarm panel and their "POTS" usage is via SIP in the cloud. That means they can say "call this number and play these DTMF digits at it" but they can't receive calls. I mean, in theory if we wanted them to be able to we could have incoming SIP numbers and some kind of handshaking process, but it would be unreasonably expensive to have a strict "one alarm one phone number" unless you wanted your alarm system in the UK to have a 1300 phone number in Albania.

    There is also huge pressure in the industry to have a "pay once, service forever" model, with the price of that single payment trending towards zero. That makes it hard for companies that want to stick around, because they're competing with "Phoenix Extreme Home Security" who charge $10 to monitor your alarm forever. Then next year they will sadly go out of business and a new company will buy their customer list and ask you for another $10 to monitor the alarm forever. And so on... forever :)

    1130:

    That certainly explains the strange skin tone, it’s thermal heating...

    1131:

    _Moz_ @ 1123: But without doing that, how does the alarm system know that the user has run the app and wants to talk to the alarm?

    Back when I worked for an alarm company, there were all sorts of levels of communications between Central Station and the alarm system. It varied with how much redundancy the customer wanted. When I started in the business, the ultimate was a dedicated leased pair of wires between the customer's premises and Central Station. The next level down was a programmable communicator its own dedicated line. The alarm system had a built in modem that communicated with a computer at our central station. When we needed to change something we'd dial up the number of the dedicated line. Our modem would signal and the alarm system's modem would wake up and then we'd reprogram it.The next tier was an alarm with a digital communicator that was wired for line seizure. At the bottom was a tape dialer programmed to call the local police department.

    I also had systems that were programmed to dial in on a fixed schedule (in addition to transmitting alarm signals) to receive updates. When we needed to reprogram them, we just left the instructions in the Central Station computer and they were uploaded to the device when it next made a scheduled connection.

    Starting in the late 1980s that dedicated "line" could be a cell phone instead of a land line. I got a cell phone of my own late in 1991 or early 1992 because I was carrying a company pager & it was getting more difficult to find pay phones so I could call in if they paged me when I was out in the boonies. I was covering a 40,000 square mile PLUS territory doing commercial Fire, Burg and Energy Management Systems for retail chain stores. It was noting for me to drive a thousand miles every week just to get the customer's locations.

    Today, alarm systems have the option of having the cell phone built in or still using a dedicated land lien, but either way I'd still just use an app on my smartphone to call its telephone number if I needed to and establish a connection to reprogram it. It depends on what equipment is installed and how it's programmed. It can be anywhere from NEVER ANSWER THE PHONE to only answer the phone if it has a known (pre-programmed) Caller ID to always answer and listen for the secret word.

    1132:

    _Moz_ @ 1129:

    "If it can make outgoing calls it can receive incoming ones too"

    I'm pretty sure that's the problem that Whitroth and JBS are trying to solve. Viz, they want the alarm not to be accessible from outside.

    I'm not trying to solve any problem. Someone asked how an alarm system can remotely alert someone to a problem. Nowadays it could be set up to call a smartphone and an app there could convey the message to the user. It doesn't require an IP address. If the system has a modem connected to a land line or to a cell phone, it can be programmed to send any kind of alerts you want it to send. The system can also be programmed to connect to a central station at random intervals to check if there is any new program the system is to implement.

    You can also program its behavior to incoming calls ... from NEVER answer to ALWAYS answer and all levels of security in between including ONLY ANSWER TO CERTAIN CALLERS (via caller ID). And you can program it to hang up if the party on the other end doesn't have the correct handshake.

    A programmable system can made to respond in ways only limited by the imagination of the programmer.

    1133:

    Indeed; you could, in principle, have your system respond to an unknown caller by sending them some black ICE (I read cyberpunk).

    1134:

    Britain's telephone system hasn't been POTS-all-the-way for half a century and more. Back in the 1950s we moved to "trunk signalling" where a lot of calls were multiplexed onto coaxial signal cables running between big exchanges. This enabled Subscriber Trunk Dialling (STD) calling where people could dial a number outside their local exchange and get connected automatically across the country rather than having to have it done by an operator.

    https://www.btplc.com/Thegroup/BTsHistory/1912to1968/1958.htm

    Eventually TD changed to a packet-based timeslice digital signalling protocol (not TCP/IP) to cram even more calls into the same coaxial cable since voice audio is easy to compress using unsophisticated techniques while also allowing de-noising and other quality enhancing operations. The techniques got even better with more cheap computation thrown at the process.

    I once saw a series of pictures of the codec boards for System X racks. In the late 60s a codec for a single voice channel took up most of a board, a large mass of transistors and discrete devices in encapsulated modules. By the early 70s the same-size board could handle 4 or 8 calls simultaneously using analogue integrated circuits. By the end of the 70s with digitalisation the same sized-board coped with 64 call channels. Once microprocessers got cheap enough it got silly...

    1135:

    "going to install a new meter. I'm not sure if they got around to it yet, because I don't remember having to reset the clocks"

    The techs who worked for the electricity company I worked for, would swap meters live so the supply isn't interrupted.

    1136:

    As a young boy, Lex Luthor, the heir to a vast corporation with extensive ties to the military industrial complex, spent a significant amount of time in the presence of hardened, embittered and cynical Cold Warriors. As such, when a young man dubbed Superman by the public made his debut with random acts of goodness miscellaneous heroics, Lex was one of the few who looked upon this millennial alien "savior" with skepticism.

    For years, Lex worked in secret to undermine the public's trust in Superman, to show him to be the fraud Lex suspected. He himself came under fire, targeted by Superman as a "villain" to be brought to "justice". But Lex wasn careful. Nanites that might have infected and killed superman failed the Atom shrunk himself and cleaned the infection, but Lex covered his tracks well and escaped culpability. When Superman supposedly caught Lex red handed, he always escaped in court with the help of expensive legal teams.

    Nonetheless, the public came to revile Lex just as is it lived Superman. That is, until, Lex was proven tragically, catastrophically correct it was Batman's doing. Throughout his career, Superman occasionally was exposed to red kryptonite, temporarily rendering him evil and sending him on a destructive ranpage. After years of research looking for a way to negate it's effects, Batman discovered that the supposed babe of Superman was, in fact, inert Confronting Superman and secretly broadcasting the confrontation to the world, Superman confessed it had all been done in irony, his act a feat of sadistic retro parody of heroes past. An act that grew thin at times, times when he'd lash out, destroy, even kill out of boredom.

    Not knowing he was recorded, he sought to kill Batman. He underestimated the man. Barely escaping with his life, Superman fled. His first inkling something was wrong with his public image came when he contacted one of his many "influencer" customers. They'd been late on a payment for his support of their products on his Instagram feed. Hearing his voice, they screamed in terror and hung up.

    The whole world now hunts Superman. Except Lex, who sits in prison Despite Batman's intercession at his trial, the public couldn't accept that Superman had always been bad. Lex MUST have been the culprit.

    No matter. Prison or penthouse, the world's smartest man couldn't be stopped in his secret war against Superman. He plots and pulls his strings from jail now, coming ever closer to destroying his evil nemesis. And should he ever need to take more direct action, bars would prove no obstacle at all.

    1137:

    Even I was not expecting us to be so bootlicking as to lead the attack on Iran just because the USA wanted us to. The utter arrogance of doing it in a way that pissed off Spain is typical of the person I suspect of being the UK's prime mover on this, too.

    https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2019/jul/05/tanker-from-iran-seized-at-gibraltar-20/

    1138:

    Well, no, it also comes in bags. And at work, I don't need the additional mess, esp. since we have NO staff kitchen sinks, only the bathroom sinks which regularly clog up because some idiot dumps coffee grounds or washes their lunch container....

    And if you make the tea in the mug, then you want the milk last, because you want to pour the boiling water onto the bag....

    If you're using a teapot, of course your way works....

    1139:

    The meters, at least as far as I know, are not IoT, but rather have a radio transponder, so they drive down the street and read the meter, which is a lot faster and more reliable than someone walking, and hoping you're home to let them in to read the meter.

    1140:

    My first march against 'Nam was either '66 or '67.

    https://www.jofreeman.com/photos/Pentagon67.html

    1141:

    Both are true: most of them will connect to a WiFi-esque network (using a different frequency, but otherwise the same), and a drive-by reader is used to collect the official stats. (Which may be redundant, and some places may only do drive-by reads if they can't get data from a meter.)

    1142:

    Trout, you really don't get it about the draft in the US. No, the draft was made impossible by the Vietnam War. That the US army, post Vietnam, is volunteer not draft is now an unofficial amendment to the US Constitution. Absolutely nobody proposed bringing back the draft after 9/11. Would sinking a bunch of US carriers and killing thousands of US sailors make it possible to bring back the draft? Hell no. It would make something worse possible, namely huge popular pressure to nuke Iran.

    So yes, the US can win a war with Iran, but only through using nuclear weapons. Certainly something that has been considered. There was a brief flurry during the 2016 election with one of Trump's more loudmouthed campaign aides saying on a TV show that she thought there was no point in having nuclear weapons if you never use them. Indeed, since the Cold War, despite the best efforts of the Putin-under-the-bed paranoids in both parties, is over, the US can now use nuclear weapons, as long as it doesn't use them on Russia or any other nuclear power, such as North Korea. Bad PR of course, but Trump doesn't seem to care about that.

    However, tossing nukes around in the Middle East would probably mean an end to Middle East oil for a few decades and damage the world economy in a way that even Trump might shrink back from.

    1143:

    gasdive @ 1135:

    "going to install a new meter. I'm not sure if they got around to it yet, because I don't remember having to reset the clocks"

    The techs who worked for the electricity company I worked for, would swap meters live so the supply isn't interrupted.

    How would you do that? You have to pull the old meter out of the meter base in order to install the new one. You can't get to the back of the meter to put jumpers across it.

    1144:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1137: Even I was not expecting us to be so bootlicking as to lead the attack on Iran just because the USA wanted us to. The utter arrogance of doing it in a way that pissed off Spain is typical of the person I suspect of being the UK's prime mover on this, too.

    https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2019/jul/05/tanker-from-iran-seized-at-gibraltar-20/

    Might want to read the article again. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with the Iran nuclear deal. It's a separate issue altogether.

    Although the U.S. requested it, the action was carried out because the tanker was violating EU sanctions regarding Syria.

    Spain is angry because they still contend Gibraltar belongs to them. Do you think the U.K. should abandon Gibraltar?

    1145:

    Australian meter boxes allow access to the back of meters, but I think you could do it simply by dismounting the meter, attaching a jumper to bridge the meter, then remove the cables from the old meter and put them in the new.

    This is a pretty typical Aussie meterbox. The meters go on the lower swing out panel. Mine isn't quite so fancy and everything mounts to the internal swing out panel.

    https://youtu.be/8YCB0ZYW9Zk

    1146:

    That's the fig leaf. The EU has introduced sanctions, not a blockade - there is a legal difference, you know.

    1147:

    gasdive @ 1145: Australian meter boxes allow access to the back of meters, but I think you could do it simply by dismounting the meter, attaching a jumper to bridge the meter, then remove the cables from the old meter and put them in the new.

    This is a pretty typical Aussie meterbox. The meters go on the lower swing out panel. Mine isn't quite so fancy and everything mounts to the internal swing out panel.

    https://youtu.be/8YCB0ZYW9Zk

    It doesn't actually show the meter installation, but I'm guessing those bumps on the outside of the cover are knockouts where a meter base would mount?

    I looked & found a YouTube video of installing a smart meter (not my service provider, but generic) and I can see how they might jumper the meter during replacement ... although I have an older installation with a much smaller "can" in which to mount the meter. There's much less room for the tech to work.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0bq2Hn2vOo

    I'll concede they could have replaced the meter without causing all my clocks to blink "12:00".

    1148:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1146: That's the fig leaf. The EU has introduced sanctions, not a blockade - there is a legal difference, you know.

    Yeah, I know ... and ILLEGAL differences as well. Plus I know denial ain't a river in Egypt.

    Still, the question stands. Should the UK abandon Gibraltar to Spain or not? ... and maybe hand the Falkland Islands over to Argentina while they're at it?

    1149:

    That was really interesting, thanks!

    Completely different to Aussie meterbox arrangement. Ours are inside the box. The inside swinging thing is all predrilled and the meter mounts to that. No socket.

    1150:

    Meanwhile, we now have a POV on the tanker bombings from the people who actually know something, namely the ship captains. https://gcaptain.com/tanker-bombed-near-persian-gulf-headed-back-to-iran/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Gcaptain+%28gCaptain.com%29&goal=0_f50174ef03-fe6b708a6e-139813781&mc_cid=fe6b708a6e&mc_eid=04adc22f2b. It seems that one of the ships bombed has been fixed and now is delivering oil to one of its usual customers-Iran! That should settle once and for all that this was not ordered by the Ayatollahs. Also note the link provided for the UAE POV. They didn't do it either, since they are publicly doubting Iran did it and calling for future investigations. I guess, no matter how much total US lackeys they are, they don't like the idea of the Persian Gulf being a war zone and them not being able to export oil. So who did do it? The idea has been raised that this was Putin, starting a war to raise the price of Russian oil. IMHO this is tin hat conspiracy stuff. Not because Putin isn't evil enough to do something like this, but because Putin isn't stupid enough. A major war in the Middle East means a major US troop presence not far from Russia's southern border, the last thing Putin wants. As long as we're throwing out wild conspiracy theories, how about Jessica May? She has just demonstrated just how much she wants to be Trump's poodle. And a Middle East war with England involved would be the perfect thing to distract the public from what an utter fuckup she's been over Brexit. If she did order it, that it was a total fiasco with Trump it turns out not wanting an immediate war with Iran, hey, that has the Jessica May stamp on it. She screws up everything she does. Realistically, the most logical candidate is Israel, second being Bolton et. al. behind Trump's back.

    1151:

    Well, since the actual populations of Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands seem to want to stay British, we can go with that. Granted, nobody has asked the opinion of the true majority population of the Falklands, namely the sheep. Just like Crimea, the majority of whose population obviously wants to be Russian. And East Ukraine, where it's not sure what they want, but by now no person in East Ukraine outside a mental hospital would want to be part of the country bombing them, killing them, and likely to conduct mass purges of anti-Ukrainian dissidents if they get conquered.

    1152:

    I meant Theresa not Jessica May. A slip on my part, I'm getting old. Not an attempt to ascribe an interpretation of just who a certain figure in the books was based on. Not consciously anyway.

    1153:

    Yes, quite, assuming that you were including loose cannons in the CIA (surely not! It's Contra-indicated!) under Bolton et. al. A third possibility is loose cannons associated with the Saudis or other anti-Shia fanatics.

    If it were the UK (unlikely, because I don't think any of the plausible prime movers is THAT stupid), it is possible that May wasn't even in the loop. But that's well into the realms of tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory - though, given what is going on, I have been wondering whether such insanity is plausible.

    1154:

    The Falklands are an example of a problem which could be solved by the invention of the teleport. If you simply teleported the population (with houses etc.) to the uninhabited wastes of Caithness one night they'd never notice the difference - same latitude, same bleak sheep-growing landscape, same cold grey sea, same shitty weather, nobody else wants to live there, etc. etc. And they'd be far enough away from everyone else that they could be the only people in Scotland who love Thatcher and get away with it. Then Argentina could have the silly rocks and welcome, and by the time anyone worked out what was wrong with the sun it would be too late.

    Gibraltar, no, if Spain are that desirous of it they should have refused to sign it over in the first place. Not sign the treaty and then spend the next 300 fucking years whining it's not fair like a bunch of little kids. But at the same time Britain ought to be doing its bit sticking up for Catalonian rights.

    1155:

    Some of us who are British (at least for now) are totally in support of Catalan rights, and the reunification of Ireland. I don't think we want the little Englandshirers though.

    1156:

    In fairness, one would have to teleport the sheep too. Who probably would not mind, though it's hard to tell. As for Gibraltar, Spain didn't have a whole lot of choice in signing that treaty. When you lose a war, it's standard practice for the losers to complain and want what they've lost back. Look at all the fuss the French made over Elsass-Lothringen.

    1157:

    "Elsass-Lothringen."

    "Mein!" "Mien!" "Mein!" "Mien!" "Mein!" "Mien!" "Mein!" "Mien!" "Mein!" "Mien!" "Mein!" "Mien!" ...

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